What is making me happy: Christmas week and summer holidays

Two Christmas trees are not enough. Also, please note my artful(!) use of vignette: I should not be allowed to play with filters.

I am on holiday now - three weeks of glorious me-time; cooking and sewing and knitting, and planning for Christmas and next year’s projects. Yesterday I put up our beautiful tree, I’ve made some simple mincemeat and we have a fancy free-range ham in the fridge for Christmas Day.

After New Year, Shannon and I are going on holiday for a week with the ever-lovely Nat and Mark - Taupō and then maybe Tauranga. Sunshine is nigh! Exciting because until very recently, Wellington has been proving itself true-to-type in the weather department. *Sighs as though her heart would break* *looks wistfully out the rain-smeared window at the rain with chin in hand*

Related to Christmas planning: I’m also enjoying planting succulents in teacups/stoneware goblets/dessert glasses.

READING:

• Naked by David Sedaris - I bought a copy of this for Nat for her birthday and then borrowed it off her - only to discover three essays-in that I had definitely read it before. I had a look on Good Reads in the vague hope that I’d actually made a note of it and it turns out I'd totally read it in August last year! How about that.
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - long conversation with Mon after I’d read this about loving everything that Margaret Atwood represents but then not really loving the books themselves. There was so much I liked about this book, but I did feel it was a bit laboured.
• The Portable Dorothy Parker - dipping in and out of the short stories, and skipping over most of the poetry. Not keen on poetry, even the comedic rhyming couplet type.
• Always sitting in my reader and making me feel dismayed with my lack of commitment to Serious Reading - Middlemarch and Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography.

WATCHING: A lot (SO MUCH) of Nigella Lawson. On Saturday I watched two series of Nigella's Christmas Kitchen in a row, six episodes in all. I am totally Christmassy right now. I want Poinsettias.

Also! Last night: Home Alone which was better than I remembered.

FAVOURITE PODCAST EPISODE: Fugitive Waves (the Kitchen Sisters) - the Nights of Edith Piaf. SO.GOOD.

The Kitchen Sisters are amaze, also I am fascinated by Edith Piaf's life story. I love a mostly non-narrative/non-editorialising podcast with lots of oral history and primary sources - so: A+++.

KNITTING: I bound off a pocket of my tunic dress and have put it away until next year.

Finally, I began swatching for my Featherweight in Madeline Tosh Lace and the tiny stitches are basically quite terrifying.

SEWING: I have many plans, lots of patterns and a fairly hefty stash - but an empty cutting table. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

LISTENING: Michael Buble’s Christmas album is on high-rotation at the moment. I enjoy his unabashed cheesiness mightily at this time of year.

Wednesday List: Fabulous things from an amazing weekend

On Labour weekend Shannon and I ran away to Martinborough for a mini-break and it was quelle amaze. This blog post is late, but also the whole experience was so fabulous so I feel totally justified in bragging about it still.

Here are some of the best things. (Non-listed best thing: Shannon. Because that goes without saying ❤, vom).

Tandem bicycles and boozy vineyard tours

Have you ever ridden a tandem bicycle around a vineyard with your lover? If no, may I recommend it to you?

The bicycle situation was pretty great. While we biked with increasing danger from vineyard to vineyard, casually drinking and buying wine, the people we hired the bike from rode around after us and collect our wine purchases.  So.decadent.

Fascinatingly, I found that my tandem-riding abilities increased with the amount of wine we “tasted".

So much delicious food

Did we eat and eat and eat? Yes we did, and it was pretty great. Highlights include the scallops at Pinocchio, a delicious roast lamb platter at Cool Change, and the inevitable fish and chips at the Lake Ferry pub on the way home. I was very sad not to have a pie at the French bakery cafe in Greytown but I guess we can't eat all the things all the time, because time just doesn’t work like that.

Chinoiserie all up in my hotel room

Shannon was lucky enough to be given a voucher for one night of our stay at the rather swanky Martinborough Hotel - hence our decision to stay there (nay, take a mini-break).

The Martinborough Hotel is a big old pile that's been renovated in a terribly tasteful style and is smack bang in the middle of the town. We stayed in the Bidwill Room and it was decorated in tres pretty Chinoiserie. There was also a small table with a silver jug of white blossoms that were artfully losing their petals.

Stonehenge Aotearoa

Stonehenge Aotearoa is worth a visit for the novelty alone. DID YOU KNOW it is not a mere replica of Stonehenge in spray-on concrete and chicken wire, but rather a perfect astronomical clock, reversed for the Southern Hemisphere and incorporating elements of Māori astronomy? DID YOU KNOW it is run by a group of enthusiastic local astronomers who also run tours and have made a lovely video guide you can watch in their auditorium? DID YOU KNOW it is beloved as a venue by local Wiccans and Druids?

Entry fee was $8, and I have no regrets.

Here is a photo of two different Stonehenges, can you tell the difference?

Washing a house, Winter Fair

Saturday morning I dealt with the tail end of this stage of the Mysterious Chunky Family thing, which involved me dressing the living areas and washing down the walls inside a house, and Shannon and my brother Tom washing down the walls on the outside of the same house and giving the gutters a scrub, becoming completely saturated in the process.

