Toast & Tits

Recently KJ headed interstate for work. He was there making sales calls, however his visit happened to coincide with an installation that was taking place over there; so rather than being alone as he normally is, he found himself in the company of two burly installers.

Being on the largish side, these installers like to eat. And that fact is crucial to the story here-in.

Being men of large appetite, what they truly cannot resist is a cut-rate breakfast. For a $10 full English breakfast, they would rise at the crack of dawn and run bare-foot over broken glass.

Luckily on this particular trip there was no need for that, as a local pub was serving cheap breakfast seven days a week. So up they got at 7am, waking KJ and dragging him along for a big breakfast.

The breakfast was everything that had been promised and much more; the ‘more’ part being provided by the waitress and her ‘uniform’. It turns out that the three of them had happened into a bar serving a breakfast special known as ‘Tits on Toast’. Cheap meals served by topless waitresses.

Now, I’m not a prude by any means. I understand the appeal of a topless barmaid. Late in the day, when all the boys have had a few drinks, it seems somewhat appropriate. But topless breakfast? Isn’t breakfast a little early for that sort of thing?
I asked this of a co-worker, and he cleared this up for me, saying ‘there’s no bad time for tits’.

I can only assume most men would concur with that statement - but I have to disagree. Because to me, there seems something kind of wrong with having mammary glands waved in your face while you drink milk beverages and eat eggs.

I suppose this just goes to show that the appeal of boobs to the opposite sex truly knows no bounds.

Recommendations for a successful start to the week

•  Don’t bring a milk drink to work, then drink it ‘shortly after arriving’, only to realise once you’re done that it’s actually been sitting on your desk for 3 and a half hours.
   
• Don’t follow this milk drink with a spicy Sri-Lankan curry for lunch.
   
• No matter how tight your budget may be, never consider single ply toilet paper a valuable money saving idea.

Food Memories

Everyone has memories of the foods that they ate during their childhood – the standout dishes prepared by family members that have disappeared from their diet as they’ve grown up. Well, actually, I’m just assuming that everyone has these memories, because I certainly do. And those memories are shared by various members of my family.

For me, the standout dishes from my childhood were all cooked by my grandmother. My mum’s mum was always the standout cook in our family. She was Greek, although she emigrated to Australia from Egypt; and although she didn’t speak English that well, she spoke volumes through her cooking. Baklava, Rum Baba, Avgolemono Soup, Spanakopita, Dolmades and Galaktoboureko amongst other distinctly Mediterranean fare are the strongest food memories of my childhood. I was never one of those children who refused to eat anything without having tried it – I had an adventurous palate for a kid, and I adored these beautiful Greek foods that were rich in flavour.

Sadly, my Grandmother passed away some years ago, and since then the foods of my childhood have slipped from our diet. Like all the best cooks, most of her recipes were stored only in her mind, and while she was here to cook for us, we never thought to learn these secrets from her.

We tried, sometimes, to help with the cooking. But my grandmother was particular in preparation of her food, and you could easily fail basic food preparation while working with her. I can distinctly remember a time when I was around ten years old, helping her to make baklava. She reluctantly let me take charge of the pastry brush, and watched like a hawk while I brushed the sheets of filo pastry with what I thought were copious amounts of butter.

It wasn’t long before the brush had been removed from my hands so that she could slap on copious amounts more butter as though she’d never heard of cholesterol or calories (which she probably hadn’t); filling the places that in her mind she could see needed more. From then on I stepped aside, letting her work her magic. Once the Baklava was finished, my mother then failed dismally at arranging the baklava on the plate in a satisfactory manner. My mum and I laugh about this now, but I see that same level of particular-ness in myself all the time.

It might seem overly anal, but the results of her cooking spoke for themselves.


It’s been quite a few years since my grandmother passed away, and most of these foods have been just a distant memory for me. Then recently, my mum bought me a Greek cookbook which turned out to be the best cookbook that I have ever owned. I made a few of the recipes, and the flavours therein reminded me so much of my grandmothers cooking that I became inspired. My mum booked us into a Greek cooking class which actually turned out to be run by the same woman who had written the cookbook, and after making some fantastic foods there, I became inspired to try to recreate some of my grandmother’s recipes.


