more from december: bakery tour no. 2

Well! Guess what I forgot to mention before going on holiday in December.

Early in the month, it was a very wet day for a walking bakery tour, but we'd already postponed so many times that it HAD to run. So I brought my car, and the 5 of us ventured (..rolled) across to Fitzroy, its north, and Collingwood.

Stop no. 1 was the French Lettuce, Nicholson St. I can't vouch for all the vanilla slices in Melbourne - probably have only tried three or four in my life, but this was very good. Better than Louttit Bay's? I can't say, but on par. It was about $5, slightly more expensive than LB, and served with a raspberry coulis that it was really better without. Delicious, anyhow.
Apparently their quiche was excellent. The pastries all looked appealing.

Next stop was Nicholson St Baker, up in eastern Brunswick. We were also looking for Inferno Cakes next door, which turned out to be upstairs because it was the same shop.
I didn't get many photos, but we tried a vanilla cupcake with lemon icing that was heated up, which was buttery, smooth and not too fluffy - divine!! and there was a date and caramel slice that I thought was pretty standard. Also a decent sausage roll, I think.
Then we drove around in circles for ages making wrong turns, parked off Smith St and crossed Alexandra Pde to get back to Sainsbury's. Hooray for the little green man! *eeooooobupbupbupbupbupbupbupbupbup*
It was worth the trip. Not for M.M's chicken pie, which was perfect other than being too heavy on the pepper, or for the reportedly average coffee, but for my loaf of Norwegian Rye. There it is in its little bag down there.
I had this with pesto, marinated fetta and cherry tomatoes about a year ago at Doctor Java, fell head over heels, and then like a shy fool, left. But the next time I was there having coffee, I plucked up the nerve to ask what the bread was and have since then been on a mission to Sainsbury's.
This with avocado makes me a happy toast eater. I had some for lunch at home the next day. The rest of the loaf went into the freezer, where I expected to find it on return from Brisbane. Not so! Mum and Dad had polished it all off.
The portuguese tarts are apparently famous and delicious. Next time I'll have to sample one.
En route down Smith to Gertrude St, we passed a couple of nice-looking bakery cafes. We stopped for a late lunch for some of the party at Upper Crust, 206 Smith, where we found a chicken sandwich that by all accounts of its eater hit the spot.
I wished I'd had room for something from Melissa, but you can't eat everything.
And last on the list: Fatto a Mano, on Gertrude St, just off Smith - a couple of doors up from Birdman Eating.
I can't wait to come back here for lunch!
This time we came for $3 (thievery!!) brownie, on recommendation from my sister. Very generous, and not bad at all.
I wouldn't come here for the atmosphere, by the way. It reminds me of a fish and chip chop à la eclectic Fitzroy. But the people running it are lovely and the food honest and good.

Finally, about the same time - the day before heading off to Bris - raspberry yoghurt cake, chez moi. Recipe courtesy of Clotilde at C & Z, the blog that made me want to food blog. She actually has a recipe up for a raspberry yoghurt cake but I just used the plain one and chucked in about 250g of raspberries. And then cream cheese icing with a fair dose of lemon juice.
My sister said this was the best cake she had ever had!

Las Veganagain

It is a warm, sunny June afternoon in Melbourne, and all is well.

DELICIOUS... Las Vegan Nirvana Lentil Patty with gourmet salad.

Depending on the place, 'gourmet' is such a crap word. It's a crap word because the fact that it's used usually seems to mean the opposite of the word's supposed meaning. Like, 'we just like our meat + 3 veg, but we'll put some token other combination of ingredients on the menu and call it gourmet to please you weird hippy people who like raw spinach.'
I realise that this is a strong and somewhat angry statement blindly stereotyping any users of the word 'gourmet'.
But tell me anywhere you had a 'gourmet' pizza that was better than Bimbo's?
I guess I generally mean, if your food is good, it's good, and it will speak for itself.

But at Las Vegan, the 'gourmet' salad is different to the normal salad, and they've named it so because it's a green salad plus avocado and marinated stuff (little bit of eggplant and mushroom), oh and dried olives. Fair enough.

There was a decent whack of oil in this meal, to be sure. Might not be able to see it under all those beautiful bright colours. Deep fried patty with oil on the salad and oil-marinated eggplant and stuff. And avocado (oh, this was some good avocado). After some initial squeamishness -squeam?- I don't feel bothered, though. It was yum. And ohh, the crispy, sweet edges of the lentil patty! aaah. It was a monster thickness, too. What can I say about the flavour and the texture? Pleasing. Very.

