Burn the House Down - Astral Restaurant

As I think I mentioned in a previous blog, we haven't managed to go to Astral restaurant yet, despite it being (literally) outside our back door. However I did manage to book 2 seats at "Burn the House Down" last Monday.

This was a special evening where the chef (Sean Connolly) comes out half way through the meal and demonstrates the cooking techniques that he and his staff have used to make it. They did mention how many there have already been - I think it was about 12 - but I'm not sure. They seem to happen once every couple of months.

The theme was Italian food and we were presented with the following:

• Italian antipasti


• Pumpkin and Amaretti Raviolo


• Squid ink and golf leaf risotto


• Wild boar with cocoa sauce


• Deconstructed Tiramisu

The antipasti included: cheese (I think it was Taleggio), parma ham wrapped round bread sticks, caramelised tomatoes (these were gorgeous), artichokes, small pieces of fried bread, tapenade and anchovies.

We had to sit at a group table of 6. This was unfortunate but couldn't be avoided, though we managed to get through quite a lot of the antipasti without anyone turning up. It was a shame not knowing whether anyone was coming as it meant that we couldn't eat it all just in case someone turned up. And in fact the other 4 guests did fail to turn up and the waitress offered to turn the table into a 2 seater for us - Brilliant!

But... just before she did so, they managed to recruit 3 passing gamblers from the casino so we didn't get to sit on our own after all. We chatted to the new recruits a bit but we also got to talk to ourselves for quite a lot of dinner so it wasn't too bad.

The pumpkin and amaretti raviolo was lovely. It was pretty sweet but served with what tasted like a kind of fish bisque which complemented it splendidly.

We then had a break, for Sean to come out and demo the cooking to us. It started with an Italian guy from Leichhardt playing a few songs on the accordion. I really enjoyed this, we all clapped along a bit and he tried to get people to join in singing (there was one chap at the central table who could really sing!).

Sean "came on" straight after. A kind of stage had been set up at the top of the restaurant with two hobs and cameras so that everyone around the restaurant could see what he was doing on the flat screens that were dotted around. We were lucky enough to be able to see Sean directly.

Sean turned out to be, rather surprisingly, from Yorkshire. It made it feel even more like watching a new version of Ready Steady Cook back in the UK! He cooked the risotto in quite a standard manner, although he chucked loads of butter in at the same time as the parmesan (i.e. the end). Sean (my Sean) was really impressed by the gold leaf, however I always feel that putting gold leaf on food is a bit silly. It doesn't look edible and it doesn't taste of anything.

The best bit came when Sean (the chef) was demonstrating how to cook the wild boar. He added some Pernod to the pan and set it on fire by tipping the pan up so that the Pernod came just over the edge and caught alight. I was very impressed, although I shall not be trying it at home.

The cocoa sauce is apparently a Tuscan classic and when the wild boar arrived a little later was absolutely superb. In fact I think the wild boar dish overshadowed all the other courses (and they were all great). It was also served with wet polenta, which was something new to me as I have only ever had grilled polenta. I was suspicious in general about wet polenta, it looks a bit sloppy and textureless. As it turns out, I was right about the texture (it's rubbish) but the flavour was actually very good (I had to eat some without the cocoa sauce to be able to taste it though). I think this was because the end of the cooking process was again adding loads of parmesan and butter.

The deconstructed tiramisu was very interesting, although a little trendy for my liking. I am more a good food, cooked well kind of girl. Not that innovation is bad, but I think innovation should be done to make the food taste better, not just for the sake of it. The dessert consisted of amaretto sorbet, mascarpone cream and coffee mayonnaise. Eaten together they tasted like tiramisu. What is the point of that?? They could have just made tiramisu. I did try all the components separately first; the sorbet was lovely, the cream bland (I think it was just sweetened mascarpone) and the mayonnaise very strongly flavoured. Also, irritatingly, there wasn't enough coffee mayonnaise to go with the quantity of cream and sorbet (see, this wouldn't have happened with real tiramisu).

There was also, at some point, a talk about the wine, which now interests me not at all. I did taste the wines throughout the evening and while I can say that I like some more than others, it doesn't hold a great deal of fascination for me. We got an amaretto cocktail with the dessert and I liked that a lot more (my tastebuds are clearly reverting to those of a teenage girl). I didn't drink it though (of course).