Which brings me to where I’m at now. The first place I had to look was in her battered old cookbook. My mum held on to it after her death, knowing that a lot of her recipes were based around the basic ones in this cookbook.
The problem is that the cookbook is in Greek. And it was written in the 1950’s, so it’s slightly out-dated Greek. Well, at least I think it is. I can’t be sure because I don’t actually speak or read Greek. Which makes the whole idea of using my Grandmother’s cookbook to relive my childhood food memories ever so slightly more difficult.

My first attempt at recreating 'Galaktoboureko'

Luckily for me, it’s the 21st century, so I have many and varied tools at my disposal – most crucially, the ability to switch quickly between a Greek and English keyboard on my iPad, and Google translate.

With these two things, I’ve begun the long and arduous process of reading a book that to me, appears to be nothing but a bunch of squiggly lines.

Despite how slow the going is, it’s not been dull because it’s amazing to see the foreign characters appear on the screen and then miraculously appear on the other side of the screen in English. And it’s also been quite amusing to read the garbled translations.

You can’t help but laugh when you find a chapter in the meat section titled “minds” or a recipe tells you to do things like “Dive your fingers into some water” or “Anoint with butter”.

Or when you mistype some characters and end up with translations like “Boiled Husband Soup”.


Translating the recipes is proving to be a painstaking, but incredibly enjoyable experience. And more than allowing me to rediscover some well-loved foods, I feel as though it’s bringing me a little closer to a grandmother who during her life was always ever so slightly distant to me through the language barrier.

Super Secret Recipe

This photo dates from almost the
same era as my kitchen.

Last night, my Brother-in-law came over so that I could help him prepare his ‘secret recipe lasagne’. I’m not sure how it came to be a secret recipe, because I can’t imagine anyone ever asks another person for a lasagne recipe; but at some point it became a closely kept secret, and since then it’s been known to all as ‘secret recipe lasagne’.

The reason that I became privy to this super-secret special recipe last night is that I offered to make the lasagne sheets for him. That’s right, you read it correctly – I offered to make the pasta sheets from scratch. To some that might seem crazy, but I find that kind of repetitive cooking task almost soothing, the same way that I find painting walls soothing. It quiets a noisy brain. And I have an incredibly noisy brain.


I guess this kind of quality addition to the secret recipe lasagne obviously ranked me high enough to learn the secret formula. I like to imagine it as like being promoted in the coca cola company and finally learning the secret formula for coke. I now know what few others in the world know.


Luckily, because I have some modicum of anonymity on here, I can share that secret recipe with you without fear of retribution. Are you ready for it? Are you ready to hear what his super-secret ingredient that he refuses to share with anyone is?


Leggo’s Bolognese sauce.


His sauce is made from a jar.

Suddenly the ‘super-secret’ aspect of it all makes a lot more sense.

I think I might have to start claiming the ‘secret recipe’ clause for some of the meals I prepare. Like ‘2 Minute Microwave Super-Secret noodles’ or ‘Subway Secret-Recipe Cookies’.

The Bones of Wisdom: A Cautionary Tale for Mother's Day

Motherly advice is always
just a phone call away

The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.

It was a Wednesday night like any other. Outside under a vast and solitary sky, the rural suburb of Torrytown* was bathed in the soothing, cool glow of a full moon. Amidst the wash of pale blue, a single ray of yellow light peeked out from behind the curtains of a cosy little house nestled into a quiet Torrytown valley.

Behind those curtains sat a young woman of extraordinary beauty, intelligence and Scrabble playing skill**. Encased in the warmth of her home, she sat quietly; tapping away on her keyboard, chatting online to a friend in a strange and distant land.

As she worked away on the keyboard with one hand, the other speared tiny pieces of salmon onto a fork from the plate beside her. She ate absently, her mind on the conversation and not really on her dinner.

Suddenly, a sharp pain jabbed at her throat! Her hands flew to her neck. The fork clattered to the table. Her typing stilled. She gasped!
Looking down at her dinner, the cause of her pain became apparent.

