Zucchini Pancakes

It's time to get this blog back to it's foodie purpose after using it to share my travels with you.

I started cooking again two days after I returned despite my jet lag. 

I am not sure why I decided to look up zucchini pancakes...maybe it was the thought of making something different, the allure of those fresh cucurbits I had purchased at the farmer's market...

I must have looked at half a dozen recipes and some reviews of those recipes and here is what I came up with.

Zucchini Pancakes

Ingredients

2 zucchini or other summer squash

1 small onion
1  clove of garlic

1 egg

1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder

fresh ground pepper to taste

fresh oregano
fresh thyme

olive oil for cooking

Preheat the oven to 300 F so you can keep the pancakes warm as you cook.

1) Grate the zucchini and the onion into a large mixing bowl. I added the garlic using my garlic squeezer, you could mince it instead.

2) Add one slightly beaten egg.

3) In a separate bowl combine the dry ingredients. If you want to make this gluten free just use oat or brown rice flour and gluten free bread crumbs or cracker crumbs.

4) Mix the dry ingredients into the grated stuff. Finely chop the fresh herbs and add them.

Any fresh herbs with do, basil, chives, tarragon, parsley would work well too. Or dried herbs if that is all you have, maybe a 1/2 teaspoon of two different herbs.

5) Heat olive oil in a caste iron or saute pan over a medium heat. Be sure the oil is hot enough before you drop a 1/4 cup of batter into the pan. You can make them any size you want, mine were about seven inches across because that's what fit in my pan.

6) Cook them for them for 2 to 3 minutes a side. After two or three pancakes I added more oil.  Keep them warm in the oven on a baking sheet until they are all made.

7) Serve with toppings or plain. The right has a Greek yogurt with lemon and the left is a tomato almond pate. It turns out they are great by themselves as well. I served them with a beet and goat cheese salad.

 8) They are great cold later that same night and probably the next day for breakfast or lunch. I wouldn't know since Bob ate the leftovers before I could find out.

Last day in Melbourne

May 23

Our last day in Melbourne was sunny, cool and lovely. We finally road the City Circle Tram, a free tram with a route around the city center every 15 minutes. Great way to get around and a recorded voice tells you about sights, shops and things to do around each stop.
We rode it to the Fitzroy Gardens for a look at Captain Cook's cottage, brought over to Melbourne in pieces and reconstructed.

This park is over 150 years old and the huge lanes of trees make that evident. The small conservatory was delightful with hanging plants and lush bromeliads, impatiens and begonias.

We were intrigued by the signpost  directing us to the "Fairy Tree and Model Tudor Village". Once we found them, we were not so impressed.

We did enjoy tea time at the garden cafe before getting back on the tram to the Docklands in search of the Polly Woodside.  Polly was a coal hauling tall ship built in 1885, we decided not to go aboard. Instead we enjoyed our picnic lunch on the steps of the Melbourne Convention Center there by the docks.

The Melbourne Convention Center is the building to the right.

Back on the tram for the ride back to the hotel. Bob went upstairs to rest while I finished my souvenir shopping.

We wanted a new dining experience and were lead to Hardware Lane, a small cobblestone lane not far from our hotel.

This lane had no cars, outdoor dinning and hawkers trying to lure you into their restaurants. We chose one, and with some disappointment on the part of our waiter ordered the kangaroo. Luckily we started with a Moroccan beef salad that was excellent; baby salad greens dressed lightly with cucumbers, tomatoes, roasted red peppers , slivered red onions and thin slices of savory beef.  The whole main course was less than satisfactory, the roo meat was undercooked, the vegetables and mashed sweet potatoes not hot enough, oh well. We did end the meal with a delightful "hot chocolate pudding with ice cream" what we know as a molten lava cake. I plan to experiment with this dessert soon :-)

Melbourne Bird List
Pacific Black Duck
Pied Cormorant
Australian Wood Duck
Scaly Breasted Lorikeet
Spotted Turtle-Dove
Willy Wagtail
Crescent Honeyeater
Eastern Spinebill
Magpie Lark
Grey Butcherbird

May 24
Our wake-up call came at 5 AM, we dressed and headed to the Queen Victoria Market to get sandwiches for the long trip home. Our shuttle arrived early and we were waiting for our plane with two hours to spare. I was once again amazed that a large airport like Melbourne did not have free wifi, in fact it was the most expensive I had seen at $4.00 for 10 minutes. The time went by quickly though and soon we were boarding our two story "airbus", more like a cruise ship, HUGE !!  We spent our 13 plus hours watching countless movies and TV and listening to the jovial Aussies behind us get louder the more they drank. The Qantas staff kept us fed and hydrated.
Getting all the way home involved LAX,  a bus ride over highway 17 and two taxis.
Our yard had burgeoned forth while we were gone, I picked a handful of blueberries and raspberries !! Max and Maggie were very glad to see us. Home sweet home !!

