Waiting...

I know, I know, it's been a while. But I have been waiting for Andy to add his one and only blog - it is supposed to be about his visit to the Grand Prix, and I was waiting so that the happenings would stay in order, however a girl can only wait so long before the blogging withdrawal symptoms start showing (forgetting what you did and when you did it).
This blog is going to be a short catch up blog in preparation for the Easter weekend blogging. Andy will just have to fit around us!

So there has been some eating, drinking and laughing on the weekends and during the week.

Little creatures dining hall, found in Fitzroy, they have a brewery and sell their many beers (and some cider) at this venue along with food. Burgers were a little bland, I had a lovely feta and cherry tomato tart with chips (the largest bowl ever).
They also serve many delicious looking pizzas but we had only just made our own the night before!

Beer. A taste for this was developed (not by me) and it was decided we would search out a brewery on another weekend.

We headed out towards the wineries down in the Mornington Peninsula, where we stumbled across the Redhill Brewery, Andy tried out their beer tasting platter and I was lucky enough to have a lovely apple juice (seriously, it was made from local Redhill apples).
Lunch was also on the menu (I have a problem taking pictures of food, I only ever think of it after I have eaten) and involved a tapas style mix of pub lunch bits, including welsh rarebit!














We have also enjoyed several of the opportunities offered by the Melbourne Comedy Festival, including the Opening Night Gala, Mark Butler, Mark Watson and Rich Hall.

Naughty... 2 weekends have passed

and no new blog.

Andy's chosen title for this blog is: Wine by the bottle, by the case and by the strawberry!

He was over-ruled, as is my prerogative and I am the one typing. However it would help to explain what happened last weekend nicely, so I will leave it there as a sub-heading.
So since last week I have joined the world of the employed again, this may mean blogs start slowing down, or it may mean that blogs become more often as it becomes my displacement activity, we shall see.

So last weekend was the start of the Food and Wine Festival in Melbourne where many restaurants, food providers, drink providers and chefs show their wares and talents (at a reasonable price).

We decided to check out one of the many events taking place that weekend - Farm gate to Cellar door. This event was held along the Yarra River next to the Exhibition centre. There were many little white stalls set up and for $35 you were given a wristband and a plastic wine glass (with a black line marked on it) and set free amongst the stands.

There were over 60 wineries at the event and each stand had several wines to try (as this was not a challenge to taste them all, we selectively chose our wines, I stuck to the whites).

One winery made all their wines from strawberries - Mmmmmmmmmmm, they also dabbled in ciders too, so a purchase was made. The day was warm and sunny and if they had provided sun loungers I would have been fast asleep, as this wasn't an option we kept on tasting the wines until it closed.



The weekend continued nicely with a barbecue on Sunday, to expand our bbqing repetoire we took a wander to South Melbourne market, we finally ended up with the traditional burgers, sausages and corn on the cob, but also prawns, salmon, mushrooms and several marinades to experiment with.




What is wrong with this picture?









Is it just me (because Andy didn't see any problem with this) or aren't the prawns supposed to lay flat?

The weekend we have just had, has been a looooong weekend (not due to boredom or the fact that I now have work to do) we had a public holiday on monday. To fill the weekend, there has been shopping of both clothes and food, tidying (of the flat) and work :(
However, there has also been a little time for fun (mostly eating and drinking in the sun fun). Saturday lunch was DUMPLINGS, we went to a lovely restaurant in chinatown and the dumplings were delicious (according to Andy), they restaurant is famous for them and even has instructions on the table on how to eat them for maximum enjoyment (Andy strictly followed these guidelines). The meal continued with various bits and pieces including some spicy prawns (heads and all!) which were covered in chillies (HOT, HOT).

The remainder of the day was spent in a variety of places including:
A rooftop bar









A bar with pool tables









and beside the river









I will include one other activity that has kept Andy very busy - PS3 Gran turismo 5 (I won't mention the pile of ironing which is sat next to the table as yet untouched).









There is also my crochet (the brown thing is a Sackboy from PS3 little big planet, the things on the left are meant to be cupcakes, I think you can guess the rest).

Mmmmm... Wine!

