These are a few of my favourite things (I promise not to rhyme)..

Current favourites (a work in progress):

Fennel soup & toasted Noisette shallot loaf with Lescure sea salt butter

Lost Thai & Royal Orchid Thai Port Melbourne

Does anyone out there remember a Thai restaurant that was on the corner of Victoria  and Nicholson Streets in Abbotsford until about 7 years ago?  It was great quality with an amazing range of dishes and really reasonably priced (and perfect curry puffs too).  Then they up and left me without warning, and someone turned it into a Karaoke bar :-(   Very sad.  If anyone knows where these lovely people with the good food went, I'd love to find them.  

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, Royal Orchid Thai, Bay Street Port Melbourne. Pretty good, and so far consistently good.  And consistency is honestly more important to me these days than anything else.  I'm tired of trying for some remembered dizzying high I'll never reach again.  How can anyone feed me a mind-blowing dish one visit, then bring me down so low next visit I feel like nothing will ever be edible again?!  I digress, bad food trip flashbacks are like that, they come from nowhere...

I'm back.  Green chicken curry with tender bite sized chicken pieces.  Balanced curry flavours, spicy but not mouth-burning hot.  Enough fresh vegetables (red capsicum, zucchini & cauliflower - pity not all seasonal like cauliflower right now) so I can feel that although I've cheated and got take away, I'm not being too naughty. Perfectly cooked coconut rice too.  Roti is OK, perhaps a tiny bit too doughy to be perfect, but not bad.

Fair value too. Curry, large rice and a roti for $21.10, which is generous enough for 2-3 meals for me...  Ooops, I meant to photograph this lot, but I just ate the last of the leftovers...

Oh, a warning though; I tried the curry puffs and spring rolls once (I've almost blocked out this memory, thankfully), greasy and without discernable flavour.  If anyone is brave enough to try the appetisers (!), and can report good things, let me know.  Otherwise I'll just keep hoping someone can help me find my lost favourite Thai... 

Bayside breakfasts - Eurodore Port Melbourne

So nice to be brunching, and not on the weekend.  The kids are all at school, the 9-5ers are doing important work things, I can get a quiet table and any section of the paper I choose to read.  Now, if I could just get that guy to learn how to close a door to prevent a draught...

At Eurodore on Bay St Port Melbourne, the service is less frazzled than on the weekends, and my other half can get his "eggs and sides" which Eurodore have stopped doing after midday on the weekends...  We've missed this place, finding brekkie only average to OK elsewhere recently.  

Now while I can easily order from the list of 8 or 9 sweet and savoury offerings, the question is put to me; how can an English chef pick from this list, when all he really wants is a plate of decently scrambled eggs with bacon & black pudding on the side?  And ketchup (sauce for us locals), which was strangely absent from the Eurodore condiment stores for several weeks in June for some reason..

Today was the first day we had been there since we heard the new rules on the self selected breakfast during the brunch/lunch hours on the weekend.  We had been there every Sunday for about 5 months (and I'd been many Saturdays as well), finding them to be the best quality and most consistent breakfast on the strip.  

Today was not disappointing, bread was OK (not from the cheap Bakehouse next door, which we were served on a couple of busy days, when the real bread from Noisette had run out) but not the great sourdough they were serving up until a few weeks ago.  The Green eggs were cooked well, and my Chai (yes, it's a syrup, but a lovely French one) was served at a temperature not aiming to remove my lips or scald my tongue.  For me it was just a shame that I had to run off to teach a class in the city, so I wasn't been able to eat the porridge with slow baked quinces which I've missed lately, and being a working weekday, no time for the second cuppa.