Saturday Evening Dinner (and Sunday Lunch)

During the various lockdowns in Melbourne and the regions, restaurants and cafes have diversified their offerings. When they can't offer sit down dining, or when the number of diners they can have is severely restricted, many of them have started offering take away meals and some are doing cook at home meals.

The Shared Table in Buninyong is one local restaurant/cafe which is offering both.

Ian and Lindsey have enjoyed their cook at home meals and last weekend bought one for themselves and one to take on our monthly care visit to Stella.

It was very delicious!

We started with canapés. They were intended for two but we shared them among the three of us. A nice, light start to dinner

Little tarts with asparagus, mushroom and radish
Savoury shortbread biscuit with French onion dip
Cucumber with wagyu tataki, ponzu and sesame

We waited for a while before having the main course, so we would all be hungry and enjoy it properly

Wagyu ragu with lots of veg and a 5 spice sauce
accompanied by mochi gnocchi

We decided to keep the dessert for Sunday lunch.

There was leftover ragu but no leftover gnocchi. So for Sunday lunch we had the ragu with potato gems, sweet corn and peas

Not quite as fancy as mochi gnocchi
but very tasty nonetheless 

The dessert was a pear and chocolate pudding with raspberry and pumpkin crumb and a chocolate and black garlic ice cream.

I took the ice cream out of the freezer a touch too early
so it more or less melted.
It was delicious anyway

It was a very tasty weekend. Many thanks to Ian and Lindsey for the foodie treat

Stella very much enjoyed her weekend

Her gardener has done a very good job clearing up  and planting the garden beds out the back

Jim seems to be more or less fully recovered from his bout of breathlessness on Thursday. He certainly tucked into his food over the weekend and seems happy enough.

And we seem to have been plunged back into winter, despite the clocks having moved onto summer time on Sunday morning. The temperature has plummeted, the wind has picked up and yesterday we had hail, rain, hail and more rain. I even lit the fire! The rest of this week is forecast to be cold and wet. Just as well I didn't sow the tomato seeds during the recent sunny and warm spell.