Home made magnolia syrup….what a joy this was to make and how delicious. I used the petals of the beautiful Magnolia stellata, one of earliest trees to flower here in the Blue Mountains. The mauve pink cups of Magnolia Soulangeana would be fine too. Here is a
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There are numerous secret bars in central Sydney. The wonderful Barber Shop Bar in York Street has elements of a hidden Chicago speakeasy and a Victorian gin palace.😍 To enter, patrons walk though a working barber shop, then sneak up the stairs to the bar. Hard to
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The very name of this hidden place warms the heart of a weary Baby Boomer in town for a few days….Grandma’s Bar. 😍 It’s located in the basement at number 275 Clarence Street. There is no street signage….just look for the guitar shop next door. This place
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The Avalon Restaurant and Cocktail Bar at Katoomba is housed in the old Savoy Theatre (constructed 1936). The venue is full of vintage memorabilia. What a sense of fun there is here. It has a definite Alice-in-Wonderland quality. Upstairs is the dining room. For a sense of
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Absinthe is a distilled, highly alcoholic drink. It is anise flavoured, derived from the plants wormwood, green anise and sweet fennel. It was popular in early 20thC Paris, especially among bohemian artists and writers such as Picasso, Proust, Vincent van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar
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CASUAL DINING OUT IN THE BIG SMOKE! This Italian eatery is located in King Street. It was so good that on a recent visit to Sydney my partner Rob and I dined there two nights running. The style is described as Euro-chic. It’s decorated with pots of
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Cinnabar Kitchen in the Blue Mountains village of Blackheath is on The Great Western Highway, just a stroll up the hill from our home. I’m not sure why it took my husband Rob and I so long to go, especially when we had great memories of Ashcrofts,
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SHAKEN AND STIRRED! Thanks to classic wines such as Penfold’s Grange, Australians are now less likely to be perceived as a nation of unsophisticated beer swillers. However, cocktails are perhaps more generally associated with Manhattan or Paris than ‘the
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