Category Archives: Food

Jotted

Family, Food, Movies

Entertainment

Iron Man was awesome, in fact I may need to see it again in the cinema.

Food

Cafe Campanile in the Robina Town Centre square does a wicked big breakfast, well worth the effort.

Nonna’s Italian Cuisine at Harbour Town (just up from the cinema) serves some great food, we’ll be going there again. Bonus, if you order a main you can buy your cinema tickets for $10 each.

Tuk Tuk Thai Bistro, which is located in the little collection of shops near the main Pacific Pines round about has reasonably priced dinners; two curries and two large rice for about $35.

Purchases

We bought another bookshelf, it’s the same as two others we have but white. It’s in the nursery and acting more as storage than a bookshelf.

After a lot of looking and what I’d personally consider quite an amount of pain, we’ve purchased a cot, change table and related odds and sods. We’ve had a bit of an issue finding something that met our criteria but in the end the fine folk at The Baby Superstore in the Robina Town Centre provided the goods.

Carnivore

Family, Food

Tonight a bunch of my extended family and I visited the Hogs Breath Cafe at the Q Super Centre in Mermaid Waters on the Gold Coast for dinner.

After working at a Hogs Breath for a number of years, I hold them in pretty high regard and also have pretty solid expectations of them too. We had a great waiter, who was more than happy to play and make jokes with Oliver (the toddler dining with us) and prompt service to boot.

I ordered a medium-rare Blackened Prime Rib with pepper sauce and I think it was one of the best steaks I’ve eaten in the last 6 months. Asking around the table, everyone was very happy with their steak – even the folk that normally order higher cooked steak where happy ordering one degree of rareness down.

We weren’t initially going to order any dessert, however as soon as one person went in for something sweet; everyone else indulged too. Mmm, sticky date pudding!

Great night out, good company, positively devine steak – just excellent.

Slow Fast Food

Food

I consider myself to be quite a patient person in most instances, however there are certain things that frustrate me no end – one of which happens to be slow service at a fast food establishment.

I understand that from time to time, things go wrong in the kitchen and it takes time to recover. I sympathise when there is an unexpected rush of people and the kitchen is completely overwhelmed; it happens and I’ve experienced it first hand many times. However, when it’s slow all the time, something is clearly wrong.

To cite an example, the Nandos at the Helensvale Town Centre on the Gold Coast seems completely incapable of serving food at a reasonable pace. I’m not expecting the type of service that you’d normally see from the finely tuned machine that is a McDonalds – no, I’m talking about a number under 10 minutes.

In the last three months, I’ve probably ordered food from the Helensvale Nandos four or five times and each time, the speed of service is completely unacceptable. Under normal serving conditions, it takes anywhere from 15-20 minutes however on one occasion I waited for just under 30 minutes.

I realise that in most cases it isn’t going to be the staffs fault and is more likely the management cutting costs by rostering fewer staff on. Of course, the public will only tolerate substandard service for soo long before they simply stop going there. If it weren’t for the fact that you pay for your meal before receiving the food, I’m sure they’d be losing a lot more money from clients walking out the door, being sick and tired of waiting for slow fast food.

Defridgeration

Food, Hardware, Life

Last weekend, our refridgerator started showing a warning signal that something wasn’t quite right and by midweek it had decided it was a good time to stop refridgerating.

When it stopped cooling properly, I opened up the phone book and started calling around to service people to come and fix the fridge. I naively thought that it’d be a simple process and someone would be out that same day, it turns out that wasn’t the case. After calling 15-20 different businesses, the standard responses were that they didn’t service Fisher & Paykel fridges or they were too busy.

Of the ones that did service Fisher & Paykel fridges, the soonest we might be able to get someone out was going to be the following Monday. Now comes the amazing part, of the ones that did performed fridge repairs on Fisher & Paykel, their fees varied from a $100 to $150 for the call out fee. Once they were on site, they billed a similar amount per hour for labor and of course parts were extra.

Apparently, refridgeration is a license to print money like plumbing.

Fabulous Steak

Food

Last night Claire and I ventured up to Brisbane to see her family and have an early dinner. Initially we were going to dine at a cafe however someone had the brilliant idea of heading to Hogs Breath at Indooroopilly.

With a tiny bit of discussion, I convinced all concerned parties that ordering well done steak at Hogs Breath is all but a cardinal sin and we put through a couple of orders for medium well. Everyone was very impressed with their steaks, no complaints at all. Claire and I haven’t had Hogs Breath for months, so it was a real treat to eat out there again and as usual, the medium rare steak was magnificent.

For dessert, I went with the sticky date pudding but we also ordered a new rocky road inspired dish. It was more expensive than all the other desserts on offer but it didn’t click to anyone at the time until it arrived and it could have literally satisfied three or four very hungry dessert eaters! It was in an oversized red wine or cherry shaped glass, none of us on the table could believe how big it was.

It was good to get out after a very long week at work, I hope it isn’t soo long between steaks again!