We had two good lunches and an impressive dinner this month. The first lunch was in regional Victoria: a restaurant called Brae, which featured fresh produce grown on site, seasonal by its nature. The second was an autumn lunch with some friends at home. And the dinner? Read on, and I’ll tell you about that too.
In one of my favourite podcasts, Leigh Sales describes how she booked a New York seasonal restaurant, securing tickets for herself and friends by booking the tickets as soon as they became available a certain period before the lunch itself. I had the same experience booking for Brae, where the seats are released a month prior. I logged on before 9am on 10 March and managed to buy five seats for me and Steve’s family for lunch at two thirty in the afternoon of 10 April. I’m not sure how I could have booked an earlier time, perhaps had I typed a bit faster.
Anyway, we all looked forward to it and the forty five minute drive to get there from Anglesea was part of the enjoyment and anticipation. As was leaving the girls and their cousin alone at Anglesea, happily fed with a chicken pie, unencumbered by any adult interference apart from the next door neighbours popping in to check on them.
It was nice to have a drive in the countryside, and the town near the restaurant was a treasure trove of little shops: one selling flowery material including Liberty prints and cards; one selling books and succulants; also cafés and antique shops. We only spent a short time looking around before meeting my sister in law’s friend, who was taking the place of my brother in law who couldn’t come. The friend met us in the carpark and we took the walk through the landscaped front gardens to the modest, white building housing the restaurant.
After some celebratory pink champagne, we were seated by a window overlooking lawn, fruit trees and a more distant and very large vegetable garden. The dishes were served on grey pottery and the table and walls were decorated with delicate art, including small baskets on the tables and a spray of golden material falling across a corner of a wall. First was a roll of prawn and kohlrabi, then ‘today’s tomatoes and chilled broth of blue swimmer crab,’ a smoky beetroot dish, a leaf salad of a huge assortment of salad leaves with some small vegetables and flowers, and dish after dish, mostly plant based, using all the riches of an autumn garden. Even the bread was as local and fresh as you could get, using the wheat grown on site, milled and baked that morning.
The portions were small, so it wasn’t an over-indulgent experience though we ate steadily for three hours. Bridging the gap between savoury and sweet was the pork selection, including their figs wrapped in prosciutto accompanied by ribs and crackling. Then we were served some light red-coloured tomato juice. Even the desserts were based on the vegetable garden: the cannelloni tubes were stuffed with a parsnip cream; the tart was a pumpkin baked tarte tatin.
As the full spectrum of autumn weather unfolded outside: from some sun, to rain, wind and chill, we spent the afternoon exploring simple pleasures (though not cheap ones). Leigh Sales spoke in her podcast about the New York restaurant serving a raw carrot from its garden as part of the dinner she experienced there, and knowing this was coming, she wondered how an uncooked carrot could possibly be worth serving so simply (after tasting it, she thought it could). This restaurant had a similar philosophy, making me reflect on how good our food is in Australia, equal to some of the most well regarded in the world.
The second lunch we savoured this month was this weekend, back at home with friends. I hadn’t had a chance to go shopping during the week after we arrived back on Sunday night, but we had brought back the fridge cleanout from our two weeks at Anglesea, including some mushrooms that we took up and back. Given one of our friends is vegetarian, I decided to make a minestrone.
I boiled dried chickpeas for almost an hour, which I think makes them taste better than the tinned ones. I fried up an onion, some old celery and leeks, the mushrooms, some zucchini and a yellow capsicum and carrot that was on the other side of the spectrum to the one that Leigh was raving about, in terms of freshness, though still fine. I topped this up with some of the last tins of tomatoes I could find and fried each ingredient in turn, before boiling it all for more than an hour. Steve thought the result was delicious. I always think that if a minestrone has nine or more ingredients, fried in turn, you can’t go wrong. We ate it with toast I made from some almost week-old, but full of grains and still good, bread that we also brought back with us. We ate cheese and fresh baguette after that, with red wine. We finished outside sitting under our red-leafed manchurian pear tree, with cups of tea and pear cake that I made that morning using the last pear I could find, sliced thinly and placed on top in a circular pattern. I found one ripe lemon on our tree to use as the lemon zest, we had none in the house, and our meyer lemons are so fragrant that it scented the whole kitchen as well as perfuming the cake.
We chatted with our friend and the girls ended up in the treehouse playing Pass the Pig with our younger friend (aged fourteen) and blowing bubbles from a tall bubble maker.
The final memorable meal this month was when the girls and their cousin cooked us dinner at Anglesea.
They made a salad with tuna and capsicum; fruit salad; and a magnificent two tiered, iced and moist cake coloured green and acqua. Hopefully the start of a long journey they will all have enjoying cooking and sharing meals with friends and family.
Different meals, but all celebrating produce, family, and connections with others.
