Knox Gateway Cafe, Knoxfield and Monash Open Gardens

It was a wet morning and the likelihood of doing anything outdoors today is becoming slimmer by the minute as more and more rain poured down from the skies. 

So I pulled out my pots and pans and prepared to make matcha choc chip cookies, and BBQ pork buns. On the cards were also home made pizza for dinner and a lemon cake for dessert but those were shelved to avoid a flour fest. Carbs are by no means the bad guy but it'll be excessive to consume all that today.

I am glad then that when we went to Knox Gateway Cafe last week to try their new dinner time menu that we did not receive too much rice on our plates. Usually, restaurants overload on rice but stinge on the protein portions. Here, we got a good portion of rice, one big piece of fish cutlet but only a few pieces of beef and half a scoop of bitter melon. 

They had an array of unlabeled dishes (frustrating!) in the bain marie but I noticed it was mainly three types - masak lemak (coconut curry) x fish, chicken or beef; masak merah (tomato base) x fish, chicken or beef; and curry x fish, chicken or beef. So with just 3 types of sauce, there are 9 nine dishes to choose from! There are 2 types of vegetables when we visited - stir fried bitter melon and eggplant sambal. 

For $19.90, I chose 2 meat (fish masak merah and beef curry) and 1 vege (bitter melon). The fish was the best - I had missed masak merah so much! 

I wanted to try the nasi kerabu but it was regrettably not available because it took too long to cook. So we ordered the nasi lemak ayam berempah which is nasi lemak with fried chicken ($18.90). The chicken is fried with a crumble and curry leaves. It was a tad too salty but I enjoyed it.

The next day, we went to the Monash Open Gardens. Only 4 gardens were open this year, including 1 community garden. An interesting one was in Wheelers Hill where the owner converted their tennis court into a big curated garden of fruit trees, vegetables, and lots of sweet pea flowers. They are very fragrant but a bit disorderly to look at. The old foliage gets trapped in the new foliage, you see. 

We also went to the community garden, getting lost in the Ashwood Secondary school in the process. We tried yukon (a type of yam) and learnt about feijoa and sapote. It was an educational day.