September 9, 2012

The week in brief: 3 September – 9 September

Agnes weekly

This week: fairly quiet, because… today Alastair and I are off to South America. Cheers! Hoorah! Whoooooo! We’ll mostly be in Peru, but also will be spending about a week in Ecuador: Quito and the Galapagos Islands.

We’ll be away for a month – I have posts scheduled to go up during that time so it’ll be like I’m still at home. For you anyway, not for me. 🙂

Okay, my week. At the beginning of the week we caught up with Adrian and CnC for dinner at Red Spice Road. The food was… quite good. I was surprised, which I think stems from the fact that I had heard mixed things when they first opened.

But like I said, the food was quite good. And the servings are really large. We ordered two starters and three mains between the four of us and we were stuffed. Oh yeah, and three desserts. Ummm. We were only going to order two desserts but somehow two became three, I don’t know whose idea that was. Probably Adrian’s (sugaraddict).

The best dish was the twice cooked lamb ribs – so tasty and crispy. The second best – their famed pork belly. Crispy cubes of pork belly – every time a good time.

The rest of the week was super quiet while I tried to tidy up things at work. I have quite a bit of time off work (6 weeks!) so I really wanted to clear as much as possible. So… lunch at my desk. Le sigh.

On Friday night Alastair and I headed out for a quick dinner at Grand Tofu in Flemington. I liked their red bean and coconut on ice.

Alastair had Hainanese chicken rice, which seemed okay. Not as good as the one I make. 😉

I had the black pepper beef, which was fine. I would’ve liked more vegetables though – so much meat, where’s all the vegies?

Grand Tofu also do yong tau fu. I haven’t tried it there, but it seems very popular and lots of people were coming in and getting it takeaway. I must try it next time.

Last night (our last evening in Melbourne!) we had a quick dinner at Thien An. We used to eat there quite often, but new owners took over about a year ago (I think) and we just sort of stopped.

Anyway, we went back tonight. It was pretty much still the same – the big horse sculpture painting (people who’ve been there will know what I’m talking about) has gone and the walls have been painted black, but the menu is still very similar. Although they did have a sweets / cake part to the menu which I hadn’t seen before.

But savoury food first. I had the chicken lemongrass chilli with rice. It was fine – a touch sweet – but I added a massive spoon of chilli sauce to it and gave myself the chilli sweats. So spicy. 🙂

Afterwards Bro and I shared a bowl of black sticky rice. It was really good! Very fragrant and sweet, and the nuts on top added to the deliciousness.

Thien An is one of those restaurants that’s not really anything to rave about, but we’ve been eating there for years and I’m sure we’ll be eating there for years to come.

This morning we flew to Sydney. 6am. Ridiculous.

Also ridiculous: breakfast on the flight up. I never fly Qantas domestically so I forgot that you get food. It’s such a short flight, I’m surprised they haven’t done away with it yet.

Our flight to Santiago has been delayed by three hours (we could’ve spent an extra three hours in bed! Regret!) which has meant hanging out at the airport with terrible, overpriced coffee. The food options are miserable and I always forget how stupidly overpriced airport food is.

(This is how the cats spent all day yesterday while I packed. Lazy sods.)

Well, that’s it from me. By the time this goes up we’ll be on our way. 🙂 I don’t think there’ll be much internet access while we’re away, but I’ll instagram if I can (if you want to follow me, I’m offthespork). Otherwise… have a lovely and safe month and happy eating. 🙂