Food: April & May

An impromptu lunch from a healthy eating stall at Eveleigh markets - roast vegetable tart, broccoli & feta quiche, and a yummy gluten-free banana bread. You know you are in Sydney when everything is delicious, tiny and pricey!

 

Salad Banh Mi from Marrickville Pork Roll. Not as good as a "real" pork roll, but pretty damn good. Especially love that pickled daikon, coriander and chilli.

An excellent breakfast at Element 6 in West Ryde. Baked eggs with chickpea and haloumi, topped by coriander relish and sprinkled with zaatar. The pillowy pita bread was just perfect to scoop up this spicy concoction, and I absolutely adored the double coriander flavour of roast coriander seeds used in the stew and the vibrant coriander relish on top.

Vegetarian eggs benedict from Thyme Square in Hornsby. This was pretty tasty - roast eggplant, zuccini and sweet potato atop good toast, a couple of well poached eggs and a solid hollandaise. Shame service was terrible though.

 Behold the new equivalent of the original cheeseburger that S and I used to eat all the time at Cafe Giulia. This is an amazing toasted bagel with avocado, tomato and haloumi. Really hits the spot along with one of their awesome juices.

Isn't this pretty as a picture? This is called "the most amazing vegan salad" at In the Annex which was pretty damn amazing. Chickpeas sit atop a bed of garlic hummus, topped by slivers of baby carrots and radish. The whole thing is bound together by a very mild chilli dressing and sprinkles of zaatar. Home made bread made the perfect scoop for this. If all food was this amazing, end.

Fleetwood Macchiato in Erskineville is one busy place, we waited over an hour for a table! These perfectly poached eggs were served with a softly-softly pickled eggplant, slivers of celery & fennel and topped with roasted almonds. Sounds like a strange combination, but the combined flavours were heavenly. The bread by the Bread & Butter project was also incredible, I could just eat that alone.

Now, it's hard for me to have a food post without some ramen. It's hard to eat ramen as a vegetarian - this beautiful one is from Gumshara but after picking out all the pork and dunking half a bowl of chilli pickled veg in it, I did feel like I was eating pickle ramen. 

Enter the solution. Rising Sun workshop in Newtown is a ramen popup bar which repairs motorcycles, and serves ramen too. They have three simple options - the Dark (pork), the Light (chicken? fish? can't remember) and the Monk (vegetarian). The vegetarian broth is amazing, and the first time I tried it I had to ask if it really was vegetarian. Apparently they have been throwing kilos of shiitake mushrooms in there, along with whole roasted bulbs of garlic and onion. The condiments are quite traditional - seaweed, bamboo, shallots. Each bowl is served with a slab of miso-roasted eggplant and half an egg (I was there with 2 non-egg eaters so I got all their eggs!).

 

This place is utterly amazing for vegetarians.