Where to eat with omnivores

Open House Melbourne is on this weekend and learning our lesson from previous years, we decided to choose only a couple of venues, rather than trying to see everything and becoming tired and emotional!

At 8.15 am we queued up at the beautiful Block Arcade in Collins Street for tickets for a guided tour of the upstairs levels. It was just fascinating, with stairs and passageways, outside walkways, a funny little phone box and beautiful leadlight windows and woodwork. And as usual, I forgot to take a picture! Doh! Then we went to the Capitol Theatre, only find that they are only open on Sunday. Doh again!

So we turned our thoughts to food. We’d planned to try Wagamama for lunch, after reading Veganopoulous’s recent post, but by lunch time we were right up at the other end of the city, so we decided to head out and try another place on our list—the Fox Hotel.

Chocolate for dinner?

Have you ever tried mole—the Mexican sauce made up of a whole lot of different savoury spices—that often includes chocolate? I hadn’t until today!

It’s not something we generally see in Australia—I’ve never even seen it in a Mexican restaurant—but it’s fascinated me ever since I saw the Hairy Bikers make it a few years ago.  How could chocolate work in a SAVOURY dish? I couldn’t even imagine it.

As a bit of a chocolate addict, I was willing to give it a try, so I was pretty excited when I noticed a recipe for Mole Skillet Pie with Greens in my new copy of Veganomicon. I can’t add the recipe here, because that would breach copyright, sorry, but it’s an easy book to get hold of.

Kids get it

Remember that viral video that did the rounds a few weeks back? The one with the adorable little boy who refused to eat his octopus for dinner?  It was a scene that was probably familiar to a lot of us—the moment when the truth hit us, that our dinner was made of dead animals’ bodies chopped into bite sized portions. Here’s my experience as a 4 year old.

What made this little boy’s situation special was that the camera captured his moment of realisation—at about the 60 second mark, when he says, “Nobody eats chicken…those are animals!” Then you can see him thinking…and realising (oh, I remember that feeling!)…and then he agrees to eat just his potatoes and rice. (I was going to embed the video, but since last night it has disappeared from YouTube…what a pity. Well, I’m sure you’ve already seen it anyway.)

We survived Hipstergeddon!

Our little dog hiding under the table during the blackout.

We had a lengthy blackout on Monday night. Some have called it ‘Hipstergeddon’ because we spent around 7 hours without lights, TV, heating, microwave, dishwasher, radio and most importantly… computers! (First world problems :-))

We’ve had blackouts before of course (although I can’t remember one lasting this long since I was a kid), but this is the first time I’ve really been aware of how much more we rely on electricity these days!

When the lights flickered once and then suddenly shut off, I was right in the middle of serving our lasagna for dinner. Only my daughter, H, and I were home at the time, so after (I’m ashamed to say) some girlie shrieking and squealing about zombies and monsters…H earnestly suggested, in her best Scooby Doo character voice, “I think it would be best if we split up.”

Canberra: full of surprises!

Green smoothies from Sweet Bones Bakery

When I asked my 16-year-old daughter where she’d like to go for our short mid-winter break, I had visions of sunning myself in Broome or Far North Queensland—but as usual, she surprised me with “Somewhere really cold. Hobart, Canberra or Kangaroo Island!”. It was only the two of us going this time, so we did some Googling and, tempted by the range of vegan options in our national capital, we settled on a 3-day break in Canberra.

Birthday favourite (or habit)

We had a family birthday at our house the other day. My baby boy turned 20!  I know every parent says this but…where did the years go??

It seems like only a couple of years ago that we were at his friend’s McDonald’s 5th birthday party and the waitress asked me, “If your son’s is vegetarian, is it OK for him to have fries?”

I was about to answer that he wasn’t vegetarian (it was ME who was vegetarian), but then I realised that he’d told her he was—and he has been ever since. (I was rather pleased!)