With shaking hands, she reached for the keyboard and typed a desperate message that crossed thousands of miles to tell her friend the cause of her agony.


'I'm choking on a fishbone!' She wrote. 'In my (allegedly) de-boned fish!'

She clutched at her throat, clawing at it as though she could remove the bone from the outside. Her mind flew to the advice that she had received about these kinds of things; tid-bits of advice from mothers, uncles, grandmothers, fathers.
She sifted through these kernels of wisdom, searching for something she knew she'd heard about fish bones.
'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' - No.
'Always wear clean underwear,' - No.
'Don't pick your nose' - NO!
'Be careful of bones in fish or they'll get stuck in your throat.'; YES! That's it! Her mothers voice rang though her mind, telling her over and over again to be careful.

Backwards and forwards she played this information in her head, as the fish bone jabbed painfully at her throat. But try as she might, she could not find a single piece of advice in that vast catalogue of wisdom to tell her what to do if that initial pearl of wisdom should fall through!

From the other side of the world advice was coming in thick and fast from her friend (the guy who sometimes kicks her ass at Scrabble, and who has this awesome website, and he's really funny and handsome, and writes great)***.
'Are you dying? Should I long distance call you an ambulance'? he typed. 'Can't you just pull it out? Mash the keyboard if you're turning blue!'

She tried to reach in and grab the bone, but alas, her hand was too big (or her mouth too small) and her gag reflex much too strong.


'Blergh, cough, splutter' she typed back; then realising that her fingers still worked - 'No, I can't.'

'You should have listened to your mother' he typed back. 'Mothers always know best.'


Inspiration!

Gasping for what could be her last breaths she grappled for the phone and hit speed-dial. Her mother answered after what seemed an agonisingly long time.


She croaked out her dilemma through stilted breath, feeling the fish bone jabbing into the soft flesh of her throat with every word.

'Mum! you never told me what to do when your advice failed!' She cried out.

'Bread.' Her mother told her calmly and knowingly. 'Eat a large piece of dry bread and it will dislodge the bone.'

With this simple advice, and another firm 'Mothers know best' from the Las Vegas Larrikin, she picked up a slice of bread and began to chew.

She could feel the fish bone moving a little as she swallowed the great wodge of bread, then a little more when she swallowed another. But four slices of bread later, while her breathing had eased, the little fish bone was still sharp against her throat.

'Mothers know best' she said to herself, 'until they don't! And then what?'

So what does one do when all the advice a mother can give you fails dismally?! She was stumped. Short of a trip to the ER, she had no idea how to remove the fish bone. If only her gag reflex wasn't so strong and her hands too big (or her mouth too small), then she could remove it easily enough.

The answer, then, was simple. What do you do when all roads lead nowhere? You have a drink.

There was some element of logic in this, although the specifics eluded her. Something about the medicinal, sterilising properties of alcohol and the muscle relaxant type of effect that it would have on her body.

So she poured herself a Bourbon and drank it down fast. Then she had another. And another. She could feel the tension in her muscles melting away, could feel her senses dulling. After four bourbons in as many minutes, she began to feel that she had underestimated her ability to extract the fish bone manually.
Suddenly, her hand seemed smaller (or her mouth larger) and her gag reflex dulled. With the kind of swift (and thoughtless) decisiveness characteristic of a drunk, she contorted her hand and somehow, she reached into her mouth and down her throat to pluck out the sharp little bone.

Later, she would look back on this moment and be unable to explain how she had managed it. Sober attempts to replicate the fitting of her hand into her mouth proved impossible. It was as though some law of physics had been broken - or perhaps just stretched momentarily to allow her to do things that she couldn't normally. It wasn't the first time that Bourbon had this effect on her, and she was sure it wouldn't be the last.


She called her mother in relief, telling the tale of how bourbon had worked more effectively than bread, believing wholly that things had come full circle and she was now the one handing advice to her mother.

'Have another bourbon' her mother told her knowingly, with the tone of one passing on an important token of wisdom. 'The alcohol will do your throat good, you know.'