Grumpiness reigned, and there was much snappishness amongst the three of us. I've reached saturation for this project, spending all weekend slaving over the house as well as all week working, and I'm pretty sure that this is the same for the Boys too. This Saturday I was determined that I would only do a what was on my list of "Last minute sprucing" things. However, I kept finding more work for myself, culminating in the final and depressing decision that in order to sell the house I needed to paint all the walls and tear out the existing bathroom. Disheartening much?

At 2pm we went home so that we could spruce ourselves before meeting up with some of Shannon's friends who were coming out to Petone from town for the Petone Winter Carnival and to watch a rugby test.

The carnival was everything you've ever dreamed of in a suburban beach-front winter carnival i.e. hot chips and a giant fairground ride, and people setting fire to wooden sculptures on the beach half an hour after the scheduled burn-time (we suspected not enough firefighter supervision - or matches). It was, indeed "A wee bit shit". But in an awesomely, comforting, know-what-to-expect kind of way.

 

The weekend in review

Horrible filthy cold this weekend. Spent most of both Saturday and Sunday in bed and either watching or reading Game of Thrones (such a dork am I). This is my second cold of the season already, and I'm afraid this bodes rather badly for the future. Will this winter be a winter of crusty noses and stuffy heads? A winter of lying in bed and reading historical fiction and fantasy novels to make myself feel better? WOE.

Nat told me that she thinks the bus is to blame for all this lurgy, and I'm now considering making myself one of those face masks that were all the rage during the swine flu scare. Frankly, I should have probably worn one on the two occasions that I went out this weekend as I was NOTHING but a filth-germ factory. I kept having images in my head as though I was on one of those anti-bacterial soap advertisements, with red-floating dots of light marking out the germs that I was transferring to innocent bystanders. UGH I am so gross.

Highlights of the weekend:

• Knitting in bed: I made a very cute beret from this pattern on Ravelry and started knitting Nat's bolero again - but only after knitting three swatches on different sized needles to work out how I would approach it. The experience of frogging four months worth of work has taught me the value of knitting a swatch and I solemnly swear that shall never knit a garment without a swatch again.
• Germily socialising: Shannon and I ventured out to see Nat and Mark on Saturday night, ostensibly to watch a rugby game at their place. I drank juice and knitted and Nat and I talked about reading about serial murderers on Wikipedia for hours instead of doing anything productive.
• Food: dark rye bread with caraway seed from the bread machine, Shannon made tomato and pumpkin chili soup. Delicious!

Interesting Times - a wedding

In my last attempt to blog I made mysterious noises about the Interesting Times and how the Interesting Times have been interfering with my blogging time/inclination. Essentially, what it comes down to is that I was rather thinly stretched between making a bolero for Nat for her wedding, getting my stuff sorted to go away for the wedding (think, primping myself so that I was suitable to wheel out as a bridesmaid) AND also packing my stuff (so much stuff) before Shannon and I moved house. Oh, and also I had to read something for book club. I got to a point where all my spare time was taken up with doing Very Important Things. Or being lazy after all the important things I had been doing.

Anyways, enough with the bemoaning already. Let me tell you about the wedding! Natalie and Mark were both totes gorgeous and I could have bitten them both. Shannon wore a suit. It was the first time I'd seen him in a suit and it was a rental and it was slightly too big, so all in all it was a bit of a disappointment insofar as seeing your boyf in a suit goes. I am prepared however to scratch the mental image and start again so that the next time I see him in a suit it will be a beautiful tailor made suit, and that will be the first suit I've ever seen him in. Sounds like a good compromise to me.

I'm the one with the glasses on.

The bolero I was knitting for Nat? - I completely screwed it up in the end. I kid you not, I was knitting like a demon in the last week before the wedding (I was knitting at Webstock) and when I went to block it out and sew it all together I discovered what a complete mess I'd made of the entire thing.

Here I am, knitting at Webstock (count six people back) - this image from the Webstock 2012 Flickr stream

It was literally about four sizes too big and somehow, I'd knitted one of the front panels much longer than the other. Did I mention that I discovered this balls up two nights before the wedding, and that the thing had taken me the best part of six months to knit? I couldn't do anything with it except frog the lot and start again from scratch. It was one of those moments where one feels suddenly, spectacularly, unreliable, and awful and pathetic.

Imagine: I had to call Nat with my tail between my legs and admit that I'd made a horrible hash of her wedding bolero and that she was actually going to freeze on the night of her wedding. Could she ever forgive me? And, because she is awesome, she totally could, and told me to stop worrying. What a wonderful woman! What a spectacularly blessed friend I am!

Two valuable lessons: one, Nat rocks my world. Two, always always knit a swatch. I have unravelled the lot to reknit, and am knitting a swatch now.

The wedding itself was super great: amazing food, fabulous venue (maitre'd was pretty much the most awesome man ever), great wine. The photographer was a crack up. Anna, who Nat and I also went to high school with, was the other bridesmaid and guided me in my duties as maid of honour. I wasn't that good at all, as in, every time I tried to reapply Nat's lipstick I kind of just smudged it more over her face? Anna is good at applying lipstick though. Yay Anna!

Here is some bride and groom action for you:

Also good about Martinborough: when I was hung over the next day I ate a croque madame with extra bacon and felt a million times better. Wedding/bacon/cheese sauce/sunshine = perfect weekend. Yuss.

