Cheese and wine and meat - oh my!

Well hello - Apologies for the long silence and, to those of you who have let me know that you missed having the blog around, aww shucks. Thanks guys!

So much food - so little time. The first thing that I should write about is the Anzac Day long weekend. This event was testament to s.i.l.'s profound and enduring powers of sneakiness - may she always use them for good. S.i.l. arranged a surprise visit for bro's 30th (officially, bro - you are now very, very old) birthday in Melbourne and being a woman of good taste we started with wine tasting in the Yarra Valley. Chandon, Giant Steps, Rochford, Badger's (I'm missing one - where do they make Mr Frog again?) and then cheese tasting at the Yarra Valley Dairy where they do obscenely good things with goats. House goat - a soft cheese with herbs was a stand out as was the ashed and matured pyramid of white, creamy goodness. After lying on the floor and groaning for a while we headed out into chinatown for dinner. The restaurant was the Golden Orchid - generous meals with fresh flavours and stacks of scallops and prawns and water chestnuts etc. Then on to one of Melbourne's funky little carefully hidden bars - Manchuria. You can just see a little sign in the alley and this heralds a dingy, dark and chilly concrete staircase. Just at the point when you're wondering if this is indeed a bar, you see a bouncer who opens a forbidding metal door. Inside is a cavern of golds and reds - a small space with odd chairs, a bloody good D.J., couches and a series of booths individually separated from the main room with gauzy pale gold curtains. And because this is Melbourne - people reading books and talking rather than conspicuously using the newest model of mobile phone and rotating slowly in order to show their fake tan off to the greatest advantage. 

I'm sorry. It's my problem - I'll deal with it.

The main focus of Saturday was a dinner party of bro's favourites - s.i.l. set up a fabulously elegant table with printed menus: beautifully arranged antipasto followed by pumpkin soup (both courtesy of s.i.l.) then beef bourguignon. After some study I picked the recipe with the most red wine and brandy in it and added more than enough little onions and mushrooms and bacon; the meat was marinated for three hours and cooked slowly for nearly three again. S.i.l. made up a truly decadent mash and green beans with a fresh counterpoint of deconstructed bruschetta garnish to accompany it. Dessert was a recipe that I adapted from the April Delicious; a short-crust pastry with some of the butter replaced with crushed macadamia nuts (very light and golden), filled with grandma's butterscotch and topped with roasted macadamias, served with dollop cream and vanilla ice-cream. While we could still move there was loud, drunken singing and dancing to Meatloaf  - I'm not ashamed to say it. When we were less mobile we experimented with the telescope and were disappointed that no-one was considerate enough to be home, naked, with their curtains open on a Saturday night.

I didn't really work up much enthusiasm for food again 'till late on Sunday, at which point - back in Sydney - I went retro and made jam-drop biscuits from Jillian Gripper's recipe (SMH's home-cook hero of last week) to take to work. I love my jam-drop biscuits. They are so pretty and sweet and only some of them are a little too dark on the bottom. Muttermuttermutterovenmuttermutter. All I really need is a way of financing my fantasies of baking in attractive aprons and heels. 

Ok - bed time for this girl. Tonight's experiment with udon will have to wait 'till tomorrow...