HARVEST HEAVEN

One of Steven Sondheim's most successful musicals on Broadway was called A Little Night Music. I took one of Australia's best known newspaper baron's to see it and at interval her snarled that "this isn't a musical...it's a bloody operetta" and we left.

But in the half we did see was a song called "A weekend in the country" and a lot of city slickers can relate to that.

Over the years I have been spoiled with country weekends. First with a property in Woodstock, New York and then with a farm and vineyard here at Mount Macedon.

The weekend trip out of town away from the house or the apartment was wonderful but hardly a novelty.

It was the norm. The huge farmhouse open fire. The huge logs burning day and night and the pine cones throwing magically coloured flames. The pot belly stove that stayed alight twenty four hours a day.

The huge country style lunches and roast dinners and wine and friends and conversation and then snuggling down in a big bed with blankets and doonas and pre-heated by an electric blanket. One of those sleeping chambers John Denver used to sing about in Grandma's Feather Bed.

I guess having been back in the city for several years I had forgotten how good all that is.

So at the weekend I went country again. And if that idea moves you then there is a great reference book called Beautiful B&Bs and Small Hotels. I've got the third edition and it includes nearly 200 bed and breakfast places in Victoria and Tasmania.

There are bed and breakfast hotels, self-contained cottages and other wilderness retreats.

I chose an old favourite: The Harvest Home Country House Hotel in the Strathbogie Ranges in the small town of Avenell.

It's only 90 minutes from Melbourne if you are sensible and go Tullamarine Freeway, Western Ring Road, Hume Highway.

I was navigating so we didn't go that way did we. Diligently using the Melway I guided us up Sydney Road through Brunswick and Coberg. Not smart on a Saturday afternoon.

Still we made it. And In know why I call Harvest Home Harvest Heaven.

The hotel was built in the 1860s. It has been cleverly and lovingly restored. The 2002 Age Good Food Guide gives the decor and ambience a justified rave.

The dining room is exquisite as are the other sitting rooms with open fires stocked with heat-throwing mallee roots.

You can drive there as I said but the Harvest Home would be great for a wedding or a small fortieth or fiftieth birthday party. Get a group together of ten or twenty people. Have dinner there. Sip your ports or cognac around the fire, sleep in the huge comfy four-poster beds and then come downstairs for breakfast.

You could take a mini bus up there, or better still for a bit of adventure, it's only an hour on the train from Spencer Street Station.

But apart from the award-winning dinners in the candlelit dining room this IS a classic Victorian Bed and Breakfast and the B and B aspect is what I was focussing on.

And for around $150 a couple can have a big bed and breakfast. And what a breakfast.

Fresh fruit juice of course but then a range of stunningly prepared fruits. Stewed rhubarb, that tradition country fruit, plus poached pears and a fruit I couldn't identify at first. It looks like slices of fillet steak. It was actually slices of quince that had been marinated in a secret sauce and then poached.

Beautiful. Nothing like the quinces my Gran made into jam and jelly. At first I decided on the grounds of diligent research for you, dear readers, to break the diet for the first time in nine weeks and have a real weekend breakfast.

That meant we could follow the fruit with some huge perfectly-formed fresh butter-injected croissants. We'll I had half of one.

And then an omelette with a hint of Tuscany to it. An omelette that included previously perfectly cooked bacon rashes folded in late, and some fresh dill, and a drizzle of truffle oil, and some mushrooms and some rocket lettuce on the same plate and the omelette sat on a slice of soughdough toast with a spread not of butter, but chutney. Sweet but earthy country chutney.

And then a coffee in front of the fire in plump old-fashioned armchairs.

Steve Sondheim got it right. I plan these weekends in the country more often. But I'll avoid Sydney Road. If I don't the driver will kill me.