Happy Queen's Birthday Long Weekend

Yay - long weekend. Any excuse for a bit of festivity, fun and a big cook up. I have seen photos of many of my UK friends Jubilee celebrations from last weekend, I loved the way they all got involved with backyard celebrations and decorations, enjoying the Royal pageantry, concerts and other various events.



Here in Melbourne we have the long weekend this week for the 'Queen's Birthday' so I decided to have my own British style celebration.



Scones, Coronation Chicken Baguette's and Scotch Eggs were on the menu. First attempt at the scones and I decided to use my Gran's cookbook - it's a Western Australian home ec book that she gave to my Dad in 1969. I love this cookbook as it has my Gran's Pavlova recipe hand written in the back cover.

If I never try cooking scotch eggs again it will be too soon. So much for easy picnic food. They were tasty but a serious process.

For those Royalists who really want to get involved you can even send your own message to the Queen to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. Or if you are really struggling for ways to fill your weekend - study up on 60 facts about the Queen.

The printables were a free download from Hostess with the Mostess - Download here

Melbourne Market's

There are so many fantastic markets around Melbourne, ranging from farmers markets to boutique craft markets.  We also of course have the large permanent markets such as the Queen Victoria, South Melbourne, Prahran, Footscray and Camberwell market. Many of these are open on different days so you always have somewhere to go to get good quality fresh produce, meat, dairy, seafood and the like.

My friend found these gorgeous knitted vegetables in a shop just outside the Queen Victoria market. They are fair trade and come in all manner of vegetables – what a great little present for a mini foodie!

A market we visited last weekend was the Slow Food market at Abbotsford convent. This market is part of a conglomerate of markets that rotate around venues on different weekends of the month including Veg Out St Kilda, Collingwood Children’s Farm market and Gasworks.

You can buy a tasty little breakfast for a cold morning such as the spicy pork and leek omelette with relish or a good old fashioned egg and bacon roll. Pick up cheeses, fruit and vegetables, seedlings to plant, nuts and coffee.

We picked up a great variety of root veg to go with our lamb leg. Off to our friend’s house to enjoy this by the fire – winter has well and truly arrived!

Winter Warmer - Burning Love

We have a few traditions with several of our friends – majority of them revolving around dinner parties and seasonal events. Always known to tread the path of completely over doing it on some nights (food and wine included) the last time we tried to stick to 3 courses only. We succeeded - although my friend’s Danish dish of Burning Love made up for a couple of courses I think! We started with delicious Tasmanian Spring Bay mussels, just with garlic, onion and creamy sauce and crunchy bread from Hardware Society in the city.

Then came the Burning Love. This is one of Denmark’s national dishes and consists of crispy fried pork belly, of which the fat that renders off the belly is then poured into the mash potato, along with milk to make it creamy. The crispy pork is served on top of the mash and we had ours served along with pickled heirloom beetroot, roasted shallots and balsamic roasted baby beets.

Dessert was little meringues, dipped in dark coverture chocolate with raspberries.

The night ended with dancing around the living room. So maybe we didn’t succeed in not going over the top with wine. I’ll spare you photos of that.