As we approached Northbridge Piazza a little after 11am, the first thing we saw was a Big Orange. We joined the line right away to get free Harvey Fresh orange juice, apple juice and stickers. It was a bright, sunshiny day and warming up pretty quickly, and we drank our freebie juice thirstily. Newly energised, we eagerly checked out what else was on offer.

There was a stall displaying New Norcia Bakeries bread, which is baked in the New Norcia Benedictine Monastery’s older than a century-old wood-fired oven.

Also on display, a selection of New Norcia Bakeries’ other products, including New Norcia Nut Cake, Dom Salvado Pan Chocolatti and Almond Biscotti.

And the best part: free bread samples!

There was a mushroom stall where you could pick up free mushroom recipe cards, enter a competition to win a barbecue and sample free freshly barbecued mushrooms.

Each sample consisted of half a mushroom, lovely and meaty.

Next to the mushroom stand there was a glass display case featuring various meats. Mmmmm… meat.

Outside the marquee there was a big wood fired oven and a couple of blokes cooking chipolatas. The blokes seemed kind of surly, but they did great work – we did appreciate their efforts!

My first taste of sausage for the day, half a beef chipolata, freshly cooked and piping hot, on a piece of fresh crusty bread.

We then joined a long queue under the marquee to get another taste of sausage. There were no signs posted to confirm the flavour/variety of sausage, but according to my programme we were lining up for pork sausage – yummy. I took photos of the sausage and trophy display as the queue moved along. I wished the sausages on display had labels (I understand why there were no butcher or place names on them, but it would’ve been cool to have at least the variety/meat on labels). It was a shame that there were no sausages for sale. I thought it was a missed opportunity – having managed to entice a whole lot of people who love sausages into one place, given them little tastes of sausages and exposed them to that glorious smell of sausages cooking on the barbie for hours… they could’ve sold LOADS of sausages, I reckon. Jac was surprised they didn’t have a sausage sizzle stand where you could buy a sausage and fried onions in a roll for a couple of bucks. She hates lining up in queues, even for freebies, and would’ve happily bought a sausage in a bun. Don’t get me wrong, it was fantastic that everything was free, but instead of having people standing around waiting doing nothing, they could’ve had stuff for sale and simultaneously entertained the hardcore shopaholic gluttons amongst us and made money too.

Could this be the Sausage King’s crown?

A few butchers were hard at work barbecuing sausages for everyone. Again, I must say we truly appreciated their efforts. I hope they got to eat some if they wanted. It would be terrible to have to stand there cooking batch after batch of sausages and not have any!

There was a cooking demo happening when we first got there – I didn’t actually sit in and watch (I was too busy checking everything out and eating sausages).

But when it was over I did sneak up onto the stage and took a photo or two of the cooking demo goodies – this was sausages with mustardy potatoes, by the looks of it.

Juji braved another long line to get a free Braziliano coffee. I wonder how much coffee and milk they got through. That coffee guy did a great job – he was kept very busy! Yeah, real ground brand coffee made to order for free! The mosaic below was made using fd’s Flickr toys Mosaic Maker at bighugelabs.com/flickr/mosaic.php

Here’s Juji’s latte:

Another feed of sausage, and we decided to take a walk around Northbridge and grab some lunch somewhere – no, the sausages were not lunch! Well done to the City of Perth and the organisers for putting on a fun and tasty free event, and hooray for sausages!