Back again

We've finished the first week back at work, and tonight we're celebrating with a G&T or two, a scratch dinner of leftovers, and Children of Earth just finished on the telly. An early night with a book to follow - the bloke has a Mike Carey and I have a Robert Harris. And a sleep-in tomorrow. It's been a hard Xmas, and parts of it were rather horrible, so I'm pretty glad it's over. Even if that does mean going back to work.

The week in cooking has been quite minimal - a curry from the freezer, a bolognese spaghetti sauce from the freezer, hot dogs with coleslaw, and a quick bite at Tien, a Vietnamese place in Dickson that opened late last year. The curry was very nice - I'll put more about that up for my next post.

Tien was rather good, too. I had the pancake stuffed with prawns and minced pork (about $14). Tasty food, the pancake is more eggy than a western style pancake, almost an omelet. It came with lots of fresh salad including some Vietnamese herbs that I don't know the names of. The Bloke had a chilli basil chicken stirfry - very fresh and light, with lots of crisp onion and carrot. We'll be going back there, for sure. In fact I have a cunning plan involving their steamboat...

I haven't managed to get myself moving very fast in the mornings yet, and I've been eating breakfast at my desk around 10am. Bring in some fruit and a peanut butter sandwich, and I'm set. Or failing sandwich making time, eat a muesli bar from the stash at work. But I exhausted that stash on Thursday, and I tried to restock at As Nature Intended at the Belco market.

I was out there having lunch with infoaddict at Beppe's - a favourite cafe of mine, they serve one of the best coffees in town. It's a drive rather than a walk for lunch, but Momo and Plunge are both closed this week. I picked up some good fruit from Wiffens, but the muesli bar shopping did not go well. The range at As Nature Intended is very small, probably because it's all organic. I bought one box from each brand, the Norganics blueberry and the Aribar raspberry.

Norganics is available widely in supermarkets, and I find them tolerable. A bit too sweet for me, but still it has chewy oats, dried blueberries and an appley tang, and it's made in Australia. I give it a credit grade. The Aribar, on the other hand... utter fail. The ingredients of wholegrain brown rice and raspberries sound fine. But I really should have checked more carefully. In the fine print, all is revealed. Norganics: 16.1g sugars/100g. Aribar: 32.8g/100g. Yes, it's unbearably sweet, and on top of that, it's made in Canada. Shipping right across the world, what a waste! Not that I'm a total local food purist; I am happy to buy imports of true specialties like real maple syrup. But there was no point to this import at all. I could easily have made a batch of chocolate crackles at home, to very much the same effect. And no, I wouldn't want them for breakfast, either.