We had non stereotypical but for us typical Australia Day lunch: steamed lime snapper with fresh sautéed Asian style vegetables.
Photos by Kitty on her new SLR. Yum.
australia day lunch
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Category Archives: food
monday night tacos
Monday @ work was pretty crappy for both Kitty and I, so we decided to cheer ourselves up with some Monday night homemade tacos.
Kitty makes the best tacos: full of flavour and with heaps of beans. We have a mini wooden lazy susan we use on our balcony table to rotate fresh ingredients to make ourselves perfect tacos.
Tacos on the balcony
Our lazy susan
Soundtrack: Free Yourself by Kiwi band Cornerstone Roots.
Good times.
my new favourite pizza place in brisbane
We noticed that Oliver & Co. in SW1 at South Brisbane (used to be called Fresh on Melbourne) are now doing wood fired pizzas for lunch and dinner, Tues to Sat til 9pm.
We’ve been twice now and they’re really good, thin homemade crust and simple ingredients. My favourite is the salami, onion and rocket. Kit’s fave is the mushroom. The best thing is that they’re only a tenner for a large. Bargain.
inflation raises its nasty head
I have been hearing for some time that inflation has been on the rise in Australia, but it wasn’t until this evening that it actually hit me.
You see, I’ve discovered a new favourite cheese snack in the last few months: Coles Brand Cheese Snacks®. And until very recently, my favourite cheese snack could be bought for a reasonable price of $0.99 cents. Tonight is stay at home movies night, so I was perusing Coles on my way home from work. You can imagine how shocked I was to discover that Coles Brand Cheese Snacks® are now $1.19: a 20% rise!
I sorta thought that inflation was bad, but only now do I realise how devastating it actually is. Three digit cheese snacks… get outta here!
apple cake
How much better is it when you make a homemade cake. We had a friend over for afternoon tea so we made apple cake. It was using K’s nana & pa’s recipe; yum.
Ingredients
- 180g butter
- ½ cup brown sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1½ cups self raising flour
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ cup milk
- 2 apples: peeled, cored and sliced
- 1 tablespoon sugar and ½ teaspoon cinnamon (for sprinkling on top)
Directions
- Preheat oven to 180°c
- Cream butter and sugar
- Add eggs one at a time while beating
- Sift in ½ the flour and cinnamon
- Fold in remaining flour and milk – alternating
- Pour mixture into greased pan
- Arrange apple slices on top
- Bake for about 40 minutes or until cooked
- Place on cooling rack and sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top
curry for breakfast (again)
As I explained in an earlier post, a few days ago I had my first ever breakfast curry. What I didn’t realise at the time was how easy it is to get curry for breakfast in Malaysia.The last two days I’ve had a hearty bowl of chicken and potato curry with two pieces of freshly made Indian roti canai. Talk about a good way to start the day.
Photo by Kitty of Beach Garden Resort’s Roti Canai
illawong food room @ evans head, new south wales
My brother opened the Illawong Food Room in Evans Head in Northern New South Wales, Australia, a few weeks ago.
Last weekend we left Brisbane to visit Evans Head and to sample the Food Room menu.The drive is about three hours long and particually pleasant around Newrybar. You can bypass Ballina via Tevan with the added advantage of a speed derestriction sign.
The Illawong Food Room is described as a ‘European style bistro’ and the menu features a variety of dishes including thin pizzas. There is a heavy focus on fresh, local seafood. They have fresh seafood on blackboard specials (depending on what is caught) so we had fresh local mackerel served with steamed vegetables, mashed potato and a lemon butter sauce. The mackeral was filleted and was very white, light, and very tasty. We also had a ‘local prawn + garlic’ pizza which was thin, crisp and had just enough topping for my liking. 
The dessert menu is impressive too. The home made Portuguese custard tarts were incredible. They have a reasonably hard shell but the custard inside is delicious. They were served with King Island double cream and vanilla bean ice cream. Yum.
We’ll definitely need to make our Evans Head visits more frequent now that we have the Illawong Food Room menu to get through.
melbourne in three days – food
Kit and I spent the weekend in Melbourne. One of my favourite things about Melbourne is the food. The variety and quality is hard to beat.
Supper Inn was really tasty and popular on Friday night, they were turning away the crowds as usual. We had salt & pepper king prawns, stir fried kai-lan with garlic (yum) and steamed rice. It was simple Cantonese food, but so fresh and full of flavour. The menu is comprehensive with lots of specialties including crispy pigeon, which we avoided.
Liagon street was as good as usual. We tried Trotters on Saturday night. Nice, but not as good as Tiamos for Sunday lunch. Tiamo’s does really good simple pastas. Tiamo’s sister restaurant, Tiamo 2, is currently closed due to renovations but due to reopen soon.
Flinders street station is amazingly busy. This busyness supports specialist food places, including one that predominantly sells fries. Chips is a better description, fat ones. Handcut and served in either cardboard cones or boxes. Your choice of sauce and less than five bucks.
Brunswick Street Fitzroy, like a lot of the city, was grotty. We still found a great modern Vietnamese place for lunch called Red Rice. Apparently they do red rice, we saw it being delivered to another table. The food was great, not your typical Vietnamese. We had two appetizers each, plus a large serve of Asian salad greens with a Vietnamese dressing.
The only thing I dislike about food in Melbourne is the acceptance of smoking in outdoor eating areas. The weather was beautiful, we would have loved to eat outside except that we didn’t want someone’s dirty cigarette ruining our meal.
