Disclosure: We attended courtesy of Australian Mushroom Growers and Prahran Market.
On one Saturday recently, Alastair and I trotted up to Prahran Market at 7.30am.
Now, I like markets and all, but I don’t like them so much that I’d be there that early on a weekend. But I like mushrooms, so the reason for the early start on this particular day was a visit to a mushroom farm – Bulla Mushrooms.
Disclosure: I attended courtesy of Prahran Market.
Several weeks ago I wandered Prahran Market with a voucher booklet and a food paddle collecting food when I was invited to attend the Taste of Prahran Market event, part of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival.
This event sells out extremely quickly each year, and now that I’ve done it, I can see why.
Disclosure: I attended courtesy of Prahran Market.
It’s that time of year again – yes, it’s March and the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival is back.
I don’t have much planned for this year’s festival for some reason. I had a bit going on when the program was released last year and just never got around to organising anything. And I must admit that the allure of staying home and doing absolutely nothing is having a very strong pull on me at the moment!
But last weekend, I left the house temporarily to go to Prahran Market to attend their Harvest the Sea and the Vine event.
Hey, remember when we went to Borneo? Yeah, I hardly remember it either because it was in July/August 2013. Tsk tsk! This is what happens when you don’t immediately edit holiday photos, they sit on your hard drive for months and months and months, with a little gentle nagging reminder popping up in your head every now and again.
Slack.
Anyway. While in Kuching we did a cooking class, and it was one thing I really wanted to write up because it was FUN. During the class we cooked two dishes for lunch – a chicken curry and a vegetable dish. We also made a very easy dessert.
As well as the cooking class, there was also an option (at a small additional charge) for a market tour. We all know how I feel about markets, so it should be no surprise that we headed to the market.
I attended the QVM tour courtesy of Queen Vic Market and Little Big Marketing.
I always like to get to a market whenever we go overseas (see here, here, here, here, and here) because I’m such a food nerd that it’s my idea of a good time. (Sorry Alastair!).
Recently I did a tour of the Queen Victoria Market. I met my group and our guide, Cleve, at the tour office. It was a particularly cold and wet day, so we stayed in the shelter of the office while Cleve gave us a brief history of the Market.
After leaving Peru, we briefly went to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, before heading to the Galapagos Islands.
Our hotel was located in the historic center. which is the best preserved and least altered in Latin America, and was declared a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site in 1978.
Full disclosure: most of our eats were funded by Taz, who won a competition for “VIP” access and food vouchers. Thanks for sharing your competition winnings with us, Taz!
What are you doing tonight? Do you have plans? If not – why not head to the Suzuki night market?
Run every summer at the Queen Victoria Market on Wednesday nights, the night market has hawker style food stalls, craft stalls selling clothing and jewellery, plus live entertainment.
I hadn’t visited the night market for a couple of years and it seems to have gotten bigger and busier – certainly it felt like half of Melbourne was there last week. It helped that it was a gloriously balmy night.
I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things since arriving home. I have lots of stories to tell and way too many photos to edit (editing photos makes me want to cry. wah wah guitar.)
I’ll start with this post on Arequipa: Peru’s second largest city, with a population of over 800,000 (incidentally, Lima is Peru’s biggest city with 9 million people – big difference, hey?). Arequipa is quite pretty – it’s located in the Andes mountains and is overlooked by three volcanoes – and it has many colonial-era Spanish buildings that are built from a white volcanic rock.
While there, we did one of my favourite things – visit a market. Yay!
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Note: this is a scheduled post while I’m away. Replies to comments/emails will be even slower than usual. 🙂
Alastair and I are currently romping around South America – if everything has gone to plan, today we will be on the final leg of the trek to Machu Picchu. Before we left, we had a celebratory-hooray-almost-on-holiday lunch with Maztech and Dazzle at Newmarket Hotel. What better way to celebrate our impending visit to Latin America than a Latin American inspired feast?
One of the things I love about Melbourne are the markets. For someone who’s a bit of a food geek, I can happily wander around a market and amuse myself for a couple of hours. Poor Alastair has been dragged around many, many food markets during our travels.