i’ll have a salad, please.

Posted at 25 Jan 2:32 pm. 0 comments

Pet owner? Meat eater? Pharmaceutical drug consumer?

Watch this.

edible ties

Posted at 20 Dec 5:48 pm. 0 comments

The balls of dough need to be handled firmly, but not too aggressively or gently. I’m rolling tong yuen, mini ones. This year we’re not adding red bean or sesame filling. I achieve some semblance of uniformity without too much extra effort and with a sprinkling of pride.

A head pops in the doorframe. “Wash your hands,” I order Phil. He’s six foot three gangly, compliant inches. He takes on the small ball of pink dough. “It’s your color.” He glares at me.

I declare my white balls stormtroopers. He declares his breast cancer. We form wedge and scissor formations with our doughy soldiers. I send in a spy. Our armies encroach on each others’ territory and suffer in the arctic snows of excess flour at the top of the tin baking dish. A particularly tiny ball of breast cancer is locked in an inescapable embrace with a stormtrooper. Two stormtroopers are infected with the enemy when Phil finishes and begins helping me roll the white with pink-tinted fingers.

Apparently, I am told after we finish with help from my grandmother, only good things should be said while rolling the tong yuen balls. Acceptable topics of conversation do not include wars and cancer and how much that roll of unshaped dough resembles a fat white maggot.

He appears again when we’re boiling the tong yuen. I call him over to watch as our handiwork is dropped individually into the pot and fished out into bowls of cool water when they float. The completed products will be divided into bowls and presented on the altars, then reheated and eaten. After the ceremony, after the joss sticks have been lit, the paper offerings burnt into the delicate lacy petals of a great ash-flower, I am pleased to see our unique half-pink-half-white baby has landed entirely by coincidence in Phil’s bowl.

Our relationship has been built thus far on food. I’d tried bonding with Lizzie first over shopping, not a topic I’m terribly interested in, and drinks and music at No Black Tie, which she isn’t terribly interested in. I couldn’t think of something I might have in common with my sixteen year old half-Aussie male cousin until my grandmother urged him to eat more for the umpteenth time at dinner one night.
“Stop smiling,” he told me.
“It’s so good to have someone else be the focus for once.”
“Your turn will come again soon,” he threatened.

During dinner at a Japanese restaurant I challenge him to eat the plate of green wasabi. “Halves,” he dares me back.
We eat the wasabi plain.
His eyes water. I have difficulty swallowing.
Having a brother, as far as I am concerned, must be awesome.

Even now, with my wrists still red after half an hour, my mind isn’t changed. He came up behind me, grabbed my wrists and tried to make me take the durian on the spoon. “You touch it, you eat it,” he said, and we wrestled. A foot hooked behind his knee did nothing. Stepping on his toes of iron did more damage to me than to him. I bumped his wrist against the box and exclaimed, “You eat the whole box!” but he wasn’t having any of it. We were still in the throes of a deathmatch when his father and sister came along and voiced concern. “Don’t be so rough with your cousin, Philip.”

Rough?

Communication comes in many forms; I’m happy with this one.

kampachi + brussels

Posted at 12 Dec 5:27 pm. 0 comments

The buffet lunch at Kampachi sets its participants back $90+ each, but it’s worth it.

Sashimi so fresh its ghosts are still lingering around the delicately sliced meat, glaring at you balefully. Green tea ice cream that is absolutely divine. If tempura’s your thing they keep it coming as fast as you can crunch your way through, and the mochi was good enough for everyone to want – and get – seconds.

A table of about half a dozen is large enough to order all the varieties of teppanyaki, so we had two rounds; everyone had a taste without getting ahead of their stomachs. Our table was divided into two: those who do the buffet every year, and those who were two obviously newbies. Mine was the only ala carte order, showing which side I belonged conclusively to.

The stomach capacities of the veterans was amazing to behold. Some even managed bowls of cold soba at the end.

