Archive for the ‘General comments on site’ CategoryOn Sunday morning Andy and I left Sydney for Oslo, the first stage in our six month travel odyssey. Thanks to the whimsy of Qantas, we went via Mumbai, where we had a sub-18 hour stopover. This route reminded me why I love flying in Asia - the inflight menu. There was a vegetarian and meat option at every meal, so with one exception the “special” meal I’d ordered was unnecessary and I was served along with everyone else. Andy had asked for the vegan option, so was still brought out a special meal as the standard vegetarian version came with dairy food. Allowing for the fact that this was economy class plane food, the standard was high. I couldn’t contain my excitement when I saw that dinner was palak paneer on fragrant rice with curry leaves. Earlier, lunch was a chickpea curry in a tamarind sauce on cous cous. Swinging like trapeze artists from one international timezone to another, our final meal was given the non-time specific label of “refreshment” on the menu. This was because it was midnight in Sydney, early afternoon in Mumbai, and breakfast by the internal logic of of our flight. The meal of soft, lightly fried chickpea cakes and raita suited all of these occasions, and was my favourite of the trip. The decent vegetarian vegetarian food so readily on offer erased the unpleasant memroies from our last international experience with United Airlines, where their best vegetarian effort was “sweet and sour” frozen vegetables, circa 1983. If the airline food is this good, I can’t wait to come back to India and experience the real thing. After a family dinner at Assiette, I had a small Sunday brunch with friends to celebrate my 30th birthday. Everyone who came had to answer five questions:
The answers made me laugh, cheer, and go ‘oh yeah, I remember that!’ You can see them in their full glory here. Feel free to leave your own answers in the comments section. The brunch turned into a showcase for the best of the Bondi Road specialty stores. We had caraway seed, blueberry and sundried tomato bagels from Glick’s Cakes and Bagels (the best in Bondi and the same as the one on Carlisle Street in Melbourne). The spreads were cream cheese, and sweet paska cheese with sultanas from the Russkis Deli .
No Bondi brunch would be complete without the sinfully good cherry strudel from the Wellington Cake Shop. The whole cherries are slightly tart, and wrapped in thick, flaky pastry.
I toyed with baking a birthday cake (it’s something of a tradition, you understand) but with time running out I settled for a tiramisu from the Wellingto Cake Shop. This photo doesn’t do it justice. It was as long as my arm. Maybe longer.
My Mum was a real trooper and helped bake quite a lot of savoury pasties (this time with curried vegetables), spinach and ricotta filo triangles, and apricot puff pastry tarts.
With so much sugar running through our veins, a fresh fruit salad made a welcome change.
Thanks to everyone for coming, sharing your answers, and spreading the birthday cheer! Special thanks to Jackie, the hostess with the mostest, Mum, Dad and Andy for helping out. A couple of weeks ago Andy and I decided to do something really exciting. Something we’ve been dreaming about, and saving for, since 2003. Something we can’t keep putting off due to work, moving cities, Federal elections, apathy… We decided to take 6 months off and travel overseas. The itinerary goes something like Norway, London, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, India, Nepal, China and Thailand. I’m calling it the ‘cool things to see before we die tour’ (a work colleague suggested ‘cool things to see before you have children’ would be equally apt. Slightly depressing thought). We leave on 24 June, so I’ll l try to squeeze in plenty of reviews of good Sydney restaurants beforehand. While I’m away I’ll blog about our food experiences. You can read about the general journey at Poundster.com. If there any keen beans who want to keep up the Sydney / Australia reviews while I’m away get in touch at veggiefriendly[at]gmail[dot]com. Some time ago Scott from Grods Corp annointed me with the Thinking Bloggers Award (thanks Scott). In keeping with the spirit of the award, I spent a long time One of the reasons for my delay is that I know memes can somtimes be a pain in the proverbial. While I think the idea behind this one is great, and I wanted to celebrate the blogs that I enjoy, I also didn’t want to burden them… anyway, blah, blah, blah, a couple of weeks later, I decided to list some of my favourites but make it clear it’s obligation free and they don’t have to keep up the meme if they don’t want to. The meme works as follows: 1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think, Here are my choices: