Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Belatedly, welcome to the Year of the Pig!
Galaxy has a neat post up about her take on the celebrations in Brisbane’s Chinatown. Anyone else want to report on any festivities (or delicacies) sampled?
Update: Great photo/vid post from David J at Brisbane is Home.
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Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
On Saturday night, nine of us (4 adults, 5 kids) went to a Chinese restaurant in Blacktown. It was for a birthday celebration, though it also happened to be Chinese New Year. We got there early and were lucky enough to see a fireworks celebration and a lion dance. The kids sifted through the mounds of red paper left after the firecrackers had gone off and they found two unexploded firecrackers which they kept for later.
The restaurant was packed, mostly with Chinese families, but fortunately we had booked a table for 7.30pm. We spoke to three waiters, each of whom promised to find another waiter to take our orders, but after an hour we had received no service, so we all got up and left. We joked about how we had spared the kids seeing a live lobster get killed, but really we were very upset at the lack of service.
We were all desperate to get something to eat, and we were thinking especially of the kids who were getting very fidgetty. Fortunately there was a grill nearby which took us in. The waitress was very pleasant, and we started off with garlic bread, but unfortunately, we later worked out, this was a ploy to keep us there, because they too took another hour to bring us the main courses. Two of us shared a $70 seafood platter. At the end there was a huge mound - about half a kilo - of mixed lettuce. We felt ripped off.
We were all pretty disappointed by service from both restaurants. The avarage main dish in the Chinese restaurant was about $18. The average dish in the grill was about $22. My advice to anyone dining out in Sydney - avoid Blacktown.
Curse the general fireworks bans. Two generations of children have been sadly deprived of the pleasures of demolishing the neighbours fence with a few well placed crackers (I thought this as I saw the Beijing fireworks). I waved a sparkler in the general direction of the new moon to celebrate Golden Pig year. This year though I intend to have “moon viewing noodles” every single full moon.
Working on photoblog/article vids of the Valley (Brisbane) Chinatown festivities…should be out tomorrow. Will post a link when done, and will link to Galaxy’s post - thanks for pointing it out, Kim.
In fact, you can watch the vid of the fashion parade on Saturday night now if you like. Might need to crank the volume up tho…
Did I hear someone say fireworks?
Look forward to the post, David. I meant to get down to the Valley last night but I was too knackered!
My eighth Chinese New Year since marrying into a Vietnamese-Chinese family. The food consisted of: roast pork - Chinese style (little cubes of crackling with pork attached), stuffed chicken wings (dont ask me how my sister-in-law did this, as I wasn’t there at the time), boiled free range chicken (including the feet and head), a delicious salad made of shredded chicken, daikon and carrot all sort of pickelled, and a bunch of more mundane stuff.
The highlight as usual was burning the “heaven money” and burning incense to “the ancestors”. My father died in 1982 - but my wife (who never met him) obtained a photograph, and as he is the patriarchal ancestor, he has pride of place in the family altar before which is displayed a feast of roast chicken, pork, fruit etc and several small glasses of wine. Ever since, on every Chinese New Year my agnostic Dad sits in a Confucian heaven surrounded by my wife’s monolingual Chinese and Vietnamese ancestors.
But he always loved Chinese food and his only complaint (I imagine) is the small size of the wine cups.
sheesh what are you, Landeryou? A magickal daemon like Beetlejuice? say your name once and you materialise?
Perhaps so, but Team Slanderyou and Andrew Landeryou can both keep their disputes off this thread. Thanks.
I’ll be deleting the two comments.
Jason: Yes.
Mark: He started it.
Sure, but I’ve deleted both. These sorts of stoushes are unedifying. Though I suppose they might fall under the on topic heading of fireworks. But please keep political and personal arguments away from threads like this one.
I salute your wisdom, which could only have been caused through the steady consumption of fourex over many years.
Joyous Year of Pig celebrations to all, particularly members of the SL.
Yes, while I like to think of myself as a sober (hah!) technocrat, I miss fireworks too. I think it’s an important rite of passage for any red blooded male to mess around with cheap explosives in their teens and preteens.
And bamboo cannons too. Get ‘em warmed up properly so the final chamber is hot and fuming and you can rip off a dozen bangs in even less minutes. For added impact, go Kai Viti style and wedge an overipe avocado in the front end. Like a big splattery spud gun.
Thanks for the link, Kim. I used to work in a call centre in the valley and once a year over a couple of days we had to explain to callers that, no we weren’t under attack by ninjas, but that it was the firecrackers going off for Chinese New Year to frighten away the evil spirits. And still those phones kept ringing.
