family & food

Naomi's parents just flew back to the US, after a two-week visit. It was great having them here. We got to show them some pieces of the city we knew, and go exploring with them.

The last post talked about our Great Ocean Road/Grampians roadtrip. Here are the four mighty explorers, posing in front of the Twelve Apostles:


Emboldened by the success of that trip, last weekend we took a day trip up into the Yarra Valley for some wine tasting. Colin was driving, and so made use of the elegant spitting buckets at the vineyards (he got more comfortable doing it after he saw the technique illustrated by a sophisticated-sounding British wine-sophisticate with a sophisticated scarf).

The weather was a little cool and rainy. But it was all very pretty. Along these lines:


Our original ambitions had been to visit 4+ wineries. But we were hungry after the first 1.5, and so headed for lunch in a nearby town. We had pizza, followed by Toblerone cheesecake. This shows the cheesecake:


And this shows our feelings about the cheesecake:


Our last stop was a brewery, where we split a tasting paddle of beer. Several of them tasted like passionfruit. Colin had a machiatto (strictly for safety reasons).


Our final dinner was at a place called Rumi, which several people had recommended to us. It was a sort of modern Lebanese/Persian place. Intensely yummy. We got so wrapped up in dinner that we forgot to take pictures until the end. The end was two desserts. One was 'Persian fairy floss' - a sort of hand-made cotton candy, made out of sugar, flour and vanilla. It looked a bit like fiberglass or fur, but that didn't slow us down. The other was an almond milk pudding, with cherries and some sort of jam. You can see them here, along with a pot of rose petal tea:


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