Salt and corrosion

I've realised the reason I haven't been writing much recently, and that's because now I'm back at work I'm not out doing interesting things. I'm buried in month-end work at the moment, slaving over a hot spreadsheet, and that doesn't make for an interesting entry.* So let's ease over a dull day with a five question meme about cheese.

1. What was the first type of cheese you ever ate?
Probably that yellow plastic Kraft cheddar, either grated or as a Singles slice. As a child, that stuff makes the best grilled cheese on toast, though my cheese palate has developed since then.

2. What was the type of cheese you ate most recently?
For dinner this evening, I fried some sliced cauliflower florets with some Apostles Whey chilli feta, which I bought when I did that food trail tour a few months back. My jar is nearly empty now.

3. What is the most unusual cheese you ever ate?
I don't think I have a good answer to this. I am boringly conventional in my cheese eating. Nothing more unusual than blue cheese, and only a small amount of that.

4. What is your favorite cheese?
Any sharp and crumbly cheddar.

5. What is your favorite dish made with cheese?
Get some camembert, stud it with bits of garlic and thyme, drizzle with honey, bake in the oven in its little box. Spread it on toasted crusty bread or use it as a dip. It's not fancy, but it's really good.




*Unless you enjoy Excel as much as I do, in which case: I did some really lovely SUMIFs today. Ooh.

Yesterday, some friends and I did a road trip round (some of the the) the 12 Apostles Food Artisans network. (It's called that because they're all near the Twelve Apostles rock formation, although fortunately inland, so we could travel on back roads without getting on the super-busy Great Ocean Road.)

We started at an organic dairy. I didn't buy anything there, but I tried, among other things, some salted caramel fudge (v. nice) and some chilli honey (vile). We did our tasting with another group of four people, including a lady in a bright yellow shirt. Back in the car we discussed the mystery of the chilli honey. The woman running the tasting experience was encouraging us to dig our tasting sticks in generously; not so with the chilli honey, which she warned us to only take a dab. And honestly, that was enough. There was a hint of sweetness and then my tongue went numb. So what would you do with it? You couldn't spread it on bread for a snack. Maybe use it in a stir fry, I suppose.

Next we went to a distillery for whisky tasting — and sparkling mineral water for the driver (me) — and a very nice lunch, sitting several tables over from our yellow-shirted friend. Artisanal whisky isn't really my thing, but I had fun in the attached provedore, getting some lemon butter and orange hot chocolate. Then we took a stroll around the corner to the gourmet ice cream shop. They offered tastings too, but I just made a choice: one scoop of honeycomb (something I'm guaranteed to like) and one scoop of orange and cardamon (which turned out to be delicious).

Back on the road, we stopped next at a cheese maker and did the full tasting experience: soft cheeses, including a brie that just last month won a gold medal as Australia's best white mould cheese; semi-hard cheese; blue cheese; and fresh fetta. I came away from there with some garlic harvarti and chilli-infused fetta. Then the tasting man took us to the counter round the corner and we each got to taste a spoonful of two of his gourmet gelato flavours. I picked salted caramel and coconut, and then I regretted my earlier ice cream, because otherwise I would have had a whole scoop of the coconut. When we walked into the cheese maker, yellow-shirt was there. She was trying the chilli fetta, and she waved the tasting stick at us, saying, "This is better than that chilli honey!" As they were leaving, her husband said, "Did you get lost? We've been going to the same places all day and I don't know how we got so far ahead of you." We explained our walk to the ice cream shop.

Our final stop was the artisanal chocolate maker, where we ran into yellow-shirt and co. on their way out. ("We thought we were finished, but we're going to the ice cream shop now," she said.) I came away from there with a bag of chocolate aniseed rings for my mother (a selfless gift because I don't like them so she will get to eat them all), a bag of dark chocolate frogs for me, and a hazelnut mouse to eat on the way home. So that was a good day out, and my only regret is that I didn't have any way to bring a tub of that coconut gelato back without it melting.

Back home, I had to get to work in the kitchen. My great-aunt Jinny is 98 this week and is having her annual party this weekend. It is the sort of casual affair where everyone brings a plate. When her daughter Sanny rang to issue the invitation, my mother asked what she wanted us to bring. "Well," said Sanny, "you know that pav you brought out at Christmas? Mum said that was the best pav she'd ever had." (And she's 98, so she's had a few pavs.) As it happened, I made the Christmas pav(lova) from a Donna Hay recipe, so I was tasked with recreating it for the birthday party. I finished it this morning and I was very pleased with it. It's topped with raspberries, strawberries (fresh from the market this morning), passionfruit pulp (from my colleague Michelle's vine) and powdered freeze-dried strawberries.