 

365DOP: Mayonnaise

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

There was a definite shortage of ingredients in the house on Sunday, which is not very Peta-like at all I feel. However, the lack of exciting fresh ingredients did give me the opportunity to whip together my very first mayonnaise.

In my limited experience as spectator, I have always considered mayonnaise-making to be tricky, time-consuming, and liable to kill one's arm from endless whisking. HOWEVER. Peta has given me the Power of Mayonnaise!

My first attempt was a dismal failure. Instead of finding the mayonnaise recipe in the book (not hard to find FYI), I tried to use the aïoli recipe on page 145.

I discovered that It is not possible to make mayonnaise from this recipe. After a good fifteen minutes of desperate beating, I had nothing but a sad thin oily-eggy soup and a realisation that the two methods are QUITE different and that I had wasted a whole lot of perfectly good oil.

On the other hand, using this recipe introduced me to the idea of using an electric eggbeater to make the sauce.* When I successfully executed my wobbly eggy deliciousness (using the recipe from Haddock Fumé au Pain Perdu, p.29 - which doesn't mention the eggbeater FYI) the electric beater had saved my arm from falling off. Also, a moment please to thank the Boy for executing one of the most perfect "thin streams" of olive oil ever witnessed by Culinary Man.

There was a bit of mucking around to get some more flavour in the mayo - extra mustard, salt, lemon juice and lots and lots of herbs. I'm not sure what this says: was the recipe not that good? Was it my ingredients or the quantities in which I used them? Has my mayo-palate been ruined over the years by Best Foods? Is it a matter of the recipe dating - that is, the ingredient balance staying on the mild side while palates get more adventurous?

Since I now have the Power of Mayonnaise, I feel confident that mayonnaise flavour is something I will be able to perfect in future. In the meantime, I will buy some Dijon mustard. Peta likes Dijon mustard, and I suspect it's my Dijon-less-state that may have caused my flavourless mayo.

*Peta lists the mayo and the aïoli under "sauces" in the index, but doesn't if feel strange to call mayonnaise a sauce?

365DOP: Poisson Fumé au Lentilles

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

On Monday, le Boy went diving and came back with the most beautiful butterfish, which he brandished at me in all its Fishy Glory.

"What are you going to do with it?!" he demanded.

Five years ago, someone waving a fish at me and demanding that I cook it would have made me boil with rage. These days, I am a fishier woman, and have more desire to cook, especially with an ingredient as awesome as a whole fresh butterfish. In addition, I'd spent all morning reading of Fête Accomplie and had the answer to this age-old question. I was going to cook Poisson Fumé aux Lentilles (smoked fish with lentils - p. 78), a recipe from Peta's Rose Blues days (Rose Blues is the restaurant that she ran while in Paris during the 80s). It seemed very simple, and I had all the ingredients to hand either in the garden or the pantry.

The first thing to do was to smoke the butterfish. The Boy filleted the fish, sprinkled it with salt and brown sugar, and left it overnight. The next day, he hot smoked it with manuka. Beautiful.


The recipe calls for you to cook puy lentils (the little green ones) with All the Ingredients in the World - and then throw the ingredients out. In future, I would maybe just cook them in a pre-existing vegetable stock instead of having to turf so many vegetables at the end of the cooking process - or very simply cook them with garlic cloves, cloves, half an onion, parsley stalks and a bayleaf. The carrot, celery and two(!) onions seemed WASTEFUL BEYOND BELIEF.

The finished product:


The fish is sliced thinly, warmed through in a pan of milk and then placed upon a bed of salad leaves, warm cooked lentils and diced tomato. The whole thing is then drizzled with a vinaigrette made with lots of herbs and a bit of onion (or I guess, shallot if you have such a thing just lying about). The recipe recommended wine vinegar, but I only had rice wine vinegar which probably is a bit mild. In future I'd even go so far as to use lemon juice as the acid in the vinegar because fish + lemon = heaven.

CONCLUSION: Yes, I shall be doing it again, with the changes suggested. Also, people liked it - nay, they loooooved it. We ate it outside and drank glasses of viognier and beer.

Furthermore, I'm feeling smug in that I applied some Peta philosophy to the preparation in terms of the seasonality and locality of the food. The cos and all the herbs came from our garden, the fish was prepared and caught locally. The only ingredient that travelled any distance were the lentils. Which came from France. Quelle horreur!

The people enjoying the food in the sunshine.

Christmas Holiday and plans for next year

I'm writing this from Shannon's grandparents' house in beautiful, sunny Tauranga - where I have just spent the last three or so hours sitting out in the sun, drinking very large gins and reading a narrative biography of the Curzon sisters (who were all, frankly, appalling). The summer up here is about twenty times better than what Wellington was offering, and while smothered in sunscreen and permanently topped with a large sunhat and sunglasses, I am not trying to keep out of the sun at all *sips gin*.

S and I came to Tauranga via Kawhia Harbour, which is a somewhat circuitous route. We spent two nights in Kawhia and went to Ocean Beach where we dug our own hot pools (a la the Coromandel's Hot Water Beach), boiled ourselves and then ran into the sea. The site we were given at the campground was right on the edge of the harbour - which is really more of a large tidal estuary. Shannon walked from our tent to the other side of the harbour while the tide was out.

