A Blogger's Dinner

Yes, I know it's only Wednesday and Sue usually gets her cooking inspirations on Friday nights. Well she's just finished 3 weeks of emergency teaching and in her first week off work, the kitchen has been calling her. It said Sue, Sue, Sue, weave your magic, I am here waiting for you......

After a hectic day driving all over Melbourne I popped into "Uncle Dan", my favorite wine cellar. Thinking I would purchase a Sancerre or a Vouvray, I finished up buying a chilled Western Australian Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blend from the Margaret River region.

When I arrived home, there it was, a whole snapper lying there with open dead-pan eyes ready for the oven.


A lettuce from the wheel barrow garden, tomato, onion and avocado lay waiting for a baked potato with sour cream before the snapper was placed on the plate. Yummmmmm.

A 15 year old port and coffee, wash the dishes and off to bed - goodnight all.


PS - My 21 year old prefers snags!!!!!

No blog last weekend!!!!

The weekly blog last week just didn't happen. It was one of those weeks where before you knew, it was gone. Lots of things happened but nothing happened.

With only two weeks before we take annual leave, work has been hectic and the social side of catching up with people leaves no "our time".
This coming Saturday, Sue's relatives arrive. They come from Virginia and she has never met them. Both her brother and sister have been the the east coast and spent time with them. I'm looking forward to meeting them and showing off parts of Melbourne, especially our bay area.

Oh, yes. Another problem. My laptop hard drive crashed over the weekend so I'll use that as another excuse for not blogging.

I have a blog in mind on Melbourne's upside down river, the Yarra. Since settlement, the Yarra River has changed from a pristine waterway where our natives fished and hunted to an ugly dirty drain for the growing industrial factories along it's banks in the 1800s and early 1900s, It has now returned to its former self and is a playground for rowers and wildlife and fish have returned to its waters.
More on that next weekend.

Food, food, glorious food (add glorious wine to that).

I walked through the door Friday night and there it was - the aroma of my all time fave meal.

Roman Spring Lamb!

The Silver Spoon - (sub-titled, Eating is a serious matter).

Garlic and rosemary

Rosemary, garlic, sage and white wine vinegar caressed my olfactory senses and whisked me towards the kitchen. The bottle of Pinot seemed to be the perfect choice.

In goes the garlic

Rosemay adding that special flavour.

The reason I buy cook books for Sue is that she likes to experiment with food, and I benefit from this. Occasionally there is one recipe that I can't get enough of. Roman Spring Lamb is one of them.

The book was originally published in Italian in 1950 and printed in English in 2005. The book has 1263 pages. For me, its an investment of my meals for life.

And finely sliced potatoes

A liitle longer and its ready for the table.

But I'll let Sue explain a little about the preparation while I just indulge in the meal and the Pinot.

"Leon would eat this very night given the choice (which he's not!) It is lovely. For such strong herbs it has a delicate and light flavour.

Brown the lamb pieces which have been lightly dusted with flour. I used pieces of shoulder, but I also use leg chops or whatever else seems good and well priced at the time. Add 2-3 chopped cloves of garlic along with chopped sage and a few bits of rosemary. Turn it around a few times and then add about 175ml of white wine and 4 table spoons of white wine vinegar. Let it simmer until almost all liquid is evaporated and then add 150 ml of boiling water and some potatoes finely sliced. Cook in a 200 degree oven for about 30 minutes, checking on liquid level occasionally.

I don't think I've left anything out. It can take a while for the potatoes to brown, give them a stir every now and again.

Very yummy."

No argument here.

The Color of Purple - Whoopi

THE COLOR OF PURPLE - WHOOPI

Great movie, great color, great actor.

Our property is pouting purple everywhere at the moment.

This photo doesn't do justice to our Jacaranda tree. I'll take another pic in a week or two when it leaves a carpet of purple blossom on the grass. You can lay on the ground and look up through the gnarly limbs and let the filtered light touch your face. Preferably with a beer in your hand...

Our Jacaranda tree in the back yard is just starting to blossom, a little late compared to neighbouring Jacarandas. Nothing unusual about that, she's just a late bloomer. Over next few weeks it will be full of blossom and as the blossom falls to the ground our green lawn becomes a carpet of purple.

In the front garden, the Agapanthus are opening and showing off their purple bits as well. Although considered a bit of a weed in the bay area, I love them when they flower. Unfortunately the snails love them in winter when they do look like weeds.

I just love these guys - Agapanthus reinvent themselves from a green weed to a splash purple every summer.

