Day 6.1 - Food and drink

Breakfast this morning was croque monsieur (aka ham and cheese toasted sanga) and red velvet cake, with a dollop of caramel semi-freddo. Red velvet cake is traditionally coloured with beetroot juice (although most these days use red food dye). Carlos' version was light and not sweet, and the caramel ice cream (melted while I devoured the toasted sanga) was the perfect accompaniment.





I also enjoyed one of Carlos' oatmeal and raisin cookies - soft, warm, not too sweet. Very good. And I didn't need anything more to eat until mid-afternoon.


I left the apartment a little before one, and spent the next few hours pottering around town. By 2:30pm, I was starting to get peckish again and made my way to Chelsea Market. This is a large building with lots of little très chic food shops. On my first walk through, there was nothing that really grabbed me, but my stomach was starting to get cranky.

I got a small serve of "Insalate de Mare" (sic), which was pretty good, with lots of tender seafood. (Sorry the pic is out of focus, I only took one).



That helped, and I probably could have stopped there, but I decided to also try something from The Lobster Place. They had a wide range of brown rice sushi/hand rolls, but I couldn't see any that weren't contaminated with avocado. It was also too warm a day for a soup, although they had a good range of chowders, bisques and other seafood-based soups. So a chose Ika Sansai, subtitled "squid salad" which looked intriguing.



It was wonderful! A complex mix of flavours, with a nice bite of chilli, touch of ginger, mirin (rice wine vinegar), a hint of soy and sesame oil and a smidgen of sweetness. It was very, very good.

Next up, I needed a cuppa. Amy's Bread, a bakery where you can see the bakers working in the three adjacent windowed rooms, offered tea. And an array of enticing sticky things. I chose a sticky bun to go with my large tea.



They are a tray of cinnamon scrolls, inverted, with the flat base then slathered with a not overly sweet mix of nuts and brown sugar. It was also rather yum. And filling!

Around 8pm, with an hour to kill before I could join the queue to start the lengthy process of getting to the Top of the Rock, I went off in search of a light supper (I was still somewhat full from lunch, but knew my food choices would be rather curtailed by the time I got back).

I found a custom salad place in my wanders, and stumbled my way through the ordering of one of those. It's a style of fast food not available in Aus. You select a container with your choice of greens (romaine (aka cos), baby spinach, or mixed lettuce), a "main" ingredient (they were out of creole shrimp, dammit, so I went with pesto chicken) and a selection of other ingredients (from the two dozen or so available). You then choose a dressing, from a selection of a dozen, many of which were fat-free (I went for raspberry vinaigrette). All the ingredients are tossed together in a large bowl, and then returned to the container from whence your lettuce came. All for $7 for a generous single serve ($9 for enough to comfortably feed two).

For an extra $1.50 I could get a small bowl of clam chowder, so I let my eyes be bigger than my stomach, and got a serve of that too.




The chowder was good, if a little tepid. It had some good chunks of meat in it, the carrots were a bit soft, but it wasn't overly salty or sweet. And the salad was excellent, and would have easily sufficed on its own.

And finally, because I could feel myself fading (it would be 11:30pm before I got home), I also got a Starbucks Mocha Light Frappucino. Which is an iced coffee/chocolate. As you're probably aware by now, I'm not a coffee fan, but I can tolerate iced coffee (ie coffee-flavoured milk), so I thought this would help caffeinate and hydrate me. And it did.