There’s this really cute Japanese-Korean restaurant near our house. We first noticed it because it was always still really busy on our way home from family dinner (RIP family dinner) at like 9pm on Sunday nights.
They’ve got laminated menus and a dude cooking everything on a tiny stove, it’s cozy inside, and the waitress was very… honest. We’ll definitely go back.
Salmon sashimi daily special. I love salmon so much.
Seafood korean pancake. Very generous with the seafood, every piece had a big chunk of prawn, oyster, or squid.
Scott had spicy bbq lamb chops. They weren’t super flavourful but he still enjoyed his meal.
Alcoholic Calpico from their convenience store next door. I didn’t know what it was going to be. The guy assured me it wasn’t beer. Tasted great!
Way back in November 2020, after having zero covid cases for 28 days, or something like that, they finally lifted our 5km/25km radius limit and we could finally, finally get out of the city. We decided to book a little cabin in Heathcote and have a weekend away.
We tried to spend as much time outdoors as possible and ended up doing a whole bunch of very short hikes.
Trentham Falls
(Still had to wear masks everywhere.)
Bendigo Conservatory Gardens
Bendigo was quiet AF. We climbed up this tower thing where you could see out over the city. Really not much happening.
It was super hot so we stopped at a random bar for a drink. I think Scott was the only male there. Everyone looked the same.
Pink Cliffs Reserve
This place was pretty cool! I love a random geological feature!
Hanging Rock
The hike up was pretty hard with a mask on!! I was gasping for air at the top. (No picnic unfortunately.)
Fresh bread with miso butter
Cured salmon with choux doughnut
Zucchini flowers with pastrami and pickles
Beef brisket steamed dumpling
Duck breast with radicchio and cherry
Pork fillet with potato terrine
Brown butter opera cake with peach sorbet
We had a pretty epic meal at Masons of Bendigo. We had the 6 course set menu, plus I splashed out and got the matching wines. They use lots of local ingredients. Everything was quite lovely and the service was great.
I was SO FULL and also DRUNK lol. Took me forever to fall asleep that night.
Scott and I had our 10 year wedding anniversary on July 14th. Our first plan was to go to Fiji, but obviously that couldn’t happen. Then we changed our plan to a few days away in the Bendigo area, but that got cancelled when they announced Lockdown 2.0 [I thought waiting until 4 days before was low-risk enough to book an Airbnb and some fancy meals and spa stuff but no!]. Ah well. Hopefully we’ll celebrate our 11 year anniversary somewhere nice.
Instead we had a couple days off at home.
I decided there was NO BUDGET whatsoever and searched around and found out one of my all-time dream restaurants was doing fancy takeaway. What a treat!!
We started with Kinoko-no-dobinmushi, which had like a dozen different types of crazy mushrooms in a konbu dashi broth. There were three types of little vegetarian dumpling things: taro, tofu, and lotus root, an interesting green vegetable that I have no idea what it was, and some yuzu and lime. One of the mushrooms was hairy!!
Next we had Truffled teba-gyoza. This was insane. It had a perfectly gooey egg yolk (Scott thinks it was duck, as it was pretty large) wrapped in a chicken mince mixture with truffle, pancetta, shiso, somehow stuffed inside a de-boned chicken wing, which was then cooked until crispy. It was so rich and tasty. I don’t know how they did it, you couldn’t see any seams!
Then the main event, Chirashizushi (for two). It had 50 million tiny pieces of absolutely perfect fish on top of a bed of sushi rice and egg slivers. According to the menu we had o-toro, engawa, prawn, tamago, ikura, tuna, trout, Hokkaido scallops, anago, nori, kinshi tamago, cucumber, shiitake, kanpyo and bamboo shoot.
The highlights were the incredibly buttery torched engawa and the super sweet and tender scallops, but honestly every bit of it was amazing. Even the pickled ginger that came with it was extra delicious.
