Only took me about… 7 years? to actually finally pay attention and try it out.
Yeah ok, I was only supposed to “experiment” with $1000 but I got too curious and excited haha.
Success!! Except I guess now it’s all gonna go downhill, cause that’s how shares work, amirite? 😀
I wanted to make some earl grey and rosewater panna cotta, and then garnish it with blueberries, blackberries and some sort of green leafy thing – I was thinking shiso rather than mint. But I didn’t want to spend money or time buying rosewater and shiso, so I used what I had instead – which was dried rose petals from a shopping spree ages back, to give the rose aroma without needing rosewater. I can’t figure out how to homogenise the panna cotta yet though, I always get the separation….
And I’m still deliberately destroying them through Photoshop 🙂
Attempting a “rant” for a few reasons. The two main reasons are: practising actually writing things, and because I’ve been reading articles about influencers and “Instagram-worthy” cafes/restaurants.
Today I read an article about how chefs feel about Instagram, and how a fair few actually now have presentation at the forefront of their minds when creating menus. They commented that they’ve received feedback that customers would see their dish online and that’s how they chose whether or not to go to a restaurant, or, upon receiving a menu, would check Instagram for how the dishes looked, before deciding what to eat. Then I stumbled across a post where a cafe had a tagline of having “Instagrammable interiors”. Then there’s also a restaurant critic’s humorous posts about “influencers who ask for free stuff”.
Really?
I love being a hypocrite. I really do, and I think it’s human nature. I love sometimes feeling superficial and ordering a milk coffee simply because I want some pretty latte art. I like seeing pretty food at cafes and restaurants. I like making stupidly pretty food too.
I also avoid spoilers (I didn’t actively look for reviews and pictures in anticipation of Noma Australia, or Attica. I’m also not researching the big-name restaurants I’ve planned to book this year) where I can because I want to be surprised and really get to know a place by living it instead of just seeing it. I still love talking to waitstaff and baristas because you get great info that way. I love reading menus and imagining what the flavours and textures look like. I don’t want to know what it looks like most of the time. I just hope it’s nicely presented.
There’s always going to be a group of influencers who get stuff for free, and maybe even get special plating for their food. But for chefs to almost need to make their dishes instagrammable just so that their restaurants can fill tables? I appreciate that it’s a good move for restaurants to stay alive, but it sounds more and more like restaurants are being pressured to make pretty food or no one will go. That’s kind of sad.
Maybe I should start up an exercise in writing about stuff instead of taking pictures. I guess that’s what restaurant critics do, and sounds like a major challenge, especially in this day and age! But I like taking pictures. Maybe that’s why magazines like Drift exist? Recipe books are pretty picture-heavy too, but the last one I read, A Very Serious Cookbook, was super enjoyable because it talked about the history of the chefs of Contra/Wildair and how they interacted with each other, and how their restaurants evolved. That was the really exciting stuff!
I guess I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, enjoying the best of both the digital and non digital worlds 😀
YAY rant over
So I just looked back at my 2017 post, and it was so detailed! My 2018 post will have considerably less content, but I think that’s because a lot of it is really the same food, just slightly different.
I spent heavily on non-food activities in 2018 and I’ve got some very extravagant travel plans for 2019, so I tried to stick to a small, sensible budget of $200 on top of my normal weekly food spend. Me being me though, I ended up spending about $400… whooops!
So where did all that money go?
YAY I started this who knows how long ago, and managed to come back to it and finish before the end of the year 😀
2 island victory:
Definitely not as “hard” as FTL: Faster than Light… but still super difficult, fun and frustrating!!!
Man I love their games!
When life throws change, you catch it and run with it! I was originally supposed to go to Melbourne this December, but things decided to take a different turn, so instead of meeting my parents there, they flew over to Perth for a weekend. The biggest challenge was that I was instructed specifically not to involve food and coffee. Well… considering I know nothing else, what was I going to show my parents as “fun things to do in WA”?
A lot of what they wanted to do was undoable without a car – such as a Margaret River tour. However, I was lucky enough to discover a tour bus in the Swan Valley which could cover Caversham Wildlife Park as well as a wine and beer tour! That sounded like fun! My parents also wanted to “catch the famous Perth ferry” which I assumed was Rottnest since that’s what you take the ferry for as a tourist.
It turned out to be a great time, even with some last minute itinerary changes and my limited knowledge of how to do an actual “Perth tour” of Perth. (more…)
Dear diary,
I went to my work’s Christmas party, for the first time in a few years. It actually turned out to be a fun one, because the meat and cheese platter was very good! The other food was pretty average though, so I didn’t eat any of that except for what I thought was an omelette, which actually turned out to be cold, almost soggy polenta 🙁
The meat and cheese was very good because it featured King Island Dairy – specifically their Stormy Washed Rind, which is absolutely lovely, as well as one of their blue cheeses. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Roaring Forties because that stuff is deliciously strong, whereas this one was more creamy? Plus not only did they have prosciutto, but also serrano! I love serrano more than prosciutto.
The most fun part was that I learned how to gamble! We were handed play money as soon as we entered, and I got shown the roulette table, which got boring pretty quickly. The other table, was blackjack. The croupier taught me how to play but alas, I couldn’t count!!! Years of not needing to do any mental arithmetic meant that I couldn’t even add up card numbers, so they had to tell me what my cards were adding to every time. It even got to the point where the croupier tested me and asked me to say what value I had!!!
It was way fun though. I think because it has some probability theory involved, plus everyone at the table was super fun and friendly, so I kept losing all my chips 😀 Not sure how others were winning though! Plus there were way more rules than I could understand at the time, like what the dealer has to do if they hit certain values etc.
YAY I LEARNED SOMETHING that is not safe to do in real life cause I’d turn into an addict lol
