I love a good Saturday morning breakfast. It's absolute bliss to be able to sleep in a little later than usual. Then just potter lazily about the kitchen stirring up those yummy smells. And then later just sit down to a nice relaxing breakfast... just the two of us... I always try to make Saturday morning breakfasts a little more special... whether it's hotcakes or pancakes, sausages or frankfurts, eggs sunny-side-up, scrambled eggs, or eggs any way you like. I think it's because I have such comforting memories of Saturday morning breakfasts as a kid. I clearly remember all of us kids chopping and dicing and whisking to make egg omelettes in the morning. And I also remember dad making his " special " frankfurts using his ingeneous method of microwaving them in a bowl of water. And mom's pancakes have a magical way of turning out just perfectly every time. The great thing about food in Australia is because of the great ingredients you can find easily. Like this...

After church on Sunday, we had breakfast at Bills a famous Australian celebrity chef. Apparently, he was famous for his breakfast menu. The place was packed... but turnover was relatively fast... we had a table within 20 minutes and quickly settled in to pore over the menu. I ordered Ricotta Hotcakes which tasted heavenly... Bill actually posts recipes of some of items on his menu on his website. Here's the recipe for the Ricotta Hotcakes that I ordered. Yummy!

I baked this on Sunday afternoon for a lovely afternoon tea. It was quite easy to make, only thing is that the recipe calls for ricotta cheese which has gone up in price recently (I'm not sure if this is seasonal). As you can see, my dear hubby couldn't resist taking a bite before I had a chance to take a proper picture of the whole slice. I've posted thhe recipe here: Honey Cheesecake

With Christmas over and done... next up on my itinerary was the new year countdown for 2006. Instead of the usual countdown in the comfort of our own home in front of the TV, we decided to be more adventurous and join the crowds down at the harbour front near the Sydney Opera House... and our couple friends, D&G were all game for it as well. So I packed chicken sandwiches, some cake, Kopiko sweets and bottled up some water and met D&G at the train station. We thought it was better to take the train down to avoid the massive traffic jams and wasting petrol cruising around for parking spaces. We found a nice grassy spot near the Botanic Gardens overlooking the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. We spread out the picnic mats and settled down... by that time it was around 6.00PM... still way early... but loads of people have been there since early this morning, and some even set up tents to camp on their spot for the whole day! Unfortunately, we were quite ill prepared for the long wa...