The week in brief: 19 March – 25 March

This week: Finally made it to the Duchess of Spotswood, Moa beer, BIRTHDAY LASAGNE, fun with dry ice, going to Temple, and 56 Threads.

(Also, the sunrise one morning this week was insane!)

But before I get into all that, the winners of the Australia Unlimited competition are lucky #5 and #8 – Thanh and Slowsunday. I’ll email you for details to send you the cookbook. Congrats 🙂

Last weekend Alastair popped over to Wellington briefly, and he flew back early on Monday morning. I took the day off to spend with him, and it meant that we could finally check out the Duchess of Spotswood (I know, I know!).

All the gushing people do about this cafe is justified. It’s great! We had a lovely brunch. Must check it out for lunch and dinner soon. 🙂


During the week I lunched with my colleague CC at La Chicas again. We both ordered their salad special – smoked salmon, roasted kifler potatoes, sugar snap peas, rocket, olives, dill. It was really tasty. It would be totally easy to make at home too. I love new salad ideas, as I tend to get in a rut with them.

On Tuesday night Alastair and I went to the Local Taphouse for the Moa beer tap takeover with April and her hubby (disclosure: we were invited). Alastair showed up a bit later, so April and I were there with her hubby talking to the Moa crew. Thank GAWD April’s hubby was there, cos the two of us know very little about beer. I mean, I drink it occasionally and I know what I like, but talking about it? Errrr… *blank*

Anyway, Moa is from NZ, so it’s cool in my books. 😉 I’m trying to convince Alastair that he should write the blog post for me – what do you reckon?

And on Thursday, it was Alastair’s birthday. 🙂 🙂 🙂

It’s a tradition that he gets birthday lasagne each year, and this year was no exception. Birthday lasagne was awesome – it seems to get better and better each year (toot toot).

For his birthday, Maz and Daz gave him the most random and coolest present ever – over 4 litres of dry ice (pun intended). We spent a lot of time playing with the dry ice.

Since then I’ve been trying to convince Maz that liquid nitrogen would make an even better present – imagine the possibilities! (She doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Boohoohoo.)

On Saturday, we continued Alastair’s birthday festivities with a visit to Temple Brewery with friends that I sneakily organised to be there. Alastair was surprised. 🙂

We drank some beer.

And ate some food. They had scotch eggs on the menu but Bro ordered the last one. Disappointment! Oh well.

Okay I’m on the home stretch for this week. This morning we had brunch at Fifty-six Threads – a social enterprise cafe in Kensington that provides employment and training to new migrants. Check out I-Hua’s post on it.

After brunch we went to the market, and when we got home I cooked a curry – the greenest red curry ever. That’s what I get for not following the recipe. 🙂 It tasted so, so good though. Will try and blog it next week.

That’s it from me – how has your week been?