Lucky Dip Dining

I was talking to one of my work colleagues last week,  who mentioned she was dropping in to one of her favourite restaurants on the way home from work to pick up the worlds best yiros and flat bread. I’d heard of the restaurant and commented about how I wanted to go there one day.  I got an enthusiastic response about how their yiros was the BEST, and made a mental note to talk to Mr. P about going there one day.

Saturday night I decided I wanted sushi but the sushi restaurant was closed. So I made another mental note to go there for lunch the next day but it got me to thinking about my conversation earlier in the week which led to another thought that we have all these fabulous cheap restaurants in our city and I'm not making use of them. Every time someone mentions a restaurant or dining experience to me, I mentally file the thought away to go there someday and never actually follow through.  

So I spent some of my Saturday night on the internets, looking up places I want to eat at then I made a list. I printed out the list , cut them up , folded them and put them into a jar. Then I cheated and pulled out the one for the sushi restaurant because that was the thought that started all of this so therefore it deserved to be first.

So Mr. P and I went off to Kintaro Sushi Train for lunch (which is Tazz's fault because she took me there for the first time  a couple of months ago and I seriously fell in love with their food ) 

I'm also rather enamoured with the idea that food whizzes past me on a conveyor belt and I just grab whatever looks good. 

Which can be a bit of a double edged sword really, because it all looks good . 

It can be a bit like playing Russian roulette with food because you might see something delicious coming towards you, and there is every chance that someone else closer to the item is thinking the same thing and will grab the very thing you were looking at so longingly before it gets to you.

You then have the choice of rugby tackling the unsuspecting thief to the ground to retrieve what you wanted , (which is anti social behaviour and probably arrestable) or to go  back to watching food whizz past you while you look for something else that takes your fancy. I chose the latter. 

Mr. P and I managed 11 plates between us before we felt we'd sushi-ed ourselves out. I did gross him out by eating sashimi, so I felt the day was a double success. 

Not exactly cheap - 11 plates of sushi and two cokes set us back $51.00 for lunch but totally worth it. 

Living La Vida Loca

I was starting to wonder whether I would ever post again, but here I am like the proverbial bad penny, wracked with guilt at having neglected my blog for so long. Starting a new job is hard work -far harder than I had imagined. After three months of feeling like a fish out of water, I'm only just now learning how to swim properly. And just when I think I have things sorted, I find something else I don't know or that I'm not sure about, and I feel like the new kid all over again. 

I spent the first few weeks of my new job travelling to the ends of the earth for training. For someone who has never travelled further than 15 minutes to work, an hour each way in bumper to bumper peak hour traffic was a truly horrendous experience.  It was wonderful when I started at my permanent office, cut my daily travel time by about half and started to get in to some sort of routine. 

Gone though, are the luxury days of fluffing round at home in the mornings, casually chucking myself into a shower and getting ready in 20 minutes and then leaving at 8.40am for my 10 minute drive to work. The corporate world demands I swap jeans for business pants ( or even scarier - a dress!), shoes that don't slip on, and  a lack of pony tail as my go to hairstyle. I even wear makeup everyday. And as gorgeous and grown up as I look-all of this takes extra time, so sipping my morning latte while I check blogs prior to going to work is also a thing of the past.

Needless to say, sewing was something that just wasn't on the priority list during my "settling in" period. Couple exhaustion and brain drain with the fact that I have been opening the door to my sewing space for months and just chucking things in the room will nilly , and that it was getting nigh on impossible to move around in there without the imminent danger of a mountain of stuff falling on me and burying me alive, and you have a set of circumstances guaranteed to kill any creative thoughts that might dare to pop into your head.

So this past weekend, I sucked it up, tied a rope around my waist (so Mr. P could pull me out mountaineer style if one of the piles collapsed) and ventured in to the danger zone. And when I triumphantly emerged , I could see carpet again. I did the happy dance around every square inch of that space ( and chucked in a moon walk for good measure) 

This led to the idea that it was high time to stop laying out quilt bits on the floor and screeching angrily at the assortment of furry things that share Maison Pyjamas every time they stampled on them , and so my portable design walls finally became a reality. 

There has not yet been a quilt finish for 2015 , but it appears I have found the motivation to start something new. Although, speaking of finishes, I have managed to quilt the Marrakesh quilt , and put the binding on ...but I still cant make up my mind whether I'm going to do some quilting in these centre rectangles, and if so what I'm going to do -so it technically remains unfinished. 

Super E has started school since I last put in an appearance here, and is loving it. I can't believe he's old enough to be at school because it just seems like a few months ago that he was learning to crawl around my kitchen. We headed off to the Lego exhibition a couple of weekends ago, which was like heaven to a small boy with a Lego obsession. 

And during the dying days of Summer we made sure ice cream featured heavily in our adventures. 

 I am currently on a mission to find the best chocolate chip cookie recipe in the world. Last time I got this obsessed with finding a perfect recipe it resulted in me trying 20 lemon cheesecake recipes until I found the perfect one. Attempt No 1 on the chocolate chip cookies  wasn't bad but wasn't exactly what I was after so attempt No 2 will be made some time this week. Do you know how many recipes out there tout that they are the "Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever"? 

 I consoled myself by making cupcakes....