Thursday, April 29, 2010

Picnic Lunch


This is our kind of picnc - the kind that involves stopping at the bakery on the way to the park!!

We called in at the Jason Lee BAkery at Westpoint shopping centre, Browns Plains and grabbed some lunch to eat at the Berrinba Wetlands


I got a Salad Sandwich.  They were extremely generous with the grated cheese. It fell everywhere. I love bakery sandwiches because they are made with deliciously fresh bread!



Janet had a sausage roll - she is a big fan of the sausage rolls from this bakery.



Shadow had some leaves and sticks. And some lettuce that fell from my sandwich.  She had a lovely time watching small children ride by on bikes



she also rather liked playing with this empty Coke bottle.

Monday, April 26, 2010

dinner at home - noodles

Noodles and vegies with some sort of meat from the freezer :-)  (possibly veal!)




Noodles and vegies with Tofu!!

I marinated both the meat and tofu in soy, brown sugar and lemon juice before pan frying.  The noodles and vegies were simply stir fried with some of the marinade from the tofu. Easy and delicious dinner!!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

dinner at home - pasta 2 ways

I'm on 2 weeks holiday at the moment, so not really spending a great deal of time on the computer. But heres something I prepared earlier :-)

For Janet - because she loves bbq meat lovers pizza, I made bbq meat lovers pasta! This was mince, pepperoni and bacon, cooked up with some bbq sauce and tossed through wholemeal pasta, with grated mozzarella on the top. Big thumbs up from Janet for this one!



for me - I cooked up red capsicum, onion, grape tomatoes, baby spinach and fresh basil which I tossed through the wholemeal pasta with some parmesan cheese on the top. Yum - I could just about eat tomatoes for every meal and be very happy :-)

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Friday Night Dinner - Souvlaki Hut


A trip to Souvlaki Hut has become a bit of a regular occurance for us on a Friday night.

 
Janet always gets the Fish & Chips. (And I always steal a few of the deliciously crunchy chips)





I always get a vegetarian Souvlaki, minus the cucumber and olives, with some hommus. Sometimes I get regular, sometimes I get small, depending on how hungry I am! But it is always absolutely delicious! I love the squeaky haloumi cheese, and the stripy bread, mmmmmmmm!!!!


We always eat in, beacaue the one time we took away, by the time we got home (only about 5 minutes drive) the souvlaki was soggy :-(

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Easter Baking disasters!

We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good.  So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.

So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2.  I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-).  The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin.  We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"



Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!

My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.

I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop.  Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard.  To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!



the cake was goooooood!!

Monday, April 05, 2010

Out for Lunch - Melange, Roma St Parklands

I met up with a lovely bunch of ladies from "Calorie King" for lunch at Melange, Roma St Parklands




Nadine had spoken to the chef, who had agreed to create some "lighter" options for the purposes of this lunch.  He came over to our table and talked us through a few items that weren't on the menu


I chose to have the "chefs special" vegie salad.  This had delicious morsels of roast vegies tossed through the salad leaves.  Suprisingly, my favourite part of this whole dish was the mushrooms! They were amazing!!

Other peoples choices included:


Salt & pepper calamari, fresh lemon aioli

Smoked salmon, hash cake, avocado salsa  sour cream


oven baked salmon with salad (chefs special)


fruit salad with yoghurt

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Out & About - Roma St Parklands

I was meeting for lunch at Roma St Parklands in the city one weekend (food post to follow!), so I got there early for a wander around.....