christmas lunch

...originally planned for 3pm (I'm guessing because having it at lunchtime would have meant waking up early to start cooking) was held at 6pm instead due to the small matter of the turkey not being put into the oven. Minor glitch...could happen to anyone. ^_^

It was well worth the wait though ~ everything was done just right. It was all pretty traditional: turkey with yummy stuffing, ham, roasted vegetables, gravy, cauliflower with cheese sauce, etc, and bowls of cherries and cashews, lollies and chocolate. I love cherries! They just look and taste festive. It's the best thing about having Christmas in summer. Speaking of which, the weather was kind to us. Usually Christmas Day is a scorcher, but it was overcast today and quite cool.

There were presents. I got a pair of slippers that massage your feet, a necklace, a handbag that's a little bit out there but okay, and most surprisingly a palm pilot. My friends also thought it would be hilarious good fun to give me one of these calendars. Twelve months worth of Mormon ex-missionaries in beefcake frat boy poses ~ good for a laugh, but seriously not likely to make it onto one of my walls anytime soon. The worst (and funniest) part of it was that there were actual missionaries in the room spending Christmas Day with us. So embarrassing. *^_^*

Keyboard Kid got one of those video games where you dance on a mat and a RoboRaptor. I told him to bring both over to my place ASAP!! Drummer Boy got an awesome amplifier and consequently spent half the evening playing rock riffs on his electric guitar. Gangsta Girl was most happy to get a mobile phone to replace the one she recently dropped into the toilet accidentally. I think she was having severe withdrawals symptoms. They all also got fun presents like little lava lamps and a game where you have to retrieve pirate treasure from a skull full of green goo. It was a fun day ~ relaxing, a lot of laughs, and no drama. Even the turkey timing mishap was just brushed aside and everyone passed the extra time with a few games of Uno and no complaints.

I called my folks and my sister, and spoke briefly to my aunt in Denmark. Tomorrow I'm going to try to ring some American friends (you know who you are). But don't worry, if I catch you in the middle of Christmas celebrations I'll just say 'Merry Christmas' and leave you be. Eventually my late Christmas cards will reach you, too.

The one thing I really missed this year was Christmas carols. Somehow carols were missing from every celebration I went to and I forgot to check out when our local Carols By Candlelight was happening. It was actually pretty disappointing because that is one of my favourite things about Christmas. When I was about fourteen I spent a few Christmas Eves with a friend's family who were of German origin. Christmas Eve is a bigger deal than Christmas Day in Germany and they went all out. We trimmed the tree that night, drank eggnog and ate German gingerbread (made each year with German Christmas carols playing as they baked...no lie). We read the Christmas story, stopping every so often to sing an appropriate Christmas carol for whatever part of the story we had reached. It sounds a bit Norman Rockwell, but actually it was beautiful and I loved spending that time with them. Anyway I love carols and so I'm listening to them now as Christmas Day comes to a close.

And to anyone who reads this blog, thanks for connecting with me across this year. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas with people you care about. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas I just hope the day itself is a good one in some magical way.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

love me enjoy me want me hide me

So say the delectable Tim Tams on my shelf. Australia's favourite chocolate biscuit (Americans read: cookie) has gotten more communicative of late. I dscovered this quite by chance. Wandering down the biscuit aisle Saturday afternoon I looked lovingly over at the Tim Tams and did a double take: one of the packets was labelled 'Want Me' instead of 'Tim Tam'. I was amused, and home with me they went. Further research on the Arnott's website unearthed the following:

Arnott’s Tim Tam - Love them, Enjoy them, Want them or Hide them?

Consumers will notice something different as they reach for their favourite packet of chocolate biscuits over the upcoming weeks. For a limited time, packets of Arnott’s Tim Tam Original will feature four fun new phrases including ‘Love Me’, ‘Enjoy Me’, ‘Want Me’ and ‘Hide Me’.

As Australia’s third favourite brand, Australians have a strong emotional connection with Tim Tam and Arnott’s research shows that these four phrases best represent how consumers feel about their beloved Tim Tam biscuits. For example:

‘Love Me’
The majority (52%) of Tim Tam lovers enjoy doing the Tim Tam Slam where the biscuit is used as a straw to drink coffee or port.

‘Enjoy Me’
50% of consumers choose to eat the last Tim Tam in the packet before anyone else does, while only 17% will share it with family or friends.

‘Want Me’
64% of consumers eat their Tim Tam biscuits on the same day they buy them.

