Raining Chaos

Category: Random

  • Cooofffeeeee?

    Dear diary,

    Today was a good day. I got up early to make dashi broth so that I could get a pandan infusion going. Then I went to Bar 9 where Ian greeted me and gave me some guest coffee: Honduras Las Moras CoE#4 2014 roasted by Nozy Coffee and described how it was roasted a little darker but not charry. I liked it. I want to go to Japan again. I then chose Bolivia Estanislao Pununi because I really liked it when Artificer made it. Still as sweet and bright, I really like this Bolivian coffee.

    Then I shopped and came home, realised I had way too much watercress and snow pea tendrils because all I wanted was two “arching” tendrils with pretty leaves for the dish I was going to make.

    I marvelled at the 200g sashimi grade Port Lincoln blue fin tuna I bought for $79.99/kg and was very glad I chose that over the standard cuts of yellowfin tuna; there was a marbling to the flesh that made it taste great!

    I cut up a lot of fish and made dashimaki tamagoyaki for the first time. It was a bit too sweet and kept breaking up when I tried to roll it, but the texture was there even though it was a chaotic swirl rather than orderly swirl. It also offset the fish very nicely in the chirashi that I made.

    My knifework isn’t great but I’ll keep working on it.

    My food actually tasted as good as it looked today, which was better than last week where it tasted worse than it looked.

    I’m thinking about buying truffle next week for a beef tartare and call the dish “black gold” because I had this hilarious and useless idea to add gold leaf to a truffled beef tartare. I think it’s too over the top, so I probably won’t do it.

    Then I went to my favourite cafe where I was so tired from so much food making that I couldn’t remember what I ordered. It was the house blend espresso. It explains why the Pedra Redonda tasted so different when I was given that after my first drink. I was surprised because I hadn’t ordered it, but I was thankful and appreciative because I was thinking of a second coffee. Then I was asked how much coffee I can drink, to which I replied a lot even though I recently broke my coffee immunity. I do believe I actually still have most of that immunity.

    I was then given two more coffees; I was essentially cleaning up their batch brew at closing time. One was an Ethiopia Aramo from Monastery Coffee which reminded me of the “sunniest” Yirgacheffes I’ve had. It was bright and fresh and smelled great. The other was the Santa Isabel which did pale a little in comparison.

    I am also proud of the chicken livers on toast I made for dinner. They were a bit bleedy so I didn’t eat it all, but the bits that I did eat were yummy.

    Now it’s bed time. I have to make azuki bean smash tomorrow morning and buy milk to make a matcha panna cotta.

  • Vivid Sydney

    I remember every time Vivid was on, I’d be walking through the city thinking, “oh, it’s that light show event again.” This was the first time I decided to actually go look at everything, plus, I think I now understand how my camera works to take night shots. Also, with my camera and my phone synced, I could use the remote shutter to take steady pictures of things by placing my camera in awkward places! For example, there was one where I was holding the camera with my back to the actual building on display, but since I could see the view with my phone, I managed to take clear pictures!


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  • Gilgamesh in Sydney

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  • Sydney 2015

    Now that I’ve gotten most of the restaurants and cafes out of the way, it’s time to blog about everything else that happened in Sydney!


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  • Sydney Coffee Rush 2015

    Yep, a rush, not a crawl. Though I couldn’t actually rush because I was a little too enthusiastic about coffee, and managed to poison myself on my very first day of adventure! That was not only embarrassing as I couldn’t finish a meal at my favourite soba restaurant, but also had to battle to not collapse in the middle of nowhere!

    That aside, I think I will write this up by cafe in no order except in which they appear in my uploads!


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  • Burj Khalifa

    Ah, the Burj Khalifa. It stands out so much in Dubai due to its sheer height, especially in contrast with the neighbouring buildings. I admit I underestimated the number of visitors somewhat, as I was surprised when the 7PM tickets were sold out by the time my session had started at 5PM, but I’m very glad that I bought the tickets in the morning to secure a trip to the top.


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  • Farewell Cape Town, Hello Dubai, Welcome Home

    This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!

    In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!

    A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.

     
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  • All that is posh, hipster, pretentious and classy

    It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.

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  • Happy Easter, etc

    I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!

    In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:

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  • Not a normal superpower dream

    My crazy dreams are back for the time being, but not quite the same as they used to be. I love my save the world with superpowers dreams, but haven’t had any in a long time.

    At least this time my superpowers were back. Well, it wasn’t actually me. I was more of a spectator that shared the same space and consciousness as the person in my dream. It was a character who wanted to run away from his city, because people were trying to kill him. He had to sneak out of his apartment, avoid a lady who was walking toward the apartment, avoid alerting or running into the police, and avoid a massive bomb to escape.

    So he ran. The first time, the lady spotted him and then called the police. He managed to run down one street before pretty much ending up exactly where some policemen were stationed, so that was the end of that. The dream “whited out” and the scenario reset.

    Next attempt, he decided he would shapeshift into a cat to be silent and to better evade the lady at the apartment. This worked out much better – though from his perspective there was still what felt like an audible thump as he jumped down a set of stairs and proceeded to dash in the opposite direction from the previous scene, and once he felt relatively safe, he transformed back into a human. He was on the left side of a river that ran through the city, when he passed a pole that lit up with red when he passed it – which happened to be the trigger for a bomb going off in the distance – but close enough that he would be caught in the blast. Once again, the scenario reset.

    Third time, he again escaped as a cat and this time ran on the right side of the river, far away enough so that he wouldn’t trigger the sensor. But… a bigger bomb went off. A white wash again, and now I returned to my real self, in front of a witch-like lady, who held a tiny half robotic man in her hand. She explained that he never did make it, and that it was all a dream – at which point I was thinking “wow this is such a bad ending to a story”

    And that was pretty much it. How random! For once the super powers in my dream were being used to unsuccessfully escape. I hope I do get another save the world dream in the future!