After leaving overcast Berlin it was a relief to touch down under the clear, blue skies of Milan. Italy was where hubs and I were to spend the bulk of our trip and I have so many things to share with you all! Once we had checked in to our hotel, we were right back out the door to visit one of the most anticipated stops of our whole trip. The very first thing we did was hop on the underground to go to Fondazione Prada and get a drink at Bar Luce, a bar designed by my hero, director Wes Anderson. If you’re not already a fan, the films to watch are Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore just to start you off. Anderson’s aesthetic is wonderfully quirky and beautiful. I was super excited to be in a place designed by him and feel like a character in one of his films.
Sometimes the only thing that makes things bearable is knowing that you have an escape route. Hubs and I planned this trip to Europe knowing that we would soon both be needing a change of scenery. I love this city and I love my job but I was getting some seriously itchy feet. So no sooner had I finished teaching my last class for Term 2 then we were off to the airport jetting to Europe. Hooray! While my first love is English, I was also a keen History student at school and uni so deeply historical Berlin was the first stop on our trip. And of course, a trip to Germany means two things:
And it’s time for another edition of Lunch at Your Desk! Hooray! This week i’m sharing a sneaky and super easy way to use leftover bolognese and sweetening the deal by throwing in a delicious snack to keep the munchies at bay. Enjoy, my lovelies!
I have been thinking about this snack for so long it’s genuinely ridiculous. When I was amping up for my European Holiday I was starting to think seriously about all the delicious German food that I was going to eat right at the beginning when I was in Berlin. Naturally, pretzels were number one on the list. Well, actually strudel was but thats not really related to this post so we will just ignore that. I picked up a fairly substantial packet of pretzels from the supermarket for $1 then spent weeks and weeks trying to think of the perfect dip to pack it with. Ultimately the answer was super easy and staring me in the face. Who could resist the siren call of the salty sweetness that comes with peanut butter and nutella? And those salt encrusted pretzels!
One scoop Nutella + one scoop peanut butter + a handful of pretzels = salty sweet heaven in your mouth
Try it. Seriously.
And on to the main event!
This lunch is really all thanks to my super dooper mother in law who kindly stocked our fridge (amongst doing many many other things to make our apartment liveable again) with delicious home cooked food for us to eat when we were too jetlagged to go to the shops. One of those dishes was a tub of bolognese sauce beefed up with mushrooms. Im still adjusting to the whole cooking-for-two malarky so I always underestimate how much pasta to cook to feed hubs and I. The few scattered pasta shells you see above are the only ones left from dinner the night before. It seems super efficient but unfortunately there is almost always a fair amount of sauce left over.
In the morning fog of tired eyes and lethargic limbs, I definitely couldn’t sum up the energy (or the mental capacity) to boil some more pasta so I called on that other carb staple, the good old crusty bread loaf to help me out. A few slices slathered with salty butter was the perfect vehicle to get the bolognese from the container into my mouth. It was a godsend on that awful cold and rainy week that welcomed us back to Sydney. You know, that week when it snowed in places that it has definitely never snowed before?
So, what have you been having for lunch this week? And do you have any other sneaky tips for what to do with leftover pasta sauce?
So you ate all the chocolate on the weekend? Now you’re feeling a little soft around the middle and guilty from indulging? Well just stop that right now! There’s nothing wrong with a bit of indulgence now and then and I will certainly not feel guilty about eating bucket-loads of chocolate at Easter, the nominated day of all chocolate eating. But, in case you feel like you need to hit the ‘reset’ button after your Easter splurge, I thought today would be a good day to post my first ever savoury post and help you through it.
