Sorry Friday Pie-Day fans. As you’ll see from today’s menu below, there’s a distinct lack of pie action on the menu at The Gabba for the 3rd One Day International between Australia and Sri Lanka.

This means I’ll have to review two pies next week, I’m sure I’ll cope. Also, bearing in mind it’s Burn’s Night (Hello Kevin!) next Friday, hopefully there’ll be a lamb pie to pass comment on in addition to an Aussie staple.

In the mean time, damn that Rosemary baked loin of Victorian lamb…..

Gabba Members Dining Room

Sportsman’s Lunch

Entrée
Roasted vine ripened tomato & goats cheese tart w caramelised onion

Main Course
Rosemary baked loin of Victorian lamb w sweet potato dauphinoise & minted runner beans
or
Roasted breast of chicken w herbed spring pea & lemon risotto

Dessert
Hazelnut meringue w milk chocolate mousse
or
A selection of fine Australian cheeses w fig paste & wafer biscuits

Premium blend coffee & a selection of traditional & herbal teas

Welcome to a parallel universe. The surprising end result of an engaging three hour train ride from Sydney up through New South Wales taking in the edge of the Blue Mountain range and scenic lakeside towns like, insert your own tired England manager joke here, Woy Woy (Hello Eats!).
On leaving the station, I catch glimpse of a bus destined for Wallsend. The second thing to notice is the massive dockyards that have made this town’s name. Across the bay is Stockton.The chaps here, to a man, are shirtless. Even the hostel receptionist looks like Olivia Colman….
The comparisons are as far fetched as they are spookily redolent.

Welcome to Newcastle. Infamous as the place where they took the really troublesome convicts.

It’s that time of the week already and, assuming the locals love for a pie is on the scale of this place’s English namesake I head for the nearest bait cabin (Hello Stevie lad!) for a spot of lunch. I head to the Queen’s Wharf and the home of the only licensed franchise of where I spent yesterday around this time, Harry’s Cafe De Wheels.

A legendary venue for the pie connoisseur, its original base in Woolloomoo Dockyard has been in service since 1945, when local entrepreneur Harry ‘Tiger’ Edwards, bemused by the lack of quality after-pub eaterie in his home town, decided to set up a caravan specialising, more or less, in pies for the esurient and inebriated.
The great, the good and the far too many self-serving types from reality TV shows have eaten there. Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Allan Border and P.C. George Garfield from The Bill are some of the many celebrities whose cheerful Troth-Cam images adorn the shiny aluminium walls of the iconic pie shack. As its legend has grown, so has its menu. Pasties, sausage rolls and hotdogs, not to mention other flavours of pie are all available these days.
Tradition dictated I left the pie till Friday, so yesterday I had the pastie. It was good. The pie today was better.
In keeping with the hulking pie tower of a fortnight ago, clearly the standard way to serve the dish here, I signed up for the original flavour in all its Aussie surroundings. No kidney, no cheese, no onions.
Just beef.

The cutlery was as ineffective as the ones issued a fortnight ago as the crust stood firm, as tough as Steve Waugh. The potato, meanwhile, was more synthetic than Shane Warne in his current state. The peas were in the same vein, though gloriously and voluminously mushy.
The beef itself was good enough, but, frankly, Harry, there wasn’t enough of it. The gravy was saltier than Bernard Manning’s joke book although a delightful touch of pepper did just enough to rescue the flavour.

Yeah, it was good alright, but legendary? I wondered if it would have tasted better in Sydney rather than my current location.
Overlooking the bay, reflecting on the latest instalment of my pie odyssey, a drunken, broke man rambled idiotically on in a strange accent, rudely interrupting my pie-based musings.

Newcastle. The comparisons really are as far fetched as they are spookily redolent.

Sri Lanka’s timid capitulation brings about an early end to the Boxing Day Test. Our choice of afternoon plans is between sitting in Federation Square topping up the tan or contracting chilblains, depending on the mood of the schizo Melbournian weather, or heckling the bloke who gave us the city tour yesterday as today’s victims gather around, eager and unknowing.
Despite struggling to put days to dates in the Christmas to New Year week, I remember it’s Friday and that means one thing. Leading China past St. Paul’s Cathedral and up through Flinders Lane we take in one of the many CBD based branches of Pie Face, a franchise that joyfully capitalises on the Aussie love of one of its signature dishes and seems to outnumber, in Melbourne anyway, the by now traditional but unwelcome fast food joints that engulf other cities worldwide.