Then dinner at Brussels, Jaya One, which makes a decent sausage. Their brownie more closely resembles a chocolate cake, served with chocolate sauce, a scoop of ice cream and a halved strawberry. I do not recommend the Blue Jamaica cocktail; go for the beers, it’s what everyone else is there for. I can’t tell the difference between most, but ordered a Leffe Brune and Hoegaarden on advice from others.

What came could just as easily have been a Guinness and Kilkenny. I’ll simply never know.

It’s a Hoegaarden, dammit. Sez so on the glass.

delectable

Posted at 22 Sep 2:48 am. 0 comments

Sexybum’s meant to have a blog post up about Delectable already, but I thought I’d write a bit about it too. He was typing with such fervor as I went through the KFC dinner plates we were having at 11.30pm courtesy of my mum (oh hi, morbid obesity, we’ll be with you in a moment), it was kind of sweet.

Now I’m not going to go into elaborate detail because he already has. I’ll sum it up in one word: disappointing.

The pristine creations in the window are so pretty! The fondant bunnies are so cute, and the little flowers so delicate! It’s pure eye candy – which has a strange taste of iron when eaten. (”Blood?” I asked in surprise as a fondant ribbon melted on my tongue.)

We got home and took delighted pictures of our costly prize – $28 for three small cupcakes, thankyouverymuch – poured two glasses of milk and oh-so-carefully lifted the first bites to our mouths in blissful anticipation.

And…

…

…

… nothing.

No fireworks of flavor on our tongues. No tantalizing mix of textures, no half-guilty shivers of bliss running down our spines.

We get real happy when fed good food, and this experience was like the beginnings of a really promising orgasm which fell flat.

Carefully we peeled off the fondant layer. Without them, the cupcakes sat small, naked and ugly in their liners. I almost felt sorry for them.

“How much would you pay for them?” Sexybum asked.
“Sixty cents?” I hazarded, staring at the shrunken, denuded confections. The flavor was nothing to shout about. The texture was too fine and far too soft. Freshness varied greatly – our vanilla cupcake was clearly older than the chocolate, and the ginger somewhere in between.

We moved on quickly to the brownie, which was thin, dry, far too crumbly and more like a soft, airy biscuit than a proper brownie, and the Seven Sins of Chocolate which wouldn’t have tempted a hedonist.

The total damage? $46. Taking into account the ridiculous inflation of the City’s food prices I’d have considered $20 to be a more reasonable price, which I’d pay once only in any case. Never again.

Delectable has positioned itself in precisely the right niche: the girl behind the counter said their main business was in wedding cakes. They create one-time works of art which should never see the inside of a human stomach.

sweet stuff

Posted at 18 Sep 12:59 pm. 1 comment

This week I’ve been spending some time with my oven. It’s a cantankerous, occasionally imprecise thing, much like its owner, but it’s capable of baking things, which is more than said owner can accomplish without traumatizing a baby dragon for thirty minutes.

A tray of muffins has been birthed from its steamy depths, with another soon to follow. Two batches of brownies have also made their debut, the second a sweet success thanks to a recipe Sexybum had his heart set on trying. We’ve settled down into a rhythm working together, which makes things go much faster and allows for the happy peacefulness I used to feel while baking in Melbourne. Which I did a lot. Mostly at midnight.

Back then my muffins were as dense as a collapsed star, and density was actually something to strive for. They were perfect for a budget-conscious student who would rather have spent time snuggling with a rabid dog than in the kitchen. I’d eat a muffin in the morning, drink a glass of milk, and pray no one pushed me into the Yarra until mid-afternoon or I’d sink without a trace.

As for the brownies, I made one almost every week before graduating on to other desserts. Whatever I inevitably couldn’t finish, I pushed on my housemates or my boys. Many were the evenings we fortified ourselves with brownies and whisky before charging the town for a night in the clubs. Perhaps people would have commented less on our boundless energy had they been aware of our blood sugar levels.

Healthy eating? I was a passionate disbeliever.

There were inevitably times I had to make real food, but sometimes cooking was fun. When I was in Vermont, Charlisse used to sit by the bar and chat to me, occasionally helping out. In Frankson Pat taught me how to make a kickass instant parma. And cooking with the boys was always a blast.

