Groups collaborate for dog trial cookshop
Cooking up a storm . . . Watching cook Linda Wallace stir the pot at the South Island and New Zealand Sheep Dog Trials are (from left) Vanessa Waters with 2 monthold Lachlan Arnerich, Sheryl Culbertson, Valerie Bell, Robyn Balchin, Liz Chittock, Anna Whiteside and Marion Gardner. ‘‘COUNTRY chicken hotpot, succulent lamb shanks, delicious roast lamb ‘n gravy, seafood chowder’’ — the menu at the South Island and New Zealand Sheep Dog Trials reads like something from a fairly flash restaurant.
Southern women have been cooking up a storm this week, on the go from before dawn to dusk, to cater for several hundred competitors, along with helpers and supporters, in the midst of South Otago farmland. And the high quality of the cooking was on everybody’s lips.
Catering is being done by four groups from the Clinton area — the Clinton golf and squash clubs, Waiwera School PTA and the Warepa Collie Club — with the proceeds being divided between the groups.
One of the kitchen’s stalwarts is Warepa Collie Club lifemember Linda Wallace, now living in Wa¯naka, who had been in charge of the cookshop at the trials for 45 years. Tania McKenzie had taken over as the boss and Mrs Wallace joked she was now just a ringin.
Mrs Wallace’s father Wick McKenzie was a keen dog triallist and her mother had the job before her.
She quipped her husband Steve was a ‘‘townie’’ when he met her but with a desire to be a farmer, courted her father more than he courted her.
Back in her mother’s day, there was no cookshop, just an open shed and saveloys, potatoes and peas were cooked on two gas rings. There was no electricity and dishes were washed in a big urn.
When the club shifted the Romahapa Church on to the grounds, it was fantastic — ‘‘we thought we were cooking in a palace’’ — and power was supplied by a tractor generator.
When the former church ‘‘disintegrated’’, cooking duties were shifted to a woolshed until the ‘‘fantastic’’ new clubrooms, incorporating the cookshop, were built.
‘‘This is luxury,’’ she said.
For the duration of the championships, the hardworking team provided breakfast from 6.30am, morning and afternoon smokos and both light and cooked lunches. Silver Fern Farms provided an evening barbecue — complete with cook — and the women had some respite, only having to butter the bread and make the coleslaw.
It was a big job but ‘‘that’s the sort of people we are’’, Mrs Wallace said.
Most of the women had catered previously in the community.
There would be a few laughs and drinks along the way. Pitching in was what rural communities were all about, she said.