In support of the Agapanthus, our lavender which seems to self seed at random has tips of purple to complement the overhanging wisteria.

The Wisteria is about to attack the Lavender - Its a jungle out there...

The wisteria gets cut back many times during spring and summer. Being outside our bedroom window, I fear it might whisk us away in our sleep one night if I didn't keep it under control.

Our Wisteria is like a python wrapping itself around the columns of the veranda and any other plants that get in its way - beware the Wisteria....

It seems to enjoy hugging itself around the front veranda columns and taking over more than its allocated space.

And just quietly minding its own business at ground level, the Elysium moves through the spaces between the brick driveway. Mostly white, some purple, well lilac is appearing this year.

Shhhhh! The Elysium is sneaking down the driveway....

I noticed this all this morning when all the purples were enjoying the sunshine. That is until mid-afternoon when a storm came and went within no more that thirty minutes.

You know what they say about Melbourne weather. If you don't like it, wait for an hour - it will change.

Today reminded me of some days last June in the Loire when after a humid day the storm clouds would roll in, accompanied with claps of thunder.

Good Music - Good Times in the 60s.

Melbourne in the 60s had a great music scene. Being a teenager at the time I saw a change in the music scene from jazz and rock ‘n’ Roll to the British beat music.

My favourite Disco in the 60s was the Biting Eye - their posters were works of art.

As a 15 year old my mother allowed me to go to my first jazz dances. They were local and I had to be home by midnight. Mum loved dancing herself - she met my father at a dance in the 40s so I guess she didn’t see any threat during her time and therefore nothing had changed over the next 2 decades. She was fairly right in her assumption. Jazz dances were very friendly places in the mid-sixties. However things did change a little in the second half of the decade

. Two more Biting Eye posters.

When the music of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Small Faces and the Who started to filter through to Australia, the dance venues also took on a change. Most Jazz and Rock n Roll venues were suburban Town Halls. Later as the British wave of music took over, venues for this music were in the dark alley ways of Melbourne in old warehouses. A little like the Cavern in Liverpool. With weed and LSD and the whole love-in period these warehouses for music venues sprung up throughout the CBD of Melbourne with unusual names that my mother didn’t quite get. I must admit that I didn’t quite get it either but you didn’t admit that to your parents. All that mattered was that it was different to your parents era.

I remember my very first concert - I was 17 and six of us all piled into my mates Morrie to see The Who, Small Faces and Manfred Mann on the one show. Probably cost all of $10 at the time.

Many of these Discos also had Sunday afternoon sessions - the Melbourne music scene was where many of the interstate bands would come to be noticed. The Twilights were from Adelaide, Python Lee Jackson from Brisbane and Split Enz (later Crowded House), Max Merritt and Dinah Lee from New Zealand.

BELOW: The Thumping Tum also had creative posters, probably due to their creative owners that were from the window dressing and interior display staff of the Myer Store.

This is a shot of the interior of Berties Disco - It had three levels including the basement for the bands, and a lounge area and a games room.

Anyway, back to the venues and the weird names. The Biting Eye was my first real “Disco”. They were called Discos then because between live bands, they would have a DJ spin a few Discs. None of the venues had a liquor licence and just as well as most of the patrons were probably 14 to early 20s. Occasionally you would get a wiff of a funny cigarette but due to no alcohol, the venues were pretty friendly. Venues opened at 8.00 pm and closed in time to get the last train home.

Another popular venue was the Thumping Tum. I was working at Myer doing visual displays and windows at the big department store in the city and one of the employees actually ran the Tum. Another fellow employee started a venue called the “Love In” down the road a little in Carlton. It later burnt down. Somebody probably dropped a reefer down the back of a couch.
Our Saturday night choices also included Catcher, Sebastian’s and Berties. From memory I can still count about 12 venues in the city alone. The local bands would do the circuit of the venues during the night.

It was great time, a little naive maybe but to my mind, a lot more comfortable before Pub Rock started. As we rolled into the 70s, the Pubs started to employ bands to bring in the crowds, usually 18 plus due to this being the minimum drinking age. It left a lot of the younger kids with no place to go.

I’ll always look on those years as the start of my music (and life) education. It was great to be in that era when music drastically changed from Jazz to Rock n Roll and to the British Beat scene and then psychedelic music. Oh yes, and I survived, got married, had a family and currently enjoy being both a grumpy old man and old fart by my adult boys who now play gigs around Melbourne with their band “In Tongues”

Gosh they have strange names for bands these days!!!!!!!

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