The week in brief: 18 June – 24 June

This week: a great wine dinner at Middle Park Hotel, lots of soup (I have a cold boohoo), another fantasticballs dinner at Chinese Spicy and Barbie Kitchen and sausage making. SAUSAGES!

But before I get into that, I wanted to let you know about a Wirra Wirra wine dinner next week on Wednesday 27 June that’s being hosted by LivingRoom in Malvern. (Full disclosure: I’m attending next week courtesy of LivingRoom restaurant).

Check out the menu for the wine dinner here – it’s 5 courses of food matched with wines from the Wirra Wirra portfolio. It should be good fun. 🙂


Okay! My week. Alastair worked down my way this week so we got to have lunch together every day. AWWWWWW. On Monday we went to La Chicas, where I had the world’s biggest breakfast burrito. Seriously, I’m pretty sure there was at least 4 eggs in that thing. Total defeat.

On Tuesday, we went to Middle Park Hotel for their Jasper Hill wine dinner (disclosure: we attended courtesy of MPH). The food was good – I honestly had two food “moments”. A more indepth post to come – I’ll tell you more about my moments then. :p

Unfortunately I caught a cold this week (wah wah guitar). Alastair and I had lunch again during the week (all together now: awwwww) and I ended up ordering pumpkin soup because it was cold and wet and I was feeling crappy. This was at Lava in Balaclava.

And then… another lunch (back to La Chicas) where I ordered soup again. Yep, I was still feeling crappy. This was spicy carrot and lentil.

Then Caturday rolled around. 🙂

I borrowed Maztech’s mother so she could show me how to make sausages. We started part 1 on Saturday – the salting and flavouring of the meat. I ended up with about 5kgs of chilli and fennel, and then the other 5kgs of meat was divided into smoked paprika, onion + sage, and cumin + cayenne pepper.

After sausage making part 1, Alastair and I ended out to dinner with Haz, Thanh, Bryan and Winston at Chinese Spicy and Barbie Kitchen. Pictured here is the sliced tongue and tripe in chilli and the steamed chicken in chilli sauce.

Dinner was EPIC. We ate SO MUCH FOOD. It was ridiculous.

Everything was good. New dishes we hadn’t tried were the deep fried crispy pig intestines (really good) the smoked pork spare ribs (again really good), and the spicy eggplant (pictured here). The eggplant is amazing – much better than at Dainty Sichuan – crispy outer, soft interior, sweetish sauce. So good.

We also ordered two serves of their lamb ribs and they were excellent, as usual.

We finished with dessert – deep fried ice cream (natch) and we also tried the sweet potato in toffee. This dessert was so interesting – it came out with a bowl of water. We all assumed it was to wash our fingers with. Thank goodness the waiter told us just that we needed to dunk the pieces of sweet potato into the water. After looking at all our confused faces, he explained further: it was to cool the toffee so it didn’t burn our mouths. It also set the sugar. We had a lot of fun eating the sweet potato.

I’ve blogged Chinese Spicy before – here’s the post if you haven’t seen it. It’s awesome, you should go.

Today was a long day of sausage stuffing.

But we got there in the end. Now I have more sausage than I know what to do with. 🙂

We also made ricotta gnocchi for dinner.

Okay, that’s it from me. Time to eat some gnocchi! How was your week?