Tropfest. Picnicfest. A bottle of excellent Winstead pinot noir from Bagdad. The Tassie Bagdad, a town in the drought-stricken Southern Midlands. A slab of experimental aged cow’s milk cheese with the texture of grana and a long, deep, satisfying flavour that brings back memories of haystacks and barns and country girls and wandering hands. Saydeh’s hummus and baba ghanoush, made fresh by the owner of my local IGA. Summer Kitchen’s wholesome hunza pie. And rugs splayed out across the lawn in front of the big screen.

We dip and chomp and try to steal moments of conversation between the short flicks.

I make lunch for friends. Mushrooms braised to silky softness in a tomato and red wine sauce. There’s polenta, cooked in the traditional way for an hour so the starch changes in flavour and the texture becomes more palatable than the fast-cooked version. It’s enriched with butter and cheese, than spread thinly on a large board. The sauce is smeared over the top and broccoli, simmered with chilli and garlic then finished with olive oil and lemon, is dotted around. You eat the polenta from the board – no plates – gouging out your territory in the yellow gruel. It’s an old Italian way of eating – no talking, I’m told, because then you’d miss out on eating your fill.

Some people get it with hairdressers. I get it with cafes. A loyalty that means when I nick off to somewhere other than my usual haunt, I feel strangely but undeniably guilty.

A busy month. There’s a new dog, a kelpie as black as squid ink, who brings a puppy’s delight to my life. There’s been music to see (DuOud, an amazing couple of blokes from Istanbul who play the classic north African instrument, the oud, but in a techno, have-to-dance way). The Cygnet Folk Festival. Joyous. Some hard work at a food stall, trying to be playful with customers, but sometimes coming over as rude.

We had a day off. The team from Bruny Island Cheese and I managed to take a whole day away from work and celebrate Christmas as it should be celebrated. With kids, a dog, family and friends.

About 22 of us sat at a long table under the gum trees: Laid with painter’s drop sheets made of a gorgeous calico, the wine glasses all garnished at the stem by my nieces so we didn’t get them confused. The food, even by usual standards, was astonishing.

Ross cooked goose, long and slow in his new wood oven. He’d stuffed the rich flesh with the bird’s livers and mushrooms. Nick fired up his tip shop find: an old boiler that we used to quickly cook lobster and prawns. My sister shucked 10 dozen oysters in record time (and my brother-in-law ate them in equally record time). There was amazing Wessex Saddleback ham, with a dark burnished skin from an old-fashioned wood smoker. Emma’s gran, Mary, supplied a pudding so big that it required a younger man to bring it down from Sydney. I can now confirm that Mary’s brandy sauce is justly renowned.

Mum made her terrific shortbread, my sister whipped up cherry trifle from a recipe she’d garnered in Grazia, there was a spinach bisteeya (filo pie), wood oven roasted mushrooms, plenty of vegetables and an amazing roast onion and duck egg flan.

It was as pretty as a magazine shoot. Add to that food that amazed, a suitably wide range of drinks and finishing the day with a walk on the beach and it’s hard to imagine a better Christmas Day.

Cherry pie: an easy trifle for Christmas Day. Photo: ACP Library

It’s a good time to be around me, so my friends say. I lost my voice on Saturday afternoon after working at a market and it’s still playing hide and seek on Tuesday. It’s a five pack a day voice, it sounds like to me. Not good when I’ve many phone calls to make, mostly to strangers who think I’m a junkie on the end of the line.

On Sunday I wanted yum cha but the best restaurant was full. Luckily I found some amazing xiao long bau (pronounced sh-owh long bowh) in a local Chinese joint. These dumplings originally hail from Shanghai and are filled with impossibly gorgeous minced pork and searingly hot soup. You have to be careful or the juices spurt all over your clothes or your face and scorch your palate. Of course the first dumpling did. But the rest tasted like China.

The roses are in full bloom in the yard. My favourites are burnt yellow, from a bush more than a century old, perfuming the air near my front step. Another, outside the bedroom window, has petals the colour of unhomogenised milk, fringed with speckles of hot pink. They’re not sprayed and I made rose water from a few handfuls of them, straining out the petals and using it to dress a wobbly latte cotto, a panna cotta made from milk.

The orchard is racing towards ripeness. The first will probably be the greengage plums. Later the blood plums and nectarines. Then the peaches, then pears and eventually several varieties of apple. But I think I’ll be moving soon. To another home on a few acres with more work and more room for an animal or two. My home, rather than a third of someone else’s. I will miss my orchard. But I look forward to getting a dog.

Last week we had a curry night. I brought dhal, a big pot of yellow split peas cooked with tomato, curry leaves and mustard seeds. There was a rendang, thick with pounded coconut and studded with chunks of jackfruit. Chicken was cooked with coconut milk. Beef was turned into a vindaloo, lightly sour from the requisite vinegar and spicy enough to make me mop my brow. Homemade paneer, the fresh squeaky cheese made by heating milk with lemon juice, was stirred through wilted spinach.

Ross had a birthday. And we got the benefit. Not just cake, flecked with dried apricot, and candles blown out by a waiting child.

Ross was also given a big cast iron, oval pan. He was given two wild rabbits. And a bottle of Gigondas. All from his darling wife Emma. So for his birthday, Ross was allowed to cook us dinner. Lucky him.

A 1981 Hunter "Hermitage" emerged from the cellar, thick with sediment, brown with bottle age, but drinking pretty well, considering the cork had turned to moss. The table was laid. A Bindi Pinot with seven years’ age was uncorked, along with the Gigondas, a lush, full flavoured French drop. And the rabbit was carried aloft to the table and ladled out. The sauce was thick with onion, rich with red wine and spicy with loads of black pepper. Ross’s braised rabbit was so good he could pass as a French housewife. A hairy French housewife, admittedly, but French nonetheless. Three hours on the stove and the tough, well-muscled leg meat had turned as tender as dumplings. We used the sourdough bread Ross had baked to mop it up, and with well-lubricated lips toasted his health.

I felt bad about how little I’d done to help in preparing the meal. So I cleared the table.

Recently I hung around fashionable places in Melbourne for a couple of days. Places where the staff spend as much on their hair products as small countries do on education. Revelled in the abundance of Spanish wine, tapas bars, urbane coffee haunts and the egalitarian nature of dining in such a wondrous city. Found Jim’s Greek Tavern in Collingwood to be just as gloriously chaotic as ever on a Sunday night. The saganaki (a seared wedge of squeaky, salty cheese served with just a wedge of lemon) was as great as when I first had it here 15 years ago. The bread slick with olive oil. The dips garlicky. The mixed grill a celebration of the chargrill – again with just lemon to drizzle over the top. And the service was as marvellously gruff as ever. The place was packed as it deserves to be.

Ate a few breakfasts, checked out some art, and then found myself back home, just a little poorer, and perhaps a little heavier, than when I left.