Coburg Food Race

The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival seems to go from strength to strength. This is the twenty fifth year of operation and the number and type of events has grown enormously from the early days when I mostly attended the Master Class offerings. This year we decided to try something a little different - The Coburg Food Race. Traffic and travel time from Geelong to Melbourne can be hard to predict so we left early and arrived with enough time to get coffee and put on our 'team identifiers'. These needed to worn all the way around the race and raised a few eyebrows along the way. This will give you a taste of the tour and race.

The event that involved a race around the multicultural shopping precinct of Coburg meeting challenges, hunting for clues to get to the next location and sampling foods along the way. First up, sorting our language sticks into the most spoken to least. It was easy to guess the first few but it took some time  to get them in order - no assistance from Google was permitted!

Once we had the list sorted we were given an envelope with our clue to get the next place. A process repeated at every stop.

The first coffee may have a mistake. The first challenge was to drink a very strong coffee and eat the biscuits at one of the coffee houses.  We were all feeling the buzz!

One of the conditions of the race was that we had to take photos and videos as evidence of completing the tasks and then upload them to Instagram  or Facebook.  Mostly, one person was in the video and the other was filming.

For this was one we were required to stand in front of the mural, eat a sample of the salad and exclaim an expression that we think was Turkish or Arabic. This video was taken by a curious bystander who was keen to know what we were doing.

A visit to a traditional Aussie venue for a pie, more videos and cheering for the proprieter's football team.

The challenge and it was a challenge, to wrap the sari. Much harder than it appears especially when the waist cord is not firmly tied. Obviously, this was not food related, however, it provided a vital clue for our next stop and an ingredient for the shopping lists.

More eating, some delicious 'dolci' and a language challenge, this time Italian.

Time to get our (Ray's) hands dirty and dig for our next clue.

And then the final filming challenge, to collect all the ingredients on our shopping list and then 'spruik' at the market.

Alfresco in a community garden setting. 

Sicilian inspired using all the ingredients that were on our shopping lists and a a few more.

This was a fabulous event and I will looking to do something similar at next year's Food and Wine Festival.