Other things That Are Good include my new job, in which I am learning and being challenged and have lots to do, and finishing school. My final assignment is online and operational: you can see it at Lake's web site (urbantramper.com). The thing that I'm most proud of on the site is not visible to the casual user for it is my content management system - I crafted it from scratch and I think I did a fabulous job. Still ironing out some quirks, but a fabulous job nonetheless.

In the New Year I'm undertaking a new blog project - Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days of Peta. The easiest way to describe it is that it will be a Julie and Julia style experiment, where I will be the Julie and the ever-fabulous Peta Mathias will be the Julia. However, there's a little bit more to it as Peta writes about all sorts of things in addition to Food - relationships with mothers and men, travel,  France, and What You Should be Wearing. I'll be doing my best to make a bunch of her recipes, but I'll also be taking cues about, amongst other things: eating in general, drinking, dressing, interior decorating, music, ageing, and hopefully travel. I think that it will be a very fun experiment. At the least it should satiate my Peta love while keeping me out of mischief over the course of the year. I'll probably be a big-lameo and cross-post most of my posts.

So, tell me: did you have good holidays?

So, about that tournament thing that's happening...

Possible subtitles include:

• a Rugby Widow’s guide to surviving the World Cup
• how I watched more BBC classic novel dramatisations than can possibly be healthy  
• OR: eating cupcakes in bed - yes or no?

Oh HAI Sonny Bill! You can leave your shoes under my bed any day.
Mark Taylor, Waikato Times. Via Stuff.

Hey, so, did you know that there is a big tournament thingy happening in New Zealand? It’s true! Every week you can watch a lot of television with lots of men with really large thighs tackling each other to the ground and fighting over an egg-shaped ball. Also, there is a great deal of hype about! As I have no TV I’ve managed to avoid most of the hideousness and miscellaneous player scandal, which is something that I’m terribly smug about (I am sooo Smuggy McSmugness over here).

On the other hand, my boyfriend is crazy about rugby. He loves it to an infectious extent. My attitude towards rugby changed completely after watching games with Shannon because he loves the game so - there is much ecstatic yelling, and exclaiming over the abilities of the various players... I’m afraid that I’m not really doing a very good job of explaining, but suffice to say, for Shannon rugby-watching is not a passive thing - it’s very much a full-on interactive experience, for him and everyone around him.

Obviously, a lot of his time is taken up with ruggers at present and as I am an impoverished social-sad-sack, this means that I have a great deal more time alone. However! I haven’t been wasting my time! No, I’ve been researching some ways to enjoy the World Cup period for non-rabid rugby fans. Some suggestions:

• Be nice to tourists. It’ll make you feel good about yourself and hopefully be a deposit in your karma bank for when you’re travelling. Also: how would I know about the Skittles bomb* if I hadn’t talked to a drunken laddish South African dude at the Malthouse? 
• Watch one or two games. Try going to a bar that has a world demographic (by which I mean - a Wales game at the Welsh bar, the Brave Blossoms at a Japanese bar). Failing that - try watching the game in a bar with decent beer/cider/wine and food. Don’t try to have a conversation. 
• Arbitrarily choose a team to support and make yourself a really awesomely naff costume. I saw a Wales fan dressed as a dragon and it made me so happy. Also: costumes are fun. 
• Enjoy your widow/widower-hood by watching programmes that would otherwise be relentlessly mocked by your S.O. Watch until your eyes drop out. Watch some more. Curse the new laws that will reveal the extent of your illegal downloading habit to the flat bill-payer if you get caught. Curse the people who scratch library DVDs. 
• Respect other people’s fandom - because it totally sucks when people are down on your fandom. (Chances are your fandom will never be respected, but think of it as another karmic deposit.) 
• Look at a lot of images of really large man thighs. Think about how those dudes could snap you in half, and how tiny your wrist would look in their fist. *giggle* 
• Go and see or take part in some of the REAL NZ Festival that’s running alongside the Cup. The Wellingtonista made quite a good list of Things That Are Happening in Wellington, and I know that The Body Festival is running in Christchurch. 

Truth be told, I’ve mostly been eating in bed, knitting cardigans for summer and watching BBC classic novel dramatisations - but I’m thinking this would be a good chance to sew two more dresses and work on my op-shopping website. Perhaps we should add “generally catch up on your life” to the list.

Lovely reader, do you have anything to add -- ways of enjoying the RWC period? We’re all people with fantastic imaginations and we have another month or so to use them! Woo!



*A shot of Cointreau in Red Bull. Sounds vile.

Eating Some Food in Wellington, a review: Dockside

In Part Five, I go to Dockside and am distinctly underwhelmed.

Get your suits here!

On Sunday I went with Shannon and his father Ross and stepmother Angela for lunch at Dockside. Dockside would never be my first choice for a place to eat, but given that Angela didn't enjoy herself very much at all at the last place we ate (Sweet Mother's Kitchen), it was definitely their turn to nominate a place to meet.

So. About Dockside. The last time I went to Dockside was about four years ago, and again, against my better judgement. It used to be referred as the Dry Cleaner, because “everyone went home with a suit” ie boozing after work on a Friday night at Dockside would lead you to score at the business end of town.

