Cauliflower soup is one of my favourite dishes because it tastes great and is easy to make. Winter is approaching and weekend soup is definitely a thing.
Hello there. It’s been a while since I last wrote. I feel like I haven’t had much to share. My time is now pretty divided. Work is getting busier and I’m enjoying blogging and podcasting Medical Fun Facts.
This weekend was pretty quiet for me. On Friday I had a good day at the hospital and ate a simple dinner of bacon with avocado on toast.
TGIF dinner. Bacon and avocado on toast.
On Saturday morning I decided to make a grilled cheese toastie with bacon.
A video posted by Yummy Lummy Gary Lum Food Blog (@yummylummyblog) on
Streaky Bacon, Swiss cheese and Dijon mustard grilled toastie
Before I started grocery shopping I had a double shot latte to get me going.
For lunch, I had a pulled pork burrito with guacamole, sour cream, jalapeño peppers and salsa from Guzman Y Gomez. It was huge. It’s a good thing I have a big mouth. I needed two hands to hold it.
Pulled pork burrito with ginger beer
For dinner, on Saturday night I made a light meal. A prawn salad.
Saturday dinner. Prawns and summer salad.
I slept well Saturday night and woke up thinking I’d poach an egg and have some bacon. Sadly, I fail at poaching eggs.
Poached egg fail with crispy streaky bacon
I went for a walk. I love the coloured buoys at Yerra Beach on Lake Ginninderra.
Colourful buoys on Lake Ginninderra at Yerra Beach
For lunch, I made myself a mango salad.
Kensington pride mango salad
And, finally, for Sunday dinner, I made a chicken schnitzel cheeseburger. It was delicious.
A video posted by Yummy Lummy Gary Lum Food Blog (@yummylummyblog) on
Hello! Sunday. Chicken schnitzel cheeseburger.
Parting words
I regularly post photographs of food to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Please feel free to connect with me on any social media platform. I also have a podcast. It’s not food related but each show is short and it’s named Medical Fun Facts. You can find it in the iTunes podcast store as well as Stitcher. A show drops every Monday and Tuesday. It has a little cynicism, a little scepticism and occasionally some sarcasm.
On Wednesday evening I went out to dinner with a mate from Darwin. I’ve known Drapes for a long time. He worked out of Katherine, Nhulunbuy, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs while I was the Supervising Pathologist for the Northern Territory of Australia. He was down in Canberra for a meeting.
We’d arranged to catch up and thought a burger meal would be the way to go. I did a little on-line searching and thought it would be worth trying out Grease Monkey in Braddon.
Grease Monkey
The restaurant is at 19 Lonsdale Street in Braddon and it opens from 11 am to 10 pm.
They have chairs, stools and tables inside and outside. Drapes and I sat on moulded stools at the front window looking out onto the sidewalk. It was good for watching people walk by. Mostly young Canberrans, the blokes with beards and women in summer wear.
The menu can be downloaded from the website and I’ve made the current one available here.
What did I eat?
If you follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you’ll see over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to be mindful of portion size. So I limited myself. I didn’t get fried chicken, mac and cheese, jalapeño poppers or hot wings. I had just one burger and that was the Double Deluxe.
Photograph courtesy of Anthony Draper
The Double Deluxe
This burger consists of double beef, double cheese, bacon, grease monkey sauce, grease monkey relish, onion and pickles. The bread roll was pretty good. It wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t too much. It was just right. The burger itself was nice, I’d happily do it again. The burger is also served with chips. The chips were cooked really well and nicely salted but they come with extra seasoning. So now I’m going to sound like a food wanker but I reckon on their own the chips would be awesome, but coupled with a nice burger, they’re too much. There is too much competing flavour.
Sorry about the backlighting on this photograph
What else?
Check out the comment from Kate on Instagram. You need to click on the image and it will open the page in Instagram and you can scroll down to see Kate’s comment. Kate is a friend who avoids animal flesh, so I’m guessing the mushroom burger is really good.
For $20 the Double Deluxe is not cheap. Is it worth $20? Not really. You can make a similar burger for less. What about the experience? It’s a good experience and I reckon Canberrans should check out Grease Monkey and have a burger or two. I’ll go back but it’s not a place I’d go to regularly.
It’s been a quiet week. Last weekend I was down with a head cold, you know, ManFlu. I ended up working from home on Monday because I was really congested and coughing badly. I’m still coughing but at least I feel okay in my head.
Work was busy with a heap of small or medium sized tasks that just had to be done. Wednesday though was a bad one. Wednesday morning, I woke up at 1 am with something on my mind and I just couldn’t get back to sleep. Coupled with the head cold it meant I felt like a zombie while I was at work. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because Wednesday’s productivity across the globe was probably down slightly because it coincided with the US presidential election. Yummy Lummy isn’t a place for political commentary so all I’ll say is that I made sure I had a nice meal while I was watching the television reporting of the results including the victory and concession speeches.