Melbourne gardens and museum.

May 21

We began the morning listening to the movie Bob took of the kookaburra serenade on our last day in Tassie. Fortified with muesli and yogurt  we set out to explore the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens. 
We walked along the Yarra River where we saw rowing clubs and sculls out for a morning row.

We must have walked almost every track in that park and spent a lot of time with our binoculars and bird book.

View from Guilfoyle's Volcano.

Inside the greenhouse.

We added some new birds to our list and Bob had fun taking lots of photos of a kookaburra. It was a sunny but cool day so all that walking was a good thing.

We climbed up into the large Shrine of Remembrance, a war memorial that had great views all over the city.

View form the top of the Shrine of Remembrance.

We wove our way back to our hotel with a few stops for more gift shopping. Bob rested while I did more blogging and photo uploading. Our plan for dinner was to find Lygon Street, we had some trouble and ended up walking for about an hour before we found it. It is known for it's Italian restaurants. We picked one at random, Bob had a nice whole soft shell crab sauce over spaghetti and I had an ordinary cannelloni stuffed with spinach and ricotta.

May 22

The weather was cold with a few showers in the morning. We were glad that the Queen Victoria Market was mostly enclosed. We headed over there for a more relaxed perusal of all the food there. Lots of fresh seafood, whole fish, meats of all kinds, amazing cheeses, breads, pastries, deli fare, fruits and vegetables...my kind of heaven as you can imagine.

Bob loved these sandwiches with the eggs on top.

Amazing chocolates.

One giant crab !!

Lots of odd prepared meats.

We took lots of great photos, bought cheeses, pastries, wine, and more raw oysters. Bob tried his first meat pie and loved it. We dropped our purchases back at the hotel and headed out to walk to the Melbourne Museum.
The architecture in this city is so varied, one street will have ornate Victorian buildings and across the street will be something ultra modern. We came across Drummond St. by luck and were enchanted by it's buildings. Shades of New Orleans ??

The Melbourne Museum is a combination of Melbourne history, natural history and Aboriginal heritage. We started with the history of Melbourne, it was a very good combination of displays and text that spotlighted points of historical interest through the decades. Their history is similar to that of California, with gold rushes, mechanization, social issues and economic depressions.
We took a break at the museum cafe for lunch then entered the Forest Gallery, a multistory indoor forest. We got to see a Satin Bower bird, busy at work on his bower, a ground nest he must build to entice the female to mate.

Satin Bower bird in the Forest Gallery of the Melbourne Museum.

We thought we would just spend a short time in the natural history section...their insect exhibit was the best Bob had ever seen. We spent at least an hour looking through the rooms of amazing displays of both, live, dead and models of insects and other arthropods.

We thought we would not spend long in their multi-tiered two story room of mammals, wrong again. While I am not a fan of taxidermied specimens, this room had the most amazing touch screens, large ones with the animals you were seeing right on them. A young girl showed us how to work them. You would touch an animal  and the screen would open a window with the animal's  range and level of endangerment.

Around the room were smaller touch screens on pivots that you could point at an animal, touch and get even more information about habitat, diet, etc...we were in awe. Another hour went by as we enjoyed this very cool technology. It was hard to leave this museum without having seen the rest of their displays. We were saturated and needed to do a bit more souvenir shopping before heading back to the hotel.
We were so glad we had purchased another dozen oysters at the market in the morning. We ate them slowly this time savoring each one. That was our "entree" which is what they call appetizers here in Oz. Bob was too tired to go out again so I slipped out and bought some takeout sushi and seaweed salad to complete our dinner.

Salamanca Market, our last day in Tasmania.

May 19 Salamanca Market

Our camp at Mt. Field was only a little over an hour from Hobart, so we took advantage of that fact to go into the special Saturday market there on Salamanca Street. It is down near the harbor.  Bob got to take more photos of sailing ships !! 

Salamanca Market is a combination farmer's market, arts and crafts fair, food court with lots of different kinds of live entertainment. Many of the crafts people are local with local products.

We loved all the wood. Bob bought himself several nice items from two different old Tassie woodturners. I was taken by all the local wool (no big surprise with all the sheep we saw) and other lovely handcrafted fare. We wandered through the whole thing buying gifts for family and friends.