There are several areas around Melbourne that are havens for wine. The areas are perfect for the vines and therefore there are plenty of wineries (as they are called here, not vineyards).
We headed to one particularly dense population of wineries - the Mornington Peninsula.
No packed lunch or picnic was prepared, we had already discovered that most wineries come with some sort of restaurant, so we decided to risk it and go for lunch at one of them.
The prediction for the day was grey skies and possible showers in the morning, however the weather is unpredictable, so with both umbrella and suntan lotion packed, we headed out in the car.
We stopped off in Mornington (presumably the town for which the peninsula was named) and took a stroll down the main street towards the beach (the drive had been along the coast so we had seen plenty of it already, but there's nothing like getting up close and personal). The town was full of shops and cafes. I was very lucky and Andy purchased me a bento box, it is super cute, with a little sauce pot and knorf (a fork/knife). I shall be searching the internet for bento box lunch recipes over the next few days - yum, yum.
So it was nearly lunch and we headed further down the peninsula to Redhill and our first winery - which also did woodfired pizza (lunch) and a sculpture trail. The wines were fine and we purchased a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
The next winery was named 10 minutes by tractor, although we didn't ride in a tractor at all and wandered into the cellar door (not because we were drunk but rather this is the name for the area were you can taste the wines). The wine tasting was $4 each but the people were very knowledgable and there were at least 7 wines to taste - you could also waive the cost if you bought a bottle of wine, which we did (well 2 bottles, a sauv blanc and a chardonnay).
We were then going to head home but there was time for one more, so I choose Darling winery (really, that was it's name) which was on the route back. This winery was fabulous, mostly due to the 2 wonderful women hosting the cellar door, they were so friendly and funny and gave a laypersons explanation of their wines. So we ended up with 7 bottles (buy 6 get one free, can't resist a deal) these were a mixture of pinot, rose, sparkling, viognier (pronounced vee-on-yay) and sauv blanc.
So plenty to drink at ours at the moment. Bottoms up!

We also went the Palais theatre in St Kilda to see Tim Minchin vs the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, both Andy and I had a fantastic time, it was comedy and music in one, very funny and very entertaining. There will be photos if I can get them off of the mobile phone!
All round a 5 Stacey star weekend.

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to...

Not really, no tears here. Had a very relaxed birthday which centred mostly on food.

I spent my friday roaming the streets of Fitzroy looking for something lovely to treat myself. It wasn’t hard to find lovely things as there were many but it very hard to choose, I stumbled into a fabric shop which will have to be revisited once I need some fabric, several gift shops with cute stuff and home wares, I returned home with some decorative papers which will be used at some point in a crafty way.

In the evening we had dinner at The Graham, I enjoyed a sesame spinach and enoki mushroom rice noodle roll with a hot broth to start, while Andy had a pork ballontine with a shallot puree. For main, I had Pan fried herb gnocchi with green veg and a cheesy sauce, while Andy enjoyed a chicken kiev with braised leeks, all very yum. We shared a chocolate mud cake with red fruit for pudding, along with a couple of delicious glasses of wine.

I had been waiting for the Gasworks Farmers Market for quite a while, after having read about it in a foodie book and missing the market last time it was on I was keen to make sure we went. It happens once a month on a Saturday, opening at 8am until 1pm, so we woke early (for a weekend) packed our bags (although we should have taken more or a trolley) and headed out. The market takes place in a park, stalls are all around the space many filled with fruit and vegetables, and the food is fantastic, next time I would get breakfast there as there are several cooked food options to enjoy.

We decided to buy anything we liked and then put together meals afterwards ‘ready steady cook’ style. Purchases included potatoes (from the potato stall), mushrooms (from the mushroom stall), parsnips, leeks, corn, peppers, rhubarb, apples (from many different fruit and veg stalls), watercress (from the herb stall), sausages (from the meat stall), etc... We decided we would have a roast, mushroom risotto and a BBQ from our harvest, along with apple and rhubarb crumble and a cake.

So there was some cooking (and eating) in the afternoon!

The market is a must, 5 Stacey stars (take a trolley).

Twist and Shout!

St. Kilda Festival continued for a week, culminating in the big day on Sunday. There were several stages for different music (pop, hip hop, indie, etc...) we listened to a little of each, we didn’t know any of the bands so if nothing else we got an insight into Australian music.

