... the good with the bad

i enjoy eating.

i should be ashamed of it sometimes but most of the time i'm not at all ashamed of how much i enjoy eating. "food for the stomach and the stomach for food" - i know it's not how God wants us to look at the world and i recognise in certain moments how right he is... and at other times how wrong i am to sometimes believe it.

once upon a time, not so long ago, i was invited to lovely! pancakes. it always is in my mind lovely! pancakes even if that's not what it's called these days. pancakes at the rocks or some equally unimaginative name, i'm sure. lovely! pancakes used to have an old-fashioned newspaper-photo-in-lines (daguerrotype?) picture of an oliver twistian-woman with a knife and fork and steaming pancakes all cramped together in a very small logo. i remember seeing the same woman being used to advertise a production of oliver! around wollongong, i think.

i like eating pancakes, so i replied in the definite affirmative. we all met up (eventually) and sat down to a late brunch. i rather liked the look (in the menu illustration) of the sausages and hash browns, so i decided to go with that. with an extra sausage and hash brown because, tempting as it was, the photo in the menu was looked a tad spartan.

i was hoping for hash browns that looked as pancake-like as the photo implied. i was hoping for delicious sausages, although who goes around ordering sausages that they hope taste like sawdust i have no idea. i was neither hoping for nor expecting what i received - hash browns that looked like deep-fried julienned potatoes that were burned at the edges and raw in the centre, and sausages that looked like i had cooked them on a bbq (implication: i burn everything i put onto a bbq. except maybe water. maybe.)

obviously i was rather unimpressed with my lovely! pancakes brunch experience and while i'm happy to try their pancakes on future occasions i might suggest that they narrow their menu to what they can cook palatably. i was less unimpressed at not being able to get into the lovely! pancakes at north rocks for half an hour - i took it as a sign that lovely! pancakes was not to have my business for a while. such is life.

two of the same friends and i went on a road trip today, although i was told by an acquaintance that driving from sydney's north shore to wollongong hardly counted as a road trip. to that, while i understand where they're coming from in making the comment, i reply that my definition of a road trip is not merely a factor of distance travelled, nor is it a matter of destination per se, but rather that wherever we're going and however far it is, travelling with friends in the car is an integral part of the activity. if i were to go to wollongong on the train (as i am wont to do) it would be a day trip.

the gastronomic feature of the day was a stop at piato in the gateway on the mall (or whatever they call it now) for lunch. very nice food. a tad pricey if you're a cheapskate like me, but well worth the cash. i has a fantastic pumpkin risotto but better than that was the fetta mashed potato! mashed so smooth they were almost creamed, the fetta adding a delicious salty/smooth texture to already delicious smooth potato. worth another visit, i feel, and i must do my best to remember to order at least a side of the fetta mash.