The LONG WEEKEND

The long weekend is now over

We celebrated Queen Lizzie's non-birthday. The long weekend gave me an opportunity to catch up on a few odd jobs around the house. The limbs from the Gum tree were cut up and await next weekend's skip along with a big cleanout of the garage.

Sue kept me to my promise to take her to Mediterranean Wholesalers, one of her fave foodie shops on the other side of Melbourne. I don't mind going there but getting there is a chore with Saturday morning traffic.

Anyway I'm always rewarded with a great meal that night when Sue experiments with the produce purchased that day.

MEDITERRANEAN WHOLESALERS

A great place to shop

Sydney Road Brunswick got its name as being the road out of Melbourne that took you to Sydney in the early 1800s - being as busy as it is these days, you can take in some of the great architecture spanning from the 1850s.

 

Trams battle the traffic of Sydney Road daily.

Leon's right, Mediteranean Wholesalers is certainly one of my favourite shops. It's just a shame that it's on the other side of town.

Next to that shop is a packed, little kitchenware shop that sells everything at very low prices. A couple of weeks ago, I did a cooking class with one of the chef's from my favourite Italian restaurant, Amiconi's in North Melbourne. The day was about making sausages and also about making that authentic Italian cakey thing, cannoli. I was pretty inspired, but needed specialised equipment before I could start. Mostly not available on this side of town. MW is in Brunswick, which has a large Italian population, and all the sorts of things I wanted are easy to get over there.

This is my favorite pasta, then most pasta is!!!

Some of what we purchased on the day.

In order to make cannoli from scratch I needed to buy cannoli tubes on which to form the pastry to deep fry it. I knew I would be able to get them at this kitchenware shop. And I did.

The recipe needs to be started the day before for both the pastry and the ricotta  filling. I began on Saturday and took them out as a dessert to friends on Sunday. They were fairly involved to make but  yummy, but I forgot to take a photo, sorry.

We bought some great food from Meditteranean Wholesalers, and I set some of it out on our family room table to show you.

 

I filled the big pasta shells with a red capsicum meaty sauce, and covered it with a cheesy sauce made from pecorino cheese. The pics you can see are of the plates ready to pop in the oven to brown up. It was very good.