Mr B is a hard person to please with Indian food, being convinced that Banjarra’s Indian Cafe in Glenferrie Road is the best Indian of all time and no others could compare. However, he has acquiesced to us trying out all the Indian around our new house, and thus we find ourselves first off at The Saffron House in Blacky South.

Pappadums to start

And dare I say it, but we might have a contender to rival the cafe! The Saffron House was pretty quiet on the Friday night we visited, with just a few tables dining, but my goodness do they do a roaring takeaway trade – a sign of local favour. Did I mention delivery is free too?

Service was lovely – friendly but not intrusive. The interior of the place is very classy albeit with a TV on the wall playing Bollywood movies – but why not after all? As fellow blogger Kenny from Consider The Sauce points out in his reviews of western suburbs establishments, that is certainly no reason to write off a place.

We ordered the lamb kashmiri ($15.50) which had meltingly tender and smallish chunks of lamb in a delicious sauce, which included ginger and fennel, although you can’t really isolate these individual flavours from the saucy whole.

Lamb Kashmiri – with ginger, garlic and fennel

Mr B’s pick was the chicken jalfrezi (also $15.50), representing a radical departure from his normal kadhai paneer order – or is it? Not really – jalfrezi has capsicum, so there are definitely some crossover flavours going on here. Regardless the jalfrezi sauce was great – rich and tomatoey but with an almost smoky flavour going on from the capsicums. And jalfrezi’s not really my favourite sauce, so these are words of high praise indeed.

Chicken Jalfrezi – capsicum and tomato

We also skipped the rice on this trip and just went with my favourite order of “maximum naan”, which in practice turned out to be way too much (see Fig 1.4 below). We got some roti to mix it up a little, some garlic naan and (not pictured) aloo paratha, which, coupled with the mango lassi that we kind-of-drank-for-dessert, saw us rolling out into the night like… like… two Zorb balls down a NZ mountainside.

Roti (wholemeal), Naan (garlic), Mango lassi (just at the top there)

To wash it all down? Why, a Kingfisher each of course.

Wash it all down with a Kingfisher of course.

I really, really liked our meal here. I plan to come back and eat our way through the entire menu – I don’t know if I need to try out any more Indian places in Blackburn and surrounds – my work is done!

Nice interior and entertainment provided by Bollywood movies

In a radical departure for this blog, I now present to you yet another pizza review – but this time it’s one with a difference.

Scandi influences are everywhere in retail at the moment – just look at Country Road’s new look, or Kikki K (the whole store), and let’s not forget the IKEA behemoth that keeps on chugging along. But up until now, apart from meatballs with lingonberry jam at the aforementioned big box homewares retailer, I hadn’t eaten Swedish food, and certainly not Swedish pizza!

I knew how Swedish people cooked from watching this video - that’s Sidepork Pandemonium by the way, well worth a watch. But when my friend Sarah put me on to Swedish Pizza since she works in the area – “it’s Swedish pizza and the flavours are all weird but good”, the concept intrigued me.

I hadn’t been to Templestowe Village for ages and was amazed at how many restaurants and cafes were going on there, well supported by the locals too! Swedish Pizza was quiet on the Friday night we visited but doing good trade in takeaways.

It’s a takeaway joint but you can eat in like we did.

We ordered regular sized pizzas, as the family ones would feed the entire Scandinavian royal family and all its branches (I’m assuming they’re heavy eaters for the purpose of this analogy too). My choice was the Kebab SP pizza: kebab meat, paprika, champignon mushrooms, green pepper (spicy!) and bearnaise sauce (not a joke).

This is a regular sized pizza. You don’t want to know how big the family size ones were!

The kebab meat was fantastic and the garlicky bearnaise background was delicious. Green peppers turned out to be mild green chillies which woke you up every now and then. I’m surprised this flavour hasn’t caught on in takeaway pizza shops around Australia.

Each pizza order also comes with a complimentary cabbage salad which is very refreshing when you’re working your way through a fairly large order of kebab meat, gorgonzola and bearnaise sauce, I can tell you.

Here are some other things for scale – complimentary cabbage salad, takeaway menu, knife and fork… and giant Kebab pizza

Pleasingly, Mr B ordered my second choice without me even putting it out there for consideration (I love when that happens): the Gorgonzola pizza, which was marinated beef fillet, gorgonzola, paprika and bearnaise sauce.

The flavour of the gorgonzola was quite strong – and you can see in the action shot below (Mr B not deigning to pause for the purpose of photo taking as he was fungry) this was a cheesy cheesy pizza. I liked it, but since it was so strong in flavour I’d suggest not committing to this as your ONLY pizza flavour – try and get a few others on the table. Try and get the kebab pizza on the table!

