"The best vegetarian dish always comes with ground up pork."

It's no secret that I've been cranking the words of late. But although I've tweaked a few things in my workflow, I credit this bad boy, the Nespresso Pixie, with keeping me at the keyboard and on my game a little longer each day.

I resisted buying one for a long time. Long enough that Jane eventually rolled her eyes and made the purchase anyway.

I was sceptical. But I have seen the Light.

I recall reading an article in The New Yorker a whole ago about how coffee making was ripe for automation, but having had the experience of campus coffee machines long ago, I didn't believe them. Turns out I should have. There is of course both art and science to brewing a perfect cup, but the art is rare and for most of us it can be replaced by the science. A good barista is a craftsman or woman of great skill, but making coffee is also a process that lends itself to being programmed. A controlled blend of coffee grounds, exposed to water of a specific temparture and pressure for a measured amount of time will deliver that same result every time.

Get those inputs right and your output will be unvaryingly sublime.

That's why a lot of restaurants sneakily, shamefully make your coffee out of sight now. They're using a Nespresso machine.

If you order an after-dinner espresso at roughly a third of the twenty-four hundred Michelin-starred restaurants in the world, you receive a demitasse filled with a thin drink that came out of small, thimble-shaped pod packed with five or six grams of coffee that was pre-ground a month or more prior. You are drinking Nespresso, which has quietly infiltrated restaurants all over the world in the name of convenience and consistency - The New Yorker.

For me, it's meant fewer trips to the local cafe. Much fewer. I still buy coffee while I'm out, but I'm even pickier and more dismissive of shitty brown water than I used to be, especially at $4 a pop. The unit cost of each Nespresso pod is about 70c. Plus I'm not having them with muffins or brownies, so I've cut out hundreds of sugary calories a day. I've lost weight using this thing! About a kilo and a half. (And grabbed an hour of time for myself that I've been using to write more).

The coffee is uniformly good and comes in dozens of different blends, some flavoured with natural oils to create chocolate or caramel aromas. I usually stock up on pods every four or five weeks and there's a lovely air of Jony Ive-style wankery to the set up at the Nesresso shop. In fact, the whole thing reminds me of the vaguely cultish experience of visiting the Apple Store.

So naturally, I approve.

I can't cook steak. There. I said it. But it's true. Even though I'm a medium rare guy, I always end burning the crap of my choice cuts. I blame the unreasonable demands of the 'well done' brigade to be served up a plate with nary a drop of the red stuff on it.

Really hoping that this Steakmate app I put on my phone today helps. It's from the Meat and Livestock Corporation, so you'd hope they knew what they were doing.

It seems to have a pretty simple interface. You choose your steak, enter some data like thickness and how well done (or not) you want it, and it sets a timer on your phone and/or watch telling you when to turn and when to remove and rest.

You can set multiple timers for people who want their meat done differently. Thomas and I are both medium rare men. The ladies, not so much.

It only does steak for the moment, but presumably it could be further developed to handle lamb, pork and so on.

Now all I need is a new barbecue to test it out on. My old four burner has not weathered the latest of its ten winters all that well.

I can't believe I missed the first three! Why was I not told? WHY!?!

There are 24 little whisky windows to open, of course, and according to the website "highlights among this year’s 24 drams include a rare 50-year-old Scotch, an award-winning Japanese whisky and the World’s Best Blended Whisky (World Whiskies Awards 2014). Each handmade, wax-sealed dram allows whisky fans to sample a new whisky, tasting everything from single grain whisky to rare Scotch worth up to £350 a bottle..."

I mean it this time. I stumbled across this Teeling Irish Whiskey at a tasting in the bottle shop at Gasworks, with which Mr Monsteryuppy will be all too familiar.

I don't normally get suckered into these things, but I was led astray by my good lady wife who encouraged me to have just a wee dram.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

This shit is insane. I tried the 20 year old, which is aged in six different types of barrel. It compared very favourably with the 25yo Highland Park I'm currently sipping my way through. Hell, it more than compared. It kicked arse. I bought the eighty dollar bottle, but would have paid more than double for it. Probably shouldn't tell the bottle shop that though.

My irregular commute, a morning run across the city just ahead of peak hour, takes me within striking distance of The Brown Dog Cafe in the back streets of the Gabba.

It was a place which intriuged me for a long time. An old, anonymous corner lot, out of the way, and yet the footpath outside always seemed crowded. Eventually I checked it out, as is my want, and discovered one of the local secrets of the southside.

The Lazy Dog Roll.

Like the cafe from which it draws its name, the roll is simple. A white bun, fresh sliced ham, cheese, a fried egg and BBQ – or possibly HP – sauce. If I had to nominate a breakfast to eat every day for the rest of my life, I think this would be it. I never tire of this bloody thing, and find myself thinking about as I'm racing ahead of the peak hour wave to drop Thomas to school.

There are heaps of other breakfast options at the Dog, some of them remarkable value, but I can never get past this roll and a flat white in a large mug. I'd post a picture, but I've never known one to last long enough on the plate to capture an image.