People in green houses...

...shouldn't umm.. waste carbon?

When people asked me how I was going to spend my birthday last week, I'm sure it surprised noone that my plans included going out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After recovering from my pirate party, I put a little more thought into this and decided to try the breakfast menu at Greenhouse in the CBD after hearing good things about it, and falling for one of the items after looking at the menu on their website.

I love being able to look at restaurant menus ahead of time and weigh up your options, but this is sometimes fraught with danger. Some restaurants fail to keep their websites properly updated, and you can find that the dish you've been swooning over all day is no longer on the menu, or they may have sold out of it by the time you arrive. Better to have loved and lost though, I say, so I throw caution to the wind and remain an online menu peruser.

I had been to Greenhouse a few times already since it opened in December 2009 to sample their booze and nibblies, and was quite taken by their approach to using the space. I won't go through all of the environmentally sound aspects of the building, as you can read all about this in detail on their website, but essentially they have sought to minimise their ecological footprint.

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The Dread Cap'n Conor turns One Score and Eight

Gather round lads and lasses
   with tankards of rum
   and I'll tell ye a tale tall and true,
Of a great ship that set out
   to pillage and burn,
   with the dread Cap'n Conor and crew.

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Start spreading the news, I'm eating today

I want to be a part of it,
Foodie Exchange!

Yes, I was the very happy recipient of another foodie exchange parcel a couple of weeks ago (following the success of my exchanges with Quebec, Arizona and Toronto). In fact, it was waiting for me at the Post Office when I arrived back from Melbourne, so it was a nice little way to keep my holiday (eating) spirit alive. 

This fabulous parcel was sent by Andrea of High/Low Food/Drink, a great blog filled with delicious recipes and reviews ranging from the cheap eats to the haute cuisine of New York. Andrea's carefully selected goodies took me on a tour through Chelsea Market, home of the Food Network USA.

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Melbourne: Flavours of Grand the Sams

As I'm sure my regular readers and friends are well aware, given that I have not been able to contain my excitement and bragging, my sister and I were recently in Melbourne for our very first Australian Open experience. It was a week of awesomeness and our thoughts are already turning to next year's trip.

As amazing as it was to have two massively solid days of tennis action, it was also a little painful to be forced to eat event food while in Melbourne. Luckily for me I'm used to buying food at Subiaco Oval when watching sport, so the options at Melbourne Park seemed quite good in comparison. At a footy match last year at Subi Oval I had a hankering for a stuffed spud (it is possible that I was needing to drown my sorrows in midstrength beer and soft carby goodness, I'll admit it), so did the trek around to where the spud stuffers were hidden, only to be met with an incredulous look and told "they always sell out by half time" by a particularly surly lady that looked like she had eaten all the potatoes herself.

 Food stalls around Garden Square, before the rush of hungry punters

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Figs deserve stuffing like Hugo deserves a slap

My book club met last night to discuss our latest reading experience - The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. Opinions of the book ranged from loving it to hating it, and it is filled with characters that you'd happily punch in the face so it was a lively discussion. As per usual the talking was interspersed with much eating as we all enjoyed the dishes that everyone had brought along to offset their opinions, be they sweet or sour.

Bookclub table of delights - chocolate fudge, stuffed figs, upside down cake, chocolate brownies, nibbles, spiced nuts, vegies, hommus and tahini, felafel, beetroot dip, cheese and crackers, Turkish bread, olives and a selection of wines.

My brain has been taking its sweet time returning to me from Melbourne these past few days, but luckily my daydreams yesterday started to shift from tennis back to food, and inspiration finally struck about what dish I should bring along - dates stuffed with blue cheese, and wrapped in prosciutto. It is not such a stretch to go from daydreaming about tennis to daydreaming about dates - have you noticed that tennis players are some of the few male athletes that have decent attributes in this area?

As it turned out, the shop that I went to get supplies only had small, disappointing, un-tennisy dates so I had to re-evaluate my recipe and got some dried figs instead. They also had gorgonzola on special so that made my cheese decision for me.

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