I forgot to mention the bases – thin, and crispy at the edges but the amount of sauce on the pizzas meant that the slices were quite floppy – easy to roll them up and eat like a kebab though if that’s your bag…

Gorgonzola and steak on a pizza? Yes please.

To sum it up: now I know why people drive to Templestowe for this. Sometimes you just want something different from the usual. Plus, we only ordered the tip of the iceberg: there are 41 Swedish pizzas on the menu, and Swedish style kebabs, and salads. Our regular (huge!) pizzas were just $15 each and the place is licensed so we washed them down with a not very Swedish Corona each.

Go and check it out!

I did.

Two other blogs have reviewed Swedish pizza: The Food Booth which ordered pretty much the same pizza flavours as we did (I don’t read these reviews before I go, I swear!) and came to the same conclusions; and Two Bears and a Fork who ordered Mexicana and Margherita and thoroughly enjoyed both.

Smaklig måltid!

It’s also great in the way that 30 Minute Meals (which I also own) was not: recipes are simple, one dish at a time, and nutritionally balanced – Jamie seems to have had to dial back the excessive glugs of olive oil he likes to add to everything with a crew of nutritionists standing over him as he stirs the pot.

This recipe is available on the internet so I won’t give it to you again – Spicy Cajun Chicken with Smashed Sweet Potato and Fresh Corn Salsa.

The chicken is supposed to be cooked with okra, bacon and polenta, but as I am cooking this in the real world, after work when I haven’t got time to go to the supermarket, I made it dusted with semolina as my polenta substitute (obviously if you were eating gluten free, this modification doesn’t work for you) and simply ignored bacon and okra in the recipe. Did it make it less ‘Cajun’? Probably. Was it less tasty? Not at all – the cajun seasoning takes care of that.

I particularly loved the blackened corn salsa with lime and tomato and coriander, although unlike Jamie I didn’t have fresh sweetcorn to hand so I fried up some frozen corn – worked well – and also canned corn – the next time I made it – which also worked well.  Both types blacken up eventually in a dry frying pan, but you have to wait for all the water to evaporate off them first. The salsa was fantastic! I’ve been inspired by it and doing similar things to corn in other dishes.

The only bit I didn’t really like was the mashed sweet potato with sweet chilli sauce. It had a funny taste to it from the sweet chilli sauce – sort of overwhelmingly sweet – and the next time I made the dish I served it with plain sweet potato which was a lot better to my palate. If you still want to amp up the chilli aspect (there’s also fresh chilli in the salsa) I’d just use a hot sauce that’s not sweet – the sweetness of the sweet potato/kumara takes care of any need for sugar.

A riot of colour on the plate.

So after a long absence from the blogging scene, Fresh Bread returns, with a promotion (at work, so… not interesting to the blog), a new address (the Far East….ern suburbs of Melbourne), a new focus (covering restaurants and cooking east of Warrigal Road – as in, where The Age staff writers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole since they require a Zone 2 Myki investment), and the same boyfriend (what up Mr Behemoth!).

Perhaps I should explain some of that.

Due to the landlord selling our share house, the move from South Melbourne out to Blackburn went well a few weeks ago, although the process of getting our bond back from what must be the most incompetent property managers of all time seems to be dragging out somewhat… although I digress. No wait, I’ll follow this tangent a little further – I would damn well make an excellent property manager. Here’s all the things that I do at work, that they don’t seem to do:

• respond to emails
• keep important documents (ours lost the condition report!)
• respond to phone calls
• be organised and actually do my work, not take five months to call a plumber
• act professionally at all times.

I have no doubt we’ll eventually get our bond back, because we’ve done everything right along the way, including cleaning the place we lived in until it literally shone – you know in cartoons or movies where someone smiles and the sun sparks off their teeth? It was like that.

Anyway, now we’re renting off my grandparents, and living in their amazing 60s house in Blackburn. I suppose I should show you how we celebrated our first night:

Yes, that’s Mr B’s arm pouring some champagne.

Pizza. We have a huge love of pizza. So we thought we’d check out the local woodfired pizzeria (yes that’s right, The Age, woodfired pizza does exist outside a 10km radius of Spencer Street) which is located in the cute little group of shops facing Laburnum Station – there’s a great cafe Gourmet Girl (subject of a later review no doubt), a deli (Twig and Two Berries – ha!), Frank’s wine store, a fruit & veg, hairdresser, post office… and the Three Angels Woodfired Pizzeria, which has an interesting collection of reviews on Urbanspoon ranging from “best ever!” to “the owner is a crazy person”.

We wondered what would happen to us as we pushed open the door to order.