For dessert I chose the Otona banana, which had a Japanese whisky infused banana pureé, Okinanwan black sugar and miso butterscotch, crispy wafer pieces, roll cake layers, fresh banana and vanilla custard. I usually only eat bananas for convenience… but I still loved this. Everything was super smooth and not over the top sweet.
Scott had the Matcha Pudding Parfait. It had matcha pudding, sponge and syrup, adzuki beans, strawberries, raspberry sauce, kanten jelly, mochi and whipped cream. It was very earthy. Scott liked it a lot.
All in all, one of the best meals we’ve ever had, and a very fun at-home experience. Happy anniversary to us!
One kinda cool thing about lockdown life has been all the new takeaway options. Fancy places doing cheaper takeaway, where you might have to do a little assembly at home. After weeks of not going anywhere we decided to treat ourselves with Attica at Home, somewhere we probably wouldn’t get to go to normally.
A Simple Dish of Potato Cooked in the Earth it Was Grown – a very tender potato with a tart curd and saltbush.
The Dish That Saved Attica aka Spice Crusted Lamb Shoulder – a verrry tender piece of lamb with some greens and a super rich puree.
Plight of the Bees: Trifle Version – a fairly basic trifle with very smooth cream, cake, raspberries etc.
Baby Holy Goat ‘La Luna’ cheese served with Baker Bleu ficelle and fresh honeycomb – really delicious creamy cheese with suuuuuper chewy rolls, with a delicious hunk of gooey honeycomb.
Cocktail Selection: one sweet, one dry.
Everything was quite nice. We loved the lamb and puree the most, and the cheese was sooooo good. Everything was pretty small so I’m glad I added the extra cheese course. The trifle was the least special part of the meal but it was still fine.
Lockdown cooking has been fun, to be honest. We have been eating well.
Homemade sushi with salmon, steamed yam, cucumber, avocado, cream cheese.
Rice paper rolls with shrimp, rice vermicelli, tons of vegetables, cilantro and mint. Dipped in the most tasty peanut sauce.
Scott made this for me after seeing it on Facebook… a KFC popcorn chicken pizza with corn and gravy. LOL.
Scotch eggs and salad. These were a bit hard to make, but sooo delicious! If I made them again I would try to get smaller eggs so it doesn’t use as much sausage per egg. The sausage stuck to my hands so much and was so hard to get to seal around the egg and do the breading, but somehow they held up well during deep frying and in the end came out great!
Arancini and umm… charred broccolini. The deep frying adventures continue. Scott made the arancini. It took a long time but they were delicious!!
Montreal style bagels. Not linking the recipe because I don’t recommend that particular one. I don’t like the bagels in this country much so I have to make my own. Still needs some work.
A quarantine classic, although not sourdough, just regular no-knead bread.
Kouign-Amann. This took me EIGHT HOURS. It wasn’t actually that hard, but the whole process was like “do one fold, roll, then chill for 30 minutes”. It was the one day I was happy that our house is never hotter than 15 degrees…. perfect for laminating pastry.
Raspberry cheesecake muffins. They don’t look that hot in the picture but these were SOOOOOO GOOD. I’m coming around on cooked fruit. These muffins have a cream cheese filling and a super delicious crumble topping. I think I’ll make more of these v soon.
Almond Brittle and Salted Chocolate Ganache ice cream. I’ve written a lot about Salt & Straw ice cream. We once drove all the way from Vancouver to Seattle for ice cream. Then a couple months ago I realized that Salt & Straw might have a recipe book. I looked it up and yes they did, and wow it was available at the shopping centre right around the corner from us here in Melbourne. Shortly after I’m making batches of brittle and ganache and making my all-time favourite ice cream at home. And it’s perfect and delicious and I am so happy.
Scott made Boston Cream doughnuts. Don’t they look awesome!?!
Scott made more doughnuts for the one time we were allowed to have a family gathering. White chocolate glazed, and filled with passionfruit curd.
