Archive for January, 2007Expect to hear the popping of champagne corks around these here parts over the coming weeks, followed by the sound of silence. The 29th of January is the first anniversary of Veggie Friendly. Ahh yes, it seems like only yesterday when I wrote my first review. To celebrate, Andy took me out to our local, Bondi Trattoria, where we had a lovely vegetarian meal and reminisced about the good times, which have included: 321 posts 7 reviewers (thanks guys) 5 different cities 84 restaurant reviews 0 defamation cases (hooray!) As if that weren’t cause enough for celebration, in two weeks time Andy and I are getting married and then jetting off to San Francisco, New York and Jamaica for our honeymoon. I’m really looking forward to the big day, but it seems there is a surprising amount of things you need to do in order to make a relationship legit. Anyway, if I’m distracted or neglectful (at least, more so than usual) it’s most likely the fault of my impending nuptials. There are a few perks to being a food blogger than you don’t expect when you’re first agonising over what witty, yet illuminating, name to give your blog. One such perk is fun, international pen pal style events where a whole bunch of food bloggers sign up to randomly send stuff to the other side of the world. Another is the guarantee of getting a Valentine’s Day card…. Anyway, such was the lure that led me to sign up to Meeta’s Blogging Postcards Around the World Valentine’s Day super special event.
This little baby is now on its way to wishing someone a very happy valentine’s day. Fingers crossed, another postcard is picking its way through the international postcard system with every intention of landing on my doorstep some time around February 14. Proving that miracles can happen, the founder of a vegetarian, coop restaurant chain in Melbourne yesterday beat the entire town of Beaconsfield to become Australia’s Local Hero of the Year. Shanaka Fernando, founder of the Lentil as Anything restaurants received the award for his successful, socially inclusive restaurant concept, where there are no prices on the menu and people pay what they can or what they think the meal is worth. He was also recognised for his work with Melbourne’s refugee community, including using his restaurants to provide training and employment opportunities. Congratulations to Shanaka and the Lentil as Anything crew on such a fabulous initiative! Apparently there’s another argument to add to the list of reasons to become vegetarian, alongside a clear conscience and lower risk of certain types of cancer. Seems vegetarians have a higher than average IQ. Sadly, it appears that becoming vegetarian doesn’t make you smarter it’s just that the lifestyle appeals to people with a higher IQ. Bummer. Moments before I went away for Christmas an exciting (and bulky!) parcel arrived on my doorstep from England. The parcel winged its way to me from the mysterious J of the Have Fork Will Travel blog. And folks, the contents were amazing… There was a tin of my favourite blend of tea (earl gray) as well as a lovely tea strainer (the like of which I’ve been coveting for some time). There were beautiful metal stars to scatter across the table, an embroidered Christmas table runner, and felt decorations for napkin rings. Despite the challenges of sending food past Australian Customs (and there are many), J managed to sneak in some Scottish shortbread, a Christmas tree shaped lollipop and chocolate mints. J also sent me a delicious recipe for parmesan cookies. She would have baked they first, but wisely figured they’d be snaffled at the border by Photos of the goodies will follow as soon as my new computer arrives and I get a The few technical issues sorted. So, lots of thanks to J for a wonderful, tasty Christmas surprise, and also thanks to the The Happy Sorceress Happy Sorceress blog for organising the event. Warning: this post contains a little ranting, some raving, and a whole lot of self pity. At the end of last year I was filled with excitement about what 2007 held for Veggie Friendly. I had grand plans for refreshing the look, entering more food events, exploring lesser known veggie restaurants around Australia and even inaugurating a regular Day of Cooking where I’d try recipes that were too much trouble to make at normal times. Little did I realise that the 06/07 period would see Veggie Friendly engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival. On 29 December my Wordpress blog was hit by a big spam attack. The Anyhow, on the 29th of December I happened to be holidaying on North Stradbroke Island. By some strange fluke the only day I had Internet access was the 30th of December. After some desperate calls to my hosting provider we figured out what had happened and reloaded the Index page. Goodbye loser spammers from hell! I was a bit shaken by this attack. It’s unpleasant to realise that something you’ve