Lady Lunchalot

One of my favourite places in Melbourne is the Queen Victoria Markets. This place has everything you could ever need to indulge in any food fantasy imaginable.

I can clearly remember the first time I walked through the doors of the deli section when I first moved to Melbourne seven years ago. I was absolutely stunned. My mouth fell open in awe - I’d never seen, smelled or heard anything like it!

The scent of cheese, salamis, bread and marinated vegetables hit me in the face the second I walked through the doors. I felt like I was making a pilgrimage! This was heaven!

The vegetables and meat are exceptional. Yesterday I bought some artichokes, beetroot, fennel, and a bunch of other stuff I’ll cook tonight. V exciting…

Now to get the Blogathon cooking underway, I am starting with a lamb tagine in the slow cooker.

My first blogathon entry! I’ll be blogging every 30 minutes over the next 24 hours to raise money for World Vision.

If you’re shopping for Asian ingredients Footscray is definitely the place to go. Barkly Street is jam-packed with Asian grocery stores that are overflowing with bamboo steamers, granite mortar and pestles, aisle after aisle of pickled, dried, and frozen goodies as well as the obligatory cardboard boxes full of knobbly identifed vegetables by the front doors.

I went to Footscray today and stopped in at the Footscray markets. This is one of the best places to buy meat, seafood and veg in Melbourne. It’s unbelievably cheap and the quality of the produce is exceptional. Especially the huge range of seafood!

Today I bought a stockpot to boil my preserving jars from one of the Vietnamese supermarkets. It was just a cheap aluminium one for $20, but should do the trick. I also picked up some lemongrass, ginger and wombok cabbage, as well as a huge bag of cardamom seeds for the piddly sum of $3.50. So cheap!

I picked up one of my favourite Footscray treats from the Victoria Bakery on Leeds St. They have a warmer full of BBQ pork buns by the front door. I think they’re called Bao? Pao? I love those things. I get one every time I go to the markets. So soft and sweet. Mmmm…

Waaay better than raindrops on roses, or whiskers on kittens, today I treated myself to one of my favourite things.

Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.

I spent a couple of hours at the Vic Market this afternoon shopping for ingredients for the Blogathon. I have two very strict rules when I go to the Vic Markets: I have to buy something I have never cooked before, and I have to eat a bratwurst.

The Bratwurst shop can be found in the deli section of the market. You can choose between spicy, mild or weisswurst sausages. In the seven years I have been performing this ritual, I still can’t decide which one I like best.

These piping hot tubes of 100% unadulterated Deutschland are nestled into fresh, soft bread rolls, with whatever combination of onion, mustard, sauerkraut, sauces and cheese you might like. I always go with seeded mustard, onions, and sauerkraut. And cheese if I manage to avoid thinking about my hips or my wedding dress.

The best thing about the Bratwurst sausages is the way the skin makes an audible crack when you bite into them. And the way they are kind of messy to eat, which makes them even more fun, because we all enjoy food more when it’s messy to eat, even if we don’t admit it. And how they always make me think of the Von Trapp family, busty Oktoberfest beer wenches, and pretzels as big as the Reichstag.

But then, sausages often have a strange effect on people.

I popped in at Gertrude Street Enoteca with Suse last week and I was won over by a chocolate, orange and pine nut cake. It didn’t look all that appealing (the pine nuts on top made it look a little bit like a health food cake… ergh) but when the waitress told me what type of cake it was I caved in instantly. Sometimes it is all too easy to shove that wedding dress to the back of my mind.

Oranges are unbelievable right now, so it’s not surprising to find orange-flavoured delicacies in every second café window. The cake had the velvety texture of a traditional chocolate cake, balanced with the liqueur-like tang of orange and the nutty crunch of pine nuts.

Enoteca also does an UNBELIEVABLE hot chocolate that even surpasses the chocolate masterpieces at The European on Spring St. This is real Italian-style cioccolata calda – a deep, dark syrup of steaming chocolate sin, with a flavour so strong that you can’t help but close your eyes with every sip.

Last night I had the honour of eating my first homemade chicken parmigiana at Ben and Julie’s house. Julie (who seems to think she can’t cook… ha!) had gone all out. Ben tells me she’d crumbed the chicken, made the sauce and baked the whole thing herself.

She did an amazing job - perfect sauce/cheese/chicken ratio, a nice crispy crumb, and a beautifully moist chicken breast. And because she served it with salad instead of chips, I didn’t even have to think about my hips too much.

And then she followed it all up with a gingerbread icecream cake. It was great! I’d never had anything like it!

And the amazing thing is that she didn’t even know how much I loved parmas. Just naturally brilliant I guess.

Thanks for a great dinner B & J!

Saturday night proved that The Union Club Hotel in Collingwood still serves one of the best pub meals in Melbourne.

