August 16 - Dinner & A Movie

 Yoghurt, berries and fibre toppers for breakfast today, which has reminded me to go and get berries out the freezer right now!  I managed to get to work early today (8:30am) so that I could leave early.  I had plans for tonight!  My morning snack was a navel orange.
   It was a bit of a busy work day today, broken up today with errands which is a nice change sometimes.  I had to go and buy welcome gifts for a couple of new team members for example.  I managed to resolve all but one of my financial discrepencies!  That one will get resolved too but I need information from an external party first so I'm playing the waiting game now.
  Super AMart rang me some time this morning to say my tub chair was ready for collection.  Yippee!  It's my last item to collect to complete my purchase.  Now I just need Bertie to come up and collect her sofa and help me pick it up because my car is too little!  Thank you in advance Bertie!
  For lunch I had pretty much the same as yesterday, a sandwich made with two slices of Bürgen Wholemeal & Seeds Bread, about a third of a Hass avocado mixed up with a handful of rainbow salad and two slices (100g) of D'Orsogna leg ham, one in the sandwich and one on it's own.
  The rest of the day passed pretty quickly.  The piles of assorted paperwork on my desk seemed to have reduced by the end of the day and that's always a comforting sign.  I also lined up some training on a new process for next week.
  I left work at 5:00pm and headed towards the city on the Eastern Freeway.  I was meeting Mr Smart at Cafe58 in Fitzroy for dinner.  It's his favourite restaurant and certainly my favourite in his local area.  I was in the right area by about 5:30pm but it took me three goes to find somewhere to park!  Everywhere is a clearway or a 15 minute loading zone until 6:30pm!  But I finally found a spot, fed the meter an obscene number of one dollar coins, and headed to the restaurant to the patiently waiting Mr Smart.

  Entree was Minced Beef in Betel Leaf, grilled and served with crushed peanuts and fish sauce which we shared.  It was 6 pieces for $8.  You can see Mr Smart was too eager to wait until after my photo!  I am struggling to be able to describe the flavour of betel leaf... it tastes like betel leaf is the best I can come up with.  Texturally I guess it is like steamed and grilled silverbeet (in this dish at least) but it has quite a unique flavour.

  For main course, Mr Smart had the Black Pepper Lamb (which I know to be awesome) and I had the Vietnamese Salad with Lotus Stem and Prawns which was $18 and huge, I needed help.  I've usually had the Vietnamese Salad with Rare Beef (divine!) but I decided to try a different variation tonight.  I wasn't disappointed.  The salad is cold and refreshing and has lotus stem (the white things), a generous number of prawns, carrot, mint, crushed and whole peanuts, garlic shoots and prawn crackers (I only ate 3) and fish sauce.
  After dinner we headed back to Mr Smart's place for a movie.  Tonight we watched The Bucket List, which was beautiful and sad and touching and made me cry.  We paused it to take my blood sugar which was only 6.4.  Lotus stems must be low GI!  Mr Smart guessed 6.3 so he was pretty close really.  The movie made me think about the one time I started a bucket list.  The first thing I put on it was 'learn to ride a camel'.  I can't think for the life of me why I thought of that but it was the very first thing and I still want to do it!
  It wasn't too late after The Bucket List finished so we then started on the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of The Ring.  Mr Smart was dumbfounded as to how I could have avoided Peter Jackson's epic telling for so long.  We got as far as Rivendell and then it was time for me to head home and write tonight's blog.
Now that I've done that, it must be time for bed!
  Jess