I loved this dish! The fish was meltingly tender and incredibly fresh, perked up with the sweetness of the pumpkin and salty crunch of the pancetta. The highlight for me, though, was the gruyere-stuffed clam. Such cheesy, decadent goodness!

Quadruple pork! There was a great contrast between the sweet and tender belly, and the crisply crumbed shin and boudin noir fritter. My main complaint with this dish was the total lack of crackling on the belly. I really enjoyed the accompanying Chardonnay as well, and we were very lucky because our hotel actually gave us a bottle of it as a gift - woohoo! Can't wait to crack into it at home.

We had a non-pork eater on our table, and she was given the crisp fried zucchini flower as an alternative course. I should mention here that the restaurant was very good about adapting the other meals and were very conscientious about pork-based products in the other dishes. (E.g. the fish dish above was done without pancetta; the bacon-studded cabbage in the next dish was replaced with an alternative vegetable - big points for that!)

Double duck! Confit duck and seared duck breast are both favourites of mine, but the best part of this dish was the little oblong of potatoes. They were cooked perfectly: tender, but with a pleasing bite to them, and wonderfully flavoursome. I couldn't help but imagine the giant tray of potatoes this from which this must have been cut. Mmm... potatoes.

The beef was one of the most popular dishes of the night. It was cooked rare (to my liking!), with a great charred crust. The lemony bearnaise was also excellent, and despite being quite full by this stage, I made sure to finish the whole dish - lovely! Our waiter was very excited about the accompanying shiraz, but it was actually not to my taste at all - I found it aggressively herbal and thought it didn't work with the steak.

This palate cleanser was just delicious, so refreshing! I must try and figure out how to make something similar at home.

The meal, unfortunately, ended on a slightly negative note. The dessert looked beautiful, and indeed, the three pink sorbets (strawberry, raspberry and rhubarb) were all fantastic - icily creamy and with pure flavours. However, the panna cotta itself had a faint but distinct taste of garlic. Seriously! I wonder if there had been garlic in the fridge while the panna cottas were setting, or if perhaps some of the kitchen utensils had been in contact with garlic earlier. Such a shame for what otherwise was a beautiful dessert! (If I hadn't been dining in such a large group, with people I'd just met that weekend, I would definitely have sent it back).


Overall I greatly enjoyed the meal, despite the hitch with dessert. I thought the service was very good, although chatting to some fellow humans after the meal I realised that not everyone had a similar experience. (You can read Miss Piggy's impressions of the night in her post about Canberra.)

Looking at Rubicon's website, a five-course degustation is $75 ($115 with matching wines), which I think is extremely reasonable. I know my friend An is keen to visit Rubicon - let's put it on the list for our next trip!

Sarah and Sandra visited Canberra as part of the Human Brochure campaign. This meal was included as part of the prize.

wines

Food & Wine humans

We were lucky to have gorgeous weather that weekend - perfect for wandering around the gardens.

I loved this tomato soup! First, the presentation was incredibly cute - I adore enamel cups! The tomato soup itself was gorgeous, with a rounded tomato flavour and the slight creaminess of the soup cutting through the acidity of the tomatoes. My only complaint: it was too small!


Childish of me, I know, but my favourite element of this dish was the puffed grains - I loved the textural contrast and the crunch!



I'd tried this dish the last time we visited Grazing, so I was super-pumped to see it on the menu! Burnt butter, hazelnuts, sweet beetroot, tender pasta and rich goat's cheese. Heaven! (Looking at lots of the other tweets that day, this appeared to be the favourite dish of the lot!)


More lambacon! It was surprising just how bacony it tasted - it must all be in the smoking.


Pork belly! These sliders were little brioche buns, stuffed with a generous slab of pork belly, onion marmalade and coleslaw served with sweet potato and beetroot chips. The pork was deliciously juicy and meaty, although I must say I would have preferred a cracklier crackling.


Dessert was a lovely, fresh little tart: shortcrust pastry filled with creme brulee, and topped with wonderfully fresh, intensely berried, strawberries. I should admit that I was hoping for a chocolate-based dessert (greedy!) - but I thought this was perfect for a warm sunny day.

Hi everybody! I'm still recovering from a massive weekend in Canberra as part of the Human Brochure - which included, among other fun activities, two six-course meals with matching wines in one day! Woah. Y'all already know I really like Canberra as a destination for weekend getaways (see my previous Canberra holiday posts for proof), and it was great to discover even more new foodie locations. The weather, as you'll see in my photos, was absolutely perfect! Canberra really showed us her best side!

Mount Majura Vineyard

I loved how enthusiastic all the operators and tourism staff were - they all really believed in their products and loved their city, and were excited to be part of this new initiative and share what they've got to offer. I must be honest and state that there were a couple of little organisational hitches along the way, which were a bit annoying - e.g. transfer arrangements out of Canberra were different from the itineraries we'd received, and we weren't told until it was too late for us to join the bus and we had to organise our own cab to the airport at the last minute. However, it didn't dent our enjoyment of what was a great weekend. Overall, Australian Capital Tourism did a great job coordinating everything, especially considering it was the first time they'd organised such a large and complex operation. Good work guys! It was great to meet like-minded foodie-social-media-people from around Australia too!

