New discoveries in my home town

We haven't been on any mini breaks since Auckland last month, primarily because I am flat out at work and we had our massive, awesome office opening party this week which required a great deal of preparation - including painting in the weekends, below are our write-on walls (taken during clean up from the party), the write-on paint hadn't quite cured so we did some other creative stuff.

Staying here in Wellington has given me an opportunity to discover, and rediscover, some great food places. In no particular order we have eaten at:

• Phong Vu on left bank, Vietnamese, cheap and the cuisine for anyone who doesn't eat Gluten - rice / rice noodles in virtually every dish. I love Vietnamese food and we just rediscovered this pace last night - yummy.
• Cafe Breton (on Brandon St) has gluten free crepes, it's like GF heaven, with both sweet and savoury options. Only open for lunch, does a pretty good long black too. I have been there twice this month already - awesome.
• Khandallah Trading Company (formerly MBBK). For the non-Gluten Free among us it was great, with cheap eats and loads of options. For me sadly the staff have no idea what is and isn't GF and the menu is full of bread and sauces. So I stuck with meat and vege - disappointing.
• Fork 'n Brewer. Again great looking menu, we were there for a large party so didn't ask about GF just chose what turned out to be a wonderful Vege stack, honestly for a pub it looked fantastic and tasted great. Steve had Spicy Chicken Wings to go with his various beers and loved them - great.
• Cafe Villa in Ngaio - I have mixed feelings about our lunch there. My GF bread was soggy and eggs under done, while the bacon was almost burnt. My friends had eggs benedict which they loved, so had promise but for me - average.

Back to the office opening, which has been my focus for weeks. We got the food from Smith The Grocer, for the most part if was well received and the staff were lovely, their cocktail menu has loads of GF options. Later in the night as we cleaned up we got Hells - our new office tradition (yep twice makes a tradition) is to get a variety of vegetarian pizzas on gluten free bases - to meet the two variations of dietary requirements in one. They are great, good bases and yummy vege toppings - yum.

Some of my favourite people
I really threw this in to see if anyone reads my blog ;-)

our beautiful flowers for the party

Here they are setting up beforehand.

Final discovery this month was Garage Project. Shane my business partner thought it would be cool to have a local micro-brewery cater the beer, so we got 3 kegs from Garage Project. Everyone gave us awesome feedback and they were great, they stayed for about 3 hours promoting their beer and helping us on the bar (there were about 80 people so that's a few pints to pour). Not a beer drinker but I am told the Trip Hop was the most popular. 

What it looks like from the other side

I recently discovered twitter - I know pretty slow to join the social media world - and am slowly getting the hang of it all. Both my work and personal profiles have been a tad challenging to get off the ground, work wise (@Optimalhq) it's pretty easy to find good technical and news tweeters to follow but hard to find inspirational women and entrepreneurs. Personally (@mactoria) I have found about 20 of my friends to follow and found they didn't do much so almost stopped the interaction - until today. Today I realised I hadn't even explored the world of gluten free living on twitter, now via a couple of wonderful hashtags #gf and #glutenfree twitter has opened up a whole new world! awesome!

Another thing happened today, one of the team came into the office for a coffee and doughnut, the doughnuts have been in the office all week just sitting on the bench beside the apples (I have added a photo of our kitchen above so you can imagine where) tempting people it seems. I suddenly realised I hadn't even given them a 2nd glance, not because they're not yummy looking and smelling doughnuts but because my brain doesn't see them as food I can eat. I started to realise this last week when at a party watching people eating pizza, again I didn't really give it a 2nd glance until the gluten free pizza's were pointed out and wham - I couldn't stop eating it!

So what does this mean? is diet just mind-over-matter? without the physical reaction to eating other things that are "bad" for me can I still teach my brain to ignore them as well? Imagine the possibilities - chocolate? wine? coffee? - Nah it can't be that simple.

Here is a photo of our lovely coffee machine at work - now that's a whole other story - this week we are using Flight (@flightcoffee on twitter) coffee's Bomber beans - they are pretty good and mean it's unlikely I can convince my brain coffee is bad anytime soon. Nope my brain is imaging that lovely freshly ground coffee smell now, yum.