Category: Melbourne & Victoria
-
A January Dinner Party – For a Birthday!
Dinner parties are hard work if you try to do all the catering yourself. And they are made more daunting by the need to “perform”, given Australians’ growing knowledge and expectations about what is good food. Apart from working out a “modern” menu and doing the actual cooking, much time is also taken up doing…
-
Indigo Valley – Home Grown Produce!
Several years ago, Barry and Liz wound up their professional jobs in teaching and accounting-law in East Gippsland, and moved to the Indigo Valley in north-eastern Victoria. That enabled them to relocate to Liz’s family home and farm, where several siblings live nearby. We recently made the four hour trip up from Melbourne to see…
-
King Valley – Food And Wine Trail!
The King River Valley is about three hours’ drive north of Melbourne. It is accessible from Mansfield (to the south-east), Benalla (to the west) or from Wangaratta (to the north). Whitfield, Cheshunt and Moyhu are the main small settlements in the valley. Some years ago we would sometimes drive through Whitfield when returning from skiing…
-
Duck Breasts With Red Cabbage
The Grampians National Park – Gariwerd The Grampians are a monolithic-like geological feature in western Victoria: they just emerge out of the surrounding fertile farming land. They have always been popular with campers and bush walkers. While we had completed a number of walks through the ranges over the years, we hadn’t been there for…
-
Champagne-Style Cocktail – With Pernod!
This is our version of an exotic Champagne-style cocktail. It is quite affordable and very popular with our friends. We came across it more or less accidentally when, some years ago, we had made a Pernod based granita for dessert. Some days later there was still quite a lot of the granita in the freezer,…
-
Showing Friends Around – Part 1
In 2014 we received some surprise news: our two German friends, from Bavaria, would be visiting us in Australia in August 2015. They are perhaps the two most travelled people we know, and since meeting them for the first time in the late 1980s we have received numerous postcards from their exotic and mysterious destinations.…
-
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…