So it turns out it’s not a good idea to watch a lot of shows with men in shiny suits, because spending money on suits as a hobby turns out to be really, really expensive! It also means I’ve acquired skills that I can’t really use myself. It turns out there are only 85 ways to tie a tie, so I should learn what the shorthand means and memorise them all, not.
So here’s a shiny dump plus a gigantic burger called the Big Moo from Moo Burgers. I wish I had better lighting but THIS IS ALL YOU GET.
La Syndra – Made with Real, Love and Violent
Sounds like a great clothing brand! Ristrel, Reine, wear La Syndra. In fact that is such a good idea, I’ll make it! Or some variation thereof. Yeah.
“Food can taste ‘photoshopped’ when it’s not made with real, love and violent”
Best way to describe overprocessed or bad takeaway food. Yesssssss’
I love terrible Engrish taglines, because I am just so good at making them.
Also for the world of memes, an obscure in joke that in good time, will be but a distant memory, its meaning transformed from what it was into an epic story of monsters and war: “LIME HARVESTER? THEY’RE FOR GOING BACK IN TIME TO FETCH BUTTER OFF TREES”
That is all!
Random post is random
GOOD NIGHT
So on my bucket list, not that I have an actual bucket list, but just fun things I should do, there is of course, going to a concert.
My ears are still ringing.
I almost lost my voice.
I was borderline dehydrated.
But wow it was a lot of fun and made me feel young again 🙂
I personally think Linkin Park is fun, so I regretted not going in 2010. I certainly wasn’t going to make that mistake again! And I’d want to go to their future concerts now. It was great and the crowd was nicer than I thought. Plus, by being in the second “row” from the front on the floor, I got full view of their awesomeness. Plus, the people at the front squirted free water! I didn’t bother getting any but of course, me being me, I did get a bit woozy from dehydration, but that was minor and I think like a rat, so all was good.
They played a mixture of all their albums and I just wished I went to their Meet and Greet – I will be sure to do so next time! They sound so different, I almost didn’t recognise their voices! But then again I’m silly like that. My camera fared better than I thought, so a lot will now be picture spam with varying degrees of blur!
Last part of my cooking adventures! My team gave me a techniques cookbook as a going away present so that makes me happy – I love it because techniques are much more valuable than any old recipe.
Anyway, so in my last weeks of Adelaide here’s some things I’ve whipped up.
I wanted to have a go at pickling, so I bought some carrots, apple cider vinegar, pickling spice mix, garlic, onions, and some chilli. I mixed this all in various quantities, and added salt and sugar to taste. I don’t think I got it quite right however it was still very tasty.
I also cut my carrots all different ways in case one was more visually appealing. Plus julienning is SKILL. Then I would also have carrots for some fantastic salad. I love making salad with access to a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables because it makes for incredibly varied salad.
Let’s get the random out of the way first. With three weeks to go, I had decided I do indeed need to get inspiration while I’m here. Sure, I cook amazing stuff, but I need to recalibrate what I think is amazing – so I booked a degustation with Celcius, apparently one of Adelaide’s top restaurants. From my research, the head chef there used to work in Noma and Marque and a few others I don’t remember off the top of my head. They do, essentially, modern Australian/Contemporary cuisine, which always causes me to giggle as the term is rather akin to what the English language actually is – a mash of other things all in one.
First, a picture of some new flower jars at Argo on the Square! I really liked the purple-ness.
Virtual Valentine
Pomegranate and rose water, coconut and orange blossom water jelly – raspberry sorbet – mint – pistachio crumbs
2 months in Adelaide, and three posts about my cooking! If all goes well there might be a part 4 as I really want to make kingfish ceviche, but alas no kingfish fillets yet! I may consider buying a whole fish…
Anyway, so I’m finding that I’m actually getting bored of cooking, not because of the cooking itself, but trying to find inspiration for new experiments (dishes). I’ve gone through so many different animals/meats that I’m running out of proteins to play with. I’m deliberately avoiding quail because I have no way to debone it.
Instead of boring text, onto pictures! Since I’ve moved apartments I’ve had to transition from gas to electric cooking with mixed results (undercooking kangaroo), but for the most part I still have some magical godlike luck/ability to make fantastic, medium rare meats.
Following straight off from my last cooking post, this was kangaroo with leftover zucchini flower. I had two that I accidentally damaged so I figured they’d look just as good as petals.
So I’ve been reading back on my past blogs and it turns out I blog about my dreams! I figured this one is blog worthy too.
It all started when a bunch of friends and myself were asked to save the world from a big evil doom (not sure if those last three words strung together make sense). As my weapon, I took my violin bow. Not the violin, just the bow. If I waved it around, then it became deadly somehow, except that I didn’t tighten my bow because apparently it had to be left loose, but then all my waving and whacking it about caused the hairs/strands to come loose, so then I started to tighten it.
During all this, we had to catch numerous buses and trains to where we needed to go. Luckily, one of my friends offered me a new bow that I could use, turns out she had an electric violin she didn’t use. Eventually after a lot of travel we ended up on a giant mansion-like building. In my dream the word mansion didn’t pop up – just a big house of sorts. We split up to try and find the bad guys, and for some reason I no longer had my bow.
Unlike most other “save the world” dreams, I didn’t have invisibility in this one. It was instead replaced with the ability to shapeshift – very rare for me to experience this! I could also walk through some walls, mostly glass window things though. Anyway, so I looked out of a window of this house and saw a black cat with these bright yellow eyes meowing really loudly at me. I then figured I should trick this cat, so I morphed into a black cat, walked through the window and onto the wall that the cat was on. I started pawing at this purple flower thing, and that caught the other cat’s interest. I knew that this flower was poisonous to cats but not to me, so I nibbled on a bit of it, which lead the cat to eat some too, and I must have psychically forced it to eat a bit cause then it died. And my only thought after that was “ok, now that Meowth is dead, what will Pokemon do with the series and Team Rocket???”
With the cat gone, we could now explore the rest of the house. I had two people with me and we were wondering how to defeat the bad guy. The bad guy was actually in a room that was down some stairs. He was totally calm but you could tell he knew exactly what was going on. He was in fact performing on some musical instrument to half a room of audience, and we knew that they were his henchmen. So with only three of us and about thirty of them, what were we going to do?
Sadly, that’s where my memory of my dream ended. I’m sure I never dreamed the ending either, so it will continue to be a mystery.
In other thoughts, I should create myself an “IRSC” card – which would stand for “Irresponsible service of caffeine” which would allow me to overdose myself on coffee 🙂
I love mussels, so when I found some at another seafood store, I was YES PLEASE. I didn’t even know how much to get, so I started with 250g. Turns out this is about 11-12 mussels, and never enough! However when I was reading up on how to cook them, I also grabbed a baguette and butter as a side.
I had found a few different liquids suggested, and ended up choosing water first, with some butter. I did make one afterwards with white wine, but funnily enough I preferred the one with water.
Re-doing this blog so that I can actually post progress pictures and nice photos of how my cooking went.
Part 1, my first real time actually experimenting with food. The house/cat-sitting time doesn’t really count 😛
After the ceviche, the next thing I made was tuna tataki. There’s this place called Central Markets and it’s the best place ever! There’s so many fruit and veg stalls, as well as several seafood shops. And lots of protein. Mmmm all kinds of protein!
Anyway, so having never made anything that required paying a lot of attention, I think my tataki came out very nicely. As I hadn’t explored every stall, my salad was still very basic, with quinoa everywhere!
