John Wren Exhibition at Federation Square Reviewed by The Age; An excellent ABC transcript about Wren’s Tote

Here is an article by John Harms in The Age which, if not quite a review of the Wren exhibition at the Victorian Racing Museum, is at least prompted by his visit to it, and is well worth a read.

Details: John Wren 1871-1953 – Glory Glory Glory, Champions – Australian Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, Federation Square, daily until January 31, 2007. Adults $8, concession $5, family $20.

And here is a little piece Michael Cathcart did on the ABC’s Rewind programme about Wren, Hardy, and the (and you will see where I stole the photo from). Extracted below is a lovely evocative passage about just how the police-proofing of the Tote was achieved: Continue reading “John Wren Exhibition at Federation Square Reviewed by The Age; An excellent ABC transcript about Wren’s Tote”

Broad beans, mussels, lemon balm and panforte

I enjoyed the market very much. There were about a million fewer people there than at the Taste of Slow festival, the entry was a more palatable $2 per person, and the stalls were a bit less chichi. It was a farmers’ market which actually had a few farmers selling stuff in a gruff kind of way. I bought these broad beans and cooked them up for lunch as directed: shelled, boiled for 5 or 6 minutes in a cup of water, with some oil, some pepper, some salt, and a chopped onion. The result was fantastic, but I cannot understand why this was a good way of cooking them. Perhaps the woman who was selling them did not think I would have the patience to “slip them out of their tough skins” as Stephanie puts it (using a typically infuriating cookbook writer’s euphemism for a task naturally more tricky than it is made to sound — the best one I recall was, in relation to an uncooked eel: “peel back the skin as if removing a glove”). I have never heard of boiling an onion. But there you go, it was glorious (though I think Stephanie’s injunction to boil them for 3 minutes is preferable), the things were as brilliantly green as could be, and I’m sure they were fresh, though it was my first foray into the world of broad beans so I wouldn’t really know.

I also got some beautiful looking mussels for lunch tomorrow, and passed up some unshucked Coffin Bay oysters caught by a mate of the mussell man.  I bought a lemon balm, a seedling of a special kind of spinach recently rediscovered in the wilds of Italy, and some very curly cress for the kitchen windowsill. I bought kipfler potatoes, bread from the Convent bakery, cheese, and some panforte made up near Shepparton which was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

Inaugural Slow Food Market at the Abbotsford Convent

I popped into the first Slow Food Market at the Convent today, arriving just in time to hear a politician give quite a short speech. It was that old Melbourne Grammarian who ended up as the Member for Broadmeadows but has never lived in the electorate, the Minister for Regional Development, the Treasurer, Mr John Brumby. Here he is having a chuckle with Maggie Maguire, the Convent’s CEO. Unbound by any code of ethics whatever, I nevertheless deleted the photograph of the treasurer flanked brilliantly by a toddler because the bastard blinked and looked kind of goofy. So you know now you’re reading a quality broadsheet. Continue reading “Inaugural Slow Food Market at the Abbotsford Convent”