Disclosure: My guest and I dined courtesy of Portsea Hotel / Lamaro’s on the Deck and Kate & Co.
Wouldn’t it be nice to leave the city behind and head down the coast for summer? Particularly on these hot, hot days?
That’s exactly what the team from Lamaro’s, the restaurant in South Melbourne, did earlier this month. They snuck down the coast and took over the deck at the top of Portsea Hotel.
Disclosure: Food and accommodation on this trip was courtesy of Mornington Peninsula Tourism and Q Strategies.
Yabby Lake
Somers General Store
Mornington Peninsula Brewery
Win a voucher to go cherry picking
Continuing on from Part 1 of our Mornington Peninsula getaway, where I talked about some of the producers we visited, this part is about the meals – yay.
(ALSO – see the end of this post for another cherry voucher giveaway.)
Disclosure: Food and accommodation on this trip was courtesy of Mornington Peninsula Tourism and Q Strategies
Places mentioned in this post:
Main Ridge Dairy
Mock Red Hill
Horseback winery tours
Max’s Retreat
Darling Park Winery
Bass & Flinders Distillery
Sunny Ridge Strawberry Farm
And see the end for a giveaway!
The Mornington Peninsula is one of my favourite day trips from Melbourne. It’s such a nice part of Victoria and only about 60-90 minutes drive from the city. There’s good food, lots of wineries, craft breweries, a couple of excellent cheeseries, and other produce producers.
Mornington Peninsula Tourism has recently launched Wine Food Farmgate, a program to help visitors discover all the great food and wine producers on the Peninsula. The program consists of a book, the website, a trail map, mini cooler bag and regional recipe cards, and features restaurants, wineries, produce growers and gourmet stores.
The other weekend, Alastair and I got together with Shellie, Haz, Gaz, Thanh and Michelle for a trip through our own Wine Food Farmgate trail.
Our journey started on Saturday, when we gathered for lunch at Yabby Lake Vineyard. After a lovely lunch (coming up in Part 2) our group split up to tackle a few different locations.
Disclosure: We dined courtesy of Barmah Park.
You may remember some of my previous posts about trips down to the Mornington Peninsula. These trips are always fun. Part of the fun is getting to spend day with friends. Part of it is getting to poke around op shops looking for food blogging props. Some of it comes from stopping somewhere midway and having a relaxed lunch. But mostly? The fun is in llama spotting.
(Truth time: the last part is probably only fun for me.)
(Truth time 2: they’re not even llamas. They’re alpacas.)
In early May, I went with the usual suspects, Shellie, Haz, and Thanh, on another op shop crawl to the Mornington Peninsula. This one was the best trip yet – now that we’ve done it several times, we know what to look for and how to plan the trip for maximum op shopping efficiency.
And here’s a pro tip for anyone interested – Frankston is the mother lode for op shops.
Following the success of Friday Road Trip, the Labour Day long weekend saw us (me, Shellie, Thanh, April, Haz and Gaz) pile into two cars for more driving and llama seeking. This trip had a slightly different focus from the previous one – instead of food, our goal was an op shop crawl.
There was still food involved of course, as we scheduled in a lunch stop. Plus we were looking for food styling props so… it always comes back to food in the end.
It’s the circle of a food blogger.
It was one of the hottest days in 2013, I had a Friday off work, and my DD was back from a month long holiday.
It called for a Friday Road Trip.
We roped in Thanh and Shellie, piled into Shellie’s car and headed down the Peninsula. On the drive down there was Spice Girls car singalong (yep, we have no shame), alpaca spotting (llama llama llama!) and a stop at the Vintage Shed for food blogging photo props.
Tired of going to lunch at wineries? Yeah, me too. Wineries are so last year – the latest destination dining is in a garden.
Okay, that is not true. 🙂 But we did eat lunch in a garden recently when Annette and Terry, Alastair’s mum and step-dad, arrived the other week for a visit. They arrived during the week when we had the beautiful autumn weather: coldish mornings, but lovely warm days, blue skies and wonderful sunsets. Having flown in from the UK, Annette and Terry were particularly happy to see the sunshine, and it was perfect weather for lunch at Fork to Fork. Fork to Fork is located in Heronswood, a garden that is the home of The Diggers Club.
How did people decide on places to eat and activities to do before the internet? When I started planning our Mornington Peninsula weekend a couple of days before heading down there, I looked at blogs, websites, checked out menus, and I even made restaurant bookings online.
One place I booked was La Petanque, located in Red Hill, Mornington Peninsula. It’s a casual, southern French style restaurant seating 60 that’s located in a rustic wooden building with rose and herb gardens leading to the entrance. Inside, it’s all wooden floors, wooden ceiling beams, tables with white tablecloths and large windows.
I’m an awesome trip planner. And I’m really good at choosing places to eat.
Hah – modest much? During our weekend away in the Mornington Peninsula, Alastair heard these two statements a lot. Perhaps I blew my own trumpet once too often when my normally patient husband replied, “Yes, and you have no trouble talking yourself up either.”
But the fact of the matter is: it was a great weekend. And I planned it. Surely that’s worth being proud of? Toot toot!
(more…)
I’m not a big fan of autumn, winter, grey skies, and rain. Every year, I eagerly wait for summer to arrive. But even I must admit that there are some positives to the cold, wet weather – one of them being wild mushrooms.
A couple of weeks ago, the Boys and I headed down to T’Gallant for a mushroom hunt. It had been raining heavily the night before and we showed up to find that almost everyone else had gumboots on. Uh oh! Were we going to be under prepared? Trust me, if we had owned a pair of gumboots, I would have brought them, but we live in Melbourne…. where it rarely rains for more than 30 minutes. So gumboots have always seemed like a stupid thing to buy. But maybe that’s just envy talking because everyone else was so prepared!