Lunchtime found us over at the fish markets nearby sampling more of the Tasmanian oysters, we each ate a  juicy dozen. Two more stops, one for local whiskey available only on the Oz mainland(so smooth, ed.) and one at a bakery I had seen during our last trip to Hobart for dinner fare. It was time to head back to Mt. Field before it got dark and the pademelons came out on the highway. There is an amazing amount of roadkill on the roads here, Bob did not want to add to the slaughter.

Back at camp we grabbed our headlamps, which we could not use as we approached the bugs because it would turn them off thinking it was daylight, and headed for the short hike to Russell Falls. At night you can see glow worms, which are actually fly larva that are bioluminescent to attract their prey to their sticky webs.

On the way back we were treated to a new bird sighting, the nocturnal Tawny Frogmouth !! It was quite large.
Our food from the fancy Hobart bakery made a lovely last dinner in Tassie. Smoked salmon and caramelized onion quiche, asparagus and gruyere quiche and a roasted veggie and rice salad, yum !! For dessert I had a huge pistachio rosewater meringue.

May 20
Bob woke up early and went out to hunt for animals on our last day in Tasmania. As dawn he was treated to the serenade of a kookaburra. Their sound is truly unique and complex and they deserve their full name Laughing Kookaburra !! We did a quick hike back to Russell Falls to see it in the daylight.

It was bittersweet to turn in our camper and eventually arrive at the Hobart airport. We had one close call when the main bridge across the Derwent River was closed for a foot race of some kind. Luckily we could follow the flow of other cars detouring to another bridge that would get us to the airport. Hobart Airport was small and dingy.

Arriving in Melbourne was a bit of culture shock after the wild and wonderful national parks of Tasmania. We took a shuttle to our hotel right next to Victoria Market in the city center. After a refreshing shower we headed to the market in search of dinner.

Queen Victoria Market has been around since 1878, it is mostly enclosed halls of seafood, meats, dairy and prepared foods. Roofed but open air structures hold both organic and commercial fruits and vegetables and beyond them were halls of trashy clothes, souvenirs and other stuff all probably made in China.
We started with a dozen oysters to fortify us before we walked the rest of the market and eventually we purchased some tasty deli fare, tabouli, marinated mushroom, stuffed peppers, cheeses and bread and sweets( great almond macaroons and a fudgy brownie).

We took this back to our room then headed out to find a park with a view called Flagstaff Park, near our hotel. Besides the view we found a large lawn bowling club and enjoyed watching a dozen folks play.

Final bird list update from Taz:

Wedge Tailed Eagle
Brown Falcon
Tasmanian Native Hen
Galah
Green Rosella
Kookaburra, Laughing
Tawny Frogmouth
Pink Robin (not our kind of robin)
Flame Robin (yeah, not the same family as ours)
Scarlet Robin (yet again, not a thrush)
Dusky Robin
Satin Flycatcher
Yellow Wattlebird
Little Pied Cormorant
Magpie Lark
Black Currawong
Grey Currawong
Tasmanian Magpie
Common Blackbird

Strolling with Quolls

May 17: Strolling with Quolls !!
We were sad to leave Cradle Mountain but excited about our next destination Lake St. Clair at the other end of the national park. As we were leaving the camp park I spotted several big white cockatoos in the tree and Bob spotted three Kookaburra.
We drove on small windy mountain roads to the mining town of Queenstown looking to re-provision and have a coffee/tea break. This town reminded Bob of many other small mining towns in the Colorado Rockies in the 1960's. It was somewhat dilapidated with some rough edges.

The people were friendly and not used to foreigners. At the local bottle shop ( liquor store) the owner accosted us outside the front door with questions about where we were from and what we did for a living. We stopped at a butcher shop to buy some bangers and once he heard us speak the butcher came out for a chat. He said he heard unusual accents and had to investigate. We had a nice chat with he and his wife, they told us to be sure to see Nelson Falls on our drive to the lake. We did and were so glad. The walk through the ferny forest was great, the fern trees huge and of course moss and fungi everywhere.

As we were searching for  a lunch spot I tried out the potato chips I had purchased at the IGA in Queenstown, they claimed to be "flamed grilled steak" flavored. They were new and unique taste experience, true to their claim !!
We lunched at the Great Divide between the mountains to the east and those to the west. Have I mentioned how much we enjoy the Tasmania cheeses ?? We had another variety for a classic lunch of local cheese, crackers and apples ( local Galas).
By midafternoon we had made it to our destination of Lake St. Clair. We took a short stroll before checking out our campsite and were treated to a quoll sighting !! I chased it into the brush hoping for photo, no luck until we were walking back near the same spot, another quoll  appreared!! This one was out in the open obviously hunting for something to eat. This time I was able to get a couple of very nice photos !! I was soooo excited to see quoll in the wild like that.

