I like Aeroplane Jelly

...Aeroplane Jelly for me...

After seeing my baby sister, Boo, off at the airport this morning, Logan and I headed to the Melbourne Museum in the Carlton Gardens.

As part of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival (which has been somewhat disrupted by the arrival of the Commonwealth Games) there was a Victorian Producer's Market in the plaza outside at what is currently called the "Melbourne Museum LiveSite". It is thus named because they have a large screen on which is showing Channel 9's presentation of the Commonwealth Games. Presumably this is to encourage people to congregate in the space in large numbers to watch what they can also see on their televisions in their home/hotel/local shopping centre. How nice of the city to provide television for the homeless.

Anyway.

Logan and I wandered around the various stalls. I was working out which things we would have to put off buying until the end because they needed refridgeration, listening with half an ear to te food preparation presentations on the main stage, and trying to sort out what to have for lunch.

I steered Logan towards tasting some apple cider from the Henry of Harcourt stand. The verdict was that it was very nice and we would come back later.

I spotted the Red Hill Brewery stand and after tasting the three ales on offer, Logan went with three of the Scottish Ale and three of the Golden Ale. There was also a Wheat Beer but the other two were more to Logan's taste. (He's doing well for my birthday, isn't he?)

We were starting to get hungry but close by were a few winery stands and Logan sampled from one of them their six wines and decided to pick four to take home. The lovely people at this stand also offered to tape up the bottom of the box holding the Red Hill Brewery six-pack so that we wouldn't have an accident as it was looking a bit precarious.

At this point we decided that we did need to eat something so we took our precious cargo back to the car and followed our noses to the hot food.

We shared a Buffalo-meat sausage (garlic) to start with. Yummy. There were vegetarian options at other stalls - felafels and the like - but Logan and I are omnivorous and the sausages smelled delicious.

I had a sit down while Logan walked around taking photographs of the outside of the Exhibition Buildings. There was some entertainment (for me while he did this) in the form of small children (and adults) being chased around by a couple of puppeteers dressed as, rather convincing, dinosaurs. Smaller children were just being chased by their parents. There were other performers from the Museum strolling around, as well as Games spectators with patriotic flags stuck to their cheeks, Commonwealth Games volunteer staff and Security, dogs and a green tomato.

Our next stop was for another sausage but from the ChoriOz stand. This company was rapidly running out of bread rolls and I think we timed it perfectly. The sausages were beautiful. There were tiny bits of chilli in the sausage and it was topped off with a fresh tomato relish. Beautiful!

I felt like having a drink after that so found the ginger beer and lemonade stand. My chilled lemonade was poured out from a barrell into the bottle I requested. Fabulous. Not too sweet, this was REAL lemonade with a fresh, slightly tart, crisp flavour.

Then it was my turn to buy stuff to take home and, of course, I've headed for the fudge. Then the cupcakes (too gorgeous for words). (And I'm having trouble loading a picture so you'll just have to visit their website instead.)

There were biscuits, preserves, natural cordials, dukkah, olive oils, salad dressings, other sweets, and I was having difficulty deciding where to go next. I spotted the Lindt chocolate fountain and bought myself a strawberry skewer dipped in the chocolate from the fountain.

Logan then said that it was coffee time so we headed to the Bean & Ground stall where he had a long black with his usual many sugars and I had a dark hot chocolate with marshmallows.

We had time then for Logan to notice another winery's Kleanskin nudie label (clever marketing tool) and want to have a tasting before buying two bottles. He was then inspired to go back to the Cidery and buy two bottles of their cider.

I purchased a small tub of raspberry ice-cream (delicious) and then we visited a stall selling Farmhouse Cheese to taste and buy a round of a melt-in-your-mouth soft cheese.

We then decided that we had had enough, we weren't going to try to go around the Museum (even if it did have the flying tram from the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games sitting in the entry) but that we were going to try to make the effort later on this year, and it was time to go home.

...I like it for dinner, I like it for tea...