This brings us to the moral of this tale, which is threefold:

1. If you're a mother, give advice to your children that is not just cautionary, but which is also problem solving. There will always be those rare times when caution isn't enough.

2. When advice fails you, you can always fall back on alcohol and its ability to help you defy the laws of physics.

And finally (and most importantly):
3. No matter what you think, Mothers always know best.


*names have been changed to protect those suburbs involved.
**My story, so I'll look however I want!
***Individual results may vary

REAL love

Up until recently, Valentine's Day wasn't really a big deal in Australia. It was just that holiday that people overseas celebrated, mostly in Hollywood movies, and specifically in romantic comedies.

Sadly, just like we have with everything else, we've given in to the commercialism and Valentine's Day has found me watching desperate looking businessmen hurriedly clamoring over over-priced roses in the supermarket on their way home.


I don't really buy into the whole drama of Valentine's Day - I couldn't care less if I spent the day alone or with a loved one. But given that it's Valentine's Day, I feel that I have to share some kind of story that is vaguely related to love, so here goes!


I've gotten into a sort of routine - or tradition is probably a better term - when I get a haircut. I usually have my appointment on a Thursday evening at around 6pm. This means I go straight from work to the hairdressers without having dinner. Luckily, the hairdresser is right next door to a Noodle Box. I never go to the Noodle Box any other time - they're way overpriced and I'm usually too impatient to wait that long for noodles. But after I get out of my hair appointment, I'm feeling good and relaxed, so I wander next door and pick myself up a seafood laksa for dinner. This has become somewhat of a tradition.


My favorite part of this routine is not the food - it's the little Chinese man who cooks the food for me.

He speaks barely a word of english, and what he does speak is very hard to understand, but for some reason, he LOVES me. He always greets me in what I can only describe as an excited way when I enter the shop, even if he's busy tucked away behind the counter frying noodles. If he's standing anywhere near the register when I walk in, he'll attempt to take my order, even though he clearly has no idea what he's doing. He gives me free prawn crackers and asks me just how specifically spicy I want the food. I sit down to wait for my order, and when it's done, he brings the paper bag around the front of the counter and hands it to me personally, all the while with a big smile on his face.He ushers me over to the plastic utensils and asks me if I want anything, then waves me off as I leave with the huge smile still all over his face.

I like to think that it's just me that get's this treatment - maybe because I'm an oddly regular customer - Seafood Laksa, spicy, every 8 weeks at around 8:30pm. Or maybe it's the fantastic confidence that I exude when I walk out of the hairdressers with perfectly smooth and shiny locks.

Either way, he makes me day. And if you ask me, that's the kind of love that Valentine's Day should be about. Because if you can only show your partner that you love them once a year, then you've got bigger things to worry about than forgetting to buy flowers and having to stop at the supermarket on your way home.

Man vs Food

After a month of non-stop writing, I feel a bit guilty for not having written anything since Monday. But it’s been one of those weeks where my brain just hasn’t wanted to work in a way that is capable of stringing whole sentences together that are worth reading. I think I need a holiday.


Last night I was introduced to the wondrous TV show that is ‘Man vs. Food’. Basically a guy travels around the USA finding the massivest meals he can, and taking on restaurant challenges to eat them. I watched him attempt to eat a 7 ½ pound hamburger in under an hour. Having just eaten dinner myself, it seemed even more sickening, because with a full stomach I couldn’t even contemplate the idea of someone attempting to eat a burger that big. The fact that we had a Greek food banquet for dinner and probably ate a couple of pounds of food ourselves seemed insignificant compared to this burger.


What really got me about the show was the part of the episode that introduced me to a dish I had never heard of before, and something that convinced me that the higher the population gets in a country, the more willing the people become to eat anything they can dream up, no matter how bizarre or sickeningly fatty.

That dish was ‘Chicken Fried Steak’.
Someone takes a piece of steak, coats it in flour and deep fries the sucker until it’s crispy. Then it gets slathered with gravy and voila - your deep fried dinner is complete.

I can’t believe someone came up with a dish like that. Who in the world decided that steak was something that could do with deep frying? Of course, I would definitely eat it – how could I not when my love of unhealthy food is so great? It’s still pretty gross though.


