Of late, we've had a fair bit of drama around here with freakish hailstorms, flash flooding, leaky house, husband falling off the ladder and an unexpected visit to the emergency room. Then there was a rather looong stretch (10 days to be exact), of doing it alone with the kid's, as Stephen had to fly to the U.S on crutches, for business.

Thankfully Stephen arrived home from San Francisco safely last Friday, to then develop a nasty oedema to his already broken foot! Yes - I know we *all* saw that one coming! So kiss goodbye any hope of heading down to the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival over the weekend, as I had to add Florence Nightingale to my already overtired repertoire.

Hence, after seeing the doctor and establishing that the patient was safe to travel, we decided to head down to my cousins beach house and have our own food and wine festival ourselves.

My cousin Ray and his wife Jane are passionate gourmands, so it goes without saying that we all get along famously. Ray had caught a tonne of calamari the previous day while he was out on the boat so on the menu were fried calamari, stuffed calamari and chargrilled calamari in Asian spices.

We told all four children that if they ate their calamari we would give them a gold coin. Both Hoover and Alessandra scoffed their fried calamari in a matter of minutes, whilst Fussy and Sam whinged and complained bitterly throughout dinner.

Did someone say more wine?



I also wanted to take this opportunity to apologise for the problems you may have experienced with Gourmet Worrier over the last week or so. I thought the problems were related to the latest Moveable Type upgrade. Hence you can imagine my complete surprise when I discovered in the wee hours of the morning that the problem was in fact related to a spam bot redirecting to a fetish site!

So please accept my sincere apologies and rest assured that the problem has been dealt with swiftly thanks to Sarah and the wonderful support team at Moveable Type.