Old friends and chicken soup

I've had a tough year for a few reasons but I am lucky to have wonderful friends and family around me to help 'fix' things.

I had dinner last week with two of my oldest friends. We've known too much about each other for 16 years now. After dinner, as I was driving home, I realised:

Old friends are chicken soup for the soul. 

 

Thanks to my chicken soup.

NaNoWriMo: week one

Cups of coffee drunk as a direct result of NaNoWriMo: 1

Glasses of wine drunk as a direct result of NaNoWriMo: 4

Day 1.

I had a terrible sleep for no reason, so at 5am I was lying in bed, staring at my desk and thinking ‘What the Fuck was I thinking. Why do I think I can write a novel? It’s going to be awful and unreadable and even I won’t like it. WHY?!

So it was a really positive start to the month.

Overall, over the last 7 days I have written every day except one. You read about how hard it is, you know that the requisite daily 1,667 words is about 2 A4 pages. But until you have tried to write that much per day on a continued theme or story, you cannot imagine how difficult it really is. Between my job, a blog and personal writing, I can write pages and pages every day. All of which flows easily in comparison to a Novel.

I have been getting up early to write. I am reluctant to wake myself up but I think it is best to write when my brain is fresh. I even write before I have had my first morning coffee.

Having seen this quote by Hemingway many times;

I decided to try it one night. That did not work. After 4 glasses of wine I am in no mood to do anything except have a 5^th glass. I certainly could not have pulled out several hours of creative writing.

So far I am unhappy with what I have written. Any spontaneity has gone and I feel myself getting formulaic, as if my individual voice has drowned under the supposed sea of words. But I suppose that is the real gift in good writing – to have a voice, to communicate your thoughts and feelings succinctly, and ultimately, to transmit emotions over the page. I think humour must be one of the most difficult emotions to get across the page, but that is how I would like to write – humorously. Rather a big challenge I have set myself.

So. Word Count. 

Total goal / where I should be at one week / current total

50,000 / 11,669 / 8.585

I'm pretty far behind, if I'm honest. I just better sit down and have a productive writing weekend.

Melbourne and the Very Big Meals

Ah, Melbourne. So many things to so many people. For my father, for his birthday, it's all about the food. And the wine. And sometimes the art. But mostly the food. So, for a very significant milestone birthday, he decided nothing could be better than a trip during which we would eat. A lot. We arrived late on Thursday night, freeing up the whole of Friday, Saturday and Sunday for outings, galleries, restaurants and cafes.

Friday Breakfast - Cumulus

Source.

This well-known Melbourne Cafe is set in the front of the same building as Arc One Gallery, and features a large, open room with a bar on one side and cafe counter on the other. The coffee is super-strong, and the ham and cheese toasted sandwich is actually Kurabouta leg ham and gruyere. The clientele include your classic inner-city Melbourne foodies, trendier yuppies, and business people getting a coffee injection before work. Even so, the food is pretty delish, and I could definitely get addicted to the strong, bitter coffee...


Friday Lunch - TarraWarra Estate Winery

TarraWarra Estate is about an hour outside of Melbourne, in the Yarra Valley, in very pretty, classically rural countryside. The main building is on a hillside, and at first the ultra-modernity of the building seems incongruous, especially above the pond-weeping willow combination just below it on the hill. But when you actually get into the complex, it's easier to see how the building has been designed for outlook, to showcase the view of the landscape, rather than to present a visual image on the hill. Not that the building itself isn't striking, but it seemed to me that it was designed more for the people inside it.

Source.

We arrived at around 11.30am - slightly too early for lunch - so we had a wine-tasting first, with a very helpful and friendly sommelier. Of course, none of us could agree on which wine we liked the best, so it was probably for the best that we were able to order flights and wine by the glass when we had lunch. (A flight is three glasses, of about 50mLs of wine each. This lets you have a taste of various wines, matched to your three course meal, without overdoing it.) (Honestly, though, we had a flight each and then another glass, so I think we might have been missing the point...)

TarraWarra Estate also includes a privately funded art gallery, which we visited after our meal. It was showing an exhibition called Sonic Spheres, which had key themes of music and sound, and featured contemporary artists including Eugene Carchesio, Ross Manning, Marco Fusinato, John Nixon, Sandra Selig and more.

Friday Dinner - The Press Club

Source.