Sunday brunch at Dockside is somewhat more salubrious. The place really is in a wonderful position overlooking the harbour and the weather was absolutely stunning, so sitting in the conservatory was very pleasant indeed. There was a man playing inoffensive music on an acoustic guitar, so inoffensive and forgettable indeed that I can't even name one of the songs that he played. So: good company, lovely views, and live muzak.

The staff were very pleasant too, even when we turned up over an hour early because Shannon had got the time wrong (and now I am letting this go). The front of house staff were attentive without being overly so, refilling our water glasses frequently enough to keep us happy but not so much that one felt one was being chided for lack of hydration. Our food and drinks arrived very punctually. We drank a rather delicious Brookfield's Rose (Hawkes Bay) which made me think about summer in a very wistful manner.

The food was another matter entirely. The first glance at the menu reveals absolutely insane overpricing of brunch food. We're talking $20 bacon and eggs, $30 fish and chips, $19.50 for four pieces of squid and a salad. Those kind of prices are all very well and good if the food is crazy delicious, the ingredients sourced fresh locally and are organic etc etc. However, the food was average beyond belief, by which I mean that it was not very good at all. While the actual squid in my overpriced salt and pepper squid salad was itself very tender, it was encased in a very floury batter with not a lot of salt and pepper going on. The salad was a sad little puddle of mesculun leaves and contained FAR too much red onion (and not a lot else). I had some of Shannon's fish and chips and thought that the fish was overcooked (mushy) and the crumbing on the fish was too too dry. Gross. His chips were good but were the kind of frozen shoestring fries that you can buy for about $10 for umpteen kilos at Moore Wilsons and the tomato sauce was definitely Watties. Dudes, the best thing about the whole meal was the deep fry! A sad state of affairs.

In conclusion: a lovely place to catch up with Ross and Angela with gorgeous views of the harbour and inoffensive live muzak. However the prices and the quality of the food leave a hell of a lot to be desired. For a place that purports to specialise in seafood, their actual abilities to cook it were derisive. Don't do it!

Epilogue: on the way home we saw a seal and the worlds tiniest little tug boat thing. That was cool.

Arohanui ...

... which I haven't published forever. Before I go to sleep at night I like listing three good things from my day, but I wonder if Shannon is over playing the Glad Game while we're in bed. Thus, The List!

From the Boy's trip to Nepal

• I'm writing this in class as I'm suitably on top of my assignment (my thrift shop database), and I really only need to test it on a mobile emulator and to pad out the information in the site. Suffice to say I'm feeling pretty confident about it all, but I'm dreaming big ... how I will migrate it and make it much more exciting. Drop shadows! CSS3 animations! MySQL databases! Feeling very pleased with myself.
• Yesterday I broke the bread-baking curse that has afflicted me on my last two attempts and produced two beautiful no-knead wholemeal loaves. They are simply gorgeous.
• Experiencing snow fall for the first time in my life. I love the tiny bit that I experienced, but I don't want to get too too excited in case my relationship with snow ends horribly, ala the series 5 episode of the Gilmore Girls that I watched yesterday.
• Sitting in bed with a hot water bottle, knitting hats and blankets and tiny baby shoes, drinking Baileys in tiny little champagne bowls and watching episodes of the Gilmore Girls until my eyes pop out.
• Anticipation: wedding dress shopping for Nat, dinner at Bella's, handing my assignment in, and I've put aside next weekend as a sewing weekend.

Roll on the weekend lovelies x

Packing!

I'm packing, I'm packing! Or at least, I'm making plans to pack and to make a giant bacon and egg pie. I have my pack sitting in my room and I can't wait to put my bits in there. I spoke to Bex on The Skype yesterday, and we talked about how packing and planning outfits for certain adventures is part of the fun of going away on holiday. I haven't planned outfits for anything for so long, but I'm bloody determined to enjoy the hell out of this holiday. Planning is definitely the way to go.

So I need to decide:

• What shall I wear to Hot Water Beach? *
• To the Waihi Museum?
• To Whitianga township for a cup of coffee?
• Road tripping around the Coromandel Peninsular?

I shall NOT answer: "jeans and a giant cardigan" to all those questions. Orrrr. Maybe I will and just bring a huge selection of scarves (a la SIOL challenge).

In slightly related news: I'm going to give this whole "no shampoo" thing a whirl. It came from reading this article on the Hairpin, and I suspect starting it while in the country is probably for the best. I wonder if "no shampoo" will stick? Should I take shampoo with me Just In Case? Is it possible to be more of a hippie than I already am with the crystal deodorant and the Mooncup? Do I smell funny?

All questions shall be answered In Time I am sure.

PS: Dropping my year long challenge because it's depressing me and I just don't need any more depressing things in my life while dealing with coding.

*Swim togs would probably be the most sensible option here.

Eating Some Food in Wellington, a review: Trisha's Pies

Part three of an infrequent series

In Part Three, I visit Trisha's Pies and eat yet another delicious pastry gravy meat treat.

via Flickr user TELPorfolio

For Wellington-based readers, I don't imagine that I am doing anything less than preaching to the converted, because these pies are what other pies DREAM of being when they grow up. They are the Ultimate Pie, on the VERY PINNACLE of pie-based achievements - perfectly balanced quantities of delicious gravy; tender, delicious and non-grisly* meat; and crisp, buttery flakey pastry.

