Local chef, Haylee Prince, will be one of the headline acts at this year’s Broken Hill Mundi Mundi Bash music festival.
While she’s not actually part of the music line up for this year’s festival, Haylee however will be playing a big role in the event as part of the catering crew.
Haylee is joining two other local area chefs, Angie Armstrong from the The Cocky’s Wife Catering near Nyngan, who will act as their catering manager, and Joel Turpin from Cooee Collaborations in Tottenham.
Together they will feed 170 Mundi Mundi crew and 80 odd performing artists at this year’s event.
Their plan is to run two kitchens, one of which will be out of Haylee’s commercial catering van.
Angie’s second smaller caravan/converted kitchen, will become their ‘Green Room’ kitchen.
“Joel is fine dining trained so we’ve put him in the ‘Green Room’ to cater for the artists.
“Me personally, I’ll just be catering for the crew based out of my van,” Haylee said.
For the first week as the crew sets up for the festival, Haylee will be on her own.
Then for the second week, when the music ramps up, she’ll have the help of two local staff, Katie and Sarah Nicholson.
Haylee calculates they will be creating 5,000 covers (serves) of breakfast, lunch and dinner over their 17 days at the event.
“It’s a bit different to my usual functions of prepping here, then driving to the event to then start cooking,” Haylee said.
“This one, we’ll be driving over empty, receiving all of our stock out of Broken Hill and Mildura, then prepping on site to cook on site.”
Haylee said it’s taken them a few weeks to get the logistics and food ordering all sorted.
“It’s probably the biggest catering event for me since I did the Elvis Festival at Parkes, but that was out of a commercial kitchen when I worked at the Parkes Services Club,” she said.
“It will definitely be the longest stint I’ve ever done.” (And it will also be her longest stint camping!)
“I was really keen to get on board with Angie and Joel. I liked the idea of a local collaboration,” Haylee said.
Previously the catering crew for the event has come from Tasmania!
While Angie and Joel are used to small group catering, they are however confident in their collaboration with Haylee that their team will be able to do a good job.
Angie said she’s looking forward to working with the two other local chefs to produce some incredible dishes for the crew and bands.
Joel said he’s keen to be part of the outback festival and, with epic scenery and solid background music for them in the
kitchen, he’s getting “all the good vibes”!
