I’m not really cooking properly at the moment, as I’m moving house this week, so almost everything is sealed up in a box somewhere. And I’ve already taken all of my non-perishable foods to the new place, so my pantry consists of a bottle of soy sauce and some pepper, at the moment! I’m also trying to empty the freezer to minimise how much food I have to keep frozen during the actual move, so I’ve been using up leftovers a lot. I’ve been eating a lot of couscous, made into a kind of warm salad with whatever I can find to use up – a piece of salmon (poached in the microwave) or some grilled chicken. I’m missing my bread machine – hope I can find the box it’s in, pretty quickly after moving.
Just because I haven’t been cooking much, doesn’t mean I haven’t been enjoying lovely food! A new bar, The Classroom, has just opened in North Perth, and I went there for drinks with friends on Friday night. The decor is great – old lockers, blackboards, vintage lunchboxes, old encyclopaedias etc all around the walls, and even a few sets of old-fashioned big headphones, plugged in to some kind of “lesson of the day” – how to speak Japanese, when I was there! In order to eat, you must fill out a school canteen menu by ticking the boxes (pencils and clipboards provided!) and handing it to your waiter. Cocktails are served in unusual shaped glasses, including specimen jars, droppers for adding colour to your drink, and screw top jars with handles on. Lots of good fun.
The food is bar food so snack-y, tapas-style – small portions, but then the prices were also small, so you could order several things to share and it worked out okay, price-wise.
I chose the smoked salmon & scallop carpaccio (sorry the pic is a bit blurry) as one of the dishes (does that surprise you?!), which actually was a tad tasteless. Can you believe these tiny little blobs are scallops?? They were the size of a 5 cent piece – hmm I wonder at the sustainability issues of that, but we won’t go there….
I wouldn’t order the salmon again, but everything else was lovely. As well as the food in these pics, we also had big thick-cut crinkly chips (served in typical cardboard cups, just like at school – back in the days when they did serve unhealthy rubbish like that at school canteens!), and a serving of beef ribs, the meat from which just melted in your mouth (it was given a huge thumbs up by our Phil the butcher). The szechuan squid (pictured at the top) was my favourite, it was totally yummy and pepper-y. Apparently the cubes of watermelon were “compressed” and taken through some long-winded process that the waitress explained to us, to make them gourmet blah blah blah – tasted just like a cube of watermelon to us!
I’m really missing all of my kitchen stuff, and looking forward to getting re-acquainted with it all when I start to unpack next weekend.
Happy Fooding!
Salmon & Avocado 