Finally...

Before

After

A few close ups

Sorry only took them with the phone will need to do a photo shoot with a real camera! We are quite smitten. Last night we dragged a few make-do mattresses as cushions, grabbed a drink and didn't move, not even to make dinner.

Monday’s Menu

A new regular posting theme for me. Well actually it will be the previous weeks menu. In an attempt to truly web log what we serve on the menu at the Hut, I’ve decided over the weekend to take a photo of our dinner each night over the next year.

The iPhone has helped me document things pictorially recently and looking at the photos, a lot of them are food related.

I think it will be interesting to see what we do eat, and how repetitive we are.

If it gets too boring I may not post them- but it might spur us onto culinary variety, you never know. Hopefully there aren’t too many pictures of scrambled eggs on toast or vegemite on toast!

This week is not complete but there were some memorable meals so here goes:

Monday and Tuesday

Chef: Rob

Beef shin, mushroom and stout pie with mash topping (a tweaking of Matthew Evan’s recipe in his latest book, Winter on the Farm) and peas.

Rating: Pretty good, beef perfectly tender, but needed something to give the sauce some more depth of flavor.

Wednesday (sorry no photo)

Chef: Rob

Pasta carbonara.

Rating: The go to meal for comfort and ease- Nigella Lawson recommends it as a meal to serve with your lover the first time he stays over, preferably in bed.

Given we’re an old married couple now, we eat it quite civilly at the table! We used some real eggs from our friend’s chooks so the sauce was a nice saffron colour.

Thursday

Chef: Rob (I’m not doing well here am I?)

Pumpkin, mushroom, spinach and pistachio risotto

Rating: Colourful and an unusual but satisfying flavour combination. Next day we ate the leftovers for lunch with out the nuts and missed them for the crunch they added.

Friday

Chef: Our equivalent of a take away meal

Cheese selection from Bottega Rotolo: Delice Cremiers, Brie and Parmigiano Reggiano. Fig and walnut rye baguette and a rocket and fennel salad. Oh and a bottle of Cotes du Rhone.

Rating: Delice Cremiers cheese a standout, a light textured cheese like whipped butter, slightly fruity but with a surprisingly clean acid finish. Which meant we could eat it all!

Saturday

Chefs: Rob (main) me (dessert)

Rump steak with Nicola potato chips and spinach.

Cherry and almond cake

Rating: Rob loves to use his Weber BBQ.  Steak and chips is always going to be a winner in this household. We just have to remember to save a tiny morsel for each dog, otherwise they sulk for the rest of the evening. My cake was a new recipe for me, using some gorgeous dark coloured glace cherries. I was a little worried I’d cooked it too long, but with a dollop of cream and a spoonful of cherry conserve it was a pretty good pudding (if I do say so myself).

Sunday

Chefs: Rob and me (terrible I know on Father’s Day- but he loves to use the Weber)

Souvlaki- slow roasted then grilled lamb shoulder, hummous, cacik, green beans cooked in tomatoes and onions.

Poire belle Hélène with home-made vanilla ice-cream

Rating: Our favourite summer food was pulled out of the repertoire a little early; the weather was beautiful at the Hut yesterday. Nothing I like better than putting our food together at the table and then eating it whilst the juices dribble down our chins. It’s not pretty but delicious. The pears has been cooked for about 4 hours and were soft and spiced with the vanilla and the red wine. Mmmm is all I can manage right now.

Well we’ll see what culinary delights the next week brings.

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!