The menu is fairly extensive, and the counter is rammed with enticing pies that gurn temptingly back at you from beneath the glass. Plumping for the deal of the day with full coke and cookie accompaniment, the snappily monikered The Stack. Grabbing an outside table we settle down, underneath the dive bombing pigeons and alongside the trams heaving with Boxing Day Sales shoppers, to a late lunch.

The pie-tender brings out the spoils. Seductively slathered in piped mashed potato, an e-number filled pea-based equivalent and topped with gravy thicker than the Sri Lankan opening batsmen’s second innings run out, today’s selection lives up to its name.

Where to begin? I press down with my plastic cutlery on pastry that billows as delightfully as a Melbourne maiden’s summer skirt in a playful south easterly breeze. The knife hacks at the pie top as forlornly as a hapless golfer in the rough. Spotting a way in through the spray-on veg, I hit the steak and cheese. The meat is chunky and tender while the cheese sauce tasked with guarding it from praying plastic forks lacks sharpness. Meanwhile, the gravy tastes like its come from the stockpot of heaven after someone’s enterprisingly added extra Worcester Sauce on the way down. The potato and peas are as anaemic as the cheese yet, combined with the steak and gravy, make for a fine Friday fix.

The nuisance birds would be reminded to not stray too close. Today’s successful trip and the extensive menu mean I’m already looking forward to my next visit to Pie Face. Today’s Steak & Cheese could be next week’s Thai Chicken, or Peppered Steak. Or the week after’s Pigeon Pie.

Think on, Speckled Jim.

To paraphrase Morrissey; spicy is nice and spicy can stop you, from doing all the things in life you’d like to.
Like getting through the first session of a Test Match.
Or a long tuk-tuk journey.
Or coughing.

So while I enjoyed the food side of the Indian leg of my trip, variations on a theme of veg curry all day everyday were starting to become a tad repetitive (in more ways than one). Thank heavens for Aussie foodie heaven then and Melbourne.

Gooders’ weekly trip to the Veg Out Farmer’s Market, St.Kilda yields the welcome conclusion to my spice odyssey. A cheerful, chubby chap in his mid-twenties greets us in an accent that is half Sydney, half Skelmersdale. He looks like the sort of bloke who’d be at home among my kid brother’s Young Farmers friendship circle (Hello Ed, Rex, Kenners, Henry, Goodge, Terry, Rustler et al) and has the happy demeanour to support my notion. One of the three protagonists of Pacdon Park, selling meat to the Aussies the British way, he and his chums set up in business four years ago in New South Wales and are very good at what they do.
Offering Great British specialities to a receptive, knowledgeable customer-base, Pacdon do traditional, they do it by hand, and, my goodness, they do it well.

In fact Gooders -possibly one of the kindest people on God’s Earth and my minder in Melbourne- fills her cooler bag with Boxing Day breakfast goodies. It’s all going in.
Lancashire sausages, Cumberland sausages. Hang on, surely not?
Yep, it’s there too.

Pudding Noir.

The linchpin of any breakfast worthy of the name. They do haggis too, though I won’t need the “Great Chieftain o’ the Pudding Race” (Hello Kevin!) for just over a month. Then there’s my lunch.

Pork Pie.

Melton Mowbray in Melbourne. The pastry is the hues Mr Cornwell deliriously sung about, lacking the darker finish you usually associate with the Pork Farm version. In fact the pie lacks in a lot of things in direct contrast to the ones you buy back home.

There’s less salt. Less pepper. And there’s no jelly.

It’s an Aussie Nanny State thing but the lads aren’t allowed to produce their pies with jelly due to food safety laws. But to be honest, you don’t buy the pork pie for the jelly, do you? Do you?
Oh, you do. Right.
But buying a pork pie for the jelly is a bit liking buying a car for the sun roof. You certainly expect it, but it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t come with it. Anyway, the quality of the pie isn’t compromised by the lack of the three above ingredients. That the pork itself tastes so delicious is as a result of this too. Maybe it’s my meat-free last month or so, but this is one of the best pork pies I’ve ever tasted.

Not for the first time this Festive period I find myself looking forward more to Boxing Day than Christmas Day.
And to Burns’ Night beyond that.