Tomorrow is a public holiday, and I should probably use it to eat sensibly after all the above.

When I was little, there was an ad on TV for a product called Tarn Off. It was a bottle of cleaning fluid, and in the ad a glamorous lady in a lovely blue dress had a pile of tarnished jewellery and what not, and she would dip each item half into a bowl of Tarn Off, and hold it up to show the half clean, half tarnished brass coaster or whatever. I wanted nothing more than a bottle of Tarn Off. Why, if I had a bottle of Tarn Off, I would be the happiest child in all the world! But my mother refused to buy it, stating (correctly) that I would leave a trail of half-dipped spoons around the house. To this day, I think about Tarn Off more often than you'd expect.

This week, for instance, I found myself thinking about Tarn Off when I went to get a silver chain necklace I haven't worn for a while, and found it was discoloured. If only there was a product that I could dip it into to clean it! You can still get Tarn Off, apparently, but I just used bicarb soda and boiling water and the necklace cleaned up beautifully.

Next problem, though: I hang all my necklaces on a miniature (30cm high) silver hatstand that I inherited from my grandmother, but they somehow manage to tangle themselves up. They seem to be hanging there, motionless, but when you turn your back, they knot themselves together. You can't wear just one of us, they say, you'll have to wear us all at once. I searched for "jewellery storage ideas" and this was one of the first things that came up. So I bought one and it arrived on Friday and I have spent far more time than I should admit sliding it along the clothes rack in my wardrobe to look at one side and then the other. I am so easily entertained.

This week is also the start of the very short period that achachas are available in the supermarket. I bought a bagful, as I always do whenever I see them. I'm apparently the only one, because the kids at the supermarket checkout have never seen them before. Today's checkout assistant was a teenage boy who looked at them curiously and asked what they were. I told him and he poked at the touch screen before saying in triumph, "There they are!"

Finally, this week I went to the theatre. The theatre has a new policy of allowing people to take glasses of wine in with them. I don't know why this annoys me as much as it does. I mean, you can buy water and snacks at the bar and take them in with you. Why should the glasses of wine you buy at the same bar be any different? Maybe it was the smell, just because I'm not used to smelling it in the theatre. (I don't like the smell of popcorn either.)



PS: Tarn Off! (Why did she let all her silverware get into that state in the first place?)

I came back from my shower this morning, ready to make the bed — only to find it occupied. This is new. He will sleep on the bed, not in it, and never when I'm not there. I don't know why he decided today was the day to try getting into the bed, but he seemed to like it.

This week being Race Week, the biggest week in the City by the Sea, there have been police everywhere. My mother was breath-tested as she was driving round the cemetery one morning. I mean, they were testing everyone, not just here. (She passed.) A couple of days later I went for a walk one evening, and ended up being glad I was on foot. There was a traffic jam on the highway and as I walked further I found out why: there was a police block with ten separate breath-testing stations. And three old men standing by the side of the road, watching all the action. "They've all been waved on so far," one told me as I passed.

This morning my mother and I went for our usual Sunday morning walk by the beach, which happily coincided with the fortnightly farmers' market being set up. We usually go to the farmers' market after breakfast, and so miss out on the devilish hard to get almond croissants, which are usually sold out before we get there. Not today! We were there, right there, as the baker's van pulled up, so we nabbed the first two almond croissants of the day.

Today I came across a recipe for beetroot chocolate cake with beet icing. No, thank you.

Gosh, my f-list is quiet these days. And so am I, so I can't complain.

I normally find Ferrero Rocher a bit of a let down. I mean, they look fancy, but they never live up to the packaging for me. But! Ferrero Rocher hazelnut mini eggs are good stuff, f-list. They are THE BUSINESS.

I haven't been eating much chocolate recently, so, in news that I suspect is not unrelated to the above, I have the most terrible headache.

When I was little, we went on holiday to Surfers Paradise and my strongest memory of it is of the little restaurant down the street from our hotel. It might have been a fish restaurant? I recall a lot of nautical decor, at any rate, and fisherman's basket on the menu. But what sticks strongest in my mind was the dessert: every time we ate there, I had the ice-cream boat, which was several different coloured squares of ice-cream and wafer arranged like a little boat on a sea of chopped-up jelly. I mean, if you're eight, that is the culinary high point of your life right there.

Anyway, I had a birthday this week and, in a fit of whimsy and nostalgia for the ice-cream boat, I made myself an ice-cream cake. Only, and here's the problem, adult me doesn't really like ice-cream. I don't dislike it, but I'd never think to have a bowl of it for dessert, say. And ice-cream cake is just ice-cream with frozen cream on it. In hindsight, I would have preferred a proper cake instead. Next year.