Once we parked the camper we walked around some more looking for animals as the sunset, no luck. The cafe was open for dinner, we have found they often close at 5:00 so this was a treat. Hearty soup and prawns over rice left us very replete and ready to call it a day. We have a week left on our adventure, hooray !!

May 18: Bangers for Dinner
The sunrise was beautiful on Lake St. Clair as Bob had his breakfast in the company of a pademelon and  the birds began their morning chorus.

We got an early start on our drive to Mt. Field , the oldest national park in Tasmania( 1885), only about an hour from Hobart. As always the roads were small, windy and empty of cars. The sky was grey with occasional showers, the clouds moving by quickly. We drove through huge hydroelectric projects interspersed with quaint and not so quaint towns. It seems that this time of year some towns are closed for the season. We did chance upon a picturesque church just outside of Gretna, we stopped and took lots of photos of the various headstones.

 We found a cafe open in Westerway called the Possum's Shed, it was very cute inside and located right on the Tyenna river.They even claim to have their own platypus which they named "Flossy". Bob had his usual "long black" and I my "chai latte".
We also shared a piece of very tasty almond coconut cake in orange syrup served with cream. It was moist and tasty without being too sweet.

At Mt. Fields we paid for our campsite and took off for the 30 minute drive up a very small dirt road to a series of alpine lakes, hikes and the only "ski area" in southern Tasmania (it had one rope tow). We enjoyed our picnic lunch in the A frame "emergency shelter", one hiker we spoke with called the recent weather up in these mountains "evil". We took a short hike around Lake Dobson, part of it in the strange pandani , and pencil pine forest.

 Back down the road we took another great short hike into the "Tall Trees", these giant swamp gum trees are the tallest flowering plants in the world. They are second in size only to our own redwoods. The walk took us through more primordial fern grottos, with the loud raucous calls of the sulphur crested cockatoos overhead. We felt we had stumbled into a scene from the Cretaceous Period.

We are camped right on the Tyenna River, and the amenities are quite good. While I did laundry, Bob worked on cooking our bangers (sausages) on the electric grill provided in open air kitchen.

We met two brothers born in Tasmania but living in Adelaide, Bob had a nice chat with them after dinner. They were researching the history of their father's life as a millwright in the nearby Huon Valley.

Cradle Mountain !!

May 15 Cradle Mountain hike around Dove Lake.
Those Tassies are smart to have shuttles running into this amazing World Heritage National Park. We started our day with a hike around Dove Lake, the weather was a bit cloudy and some of the trails were more like small streams. The views were spectacular of Dove Lake and the iconic Cradle Mountain.
This was the area Genna visited when she was in Australia with UC Davis in July of 2009. She spent a long weekend at Cradle Mountain, her photos and glowing report of the animals were part of the stimulation for our trip.

The forests here are so different from our own, full of gums trees, odd pines, beeches and lots of moss, lichen and fungus.

More wombats greeted us on the walkway as we headed to find Waldheim Cabin very rustic cottage built by the John Muir of Cradle Mountain, Gustav Weindorfer in the early 1900's. We could imagine the hobbits as we explored the mossy forest around Waldheim.

The interpretive center was curiously deserted but worthwhile once we found a very strange art exhibit of paintings of Tasmanian Devils in different famous styles and motifs.

As we were turning in the for the night two brush-tail possums were having a row just outside our camper. In fact as I was trying photograph them Bob was concerned that they would join us inside !!

May 16 Cradle Mountain day 2

This morning we were so lucky to have a clear day when we arrived at Dove Lake. The reflections of the mountains in the lake were exquisite, many photos were taken. To crown the beginning of our day, I spotted a platypus swimming around the lake. WooHoo !!  We decided to hike the lake circuit  the other direction, the trail was icy in spots but less like a stream today.

We lunched at Ronny Creek on amazing blue cheese and our last apple from Launceston, the currawongs were cheeky and lurked at a close distance.
Our afternoon walk was down the boardwalk trail  to the visitor/interpretive center.

 

The many changes in eco-systems were dramatic.

Once back to the park we availed ourselves of the large communal building to enjoy their large fireplace and use their tables and power outlet for camera and blogging.