Do I even really need to say anything, here? This famous bar and restaurant is in the city, on Flinders Street, just up from the back of Federation Square. The fit-out is beautiful, the food is amazing. I doubt I could say anything that hasn't already been said; the food was excellent, and the wine delicious. The modern gastronomy - infusions, jellies and foams all over the place - isn't something I prefer to eat, and my asparagus entree wasn't really to my taste, but even that part of the experience was interesting. I had the chicken for main course, and it more than made up for it, with a delicious collection of flavours and perfectly cooked meat.

The restaurant also has a wine list with about forty pages, which comes in a binder. The Press Club offers wine from across the world - Greek, French, Italian, Australian... Our poor sommelier had to put up with a lot, however, as my father is fairly picky and wanted to discuss the dinner bottle in depth. He also had to try not to look horrified when I wanted red wine first, regardless of whether or not it matched my food (we'd had a lot of white wine at lunch, and the last thing I wanted was yet another glass!), so I'm pretty sure I got written off as a total heathen right around then. But after the meal he provided us with a complimentary shot of Skinos Mastiha liquer, which has quite an amazing taste and was a delicious finish to the meal, so perhaps he didn't dislike us too much.

Saturday Lunch - Gypsey and Musquito

This is a small cafe down on Bridge Road in Richmond, and was an excellent place for lunch. It has mismatched, rustic furniture, a slight bush/outback theme to the menu, great-looking muffins and cakes on retro cake stands, and again, super-strong coffee. The food was delicious - I had something called a box, which was essentially a square-shaped pie without a lid. There was a steak and potato version, but mine was organic chicken and corn, and it was absolutely delicious. It came with broccoli, avocado and green bean salad. The clientele ranged from people picking up coffees, to hipster kids with piercings, to an old lady reading a book at the table next to us. I was a little jealous of her, as it would have been a great place to sit and drink coffee and read something for a while.

Saturday Dinner - Cutler & Co. Dining Room

Source.

Cutler & Co is on Gertrude Street in Fitzroy, close to the city but just outside. The front is very unassuming, with big windows and a small logo painted on one door, to let you know you're in the right place. Once inside, though, the beautiful design and fit-out of the restaurant is immediately obvious, with a variety of dining spaces, intriguing lighting, and an impressive glass wine cellar. The staff were professional and accommodating - including the sommelier, who had slightly more success with my father than the poor guy at the Press Club - and the restaurant experience was great before we even tasted the food.

And the food, honestly, is amazing. I had an entree of peas, broad beans, sunflower seeds, onion and

Source.

bergamot, which does nothing to describe the small, adorable collection of ingredients I received, which the waiter proceeded to dress with an onion reduction. My main was chicken again; a slow-roasted chicken breast with pancetta, braised turnips and onion, and we also had roast potatoes with garlic dressing. I managed to make room for dessert, which is always worth it when there's a chocolate ice cream sandwich with vanilla parfait and salted caramel sauce on the menu.

From the helpful yet unobtrusive service to the delicious food, the whole meal with Cutler & Co was
absolutely worth it, and made it clear the place deserves every accolade it receives. (Incidentally, it's owned by the same folks that run Cumulus.)

Sunday Lunch - The Hellenic Republic

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By Sunday, my personal desire for another big meal was flagging considerably, but I braced myself - and didn't eat breakfast - in preparation for a classic Sunday lunch with the extended family, in final celebration of my father's birthday. And I was glad I did - the food here is fantastic. It's owned by the same folks who run the Press Club, but the Hellenic Republic is far less gastronomie, far more family-style shared food. It's down at the far end of Lygon Street, for starters, miles away from the Italian section near the city. The restaurant is in a white-painted low building with lots of windows, and overall the atmosphere is casual and relaxed. It also has an open kitchen like the Press Club does, so you can see the rotisseries of grilled meat, and occasionally get a waft of barbecue smoke.

Source.

We ordered one of the banquets - because too much is never enough, apparently - and were inundated with food. We had grilled meat, fish, prawns, pita, taramasalata, tyri saganaki, lahano salata, delicious Cypriot Grain Salad, and a lot more. It was all excellent, and was topped off with a dessert of Hellenic Mess - broken meringue, orange blossom jelly, vanilla crema and strawberry ouzo sauce - and watermelon, feta and mint salad. I had also decided, by that point in the weekend, that I was totally sick of white wine, so I drank a beer and had some Greek red. I didn't regret it!