At last…my article is finished. 50 photos and two videos (of mine - two other vids as well) - please enjoy.
Kirsty, did your call centre front onto the Chinatown Mall? I used to work at Stellar (paging and directory assistance) which is in the building that contains the car park.
For the stuffed chicken wings you need to remove two bones and leaves a sock of skin attached to the final wing tip.
First remove the single bone that attaches to body. Just work the meat and sking back carefully with a knife (a curved ‘ beak’ paring knife works well for this - victorinox make one for $6). Remove at the joint - you may need to cut around the joint.
Now gently work back the meat and skin around the next set of double bones by scraping with the knife. Peel it the meat and skin back until you can get at the next set of joints and remove the bones by carefully twisting and cutting.
Use the meat for a stuffing which is inserted back into the skin like a sausage and cooked with the wing tip.
David, yep, that’s the one and the very same section by the sound of it.
Oh dear…that job drove me mad…600 calls in a 6 1/2 hour shift…and people can be really ignorant when they call directory assistance!
Anthony - how did you get on to chicken wings? I mean, great instructions, but did I miss summat?
My Saturday night in Chinatown sucked fat choy I’m afraid. Got royally shunned at my regular joint with some out-of-towners. Slow service, with dishes coming out about 10 minutes apart. Had to ask 3 times for bowls and chopsticks after food started arriving. $14 for a quarter of a roast duck (normally you get 1/2) chilli squid was maybe 1/3 squid and 2/3 capsicum, pork belly was mostly those bits of shitty white cartilage.
Meanwhile, the non-gwai-lo were fawned over. Hmm…
Just being proxy for Robert Bollard’s sister-in-law FDB - haven’t descended into random culinary didacticism
yet.
Just thinking about the stuffing ingredients though. The Chinese and Japanese make stuffed chicken wings too and adjust their ingredients accordingly - it’d be nice to mess around and maybe do a sage, butter and lemon one or maybe the chicken kiev is due for an update.
Kim only just saw the update with the link to my article.
Thanks very much for that
No probs at all, David! Nice work!
Yes, very nice post indeed, David.
Congrats on the new site - good stuff.
Thanks a lot Mark!
I’m lucky I’ve got such a booming city to be blogging about…Brisbane’s going off right now.
I’m also lucky that the world of business is changing. I had to submit 3 sample articles to apply, and two of them were on Let’s Take Over.
That means I put forward a business application using articles from a site that calls for ‘kicking out the bosses and running the world ourselves’ above the fold on every page.
This is not, I understand, a tactic recommended in most guidebooks on business, but it was dealt with in a simple email exchange - as long as I don’t use it to push my political agenda (which would be silly on a mainstream site anyway), it’s all good.
So how does it work, David? Is the revenue driven by advertising?
Google Ads and Amazon affiliate links at the moment…and then see what opportunities become available by selling ads directly to businesses.
We’ve been forbidden from using pay-per-post or similar schemes, which is a smart decision I think.
You have to be picky about ads. I don’t think people resent them if they are not too obtrusive. My general strategy is “while you’re here, you might find this interesting”, and then move back to the content.
But people hate seeing friendly articles in return for an ad. If I try and pretend something is interesting when I think it isn’t, I’ll fail.
BTW I’ve found Problogger very good for advice if anyone else is interested in trying to make money blogging. I actually started reading it just for ideas on how to make Let’s Take Over more readable, without any plans for ads, but the job ad for Brisbane Is Home turned up on the job boards there.
Mark, you should think about reviewing more books that you can link to on Amazon, I think.
I guess it’s not too off topic to be talking about plans for making money at Chinese New Year…
We’re a non-profit, David.
Non-profit or non-ad? There is certainly an argument for a political site being totally ad-freee.
Both! We did try google ads at one stage, but the amount of money they brought in was so inconsequential it wasn’t worth having them.
Anthony:
Ah yes. I missed that. Carry on.
Best thing about skin-heavy dark meat (oooer) cuts is the capacity to stand up to a robust stuffing (OOOOOEEEERRRR!). Sage, lemon, butter AND garlic sounds like a good update on the Kiev. I’d be hard pressed to keep saffron out of it at the moment - a good mate gave me about 100g of it in a nifty box, and I’m going nuts.
p.s. admin-meisters - I seem to be routinely spaminated since yesterday. Was it something I said? Are-you-being-served dark meat innuendo, perhaps?