Mari the baker and food news ...

I'm glad Tartine has a CookBook and mari bought it along to NZ. She's gotten into the cookbook quite heavily and has been making delicous treats the past week. This week we've had yummy lemon pudding, delicious whole wheat scones and shortbread. Here's hoping that this continues for a long long time. I'm hoping for the gougiere and croissants next :)

In other food news, we went to the local Malaysian Restaurant Spices on Hardy Street. We went there a bit early, 5:30 pm, so we could finish dinner and put the kids to sleep after a long hard day. People eat quite late out here, the place was quite empty even when we left at 7:00 pm. The food was not bad (5/10). Some of the dishes were quite good (nasi lemak, specifically the lamb rendang), others mediocre (seafood mee goreng) and others just plain bad (roti canai). How can u serve roti canai without the sauce? We did order a side of peanut sauce which was terrible.

After dinner, we stopped at the Gelato place. The ice-cream place closes at 5:00 pm in summer on a Friday night!!!! We did go back earlier this morning, and it was decent but definitely did not come close to Sketch

Today was saturday, hence it was farmers market day :) The kids slept in today (8:00 am), so we were a bit late getting there and it was fairly crowded. We now have a routine there and a specific set of vendors we frequent which makes it nice and convenient. Since its summer here, we get fresh raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. Reminds me to make my french toast this week, so i've got to find some good brioche bread :). Saw some fresh organic sockeye salmon today which I did purchase. The vendor informed me that all salmon in NZ is farmed!. I suspect fish farming is quite a big industry in NZ, need to do some more research on this. We also found a very yummy pie company, MyPie.