The Cambridge Terrace branch of Trisha's is right across the road from my school, and it takes every ounce of self control NOT to eat a pie everyday. Tuesday is my special day for Pie Treats and I usually zip across the road after class has finished and take a Peppered Steak pie to the waterfront where I proceed to burn the top of my mouth with hot gravy because I'm so desperate to eat my little pastry-meat envelope.

I can strongly recommend the Peppered Steak pie, but may I also recommend that you look into the Steak and Kidney and Steak and Onion pies? I have heard a rumour that the chicken pies aren't really All That, but I cannot testify to that end myself. The regular sized pies are normally fine for me ($4.50) but on a particularly gluttonous day I have been known to have one of the larger ones ($5.20) which was no challenge whatsoever.

Anyway, today I actually wagged school in order to some work for a friend, but I did not allow this to throw out my Tuesday treat! I decided to have a Steak and Onion pie to mix things up, and while it was good I did regret that I hadn't had another Peppered Steak which are my current passion. I believe the lovely older lady behind the counter in the tiny shop is Trisha herself, although I wouldn't swear to that. Generally, she's more cheerful than she was today, but I believe she still managed to call me "dear" which suitably completed my Trisha's Pies experience.

The first time I went to Trisha's Pies was only at the end of last year, during that strange pre-Christmas period where some people have already gone away for their summer holidays and others are still slaving away in stuffy offices. Shannon and I went to buy a pie on our way down from our house, and the lady behind the counter made small talk with us. She remarked that Shannon and I "must have broken up already."

I was shocked! And I believe that my face must have show it as she then quickly clarified the statement with "Oh! From work!" In the split second between remarks I'd had this horrible sinking feeling, that somehow she knew that S was only taking me to get a pie in order to soften the blow of the end of our relationship. Did Trisha know something I didn't? Were meat pies the food of couples that had just broken up? How many other couples has she seen buy their final pie together?

And now for some kind of conclusion:
Trisha's Pies rule, and you should totally get yourself a pie! And Trisha doesn't really want you to break up, it's all a horrible misunderstanding.



*or indeed, non-gristly

First Autumnal Weekend

Lillian Harvey, via Women Reading

I'm sure I've raved about this many a time, but I love love love the word autumnal. It makes me think about Mr Tumnus the Faun in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he's a good faun really before he gets turned into a stone statue by the White Witch, so that has to be a good thing, doesn't it?

Last night, all the clocks went back an hour, which I didn't even notice until about 1pm, because I am totally reliant on Modern Technology to tell me the time and the Modern Technology doesn't need my help to fall back an hour. Thus, I woke up at 8 o'clock, fully rested, and managed to read the rest of my Ngaio Marsh detective story while drinking coffee and with the Boy wrapped around me. Later, we went to the vegetable markets on the Waterfront and ate steamed pork buns. Is that not Sunday Morning Heaven?

In fact, all round, this weekend has been a super uber grand old time. I tidied and cleaned the hell out of my room, so NO MORE AMBIENT DUST! I read Ngaio Marsh detective novels in the autumn sun and my Virginia Woolf biography in bed. Shannon and I made pate and James bought all the meat in the world to cook on the barbecue on Saturday (seeing out the last of the sunshine with meat). On Friday night I socialised for the first time in quite some while - I challenged the Hermit within! And the Hermit said "ok, but as long as we can watch The Wicker Man on Saturday night" so I did that too.

And finally, I'm waiting for my baked potato to bake so I can have a dinner of potatoes, and mussels, and tomato and avocado salad. I have a lovely warm and clean bed to curl up in, a mitten to knit, and an episode of Time Team to watch. A creature of small pleasures, I am Very Happy Indeed.

Arohanui! Friday! All the good things at once!

ello poppets

WOW. This week has seemed very, very long. Odd isn't it, how sometimes the time just runs away with itself and sometimes it just drags by soooo sloooowly, it's beyond all belief. Defo this has been a week in the latter category - and I couldn't even tell you why, because it's been a week filled with awesomeness! WITNESS:

♥ I am extremely spoilt and the Boy bought me a ticket to WOMAD, which is happening next weekend! Exciting.

♥ My cooking mojo is back with a vengeance. I made two really great dishes over the last two nights and also baked an unbelievably good chocolate peanut butter slice type-thing.

♥ ALSO I didn't realise how big the slice recipe was and I ended up making far more than we could eat in our flat so I got to give it away as well, which made me feel awesome. Giving people food is a wonderful thing.

♥ Shannon went back down to Christchurch to work and came back a day earlier without telling me which meant: A Surprise! I love surprises!

♥ I passed my first assignment pretty much perfectly. Awesome.

♥ Bella came over for dinner last night and it was fabulous! We ate risotto and drank red wine and talked and then Bella made harissa in my food processor.

♥ HTML and CSS now make sense to me in a vague kind of way - as in, I can actually use it. It feels weird because it's bemused me so much over the years and all of a sudden, I've been given the tools to read it and understand what it's doing.

♥ And finally I get to make (or rather, re-state) another resolution - to exercise more. And I LOVE resolutions, they're like, my favourite thing ever to make.

Have a fabulous weekend lovely people! Can't hardly wait!

Eating Some Food in Wellington, a review: The Southern Cross

Part one of a (proposed) infrequent series about Eating Food in Wellington.


In Part One, I visit the Southern Cross, and eat quite a lot of meat.

