There have been more non-food entries than normal recently. While I have merged all our blogs into one personal blog, this is still supposed to be a food blog primarily. The problem with being on a diet is that it doesn’t make for very good food blogging, hence the lack of updates recently. While we’re still far from being at the weight we want to be, I’ll have to make a more concerted effort to blog a bit more about the food we do eat! In general the food we’re eating most days these days is Woolworths pre-made dinners. It’s not because we’re lazy, but because we couldn’t be bothered to cook in the tiny (and I really mean tiny) kitchen that we have currently – another reason is that the diet that we’re following is purely a kilojoule restricted diet, which means that we can pretty much eat whatever we want as long as the total kilojoules for a day don’t add up to more than a certain amount. Now when I say that we can eat anything that’s not strictly true. While anything is on the cards, if the kilojoule amount for a particular food is too high then it kind of blows out the eating for the rest of the day, hence if you want to actually eat three meals a day, you can’t blow the allocation on one meal. Pizza is a perfect example of this. A single pizza costs more kilojoule-wise than my entire day’s allocation of kilojoules. There was a day when I could easily eat an entire pizza plus some of Caroline’s. That’s just out of the question these days. Oh yes, the pre-made dinners… The biggest reason that we have these is that they have all the stats on the box so you don’t have to think too much about what all the ingredients cost in terms of energy. It’s one thing to work this out for something you’ve cooked yourself, but to try and guess for store bought food is near impossible. The Woolies meals seem to be pretty accurate with their energy figures, and they taste good too. I’ll take a pic of a few of the next ones we have so you can see what we’re having.
We are still going to restaurants once a week or so, so I really have no excuse for not taking photos to share, and with Sydney coming up there’s going to be some new stuff to show you too. Plus in the next few weeks we’ll be having a few dinners with family before we go so I’ll try and include these, and on the final days in South Africa there’ll be plenty of good eating because we will have moved into a hotel, and then there’s the flight.
Now recently we realised that we hadn’t had bacon in a long time so we decided to go and find some. We wanted crispy bacon specifically, but you don’t really know who is going to give you that until you get it, so we thought of a few places that we’d like to visit before we leave South Africa. One of the places we thought of was the Blue Crane Restaurant, which we’ve been to before – a long time ago and had some good meals. They’re located in a park in Nieuw Mucklenuek, a suburb of Pretoria, right next to the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary. Their restaurant has sweeping views over the waterhole and onto the sanctuary, which not only is home to a plethora of birds, but other animals such as antelope, other mammals and reptiles.
On to the food. This is Caroline’s breakfast, the Pied Kingfisher breakfast (R38) – Fried egg, bacon, toast, chips & fried tomato.
I had the Bushveld breakfast (R68) – Two fried eggs, bacon, pork sausage, mushrooms, fried tomato, chicken livers, toast & chips. I don’t eat offal so I opted to have mine without the chicken livers.
In both cases we had our eggs “medium”, which generally means runny yolk with a completely set white, in essence easy over. Besides breaking both my eggs I think they did a fairly decent job. The pork sausage was nice, although it could have been a little bit bigger. The mushrooms were nice – fried in butter (I think), with thyme and onion. The tomato was good too, as was the toast, which I placed under my eggs before cutting them up and eating them with the bacon. I normally don’t like chips with breakfast as I don’t consider chips something that should be had with a fry up breaky, although it is something that is common in South Africa. The chips however were really nice – perhaps I was just in severe need of some fat intake! 
The bacon we specifically asked to be crispy, but they have a breakfast buffet too, so I think the bacon just came from the buffet table. I think the waitress did try to find the pieces that were the crispiest, but they were by no means crispy. Don’t get me wrong though, the bacon was lovely. It seemed to be especially thick cut, there was plenty of it and it had a great taste! My crispy bacon craving is not gone though, so you might see a post soon featuring that!
The restaurant is huge! We were seated outside in this area. Unfortunately all the seats by the water’s edge were taken. There is also some seating behind us that you’re not seeing, plus an inside section AND an upstairs deck as well.
The view out over the sanctuary is beautiful. This is the view in only one direction…
This is the view in the other direction, and there’s still more of it.
If the eating areas that I have described are not enough, there is also this area amongst the trees that you can be seated in. There were two separate birthday parties going on at the restaurant too. This one featured a woman with dishcloths for a skirt and clothes pegs in her hair. I can only hope she was the kiddies’ entertainment!
On our way out we met this “little” fellow. He really isn’t small as you can see by comparing him to the paving bricks. He was quite preoccupied with getting some grass out of his mouth and didn’t really pay much attention to us.
Looking back at the restaurant area from the entrance.
After we left the entrance we went to sit in the hide for a while. Before we sat down we had a look at these ducks that were swimming around and chatting with each other on the bank of the water right next to the hide.
This is the view of the restaurant from the hide.
And the view of the rest of the waterhole.
Until next time, take care!
Blue Crane Restaurant
156 Melk Street
Nieuw Muckleneuk
Pretoria
Gauteng
South Africa
Tel: 012-460-7615/7
Email: bluecrane@lantic.net
Web: www.bluecranerestaurant.co.za
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austin roberts bird sanctuary,
bacon,
blue crane restaurant,
chips,
egg,
mushroom,
pork sausage,
pretoria,
toast,
tomato
