Perth & Margaret River

Yes, I realize, I promised this post a week ago. I apologize. I’ve been entirely too wrapped up in *what to do with my life* (now that I don’t have a job lined up for next year for the first time in my adult life) to think about things like posts and food and, oh, the little things that I really should be paying more attention to.  Like gorgeous beaches, sun (when it happens!), berry picking, and the massive stack of vacation pictures I finally put up on my flickr page.  This first one is from Little Creatures, in Fremantle, which is one of the best places I can think of to have a beer by the sea and dream about living anywhere warmer than CT.  As long as you don’t want a stout, of course, but Australia isn’t really the place for stout anyway.

Perth itself looks like this:

It’s a small city, but it has the most amazing park right near the city center with preserved Bushland and all sorts of gorgeous places to while away the day.

Kings Park aside, Perth was just a good chance to catch up James’s family and go shopping for passionfruit tea and delicious jam donuts and all sorts of other good stuff at the Fremantle Markets and this greek spice market whose name I can’t recall at the moment.  This was good in its own right, but I wanted to see something new, so we ended up heading down to Margaret River for a few days.  We stayed near Yallingup, which is a tiny town a bit north of Margaret River, with cheap campsites and views like this:

It’s nice seeing the sun set over the water again.  There’s also a pretty awesome cave nearby:

It is one of a few sandstone caves in the region, and it was worth a trip, even if we did have trouble getting pretty pictures. We headed down toward Margaret River, as well, to check out the Karri forest (pictures do not capture how awesome this was):

They’re as tall as redwoods, almost, except they all seem to reach the same height, so you feel like you’re under this light, open canopy of green.  It’s the kind of place you’d expect to find fairies if you happened to be five years old and less cynical than I am.

In Margaret River, we stopped for lunch at the Margaret River Bakery, which was cheap and awesome.  I had a burger with the works,

which was something like AU$7 with the chips.  Beetroot, fried egg, and grilled onions were all involved in this masterpiece, and while I was skeptical at first, there is a reason burgers in Australia come with this particular combination.  The beetroot and onion were a sweet counterpart to the savory grilled beef and fried egg, and despite my misgivings, I ended up liking it.  James had a AU$4 pie, chips, and gravy special:

This was proper Aussie tucker, as James would say if he happened to be feeling homesick and in the midst of making pie.  Yes, gravy and chips are brilliant together, if slightly indulgent.

Now, Margaret River is probably not known for its bakery, however delicious our lunch happened to be.  It IS known for wineries and food producers, which happen to be all over the region, which you can go check out if you have a car and an adventurous stomach.  We didn’t do much wine tasting (I was driving — on the wrong side of the road! And James doesn’t drink.)  but we did check out some local cheese producers, a chocolate factory, and an olive oil producer or two.   Olio Bello was my favorite one, I think.  They had new olive oil they had just pressed that week, which was green, fresh, spicy, and tasty. We picked up a bottle to bring back with us, and had to restrain ourselves from buying more.  The liquid ban in airports is cumbersome.  We also checked out The Berry Farm, which makes jams, berry-infused ports and wines, and this incredible sparkling strawberry wine that I seriously would have bought if we could have brought it back.  We also stopped for a coffee on their grounds, since we ran into a guy that said they made “incredible cappucinos”  on our way into the tasting room.  He was right, though the setting might have helped the experience.

Most of the wineries have cafes and restaurants on their property, and this was no exception. I’d say go for lunch and a glass of strawberry wine and just hang out for a little while in the sun, if you have the chance.  If we hadn’t already been eating almost continuously all day, we might have done just that.

It was a different sort of vacation.  You have to understand that you will be driving everywhere, stopping for free food at random little farms and shops all over the place, and spending more money than you really planned on spending.  This wasn’t a bad thing at all, and we balanced it with plenty of beach walks, which I sorely miss here.  (The Long Island sound is just not the same!)  I think I need to look for a job somewhere warmer.