‘Hide Me’
Many consumers go to extremes to hide their Tim Tam biscuits from others…inside the crisper draw in the refrigerator, the laundry basket, the freezer, the car, in a desk drawer, in the bedroom, and even in the safe!

I don't hide my Tim Tams ~ I'm more of a 'share the wealth' kinda girl ~ but as for the other three...guilty as charged: Tim Tam slams are the bomb, I'll eat the last one without hesitation, and Tim Tams may last two or three days in our cookie jar, but they are ALWAYS opened on the day of purchase. Simply irresistable!

five days in melbourne

Okay, so Melbourne was mostly great, but it had its downside. You'll see what I mean as I go along. People-wise I spent the first three days staying with a friend and her husband, and spending my time with them and a close friend of theirs who lives in Melbourne. We also saw a lot of my friend's daughter, who moved to Melbourne about six months ago.

First night in I saw Miss Saigon. It's a powerful story, and the production was wonderful, particularly the staging (the sets were great and at one point you would have sworn that a real helicopter landed on the stage and then took off again). I have to admit though that the score was kind of average. The one exception was a really stirring song at the beginning of the second act called "Bui Doi". It's a song about the Amerasian children fathered by GIs during the Vietnam war, children who went on to be pariahs in their own society once the US withdrew. The whole time the song was sung they showed images of these children, including some from the child camps they were put into after the war. Here's a youtube link to the song. Here are the lyrics.

The next day we had lunch at Fifteen, the restaurant that Jamie Oliver set up in Melbourne to offer a career opportunity to troubled youth. The first batch of trainees were part of a television series that showed their personal journeys to become chefs and the setting up of the restaurant itself. Of course there were a few who wasted their opportunity, but I was so impressed with most of them and the way they really turned their lives around that I wanted to visit the restaurant if the chance came. Thirty percent of the profits go back into the foundation to train other young people, too. I like the combination of a casual atmosphere with silver service level dining, and the food was SO GOOD! ( I had the Roasted Berkshire pork with fennel seed and rosemary, Mt Zero lentils, baby chard, crème fraiche and pan juices. Chocolate nemesis (yes Nemesis, apparently there's a dessert named after you) with pistachio biscotti and blood plum. Mmm.)

Later that night we hit the Pink concert. She is so powerful, so bold. Most of the songs were from her latest album, I'm Not Dead, which I like a lot. Unfortunately the concert indirectly led to me having an argument with one of my best friends over Pink's song, "Stupid Girls". She was basically defending the girls the song describes(here's an excellent explanation of the song if you're interested), saying that if all they care about was partying and shopping and being a size 0, that that was their right. I tried for a solid hour to explain that the song is not targeting them individually so much as the superficial culture they represent, and that while it certainly is their right to live as they choose, I'm allowed (and Pink's allowed) to have an opinion about it, especially if I feel their lifestyle is negatively affecting girls who think they are supposed to emulate it. There's nothing wrong with calling something stupid if it IS, especially when that something is influential. I think the most frustrating part was when she argued that "they can't be totally stupid if they're making that kind of money". I hated the fact that I needed to explain to this wonderful friend, right in the middle of a discussion about superficiality, that money alone was hardly a worthy marker of success. There was a time when she wouldn't have needed someone else to tell her that.

And of course having been friends for over twenty years we moved on by the next morning and had brunch at a lovely Italian cafe called Brunnelli's: chicken and asparagus crepe with a Caesar side salad. They also make confections and nougat and ornate cake for big Italian celebrations. It was worth going there just to look around. Restaurants featured heavily in our trip. Fifteen, Brunnelli's, a place on the beach called The Stokehouse, plus a little Thai restaurant and a couple of cafes. I mean just because our hotel room had a kitchen with a microwave didn't mean we were going to cook. And in fairness if you're going to check out restaurants, Melbourne is the place to do it. There's good reason that Jamie Oliver picked Melbourne. Each year there'll be new trainees and he needed a strong restaurant and cafe culture that will provide jobs for them once they've done their year at Fifteen.