The fact that the guy on this TV show is able to find so many enormous meals is amazing. I don’t think food like that exists here in Australia. Sure, we have restaurants that advertise that they serve extra-large meal sizes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so fantastically huge as some of the things he eats. The only thing I can ever recall coming across that was big enough to rate as a dish on that show was served at 'The Great Australian Ice-Creamery'. It was called ‘the kitchen sink’ and was basically a 9 litre ice cream sundae. It had every flavour and every topping, and they served it in a mini sink-shaped dish.
Now that is a challenge that I definitely couldn’t do – I struggle to eat a regular serve of ice-cream, so 9 litres would never, ever happen.



I may have to rethink my idea of a trip to the US, because there's a very good chance that with junk food available to me in sizes like that, my trip could end with a heart attack rather than a flight home.

I think I’ll just have to watch the rest of the Man vs Food series so I can enjoy my love of junk food vicariously while it clogs someone else’s arteries instead of my own.

B & E Fridays

No, this is not a post about some secret weekly criminal habit of mine. It’s a post about eating, which is much safer, easier to do more often and I’m sure infinitely more satisfying than breaking & entering.

---

One of the things I miss the most about my old job is Bacon & Egg Fridays. The sandwich shop near my old work made the most fantastic two-egg and bacon toasted sandwiches. Slightly runny egg yolks, soft bacon, thick fresh bread and just the right amount of butter and salt. I think this approximates to about one metric heart-attack’s worth of butter per sandwich or some similar technical measurement. You could feel your arteries hardening with every bite, but you didn’t care because they were pure heaven.

*what the internet does not allow you to see at this point is me pausing to wipe the drool from my keyboard at the thought of these glorious sandwiches*

Bacon and Egg Fridays made what is already the best day of the working week even better. Sadly, after changing jobs, I am now without a sandwich shop. This means that Bacon & Egg Fridays are a thing of the past. My heart is saying thank you, but the rest of me is devastated.

Normally, I don’t eat breakfast at all. It’s not that I don’t like breakfast, it’s just that I can’t be bothered. I’m lazy, and I don’t usually get hungry until about midday anyway. Bacon & Egg Fridays were my one day a week of providing my body with the sustenance it needed to make it through to lunch. You need that extra push on Fridays, especially if you’ve had a week as busy as the one I’ve just had.

So I think that tomorrow, because it’s been a busy week and because the cold weather has started to properly set in, I might drag myself out of bed just that teensy bit earlier than usual and make a stop out of my way at a sandwich shop to resurrect Bacon & Egg Fridays just for one day.

An addendum to my previous post

Funnily enough, my recent massive consumption of sugar-filled Anzac Biscuits has also coincided with a bout of insomnia.

Random Childhood Memory #3

Random memory #3 is less of a memory and more of a childhood behaviour which directly relates to what I have to say about yesterday's lunch.

Yesterday's lunch was a lunch pack from the local Chinese store - steamed rice with chicken and veg. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of Chinese food; not the kind you get in Australia anyway. As a general rule, I don't really eat it any more. When you see it in food court windows, it's always formed it's own gooey, gelatinous semi-gloss coating that is anything but appealing – so why eat it when there are other, better options like Japanese food or Indian food?

KJ doesn't feel the same way about it and constantly requests that we have Chinese for lunch. Yesterday in a rare moment of food weakness, I finally agreed. So I ate the food without really enjoying it but since lunch didn't last long, it was gone and forgotten 10 minutes later.

2 hours later however, I got a reminder in the form of stabbing stomach pains.

Food poisoning.

I've been up all night trying to squeeze in a few moments of sleep without the constant stomach pains. They're still here, and every time I have one, it's like a painful little punch in the stomach while someone yells at me “You don't eat Chinese food! This will teach you!”

These stomach pains are probably a lot worse given the fact that I haven't been able to throw up and rid my body of what's left of this nasty food. Why not, I hear you not wanting to ask?

