Foxes den

Foxes den is in richmond near Richmond train station. Here they are all about bringing good health to inner suburban workers. The members of my Fitclub recommended this place to me. I once tried the food at one of their events. It was a chicken salad and another salad which I cannot remember the name of. But it was healthy.

You can choose salad, chicken, curry or soup. By 7:30pm they had run out of most things as people really liked that place. The service there was very friendly and the place was clean and tidy.

I had the meatballs and it was yum. But I could not finish all. Here it came with a $2 serve of brown rice which was massive. So I took some away and gave some to a homeless man outside of the restaurant.

Do support my cause for homeless people here.

Poolside coffee

Poolside Coffee is a new coffee place in the Melbourne City baths. Here they do good quality coffee and blends which is what RMIT students love.

Poolside and gym lovers will also love the healthy treats on offer. Their piccolo is great and it should be for the price of $4

 The rice paper rolls (3 for $7) were really good and they were freshly made. They were really moist from just being made.

Poolside lovers will also like the friendly service and smiles that come with their coffee. They will also love the free flowing water- both sparkling and mineral.

My piccolo was not burnt and had chocolatey taste to it.

Do come on by and try their marvellous coffees and healthy treats. This is a good place for sugar free september.

Pressed juices

Pressed Juices is a cold pressed juice company with stores all over Melbourne. Their aim is to be healthy and promote healthy living via their juices. Ever since training for the 10km run I have been aiming to up my fluids.

Here I went to the one in Collins st near Southern Cross.  This one is just outside Virgin Active and outside an office block.The staff there are down to earth.

My PJ OJ was $7 and it included orange juice, plum and lemon myrtle. The lemon myrtle was subtle which is great as I don't like a lot of lemon. Rather I like a lot of OJ. Here it packed a lot of vitamin goodness

I also enjoyed eating their donut which is super healthy. Rather than having a lot of starch from the flour, it has pumpkin in there and the pumpkin kept it super moist.

Do go to Pressed juices for your liquid and vitamin fix.

BBQ and zumba with Leandro and Melilbaba

Melibaba is a Japanese meetup group and Leandro invited us to go. And so we did for better health. We went to the beautiful Albert Park where we saw the ducks and swans. It was a lovely, beautiful day for all the dogs and people to be out.

It was Melbourne Cup day where racegoers flocked to the races. Well here we flocked to Leandro's Zumba class. He had his twenty minute class which was intense and lively.

Bean mix

Salad

Veggie burger

Bbqing lots of meat

Meat from Costco

We brought our own food. We brought beans, cucumber, red onion, feta, dips, veggie burgers, olives, haloumi and wraps. We made and enjoyed a tofu wrap. All the things were bought from Aldi except for the wraps and the veggie burgers which were bought at Woolies. It all came to $32. The olives were the least favourite with this group but the bread and the onions and salsa everyone liked.

We made this easy salsa of mixed beans, cucumbers and tomatoes. Everyone seemed to enjoy that. They also seemed to enjoy easily grilled tofu and haloumi. Haloumi is a cheese that needs to be cooked before being eaten and it is an Australian cheese.

There was too much meat and sausages and not enough bread. Maybe next time we can suggest that people bring a plate or two on top of their $5 fee for the food and soft drinks and juices which ran out earlier on. What we can also suggest is to bring water. We are not drinking enough water.

Lentils as Thorncote

There is a new Lentils brewing in town and RNIS had heard about it for a while but forgot that it was sitting in their Facebook feeds until now. And after the Vinitalia event and gym we went. We had paid for the meal online.

Love the cute sign

Flower hanging

Dogs

Soft toys for the kids

Lentils is a vegetarian café which is a pay as you go café. It supports the homeless people and people needing jobs. You can volunteer at Lentils if you want. They pride themselves on fresh and organic produce and having fun in the kitchen.

But it was busy and crazy busy. Things in the kitchen and on the floor were super disorganised. I waited and waited ages for mains and dessert. Service was really hard to grab hold of and once we did it was all good.  Meanwhile there were people after me who got food first.

When the main came it looked really beautiful on the plate and tasted good. Everything was fresh. But waiting for the dessert took ages and ages but at least we got some samples of the cheesecake base.

The chai was really beautiful and creamy and the music was just great.

Rating: 10/20- please sort out your teething issues or otherwise you might just end up like Abbotsford café which is down the drain. The locals might not like you.

The Couch's bbq with the new Quinoa wraps and Honey mustard sauce

The Couch were holding another BBQ to mark the start of spring and warmer weather. I was invited along and did not have to pay. I really wanted to use my discount voucher from the show so here it is.

I got a 5% discount from the Royal Melbourne Show for Woolworths so I decided to use it before it expired. I bought some cheese for $5.90, 2 for $5 Chris's dips, a $2 bottle of Honey mustard, veggie patties, crackers and a Red rock deli dip. Oh and the Mission wraps which Gastrology reviewed earlier on which was about $5.

I got to say that they were delicious. Everyone enjoyed the dips and crackers as well as the Honey mustard. People also enjoyed the wraps which were chia seed. There were around 40 peeps there. The Tasmanian brie went well with the white wine and the champagne. I enjoyed the creaminess of it all.