Cadged directly from the Southern Cross dining page. I like the seats quite a lot.

On Tuesday night Shannon and I had a hott date night: but also, a hott date night that was super cheap because I had been given $40 worth of "Southern Cross Dollars" through Derby. I'd never eaten a proper meal at the Cross before because it's mostly a pub, the food always seems crazy expensive for pub food, and whenever I was there I was more intent in having a derby meeting or drinking as much beer as possible than on eating. ANYWAYS, we went, and it turns out that Tuesday night is two-for-one hot stone grill night! I had no idea that such an amazingly awesome and simultaneously bogan thing existed in this world. Also, isn't it bizarre the way that it's MORE expensive to cook your own meal on a ridiculously hot paving stone in a purpose made serving dish than it is to get a qualified chef to cook it? A deep reflection, I know.

We had Devils on Horseback as an entree (pre-dinner nibble) which was accompanied with a huge jug of Emerson's Bookbinder beer. The Devils on Horseback tasted like Devils on Horseback, which are (for the uninitiated), prunes wrapped in bacon, and are retro as all hell but well due for a major revival. The Emersons Bookbinder tasted like Emersons Bookbinder and there was quite a lot of it. Too much, in hindsight but HEY HO! All good in the 'hood (she slurs, as she slides down the Formica table).

The entree was cleared away very quickly (good if we're going to the theatre, bad on a date night) and we were presented with our hot stone grill mains: Shannon had a 400gm Surf and Turf (classy!) and I had a 400gm steak and envied his prawns. I only burnt myself on the paver once so I was quite pleased with that. We both had salad and I had chips and aioli with the steak, which were - boring. But! Even if I didn't think much of the accompaniments (blah caramelised onion blah) the meat was really, freaking good and we were both very happy with our enormous meat portions (*snicker*). Fun fact: hot stone grill makes your clothes smell like meat.

The waiter was a bit vague in a snooty kind of way but warmed up throughout the evening; I confess I felt very sorry for anyone having to work in the humidity and heat of Tuesday and I totally empathised with her vagueness. At the end of the meal we presented the vouchers which caused some consternation because we were getting a free meal (two-for-one) and paying with free money ("Southern Cross Dollars") and we were mildly told off by some guy higher up on the ladder than our waiter, who figured that they were paying for the same meal four times? However, when I offered to pay for both meals they refused my money, which was both passive aggressive and kind of nice, and meant that I paid something like $25 for a meal worth three times as much.

In conclusion: you could probably have an OK time at the Cross; a much better time if you drink lots and really want to experience the weirdness of hot-stone grill food. I probably wouldn't strongly recommend that you go, except maybe if your parents were in town from New Plymouth or Tauranga and didn't want to go somewhere too threatening. The staff we had didn't appear to really give a fuck, but I've been served by completely fine people there in the past so I don't want to tar them all with the same brush.

In which Ginger goes to a wedding, and doesn't get a sausage

via We Heart It

I went to a wedding in Auckland on Saturday - literally a whirlwind weekend, as we flew up on Saturday morning and down again on Sunday night. It was tiring but it was great travelling so lightly and really, an hour flight is a pretty quick commute. The wedding was as weddings always are - bits that you like, bits that you think are strange and horrible, and that are quickly followed by strangely emotional moments where you cry despite your cynicism and desiccated heart. Yep. Wedding.

The day after the wedding, Shannon and I met up with Shannon's friend Callum who is in the process of moving back down to Wellington. We had a meal with him and a friend of his, and the woman who owns the house where he is staying during the moving-back-down period - who is, apparently, the mother of another friend who is presently overseas.

However, I was too hungover to take in any of this in at the time. At the time I was 100% focused on eating sausage and bacon, so imagine (quelle horreur!) when I discovered that the cafe Callum had chosen was vegetarian. Shannon thought I was going to cry when I discovered that the cafe was meat free, given that I had been talking about pig the whole way there on the bus. BUT, rather than Close to Tears, I was consumed with a Carnivorous Rage that made it damn near impossible to communicate with any degree of civility with the (aforementioned) very nice but rather batty middle aged woman that I'd just met. She had a puppy with her - which would have been easily the best thing about the entire experience, were it not for the fact that the puppy was a trainee guide dog and thus wasn't allowed to be spoiled and cooed over and patted lots like other puppies. Sad for the puppy, and most importantly sad for ME. I hope that some blind person is really pleased with themselves one day for contributing to the horridness of my horrible hungover breakfast.

The food itself, while totally edible and made of impeccable organic ingredients, was almost completely flavourless. At any rate, my jaded palate was unable to discern the delicious taste of gruyere that I was eagerly anticipating in my very boring omelette. I was sad and angry and unable to be sociable because of a distinct lack of both pig and cheese. BUT NEVER MIND! Because two hours later I shared a lovely plate of kidneys and bacon with Shannon, and the day was saved!

Social Networking I Have Known: Foursquare and Brightkite

Part two of an irregular series in which I talk (not particularly knowledgeably) about the Social Media things I've done. And usually withdrawn from at least once.

Could you imagine texting with these nails, on this? I can't. My mind is officially Sparkle-blown.
via We Heart It

I grouped these together, because my limited experience of Brightkite was as a kind of location based messaging service. Either I was using it all wrong or it turned on it's heel and became something entirely different, because it now seems to be some kind of group texting service? Anyways, for the purpose of this let us say: I am talking about location-based services.

