June 16, 2013

The weeks in brief: 3 June – 16 June

Agnes weekly

Hi hi.

Before we get into the last fortnight, first some news about Foodbank Victoria:

Foodbank Victoria launched its Warm Up Winter campaign this month, aiming to raise $100,000 for the 500,000 Victorians struggling to meet the cost of living.

Foodbank Victoria is the state’s oldest and largest food relief organisation that delivers nutritious, healthy food to people experiencing hardship. They estimate that 1,725,000 meals will be required to feed Victorians doing it tough this winter.

Did you know?

526,700 Victorians are living below the poverty line

Approximately 90,000 of these people are children

11.4% of people in Melbourne live below the poverty line

12.9% of regional Victorians live below the poverty line

29% of households in poverty had a wage earner as the main income

25% of sole parent households are in poverty

To help raise awareness of how urgently food is needed, Foodbank Victoria has partnered with JMC Academy to create a series of short films to launch the annual fundraising campaign, which can be viewed on YouTube. The films illustrate the individual stories of Victorian’s living in crisis who rely on food relief for a regular meal, including single mothers, pensioners and individuals, who after paying the bills, may have less than $20 a week to feed themselves. The films also demonstrate how much work is involved to get food onto the plate, to highlight the growing need for financial assistance to continue to provide fresh produce to food agencies.

How you can help

Visit www.warmupwinter.org.au

Donate what you can to help feed Victorians living in crisis

Share the short films via Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness of the work of Foodbank with the hashtag #warmupwinter

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

I had lunch the other week at Chez Olivier, which was very, very nice. For lunch there is 2 courses for $28 or 3 courses for $35 (value yes).

My dessert – poached meringue with custard praline sauce and caramel on top – was amazingtown. The meringue was soft like a cloud.

Last weekend, DD and I took advantage of the Monday public holiday and took ourselves (plus husbands) off to Hobart.

After checking into our hotel, we went for a wander and had breakfast at a cafe called Environs.

Haz and I both ordered the sardines for breakfast – an almond crusted sardine with poached egg and dressed rocket on a hash brown with hollandaise sauce.

It was really weird. 😐 Really, really weird. I like sardines, but nothing in this dish seemed to work together.

The boys had a breakfast (scrambled eggs and other stuff) that looked like grey on grey. It was not good. 😐 I’m pretty sure Hobart has better cafes.

Later in the day, after visiting Salamanca Market, we had coffee at Doctor Coffee. Yay for good coffee.

And yes, of course we had dinner at Garagistes. We showed up at about 6pm and there was a huge wait (2.5 hours…) We went next door for a drink and a snack and came back.

Dinner looked beautiful, and it was nice, but I don’t think it was worth the wait. More details later.

The following day we went to Mona via ferry. 🙂

I loved Mona. Love love loved it. It’s definitely worth the visit. It does have some really wanky arty farty pieces (eg video installations. Argh I have a particular hatred for video installations, so much wank srsly) but I liked quite a lot of the (non video) works.

My favourite was Kryptos. It has to be experienced in person to get the full effect.

This weekend was fairly quiet. I did a bit of cooking, baked a banana syrup cake, and Dany fed us ribs and wings.

Today’s breakfast at Reading Room Cafe: muesli, grated apple, poached pear and passion fruit. I *never* order muesli, so this was very out of character for me. I did enjoy it, but I would have preferred it without the passion fruit, it was too tart and overwhelming.

Oop, catspam time. Sometimes we watch movies together. 🙂 (Ten points if you know what this movie is.)

Righto, that’s it. I’m out. Byeee.