The transaction went smoothly however (yes, they do have eftpos) and we ordered a large chicken pizza and a large garlic prawn pizza (both $20, so… relatively expensive).

The decor in the restaurant – and you can eat in, although when we were there it was just the owner and offsider eating their dinner which made us feel a little awkward – is over the top, but in a good way. It’s kitsch and cluttered and fun to gaze around while waiting for takeaway pizzas.

We got the pizzas home and… well… the bases were really good, I thought. Really good. Good in that woodfired, crisp, thin yet chewy way.

“No Worries” – Garlic and prawn pizza with prosciutto

Chicken and pineapple pizza … with cheese. Lots of cheese.

However.

The toppings… left something to be desired. Mr B’s chicken pizza, was essentially a molten lavaflow of cheese, with some dry bits of roast chicken, and some pinapple, and some unidentified black fluff which we’re sure wasn’t meant to be on the pizza and you can’t really see in the photos.

Mine was also very very cheesy, but a bit more balanced in terms of flavours – the garlic prawns were yummy and the pieces of prosciutto were also very enjoyable.

I think Rocket Pizza in South Melbourne ruined us with their “healthy” pizzas – they (Rocket) are minimalist with the cheese and these two pizzas just basically overwhelmed us with cheesestrosity. And we are cheese lovers!

Cheesestrosity – unappetising when it congeals later in the fridge

Mr B was hungry, so he still ate his chicken pizza, even though it had black fluff (was it hair? We don’t like to ponder these things), but found it pretty tasteless. And in a sure sign that the pizzas didn’t float our boats, we had leftovers in the fridge for the next two or three days while we valiantly worked our way through them. Thing is, if we really like a pizza? We finish it on the night.

I’d go back, for the woodfired base alone. But I might pick a more minimalist pizza next time.

In terms of other reviewers, Hold the Peas visited and found the place quirky but enjoyed the food, trying one of the baked pasta dishes as well (“ziti”) which we are yet to do.

Pictures tell a thousand words, especially when there are already 100,000 blog posts on Hardware Societe. Let’s be honest, it’s one of the better cafes west of Elizabeth Street, and every time I’ve had breakfast there I’ve highly, highly enjoyed it. Go. Get there early enough that you beat everyone else.

Glowing red latte… we were sitting under a red light and the sun hadn’t come up yet (yeah, that’s how early you have to get there)

Poached pears and porridge are a beautifully warming breakfast

Baked eggs with chorizo and plenty of bread on the side.

The scrambled eggs come with a side sandwich!

TL, DR: Go back and read it, I didn’t write very much you lazy sod!

The Quiet Man do giant servings of Irish classics, and when I saw that they served stew IN BREAD, I had to order it. Torn between the choices of irish stew, or beef and Guinness stew, I went for the latter.

Beef & Guinness stew, served in bread!

Delicious and I was unable to finish it. Others around the table ordered beef & Guinness pie (looked to be the same stew filling), Irish stew in bread, steak and chips and other pub classics with an Irish twist.

Cheap, filling and yummy food. I’d come back here again any time.

http://www.theworkersfoodroom.com/

I don’t know much about the area at the back of the Courts in the CBD. I’ve never worked north of Collins Street, and ventured there only occasionally. This occasion was with a friend to check out the accurately-named Workers’ Food Room after reading a good review of it on Foodie About Town.

The menu and waitstaff are French-inspired and more interesting than the standard work caff stuff you might get elsewhere. I ordered the “levantine with spiced lamb, pine nuts and hummus”, in a complete absence of information as to what a levantine was at all. It came, spiced and pine-nutty and lamby (so far so good), but so so oily (probably from the lamb). I ate it all up but felt guilty about it.

So, for future reference, a levantine is…

Flatbread!

Danielle ordered a salad combo that she was less happy with – a bit boring in flavour was the report. The salads of the day change, so you might be happier with your choice than she was!

Beetroot salad, and cous cous salad

I’d come here regularly if it was in my work sphere-of-lunching, but it’s not a “trek across the city” kind of place.

Fugazza
31 Equitable Place (between Collins & Little Collins, near Elizabeth)
Melbourne CBD

http://fugazza.com.au/

Fugazza are located in that excellent lane of lunching options, Equitable Place, which runs through from Collins to Little Collins Streets just after Elizabeth Street. Hot tip: if there are no tables available where you buy your lunch, carry it through to the upstairs food court at Galleria (the shopping centre to the north on Little Collins). Keep carrying it through the food court, and out to the balcony overlooking Little Collins, that not many people know about. Close the door behind you to shut out the food court sounds, sit, and enjoy your meal while spying on pedestrians below.