Essentially, any opinion that I have on either service is preceded by the fact that I think that location-based services are a bit creepy. I don't want people to know where I am all the time,  especially if that place is my home, and given the fact that my "real life" and "online life" friends and acquaintances rarely co-incide. In the end it was this that ended my brief love affair with Brightkite - particularly a conversation in which Shannon was unimpressed that both Mark (Maetl) and I had listed his house on Brightkite. I think his hesitancy to have all and sundry find his house is pretty understandable, all things considered.

The Foursquare thing has been a more recent experience, and I confess that it was fun while I just checked into places around town. Eventually this became rather dull and repetitive and constantly logging on to the local 3G network with my phone was costing me money that I simply don't have. This problem is possibly greater for New Zealand users - here the Wi-Fi is pretty shite (not public at all, and not well established in most cafes etc), and I feel as thought the effectiveness of the service relies on the availability of free Wi-Fi networks (am happy to be proved wrong though).

New Zealand fails at Foursquare in another way too - that is, that as the population is fairly limited, there just isn't enough people to make playing Foursquare interesting or worthwhile except for a fairly short period of time. I guess it would be cool if you could find out that your bestie was in the coffee shop down the road and surprise them, but I didn't really know the people on my Foursquare radar that well. At any rate, I wouldn't surprise them with cat ears or cake. And maybe it's creepy to stalk people that way and follow them about? It will be interesting to see the wider implications of FB's adoption of location services as I think this is kind of likely to happen through that. Imagine all those people you've been avoiding in a low level way since high school finding you and coffeeshop-bombing your pre-caffeinated mornings? GROSS.

Finally, I'd like to imagine that I was tarred with the brush of the early adopter. People who don't do social networky things would nod and smile when I mentioned my Foursquare obsession - I told the people who ran the local cafe that I was the Mayor there and their response was (and I quote) "*crickets*". I know that in the US various schemes have been set up where Foursquare Mayors are given discounts on meals and free coffees and free entry into the Brooklyn Museum, but I guess that there has to be some sort of critical mass reached before it's worthwhile for a business to offer these kind of promotional whatnots. I think that it's probably a while off here, and for the time being I'm more than happy to withdraw and rejoin later if things develop. Yes, I'm that flakey.

Social Networking I Have Known: Myspace

Part One of an Irregular Series

Tom's still on Myspace. He says hi.

Myspace was my first foray into the world of social networking. And what a foray it was, eventually leading me to LOVE and ROMANCE! The memories! Despite the bad graphics and sifty sex predators, I would never change those Myspace days. It was through Myspace that I rediscovered myself post-Andy-break up. So much music to be found and loudly and obnoxiously blare at people! So many lurid colours and flashy sparkly gifs! I think building myself a social presence online helped give me the enthusiasm to maintain my social presence in real life (as oppose to hiding in bed for weeks at time).

However, all good things must come to an end, including this wonderful (‽) episode in human communication. Myspace has run its course. But why?* I'm guessing that the kind of limitations I found in the medium were the same limitiations found by others: it was far too similar to what I used my blog for at the time, it wasn't easily customisable, it was too easy for creepy people to find and follow you, and actually quite hard to get good information out of the format. And lets face it, Facebook ran Myspace into the ground. The best thing that can be said for Myspace these days is that it offers a pretty good cheap format for low budget bands to get their music out and publicise tour dates and album releases. The changes that were designed to make Myspace more relevant in a post-Facebook-world made the format even more unwieldy, and every time I checked into my account I just found myself inundated with crappy updates.

All in all, I think that the best thing that can be said for Myspace is that it gave people who weren't prepared to invest in blogging time an opportunity to create and maintain an online presence. I grew out of it pretty quickly, as did most people I think. In the meantime though, I had a lot of fun getting my flatmate to make me tea through Myspace wall posts.

Were you/are you on Myspace? How do you feel about it? Spill, y'all.



Note: During the process of researching this I discovered that I'm still on Myspace - I tried to quit it but apparently it's like, really hard to leave. Also, I found all the little love notes between Shannon and I. Oh, young romantic times!

* not intended to be a authoritative view on the demise of Myspace.

Secret Garden

Last night, I met the Boy for a drink and then we walked home together. We went via Moir Street in Mt Victoria (if you don't know Moir Street, I strongly recommend you visit it. I walk through there everyday and it's the highlight of my walk to work).

While we admired the tiny cute workers cottages with gardens and porches, we had a discussion about roses and the perfect garden in my ideal house. I am obsessed with roses - not those creepy chocolate box ones of which they have too many in the Lady Norwood Rose Garden at the Botanical Gardens, but climbing roses, pale pink scented ones. I like the word "Tea Rose" but tea roses themselves tend towards the exact kind of rose I don't like that much.

The garden: imagine pale pink scented climbing roses up and along the porch railings. A big wooden bench on the porch with lots of Liberty Print fabric cushions, where I could read or knit. Native trees and plants so we can be visited by tui and fantails. A pitcher of iced tea. Biscuits. (The smell of the Boy smoking freshly caught fish).

Also; French windows, net curtains, breezes that blow the curtains into the bedroom, wooden floors (underfloor insulation). Peonies. This as my soundtrack.