Food!

So last night I went out for dinner with the boy. It was for his 21st (which was late November, woops!) so it was a fancy pants restaurant. It was at the top of a hill that overlooked the city/central Canberra, and it was sprinkling so it was really pretty. Especially when it started getting dark and you could see all the lights.
We had 4 courses - 4 entree sized that we shared, 1 main we shared and a dessert each. The restaurant does entree sized dishes so that you can have a couple rather than just entree, main and dessert, and they really encourage sharing! Which is great, because we both wanted to try everything.
We had polenta crumbed calamari, gravlax with celeriac remoulade and seriously delicious potato croquettes, sweetbreads (glandular tissue, not sure which type though) with a bread sauce hazelnuts and sultanas, glazed duck breast with confit duck and buckwheat, and roast lamb with crumbed confit shoulder, parmesan gnocchi and pea/pea mash and tomato jam. Dessert was white chocolate cake with strawberry ice cream, cream and lemon meringue (which were not so nice), and the boy got Creme Brulee with rhubarb and rhubarb ice cream. It was all incredibly delicious (bar the meringues), and I could not pick a favourite.
We planned to take photos of all the food, but got a bit too excited when it came out that we wanted to eat it all straight away. All we got was photos of the sweetbreads and the duck.

The Sweetbreads

The Duck

Here's the view from my seat.

On another food related note, I've been asked by a friend at work to write an article for the uni magazine about cooking good food on a budget. It has to be my own recipe and he'd like it to be able to feed a few people - for people living in share housing. I want to try something out tonight but I'm completely stumped for ideas. I'm usually good with knowing what food I want to cook (or more like eat) so this is a bit annoying!