The highlight for me this week was flying to Brisbane on Friday night and spending the weekend with my daughters and my parents.
The flight from Canberra to Brisbane started well. I got a seat in the exit row and had a meal of meatballs and mashed potato.
Meatballs with mashed potato
On landing the doors opened and a wave of humidity travelled backwards and hugged me like a child runs up to greet you at an airport and grabs you around your legs. Best feeling in the world!
Ms19 was working Friday night so after arriving at my parents’ place I suggested to Miss15 that we go see Ms19 and get ice cream. Ms21 couldn’t join us, so it was just me and Miss15.
I had a nice caramel condensed milk ice cream with a Ferrero Rocher crushed into it.
Caramel condensed milk with Ferrero Rocher
After a pretty crappy sleep (I don’t travel with my CPAP machine) we went and had breakfast at The Groove Train in Chermside.
I had a nice granola which I think did something to really stimulate my gastrocolic reflex because my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) went crazy. It’s a good thing I was close to a clean toilet.
Now that Ms19 has retired from gymnastics we’re not totally bound to a sports schedule. Miss15 had a gymnastics evaluation from 2.30 to 5.30 pm and Ms21 was working so what to do between 11 and 1.30? We ended up taking a short drive to Sandgate and walking from the swimming pool to the big jetty and back. All up it’s about a 5 km walk. It was really warm and overcast and it was low tide. The sea breeze was really nice. The smell from the mudflats though wasn’t that good. In fact, it was pretty rank. That part of Sandgate with a view of the water and the sea breeze is really nice. The low tide smell though would make me think twice about living there unless I could keep the house fresh.
After a pretty good walk, we went to the Sandgate fishmonger and bought some potato scallops with crumbed squid. Like most good shops, especially in Queensland, when you ask for some potato scallops you inevitably get n+1 with n being the number of scallops you ask for. These potato scallops were really nice. The crumbed squid was also really good. If you’re visiting Sandgate and want a nice takeaway deep fried meal, I can recommend the Sandgate Fishmonger.
Potato scallops and crumbed calamariSandgate fishmongerPotato scallops and crumbed calamari
After taking Miss15 to gymnastics, Ms19 and I had been thinking about going out for a milkshake somewhere. As it turned out we were pretty full from lunch and the weather put on a show which made driving less than ideal. Brisbane was treated to a really nice thunderstorm. The rain was heavy, the thunder was loud and the sky almost went black. I love this sort of weather. The rain lasted about 45 minutes and afterwards the air freshened and the heat was gone. Perfect subtropical weather. You can’t ask for better.
For dinner, we went to Thr3e Restaurant in the Kedron-Wavell RSL club. This is a cheap and cheerful buffet affair with upgrades. I had a nice seafood platter and Mum and Dad had a bucket of prawns.
Seafood platterSeafood platterBuffet plate
We all went to bed feeling fairly sated.
Sunday broke with a brilliant warm and moist morning. Mum and Dad had planned a big breakfast. We had bacon, sausages, pikelets, fried eggs and cooked tomatoes. It’s always good having breakfast with my daughters and parents.
Bacon, sausage, tomato, egg and pikelet at Wheller on the Park #breakfast #yummylummy #foodporn #yummy #delicious #instafood #iphone #bne #brisbaneMaply syrup and bacon on a pikeletThese plates are older than me
I’m now back in Canberra where it is cold, windy and wet. I wish I was back with my daughters in Brisbane.
So on Saturday instead of picking up two pieces of salmon I bought one piece of salmon and one piece of pink ling. I’ve been conscious that the salmon is very expensive at about $32 per kilogram while the pink ling is about half that price. I’ve never had pink ling as far as I know so I was interested in trying it out.
I assumed it could be baked just like salmon so I gave it a go. To hedge my bets I also baked some Pialligo Estate artisan bacon, knowing if the fish wasn’t too good the bacon would save the dish.
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What you need to make this dish
One piece of pink ling
Two rashers of streaky bacon from Pialligo Estate
Strips of capsicum
One avocado diced with a little olive oil
How to put it all together
Add the capsicum fish and bacon onto a baking tray
Cooking in an oven at 200 °C for 15 minutes
Allow everything to rest for 5 minutes while preparing the avocado
Plate up
Prepare for a photograph
Shoot a photograph
Eat the dish
Think about the future of pink ling in my life
Wash the dishes
Write the recipe
Make nice pictures using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom
Blog and Vlog (verbs)
Baked pink ling with bacon, capsicum and avocado
How did it taste?
Well I don’t think I’ll place pink ling on my favourite list
I think I may need to cook it differently. It basically lacked taste/flavour. I needed to add some extra salt and pepper after my first bite.
I may need to crumb it or batter it or at least pan fry it.
I was expecting it to be firm and flaky but it was soft and mushy.
The bacon was delicious as was the avocado
Final thoughts
It was an interesting experiment. Well worth doing. I won’t give up yet. I need to have a few more goes. At half the price of salmon I can afford to experiment a little with it.
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