So that’s finally Western Australia, more than a month after our return.  Maybe I’ll even get back to posting about our garden (which is growing like mad), that awesome strawberry rhubarb tart with the easiest crust ever that I made ages ago, or berry picking in CT. You’ll have to wait and see…

Strawberry basil lemonade

Perth seems like another lifetime by now.  I think I’ll save my report on Margaret River for later this week, since I have yet to upload the photos from that trip.  At the moment, I want to talk about strawberry basil lemonade, and the three weeks I spent in nuclear camp.

Yes, you read that right.  I am a nuclear physicist, and in an effort to try to figure out important life questions like what the hell I want to do with my life, I occasionally try new things. This was a summer school on nuclear nonproliferation, which covered everything from cold war nuclear hysteria* to what it would be like to be a UN weapons inspector.  It was awesome. So were my fellow students.  Maybe it was the return to dorm life, or the fact that we spent way too much time in the same classroom together, but I haven’t actually had so much fun since I was an undergrad. Perhaps that’s telling.  But I digress.

My point is that I realized I essentially want to save the world, to put it bluntly, and that I’m not the only one with that ambition.  It’s kind of cool to find out there are other people out there who feel this way, and that they’re talented, motivated, and fun to hang out with to boot.

Don’t worry. I won’t get totally serious on you all of a sudden. I plan on finding a job — any job — that gets us to Europe for a couple of years, before we have too many responsibilities.  The world can wait a little while.

So… Where was I? Oh, right. Lemonade.  It has absolutely nothing to do with this post, except that I was making it while I was thinking about career options today, and it sort of got tangled up with all of this in my head.  That and it’s a delicious accompaniment to a day full of making jam and putzing about in the garden.

*30,000 weapons, US / Soviet Union? Really? You could destroy thousands of worlds with that kind of stockpile…

Strawberry basil lemonade

I’m obsessed with lemon + basil at the moment, because I bought this tiny globe basil plant (with mini leaves) and can’t resist using it whenever and wherever I can.  We went strawberry picking on Sunday at a nearby orchard, and I happened to be making jam when I started craving lemonade, so that’s what this particular combination came from.  I sort of mashed up the strawberries and basil and threw it into the lemonade, chunks and all. You can blend it a little more thoroughly, or strain out the pulp, but try it first as is.  I sort of liked the texture.  Make sure your strawberries are ripe and flavorful.

• 1/2 c. strawberry mash (This consists of ~6 medium-sized strawberries, pressed into a pulp.)
• Juice from 6 small, juicy lemons
• ~1 c. simple syrup (Heat about 3/4 c. sugar in 3/4 cup of water until the sugar dissolves, and let cool). Add this to taste — the amount of sugar you need depends on how sweet your strawberries are and what your personal preference is. Make extra simple syrup if you like things on the sweet side.
• handful of basil, crushed
• 3-4 cups of water.  This is also to taste, as the amount of juice your lemons produce will vary, and you may prefer a stronger or weaker drink.

Mix all ingredients together. Taste and adjust as required. Strain if you want a smooth drink; otherwise, don’t bother. Enjoy cold, preferrably somewhere sunny and warm.

Matteo’s on Brunswick Street

I didn’t plan on writing this one up, so here’s the sole picture, in all it’s cell phone-quality glory:

Thanks for sending it along, PG.  You’re looking at tempura-wrapped squash blossoms stuffed with goat cheese from Matteo’s, in Melbourne’s North Fitzroy neighborhood, which I had as a starter (or entree, as they called the first course).  Yes, it tasted gorgeous, as deep-fried squash blossoms tend to do.  The watermelon and veg balanced the richness of the tempura batter quite nicely, which I would say the restaurant tended to do very well as a whole.

The food at Matteo’s is probably best described as Australian-Asian fusion.  It’s not cheap, but if you’re looking for a nice place to eat in North Fitzroy, it’s worth checking out.  There’s a tasting menu, an a la carte menu (which I ordered from), or, if you’re there for lunch, a two course + wine fixed price lunch deal for $35.

For the main course, I ended up having a decadent mushroom tart with a brioche crust, topped with a poached quail egg, spinach, cherry tomatoes, and a shitake mushroom sauce.  Now, I love mushrooms, so this dish may not be for everyone, but if mushrooms are your thing, you will love the creamy, mushroomy tart filling.  It paired really nicely with the Tasmanian Pinot J picked out for the main course.  Everyone else was pretty happy with their mains, minus those who got the duck.  The duck itself was good, but the Japanese omelet side was a bit on the greasy side, which may be why this particular option has since been taken off the menu.

