Yes, I have been reading Twilight. I’m ashamed to admit it but it’s true. With the first two books, whenever I pulled it out of my bag on the train I’d quickly try to hide the book cover so no one would know what I’m reading, but that’s all about to change now.

I went to a couple of bookshops trying to find a copy of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn without the red-edge, but didn’t have any luck. I didn’t want to be a giant ad for Twilight. After a couple of days searching I crumbled under the weight of Twilight-withdrawal and just bought them with the red-edge. Whoever thought of this red-edge crap is a marketing genius. Now whenever I pull the book out of my bag people a mile away will know it’s Twilight.

Great…

I seriously did not stop eating on the weekend. It felt like I went from one meal straight to the next and it was all Italian food. It started with Pizza at the Beresford on Friday, then pasta (from Pizza Hut) on Saturday night, then the big one – Sunday.

Sunday started with pancakes for breakfast (at 11am). After “breakfast” I headed to Criniti’s at Darling Harbour for lunch with the girls. We love going there, especially after Agata introduced us to their Brescioli dish (pictured top centre). Rice dumplings with melted cheese on the inside. If you ever go there you have to order it!

After lunch, I drove home then straight away drove to Dee Why for dinner (with a full belly of food). It was Matty’s birthday and every year, without fail, we throw him a surprise dinner (or at least we try). I’m pretty sure he’s clued on by now and half expects a surprise every year, but never the less, it’s still fun.

Dinner was at Moltofino and the food’s pretty good. I highly recommend the Seafood Paella (pictured bottom centre). Yumo!

Anyway, Happy Birthday Matty! Quarter Century. Getting old…

We headed to the Beresford in Darlinghurst for a couple of after work drinks and I was thinking that I was going to miss the game. You should have seen the smile on my face when I saw the giant screen set up in the beer garden. Wall sized semi-finals, now that’s how you watch the game.

Our company was nominated as one of 10 finalists for the Dell Small Business Excellence Awards. As such we were invited to the finalist lunch held at Quay Restaurant. I was uber excited because Quay was recently announced the winner of the 2009 Best Restaurant of the Year – SMH Good Food Guide, and 2010 Restaurant of the Year – Australian Gourmet Traveller. It also has an amazing view of the Harbour Bridge AND the Opera House.

Time for the food.

For entree I went with: Seared sea scallops, baby leeks, fennel, confit tomatoes, lime crème frianche, basil and lime dressing. Spectacular!

For my main meal I chose the: Victorian Pyrenees lamb rump, eggplant, eschallots, Ligurian olives, roasted tomatoes. Had this lunch been a year ago I wouldn’t have dreamt of choosing lamb, but now I love the stuff.

These potatoes were a big hit on our table and there was much discussion as to how they got them to be that shape. Pushed through a machine? Smashed, then shaped? Hand-carved? We’ll never know.

Dessert was highly anticipated: Seven texture valrhona chocolate cake.

It took us a while, but we eventually found the seven textures (I think). Here’s the breakdown (top to bottom):

1. A thin sheet of dark chocolate
2. Light chocolate mousse – not quite white chocolate, but not milk chocolate either.
3. A thin sheet of milk chocolate
4. Dark chocolate mousse
5. Some kind of nutty chocolate mixture – tastes like crunchy Nutella
6. Chocolate biscuit base – yum!
7. Chocolate sauce along the base.

Just a word of warning, you seriously cannot eat the full thing to yourself. I could only really get half way through it. Dan finished her’s but then felt sick the rest of the day.

The other option for dessert was Crème caramel, sauterne jelly, caramel cream, caramel ice-cream. It looks amazing, but it’s seriously death by caramel.

With a belly full of free food I can definitely see why it won Best Restaurant of the Year. If I were paying, I might have seen things differently. Free food always tastes better.

Naturally I jumped on the bandwagon and decided to blog about the dust storm. Like everyone else in Sydney I woke up to a sea of orange (or red if you’re an early riser).

There are some pretty amazing photos of the red dust on the smh photo gallery and I’m pretty sure you’ll find more awesome shots sprouting up tonight when people are able to upload their photos.

Right in the middle of it were people from Broken Hill. Check out this crazy clip – it starts to get interesting at about the 30 second mark. Seriously looks like armageddon.

