Friday, 4 July 2014
Monday, 30 June 2014
Wanderlusting After Vacation
Crochet bag, Mink Pink bikini, Zara sunglasses, disposable camera, Moleskine notebook, I Am a Cat by Soseki Natsume, iPhone.
I'm going overseas soon and this has made me so much happier and excited! At the moment I'm thinking about what to pack. Ah so excited, I'm getting all wanderlust-y!
Sunday, 29 June 2014
Book Review | Gone Girl
I've decided broaden the subject of my blog, at the moment there's a lot of reviews of cafes and restaurants I've eaten at, and I just want to branch out and do posts about other things I'm interested in like books, film, fashion, holidays and so on. I thought a good place to start is to do a book review! This post's is on Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is a mystery thriller novel based on the disappearance of one of the main characters. I bought this book at the recommendation of a friend and I am so glad I did. This book is simply amazing! It's so thrilling, mysterious, heart-racing and shocking. The book is about this couple called Nick and Amy Dunne, and one morning Amy suddenly disappears and as the investigations go on Nick is put under scrutiny and everyone starts to suspect him.
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| Blurb |
Gone Girl is very central to the theme of relationships and hidden characters and there is a huge twist in the middle, it will shock you. I was constantly reading it while commuting to uni everyday and thank you Gillian Flynn for writing a book that kept me occupied, interested throughout and entertained during all those forty-minute train and bus rides. Without ruining the book for anyone, the ending was unexpected, I didn't see it coming at all, which is quite frequent through the book. There's also a Gone Girl movie coming out later this year, which I am so excited about! It stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as the main couple, Nick and Amy Dunne. I'm not sure how the movie is going to turn out, because movie adaptation of books are so hard to get right, but I can't wait to see how they portray Gone Girl! The trailer's below!
Monday, 23 June 2014
Simple and Comforting | The Blue Lotus Cafe
The Blue Lotus at Waldecks is a nice and relaxing place to grab simple foods. Their menu offers dishes that are simple and warming like, vegetables tarts, warm soups, sandwiches and salads. It's the type of food that you've already tried and don't mind getting it again. I really recommend sitting outside because the water features, the rustle of the plants on sale make everything calm and relaxed, and you're able to stare at the beautiful sky. The Blue Lotus is an extremely family and children friendly place, so don't be surprised if you see a dozen or so children running about. Don't worry it's not irritating or noisy, the outside sitting area is spacious and airy so you don't feel cramped and the voices tend to just evaporate or blend in to the atmosphere instead of bouncing off walls like it would inside.
For lunch, I ordered the sweet potato, zucchini and haloumi tart with the daily special salad. The food took awhile to come, which was surprising, but we weren't bothered by this. The tart was nice and hot when it came out and it also came with some relish. The daily salad was chickpeas, cauliflower, sprouts, artichokes (I'm presuming they were artichokes) and sour cream. Seeing as we were sitting in the shade and the weather was cool, the salad made me slightly too cold. It was okay though, because I had the tart! The tart was very light and easy to eat, and the relish was great.
My mum had the carrot and turnip soup with ciabatta bread. It's a great soup to have on cold days, it was quite thin in texture but not to the extent that it was watery. For dessert, we ordered a sticky date pudding with flat whites. The dessert was sticky, dense and came with a serving of cream, which went perfectly well with the coffee. The Blue Lotus's food are wholesome and homely, familiar and comforting. It isn't particularly inventive or quirky, it's just yummy familiar simple foods that everyone knows and loves.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Breakfast Before Shopping
Last Saturday we decided to go on a shopping trip to Garden City to celebrate the end of exams and to check out all the end of financial year sales. Whenever we go shopping, we try to get there early in the morning so that it's not that crowded, this usually means skipping out on breakfast at home and having it at a cafe, which is great. We went to Little Stove in Melville, which is about ten minutes from Garden City. It's a cute neighborhood cafe that isn't as commercialized as some cafes tend to be. It's the sort of cafe that has people living nearby come in every morning to grab a cup of coffee. The area is so nice, it's quiet and homely. There's also great parking out the front, although it does get filled up pretty quick, from cars attending the cooking school next door. It seemed however, that majority of all the people dining at Little Stove walked or biked to the cafe. I'm presuming they live nearby.
