SW1 Kitchen

Its a bit pathetic I'm so excited over being the first person to add this restaurant to Urbanspoon AND blog about it. At first, I was a little confused as it wasn't appearing on Urbanspoon no matter how many different ways I inserted the title, then I decided to do a google search and lo and behold, it has a website, there's a Foursquare deal for it, a post on the Weekend Edition and reviews on Yelp! So I added it to Urbanspoon :)

Yay!

I noticed it a while back whenever I walked into West End from the Brisbane CBD, its in that little space near IGA, French Twist and Era. It seems to be a busy little business lunch area, so either it was quite good, cheap and fast or it was just convenient  but then again, being in the city makes for tough competition and good lunch deals. There was always a large queue of business people there and I was always wanting to see what they had.

There's also a juice bar!

The front display has food not on their menu

One day, early in the morning I decided to drop buy and buy something. I picked the Reuben pocket, which they seem well known for but doesn't feature on their menu at all. Oh here are their menus, stolen/linked from the website. Lunch menu. Breakfast menu.

Reuben sandwiches are an American classic, corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and Russian or Thousand Island dressing, sandwiched on rye bread and grilled until gooey. Wikipedia says they are delicious and it won national sandwich contests and junk.

Deceptively small

Whatever it is, it is delicious and stinky. I'm not sure what it is about it, Swiss cheese doesn't smell, the dressings don't smell, corned beef doesn't smell and sauerkraut does smell pickley, but the combination of the flavours makes a powerful stench. Then you eat it, and all is right with the world. I'm not sure how it could go wrong, melted cheese, salty beef, sour pickled cabbage and crisp, crunchy bread with a sweet sauce. Oh god, I need to eat one right now, but that would mean I'd have to go put on some clothes and go shopping. Tomorrow perhaps.

Never open a toasted sandwich, it'll ruin your appetite

My Boyfriend and I were sharing it. Then I may have bumped him as he was drinking some milk. He got milk all down his shirt, and then I convinced him to go home and get changed. I stayed behind with the sandwich. You can actually see the stain on his shirt in that previous picture :)

SW1 Kitchen
Atmosphere: 5. Public hole in the wall. I liked what I could see inside though, very, very well organised kitchen with bustling, quiet staff and labels on everything
Service: 8, polite, efficient and respectful. He was very quick and walked out to give us the pita after it was finished toasting. He also made me a fresh pita rather than grab the display one :)
Food: 7, it was a pretty good pita, I hope to go there again before this goes online, if not, 7 is good.




Also, my long time computer of four years, the first thing I bought with my adult job paycheck besides dinner for my family, has broken. I got it for $300 off EBay, used already and estimated almost, 10 years old when I got it. One evening, I was listening to songs on Pandora and playing Path of Exile with my boyfriend on Skype and it froze. I reset and it started making this distressing loud continuous beeping noise, then I turned it off and took off the case. My GPU popped out, it was terrible and I couldn't put it back. So I'm slowly saving up for a new PC, tax time cannot come sooner ;;

RJIE 9: Shlix - Lime and Mango Gelati

This has the most unfortunately named ice cream shop I've ever heard. Why is that you say? I dunno maybe you be on the internet more, or maybe if you know what I'm talking about, you should be on the internet less? Shlix shlix shlix. 

Anyway, this is a little home made salad and wrap bar by day and a gelato bar by day and night. Its located in the Valley and prides itself on wholesome healthy, no preservative, no artificial ingredients, low fat, low air volume and fresh Dairy Farmers milk for all their ice cream. They have a suggestion box/page for any ideas for new flavours, they have some really interesting ones there and rotate quite frequently. Here is their website.

If you're a bit confused by the air volume thing, air is necessary for ice cream that doesn't resemble a rock, a lot of cheap ice creams churn air into their ice creams for added volume. Added air, also makes ice cream a lot fluffier, but lets not forget that ice cream is sold by VOLUME and not weight. As a result you can typically tell a high quality ice cream, the denser, creamier and thicker it is, the higher quality it is. For example, compare say a no name brand of vanilla ice cream in a 1L box compared to the same volume of an expensive brand like Movenpick, Haagen-Daaz or Ben and Jerry's. The expensive brand is in a much smaller box but contains the same volume of ice cream, typically a better flavour and a much higher price tag.