We were encouraged to go and see the new private dining room before coffee. I have omitted to mention the view so far, which is a bit of an omission when talking about Astral. It is situated on the top floor of the casino, which is just down from us towards darling harbour. Three of the restaurant walls are glass and you can see a wall of skyscrapers and also the harbour bridge. The private dining room comes off one of these glass walls and itself has glass walls. The view is incredible. The room seats 16, if we had 14 friends here we would definitely go.

Our table mates went back to their gambling, while we had tea and then came home happy. The next Burn the House down is in 2 months time and is French themed. Apparently there will be can-can dancers.

Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House

I have never been particularly interested in architecture. I remember when Andrew would ask me "What's the architecture like?" (in particular about Cambridge I think) and I would reply "I don't know, it's a building".

The architecture tour started at the Museum of Sydney, which we had not yet come across in our travels. However, it looks interesting so we may go back one weekend. The tour involved more talking than I expected and less walking, which was not what I had had in mind; we walked directly from the Museum to the Opera House, which was not very far at all. This, however, turned out to be a good thing.

The tour was fascinating from the start. I don't think I had ever realised that architects have great visions before they start building somewhere. I had always considered building as either functional or decorative. According to our tour guide (an architect himself) the Opera House is a combination of

1. a representation of the topography of Sydney (the edges of the land go very sharply i.e. orthogonally into the water); this is represented by the orthogonal steps

2. the billowing clouds above; this is represented by the white domes.

However, even better than this (from my slightly more functional perspective) is that in order to make this building realise his artistic aims, Utzon applied all kinds of cleverness: all the functional bits that are needed in buildings but are better hidden have been put in the steps, he came up with a very effective way of creating the white domes and he designed the inside of the Opera House to be acoustically close to perfect (this was an amazing achievement, however for reasons I shall come on to Utzon's design for the interiors was not implemented).

The reason that the Opera House was built at all was interesting: the premier of Australia was dying, and as his legacy organised a competition for a building, without budget and without timescales. Only a politician who does not need to be re-elected can propose something so crazy.

And it didn't last: the Labour party lost power in Sydney in 1965; this was unprecedented and they were not expecting it. The incoming Liberal party seized on the (unfinished) Opera House as an example of all that was wrong with the Labour party: over budget, over timescales, employing foreign workers and designed for the elite (it's for Opera). I won't go into all the aspects of the talk, there were too many and all too interesting (even our tour guide ran out of time to say all the things he wanted to) but suffice to say in traditional bureaucratic style (not, so it would seem confined to the left as commonly believed) they constructively dismissed Utzon and finished the Opera house with local architects.

So, the base and domes are Utzon, but the great glass windows and the interior are the subsequent designers. You can see the difference. What's more, the acoustics that were put in place were absolutely useless and there is no evidence that leaving Utzon alone would have cost any more money (even for the better result it would have achieved).

Throughout the Utzon debate architects have been split, but a recent enhancement to the house was awarded to a pro-Utzon architect. He took the job only if he could then offer it to Utzon and in order to get Utzon involved (Utzon was understandably reluctant) offered him a bribe of being able to write a document explaining the overall site design. The enhancement (to my mind) has turned out to be an amazing success (although a very small piece of the house); one thing that I found throughout the talk is that Utzon is clearly an architectural genius (or appears so to a novice such as myself - maybe a lot of architects can produce amazing buildings).

I can't find a picture that demonstrates the brilliance of the extension, "The Colonnade" (what an omission from the Opera House website!) so I shall endeavor to explain.

Windows (and doors) have been put into one of the walls of what is used as a foyer. (The windows were not originally there as it was not supposed to be a foyer; this came about as a result of lack of space.) The walls of the windows are angled sharply inwards and the glass has been placed on the outside. From the outside it does not make exciting viewing. But from the inside it looks as if squares have been cut in the wall and frame the view. The views from the windows look like pictures. If you're ever in Sydney, go and take a look.

Utzon's document describing the design is here.

Sydney Writers' Festival

It's Sydney Writers' Festival here at the moment. The reason that this was first brought to my attention, was that the festival has commandeered the dance studio for the week and so my dancing lesson was cancelled. However, I only got around to looking at the website to see what was on on Tuesday so we possibly haven't planned what we want to do well as we might have.

