Food

I am, as some of you may know, a big fan of Masterchef Australia.  It shows on subscription TV in the UK, frustratingly a month or two after the series has finished in Australia. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to avoid finding out who has won. I follow the regular judges on Twitter but even if I am very careful what I read, it is still nigh on impossible not to know who has won by the time you get to the final.

Anyway.  One of the judges started re-tweeting tweets from something called Jimmy Grants.  What, I pondered, is Jimmy Grants?  Oh look.  It's a souvlaki eatery, owned by the judge in question, on Smith Street, about a kilometre from Lindsey and Ian's flat in East Melbourne.  I like souvlaki. We must go when next we are staying.

So on Tuesday we The Builder and I braved the hot wind and the hot sunshine and strolled up Smith Street and found Jimmy Grants.  The Builder wasn't impressed by the style of restaurant (it's really a takeaway, with a big benches rather than tables if you want to eat in).  But you couldn't fault the souvlaki. Slow cooked lamb shoulder in a pita, with chips.  Next time I am planning to gather up another person or two and have the sharing platter, which you can mix with salads and various wotnots.

Tuesday night is pub night.  Except in my world where it is Japanese class night. But Japanese classes are on hold at the moment, so we declared Tuesday to be pub night for us too and joined the pubbers.  It was also Emily's farewell night. So we all decamped to The Fox in Collingwood to fare her well.  She's gone back to Townsville for the start of the new academic year. Ian had a seafood platter.  If we go there again, I am definitely having one myself!!

Wednesday lunchtime is not, ordinarily, Pub Lunchtime.  But The Builder and I decided that it could be if we wanted it to be and wandered across the road to the Prince Patrick on Victoria Parade.  It's a funny place.  If you didn't know about it you would almost certainly walk past it, on the assumption that the peeling paint and general scruffiness of the outside clearly indicated that it was a dive and a hovel. You would be mistaken, however.  The inside is anything but scruffy. And the food is lovely. It's a limited menu but what they do, they do well.  The Builder had a vegetarian noodle dish and absolutely loved it.  Vegetarian is not normally his cuisine of choice!!

Then we came back to Ballarat with Lindsey and had what was effectively an  auxilliary Steak Night. The Builder and I had stopped in Woollies on the way to Lindsey's surgery and had grabbed some steak and the makings of a salad and some potatoes. I knew we would be back into Ballarat quite late so we didn't want anything that took a lot of cooking.  And the steak was really quite nice. (So was the salad - I put mango in it :-D)

And the food theme continues as the week progresses.  There are more lunches to come.  (I like lunches :-) )

Bye Emily