Well, that brings us to Random Memory #3:
When I was little, we had a sandpit in our backyard. My brother and I loved this sandpit and played in it every day. My brother is 2 years older than I am, so I was playing in it before I even had any idea what a sandpit was, which is probably the main reason that I became a sand eater. That's right - I used to eat sand, and not just the odd handful. Like any kid, I put the stuff in my mouth to try it out, I just didn't stop. I ate big handfuls of the stuff, and even after my mum tried to discourage it and even took me to a doctor to make sure it wouldn't hurt me, I kept on eating.

It's weird and kind of embarrassing behaviour, but I think it did me a favour in later life. By sending what is basically granulated glass through my body every day, i'm sure I created some sort of protective scar covering to my stomach, which has meant that I haven't thrown up since I was about 12. The only exceptions I can think of are drunken throwing up (which still didn't happen as often as it should have) and when I was 18 and had glandular fever (although I was sick enough to be hospitalised, so I count that out too).

I've never caught a stomach bug, even while living with someone who had it and i've never had a bad reaction to dodgy food, even when it affected others.


So it must have been some seriously bad food to make me feel this crappy. Damn you, Chinese food! I will never eat you again!!!

Conversations with a Vegetarian Friend

Me: So you guys just come round after work at whatever time and we'll chuck some stuff on the bbq.
Vegetarian: Great! Do you want me to bring something?
Me: Sure, why don’t you bring a salad or something?
Vegetarian: Actually salads aren’t really my forte...
Me: ......

---

Me: I made vegetarian lasagne, you should come round for dinner!
Vegetarian: Cool, what stuff is in it?
Me: It has tomatoes and zucchini...
Vegetarian: Oh I don’t really like zucchini.
Me: ...and mushrooms and capsicum and ...
Vegetarian: Oh, mushrooms, yuck.
Me: ...eggplant and silverbeet.
Vegetarian: Yeah I don’t like either of those
Me: Are there any vegetables you do eat?
Vegetarian: I’m not really a big fan of vegetables actually.
Me: .....

Spudarama

Here it is, my final choice out of 30 possible parmas:



The 'Spudarama Parma'. Chicken topped with mashed potato, gravy & cheese. Ok, so it’s not very adventurous, but it just sounded so damn good, I couldn’t resist.

We had planned to head out to Alexandra at sunrise on Sunday, but the weather had other plans. There were thunderstorms and rain forecast for the early morning, so instead we headed off at about 9. It actually ended up being quite sunny in the afternoon and we still got some good photos. We spent the whole day out there, stopping at a lot of places along the way.

To get to Alexandra we had to drive through some of the areas that were hit hardest by the black Saturday bush fires, and it’s odd to see the way the trees are starting to regrow. They’re sprouting leaves all the way up their trunks, which gives everything a weird, fuzzy kind of look. Then in other places, everything is still as blackened and dead as it was a year ago. It’s good to see so many people rebuilding in amongst it all though.


I’ll definitely be going back to Alexandra, and soon. The parma was absolutely awesome, and now that I’ve gone the safe route, I’m going to head back and have something a bit more out-there.


Is it sad that the most out-there thing that I’ve done lately is eat a strange food? Yes, I think it is. I need to get out more.

Chicken Parma

This Sunday we’re taking a trip to Alexandra at sunrise to take some photos. It’s surrounded by mountains and pretty dense forest, so should make for some great landscape photography, particularly if there is a bit of mist hanging around as the sun rises.

Afterwards, we’re having lunch at the Commercial Hotel, which is the part I’m looking forward to most because they’re widely known throughout Victoria for having an incredible 30 different kinds of Parma on their menu.


Chicken Parma would have to be in my top 10 favourite meals (which are mostly made up of comfort foods) – as I’m pretty sure it is for most Australians. Parmigiana is a term that’s used pretty broadly here. Aussie Chicken Parma is not very close to traditional parmigiana. Usually in your typical pub, it’s a chicken schnitzel topped with Napoli sauce and cheese. But it’s also been extended so that it really covers putting any kind of topping on chicken schnitzel.

A while ago we stopped randomly at a pub that had a small chicken Parma menu. I don’t remember them all, but I remember that the one I had was topped with egg, bacon and cheese, and the whole lot was grilled so that the cheese was crispy, but the egg yolk was still a bit runny.
Heaven.