One of our favorite recipes involved tipping a large bag of Doritos (cheese flavored, preferably) on a big plate, scooping copious amounts of salsa on and emptying a third of a bag of cheese over. The plate was shoved in the microwave and gloated over until the cheese melted, at which point it was served with gummy worms. No matter what anyone said, we refused to believe this wasn’t a balanced meal.

Wraps were the second best thing to eat the morning after a drinking session. Anything edible went in a wrap except tomatoes. Ham, bacon, fresh greens, cheese, strips of sauteed meat, whatever was in the fridge. Our creations went into the microwave too, and considered done in one universal time unit of “when the cheese melts”.

And there was only one really acceptable kind of cinema food when we were tired of gummy worms and Cheezles: pizza buns, torn into halves like a hamburger bun and filled with so many Lays chips we could barely fit it them in our mouths for bites. There was no way to consume them in a civilized manner. We’d come out of the cinema sheepishly brushing crushed chips off our clothes but looking satisfied. Really the only place we could have eaten them was somewhere dark.

Ah, food: I don’t make it like I used to.

deKuypers

Posted at 13 Sep 2:58 pm. 0 comments

Ways to enjoy butterscotch liqueur:

• On the rocks.
• With Baileys/Tia Maria and milk.
• Over vanilla and chocolate fudge ice cream.
• After the port wine and cheese consumed at the end of a lovely dinner.

krabi – a review

Posted at 19 Aug 3:20 pm. 0 comments

Nopparat Thara beach

Ao Nang was, in essence, very hot (did I mention that already?) and rather more expensive than I expected, but they weren’t kidding about the beaches of pristine white sand, picturesque limestone islands and clear blue-green seas.

The heat was probably even a plus given that no fever could survive the amount of sweating it induced; mine certainly didn’t. Beginning the afternoon we touched down in Krabi, Sexybum and I ran the gamut of flu symptoms: fever, chills, body ache, headache, dizziness, sore throat, coughing and sneezing. The worst of it wore off in two days, which was ample time to appreciate the care my amazing boyfriend was giving me while feeling very under the weather himself.

Things which were good to consume:

• Grilled chicken drumsticks from roadside stalls.
• Pancakes from roadside stalls.
• Any food from Jamali’s, which is cheap and tasty… and a roadside stall. It’s situated by the road, round the corner from Ao Nang beach, next to a stall which sells drinks at night.
• Coconuts, and anything in a coconut. Coconut shakes? Yum. Coconut coolers? Wonderful. If they put pig’s blood in a coconut I’d probably drink it too.
• Alcohol in buckets.

Alcohol in buckets. No, I still haven’t gotten over it.

Usually the list of edible local goodies is longer, eg. Hanoi where mouth-watering delights await around every corner, literally. This time, due to where we were we simply couldn’t find any local dives, we couldn’t get around that easily or we just weren’t up to looking. We did discover a no-no though: bottled alcohol made locally. Our last two nights there we celebrated with bottles of Thailand-made Bacardi Breezers and Espy cocktails. The following mornings we woke up with headaches and aching eyes. The local alcohol is seriously dodgy.

A brilliant warning.  Also notable is the blue tsunami-exit-that-way sign above it. I’d have assumed “RUN AWAY FROM THE GREAT BIG WAVE!” was only common sense.

I normally micro-plan everything, but this time I didn’t even know where I’d be sleeping that night. Given that unpreparedness and our health we had a really good time, but I’d go back again because for those exact same reasons we didn’t cover as much as I’d have liked to. We slummed it a bit but for the most part rolled with the mainstream tourist crowd – it seemed inevitable. Everywhere we went the streets were swarmed with Caucasian tourists, which meant that local traders used to conversion rates about 40-60 times higher than their own currency were naturally going to hike their prices up.

Conversely, we saw some of these tourists haggle over already cheap items, or things that were non-negotiable – bus fare, for instance. Proving once again that common sense is a rare commodity all over the world.

I leave you with a photo of a fighter’s legs looking cool.

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