So, our weekend of meals was finally over. And you know, while I really enjoy having the occasional gastronomically-fabulous meal, it's not something I prefer to do on the regular, and for me, this many huge eats in one weekend was a bit of a stretch. Which is not a complaint! More a lament that we can't all live in Melbourne, so as to go to these amazing restaurants with a bit more space between visits. I suppose some of us just have to eat too much, then spend the plane ride back to Brisvegas digesting. Which I did. I did not require dinner on the plane at all. Or breakfast on Monday, come to that...

Brisbane on a Sunday

Sundays fall under one of two categories;

1. Sundays when you do nothing but recover from the week/end, drink coffee then beer on the couch and watch television.
2. Sundays when you get out and have lazy social time with friends.

Neither is better, each is wonderful in its own way. Personally, I find when I spend Sunday afternoon out, it distracts me from thinking about the impending work week. Oddly though, I can feel guilty when I’m out enjoying myself on a Sunday rather than staying at home ‘resting up’. Find the logic in that.

Anyway, I’ve had a great couple of Brisbane Sundays recently.

Last Sunday I paid my first visit to the Eagle Farm markets. Now that I’m a north-sider these are my new local fresh food markets and being a lover of markets in all forms, I couldn't put off my first visit for long. So I dragged myself out of bed on a cloudy and windy Sunday to get to the markets and pick up weekly necessities like baby roma toms and smoked bacon. 

When I arrived, the cheap-skate in me grumbled a lot about entry into the markets costing Twice As Much for Eagle Farm than Rocklea ($2 rather than $1. $2!). So cheap sometimes.

Eagle Farm is significantly smaller than either the Rocklea or West End markets. However, many of the stall holders are the same and there is one of just about everything. 

 

I had lovely chats with Black Sheep Coffee Guy, Jus Oils Couple, the Bacon Ladies and Egg Man. I'm a chatty person. The two separate food stall sections were giving off the most wonderful aromas of baked and fried breakfasts, but I got seduced by a mars bar muffin, which I took home to enjoy with my freshly ground Black Sheep Coffee. Good espresso puts me in an expansive mood.

This Sunday I tripped into the CBD to check out Suitcase Rummage. This ingenious idea for a market has been happening in Brisbane for a few years now. Held on the first Sunday of every month, it is an opportunity for people to ‘sell like their Grandmas’. You take along suitcases full of stuff you no longer want, lay it out and wait for someone to decide your trash is their treasure.

Book review: Civilization by Niall Ferguson

How did it come to pass that a tiny percentage of the world's population came to dominate global culture and the global economy for half a millennium? That is the big question posed by Niall Ferguson in Civilization: the West and the Rest. How did this dominance become so universal and accepted? And as the world changes and new global powers arise, where and when did this supremacy start to fall apart?

No one can argue that 'the West', itself a hugely outdated term, is in trouble. Capitalism, that great builder of wealth and power, has stumbled and with it caused great economic hardship in those countries so dependant on free-market free-spending to circulate and grow national wealth. America is in trouble, the Eurozone is in trouble and though here in Australia we sit smugly proud having braved the worst and come out seemingly on top, we are none the less hugely dependant on the uncertain fates of our economic treaty buddies and former colonists.

Where we are fortunate is that our proximity to Asia has caused us to form close economic ties with countries such as Indonesia, China and Japan. China is our largest two-way trading partner, Japan number two. In 2010, 7 of Australia's top 10 trading partners were Asian countries. Countries that an 18thCentury traveller would have viewed as undeveloped are booming and with that boom comes the power of money to spend and goods to sell.

No one can argue that global economic supremacy is drifting away from Europe and its (former) colonies to China, India and even parts of Africa, where economic development may have lagged behind 'first world' countries, but in a tortoise vs hare race, the Asian tortoises are now equipped with jet packs and rocket launchers prepared to overtake the US, Australia and Germany within decades.

Happy Saturday

Five for Friday no. 43

Today's Five has a theme: TUMBLRs!

Fiction bucket list. No, it's not books to read before you die.  

Fuck Yeah, movie posters!
 

 Thug Kitchen. Jane's new favourite tumblr.  

Research in Progress.A tumblr for my scientists friends. Of which I have almost none. 

Tumblr of a professional cartoonist and illustrator. Off-kilter Disney Princess, My Little Pony and Superhero comics. Adorable.

Images are the original artwork of Amy Mebberson.