All You Can Eat: ultimate Mexico/USA food safari

I decided to break with our regular programming for something a little different tonight. On Saturday, I went to Groovin the Moo , a massive regional music festival which is held in Townsville, Maitland and Bendigo. Some friends of mine are in a hip-hop group and are playing the whole tour, so I was lucky enough to be able to ride their coat tails all the way into the festival - access all areas.

Hilltop Hoods tearing down the stage at Groovin’ The Moo

While I was ploughing through the back stage food stalls and stealing drinks from artists’ rider, I decided that the back stage food set-up at one of Australia’s biggest travelling music festivals would make for an interesting food blog.

So here we are..

The back stage set-up at this particular festival consisted of a number of canvas tents (starting at about 20m square each and getting a little bit bigger for the headline acts), outside tables and chairs, a long food bar and a ping pong table. Each tent had a big esky full of ice and drinks and the food bar was cooking food all day.

The food that they were serving was actually pretty impressive: marinated chicken and lamb skewers, chorizo sausage pieces (which were fantastic, might I add), pastas, those weird vegetarian burger things (I’ve got plenty of love for vegetarians but have never understood vege burger patties; really, what the fuck is going on with them), garden salads, greek salads, bread rolls, potato bake, etc.

Note: this is a photograph of Solo from Sydney hip-hop/emo outfit Horrorshow, who were playing at the festival. Solo was looking a little glum, so I put him onto the All You Can Eat tip: combine chorizo, lamb pieces, lettuce, feta and tomato sauce on a bread roll.

You get the impression: there was shitloads of food there. They had a team of “chefs” cooking all day and all night to make sure that the artists and their coat tail riders were fed. At the end of the day, it wasn’t gourmet Neil Perry stuff but I was pretty impressed with how it tasted, as you may have gathered.

Now this was the communal stuff. Depending on how big a band/artist/DJ you are, you were also given special fruit plates, sandwich platters, salted nuts, etc - you’ve heard the jokes about super star bands ordering the most obscure shit in their rider.

Being the slippery investigative journalist that I am, I managed to slip into De La Soul’s tent and sample some of their fruit plate and Remy Martin flavoured cognac - needless to say, it was baller.

This is the first in a series of backstage festival food specials that we’ll be covering - stay tuned..