It took me about 20 minutes to decide on that one from a menu of about 8 different types – I can’t imagine how long it will take me to decide from a list of 30.

Its’ a tough choice –do I go with safe and innocent, like the ‘Italian’, or do I go right out there and choose something that I would never think to put on top of chicken if I were making it myself, like the ‘Bananarama Parma’? And most importantly, can you pass up something as glorious as the ‘Nacho Parma’? Because if there are two kinds of food that were ever meant to be combined, it was these. Although maybe Nacho Parma is more of a late night drunken food because it combines the beauty of one of the world’s greatest drunk foods with one of the world’s greatest comfort foods.


So any suggestions on which one might be the best choice are more than welcome, and I’ll definitely post some photos of whichever one I end up choosing – it is supposed to be a photography trip after all.

Further to my earlier post...

How weird is not eating red meat but not being a proper vegetarian. It really removes the best parts of being a carnivore.

Bring on the steak!

Noodles for One

You know what? Cooking for one sucks. Honestly, if I had to cook just for myself every night, I would probably starve to death. It’s hard to get motivated to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal when it’s just for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to eat, and I enjoy cooking; it’s just that when you have to put all that effort into making dinner just because you're supposed to have an evening meal, it’s hard to get motivated.

KJ is away again, and right now I should be preparing myself dinner, but in all honesty I can’t be bothered. Do two-minute noodles and a cup of coffee count as a healthy dinner choice?

Probably not.

Leftovers

Why do leftovers always taste better than the original meal?
If you could make an original meal taste as good as leftovers, what would the leftovers of that meal taste like?

La-Di-Da Date

Tomorrow night KJ and I are going on a hot date to a very fancy restaurant. We wouldn’t normally head to somewhere as posh as this place is, but we were given a gift certificate as a present a little while ago, so we’re going on Saturday night.

We booked online – you know, coz we’re nerds, and that’s just the way nerds deal with dates – and when they emailed back to confirm the booking, they also sent a copy of the menu. It’s probably a pretty good thing they did, because after a quick browse through the starters, I realised it would require some translation.

Ordinarily, If I wasn’t sure what a food-related term meant, it wouldn’t really bother me. I like most foods, so a bit of mystery in a meal isn’t a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. But in this case, I came across a menu item that made me decide to do a bit more research just in case. That item was ‘Caramelised Sweetbreads’.

‘Sweetbreads’ is a term that I’m familiar with. I know that it’s trick terminology designed to make something really un-appetizing sound more appealing. If they wrote ‘Caramelised animal glands’ on the menu, people might be slightly less likely to order them. It’s a little bit evil if you ask me, because if you forget what it really means, sweetbread sounds like something really tasty.

Another thing that I found really odd was that a lot of the starters seemed to include items that people don’t usually want to eat - things like ox tongue, sweetbreads and snails. Do they do this because their superior culinary skills can turn these somewhat unappetizing items into something spectacular? Or do they do it as a secret in-joke, just to see if people will eat it because it’s on the menu in a posh restaurant and they don’t want to seem un-sophisticated?

The great thing about this particular restaurant is that their specialty is steak. According to their website, they “showcase Australia’s finest beef from Victoria, Cape Grim Tasmania and the Clare Valley South Australia”.
So I’m looking forward to seeing what a $60 steak is like. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is working out what to drink – their wine list is over 30 pages long. I might just have to stick with beer, otherwise by the time I’ve selected a wine, the kitchen will be closed.

Australia Day 2010

It’s the Monday morning before a public holiday, and because of the fact that I’ve run out of annual leave, I’m pretty much the only person in Australia who’s working. So I’m using that time wisely to do things like update my blog, and surf the web. So I guess I’m working just about as hard as everyone else. Ah well, it’s the Australian way.


