Friday, October 7, 2011

Salad Days


Sean Adcock and his wife Brenda arrived in Toronto for Rocktoberfest late last night. They flew in from Kentucky where Sean had just finished up judging the dry stone wall competition run by the Stone Conservancy. 


Sean told me he was very hungry.  When we met up at the pub it was past ten o'clock and the kitchen was closed. None of the pubs in the Caledon area were serving food that late either so we drove on to the festival site at Hart House Farm to see if we could find something to snack on there. 


Our son Colin who is a professional chef, and has been preparing meals for the festival for the last week, was still working in the kitchen getting things ready for the next four days of meals and snacks to be served during our Rocktoberfest weekend. He kindly offered to whip something up for the hungry vegetarian even though it was on very short notice. The salad plate looked fantastic. 


We feel it's not enough just to run professionally taught workshops and have interesting speakers come as well as plan for unusual structures to be built at these events. Ever since the first Rocktoberfest in Port Hope in 2003 we have continued to put a big emphasis on providing a beautiful pastoral setting to work in, appropriate live musical accompaniment and special gourmet meals each day too, so that the stone workers and wallers who come to demonstrate their craft  are well taken care of and always enjoy participating at these Canadian dry stone wall festivals.