Me mate had the TVP Calzone with gourmet salad and a cup of the bottomless Chai. The calzone was all right, but I won't bother with them when there is so much amazing stuff on the menu.

No chai for me, but I escaped having spent a total of $10.50 for my patty with gourmet salad and a crazy muffin that seems to be chocolate, walnut and cinnamon. Had a taste of the lemon and ginger too... crunchy sugar on top, fresh ginger.

More soon.

Las Vegan Bakery

Just went there for lunch today.

OH MY WORD it was delicious.

No, I'm not vegan, but I have increasing numbers of friends who are.

My sister went with a vegan friend of hers and told me more than once about the tofu and tempeh with satay sauce, bean shoots and salad ($8.50), which I dutifully ordered, eyeing the rest of the menu with equal longing. I wasn't sure what to expect, having had tempeh only once before at Vegie Bar (I LOVE Vegie Bar, but don't get tempeh there, at least not with the House Salad. It's as dry and boring as 7:30 on a Sunday night with no food in the house). But S1 had said this would be nothing like that.

She Was Right.

My local lunchmate ordered the Rice Balls (also $8.50), also with satay sauce, bean shoots and salad. A girl at the next table had this - I asked about it and she said it was her favourite! - and it was inevitable that one of us was going to order it.
Not everything on the menu has bean shoots, or salad, or satay sauce - in fact, some things have none of them! - but I was exceptionally glad to have all of the above.
The salad was just good old salad, but with little semi-dried olives and this fantastic dressing. I can't quite describe it. Think it had garlic?
The rice balls, 2 plump mounds of rice with a little bit of corn and stuff, encased in a sticky, sweetish batter and deep fried, were gorgeously ugly.
The satay sauce is evil, it's so good.
But I was happy with my tofu, hard on the outside, soft in the middle, and meltingly good tempeh.

The place is really cute. Run, it seems, by this funny straight-faced man.. he was serving and this helpful woman was out the back cooking (to get to the toilet you have to go through the kitchen and they tell you how to use the basin with the foot pedal). I shall check out what has been written about them when I have more time coz I want the story.

Everything is a similarly cheap price. Nothing under $5 except a muffin ($2, today only, according to the sign... they ran out while we were there. They looked great.) or a $3 all-you-can-drink cup of chai with bonsoy, but I don't even care, it's still super value for the best meal I've had in weeks, that's how pleased I am with Las Vegan.

They do takeaway, too. It's worth noting that they're only open 11-3:30, Tues-Fri.

If you're reading my blog and you don't know where Las Vegan is, I am surprised. And pleased. Don't make them too busy to fit me in, but they're on Smith St Collingwood, right near Trippy Taco and Espresso 24 or whatever it's called... between Victoria Pde and Gertrude.

Shhh!

Orange, we glad we went

... to Gigibaba. I'd heard of it a few times over a few months and was quite keen to try. Then Larissa Dubecki's article in the Age Epicure, Orange, You Sad You Left? came up a week or two ago and reminded me. So on the spur of the moment, a couple of friends and I went to line up at 6pm and got a spot at the bar.
All the staff were wearing orange, and the title of the article was stuck to one of the bar shelves, at which I couldn't help but smile.
I didn't have my camera on me, but I thought I'd blog about it simply because of how ridiculously exciting it was to be somewhere so hyped up.
The food was really good. I didn't drink because there hadn't been time to get to the ATM for any extra money, but liked the sound of the national Turkish drink. This was a pity as the style of the place is Turkish tapas, plus I had an hour to order, eat and leave, so it was a little bit frantic.

They were out of BBQ Hellim cheese! weep! but sold us instead some delicious zucchini fritters, egg-shaped and gooey inside, but not too much, and with flavour. I adored the smoky eggplant salad with walnuts, tomato, lemon, parsley, and tahini yoghurt, which my companions quite liked but for me, smoky eggplant is the KING.
We also had lamb in vine leaves (the others liked them a lot, maybe not my thing), lamb kofte (this is what all kofte should now aspire to be) and some enjoyable but very tapas-sized BBQ chicken with black-eyed-bean salad.

You order things in sizes for 2 or for 4, and it's all small. Worth going when you have a while to first wait, then eat and drink, and about $50 up your sleeve to make the most of it and order the whole menu. So price-wise, it's not somewhere I'll be going for my next dinner.

But if anyone wants to teach me how to use flavours like theirs, I'm listening.