This week’s small pleasures #150

This week’s small pleasures, is coming to you on Sunday as guess what? Yes, I am off on work travels again Monday and Tuesday. Anyway, for this week’s post, I decided to try and find a small pleasure for each day, starting on Tuesday. Here we go….

Tuesday

It is lovely to see brighter mornings, and be able to walk through the gardens again. We had some good weather at the start of the week and it was good to walk home, enjoying the gardens in late winter.

Wednesday

The small pleasure from Wednesday was a bunch of tulips to cheer up the house, the mood, add a pop of colour…don’t think any more words are needed.

Thursday

Thursday: always a good day with Pilates after work and then dinner somewhere, even if it is just a pizza. However, it is Wellington on a Plate (WOAP)right now, so for this week’s Thursday’s dinner we headed over to Boulcott Street Bistro, a real Wellington institution (and do check out the link to their webpage to see what it looks like). The fixed menu for WOAP was blini topped with crème fraîche and hot smoked salmon and micro greens. This was lovely and simple, and a good starting dish. Karl opted for the 350 grams T-bone steak with smoked garlic and thyme butter which he said was excellent. I chose the Festival dish which was fish cooked ‘en papillote’, ie wrapped in greaseproof paper parcel and baked. It sounded good – fish, mussels, tuatuas (a type of clam), native seaweeds, fresh herbs and samphire, all steamed in a white wine based broth. Now, I have never had luck with cooking fish myself this way, finding the results to be always rather dull and flavourless, so I had hoped that this dish would convince me that fish cooked en papillote can be good. Sad to say it didn’t, and I have come to the conclusion that I obviously just don’t like fish done this way!

Friday

I took Friday off work, as was owed some time off in lieu, and headed out for lunch at 1154 Pastaria on Cuba Street. We’ve been meaning to go back here, but it is always so busy, so an early lunch time seemed like a good idea.

I went for their Wellington on a Plate dish of housemade fettuccine with crayfish tails, bacon, crayfish oil and fresh black truffles. I’ll just say that this is so much more my kind of food, and I left round, happy and content.

I then went to the cinema to see what will be my last film on the film festival, namely Doubles vies (Non-Fiction). This film turned out to be a gorgeous French comedy set in the world of the contemporary publishing industry. Juliette Binoche stars as Selena, the wife of publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet) who is tired of mid-career writer Léonard’s (Vincent Macaigne) auto-fiction. There is a whole lot more to the film than this, but there are some lovely moments such as characters wondering if Juliette Binoche would record the audio book of Léonard’s most recent novel. Recommended.

Saturday

So to the weekend, which began as usual with toast at Squirrel followed by Pilates – small pleasures in themselves. It was then time for this year’s Beervana, the craft beer festival, which I will show more of on Wednesday’s post.

Sunday

Would you believe we have nothing in our diaries this Sunday? Hoorah! There has been time to enjoy some sourdough bread with hardboiled eggs and micro greens, time to sit and read, drink tea and listen to the rain, time to catch up on things. If that is not a small pleasure, I don’t know what is.

And that’s it for this week. What were your small pleasures?

Thanks to Mani over at A New Life Wandering for the original idea.

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