Harajuku crepes

Harajuku in Tokyo, Japan is famous for crepes.  Amazing, decadent crepes which are displayed as plastic models all around Harajuku.  The creperies are little tiny kiosks full of staff whipping out hundreds of crepes all day!

I enjoyed the creperies when I visited Tokyo (as did my friends) and when I heard about the Melbourne shop 'Harajuku Crepes' I knew my friends would be excited!

There is certainly not as many options in Melbourne, but they had some of the standard Japanese ones - the cheesecake crepe, the pudding crepe and the brownie crepe!

Cafe Vue

Some of you may have heard of Vue de Monde, a french restaurant that is run by Shannon Bennett in Melbourne.  Actually at the moment it isn't open - he is reopening it at the top of the Rialto building on new year's eve this year.

In the meantime you can still enjoy his food at Cafe Vue on St Kilda Rd and on Bourke St - all details on the website.  G and I grabbed a lunch box from the St Kilda Rd cafe.  We had potato chips with red pepper dip, roast chicken roll, waldorf salad and a rum baba with vanilla custard, for $15 each.

The lunchboxes are packaged beautifully and each day you get what you are given - which is how they do the volume at the price I suppose.

Of course, we had to round out the purchase with some macarons, which we enjoyed later on in the day: yuzu, cassis and caramel. 

The best one was the caramel.  However, I don't think the biscuits were soft enough - or rather they were soft inside but there wasn't enough of the soft stuff!

Dinner at Maze

Gordon Ramsay has opened Maze and Maze Grill at the Crown Metropole in Melbourne.  Maze Grill is a steak restaurant and Maze is a french small plate restaurant.  I think the waiter recommended 4 dishes each (because we weren't doing the degustation) and we decided to get 3 savoury and 1 dessert each.

The interior of the restaurant is beautiful, with plenty of room between the tables.  The service was good - attentive, but not too much 'story' about each dish, just a short description so the meal was hot when you ate!

Tuna with truffle and radish:

Scallops with champagne foam:

Artichoke salad:

Pan seared snapper:

Roasted quail:

Chocolate fondant:

The "Lamington":

How can you tell a restaurant is truly fabulous?  For me personally it's when I choose a non-dessert course as my favourite.  In this case it was the tuna and G loved his scallops. 

Greek meatball salad

It is finally getting warm (on some days) so I decided it was time for a salad.  However, it's not quite warm enough for an entirely cold dinner, so G and I made some greek meatballs to add to the salad. 
Making meatballs is a messy job - one that I generally defer to G!

'Greek' meatballs are just like regular meatballs - mince, spices, breadcrumbs and egg, but instead of beef you use lamb and the spices are 'greek' - mint, oregano and also some lemon zest.

Made even more 'greek' by the tzatziki like salad dressing!

Wedding cake!

G and I were married in mid November and I wanted to share the cake.  When we arrived at the reception and I saw the cake I exclaimed "oh, the cake, it;s perfect, now we can get married!"

Maybe that was a little extreme because I would have married G anyway, but the cake was an added bonus.  We had spoken with Kerrie of Love at First Bite about the cupcakes in detail, but had given her free range, using our invitation as the base, for the top tier cake.

There were 100 mini cupcakes (half vanilla and half chocolate and all wonderful) and the top tier, which we didn't serve.  So we ended up with a few left over cupcakes which we ate the next day and the top tier.  We have frozen some for later, each took some to work and enjoyed a slice the day after the wedding.

Salmon rolls

I decided to use a salsa verde smeared on the salmon, rather than dry spices, and I think that was a good move. This is quite a nice looking meal, and my version looked similar enough to the Delicious picture, so I was pleased.  Of course it was a messy meal - smearing the salmon with salsa verde gave G green fingers!  And a little bit fiddly - wrapping the salmon, the various amounts of 'chilling time' - in fact, this is definitely not a week night meal unless you have the afternoon off!

I cooked ours on the rare side, because that is how I like it - but you could easily cook it for longer if you like your salmon cooked through!

And the picture from Delicious, just for comparison purposes!

Zucchini fritters

These were not as successful as the delicious corn fritters I made recently.  The recipe was much wetter, despite the draining and squeezing, and as a result the fritters were quite limp.

To try and remove some liquid I first salted and drained grated zucchini for 30 minutes.

 Served with lamb sausages and Bill's yoghurt sauce.