A passion for food that never faded

Ever since he was a kid, Peter Ashcroft has loved cooking food for others and after leaving high school he has turned that love into a lifelong career. "I just love food, love serving, hospitality, love serving people. It's a passion," he said. Peter began cooking at a young age where he joined one for the first elective classes for boys cooking in Year 8 at Forbes High School. "It must have been in my blood." Following on from school he joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1979 where he completed his catering training and learned how to cook at scale. "It was bulk cooking so I learnt how to cook a lot of food quickly, and the customers were always fairly fussy, so it had to be good food otherwise you heard about it really quickly," he said. While serving in the defence force Peter competed in the 1982 National Salon Culinaire food competition where he claimed bronze in Australia with his entry of a four-course French meal. "I was only 18 at the time, so it wasn't the easiest thing," he said. "I had time to prepare and work it a few times through before I actually went and did the competition. "The defence force were behind me at the time." Peter said the defence force let him have a bit of free rein on what he wanted to do and how in the competition. While still serving in the force Peter started up a little spit roast company in Sydney on the side-line with one of the hardest challenges was the difference in scale. "I left Wagga where we were feeding 3000 people, ended up to Sydney where I was feeding 70 people," he said. "First day there I made enough gravy to last a week. "But you had to adapt pretty quickly. "So it didn't take very long to sort of mould around that." While he didn't have this business for long Peter remained involved in the catering side of hospitality for the remainder of his career. After leaving the Royal Australian Air Force, Peter moved back to Forbes in 1986 where he started catering for events and birthday parties for friends. Over the following years he slowly built up his catering skills, starting his All-U-Want Party Hire catering business in 2000. Along with running the catering business since returning to Forbes, Peter has worked for a range of restaurants and businesses across the region including the Pitt Stop Cafe, Trundle, Eugowra and Parkes Golf Club and Jemalong Retirement Village. Peter currently works as the catering manager at Red Bend Catholic College as well as running his catering business, which predominately caters for council, formal or business functions. Peter said while he hasn't faced too many challenging dishes, there have been several events which proved to be challenging logistically, including the 2022 floods. What initially started as a request from the State Emergency Service (SES) to cater 20 meals for emergency services quickly grew to 80 meals in a couple of hours and over the course of the flooding expanded dramatically. "Twenty-one days later we fed about five and a half thousand people," he said. "So we set up a kitchen up in the SES headquarters. "A few of the suppliers were good enough to get food through to us from through the floods and everything so we could keep feeding the SES and the Air Force and the Army and the Navy." Despite the challenges and changes to the industry Peter has no plans of hanging up the apron and aims to keep on cooking. "I love working at Red Bend. I love doing the catering, it's good," he said.