"Bondi Beach Bar: Australia by way of Colorado"

Dear Blog,

I miss you. I don't know when we will be reunited. It looks like that won't happen until the end of the semester. All my intentions to post once a week have turned out to be wicked lies, and I apologize.

But I can offer a sort-of recent dining profile, which is here. Ignore the weird and inappropriate hyphenation, or just imagine a robotic voice is reading it aloud. Also, forgive me.

Up to her neck in school,
Soopling

Tucking in pies from Tuck Shop

Anything wrapped in dough is worthy of adoration in my book, and I'd long thought about popping in for one of the Down Under meals-in-a-crust being sold at Tuck Shop. On the way to having drinks with our co-workers at d.b.a., DL and I decided to grab a few to pair with our beers.

It took a while for our pies to heat up properly, but once we got them over to the garden area of d.b.a. and dug in, we found they were worth the wait. The Guinness steak and mushroom pie I got had a buttery, flaky crust bursting with tender chunks of beef in gravy, its flavor nicely balanced. The pies were hefty, too, meaning one made quite a satisfying meal. Altogether they were way better than the ones I sampled at DUB Pies, though the comparison might be unfair (these were fresh, and I waited until the next day to eat the ones from DUB).

DL also picked up a lamington, a square of butter cake that had been dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut. As it made the rounds among our coworkers they discovered the thin line of strawberry jam running through the middle, since we had begun breaking off pieces of the cake from the wrong end. Happily, the lamington came back to us intact enough so that we were able to eat another bite of cake, chocolate, and coconut complete with jam, providing a fruity and just-sweet-enough ending to a perfectly Aussie lunch.

(Park) Slope Day: DUB Pies and Terrace Bagels

After BH's potluck brunch, I took a stroll around her neighborhood. There was a period of time where I used to hang out in Park Slope a lot, but it had been a while since I had last wandered around.

I was stuffed from brunch, but at Terrace Bagels, one of my favorite bagel places, I couldn't resist picking up an everything bagel for later.

I know their doughy, oversized orbs aren't very authentic, but that's exactly the way I like 'em, especially the paler ones. With bagels, I have a fondness for their soft, undercooked sides where they've touched their neighbors, and the chewy edges of their holes in the center. No crusty, extra dark bagels for me.

A block later I saw DUB Pies ("Down Under Bakery Pies"), a tiny, hip-looking shop at the western corner of Prospect Park. While I was checking out their selection, the girl behind the counter asked me if I wanted a soy hot chocolate on the house.

Non-Asian-style soy milk isn't really my thing—which I reconfirmed in my first few sips—but it wasn't bad. There was still the aftertaste I don't like, but all the sugar and chocolate in there went a long way towards masking it.

I picked up a steak mini pie and a chicken mini pie, which I had the next day after heating them in the toaster oven. They had pretty good flavor, the steak being better than the chicken, but both were terribly dried out. I'm not sure if this is because I didn't eat them fresh or because this is just how they end up after sitting under heat lamps all day. At $1.50 each (I think), the mini pies were a fairly expensive couple of bites too. For 80 cents I would have been just as happy with a curried meat pie from a Chinese bakery.

And if they look big in the photo, here are the pies next to an alligator for some comparison:

Well, maybe that doesn't help much.