Another thing to mention: even though we were encouraged to share via our various social media channels and have it aggregated to The Human Brochure, they didn't impose any limits or requirement on our tweets/posts (i.e. I wasn't told that I could only write positive stuff, or that I even had to write/tweet at all). Just quietly, I was happy I could Tweet and Facebook to my heart's content without getting funny looks!

I'll be writing up a couple of these places in more depth, but for today I wanted to give y'all a snapshot of what the weekend contained.

Humans from the Food & Wine stream were put up at the East Hotel, a brand new and rather swanky hotel in Kingston.

East Hotel, Kingston

On the first afternoon we had some free time, so met up with our Canberran friend An (yes, he of the Vue De Monde, Embrasse and Tetsuya's fame), and had lunch down the street at my favourite Canberra cafe: Silo Bakery. (N.B. this meal was not included in the prize).

Clockwise from Top Left: Croissant; iced lattes; cheese platter; fluffy bread; pizza with potato, chilli jam and anchovies; the cheese room

Everything was excellent, as expected. The iced latte was refreshing and creamy, and the pizza - with potatoes, anchovies and chilli jam - was just divine! I loved the crunchy, chewy base, and the contrast of textures between it and the soft potato slices. The flavour combo was great too! And don't get me started on the fluffy fluffy bread! I actually wonder why Silo, a Canberra institution, wasn't included on the Food & Wine itinerary...

Later that night, there was a welcome function at the Australian War Memorial. I thought it was an odd location for a celebration, being so sombre and all, but it was a fun night - there's actually a huge museum underneath with real fighter planes and heaps of really interesting artifacts on display.

The Australian War Memorial

The roll of honour

Inside the museum at the Australian War Memorial

 A few things about the above photo:

• Human Brochure cupcakes! 
• It was amazing to see real life fighter planes and other weapons
• The dials on the bottom left are steering equipment from German ships. I got Sandra to translate, and discovered that, "Full speed ahead" in German is: "ALLE FAHRT!!!"
• Loads and loads of food and wine on offer that night - and the kids got their own little lunchboxes with fish and chips and mini pizzas! The canapes were of decent quality, and the most interesting thing for me was the smoked lamb chops. Look like lamb, tastes like bacon!

The next day we enjoyed a lovely six-course lunch with matching wines at Grazing, which was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon! I'll be blogging this in full shortly, but you can read about my previous visit to Grazing here).

Grazing at Gundaroo

After lunch, we humans walked it off at the National Gallery of Australia. Not being a very arty person, I must admit I wasn't particularly excited about this destination when I saw it on the itinerary, but it turned out that I really enjoyed it! They've got So Much Cool stuff there! Normally visitors aren't allowed to take pictures, but we were lucky and told that we could, as long as there was some sort of "human" element in the picture. (That meant when there was no-one else in shot, I'd be making a peace sign with my fingers to take the pic, hehe). Again prefaced with the disclaimer that I'm not an arty person, here are a few of my favourite pieces that we saw:

Hey hey everybody! Just a quick one today: I wanted to let you all know I'm off to Canberra for the weekend, as part of the Human Brochure campaign that Australian Capital Tourism have put together to promote the nation's capital!

Basically, they created a big competition to bring 500 humans to Canberra for an all-expenses-paid weekend. (Half now, half in March next year). The idea is for us to come and experience Canberra, and share our experiences and thoughts via social media. I'm told that over 32,000 people applied for the 500 spots, so I'm pretty chuffed that I won!

We had four streams to choose from: Adventure, Family Fun, Arts and Culture, or Food and Wine. So you can all guess which one I selected - adventure, of course! Haha, just kidding! Food and Wine, Food and Wine! (I think the Adventure guys are doing some kind of mountain-biking-trip - it makes me tired just thinking about it, hehe).

Those of you who've read my blog for a while will know I've been to Canberra a few times already, and have always enjoyed it. Ostensibly we go to visit my friend who lives there, but also to check out their wineries, restaurants and cafes. (It's the city with the highest number of restaurants per capita in Australia!) I'm excited to discover new restaurant and foodie destinations, but also happy that we'll be visiting a restaurant I've been to before and really enjoyed. (Spoiler Alert: it's Grazing at Gundaroo!)

The humans behind the scenes at Australian Capital Tourism have been putting heaps of effort and work into the trip so far. The Food & Wine itinerary looks like a lot of fun, and the hotel they're putting us up in looks pretty schweeet. I can't wait!

You can follow the trip at the Human Brochure website, or using the #humanbrochure hashtag on Twitter.

I'll be blogging the trip after I get home, but if all this Canberra talk has whetted your appetite for all things Canberran, do check out my posts from my previous holidays.

2007 Trip:

• Canberra: No Really, It's a Cool Place!

2009 Trip:

• The Canberra Weekend: More than fireworks and po...litics
• Canberra 2: Artespresso
• Canberra 3: Milk and Honey... and Schnitzel!

2011 Trip:

• Italian and Sons
• Lonsdale Street Roasters
• Grazing at Gundaroo
• Aubergine
• Poachers Pantry
• Urban Pantry