Jam Packed July

Is what I wanted to call the post, because it has a better ring to it than "Jam Packed June".HOWEVER since I have posted this before July, I should make it clear that I am not a time traveller... yet. So all this did not happen in July!!!As always, food is first. But this wasn't an exercise in cooking or eating, it's part of what I like to call "intense palate training" as for the coffee I drink, I cannot identify flavours within them. So, after having collected a variety of sour citrus, I ended up doing a lemon and lime taste test - to see what I could figure out.Say hello to meyer lemon, lisbon lemon, tahitian lime, keffir lime, blood lime! I stopped buying normal lemons after tasting a meyer lemon, because I perceived the meyer lemons to be sweeter. And then I saw tasting notes for a coffee that said meyer lemon... so then I wondered if you really could taste the difference between different kinds of lemons.And the insides! The lisbon lemon is your standard yellow, the meyer lemon is darker below. Ordinary lime above, keffir lime in all its wrinkly glory below, and then the obvious blood limes. That is how you identify their insides!And lo and behold, the taste test! But there are only four?!?! Left is lisbon lemon, then meyer lemon with a slightly darker colour, then lime green lime, and lastly, blood lime. The blood lime really liked to donate its little pulpy things so they went in too. First of all, I didn't have a fifth mini ramekin thing to put keffir lime juice in, and secondly, the person who sold me the lime said that it was bitter and best in curries. Could I taste a difference? Yes! Could I figure out which was which in a blind tasting? No! The meyer lemon was more.. "full bodied" than the lisbon lemon and I definitely like it better. This lime was not so sweet, and ended up tasting more sour than the lemons and didn't actually have its distinctive lime flavour. Then came the blood lime, which was less sour than a normal lime too. And I did lick the keffir, it's not actually that bitter but lends itself more to its aroma - and I wanted to make a curry after smelling it!And that was the end of me burning my tongue off with natural acid.Onto the tasty stuff! So I cured some ocean trout because the fillets were cheap, plus I've always toyed with the idea of making sake cured salmon, but I don't have the sake. So instead, I call this "viogner ocean trout with chive scrambled eggs." Oh, that's right. I have to post the picture and make it a caption!

Wine cured ocean trout with chive scrambled eggs

Okay, so it would have sounded so silly to be so specific about the wine, considering I couldn't actually taste it and I probably salted it a little too much, but it was perfect with the eggs!

And I'm not all about pretty dainty food. Matt Preston is totally right when he says you can make tasty stuff for cheap. I put some canned tomato soup with parmesan, pork and beef mince, plus kale, caulifower, carrot and capsicum and put the whole thing in a try in the oven. Smells great and will last me a week!

And I do have hobbies outside of cooking and drawing... which means too many hobbies. But here is my adorable little air plant and a bonsai fig that I bought and then placed in a terrarium jar.

PACKED FULL OF JAM

Fancy cooking? What's that?

Watching Masterchef and eating baked bean allsorts - baked beans and frankfurt, baked beans on toast, baked beans + bacon + egg bake. Oh, and some mi goreng instant noodles, why not. :)

Oz Comic Con, Benedict, Amanda, Corin, and a quartet of vocally active troublemakers and the heartless dog

Where do I start in a world where I like to begin at the beginning, where the beginning is relative to my train of thought, the view of others, my out of body view of myself and the order of events as I recall and the actual happenings. Oh and of course, my own ability to prioritise each of the events in the title.Oz Comic Con? I went for Benedict. That silly, adorkable person who is just so polite, and silly and so polite and nice.

Paying extra for the Benedict Cumberbatch Experience ticket was well worth the photo and autograph. The lines were super crazy; we had heard that he'd done 900 autographs on the Saturday alone! This was also the first time I've attended a convention to participate, rather than just walk around and take pictures of cosplayers and famous people from afar. Not only did I attend panels, but also splurged on photos and got a few autographs in the process.

First thing I noticed, was his clothing - his usual casual self. Then I noticed his hair. His hair is so wonderful! And a lovely brownish colour. He complimented me on my dress, but he did that with everyone. But he is so huggable! Hugs weren't allowed but since he had his arm on my shoulder,  I put my arm around him. So huggable! Huggable and adorable! I think I confused him a lot by talking about yellow cars for all of ten seconds during the autograph lineup though. And I forgot to check his socks!!!