So, to sum it up: I’d recommend this place if you’re looking to spend some money on a nice meal in Melbourne. The food was excellent and fine dining atmosphere wasn’t uncomfortably posh, which is always a good thing when you’re traveling with someone who refuses to admit he owns a single pair of long pants.

And with that, I’ve finished my report of Melbourne, mostly because we didn’t do much there this trip. We only had a couple of days, and we’ve both been there before, so there wasn’t anything too exciting to write about.  I will say you should check out the Melbourne Museum if you have a chance, because live spider exhibits are the most awesome thing you will ever find in a museum.  One of the first supercomputers is there, too, which I never get tired of checking out. I mean, seriously, memory made of vacuum tubes? How could that not be cool??

Yes, I am a total geek sometimes.

Next, I’ll post on Perth and Margaret River, though it may take me a little while … I’m at a summer school during the next couple of weeks and am learning lots, so the blog is sort of on the back burner for the moment.

The Great Ocean Road

This post is for those of you who have never driven down a stomach-wrenchingly windy road just to have a look.  You really should know what you’re missing.  It’s one of those things you should do as often as possible, if only because the crazier and more indirect the route is, the more insanely gorgeous the view.

Of course, there is an easy route, for those of you who are as terrified as I was of driving on the wrong side of the road in a strange car (or perhaps colliding with a tram on the way out of Melbourne, after trying to pull one of those insane right turns). It’s called a tour bus. Yes, it’s cheesy and touristy and blah, blah, blah, but they can occasionally be useful. I think the Great Ocean Road — a mostly coastal road in South-West Victoria, near Melbourne — is one of those times, provided that you are on a small tour bus (no mega-bus, please), and your driver doesn’t take his job too seriously. You know — something along the lines of: “Folks, there’s something worth seeing just down that trail. I’ll be right here having a smoke.”

We took this trip the day after we arrived in Melbourne. Despite a slight headache involving luggage stuck in a cargo hold (United SUCKS, for the record) and an appreciable lack of clean clothing, the full day trip was worth it.  It is designed to take you through a few diverse set of ecosystems and some photogenic geological formations in Australia in a very short amount of time, which essentially means you spend a lot of time sitting on a bus, staring out a window, with occasional 15 minute walk breaks into well-marked tourist havens.  But in the process, you begin to get a sense of the kind of ecological diversity that existed in Australia even in recent history.

You see a tiny swatch of cold temperate rainforest, preserved only because of the lucky eccentricity of one man, surrounded by acres of pine plantation destined for wood chip factories somewhere in the world.  You also see sandstone, build up layer by layer over millenia, and then carved by ocean currents and wind.

And beaches. Of course you see beaches.  I’m pretty sure this one is in Torquay, but I can’t be sure.

And koalas, which you shouldn’t try to pet. Apparently they’re quite mean over in Victoria, though they just looked a bit sleepy to me:

And of course, there were cheesy photo opportunities for busloads of tourists (This entrance to the Great Ocean Road is, according to our tour driver, the fourth one they’ve built. Others have succumbed to fire, trucks, and one other disaster I can’t quite remember? Maybe another fire… I think I would suck as a tour guide):

You also get some kick ass fast food in middle of nowhere Colac (which I’m sure is actually a pretty big town in comparison to some — I mean, it’s a big dot on the map, right?). Who would have thought?

So that’s that. It was a tour with a lot of pretty sights, which are worth seeing if you have a day to spare.  And yes, I’m glad I didn’t drive myself, even if the road wasn’t nearly as bad as the northern stretch of Route 1 in CA.  I do like actually being able to look at something other than the car in front of me.

Next time: a taste of Melbourne before we head off to Perth.  If you want more pictures of the Great Ocean Road, you can find them here.

An update soon…

I’m busy sorting through two SD cards worth of photos from my trip to Australia, so bear with me.  Awesome food in Melbourne, a journey on the Great Ocean Road, and Margaret River treats are coming soon!