Yesterday I went to Sydney Theatre (also requisitioned for the festival) to see Neil Gaiman and Audrey Niffenegger talking about Graphic Novels. I am not particularly interested in graphic novels - I'll read them if they're lying around but I've never bought one - but I wanted to go and see Neil Gaiman and we missed him when he spoke solo on Tuesday. I also thought it would be interesting to see what Audrey Niffenegger was like. I've got her novel, but haven't read it yet and I saw her graphic novel in Books etc. but didn't pay it much attention as it seemed a bit gratuitous (it is called "The Three Incestuous Sisters", which just says male-oriented porn to me).

I went a little early to pick up my tickets and I thought I might have a cup of tea while I was waiting but I didn't have time! I think the theatre has been redecorated for the festival (or my memory is very poor) and a bookshop called Gleebooks has set up bookstalls all around it. On walking in my eye was immediate caught by a new Umberto Eco novel (well 2004 - but I hadn't seen it before) so I picked that up straight away. Interestingly enough it is an illustrated novel, so kind of in keeping with the talk I was going to see. All the books were really interesting and mainly hardback - let's put it this way Paul (Williams) would have been having a whale of a time. The people seemed to be interesting too, but my impression was probably affected by the fact that they were surrounded by books.

I also noticed a big sign saying that I could join the Gleebooks club and get free tickets to literary evenings and 3 free books for $25. This seemed to good to miss so I signed up when I bought my novel. One of my free books is called "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales" and is designed like a 1940s children's book. It is absolutely brilliant just for the front cover, but has a lot of well known authors inside it too (Steven King, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Neil Gaimon, Glen David Gold...). According to the Gleebooks magazine (I get sent this too now I'm a member) I should have got a copy of "The Plot against America" by Phillip Roth, which I thought might have been a bit of a laugh, but I seem to have got a book about 1968 instead.

Apparently, there was an authors' signing room upstairs but I didn't manage to find it and I was too scared to look properly in case I went somewhere I wasn't supposed to. Still upstairs was by the door to the theatre and it was nearly time to go in. So I did.

Audrey was a softly-spoken American (she said she lives in Chicago but I'm not sure if that's what her accent was, I'm not really up on regions) who came across as a bit arty. Apparently she trained as a visual artist and then wrote a novel by accident. I found Neil to be reassuringly British. It's funny, I've never been particularly nationalistic but when you live in an other country, you come to appreciate your own culture and what I consider most British (aside, of course, from tea and cricket) is wry, off-the-wall humour (c.f. Python, Douglas Adams).

Unfortunately we're playing backgammon this Sunday so we will miss the talk on speech giving and the chance to have afternoon tea with readings. (Which, by the way, is a great idea; there should be somewhere you can go and do this in the UK.) Something else we were considering was the literary walking tour of The Rocks but it is sold out. However, the people who are organising the tour for the writers' festival also organise other tours (which presumably aren't as well publicised) so I've booked us in for an architectural tour about Jørn Utzon (creator of the Opera House) instead.

I'm off now to a talk on The Politics of Poverty (in the dance studio), which promises to be interesting.

What we did at the weekend

We didn't manage to go out at all after our Kylie Kwong extravaganza on Monday - it completely wiped us out. I've booked us in for another one of these food/drink/celebrity chef inclusive dinners next Monday ("Burn the House Down" at Astral in StarCity) so I should imagine the same thing will happen next week.

On Friday we opted for a takeaway curry. We decided against Viva Goa as although it is very good, it is not quite the same if you just want a standard curry. So instead we tried our other local curry house, Vrindavan. The reviews had all said that the food was good and the restaurant decor poor so it seemed the perfect place to order from. The food was really good - we had three different types of bread and they were all very tasty (and all deep fried I think; the two may be connected).

We didn't manage very much on Saturday during the day, but we went to a new Sydney suburb called Leichhardt for dinner with some of Sean's colleagues (and ex-colleagues) in the evening. Leichhardt is the Italian part of town and we had some nice Italian food - I had some really good mussels as a starter.

On Sunday morning we walked up to the Rocks and had a cup of tea opposite the Opera House and in the afternoon we went to Frenchs Forest (another suburb!) and played backgammon. In a seemingly novel experience for me, I came out up (+17) and Sean came out down (-21) so I was pretty pleased with myself.

Finally, I have run out of enthusiasm for updating the smoothie blog. If I wanted to do it properly I think I would have to

a) Spend a lot of time making / drinking smoothies when I didn't want to. (At the moment I seem to prefer fruit salad.)

b) Make the blog look nice, which is too much like hard work.

c) Learn how to take photographs. I am getting better, but I think I need to find out how to focus my camera.