I didn't eat any of this but this is what others enjoyed

I also enjoyed the freshly cooked prawns and fish. They went well with the chia wraps and tzakiki and I made a prawn wrap.

Everyone enjoyed the crackers.

Most people were keen to try the veggie burger but not everyone was too keen. I made a hamburger out of this with the tzakiki dip and white bread and it was yum.

Many thanks for the invite. And do visit your local Woolworths for some amazing specials and BBQ food now that it is the BBQ season. It's always healthier to go pescatarian at a BBQ and you'll be surprised at what you can do

Sugar free month

Sugar free month is on for the first time this year. It was held in September and it was free to participate. We participated in this and enjoyed ourselves.

This was one of our snack ideas to keep us going

Sugar free month is a month where you have to read the labels for most things and cut out white or refined sugar which is more than 5-10g per thing. Some of the included sugars are alright especially in milk. The aim of this is to teach all Australians and International students alike to have a healthy diet which is not full of sugars.

You get used to not having sugar for the month after a few days. Here we had all sorts of snacks which didn't involve sugar such as peanut butter, cheese, milk and the like. Occasionally we would have things which have added sugar in them which we did not know about.

The mood swings varied. As a woman I did have pms at one stage but we effectively managed it by eating lots of proteins, exercising and the like. The sleeping patterns were always good except for just a little bit of bad night's sleep. I didn't have a lot of sugar cravings to begin with but sometimes at events I did.

I think for the next sugar challenge I need to learn to control these at events. But I do recommend that you do it just to learn how to have better health.

RNIS's own clean eating challenge

Clean eating has been around for a while now, but Australia has the highest amount of people who are obese. Everyday more and more people are turning to fast food because that is the easiest thing that people can find.

Clean eating is easy to do, but it is hard to adapt to. Its a good idea to record how many calories you have eaten each day.

Fruit salad. Image courtesy of chiukatherine on Instagram

We started this clean eating challenge and went for about four weeks. Here we had lots of tofu, fish, seafood and good proteins such as turkey, nuts etc. We had lots of dairy and stayed away from the salty and sugary foods.

Salad. Image courtesy of chiukatherine on Instagram

This clean eating challenge taught us to appreciate food and taught us about healthy eating. For example we had sushi as a snack and that had a lot of proteins. We chose brown rice over white rice. Its the little things like this. Instead of sweets for morning tea we had other foods or nothing.

The uni cafeteria has too much proccessed foods.

We felt a lot cleaner afterwards which is good. We didn't lose much weight but we learnt lots

Ricotta cheesecake which is homemade by chiukatherine on Instagram

What next people?
Clean eating is easy but you need to follow the diet to the latter. It was easy for us as we had people around me making sure that we followed and we did not fall behind. You need to learn to love salads and raw vegetables and fruits as well as oats without the sugar.

For snacks you can have sushi, fruits, nuts, yoghurts etc as these are easy to find at the supermarket and are good for you.

We are already doing the Sugar challenge and that is due to finish soon.

Four things to do with cucumbers

As part of Bupa's best blog competition

Here we talk about some easy ways with this simple and humble ingredient.

Cucumbers are good for your skin. At the supermarket they are about $1-$3 depending on the season. A cucumber is a summer vegetable.

1)Salads
This is so easy to do. A cucumber is versatile with any salad

2) Pickled cucumbers
Here you just put it in a jar of vinegared water for a while.

Image courtesy of  ichef.bbci.co.uk

3) Salsa
Just simply dice tomatoes, red onion and cucumber to make a Mexican salsa

Image courtesy of thehungertimes.com

4) Sandwiches

They are versatile and work well for most sandwiches which have meat or veg.

What other uses for cucumbers can you think of?

Pantry Challenge

As part of Bupa's best blog competition for 2015

This August, RNIS did the Pantry challenge and we enjoyed this. Here we saved up a bit of cash on our groceries and you can too. Our pantry is cleaner and now we are a bit more organised.

Instagram: chiukatherine

Oats. Instagram: chiukatherine

Bean salad: Instagram: chiukatherine

This is a really good challenge for students who want to save some money and their health. We found out about the challenge via a poster on a cafe wall. The challenge is about using the goods in your pantry and in your freezer. You can buy fresh stuff and all the regular things such as coffee, tea and milk. But you should not try to buy bread. Instead you should make your own with Laucke's bread mix.

Leftover museli

Snack

Bondi chai: chiukatherine on Instagram

We also made lots of lists of stuff. We saved about $30-$50 this time by doing the challenge and saved all our stuff from going bad. Occasionally though we did forget about the challenge but we came back on track with it. We had a lot of fun during the challenge with thinking up new ways to use stuff.

Before we started we had to clean the pantry and get rid of the mouldy food

Our tips
* Frozen fruits was really easy to defrost
* Make your own bread using your bread machine
* Portion your nuts for the week
* Work out your meals and snacks for the week using what you have in the pantry and not buying.

It is hoped that Meld Magazine will do a similar challenge soon. Students its a good idea for you to clean out your pantry once in a while.