And if anyone’s free to wash my car this weekend, I would greatly appreciate it.

Car wash businesses are going to make a killing this weekend!

I don’t often go to the cinemas, mainly because they’re extremely over priced and it usually smells funny. But seeing that it was tight-ass Tuesday and this movie had gotten pretty good reviews and we hadn’t seen one of my mates in a while, we ventured into the city. I’d forgotten just how packed the George Street cinemas got on a Tuesday night.

I really liked 500 Days of Summer, it’s not overly cheesy or predictable. I won’t say much about it because I don’t want to give anything away, I hate it when people ruin movies for me so I won’t do the same.

The only thing I didn’t like about the movie wasn’t the movie itself, but the fat-head sitting in front of me who kept making out with his girlfriend. Very annoying. They must have been high school students.

Anyway it’s well worth watching and I’m sure you’ll have a few giggles. And like me I’m sure you’ll be sitting there trying to remember the name of the character he played in 3rd Rock from the Sun. That’s right, little Tommy Solomon grows up and lands the lead as Tom in 500 Days of Summer. What are the odds of that? I wonder if they purposely named him Tom, just for kicks.

I recently stumbled upon the new free-to-air channel on digital TV – Channel GO! If you have digital TV, flick over to channel 99. You won’t regret it.

It’s a new channel that caters for, as quoted from the website, “the young, and young at heart”.

It’s got a great line up of shows like Gossip Girl, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, Survivor, The Hills (I love The Hills!), Weeds and the ever so controversial Dance you ass off. With a line up like that, I can see myself turning back into a couch potato.

We had our company birthday lunch yesterday at Pendolino, The Strand Arcade. The decor is pretty cool, I sort of felt like I was at Hogwarts or a Parisian cafe. The place doubles as an olive oil gift shop where you can sample their olive oils.

I’m usually not a fan of olive oil, I think it just tastes like grass, but this olive oil was actually really nice. I must say, I was quite impressed, but not impressed enough to buy some.

I ordered a pretty crap entree because I hadn’t actually looked at the menu before the waitress came around. I thought I’d ordered pork belly as an entree, but turns out it was actually pork lard and prosciutto. At least the breadsticks were nice.

For my main meal I went with the Ocean trout, boy was I pleased. The trout was cooked perfectly and just fell apart in your mouth. As for the skin – amazing. I don’t know how they got the skin off and deep fried it so beautifully but they did, and it was great.

For dessert I went with the Pear tart. I was hoping it would be similar to the pear tart that Justine cooked on Masterchef. It was nothing like the Masterchef one, but I’m sure it’s of the same standard. Yum!

As mentioned in the previous post, we did a run to My Little Cupcake yesterday. I purposely didn’t eat my cupcake straight away because I wanted to save it for after my gym session. It was going to be my reward and evidently make my visit to the gym an utter complete waste of time.

After my gym session and was walking back to the office with an extra bounce in my step knowing that there was a pretty little cupcake waiting for me. Much to my disappointment, it wasn’t there. I search the entire office, even checking the fridge in case someone was kind enough to put there. Nope, no cupcake. I was so upset, and grumpy cause I was hungry. I was looking forward to it all day long and even did an extra 10 sit ups at the gym for it. Gr..

The next morning I told my colleagues what had happened and no one knew who took it, they all knew I was saving it for after the gym. After a bit of detective work we found out that it was one of the ladies who we share the office with. She said she saw it sitting there and thought it was going to go stale, so she ate it. Unbelievable! As if you eat something that’s not even yours. Least to say I was a bit annoyed. To cheer myself up I picked up a 6 pack of these cupcakes while I was at Chatswood.

They’re from Cupcakes on Pitt, but the shop isn’t on Pitt. They’re not as nice as the ones from My Little Cupcake, but they sure are pretty.

Still can’t believe she ate my cupcake!

We did another trip to My Little Cupcake yesterday, only this time I decided to try one of their lamingtons as well. As you can tell from the picture, they’re not quite your usual lamington. Instead of the usual chocolate dipped square cake, these lamingtons are coated with coloured frosting and huge chucks of coconut.

Think I’ll stick to the cupcakes, there was a bit too much coconut for my liking.