I'll still post to it occasionally as I also wanted to use it as a kind of personal smoothie recipe book but I am going to try and divert my energies to taking pictures of food when we go out. (Until I get bored with that too.)

Long time, no blog

We've been quite busy and so haven't had much time to post (no change there then), but this also means we've been doing lots of exciting things.

On Friday we went to our local Taiwanese restaurant, which is called Blue Eye Dragon. We had Pork and Prawn dumplings to start, followed by Calamari in Spicy Sanbei Sauce (I still don't know what Sanbei is) and Steamed Fish Fillets, which came in a kind of ginger and spring onion sauce.

Sean was a bit worried that the dumplings were undercooked but I thought all the food was brilliant. Now we have two great restaurants less than 5 minutes walk from our house.

Also on Friday, a large package had arrived. This was a long awaited birthday present of a Lego Millenium Falcon. Sean started straight away on Saturday morning.



In progress



Finished

He was finished by lunchtime, so we trotted off to the Powerhouse Museum and stopped for lunch at a local cafe on the way. Sean had scrambled eggs on toast and I had a halloumi, pumpkin and spinach salad. My salad was nice but nothing spectacular. Sean was similarly non-plussed by the eggs. There are lots of cafes in Pyrmont, next time we will try a different one.

I was planning on being disappointed before we got to the Powerhouse Museum: there had been a Kylie exhibition but it had finished the week before. What bad timing. However it was slightly less exciting overall than we had imagined.

The second most exciting thing was the Strasburg Clock. It was a photo of this in the guide book that had prompted me to go. It is a working replica of a clock in Strasburg and has lot of exciting features (like an orrery). I thought it was great but Sean wasn't very impressed.



The Strasburg Clock

The most exciting thing was a replica of the robot from Lost in Space. We didn't stay very long.



The robot from Lost in Space

We didn't go out and explore on Sunday. I think this was because we knackered ourselves out by going for a swim / run in the morning.

On Monday evening we went to a traditional Chinese banquet at the restaurant Billy Kwong. I didn't realise until we got there that it was in conjunction with Vogue and designed to promote the owner (Kylie Kwong)'s new book.

The food was all from the book, we had:

Grandfather pickled vegetables and Wontons
Salt and Pepper Squid
King Prawn and Mint salad
Crispy and runny eggs
Mussels in black bean sauce
Cod in soy sauce and something
Steamed chicken in some sauce
Duck

Sorry for the inexactness; we would have been able to bring a menu home (and I could have told you all about it) but unfortunately Sean was falling asleep by the time we got to tea so we had to leave.

We also missed dessert of a fruit platter and Fairtrade chocolate (Kylie is the Fairtrade ambassador for Australia and New Zealand) and a chance to buy a signed copy of the book (and make the recipes at home). I think we're going to try and go to the restaurant another night and see if we can get a book. If we do, I'll update you on what the dishes we ate actually were!

All the food was amazing and Kylie Kwong is clearly a very cool person - she's involved with everything: free-range, Fairtrade, sustainable fishing, organic produce. She said that it all forms part of her Buddhist beliefs that everyone has unique talents that they should use to help the community.

There was a girl at the table next to us and I thought she might be Augustus Gloop from Grab Your Fork (a food blog). I thought this partly because I have the suspicion that our paths are going to cross: I found her blog when I was looking for details about the Farmer's market in Pyrmont (she was there too) and also found that she'd been to Viva Goa just before we didn't. No post has appeared on her blog though so it can't have been her.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to going back to Billy Kwong on the excuse of getting a book and eating some more of Kylie's food!

Dancing

I've managed 4 weeks of dancing in a row now, so it looks like it's set to become a permanent thing. It's reasonably tiring and includes the usual warm up involving painful stomach muscles exercises and so on. Still once you get on to learning the dancing it's much more fun!

The dance studios are right up the top of Sydney, just past the city, in an area called Walsh Bay / The Rocks. This is a very popular tourist area, it has a lot of old buildings including an early house preserved in the colonial style and the oldest pub in Sydney, in the shadow of the harbour bridge.



Dance Studio

It's a really good place to have classes as they are the studios of a professional dance company. The lessons are a money-making sideline ("the commercial side"). It means that there are always exciting things going on. Today there were some important rehearsals happening (hence "No noise in the corridors" signs) and also an audition for something.