Fugazza offers ‘traditional Italian sandwiches’ with a variety of interesting fillings, along with soups. You can also do a combo deal which is half a “fugazza” and a bowl of soup or salad, which is what I went for:

Bean and vegetable soup, cheese fugazza

Yes, the bean soup looks like brown sludge, but it was delicious. The half fugazza on the side had taleggio in it and was a great little counterpoint.

Lot 7
95 Flinders Lane (you will know it by the giant smiley face)
Melbourne CBD

http://lot7.com.au/

Lot 7 (run by Zagames) occupies the warehouse and front part of the late Rosati’s, on Flinders Lane. It offers a bunch of reliable favourites, caters well to large groups and has a good lunch deal where you get a glass of wine included with your lasagne, parma or pasta, so we’ve been there a couple of times with work.

I got the ‘lunch special’ parma, which came with a cute little basket of chips and wasn’t half bad. The full menu parma is around $10 more and doesn’t include a glass of wine or beer, so for that price I’d start expecting a bit more.

I’ve also had the BLT from here too – it was good but heavy on the pepper – someone was a bit over the top in seasoning…

Lunch parma at Lot 7

Be careful, the waiters will try to suck you in to getting olives and grissini to start the meal, but that ain’t free. Still, who doesn’t want to dine in a place that gets your food quickly and efficiently, and has a giant smiley face poking out from the building into Flinders Lane?

Another day, another brunch post! Matt Wilkinson (he of the new book Mr Wilkinson’s Favourite Vegetables, which I’ve been eyeing off) is the chef and co-owner at Pope Joan in Bruns-a-wick, which makes cheffy and delicious brunches and gets absolutely packed out. Get there before prime brunch-o-clock, or sit next door in the bar where you can still order the same dishes but the tables are less comfortable.

Some friends and I went for breakfast before attending a Green Renter’s workshop up the road on how to make our own jams and preserves. On a side note, I’d recommend, if you are going to a workshop like that, NOT to eat this much beforehand, as Cate (the workshop presenter and half of Green Renters) will have prepared a delicious spread for you to try out jams on scones, cheese platter and the like. Regret!

The dishes are presented beautifully, which is what I meant by cheffy. Check out my order – scrambled eggs, cornbread loaf, smoked trout salad with capers and fennel. I must say although I enjoyed this dish I found that the components didn’t really marry with each other on the plate as well as I hoped. The eggs went well with the cornbread, but the salad felt like a completely different dish. On the plus side, this meant I got to eat breakfast AND lunch, all at once.

Salad for breakfast?

Friend Nat went for a pumpkin and haloumi pie, which she said was amazing, and indeed  looks amazing in the photo below. It’s on my revisit list when I return. Squeaky salty haloumi is God’s gift to cheese.

Pumpkin & haloumi pie is calling me if there’s a return visit…

Incidentally, I’m laughing as I type this because looking at the stack above is reminding me of the episode of Black Books where Manny and Bernard try to serve restaurant dishes in the bookshop, and on Bernard’s orders, Manny creates a tower of soup:

“What’s this? Where are the turrets? It’s RUBBISH!”

But I digress. It looks much nicer than that.

My other friend A ordered the feta omelette with herbs and it came out looking pretty as a picture and strewn with herbs and flowers. That’s gluten free toast on the side, kids, so you can ask for that if you’re coeliac (as A is). She loved it but found it a large meal.

Doesn’t it just look like a spring garden?

Pope Joan is one of those cafes that does really interesting and different brunch food, and is a must visit especially if you live in the area, and even if you don’t. Worth queuing up for.

After visiting Tien Dat the girls I was dining with decided that we should do a bit of a tour around Box Hill eateries for our catch-up dinners. Dumplings were eaten at Dumpling King but really I’d wanted to try Indochine for ages. Mum has been on several occasions – tennis dinners, catch-ups with primary school parents – and talked it up.

I’m going to do something different in this post and tell the story through the picture captions. Enjoy!

Spring rolls are the appetiser no-one has to think twice about.

The pho bo as it arrived…

Pho bo, post accessorising. The meat was pre-cooked in this, so I found it disappointingly tough.

Although it was a cold night, bun salad was the ticket.

Visible prawns make diners happy.

Mmmmmm… lemon tart. I really love how the Vietnamese use the best bits of the French rule, like baguettes and patisserie.

Unfortunately Indochine have chosen against the hilarious placement of one banana, two balls of icecream, so beloved by diners for generations.

Other than the disappointing pho, I preferred this place for a night out to Tien Dat (which would be fine for a lunch!). Service seemed less rushed and forgetful, and dishes were better presented. Just don’t order pho (or specify that you like rare beef) and you’ll be fine.