Back again

Finally, I made it. The first post after almost a month’s absence. Feels really weird. After coming back from our trip to Western Australia, I wanted to write about it at once. However, I got a lot of work to do in the past two weeks (which, of course, is something no freelancer will complain about). But I so missed my little blog. And I so feared that no one would ever come back to check on it again. Anyway, there won’t be any more delay as far as I’m concerned. Life with blog-reading, blog-thinking, and blog-cooking is much more interesting.

For some reason, my latest trip wasn’t all that gourmet-centred as I originally had hoped for. I suspect my boyfriend is luring me into much more sporty adventures than I’ll ever be able to lure him into culinary adventures… We went mountain-walking, tree-climbing (61m up high and quite scary, I can tell you), swimming, and diving. However, I do have a few pictures to show what we’ve been up to in foodie terms:

While driving through national parks, along coastlines, and through the pretty lonely inner parts of Western Australia in our very colourful campervan, we mostly cooked ourselves instead of going to fancy restaurants.

I did want to try some of the fancy gourmet places in Margaret River but in the end, we rather bought fancy gourmet picnic stuff in one of the wineries (pictured above) and had a very nice leisurely birthday picnic. The Coward&Black vineyard is not well known for their wines yet (which they started just a couple of years ago) but they’re very successfully selling their award-winning olive oils, sauces, and relishes. Unfortunately, we couldn’t buy everything – it all looks very tempting. After that, we still felt pretty stuffed at dinner time and decided to drive a bit further to a nice and lonely beach at Cape Freycinet. There, we cooked some seafood on our camping gas stove.

Very tasty, very romantic, only the sunset didn’t quite live up to the occasion.

Apart from a not very remarkable pub dinner, we ate out only once: Breakfast in the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. An extremely isolated spot in the middle of nowhere, this town only exists because of the mining industry. Interesting and very strange but certainly not a place to spend an entire holiday... Something that can’t be said of the shop of the Kakulas Brothers in Perth. I had already walked past the shop when the strong smell of spices caught up with me. One step across the doorstep and you think you’re in heaven! At least in foodie heaven! Open sold spices and flours, a big counter full of European cheese and only the owners will know what else! Keeping in mind that we had to fly all our souvenirs back to Sydney, I really had to restrain myself and only bought some spices and a kilogram of buckwheat flour which didn’t take up too much space. So many interesting goods and dead cheap, too – I just have to find such a shop in Sydney!