I've definitely got a bit better by going for just 4 weeks - I'm finding it easier (possible) to pick up the routines. We did a hip-hop one today, which seemed really hard without the music but somehow seemed to just fit in with it when Ramon turned it on.

I particularly wanted to say a bit about Ramon, he is a really crazy character. He is definitely your typical flamboyant dancing teacher.

He has stories to tell us every week, which are almost always somehow related to the dancing we are going to do. For example, he told us a story about a woman he saw wearing crippling heels ("Sweetie, a drag queen could walk better than she was") and then later on told us to walk in a certain way for part of the dance ("Not like the lady I saw earlier").

Perhaps it is just that he relates his stories back to the dancing so we can remember the routine. He also likes to give us mnemonics at various points, for example any movement where your arms going anywhere near the legs is always "waxing" and many other things relate to adverts, particularly shampoo adverts.

As Ramon is instructing us what to do, he tends to be talking quite a lot of the time and sometimes comes out with inappropriate things, making his catchphrase "Did I say that?". For example "Take it easy today if you are pregnant. Did I say pregnant? I mean take it easy today if you are injured.".

I wanted to take a photo of him for the blog, but he came over all shy (in a way that only extroverts can do) and refused to have his photo taken on his own and grabbed the nearest dancer. This makes the photo quite remarkable as he managed to pick a bloke - statistically unlikely given an average of 1.5 per class and only three different ones seen in total.



Ramon (on the left)

Local Indian Restaurant

On Saturday evening we were looking on www.eatability.com.au for somewhere to go for dinner and we noticed that one of the local Indian restaurants, Viva Goa, was rated very highly - I think it was the second best restaurant in our area! I booked a table for that evening.

(Viva Goa was second after Astral, which scores highly but is tres cher. We haven't been there yet - we tried once but it was full - but we're going to a special event there on Monday 29th.)



Viva Goa

Viva Goa seems like quite a strange name, but it becomes more understandable when you realise that Goa was a Portuguese colony. As such the restaurant serves Portuguese-Indian food, which is extremely exciting. I'm not whether this is what people eat in Goa, or whether it is just a theme.

We managed to remember a bottle of wine as the restaurant is BYO. A surprising number of restaurants in Oz are BYO and it is certainly no indicator of poor quality. I ordered a Cashew Feni sherbert drink, but unfortunately Cashew Feni turned out to be a liqueur. I felt a bit bad sending it back, but it had been underneath Mango Lassi in the middle of a list of drinks which were ALL non-alcoholic.

Sean had a braised lamb shank curry and following the theme, I had Chorizo curry! My curry was very exciting and tasty too. I also tried Sean's and I think I preferred his slightly, but they were both excellent. We had basmati (very fluffy) rice with it and chapatis which were very light. The portions were quite small so we managed the previously unthinkable and finished everything we were given!

In short, we will be returning and probably often! I will try and remember the camera next time and take some photos of the food. The bill (without booze) came to $50 - £10/head! I feel like we are finally at home here now we have a local Indian restaurant.

Seems like a long time ago again that I last posted. The week days tend to be very busy. Typically we either get up at 5:45 a.m. and go to the gym (where Zoe swims and I go on the running machine) or we get up at 6:30 and get ready for work. I tend to leave the house at about 7:15 and the drive to work takes about an hour. On the way I listen to Australian radio which is outrageous and hilarious in equal parts. There is no way you would get away with saying some of the things they say here at 8:00 in the morning. The working day in Australia runs from 8:30 to 5:00. I tend to leave work beytween 5:30 and 6:30 getting home an hour later. Usually by the time I get in I am completely exhausted. Zoe has most often cooked dinner so we eat and watch some Monty Python DVDs, read or play some backgammon. I am usually asleep by about 8:30 on the sofa!

On the subject of backgammon eagle-eyed readers will be wondering why the score in the epic Zoe Vs Sean backgammon ladder super-series has not been published. This is because Zoe updates the blog a lot more than I do. Suffice to say that one of us has 45 points and one of us has 14 points.

Last weekend we went out for dinner on Friday night with some colleagues from work and had some colleagues from work round on the Saturday night to ours for dinner. Zoe cooked seafood pasta containing vongole, squid and prawns. It was very tasty. We also got through a fair quantity of red wine. I had a bit of a headache on the Sunday but the evening was really enjoyable.

