Melbourne,,,,,a city of Markets

Well another weekend has passed by and we discovered another Market.  Who knew Melbourne had so many markets!!!  Coming from Adelaide where markets just don't seem to survive, the list of markets to visit here is huge by comparison.

The market we discovered this week was the Dandemong Market.  We had no idea this one existed until we chatted to a lady who lives a couple of houses down from us (she has a couple of dogs,  one of which, named Chocolate, seems to be in love with my Hubby lol so we have no choice but to say hello if Chocolate gets his way!).  She has been living here for 2 years after moving from another Melbourne area.  She recommended this market for its cheap veggies and meat.

So on Saturday we made our way over to Dandenong which is only about a 20 minute drive from here.  We weren't disappointed.  While we found the fruit and veggies to be a little on the hit and miss side unless you are wanting to buy by the box, the meat was very reasonably priced indeed.  (The boxed fruit was incredible value, they had boxes of oranges for $5, bananas by the box were $20 from memory and apples were $8 and this is just from what I can remember.  I told Hubby that once we are a little more settled in I will buy a box of apples and make a stack of apple pies for the freezer and a box of oranges to juice/make cordial up from).

We stocked up on a bit of meat for the freezer.  We bought:

1kg of Satay Chicken Sausages ($6)
1kg of Tomato and Onion Chicken Sausages ($6)
2kgs of Pork Chops ($14)
2kgs of Lamb Chops ($11)
3kgs of Beef Mince ($12)

So far we have only used the mince and I have found it to be of great quality.  It isn't all fatty like alot of  the cheap mince meat you can often find,  we made a Shepherds Pie and it turned out nice and firm with very little fat to be found.  We also made up a meatloaf and that also had very little fat come out of it.  (Yes we had a very beef orientated weekend lol, normally we do try to spread our red meat consumption out a little more than that!!).

Yesterday we were going to go and have a look at the Caribbean Markets in Scoresby (I think about half hour from here) but decided the kids were a little marketed out.  I love markets but the kids have their limits and I think being in crowds on Saturday with all the fruit vendors yelling out their prices was little excessive for them.  We decided to leave the Caribbean Markets until next weekend.  The Caribbean Market does have things for the kids to do though so I think they will like that one and I can't wait to go there, I remember going there as a kid when my brother lived over here and I loved it,,,,hopefully it hasn't changed too much!!

So instead of hitting the road yesterday, we had a quiet day at home.  The morning was very lazy, followed by finally having reasonable weather to get the grass mowed, it looks so much nicer now!!  I began attacking a very unruly bush which has made hanging washing on the line very difficult.  Now at least I can almost walk to the clothes line without having turn myself into a twiggy stick lol.  We put our fruit tree pots out into the spots where they will eventually (probably next year lol) get planted.  I am actually wondering whether or not we will bother to put up our trampoline or not.  We have a huge trampoline.  Our yard isn't tiny but it isn't huge either so the trampoline will look very imposing out there, we shall see......

We went for a bike ride (kids)/walk the dogs (hubby and I) around the local area yesterday.  We were pleased to find a couple of small parks we didn't know about.  They are definitely not large but they are quite nice and break up the house upon house effect that is going on around here.  The park at the end of our street is the nicest though as it has a large area for the kids to kick a ball, a small playground and a lake.

Well I must get back to organising.  I am just a little over it all but the house isn't going to organise itself unfortunately!