Today I know:

• That I’m welcoming the first day of Spring. Even if it’s a little chilly in Hobart.
• I like tangelos, my workmate has introduced them to me, and I love the sweet/sour taste, and they make my hands smell devine.
• Not to dry clean my blazer again. I did it three weeks ago and I still smell like a grandmother, and not a nice smelling grandmother either! It’s my favourite black go-with-everything jacket, made of a lovely soft moleskin fabric, and I can’t bear to wear it!
• I have to attempt to make a croque en bouche on the weekend, as a trial for my niece’s baptism cake. Yikes.
• Our dogs make me laugh. They’re at a funny stage now where they play mind games with each other over their food. Their antics and elaborate ruses to distract each other so that they can steal the other’s food is hilarious to watch. Better than tv.
• That we almost have a window seat. The builder says it might be finished and delivered tomorrow or Monday. I can’t wait. 
• We have our dinner sorted for tomorrow night, our Friday tradition of cheese, good bread and a bottle of red. We picked out two nice creamy soft cheeses and a piece of 24 month old Parmigiano at Bottega Rotolo today.
• My husband makes an excellent beef shin, mushroom and stout pie with mash topping.
• I like to collect the tiny plastic bulls that are attached to bottles of our favourite Spanish red, Torres Sangre De Toro. Each one is in a unique pose, my favourite is the one lounging on his back with his legs casually behind his head!
• This is my 100th post, and you know what, I like blogging, and the friends I have made in this electronic world. I especially like meeting people that I’ve first gotten to know through blogging.  This first 100 posts has seen me through building a new hut to live in and moving in, adding a new furry friend to our pack, and getting married to my best friend in a surprise ceremony for our guests. Can’t wait to see what the next 100 bring and hope you continue to drop by to find out.

Good food right here

This week is a big one for the restaurant world in Australia with the announcement of the Gourmet Traveller top 100 and awards. I can't help but be interested as an outside viewer, a consumer with a keen interest in good food. A Tasmanian chef, Luke Burgess, won best new talent, and I'm sure this will certainly cement his restaurant Garagistes on the culinary map of not only Tasmania but that big island we are sometimes included in.

I haven't yet tried to visit Garagistes. The concept is certainly intriguing. But I'm worried now it will be near impossible to get anywhere near it!

It has had me thinking about the revolution in food in Tasmania. The bar has been lifted by keen chefs, bakers and producers. Take bread, it wasn't that long ago when our only option for good bread was Jackman & McRoss in Battery Point. Now we have such a wide variety of may I say damn good bread that Rob and I take some time to decide where we'd like to buy a loaf. We can have the Companion Bakery country batard, Sweet Envy's potato bread, Red Velvet Lounge rye, Summer Kitchen sprouted rye, or Pigeon Hole's sourdough, and that was just this week! Just joking, although we are eating a lot more bread than we ever used to.

Rob and I popped in for a quick mid-week lunch at Pigeon Hole, mainly because my friend Pauline has been working in the kitchen a few days week recently and I wanted to see her in action. We work together in our real life at uni, but I think I can safely say that most of our days are spent thinking about food, cooking, baking and mentally composing blog posts about it. She looked content, and perfectly at home there. Whilst eating my eggs baked with cheese, onions, spinach and jamon and Rob ate his jamon on bread, I said outloud, how lucky are we now to have a cafe like this in little ol' Hobart. We often linger 10 years behind the mainland, but the food was excellent and I didn't have to travel to eat it.

Not only Pigeon Hole, but Tricycle, Sweet Envy, even the perennial favourite Jackman & McRoss, we now have so many options for a quick meal during the week. I did then have a slight moment of panic- what if we regress in Tasmania- could that happen? Rob thought not, we always appear to go forward.

Things are exciting here in Tasmania at the moment, new food shops like Bottega Rotolo complement our old favourite haunts like the Italian Pantry and the Wursthaus. I am yet to get out to an Agrarian Kitchen cooking class but have heard nothing but good things from those who have been. I love the change at the Salamanca markets, more local produce, free-range eggs, cheese, and of course our favourite sweet treats from the C and C cupcake factory. Producers of well treated animals such as Mt Gnomon farm. Regional cafes and restaurants mean that you don't have to stick to Hobart to eat good, honest food.

We bookended our week with the Pig Day Out at what I like to call (now) our local, Red Velvet Lounge. Steve's food is a constant delight to us, and last night was great fun. A wood-roasted pig, local cider, beautiful smoked salmon and an apple pie with such crispy pastry I forced myself to finish up even though I probably shouldn't have. Such bloody good food highlighting the quality of the produce, shared with 68 other people who appreciated it as much as us, rustically shared with others at the table in such a generous way. No phaffy pretentious food here!

I am so excited that good food is right here, in Tasmania, my home, and I look forward to it only getting better.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Our life:

Left to my own devices I am actually quite lazy. I admit that upfront. Some of it is learned behaviour, I guess, my parents are really “inside” people, movies, books that’s their thing. Given the choice between staying in bed with a good book (or more likely nowadays the iPad to check out what’s happening in blog-world) or get up and start gardening, I would choose bed nine times out of ten!

