Democracy Sausage, or not.

Yes, it’s another half-eaten sandwich photo from me!

Here, elections are held on a Saturday, and polling places are often local schools. The P&C committees see the arrival of community members on the school grounds as a perfect opportunity for fundraising. With compulsory voting, and legitimate reasons required to pre-poll, schools are guaranteed a relatively captive group who wouldn’t all turn up to the annual fete for the purpose of having their wallets emptied. When I was a kid, the best fundraiser was a cake stall, selling squashy sponges and dentally challenging toffees in cupcake wrappers for 10c each. Maybe 20c. These days the squashy sponge, or banana cake is about $10 and the toffee will be a dollar.

These days, the sausage sizzle is the default, so much so that there are websites devoted to where to get the best snags. What can I say, we love a sausage!

Today’s election was the local one, and after the balls-up that was the federal election (queues for over an hour, and a bonanza for the sausage stalls) I turned up relatively early to vote. I was pleasantly surprised to see no queue protruding from the doorway into the hall, so I sent the 8 year old off to procure his own sausage sanger and wandered in to vote.

My civic duty took me about 3 minutes, so I joined the small one in the sausage queue, which was longer than the voting one. I wasn’t actually in the mood for sausages, so I was genuinely excited to see that they were offering the other standard; egg and bacon roll. Only they’d crossed out egg on the sign. Turns out they hadn’t quite run out of eggs, so I scored big there. And served by one of my favourite school mums 🙂

A bit of bbq sauce and I was away. The egg was good, fried both sides (I know, you call it ‘over easy’. We don’t) on the bbq plate with the sausage and bacon grease. Slightly over cooked, but that’s kind of good for something you have to eat with one hand. There was only one small rasher of bacon, most of which the 8yo flogged as I lifted the sandwich to my mouth, and the bread was thin and squashy. Pretty bloody good really. No onion (I forgot to ask) but, eh, school fundraising and sitting in the sun sharing food with my offspring : priceless.

Crit

I’m a mother of two boys. I work selling organic produce to gullible locals, and in my spare time I run as far as I can. Oh, and I live in Australia, married to a US citizen.