The day we went was after we went to Himalayan Cafe and we had a lime and mango gelati on a waffle cone. I always choose mango gelato, I think its the best flavour in the world and is hard to balance, since you don't want a sickly sweet mango flavour, you want a bit of acidity in there too. The colour was pale but it was exactly like I had bitten in a sweet/sour ripe bowen mango, delicious!

The lime was very much the same, white but you could smell zestiness straight away. I can't describe it, it tasted exactly like what you want lime ice cream to taste like, sweet, sour and tangy all at once. 

I highly recommend this shop and advise you to take advantage of their loyalty card system and try all the new flavours!

AWW 2013: The Passage 7.2

I really disliked the look of this cover so I avoided buying this book

The Passage is the first novel written by Justin Cronin. Its a post apocalyptic novel, split into two parts, the first detailing the before and after of a Bolivian virus that massacred a group of tourists, all of whom had cancer before they were attacked and then mysteriously didn't. The US government decides the cure to cancer is amazing and then genetically manipulates and experiments on criminals to create super soldiers for super healing and stuff. As usual, this is a bad idea. The super soldiers get super powers, start drinking peoples blood, kill everyone and turn one in ten people into vampires, then the US gets bombed by other countries as they try and escape to contain the infection and California becomes its own country. 'Merica.
 

Almost, almost

 The second is the aftermath of the attacks, roughly one hundred years later. The US has segregated into colonies where super powered lights and giant walls protect the last shreds of humanity against the virals/jumpers/flyers/spooks/Draculas/vampires or whatever you'd like to call them, depending on the state of origin.
 Babcock is the big bad and has been mind controlling people for years.
The Californian colony is segregated into a confusing group of capitalized functions, like the Teacher, the Guard, the Nurse and so on. Its a bit unclear why there are so many capital letters everywhere. However, their society begins to crumble for reasons best left to spoilers. You know the drill, highlight the article for the spoiler. It follows the lives of Theo, cool guy who goes missing and is Peter's brother, Mausomi, super cool chick who gets knocked up, Peter, the secondary main character I don't care for, Alicia, super soldier chick who is the only person ever to have killed three virals single handed and Michael, super engineer, as they discover the fuel cells powering the lights are starting to fail. Chaos ensues.
He starts pushing residents of the Californian colony into destroying the city.
Fortunately, one girl is there to save the world, Amy Bellafonte, abandoned at a nunnery, and kidnapped by two FBI goons for the facility. Even before she got infected with a refined version of the virus, you got the feeling she was a bit spooky. She talks to animals, causes a weird zoo outbreak and can tell when people are about. Spooky. Anyway, she now has super healing, has semi-psychic powers, an allergy to sunlight and can potentially live forever. She's pretty cool.

The vampires/virals in this story are quite interesting. Its a mix of old school traditions, allergies to sunlight, turning into dust when dead, allergies to garlic and crosses, Dracula-esque customs, with Renfields aka human servants and mindlessness but they also share similarities with I am Legend, in that they are unsexy and balding. As well as that, they have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, key to the story. They share a hive mind with their original source of infection, one of the Twelve, the original condemned criminals who are experimented on. They get dizzy when viewing spirals. They are mindless attackers of anything that has blood unless focused upon by their maker. They also have very distinctive signs of infection, such as fevers, sweating and weird stripping.

I can name nearly all these vampires sadly.
You thought this picture would be weird stripping, didn't you?

Despite that almost pulp fiction synopsis, its an entrancing read, its more than just vampire pulp its about the human condition and surviving when the world falls apart. I was initially reading the first part of this book whilst on Skype with my Boyfriend and I kept shushing him, while I was getting to the good parts. Some parts of the book are lacking in detail with the start of the Californian colonies being the worse part of the book for me. I feel like a lot of this was cut out since it has the feel of being something you would know if you had read an earlier book, but that could also be the way some of the phrasing is laid out such as to imply a longer history, "Jaxons and Fishers were always together," or "A Chou always took care of the Gardens."

This book is being made into a trilogy movie, as of this post, only two books are published, the Passage written in 2010 and the Twelve written in 2012. I have this feeling the third book will be dealing with Zero, patient Zero, Dr Fanning, one of the doctors from the original Amazonian expedition and his death.

Since the making of the post, I've also read a book on cancer in young patients 18-30 age group from the US called Everything Changes, as well as Chicken Soup for the Women's Soul, Uglies, Pretties and Specials. The first number in the title is the number of books I've read, the second being the number of books I've reviewed.