Since we don’t live by politics alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
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Frist!
Spent most of the day discovering yet again that prevarication is the only thing that you can never put off until later.
Discovered the recipe for Matcha Floaters.
Catching up on emails, filing away correspondence etc.
Dealing with an over-supply of food shopping because the expected visitors from interstate are not arriving until Thursday. White beans cooked and frozen, ditto some salt cod which had been soaked ready to cook. Both handy things to have in the freezer. Two large chickens chopped into pieces yields a Sri Lankan curry ala Charmaine Solomon, a chicken paprika and a pot of delicious chicken stock with enough white meat leftover to provide a hearty chicken soup later this week. All this means I won’t have to spend too much time in the kitchen when my friends do arrive. Thank goodness I had tons of room in the freezer.
Right now there is a shoulder of lamb in the oven for this evening’s roast meal and an overdose of meat.
Best of all from my point of view is the large basket of beautiful fruit which I can now gobble down mostly on my own over the next few days.
There is a heat wave in Japan at the moment. Today is the 14th consecutive day that Osaka is over 35C, the longest period since records began 150 years ago. Beppu is slightly cooler, but still quite horrible, and I’m thoroughly sick of it.
So I’m spending this weekend finding ways to stay inside in the cool, trying to convince myself that having the air-con on all day long is cheaper than just spending the day in cafes.
Also I’m baby-minding my kitten, who is still injured and on restricted-movement orders, but when he plays he plays like the feral cat he was – all teeth and claws and rapid movement.
I have spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about the meal my wife and I enjoyed Thursday night at 1918 Restaurant, Tanunda in the Barossa Valley, the occasion being another wedding anniversary. I had the Lamb, my wife had the Pork Belly Confit. It was right up there with our favorite dining out experiences.
ah the Barossa… my partner just returned to Japan from Adelaide and brought with her a whole bunch of Maggie Beer-type pastes and some Dukkah, which so reminds me of the joys of food in Adelaide… she also brought back a 4 pack of flavoured tuna tins (you can’t get them here, and I think they’re awesome). It’s a type of food that’s really hard to find in Japan, and reminds me of just how good Aussie cuisine is!
Went to visit my 89- and 90- year old Mum and Dad. The Mum made an absolutely kickarse coconut milk and vegetable soup which she pinched from a nephew. The noughties way of intergenerational cooking!
Part of this very nice relaxed afternoon was (1) going to check out the room we’re using for Dad’s 90th next month, and (2) being stepped through various folders and filing cabinet drawers: Mum is Setting their Affairs in Order. This was confronting, but it’s good that it’s done and we know what to do When. [Blub]
@sg,
I thought you were supposed to eat the tuna, not the tins! (out of curiosity, what flavour are the tins?)
Helen,
My mum’s doing much the same thing, and she’s only 80.
Asking us to put our names on the backs of the things that we would like to have after she’s given a couple of pennies to Charon for her passage on his boat.
It is rather confronting. Aren’t one’s parents supposed to live forever?
terangeree, I have copper, brass, antimony, and mouldy-metal-from-the-back-of-the-fridge (my favourite).
Actually lemon and pepper, red curry, and two types of sundried tomato. Yum!
You can’t get tins of flavoured tuna like this in the UK or Italy or Japan, though in each country there is one non-oil flavour (chili I think in the UK, and tomato in Italy). In Japan the only flavoured tinned fish is saba or sanma (herring and pilchard, maybe? – anyway, dark oily fish) boiled in miso. I learnt an excellent recipe using a tin of miso saba, rice, sesame sauce and cucumber, but it still ends up tasting of dark oily fish with crunchy bones. I’m kind of astounded that a country with such an obsession with fish hasn’t thought of expanding its tuna range…
Just back from taking the dogs to Riverside Park (Bayswater, Perth, WA). They could go and go and go and go but I was exhausted.
We did go to Maggie Beer’s and I bought a Pheasant liver pate which was under $10 but they wrapped it up with ice for the 1hr trip home. Felt a little guilty for not buying more after that. I recommend Maggie Beer’s Pheasant Liver Pate! (guilt gone)
Just cooked up a nice bream that I caught last night.
Grilled with lemon & butter, alongside mediterrannean vege couscous & green beans. Yes, I cheated on the couscous (pre-packaged).
Another bream I caught has been filleted and is in the freezer.
Media_tracker I have just cooked a kick-arse Charmaine Solomon Sri Lankan Pork Curry for which I am famous. This one wasn’t as good as usual. Upon analysis its because I didn’t add extra tumeric, cumin and coriander.
Stu’s bream sounds very nice.
Hot chocolate at Cocos.
You shouldn’t have asked, tigtog.
#1 – food,
#2 – food,
#3 – avoiding heatwave,
#4 – food
#5 – food
#6 – food
#7 – food
#8 – see #6
#9 – food
#10 – dog races
#11 – food
#12 – food
#13 – food
#14 – food
I think food was on the plate of events today.
Radish green saag,
Matter Batata
a kurma, and
delhi-style curry eggs
After my recent Italian jag it’s nice to come back to some spices, again.
Also apropos for the post I did on Tor.com this week about orientalism.
It’s amazing what we eat – what a rundown!
Tonight we entertained the neighbours with chilli mussels and a Morrocan style chicken dish.
All so easy to make from scratch and delicious.
Pity it’s a Sunday night, so off to board shortly.
… and all I had was pea soup.
Out of a tin.