But then I started living with Rob. He doesn’t sit still. He lives for action. Doing something, anything, preferably outside with our dogs in tow. He lives by the saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”. For someone who is older than me he puts me to shame with his energy!

I think it works out ok for both of us as we counteract our natural tendencies for slothfulness (me) or busyness (him). Sometimes I encourage him to just sit and enjoy the moment with a cup of coffee and a Chocolate chip biscuit (best recipe ever thanks to C & C cupcake factory).

But more often he’s encouraging me to get my lazy butt out of bed and to live life.

I am grateful, for many things that I’ve learnt from my husband, but this is a good lesson to learn.

So our weekend consisted of:

• watching Rob play real tennis (this was me at my multi-tasking best in between points I could read and comment on my favourite blogs with near perfect reception on the iPad and he got to run around for an hour);
• heading to bed early to read new library books;
• going to the gym for a weights class together;
• shopping at Salamanca market, for vegies, seedlings to plant, treats from Jo and Michelle (the gin-soaked damson brownie was to. die. for.);
• visiting my little niece Maisy and marveling at how much she’s grown;
• cooking a lovely dinner of rib-eye steaks, baked potatoes and wilted spinach followed up by a Seville marmalade steamed pudding (I’m unjustifiably proud of my first batch of marmalade!);
• being served said pudding in bed for breakfast;
• sorting out a few last details with the builder at the hut- he even took down his builder’s signs at the front gate;
• cleaning the hut as a team so it was done more quickly;
• sitting for a moment in the sun coming through the bi-fold door while we ate toast and vegemite;
• planting out five cider apple trees, four quince trees and a prune tree in the orchard (stage 3) and protecting them from marauding wallabies;
• cooking a roast chicken in the Weber BBQ for Sunday’s dinner and chatting about how much we enjoyed our weekend but looking forward to falling asleep!

Sorry it probably sounds a little saccharine, but then we have only been married for four months and living in our hut for two of those so we’re still in that honeymoon phase!

Yes I am addicted

I had to head up to Canberra for a quick work trip this week.
This gave me the perfect opportunity to go and stay at the University House at ANU.
Ever since we began collecting Australian mid-century furniture last year, and I found out that my favourite designer, Fred Ward, had designed all the furniture at the Uni House I’ve been desperate to visit. It’s a bit sad really!

The House was built in the 1950’s and it was home to all of the research students and professors of the University at the time. Very much styled on the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge it was, for a time, referred to as “Oxbridge in the Bush”.

To me as I walked through the front entrance into the garden beyond and looked at the wings of the building that surrounded it I felt as if I had stepped back 60 years. I wanted the young (albeit all male) academics to be strolling around discussing their research, meeting in the library to read, having a special dinner in the Great Hall, traipsing into the breakfast room together.


I’m at home in the university environment. After heading to my local one straight from school, I’ve never managed to leave, finding myself a job at the uni and a husband who feels exactly the same and works there too!

Anyway, I walked around the path to my section of the building, each six rooms had their own stairwell, and my room was on the top floor. I opened the door (sadly with an electronic swipe card) and there it was. A room full of the original myrtle (I think) furniture designed by Fred Ward. My own desk and chair, wardrobes, and lounge chairs and a separate bedroom and en suite. A small personal balcony with the original balustrade would have been a lovely spot to sit and drink a cup of tea in the late afternoon sun.

I rang Rob to tell him all the details, and I think for a moment he was worried that I wasn't coming home! But I did admit that I prefer my own little hut with our personal collection of
Fred Ward pieces to the Uni house.

I would thoroughly recommend a stay there if you are in Canberra (it's very close to the middle of town) and particularly if you are keen on visiting a part of our cultural history.

Exciting news on the furniture front at the hut- the long awaited window seat is nearing completion. We visited the workshop this morning to go over a few last details and we should have it by the end of next week. Rob and I are beside ourselves. I can't wait to show you.

Good food weekend

The weather in Hobart was grey, rainy and cool.
This meant it was a perfect weekend for baking and cooking at the hut.

We had a little lunch party on Sunday to prepare for.

So we headed into town on Saturday morning to shop for vegetables, herbs and fresh ocean trout. Luckily C & C cupcake factory are now going to be at Salamanca markets, so we stocked up on salted chocolate chip biscuits, chocolate meringues (nice and nutty with hazels) and chocolate brownies. We also picked up a few loaves of bread from Pigeon Hole.

For Sunday's lunch we made 3 dips (hummus, red pepper and baba ghanooj), drained yoghurt for labnee, crispy lavosh and pitta bread, green beans in tomato, ocean trout with a tahini/yoghurt sauce topped with coriander, mint, chilli, red onion, walnut and sumac salad, a Persian love cake, and baklawa. Sorry the only dish I took a photo of was the baklawa straight out of the oven. It smelled delightful and extravagantly I used pistachios so it was very pretty! Lunch was lovely, but we all felt extremely full afterwards, in fact I struggled to eat breakfast this morning.

Last but not least, our favourite avocadoes are back in season- Reed. They're huge, but their flesh is so buttery, we ate them in a salad with some crispy cos lettuce earlier in the week.