It was Zoe’s birthday and she wanted to go salsa dancing at Copacabana on Smith St, Collingwood. I went to Copacabana once, many years ago, for a work Christmas party and was immediately struck by memories of swashbuckling waiters bearing long life-threatening sword-spears of meat. I had to duck every time they came to our table to avoid a swift decapitation.

Anyway, when Zoe asked me where we could go for dinner nearby, I immediately thought of The Union Club. Although, that’s not surprising. It’s easily my favourite place for a casual dinner in the inner north suburbs.

There were ten of us for dinner. The men were vastly outnumbered - O and another guy held their own up the back of the table, but there was no way they could compete with a gaggle of eight alcohol-fuelled women at a 30th birthday party.

I’d had a monumental achievement on the bathroom scales only hours before (I’ve lost 4 kilos in 6 weeks - woo hoo!) and I didn’t want to lose my momentum, so I went with the most calorofically Spartan item on the menu - Moroccan chicken salad.

This menu choice showed the unwavering Ghandi-esque determination I have to fitting into a size ten wedding dress. It killed me not to order the chicken parmigiana. I LOVE the chicken parma at The Union Club. But not only that, I was forced into ordering a dish that not only contained chickpeas, but even featured (I can barely bring myself to type the words)…. lentils!

Although I rarely eat dhal and am a dyed in the wool meat-eater, I actually have nothing against either chickpeas or lentils. It’s just that I tend to associate them with tofu-eating politically active women called Hannah who drink soy lattes and look like they are in dire need of a protein injection and a hair brush.

As it turned out, the salad was delicious. And it did have chicken in it, so my vegetarian fears were promptly allayed. The added unexpected bonus was that I felt very saintly tucking into my lentils and chickpeas while everyone else got stuck into steaks, parmas and chips. I kept my mind fixed on my rapidly evaporating waistline and the fact that I was wearing a pair of jeans that I hadn’t been able to button up since before I met O and the happy fat started to muffin-top over the waistband of my Levis.

As to be expected, O’s parma was up to The Union Club’s usual exceptional standard. He even gave me his last mouthful, which just proves that I am marrying Mr Right. One of the girls rolled her eyes at the massive porterhouse and mountain of mashed potato that was placed before her, declared that she’d never manage to get through it all, and then didn’t come up for air until she’d polished off every morsel. She looked mortified when she realized she’d eaten that much food. But I would never hold that against anybody. If anything, she moved up a few notches in my esteem. And The Union Club is that kind of place. If you can’t enjoy a good pub meal once in a while, what’s the point?

Horsham is really growing on me. I’ve already noticed some peculiarities about this town – the way everyone from the taxi driver to the local real estate agent tells you their life story (this is one quality that I find quite endearing) and how all the restaurants in town are so keen to feature seafood on their menus. I still haven’t figured out where all this fresh seafood is coming from. It’s enough to make you think Horsham is a quaint seaside fishing village with a crab pot and a prawn trawler around every corner, when it’s actually many hundreds of drought-stricken kilometres inland in the heart of Victoria’s sheep district.

So when O and I took ourselves to The Olde Horsham for dinner on Friday night, you can understand why I was expecting to find a menu full of hearty country dishes like lamb casseroles, mutton pie, and maybe something exotic like, oh I don’t know, corned beef?

Instead I found a weird medley of surf ‘n turf. There was steak cooked to your liking topped with a crown of king prawns, seafood marinara, and my personal favourite, steak kilpatrick (!) That name is so good it deserves a drum roll.

Ever mindful of my generously-proportioned hips and impending nuptials, I went with a piece of grilled barramundi (it’s a freshwater fish, so forget about the fact that Horsham’s waterways have all but vanished in the drought and I could almost pretend that fish came from local waters) and steamed vegetables with strict instructions to hold any form of butter sauce.

O ordered the obligatory lamb shanks. The lovely man said they were the second best lamb shanks he’s ever had – he last had shanks when I cooked them for his birthday dinner last year. He’s always loved my legs ; )

My fish arrived and it was beautifully moist and tender, and the veggies were great even though they arrived dripping in deliciously hip-thickening cream sauce. The waitress was so lovely I didn’t have the heart to send it back. We heard all about her aunty, how she always scoffed down the bread when she went to restaurants (the waitress, not the aunty), and how much she loved McDonalds sundaes.

So all in all I loved The Olde Horsham. It was a warm, generous place to have dinner even if they did mess up my veggies and offer us strawberries for dessert despite the fact that they hadn’t stocked fresh strawberries for ages. It’s really nice to go to an honest restaurant with a soul. And I am sure they must have an aquarium out the back for all that seafood!

On Saturday night O and I found ourselves halfway between Melbourne and Horsham absolutely starving. We decided to stop for a counter meal at the next pub we saw, which happened to be the Wickliffe Hotel, affectionately known as “The Wickie”.

As we walked in, the four guys sitting around the bar stopped dead in their conversation and turned to stare at us as if we were standing there stark naked. But that seems to be pretty normal for a country pub when a stranger walks in. It made even more sense when we discovered that Wickliffe’s population reaches the staggering heights of 54 people. That would make pretty much everyone either a relative or a stranger.

