A friendly visit

This past weekend I had the lovely treat of a visit from Nicole, one of my awesome speechie friends!  Her work flew her from Hobart to Adelaide for a professional development day about acquired adult apraxia of speech.  She convinced me to attend as well, and I'm glad that I did.  Apraxia is the bane of a speech pathologist's existence and it's nice to do more learning around the subject.  It also gives me "Professional Self Regulation" points as a Speech Pathology Australia member.  Of course, it definitely wasn't free, but money well spent and another thing to add to the CV.

Jeremy didn't have to work this weekend, and I think he was quite happy for Nicole and I to go off and entertain ourselves with South Australian tourist activities while he relaxed with books and video games. 

We spent Saturday in the Barossa Valley.  Our first stop was Maggie Beer's kitchen, where we watched a cooking demonstration with verjuice.  If any Canadians have heard of verjuice, I'd be totally impressed.  Since I'm assuming most haven't, I will explain:

Verjuice (/ˈvɜrˌdʒuːs/ VUR-jooss; from Middle French vertjus "green juice") is a highly acidic juice made by pressing unripe grapes, crab-apples or other sour fruit.^[1] Sometimes lemon or sorrel juice, herbs or spices are added to change the flavour. In the Middle Ages, it was widely used all over Western Europe as an ingredient in sauces, as a condiment, or to deglaze preparations. It is still used to some extent in the American South.  Maggie Beer, an Australian cook, vintner, and food writer, began the modern resurgence of verjuice when she began commercial production in 1984, after a harvest of Rhine riesling grapes could not be sold. She persuaded a winemaker who was a friend to assist her in turning the juice into verjuice. After slow national sales, 15 years later came international sales, that were then followed in France and elsewhere by local product.

We got to try a little sample of verjuice and we watched a lady make onions, pumpkin and mushroom deglazed with verjuice.  I can say for an absolute fact that these were the best mushrooms I've ever tasted! (I HATE mushrooms).  If all mushrooms were made with verjuice, my mind might be changed.  After the demonstration, we were encouraged to put on some Maggie beer aprons and take pictures, which we did, as you can see!

 

 Another one of the Maggie Beer specialties is pate.  I'm not the hugest pate fan, but we were at the kitchen of an expert!  We decided to share the "pheasant farm pate" picnic basket, which came with bread, some sort of grain salad, onion chutney and pheasant farm pate.  It was actually quite yummy!

 We were lucky to be able to do our tour of the Barossa on a beautiful day!  The Maggie Beer farmhouse is definitely a scenic location for a picnic.

 Lots of wonderful colours!  The drink was so refreshing - Maggie Beer's non-alcoholic sparkling wine with soda water and mint.  Delicious.

I have been to the Barossa a couple of times now but hadn't yet been to the famous Jacob's Creek winery.  We decided to fit this into our itinerary.  We had a memorable wine tasting with a very funny employee, and now we can say we've been there!

 Jeremy decided to join us for dinner that evening after his leisurely day.  We like to take guests to a restaurant in Chinatown for a dumpling feast!  Good value and delicious food which is so filling that we couldn't finish our two orders of dumplings and one order of Chinese broccoli between the three of us!!! 

 Sunday morning, we had breakfast in Glenelg, the tourist-y beach suburb of Adelaide.  We all were very content with our breakfast choices.  We wandered down to have a closer look at the beach, and then dropped Jeremy off at home while Nicole and I continued on to the Adelaide Hills.  We spent the day there and then I dropped her off at the airport after a fantastic weekend of many, many laughs!!