Sunday lunch number three was in Cobar. And yes, I know that’s more than a couple of hours drive from Wollongong, but we’re up here visiting relatives for Easter.
This time lunch was a family barbecue at a cousin’s property just outside town.
One thing that hasn’t changed much about life in the country is people are all still mainly carnivores, and what’s a barbecue if not a chance to cook and eat lots of meat? Despite me having put on weight in the few days we’ve been here, everybody’s very worried that I don’t get enough to eat, so it was decided that my contribution would be a couple of vegetarian dishes.
As Doc broke our car in the morning while trying to fix it we only had one car left to transport six of us out there and had to do it in relays. Doc and I took the two boys out first, then he came back for my aunt and uncle. It’s lucky that “out of town” is only five minutes drive.
It was a typical family day on a farm. The kids went yabbying in the “tank” (local lingo for a dam), and even caught some yabbies for dinner, and rode the motor bikes and quad around the bush. The little ones played with their cars, making tracks in the dirt and gravel. And the horses were being shod in the next paddock.
As we haven’t been to our farm since Christmas, the highlight of Doc’s day was riding around on the quad, with me on the back. He had as much fun as the kids did – kicking up dirt, riding through the bush and up the hills around the dam, trying to get me to scream.
Being a city girl I’d never seen a horse being shod before so went and watched that for a while. There isn’t a farrier in Cobar, but the farrier from Parkes is a local girl, so whenever she comes to Cobar for a visit she’s booked out. There’s also a family connection within the extended clan yesterday, so she was there doing three of the horses. It was hard to believe that a horse would just stand still while it gets its hoofs cut away with a sharp knife then has nails driven through them, but not only did the huge horse stand still, it picked up its feet for the farrier when she walked over to it. Now that’s somebody who is good at their job!
Lunch was a relaxed affair, as family barbecues usually are. There was all the meat you would expect at an Aussie barbie – sausages, lamb chops, steak, chicken, rissoles – and there was a good array of salads. Not only my pumpkin, feta & walnut salad and roasted Italian vegetables, but potato salad, coleslaw, green salad, Asian vegetable salad, and BEETROOT! I love beetroot and its presence at an Aussie barbecue is as necessary as sausages. Beetroot is such an integral food here that even McDonalds caved in and did an Aussie burger with beetroot.
So lunch turned into afternoon tea, and the kids kept riding the bikes and checking for yabbies. When the sun went down the temperature dropped and we retired inside, where afternoon tea turned into dinner, with my cousin’s daughter using us as guinea pigs testing recipes and quantities for her new catering business. If anybody is looking for a caterer in Parkes I can strongly recommend Sweet Spot Catering (sweetspotcatering.com.au). We had vegetarian rice paper rolls, mini filet mignon with mushroom pate, bruschetta with smoked salmon, king prawn & chorizo skewers, pork & prawn dumplings and spring rolls. And yabbies.
It was a fabulous Sunday lunch, and worth driving all the way to Cobar for!
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