Birthday Lee

Lee's 24th birthday was YESTERDAY, Friday 26 October. But by the time we got home after a celebration dinner at Moon Under Water, it was too late to blog!

Here is a typically pensive Lee on his first birthday. Sorry about the cake, Lee. I was never a very good baker.

And here is the happy birthday person, many years later (last night in fact), with the lovely Suz.

Moon Under Water is a trendy new restaurant in a very hip part of the city. It has a fixed menu, which I find enormously relaxing. Delicious.

Birthday Dustin

Happy 29th birthday, Dust! Hope you have a wonderful year. As your fond and nostalgic godmother and aunt, I offer below some memories from 1984. (I am sharing memories of your youth one year at a time. Other years to come on your future birthdays.)

March 1984: lunch at Boschendal in Franschhoek. The Robertson family, with baby Dust, is in Cape Town because they've been at our wedding.

April 1984: we had a second (wedding) reception at Mom and Dad's house in Bryanston. Dusty wore primrose yellow.

It couldn't have been very long afterwards that Dustin was baptised at St Michael's Church, with a christening tea at 43 Berkeley Avenue.

Now we jump ahead a few months to winter 1984. We spend the day on the Nash farm out in the African bundu.

And then it is the end of the year: Christmas 1984. We are in Arosa, Switzerland. Mark Sater is with us for the holiday; fluffy sheepskin slippers and funky socks are in abundance.

Happy birthday, Dustin -- we'll drink to your good health and happiness tonight!

Grandfather Bop

Today is our grandfather Roy Sater's birthday. Mom called him Pop; Heidi and I called him Bop.

Roisen Severin Sater was born on 14 October 1899. His family was Norwegian but he was born in South Africa. Mom adored her father and he was very special to Heidi and me. He took us to the theatre (my passion for musical theatre comes from him), to grown-up restaurants (duck a la bigarade: yum), to the Wanderers Club where he was Bowls Club Treasurer for years, and to the Rand Easter Show where he was a member. He bought me some of my most memorable childhood story books. He collected excellent South African art and his collection is now shared between all his grandchildren, from Johannesburg to London to Melbourne.

Dad always acknowledged Bop's generosity to him and Mom as a young married couple. Every year Mom and her brother Geoff would celebrate their father's birthday. This year is the first year that Mom is not here to do this, so I will celebrate the day to honour Bop, but also for Mom and Dad.

I have many photographs of Bop, both as a young and an old man, but I will include only two in this post. I hope that we have time to think of him and write of him many times again in the future.

Rosella morning

I love the colourful birds that are native to Australia. We don't often see rosellas in our garden, though. This one had found an apple core in the school next door, where there is building happening. While we're resigned to the site office next to our fence for a few months, we think it looks much nicer with rosellas on top! This pair of birds was a bright start to my day.

 

Loam

Loam is a restaurant that is excellent, regional and very very trendy. It is a 'two hat' restaurant. Hats are Australia's equivalent to Michelin stars. There are very, very few three hat restaurants in the country -- so two hat restaurants are AMAZING.

Loam is located on an olive farm about 2 hours' drive from Melbourne, on the Bellarine Peninsula. (See my previous post with map.) I had booked this family dinner about five months ago, That's the waiting time for a reservation on a Saturday night. The restaurants holds only 40 people. So, here we are arriving for our dinner, and the view across the olive groves as the sun sets.

We take our seats. The menu arrives. We are going to have the nine course dinner, with matched wines. There are no choices -- you get whatever the chef decides -- but we do get a list of ingredients. If there is a particular food that you don't like, it will be omitted. Suz: no oysters. Lee; no olives. (What?! No olives or oysters?! Outrageous!)

Now, this is not the menu. This is the little memento that you get as you leave. It reflects what you ate. But I'm popping this in here so you have a sense of the total experience. Each line on this list refers to a particular dish.

I'm not including photos of every dish but here are some. This is the sand whiting, cod skin, sourdough, wild garlic, celery.

This is the chestnut beef (i.e. beef from cows that eat chestnuts so that the meat has a nutty flavour), yolk, squid, beef fat, chervil. One of the best steak tartares we have ever had (and we are BIG steak tartare fans).

Unusually delicious for a vegetarian dish: broccoli heart, fermented millet, red mustard leaves.

This is chicken wing, shitake mushrooms, kohlrabi, shaved scallop.

Pork tail, pigface, native spinach, lemon. This was offered as an optional extra dish, but we are all such huge pork fans that it was an easy decision! The pigface is a succulent plant that grows wild near the beach. It's very common in South Africa -- is it called pigface there too?

This was one of the two desserts. This is apple in molasses, served on sichuan pepper custard (yum!) with mint and dried olive oil. The white powdery stuff is dried olive oil. It's light and fluffy and super-delicious.

The second dessert was a brown rice pudding with mandarin pieces and seaweed icecream. The seaweed icecream tasted a bit like sushi. Interesting.

Yes, we thought we had reached the end of the meal but we got some extras: these are Earl Grey tea jellies ...

... and lemon curd tartlets with lavender flowers.

Here we are, noticeably larger than we were before the meal. But very very happy!

Point Lonsdale

We spent the weekend on the Bellarine Peninsula, which is one of the two peninsulas that curve around each side of Port Phillip Bay. Melbourne lies to the north of the bay. The Bellarine Peninsula is the one on the west, on the Geelong (pronounced juh-long) side. We live to the east of the city. Geelong is about 90 km from our house and driving there takes about an hour and a half.

Our main purpose was to have dinner at a restaurant called Loam. More on that in the next post. We stayed about 15 minutes from the restaurant, in a little beach town called Point Lonsdale.

It was a cold and blustery spring day -- the best kind of day for a long, bracing 5 km walk along the breakwater. Smuts and I love this kind of walk next to the ocean.

There was a large container ship heading out of the bay. As you can see on the map, all shipping to Melbourne port has to pass through the narrow break (called 'The Rip') between the two peninsulas. As the ship goes out of the bay, it enters the Bass Strait, which is the strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. Tasmania is 250 km to the south of where we are standing in the photos. (And beyond Tasmania, the Antarctic ...!)