Tomorrow is Australia Day, which really means we get the day off to have a BBQ and listen to one of the myriad of music choices available on the day. The big one is the Triple J Hottest 100 which is counted down every year on Australia Day. Triple J is Australia’s big alternative music station, and I hold a kind of secret hatred for it because much like Mac users, Triple J listeners are interminably smug. They are over the top anti-commercial-radio, which annoys the hell out of me, because every comment they make seems as though it’s designed to put you down for daring to listen to anything else.

It’s a shame really, because they play a lot of good music, but the attitude of the average Triple J listener really puts me off. My best friend is a Triple J listener and she complained nonstop when she had to stop listening to the countdown in order to go out to a hen’s night drink-a-thon that she wasn’t even paying for!


Anyway, enough of my ranting about Triple J. The other radio stations are all doing best of Australian music countdowns, which I’m looking forward to because there is a hell of a lot of awesome Australian music that, as demonstrated in my previous posts, I mostly had no idea was Aussie.

So I suggest that even if you don’t live in Australia, you should spend tomorrow cooking some lamb chops on the BBQ, drinking beer and listening to some good, Aussie music.

Making Jam

Last night I made jam. I’ve been saying for ages that it would be cool to eat more stuff that we made ourselves – the only problem with this being that we would then have to make it ourselves. Obviously that doesn’t fit very well into my lifelong plan of supreme laziness, so it’s never happened.

That hasn’t stopped me from telling everyone for the past 6 months that I’m going to make jam, and as a result, people have been giving me empty jars to use. The pile of them sitting on top of my fridge has gotten so big that last night, after a near death-by-jar experience, I thought I’d better give the jam making a crack so that I could open the fridge again without getting a concussion from falling jars.

It turns out that making jam isn’t as hard as you would think. You basically just cut up some fruit and stuff and boil the crap out of it until it reaches a point where it will set when it cools. It all sounded so much more high-tech when I was reading my little book of instructions and it was talking about measuring the temperature and sterilising jars and stuff.

I made a recipe that wasn’t in that book because I wanted something a bit more basic to start with (apple and strawberry), but I think I’ll try the fig, tomato and red onion jam from that book next.

How 1950’s housewife-ish am i?!

Dodgy Dinner

Last night I went to a friend’s place after work, and she made dinner. In the past she has always come to my place because she never had a place of her own, so I’ve always made dinner for her. She’s a vegetarian, and since my vegetarian cooking skills are fairly limited, I usually make risotto. So she decided that since that’s what I usually make for her, she would make it for me this time. I was happy with that – I always figure that as long as I don’t have to make it myself, anything is great. I may have to revise that belief after last night.

I make my risotto from a recipe I found in a Jamie Oliver book – it’s the most awesome, creamy, cheesy risotto I have ever had. I’ve made it so many times that I know the recipe by heart, which means when my friend watches me make it, she sees me throwing things into a pot as though I’m making it up along the way, when really I’m just working to the recipe from memory. I think that this might be to blame for what turned out to be the most shockingly abysmal meal I have ever had.

I can only assume that her risotto last night was made based on the principle of remembering what I’ve done before and trying to copy it. When I showed up, she had just started cooking, and as I watched her prepare the risotto, she got everything so far out of whack that I couldn’t watch any more.

She used a carton of supermarket stock (vile, nasty stuff that always smells like rotten vegetables), and she would pour big glugs of wine in at random intervals throughout. She had the heat up so high that everything she poured in just evaporated on impact. Quite bizarrely, she tested it about 5 minutes into the cooking process, when the rice would have still been hard enough to hurt your teeth and said “yep, nearly done”.
And then, in the last, most important stage, where you add butter and parmesan cheese to make it go all gooey and creamy, she put so much butter in that you could see it running through the incredibly undercooked grains of rice.

She then proceeded to dish up a gigantic bowlful for me, which I had to crunch my way through so as not to seem rude.

I felt bad, thinking that she had tried to make something on my account and failed – but I spoke to her boyfriend today, and he told me that it wasn’t just a case of her trying to make something that she didn’t know how to cook – apparently she’s just not very good at cooking in general. And in fact, she is completely unaware of this fact and thinks that her food is spectacular.

Now I feel sorry for her boyfriend, because I’m happy to pretend to enjoy her cooking every once in a while, but he has to do it every day of his life.