spent a year building up can be suddenly and silently obliterated by an unseen, uncaring spammer. But I also thought it was a salutory lesson about keeping my blog software up-to-date and remembering to back-up stuff. Glowing with newfound awareness I returned to Sydney. Unfortunately, there soon followed a catastrophic collision between my clumsiness and my computer. In a post-holiday stupour I tripped over the power cord of my computer which was connected to my laptop on my kitchen table. I picked up the cord and saw that, annoyingly, the jack at the end had bent 90 degrees and was now useless (anyone who has a Mac knows that this sux because you have to replace the entire power cord and this sets you back quite a bit). Also, there was the small matter of no longer being able to charge my laptop or ipod. It was just as I was examining this cord that Andy started to make a small cough, in a kind of tea and sympathy way, and quietly said “You better come and look at this.” I turned around to see that the bottom part of my trusty laptop screen had split apart. It was like a wound, only rather than revealing blood, or bones, or internal organs, there were neat rows of circuitry with lots of extremely delicate looking bit and pieces protruding from it. I sensed immediately that we had moved from annoying, to bad. Vale little laptop. You served me well from 2001 - 2007. I suspect you can still be held together with gaffer tape, but it seems that the time has come for you to retire gracefully to greener pastures (that means my spare room, by the way. It’s not a metaphor for euthanasia). OK, so 06/07 not going so well on the blogging front. But Veggie Friendly had survived the spam attack, and Andy also had a laptop. Even if his Internet Explorer program doesn’t let me edit my blog at all, and even using Firefox I can’t edit in html, and despite the fact that my supposedly PC compatible camera software doesn’t seem to work on his laptop and I can’t download any photos (which, as you will hopefully see in coming months, is a shame because I need them for a couple of posts). No, despite these travails the Veggie Friendly upper lip was stiff and the chin was resolute. Until last Thursday, when a second extraordinary spam attack occurred. This time the spammer attacked my hosting provider. From what I can tell they hacked a number of accounts, riddled them with spam, and generally caused a lot of agony. The effect on Veggie Friendly was that the main page, and admin, continued to work, but a file controlling all of my other pages was knocked out of action. This meant that from Thursday until Tuesday you could not access my Google map, my archives links, nor any of the navigation pages helping you to find restaurants by suburb, name etc. This is when I transitioned from the ‘bad’ to ‘extremely angry’ stage. Particularly when my hosting provider initially said that the latest complete back-up they had was from July last year, and yes, restoring it would probably mean that I would lose half a year’s work. But no matter. Because my site is now working again (turned out the most recent back-up was on the other server), and a new computer is ordered, and I have a new and valuable appreciation for the fragilty of online content. And (all extremeties crossed) within a couple of weeks Veggie Friendly will flying smoothly along and back on track to realise all of my New Year’s resolutions. Ok, so the meme baton has been passed to me by Trevor (who revealed some fascinating things about himself…) 1.Through a strange twist of fate, my birthday almost always falls the same week as Eurovision. There was one very special time when my birthday party and Eurovision coincided… and those photos will never see the light of day. 2. I’ve lived in ten different places in three different continent. The smallest place was a town of 300 people called Hawker, on the edge of a beautiful mountain area in South Australia called the Flinders Ranges. The biggest place was London. You probably know where that is. 3. I am a sucker for a good back tickle, especially when I’m having trouble waking up in the morning (which, basically, means every morning). 4. I composed my first story when I was 3. It was called the Frog Who Ate the Mouse’s Strawberries and it was a heart-rending tale about a big, mean frog who suddenly bursts into a lovely little mouse’s quiet life and greedily eats all of her strawberries and then her entire house and its contents. For the amateur psychologists amongst you, I came up with this story about the time my little brother (and only other sibling) was born. 5. I accidentally became a vegetarian in Toronto in 1997 through a combination of penury and a free lunch at the healthy food cafe where I was working. It became a permanent and deliberate part of my life when I realised how much healthier I felt once I stopped eating meat. |
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