Well worth it just to have the photo and autograph - it was definitely a once in a lifetime experience! Plus seeing him in real life pulling a deaded fly out of his wine during his panel was hilarious.

However, while I was disappointed in missing out on paying $200 to have an exclusive meet and greet - I mean DINNER - with Benedict, it turns out the future had a much better plan for my friends and I. As the most enigmatic and fortuitous events unfolded to present my friends with an awful unkempt apartment, so they rebooked at the Hilton. So after a day half-filled with waiting, we returned to the hotel only to find Mike McFarland, Corin Nemec and Sean Schemmel in the foyer! We politely greeted them and promised not to tell anyone about their whereabouts, before heading up to our room.

Now I had attempted to book a table at Press Food & Wine for Saturday only for their tables to be booked out - which meant we had to take our chances on the lower, walk-in only floor. My friend was hyper-alert, as her reason for visiting was for Todd Haberkorn, and luckily I'd watched some Soul Eater to gain some context as to what he had worked in. So there we were, entering the restaurant when my friend pointed out that they were sitting right there!!! Sean, Mike and Todd having dinner, IN FRONT OF WHERE WE WERE STANDING. They were full at that time, so we were taken to their bar to wait for a call. And when we did eventually get one, we walked back in to see three sets of cutlery next to the group of celebrities.

Then lo and behold, we were seated next to them! They remembered us from the foyer and said hi to us and we had a short conversation about how amazing Adelaide food is. I also mentioned to Sean that Press Food & Wine is so good, that I take all my friends there. What turned into a day at Comic Con turned into a dinner with voice actors at the communal table. It was the best ever! We kept to ourselves for the most part, and as they left (since they started and finished before us), they expressed their appreciation for us (as fans), and from my friend's response of her admiration of Todd, he gave her a high five!

Who needs to spend money to have dinner with famous people when all the pieces just fall together perfectly :) And by perfect I meant that we headed back to the hotel after dinner and eyed them from afar at the bar, as the finishing touch to the night.

The other highlights included finally meeting Amanda Tapping and Corin Nemec. I had missed an opportunity with Amanda back when I was young, so I definitely didn't want to miss out again. They were awesome people too!

So high was the awesomeness factor that we went back again the next day to get a photo taken with all four of them. We'd bought so many tokens that we ended up getting three photos with Sean, Todd, Mike and Rob Paulsen - a normal photo and two silly photos, which we then got signed, again with some silliness included.

I did feel sorry for Benedict because of how much he had to go through - all those fans, all those photos, and all those photographs. He'd stayed back on the Saturday till 7PM and was half an hour late to his own meet and greet (the con finished at 6PM both days). I love his dedication.

However, the whole weekend reinforced my own desire for narcissism. Why pursue normal people who are just more well known than everyone else? Hence, I want to aspire to be myself - a self that is a combination of all my experiences and what I see to be my future. Or something. I want to be the most famous person to me!

Why is the heartless dog also featured? Nevermind me, that was but a dream of a dog whose heart was ripped out from its chest. Had to write it down so as not to forget. I think the closest description would be a long haired golden retriever. Teehee!

Running, jumping, and vivid succulent trees

Every now and again, I get my weird, random dreams that I actually remember in enough detail that I can actually blog about it like an epic story. And when I get really lucky, it comes illustrated!Turns out dreaming can really tire you, especially if you spend 2-3 dream hours running away from what you think are bad guys, but you're not really sure because it's not explained in your dream why they're chasing you, your friend simply says so, and they're waving guns about, so you may as well run for your life.In my case, I was with a friend and we were getting ready to be in a play. First we're getting our costumes ready, next we're sitting in the audience, staring at an empty stage waiting for things to happen. My friend got up and started walking off, and indicated for me to do the same. I was confused, but followed her lead. It turns out she just wanted to escape, so we spent the first part of our night out on the streets, just walking about, when I came across a succulent tree. With chunky, triangular leaves and bright orange and red flowers as big as my hand, the branches weighed down from all the water in the leaves, enough that the flowers were within my reach. I also wanted to take a cutting so I could grow them at home. I reached out, plucked one, but then found that the entire tree was infested! White caterpillars and a bright green gummy worm (yes, a gummy worm) were all over my flower, so I threw it back on the ground. I had no time to be disappointed as some mysterious guy started walking towards us - possibly a council worker or something, so my friend and I quickly disappeared.

