Environs Cafe, Battery Point

Environs Cafe is a newcomer to Battery Point but I have a feeling that it will be around for a while - it's just that good. The food is fantastic, the menu is really interesting and it's very reasonably priced.

From the breakfast menu, the Cottage Green: almond-coated sardines, poached egg and rocket on a hash brown ($12.50). The hash brown is on the left and the sardines on the right - this is a pretty tasty light meal.



The savoury breakfast ($14.50) is enormous, and one of the best full breakfast-type plates I've ever tasted. It comes with scrambled eggs on a corn cake, and bacon, hash brown and tomato, topped with hollandaise sauce. The corn cake and scrambled eggs are the highlights! The picture below shows the dish ordered with their home-made sausage ($3.50 extra), which was nicely spicy.



The French toast with poached fruit, labne and pistachios ($12) is a winner for the days when something sweet is wanted.



The risotto ($13) is on the lunch menu and comes with roast vegetables, mushrooms, garlic and parmesan cheese. It was lovely and hearty.



I didn't try the chicken pasta ($15) but it looked fantastic - I plan to try it soon! It's pappardelle pasta with roast chicken, pumpkin and cashews and a garlic cream sauce.



Both the breakfast and lunch menus are an option all day, and there are also some antipasto dishes that I've yet to try. Definitely a new favourite place to eat!

Deliciousness.

Some recent cooking highlights!

Ottolenghi's Plenty is an amazing cookbook - one of my favourites. The recipes are generally not particularly simple but the amazing flavour combinations are worth the extra time/effort/ingredients that are called for. A dish I've cooked a few times now is the soba noodle salad with eggplant and mango. It's amazing, and great for dinner parties. The recipe can be found all over the internet, e.g. 101 Cookbooks.



A swiss cheese and tomato tart from taste.com.au. A simple and tasty recipe. As suggested in the comments I doubled some of the filling ingredients, although didn't quite cook it as long as I should have because of this. Next time!



Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible is my number one favourite cookbook. Almost every recipe that I've tried (more than 10 now) has been spectacular, and I've used it so much since I bought it a few months ago that it's almost permanently stationed on my cookbook stand. The royal chicken korma below is one of my favourites.



Not much in the way of cooking was involved here, but this was a very delicious cheese! (from the Wursthaus).



What tasty things have you been cooking recently?