Now of course I couldn't be in Melbourne for the tail end of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival without catching at least one show, so we went to see Adam Hills' current show, Joymonger. It was great, so upbeat and positive (hence the name) and very funny. We were in the front row and he talks a LOT with audience people, so I was trying to keep a low profile, haha. We did have a chat with him afterwards. Nice guy. He talked a little in the show about having an artificial right leg, a little bit of trivia about him that I hadn't known. He shared a story about getting his licence renewed...a little adventure in bureaucracy that resulted in his driver's licence now being printed with the licence condition: "Must wear artificial right foot." He said he showed it to an Irish friend once, who gave him a sly smile and said, "Ah, but it doesn't say where." :)

A couple of other photos from the trip ~ a quirky shop name and some fun street art I happened upon.

The other activity I spent a lot of time on in Sydney was called "avoiding shopping". Don't get me wrong. I did some shopping. I bought a pair of black jeans, I browsed the bookstore, I checked out some homeware stores and I tried samples of Aesop's mandarin-scented hand balm (pricey, but oh so good). And then I was all shopped out. So while my friend went to ten more stores, I saw a movie. The next night we met an old friend I hadn't seen for years, so when they decided they wanted to check out every designer brand store that was open late at the casino complex, I couldn't duck out and do something else. I'm not into the brand label thing. In fact I'm next door to being anti-brand after seeing how it drives many women and girls in Japan. But there I was, for two hours straight, trawling Guess and Gucci and whoever else with them. So you can imagine my glee (not) the next day when she announced that the thing they most wanted to use their last day for was to visit DFO (designer factory outlet). I told them to meet me when they were done, at the Starbucks where I would be reading my book (ironically, The Devil Wears Prada). Good book by the way.

I had two days in Melbourne after they flew home, which were so relaxing. I wandered around St Kilda, sat by the ocean and slipped in another lunch at Fifteen (Grilled Margaret River porterhouse steak with rosemary potatoes, large leaf rocket and eggplant funghetto). I visited a family who recently moved to Melbourne and had a surprisingly lighthearted visit with a friend of my mum's who found out a few months ago that she has an inoperable cancer. She's retired and is using her time now to visit her children and grandchildren. I left them feeling very peaceful and reassured.

And that was Melbourne.

soy beans and strawberry pocky for everyone!

The international culture night was a huge success - I reckon about 300 people turned up. There were booths for Australia, Greece, the Phillipines, Scotland, England, Samoa, Tonga, China, maybe one or two more I can't remember, and of course Japan. We had to provide some kind of food for people to sample. I had edamame, wasabi peas and strawberry Pocky. And consequently spent roughly half my time in the booth explaining that you don't eat the pods of the edamame and showing people how to squeeze the beans out, and the other half stopping kids from coming back to take Pocky again and again. One Samoan girl was relentless. I told her she had to try the edamame before she had another Pocky stick, and the next time she came back she ate about nine of the edamame. :)


I didn't get a lot of time away from the booth to check things out, the people helping having decided that 'helping' meant putting up a few posters and then spending the rest of the evening with their friends and leaving me to it. But I did get to try treacle tart, something that I'd never had but which was often mentioned in the British boarding school books I used to read when I was a kid. Quite yummy.

There was also almost two hours of entertainment ~ singing, dancing, bagpipe and fiddle playing, and one guy read a bush ballad. I wish I could have done some Japanese drumming but I have no way to get hold of a drum here. It only occurred to me halfway through the night that I could have done a booth and even maybe a song for my own birthplace, Barbados. Maybe next time. We ended the night with everyone singing, "I am Australian." The chorus goes:

We are one, but we are many.
And from all the lands of the Earth we come.
We share a dream and sing with one voice,
I am, you are, we are Australian.

Quite stirring with 300 people singing. Strangely the chorus seems all about multi-cultural Australia/migrants, but the verses only mention the Aboriginal people and the British convicts/settlers. Nice tune though.

celery

Today I made an executive decision.

I like celery.

Forget the fact that I've always hated celery. Hey I used to hate avocado, too, and then I tried it with this Russian dressing and eventually I liked it by itself and now I think it's totally delicious.

So why can't I acquire a taste for celery?

Celery has negative calories - that is, it takes more calories to digest celery than the celery has in it. It's also a green vegetable, so immediately you're getting iron, which is great! So I've decided that I like celery. And now I'm going to eat it as often as possible until my taste buds agree with me.

My strategy is simple. Either it gets cooked in with a dish so full of garlic and herbs and pepper that I can't really taste the celery flavour, or if it's raw it will be soaked a little in balsamic dressing (only 4 calories per 20ml, excellent!) to take the edge off the flavour. And each time, just before I eat it, I'll say:

"Mmm, celery. I love celery!"

Hey, it could work! It could!