Introducing my beautiful girls

Oopps..I blinked and missed September. Well not exactly but that's what it feels like!  I have spent the last six weeks being a busy little bee so I have of course neglected the thing I love to do.  Hmmm...how does that always happen?

Something I have been meaning to do for a long time is to introduce my beautiful girls to you. These girls are my family away from family and I spend so much of my time with them or talking about them I thought it was about time that I shared the girls that share my food experiences.

Peta, Mel & Jo

We recently headed out to Fu Man Lou, a dumpling bar that opened in Ballarat a few months ago. If you are not a fan of dumplings, don't worry there are plenty of other Chinese dishes on the menu. We decided to share some dumplings and some main dishes and a sneaky dessert. We had a mixture of dumplings and if I am honest it was a while ago so I can't remember which ones I liked more but I do remember that the dessert I had was horrendous!! I have never tried deep fried ice cream before and it was not what I was expecting.  I was expecting it to have been deep fried just before coming out with a hot outside and melting ice cream when you break through the batter...wrong!  It was deep fried and refrozen and the batter tasted yucky cold! Apparently this isn't normal but I don't think I can try it again any time soon!

This wasn't the only new thing I tried and didn't really like since we last spoke.  I was out for sushi with a friend and it was so cold I needed something to warm up. She was telling me how much she loved the pork buns there and was so shocked I had never had one before so I gave it whirl. It was so strange! The outside is a fluffy dough and was very bread like.  The pork mixture inside was really delicious but the dough had a sweetness to it which I think was what I found so strange.  Sweet and savory should not be friends in the one dish.

On reflection I have had some really crappy eating experiences since the last time I wrote but this one takes the cake. I headed out to breakfast one morning, and no I am not going to name where, and baked into my corn fritters was a delicious elastic band.  That certainly turned me off food for the rest of the day. While they were very nice about it, I think it will be the one and only time I go there to eat!

Some of you know I have been really busy with work which lead me to Sydney for Australian Uni Games a few weeks ago.  I must admit I am still recovering from the lack of sleep (it helps that I am having three days off this week!) not to mention the amount of crap that I ate...let's just say Pizza Hut all you can eat did feature as a team dinner one night. There was one night however that I had the chance to head out and have a delicious real meal.  I headed down towards the opera house and found a beautiful Italian restaurant over looking the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I made a conscious decision to make sure I tried something out of the ordinary so I settled on squid ink risotto.  It was really strange and very thick but actually really delicious, apart from the black tongue and teeth I was left with afterwards.  It was such a beautiful night sitting outside enjoying people watching, not to mention the amazing view. It is definitely nights like that make me want to travel again.

So even though it has been weeks between writing, I seem to have done a lot of eating out and not a lot of cooking.  As a result I only have one new recipe Sunday to share with you.  As I have mentioned before I am not big on cooking with pork.   We didn't grow up eating pork in our family (except bacon..who doesn't love bacon!) so I really struggle with knowing when it is cooked.  There are two pork belly recipes in the Donna Hay cookbook I have been working from and I have wanted to try them for ages so I decided to bite the bullet.  I settled on malt vinegar and bourbon sticky pork belly.  The flavour was really good and I think I cooked it well but I was really disappointed with how fatty it was.  Dylan seemed to think it was amazing so perhaps pork belly isn't for me!

I think I have taken up enough of your time for one day.  Enjoy your next week or so and I look forward to catching up soon to fill you in on my first ever fun run I am participating in next weekend.  Wish me luck, I need it xox