At first, we wanted to sit outside but as we were deciding what to eat, it got too chilly for us as there was no sun shining on us. So we quickly grabbed a table inside the cafe. The inside of Little Stove is decorated with mix matched tables and chairs, vintage black and white photographs and random little bits of decor and furniture. It's the sort of interior that one might describe as 'indie' or 'hipster', due to having retro and vintage elements. It's very cute and wherever you look, your eyes land on something peculiar
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| Hash brown with poached eggs, relish, rocket and parmesan: $16.00 |
For breakfast I ordered the hash brown with poached eggs, relish, rocket and parmesan. The eggs were cooked perfectly and went super well with the crunchy hash brown. Surprisingly, I also enjoyed the rocket and parmesan, two things I usually don't eat. The reason why is that the flavour of the rocket and parmesan were mild and it compliment the rest of the dish. I absolutely love, love hash browns. They're great. Little Stove's hash browns were yummy, but slightly too oily for me. There were parts of the hash brown that were oily in taste making it a bit too much for breakfast. I also ordered a flat white, which was very strong. I was happy about this though, because a lot of cafes tend to make their coffee too milky for my liking. My flat white came with an awesome artwork of a lady made out of foam, check it out!!
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| Flat white: $4.00/4.70 |
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| Little Stove Crumpet with whipped ricotta and local honey: $10.00 |
The other dishes we ordered was the crumpet with whipped ricotta and local honey and the bircher muesli with pounded spices. I've never understood the concept of a crumpet. I find them so weird, but tasty. This crumpet dish was simply yummy in it's subtle sweetness. The crumpet on the plate however, looked slightly awkward and lonely. It only came with one crumpet which maybe not be satisfying enough for people who eat quite a bit in the morning. The portion for my sister was great though, because she doesn't have much for breakfast. The bircher muesli was thick, crunchy, creamy and had a crisp texture to it due to the Granny Smiths. One thing I noticed was that the plates and bowls used to serve the food, in contrast to their interior, lacked character. I don't know what it was about them but they look like the kind of plates used at a buffet. It didn't particularly suit the rest of the cafe or their food. Melville is quite far from where I live, but if I happen to be around that area I would definitely stop by again!
Sunday, 15 June 2014
Potato Frenzy | Sweet and Purple Potato Recipes
Okay, so this is a pretty weird post, I mean the title's 'Potato Frenzy', I'm not sure why I chose that, oh well. I wanted to put these photos on my blog because I loved how the colours turned out. I also wanted to do a potato appreciation post, because potatoes are basically my life. A few weeks ago, for lunch we just ate potatoes, two kinds in particular: sweet potatoes and purple potatoes. My God, they are great. Everyone knows what sweet potatoes are right? Have you ever heard of a purple potato? It's such a great vegetable. It's quite similar to the sweet potato, due to its sweetness but the purple potato is much more dense and its texture is somewhat more creamy and thick than a sweet potato. It also has the most amazing colour. 
For the sweet potato, what I like to do is to cut them in to long chunks, spread them on to a tray with baking paper and cover them with Thai red curry paste. It tastes amazing and I can just eat it everyday. This is what I did on the right side, on the left, I've drizzled it with some olive oil, sprinkled salt, pepper and paprika, this is a great way to eat sweet potatoes too!
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| They really shrivel up once they're done roasting in the oven. |
For the purple potatoes, we just steam them and sprinkle some salt on top once they're cooked. Notice how the cooked purple potato has intensified its colour? How amazing is that? I just love all these photos I took, all the colours look amazing! Wow, I sound like a potato freak.
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