For lunch, Chad and I went to Toraya. She had the dish that’s become her favourite there, the medium agedashi tofu lunch box.

I had my favourite, the karaage donburi, topped with chilli mayonaise. Both our meals included miso soup (not pictured).

Back at the office at around half-past three, we had afternoon tea in honour of RR, celebrating his 25 years working at the organisation. My boss shouted us a selection of savoury and sweet goodies from Chez Jean-Claude Patisserie. They don’t do mini sausage rolls, so we ordered a selection of “regular” sized rolls – spinach and ricotta, pumpkin and tuna, and of course, good old sausage – all of which I then cut into three to create mini rolls.

They were warm when we picked them up – lovely! Here’s the innards shot – left to right: pumpkin and tuna, spinach and ricotta, and sausage.

We also got half a dozen little tartelettes, whatever they had available, which happened to be five fruit tartelettes and one lemon tartelette.

I just love how colourful and shiny they are. Underneath that glossy fruit is custard.

Although we’d told him we would organise the food, RR very generously brought in a couple of cakes from Michel’s Patisserie. One was a chocolate mud cake, moist and covered in chocolate ganache.

The other was an orange and poppyseed cake topped with orange flavoured cream cheese icing, poppyseeds and little sweets shaped like miniature orange slices. I didn’t actually eat any of the cake, but most of the others did, with great enjoyment.

But wait, there’s more! Jac sent me an SMS during the afternoon and arranged to meet me after work to take me out to dinner. We went to the Lynwood Arms Hotel, in Ferndale. They have a regular dinner deal – you can get soup, your choice of porterhouse steak, chicken schnitzel or deep fried fish, plus salad bar and dessert, all for $10.95. There were quite a number of seniors there, obviously taking advantage of this great value deal. But we decided to order from the a la carte menu instead. Our meals also included the salad bar, and while we waited for our main meals to arrive, we each got a selection of salads to start – I chose probably the least “salady” salads which were on offer – corn kernels and peas (definitely couldn’t call that a salad!), farfalle (pasta bows) in a tomato dressing (or sauce, depending on whether you considered it to be a salad), coleslaw, and pasta spirals with sultanas (a hint of curry flavour, I thought).

Jac had a steak with Diane sauce (AU$19.90), which was served with chips. The steak was cooked to a perfect medium-rare. I could see just how much Jac was marvelling at its perfection, juiciness and tenderness each time she cut into it with her steak knife. I tried a little piece and thought it was really tasty even though I usually like my steak a little closer to medium-well.

I had grilled chicken breast with garlic prawns (AU$19.90), also served with chips. The ten prawns (yep, I counted) were satisfyingly bursty to the bite, and the two enormous chicken breast fillets were cooked nicely, not overly dry as white meat can often be. The creamy sauce was pleasant, but nowhere near garlicky enough for a garlic fiend like me. I did enjoy it, though.

After devouring that steak I thought Jac would’ve been too full to contemplate sweets, but at her suggestion we stopped by Gelare afterwards and shared a small serve of waffles with syrup, cream and ice cream. I was more interested in the waffles and syrup, so I told Jac she should pick the ice cream flavour – she chose “Honey Malt Crunch”. Oh my gawd. I felt even more guilty about eating this than everything featured in my recent guilty pleasures post. I think it’s that sickly sweetness that does it to me. On a slightly different note, I’ve always felt that a rounded scoop of ice cream is more appealing/appetising and pleasing to the eye than the Gelare pyramid-like (or perhaps conical?) scoop. For maximum enjoyment, I like a nice plump rounded scoop of ice cream. Does the shape of the scooped ice cream make any difference to you?