I am currently reading 'The Ascent of Science' by Brian Silver tying together the practice, theories, paradigms, history and philosophy of science from Aristotle through Newton to the present day. It is a fascinating book and written in a quirky original style that I really like. I am learning a lot of new things - for example I never knew quite how fast molecules in a gas travel. The oxygen molecules around us on a warm day are travelling at 1030 miles per hour! I have just finished the chapter on the Newtonian revolution. Silver is now showing how the Principia helped spawn the Enlightenment.

Today we were going to go out and buy a lamp. We thought Ikea would be a good idea. Unfortunately when we got to my car we found that I had left the lights on and the battery was completely flat. We are going to try and get it charged on Monday so I will be on the train tomorrow morning meaning a very early start indeed!

Instead we walked into the city and, after much searching, found a couple of reading lamps. We need these to aim at us when we are talking on the webcam so that people can see us.

This post has been a bit of a stream of consciousness. Hope it all makes sense.

It wouldn't be a proper post from me if I didn't finish with a few backgammon positions.

These are all from the same game. Match to 11 Sean Vs Gnu I am playing black. I got all three positions wrong. What's right and why? How much respect should one afford a 5-point board?

Position 1



Position 2



Position 3



Answers in the comments box below!

Farmers' Market Take 2

Last night as I was on my way to and from buying frozen fruit in the department store (I went to buy frozen mango and strawberries and found some frozen rhubarb as well), I noticed that there were lots of little tents being set up on the communal grass outside the casino (i.e. 2 mins walk from our house). The locals on the benches were looking on in amusement and the fitness punchers* must have had to go elsewhere.

They all had small chalkboards at the top and on each was written. "Sydney Morning Herald Growers Market". I was pretty excited - there were loads of tents. It looked like it was going to be a better market than the disappointing one we visited in Kings Cross and right on our doorstep!

Consequently we ambled over once I dragged myself out of bed this morning at a tardy 7:45am (Sean had been up for nearly 3 hours, although I feel I must point out that this discrepancy is partly owing to Sean getting some kip on my lap last night while I stayed awake reading Marx).

Our stated aim was to buy some pork sausages (as at Kings Cross), but the variety of stuff there was amazing and we ended up buying: bread, sausages, fudge, fruit (grapes, clementines, bananas), avocados, zucchini flowers (!) and a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald (it only seemed polite). I wanted to buy some raisin bread and croissants as well but there is only so much food you can eat. If we had a large freezer we would have bought loads of exciting meat, including venison and goat and especially salmon sausages.

I forgot the camera (as always) so we couldn't take any pictures.



What we bought



Zucchini Flowers

We came home, had some sausages and bread (pretty good) and then I had some fruit before starting on the fudge. I only meant to have one piece.



Empty fudge packet

The fruit and sausages had been excellent (although I don't understand why fruit should taste better when it comes from a farmers market - fruit is surely grown on farms and then shipped to places where it is sold, why should it be better if this is a tent rather than a supermarket?) but the fudge was amazing.

Since I had eaten it all and the farmers market was so close by, I decided to go back and get some more. It was about 11am now and when I got there a lot of the stalls had already packed their goods away.

I took the camera this time.



The market



A particularly interesting stall

I bought some dates. I had wanted to do this earlier, but the stall had been too busy. I also bought a date and coconut roll, which is apparently just dates and coconut mixed together. If it is nice I shall make some myself.

I also went and bought a jar of macadamia butter: the whole concept was just too exciting to ignore. While there I tried their lime curd. It was so nice, I almost bought some even though I clearly wouldn't eat it. But sense prevailed.

By this time I had been past the place where I thought the fudge stall had been and through most of the market as well and was despairing of finding fudge, although I didn't feel too bad armed as I was with new purchases. I finally found it and I was just in time as they had almost packed all their fudge away. The bag I had eaten had been a mixed bag containing chocolate and caramel, which were both gorgeous and another one (luckily only one piece) with macadamia nuts added unnecessarily. They didn't have any unmixed bags, so I bought two bars of chocolate and two bars of caramel. They may last me until tomorrow.



Final shop

* It appears that on all pieces of communal grass in Australia, especially early in the morning there are gangs of people in Lycra who exercise by taking it turns to be puncher and punchee. The puncher gets the standard boxing gloves, while the punchee gets a kind of round shield, very much like the round bats children play with on the beach that tennis balls stick to.