This week in brief

Hello! It’s Melbourne Cup long weekend time – whomp whomp! Alastair is still away, and while the husband is away, the wife… eats out a lot. Too much.

Oh remember, how I made pulled pork last Sunday? On Sunday night I gobbled some down in lettuce cups.

And the day after I made pulled pork mushroom bunless burgers. I grilled two big portobello mushrooms and put lettuce, carrot, pulled pork and avocado in between them. Too easy!

However, you can’t really eat them like a proper burger. It’s knife and fork material because the mushrooms leak a lot of juice, so (confession) when it comes to eating them I knock it all over… yes, I stacked them into “burgers” for a photo. Pulled pork and mushroom salad doesn’t seem as cool as burgers! 🙂

On Tuesday night Bro and I headed to Omah’s in Port Melbourne with Thanh, Bryan, Allan, I-Hua + Aaron, and Li + Robert. Our mission? Stuff ourselves with crab until our stomachs begged for mercy.

Did we succeed? Oh yes, we did. Between 10 of us, we ate 13 crabs. We mostly ordered the salted egg flavour (pictured) but also tried lemongrass, black pepper, chilli and the new pandan flavour. As always, salted egg was the best, but it was better last time we were there. On Tuesday there was more batter on the crab, which reduced the salty richness. Still good though.

If you’re interested, here’s my previous post about crab at Omah’s.

I felt disgusting on Wednesday, so thank god I had a night at home. On Thursday I caught up with Thanh, Kat + Josh, I-Hua and mybyclementine for a cheap and cheapful Thai meal at I Spicy in Hawthorn. We spent less than $20 each, and we ate until we were stuffed. It was the second round of dishes that tipped us over the edge – we really ate way too much. Foolish fools.

This was a poached chicken, avocado and green bean salad from La Chicas that I ate for lunch the day after. I was really happy to eat greens after all the Thai food the previous night.

(I really like the food at La Chicas. I eat there several times a month because it’s close to work, and there’s not many other options. I also ate lunch there on Wednesday – a ham and brie omelette, that I forgot to snap a photo of, probably because I felt so damned awful from crab night.)

And thank goodness that I did eat salad at lunch, because that night I caught up with Maz and Daz at Agraba in North Melbourne. Agraba serve Lebanese mezze, and offer a $35 banquet (pp), which naturally we ordered. One of the dishes that came out was this deep fried crumbed haloumi. HOLY SMOKES IT WAS INCREDIBLE.

If you go there, don’t bother with the banquet – just order 5 serves of this cheese! Hah.

After the week of epic eating, yesterday I woke up and made myself a coconut milk, raspberry and spinach smoothie. It looked DISGUSTING. Ugh green sludge alert! It tasted okay – a bit sour – but cripes, I couldn’t look at it while drinking it because it made my stomach heave.

But I obviously didn’t put enough fat in my smoothie because I was hungry about an hour later. So I made myself a poached chicken and celery salad with a teaspoon of whole egg mayo. Y’know what? Celery rocks! I’ve never minded it, but now I really like it. I think it’s the crunchiness that I really enjoy.

And dinner on Saturday night? Basically the same thing, except I added an extra stick of celery and a carrot. It felt like I had made up for some of the bad eating over the week. Crunchy vegetables = happy times.

And finally – here’s today’s breakfast. Paleo pancakes with raspberry sauce and bacon. I used this recipe for the pancakes and made the raspberry sauce from a handful of frozen berries and a small teaspoon of honey. Here’s to lazy Sundays.

Sorry, that was a long one! How was your week, my friends?