Lady Lunchalot

If you’re into Italian food and plenty of it, you’re stepping through the gates of paradise the moment you enter Brunswick’s Mediterranean Wholesaler.

This place is a catalogue for the confirmed Italophile, and is a nostalgic step back into the smells of nonna’s kitchen. Any place that has an entire aisle dedicated to pasta is alright by me.

O and I made the pilgrimage to MW on the weekend to stock up on some supplies. I tend to go a little nuts when I visit this supermarket, so it was a good thing he was there to rein me in. We did the obligatory bulk purchase of all the staples in my kitchen: cartons of tinned tomatoes, olive oil, pasta, and we threw in a few goodies for fun. I found some mozzarella di buffala which promptly became a couple of calzones for dinner on Sunday night (with salami, anchovies, olives, garlic, various herbs) . I had a little trouble with the dough and it didn’t rise the way I wanted it to. I think the kitchen was a little too cold for the yeast (bloody Melbourne), so I took the dough into the living room to rise next to the heater for a while.

My pizza stone has been baptised now - one of my calzones had a Vesuvial eruption of cheese, leaving a burnt stain across the surface. O loves it. He gave me that pizza stone for Christmas, and he likes that it looks a little more worn (like most of the things in my kitchen).

As a Mediterranean Wholesaler virgin, O was quite gobsmacked at the range of items the supermarket carried. He was particularly impressed with the pasticceria, so we ordered a tray of biscuits that tasted so much like my dearly departed nanna’s that I wanted to hang her rosary beads back on my kitchen door. The biscuits didn’t last long. Once we had loaded all the food in the car there was a frenzy of glace cherries, almond paste and chocolate buds and it was all over before you could say “mangi!”.

I always look upon the world a little more softly when my pantry is full of pasta.