There was more than just music; there were many stands, some selling clothes, food and general stuff. Some were selling a very special foodstuff, Da-dada-da-dada-da THE TWISTY POTATO (on a stick) I have mentioned it before, but this time I had room enough (in my tummy) to eat one. Andy wants to bring them over to the UK and make a fortune, they were $5 each and to make them they spiral a potato, dip the potato in a batter mixture and deep fry then you could have any flavouring added to it. We had a plain salt and a hot n’ spicy, but you could have had cheese, vinegar, vanilla sugar, even chocolate (you know I am a chocoholic but I couldn’t quite get my head around a chocolate flavoured potato)!

Bikes featured heavily at the festival, with pro riders, BMX riders and some quite impressive motorbike stunts which we enjoyed watching whilst sat on a hill.

Unlike the last weekend, we were not fooled by the cloudy grey sky and slopped on the suntan lotion, which was good because like last weekend the sun and the wind came out in the afternoon.

It was a nice afternoon, even if I had the sniffles (aww...) which was rounded off by a hotdog BBQ, and an evening spent trying to fix the mouse on the computer as it had stopped moving only to realise half an hour later that actually the whole computer had crashed and the screen was frozen (noticed only because the clock on the screen had not changed).

Other random stuff

Just wanted to share a few bit of info with you and a few photos.

Firstly the building and the story behind the building of the BBQ.

The BBQ was a self build, not a worry after the many years of putting together flat pack furniture from IKEA. So after the purchase was made and a short drive home assembly began, only to find (or not) that there were 3 screws missing.

One phone call and another drive we collected the screws (for the handle). When screwing in the handle, it snaps (the shops are now shut). Another phone call the next day results in a handle being sent through the post. After a couple of days a courier drops of a package, I open package to find that the new handle is in 2 pieces.

Another phone call, a new handle will be couriered round tomorrow, the guy even wraps the parcel himself to ensure enough packaging material is used. So it took a while but we have a fully functional BBQ and all in all the shop people were very good and I can now enjoy barbecued corn on the cob, YUM.

Next, comes the lettuce and the spring onions, the lettuce comes with roots and the spring onions are really long. No real reason for this just I thought it was interesting/unusual.

Lastly, I am a learning to crochet, I have had a lesson, so send in your requests, I am a little slow at the moment so they might take a while, I also need to buy more wool as I only have green left, which is fine for practise and green objects but it is a little limiting.

A little bit pink...

The weekend was left open, no fixed plans were made. After a spontaneous trip to South Melbourne market on Saturday which resulted with Andy hacking at a piece of fish on Saturday night trying to make his own fish fingers (let's be posh and call them goujons, he was succesful in the end thanks to the addition of Panko breadcrumbs), a slightly better plan was made for Sunday.

The weather had been a bit rubbish, with some really big downpours, so I packed the ol' faithful (in other words the umbrella) and we headed out on a longgggg walk to St. Kilda (it doesn't look that far on a map, bit it is). The stretch of beach towards St. Kilda was full of kite surfers (I am kind of planning to do this, although it does consist of 2 lessons before you are actually allowed to kite surf, one learning to fly the kite and the next learning to flying it whilst up to your neck in cold salty water).

The reason behind this longgggggg walk was to check out anything going on in St. Kilda as the festival had started, but more importantly to view the craft fair at the esplanade (a curve of road).

The craft fair was really quite impressive, it is held every Sunday, there were stalls of clothes, woodwork, jewellery, soaps, paintings, juggling equipment, bags, and the list goes on. We didn't buy anything, not because there was nothing we wanted but because we needed to check out the policies on bring stuff back to the UK (they had beautiful wooden boards, but I would need to be sure about getting them past customs before buying).

The trip also included Andy taking me out for lunch (I know, I know). We had a lovely pizza in a cafe on Acland Street, before heading back past the craft stalls for one last look and beginning the walk back home. It was at this point that the sun decided to come out for the first time in a couple of days, the wind continued to blow and Andy and I started to feel the burn (not from the walk, we didn't go that fast, the burn of the sun and wind). You might think why not use the umbrella as shade, unfortunately the wind put paid to that (and almost to the umbrella).

So here I sit and I am as the title says... a little bit pink (or very pink). So the lesson learnt is when packing an umbrella put in the suntan lotion and as the girl guides/scouts say "always be prepared".