We will spend this New Year’s Eve at a friend’s apartment which has a wonderful view over Melbourne. There will be a dozen or so of us, starting around 8.30 pm. The aim is to make it through to midnight, waiting for the fireworks. Everyone will ‘bring a plate’ and, no doubt, there will be partaking of celebratory drinks. If …
Special Experiences
(Continued from: Jobs and a Family Catchup) Tasmania is known for the quality of its produce and there are more and more outlets willing to showcase what the State can do. While it is renowned for its berries, it isn’t really known for Thai cuisine. A showcase of Tassie produce Wednesday was our last day. We had arranged with my …
Jobs and a Family Catchup
(Continued from: An Afternoon Feast) Olive’s Cottage is both a business and a holiday house for us. This means that there are generally jobs to do when we visit from Melbourne. We try to work these into enjoying the property, catching up with family and friends and searching out new experiences in the region. Business matters Our intention had been …
A Salad for Christmas Day
This was one of the surprise dishes for us in 2015. It is what we will be preparing this Christmas. Rhonda’s family have their Christmas dinner in the evening and there is always a big crowd. Always our role is to prepare the entree, while others contribute with turkey and ham, vegetables in different guises, and traditional pudding with brandy …
Forty years at Main Ridge Estate
In 1975, Rosalie and Nat White (Rhonda’s sister and brother-in-law) bought a lemon orchard at Main Ridge, near Red Hill and Arthurs Seat, on the Mornington Peninsula. Their goal was to establish a vineyard and make wine that they hoped would be of exceptional quality. From a risky beginning … With all but one of the lemon trees soon uprooted, …
An Afternoon Feast
(Continued from: Preparations for a Long Lunch) Back at Windermere after the cheese and vegies pickup, we had forty-five minutes or so before our friends arrived. Final preparation A quick check of the chicken in the oven showed all looked fine. The broccoli shoots and silver beet were quickly trimmed, washed and shaken dry. The white turnips peeled like a …
GST Changes and Fresh Food
If the full GST model is implemented, expect fresh food, fruit and vegetables in particular, to increase in price by 15% and expect your ‘cost of living’ to go up by around 10%. Today, Friday 11 December 2015, the Australian Federal Government will be meeting with the state governments at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to discuss tax reform, …
Preparations for a Long Lunch
It was late Sunday night when I realised how much the lunch that day was a microcosm of life at Olive’s Cottage, with memories from my parents’ time mixing with aspects of how the cottage works for us now. During the afternoon we had lamented to our Tassie friends that we had eaten our breakfast while a recalcitrant wallaby calmly …
Traditional Christmas Cake
I doubt you will find a better Christmas cake recipe than this one. It is based on one given in the Melbourne Age in 1982 by Beverley Sutherland Smith. She described it as the style of traditional cake which people expect to see on the table at Christmas time: rich, full of fruit and very moist. It is rather like …
The First Blog Post – Start Here
There isn’t any need to go into detail about who we are and why we set up this blog: all that detail can be found from the ‘Welcome’ (‘Home’) page, the ‘About & Contact’ page and ‘FAQs’. A blog is something I (we) have thought about setting up for some years. It was just a case of finding the right …