Then we were returning back to the building where the play was being held, and noticed only a couple of silhouettes in the doorway. It turned out that rehearsal had finished, and so everyone was leaving. This was apparently a very bad thing, as my friend then told me the whole thing was a trap and to run for it. As with all stories, the silhouettes of the guys turned and saw us. Time to run! We ran through the parking lot, hiding behind cars while these people looked for us. We managed to circle around them and get ourselves out of the carpark, only to run for our lives.I got separated from my friend, and had to make my own way to... well, I don't know. I was just running. I managed to run into a hairdresser's that was still open at some ungodly hour, and I have no idea why I decided to hide there. But alas, it was a trap! They were after me too! This time with guns! So I jumped a table and ran for it. There was also at some point another shadowy figure also pointing a gun at me from a distance, though I knew they were too far away to get a good aim, so I ran. A lot of running!But it turns out I had done this twice, the first running away was a lot smoother than the second as I had more hiccups and run-ins with the bad guys, so by the end of it (whatever that was), I was reunited with my friend in some empty street, next to a postbox and a lamp post. Along came Fusco, a character from Person of Interest, who told us then that we could lock in whichever experience we wanted with a handheld video capturing device.The end!Then I woke up and realised that the dream kept me in bed for longer than I wanted! What a cruel dream, to leave me exhausted for a fun day at work :)

Snobbery snob snob

So the other day, I met my first real snob. Not just a pretend snob, or wannabe snob, this was an absolutely real, fully fledged snob, and it was an amazing experience.Basically, I was frequenting my cafe, sitting at the communal table eating waffles, and eventually the barista asked me how my coffee was. The person diagonally opposite me then got asked the same thing. Due to my response (which was usually some panicked survival instinct kicking in to help me describe my coffee in the hopes of not sounding like I have no clue), he started talking to me. It always starts out the same, "so you like coffee?" which then turned into a very interesting conversation.I was explaining that I love coffee because of the flavours and that it's interesting to drink, and then he mentioned how he liked places that serve consistently good coffee - that it was important for him that a cafe had a solid house blend. Actually, my memory is no better than it was before so he could have just as easily meant that as long as a place had a solid coffee, then that was what mattered. I then discovered that he used to also live in Sydney for a bit, and wait for it... he thought everyone on the south side of the bridge was scum! At this mention I realised I was talking to a very interesting kind of person. He then went on to say that  the Melbournian coffee scene was getting boring as it was all the same thing, that the cafe culture was so established that while you go there to get good coffee, you don't go there for a surprise.Going on from there, we then discovered we both work in nerdy jobs and had another common talking point! Again, very strong opinions, most of which make sense and some which were very subjective. Being in a job where everything was maths and computers, he valued artsy friends highly and said that it was great, even vital, to have arts/music people to hang out with in a very technology related environment. He then mentioned that he was writing about cafe culture and I commented about how he still used pen and and notebook, and there, another point of mutual agreement that the core of creativity comes from the motion of pen to paper.His observations included his opinion that the Adelaide coffee scene was not yet refined enough, that most patrons were too loud and made the atmosphere akin to that of pubs. He believed that communal tables were for solitary people who read, worked or were on their phones, and that noisy/chatty people were to sit outside or facing the window/wall. He was very adamant about this. While I didn't judge his comments, I did say things that showed I had a different opinion, and that's when he confirmed he was a snob, and all his friends knew this. He'd often be told that he was a snob and he admitted to it and it was something he was completely comfortable with.It was fun having that length of conversation with him, as I'm generally terrible with conversation, however I love when I meet new people. It's always interesting and I didn't mind one bit that he was a snob. I think that's how we talked about so much , cause the whole time I was thinking, wow, that's some extreme snobbery right there, but he was confident and comfortable in his own skin and that's all that matters.And hence, my very first encounter with a real snob! Very exciting and enlightening indeed.