March books read

* Slade House - David Mitchell (2015) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Autumn - Ali Smith (2016) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Sinking Admiral - Members of the Detection Club (2016) ★
( Read more... )

* The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross - Lisa Tuttle (2017) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Sheer Folly - Carola Dunn (2009) ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Carry On, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse (1925) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

I meant to take a photo of my raspberry pavlova wreath, but didn't get time on Friday. This is all that was left on Saturday:



It was good. And it made quite an impression, especially considering it's a regular pavlova with spoonfuls blobbed on the tray in a ring shape.

I was supposed to crush some freeze-dried raspberries so as to dust it with hot pink powder, but Pronto Fine Food Merchants (the City by the Sea's number one delicatessen) didn't have freeze-dried raspberries. They had freeze-dried everything else, though, even bananas. I ask you, f-list. Who wants freeze-dried bananas rather than raspberries? No-one at all, that's who. Anyway, after some deliberation, I bought freeze-dried peaches and made a pale pink powder, and you know what? Whole or crushed, they are delicious. I am going to buy some more and break them into my next batch of trail mix.

I also made some spiced walnuts, which required coconut oil, and now I've got most of a jar of the stuff left. What to do with it? I found a coconut oil cookbook in the library when I was returning my mother's books yesterday. It says you can substitute coconut oil anywhere you would normally use oil or butter, then proceeds to give recipes for coffee (one espresso shot, coconut oil and butter) and porridge (oats and coconut oil), two things that no-one adds oil or butter to. Or maybe everyone does and I've been making them wrong all these years.

Weekly knitting update: ( A bit )

Today I made gingerbread brownies. I am so festive.

There is a big jewellery store on the corner of the City by the Sea's main street, part of a statewide chain. This time last year, they were having a massive sale prior to renovating the shop in January. I bought an alarm clock for a song. After a big re-opening in February, the chain announced a few weeks ago that it's closing. Not just the City by the Sea's store; all of them. What a waste of a glossy new fit out. Anyway, this year they're having a massive sale prior to closing down, so I popped in as I was passing. Gosh, it was sad. Empty. I was talking to one of the shop assistants, who said they were meant to stay open till Boxing Day, but she thought they'd be cleaned out weeks before then.

My mother keeps the deed of her house at the bank, but she has decided to get it out and put it with her will at her solicitor's office. I browsed in the bookshop next door while she went in to get it, and she came in, outraged. "Three hundred and eighty-five dollars!" was her greeting. That's how much it cost to get stuff out of the bank's vault. That's... exorbitant.

This morning my mother and I went for our usual weekend walk along the beach path. We do a circuit from the surf club car park along the beach front to the breakwater, then back along the road to the car park. This morning we returned to the car park to find the monthly farmers' market had set up while we were gone. So we wandered through that to the artisanal baker, and headed home with a sourdough cob for lunch and some almond croissants for breakfast. A good morning's work there.

Weekly knitting update: ( First part finished )

Flatbread wraps were on the shopping list, so I headed to the flatbread wrap corner of the supermarket. But what was this at the end of the aisle? A stand full of black boxes with gold-labelled jars. What could it be?

Turns out there is a special blend of Vegemite: a limited edition called Blend 17. How lucky am I to get one of the only 450,000 jars of it? For just twice the price of the normal stuff!

(It tastes more or less the same as the usual stuff. Maybe a bit more mellow, not quite as salty.)

This week:
1. Spongebob Quizpants came second. We are creeping up slowly.

2. Someone on Masterchef served up coriander ice-cream. That's a big bowl of nope.

3. I went to Melbourne for the National Gallery's annual winter blockbuster, which this year is Van Gogh and the Seasons. The paintings were superb, of course, but they really needed to rethink the layout. To enter you had to go through a narrow, zigzagging walkway. I think it was supposed to be like walking down an alley, which would have been fine, except they don't stagger the number of people who can go in at once anymore, so the alley was packed. And it was even worse in the little room they had for each season: still a lot of people, and they don't prohibit photography now, so people were taking photos of the works from oblique angles. So I was hot and crushed and grumpy and not inclined to linger.

On the other hand, when I was a teen, I had a print of Wheat Field with Cypresses on my wall, and it was lovely to meet it in person. I treated myself to a reusable grocery bag printed with it in the gift shop later. No glasses cleaning cloths like they had for Degas last year. I wonder if Van Gogh would be pleased about that or not.

Next week: Monday will my last day at work. Again. I feel oddly flat about it this time round.

Weekly knitting update: ( First band in progress )