The Old Foodie: Every day the old foodie publishes a food related story that has a link to a historically significant event from that day. It might be the birth or death of someone who left an impact on food, a recipe associated with an annual holiday, or a reference to food by a historical figure. As much as I enjoy food blogging, it can tend towards homogenity, with a never-ending cycle of food events, recipes and infinity background photos. I love the fact that the old foodie avoids this side of food blogging altogether, and concentrates on producing a completely unique blog, with posts that are intriguing, charming, interesting and thoroughly researched. Limes and Lycopenes: Kathryn is a vegetarian food blogger who actually knows what she is talking about. Straddling the worlds of naturopathy and journalism, she writes with authority about nutrition, food and current health debates. I learn something new every time I read her blog, and love the fact that she brings a broader political perspective to the food blogosphere. Cook (almost) Anything At Least Once: There are some food blogs that leave me bewildered at the writer’s energy. I can’t believe they find the time to cook fabulous food, take beautiful photos, write informative posts, research new food products and still manage to have a life outside the Internet. Haalo’s blog fits squarely in this category. She’s indefatigible, creative, talented and inspiring, and one of Australia’s best food bloggers to boot. Oikos: Everything I know about enivornmental economics I’ve learnt from this blog. Dave is a great writer and a clear thinker. He doesn’t accept common wisdom - he questions it - but always in an open and entertaining manner. With so much emotion, fear and propaganda encircling environmental issues, it’s always a pleasure to read Dave’s blog and get a fresh perspective. Crazybrave - the arrival of a new baby has left things a little quieter on the crazybrave front, which just makes me realise how much I miss Zoe. Political, sassy, funny and eclectic, crazybrave is awesome and always makes me wish my blog had more of those qualities. Over the last year I’ve come to realise that despite being an amateur in the kitchen, I don’t make “simple”, cornerstone dishes like sauces, stock, chutneys, dips, but do make more difficult meals. This is crazy. Normally, when you’re learning to do something you start at the beginning, but for some reason I’ve skipped the basics and gone straight to cuisine. My epiphany began last year when I took a Thai cooking class and made sweet chili sauce. I don’t really like sweet chili sauce so wasn’t too excited about learning how to make it. But when I tasted the final product I was shocked to realise that what I don’t like is store bought, mass-bottled sweet chili sauce, which has nothing on the flavoursome, and less astringent home-made variety. I was also surprised to see that it was quick and simple to make. Later, I decided to enter a Paper Chef event and make a chutney. I also don’t really like chutneys, but it was the best thing I could come up with to use the feature ingredients that were part of the Paper Chef challenge. Once again, I was shocked to realise that what I don’t like is store-bought mass-produced chutneys, not the home-made versions and that like the sweet chili sauce, making chutney was easy. These experiences brought home to me that being a good cook is not about trying difficult and exotic recipes - it’s making all parts of a meal to a high standard, using fresh ingredients and getting the simple things right. So, I’ve set myself a challenge to go back to basics and try making my own soups, stocks, sauces and dips - the kind of dishes I’d normally buy from a supermarket to use as part of a more complicated meal. I have a feeling that if I can learn to make the simple things well, my overall cooking will improve. I’m also discovering that a lot of the joy of cooking comes from making food from scratch - I feel like I’m continuining a long tradition of cooking and that I could be in a kitchen anywhere in time when I’m making a classic vegetable stock (except when I glance over at the microwave or food processor - thank you progress). Anyway, this post is a precursor to my entry in Weekend Herb Blogging, which is baba ghanoush. I normally feel embarrassed about entering simple dishes into food events because I feel like it reflects poorly on me a as a cook (accurately you understand, but also poorly), but with the cover of my new simple pleasures philosophy I’m glad to have an opportunity to try a simple, traditional eggplant dish. 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. 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. |
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