Slept in,
Ignored Insiders.
The world passed me by.
Made yogurt.
sg @ 5 & 9 I was not keen on tinned tuna until I discovered the flavoured varieties several years ago. Lime & Cracked Black Pepper was my top favourite but Greenseas seem to have discontinued that combo. Aldi’s Portview Lime and Pepper is quite a good substitute. My other favs are John West Sweet Seeded Mustard and Sundried Tomato & Basil and Greenseas Smoked and Spicy Chilli.
The Tomato and the Chilli ones are a great standby with pasta, olives and parmesan cheese. The mustard and the smoked varieties are great on either multi-grain bread or rye. Lime and Pepper is great with cold pasta or noodles.
Actually, its probably a good thing that these flavoured tuna varieties are not more widely available. I just went to both the Greenseas and the John West websites to check their tuna list because I was sure that I have seen a Japanese style flavour at my local Coles Supermarket. My search eventually led me to a Greenpeace list ‘Out of Stock, Out of Excuses: How Australian Supermarkets stack up on Tuna sustainability. http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/australia/resources/reports/overfishing/cannedtuna-050310.pdf Greenseas head the list of those with most sustainable practices with Coles Home Brand and Aldi’s Portview listed at Nos 2 & 3. John West come in at No 7 of 10 brands.
Sorry to throw a dampener on your new taste delight. I’ll have to find a substitute for my Sundried Tomato & Basil now.
Quiet weekend. Spent most of my time taking notes from James Thacher’s A Military Journal, Sylvia R. Frey’s The British Soldier in America. Started reading Alan Frost’s The Global Reach of Empire. Been meaning to read it for several years, finally got a copy.
Insider’s was sane. Is this a sign of the new paradigm, or did the RWDBs refuse to participate in case they joined the list of Coalition backers upsetting the 3 amigos? Watched Gracie last night. A bit disappointing.
Food was highly unimaginative, Chacken stir fry with honey soy sauce (out of the packet, of course), on a bed of white rice, boiled.
Laundry, laundry and more laundry.
Teething toddlers that cry lots in the morning can have bubbly days.
The Hbomb’s fav flavoured tuna is Puttanesca, a secret history of sex work every time i go to the shops.
I cannot tell if this stats course, for behavioral sciences, is easy or hard. i do well in the pop quizzes, but have a lot of difficulty figuring out why. my admiration for the pseuphs has risen somewhat.
Eclectic@15 points to the many posts about food. Food is the great communicator, a form of communication which this country has not embraced to any great extent until recent times. It was the French philosopher, Brillat-Savarin, who reportedly stated “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are”. Big statement and one that is still debated fiercely to this day in the field of gastronomy.
I think it is no surprise really that on a Lazy Sunday our thoughts turn more inwardly and we seek to communicate using an important code to tap into memory and history via food reminisces. The link to the Greenpeace item serves to remind how highly political questions around food practices and sustainability really are.
Monday’s my Sunday, so I’m making a chicken and mushroom pie while trying to deaden my drum room for some home recording, and installing a curtain or two.
Radish green saag eh Patrick? Just so happens I let a couple of radishes go on too long for a tender bulb – now they’re like 4ft tall shrubs. I’ll be trying that for sure.
I haven’t tried it yet, FBD, cause I do all my cooking for the week on sunday afternoon, but fyi it’s 50/50 spinach and radish, apparently the radish greens can stil have a peppery flavour. I shall report back with my results, I reckon you could push it higher!
Bathed an elderly and incontinent guinea pig and moved my chook dome. Helped the boys to plant radish initials. Ate fresh peas, straight off the vine.
Friend’s for lunch and lazing about Saturday arvo. V enjoyable, particularly with sunshine, labradors and magpies popping in to see if there was anything they could freeload.
Yesterday spent roasting bones to make soup to be blitzed for the husbandy substance, who has had to have false fangs installed due to a combination of 30+ years of heavy smoking, type 2 diabetes, jaw bone degeneration and gum disease (no doubt attributable to all of the preceding).
Tonight we try blitzed snags and mashed veg using blitzed soup as the moistening agent. Boys and I munching with proper teeth.
“I reckon you could push it higher!”
I have enough to experiment a little, plus silverbeet and warrigal greens to move the flavours around this way and that, so I’ll approach with caution. Let me know how the 50/50 goes.
Lunch at an outdoor place that could manage to do a fair Welsh rarebit, with some funky unexpected variations. Flirted with the delightful waitress… there remains within our much-degraded Kosmos a supple and exquisite art to flirting with a waitress, without making rude and annoying presumptions, which still cosmically (as Gram Parsons would say) flatters the Genius of both sexes.
And now as I type this I’m listening to Her Majesty Emmylou Harris singing “Waltz Across Texas” — which has I believe some small thing to do with the genius of Welsh rarebit…
“stars from stars”
– (the late Jim Carroll)
…Sleep; sleep and dream of poetry, magic Jim.
I’ll tell yez a particular thing… I’ve literally (at least in some very small fraction) waltzed across Texas. I encourage my esteemed Commonwealth confreres here to at some point take the trouble to waltz across Australia.
Ye’ll be glad ye did.
I’ve been listening to Her Majesty sing From Boulder to Birmingham.
FDB – 50/50 was suprisingly peppery! I reckon you could push it to 60/40 but any higher would be too much, methinks. Maybe try 50/50 first…
FDB @ 24 Egg cartons make great soundproofing.