A man wandered out of a back room with a proprietorial air, so O asked him for some dinner. He pointed to a sign which offered a parma, fish and chips, or lasagne. Now that I have ordered my wedding dress I’m trying to be a little more saintly with my appetite, but there weren’t really any Jenny Craig offerings in sight. In fact you could nickname these dishes See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.

I was even too scared to ask for a Diet Coke and I would have been laughed out of the pub if I ordered a mineral water, so I settled for a pot of Carlton that I didn’t really want and decided that a parma would be the most readily pardonable sin to my hips.

The parma filled the empty spot, and the guys around the bar had forgotten about us by then. Their conversation was getting progressive more… colourful. One of them wandered by when we were chatting to the owner. As he joined in the conversation he leaned over me and asked, “You finished with those, luv?” and before I could answer had helped himself to the leftover chips on my plate! Worse than that, he ate half of one chip, and then put the uneaten half back down on O’s plate!

Cue banjo music….

One of my favourite menus in Melbourne can be found at at the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder, the place that I insist on calling “Stephanie’s”.

On Saturday morning Stu suggested that O and I meet him there for brekkie, as he had a hankering for Stephanie’s cheese on toast. You just haven’t tasted cheese on toast until you’ve been to Stephanie’s. (Ok, the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder.) Stu insists on a piece of tomato underneath the cheese, and he always orders an extra slice because he knows I cannot be trusted around his. The truth is, I never order it even though I love it, because I’ll always end up having some of Stu’s and that way I get to taste two different dishes!

Even though the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder attracts gaggles of Mercedes-driving pashmina-clad women with names like Prue and Pamela, it is also chock-a-block full of delicious goodies. I’ll never forget the time I tripped over one of these bejewelled ladies when I caught sight of the most unbelievably decadent cake sitting on the coffee counter. It was almost pornographic in its indecency, and when I saw it I must have looked like Kevin Spacey in that cheerleader scene from American Beauty.

On Saturday morning I restrained myself to a hot chocolate (you could really taste the cocoa) and scrambled eggs with parsley and a serve of perfectly cooked bacon. O and Stu, of course, had the cheese on toast. And they both ordered an extra slice for me. It’s nice to be loved. : )

And the Cheese Room is really something else. I could spend hours in there just soaking up the cheesy perfume. The staff are so helpful - not only is there nothing they don’t know about cheese, but they are completely evangelistic about it. I remember going in there once and receiving an impassioned lecture from the cheese lady about how we needed to petition our parliamentarians to allow the importation of Roquefort from France. (Which incidentally, has been allowed in Oz since 2005. Go cheese activists - yeah!)

O was a Cheese Room virgin. He was sufficiently impressed with the cheesiness, though he was a little cheesed out after his cheesy toast. He selected a beautiful piece of Pasti from Veneto, Italy for Signor Valvasori’s birthday present. I went with a soft squishy Clarine from the French Alps. That cheese was so ripe and runny you could suck it through a straw - but that would be a bit gross and spreading it on a nice slice of pumpernickel is a tad more socially acceptable.

I’m a big fan of communal eating. That’s why I love it when I go out to eat with a bunch of people who like to share their food, so everyone gets a taste of everything else.

Last night O and I went out to celebrate Signor Valvasori’s birthday at Manchester Lane. It was my first time there but it had all the necessary criteria for a great night out in one place: an imaginative cocktail menu, a dinner menu that makes your brow furrow with indecision, a non-smoking venue and great jazz music.

I suspected I was in for a treat when it took me about 20 minutes to decide what I was going to order.

For entrée we all ordered a few serves of dukkah floured calamari with rocket leaves, lime aioli and fresh lime to share. The calamari was nice and fresh, and it was a simple, clean dish, but it wasn’t particularly amazing.

The main courses were a different story. I ordered Asian style roast pork belly served on a salad made of crackling, lup chong sausage, apple and vietnamese mint and a beetroot roesti with a star anise jus. I know. How could I possibly go past that one on the menu?

O had duck confit (of course – I’ve never seen him ignore duck on a menu), served on braised cabbage and Kaiser fleisch bacon parcel with a marsala jus. It was very dark, very heavy and very wintery.

We also tasted an incredible gnocchi with blue cheese sauce, nashi pear and rocket salad (courtesy of the birthday boy) and brioche crumbed veal and sautéed du puy lentils. They were all superb.

But the main course was quickly forgotten when dessert arrived and I was served one of the most creative desserts I’ve seen in ages. Honey and walnut baklava with a tuft of very grown up fairy floss and Turkish delight ice cream. It was an exceptionally sweet dessert, but I have a healthy sweet tooth so I loved it. I’m also a sucker for baklava.

So many thanks to Signor Valvasori and his lovely lady Signorina Clarkebrese for introducing me to one of my new favourite places for a great night out.