For dinner tonight: 15 fresh clams, 15 fresh tiger prawns and a 750g silver perch, stuffed with spring onions and coriander. All cooked on a disposable charcoal barbeque and eaten with Thai “seafood sauce”, a delicious combination of green chilli, coriander, garlic and palm sugar. Smelled like Bangkok in our tiny back courtyard. Total cost: $25.
My goodness. Over the weekend Hoff, Clinton, Gabby and The Other Elaine came over for a Curry Night. D. made an awesome red lentil dhal, Clinton made amazing curried potatoes, and a fantastic lamb curry, and Hoff brought a pack of frozen roti. These were a revelation… much better than I expected, and better than what we’re served in many restaurants. Tonight we had leftovers, along with a Malaysian chicken curry, and we cooked the last two of the roti. Just totally, totally sensational. I, for one, am going to start shopping in the freezer section again!
Woke early and drove down to the Westerm Farmers Markets, within the FERN Community Garden, next to Fremantle Golf Course, precisely where a Putt-Putt course that I remember from my childhood used to be. Breakfasted on a bacon, egg and spinach roll, which was spectacular, with smokey bacon, tasty eggs and freshly baked bread. Came away with 2.5L of Redtail Ridge olive oil, which is fantastic, and unavailable in the shops. Followed by a trip into Freo, then back home to make grilled fish with a white miso sauce; Lainey came over and we chatted and watched the first episode of the second season of Breaking Bad. General awesome all round.
For dinner tonight:
Yep, not bad.
My parent’s bought themselves a PC. Not terribly successfully. Their brand new HP Pavilion a6130a desktop, with Visa Home pre-installed, came with the default amount of RAM: 512MB. To an old-timer like me, that’s a massive amount of memory, as I got by quite well with 512KB on the old Amiga, thankyou very much, so three orders of magnitude should suffice. But, as the tech-savvy among you know, Windows Vista will hardly boot with 512MB of memory, and will start swapping the moment you attempt to open a web browser. My Commodore 64 was more responsive than the brand new PC my folks bought themselves. So, I thought I’d upgrade their machine to 2GB. And, you know what? That cost less money than what we spent on a dinner of fish and bloody chips. Considerably less. To think upgrading my old Amiga to 1MB with a 512KB memory expansion cost me five hundred bloody bucks. Sheesh!
Wow… a homemade curry laksa with fresh prawns and scallops, fresh coriander and a generous squeeze of lemon is an amazing meal experience. And fifteen minutes to prepare!?! In other news, I can field strip a toddler’s car seat in sixty seconds, and we spent three hours tonight with our builder, discussing small details like how exactly the bathrooms are going to be tiled, bringing the pre-costing discussions up to six three-hour meetings. Our man is thorough, I tells you!
Saturdays begin with a trip to the Subiaco markets. Eliza and I buy an almond croissant from La Galette De France, together with Machiatto and Baby Chino, while D. shops for whatever looks fresh, which determines what we’ll be eating for the coming week. Today tomatoes and parsely looked good, so tonight it’ll be Middle Eastern; we bought some Burghul and will be making Tabouleh, and we bought some Tahini and chick peas to make Hummous. Olives, flat bread and some grilled meats will round things out. Yums!
Just finished the curry. Wow, so much better the next day. Amazing that you can cook the bejeesus out of it and still have the potatoes hold their shape… especially when they’ve absorbed so much of the sauce. And plenty for leftovers, too! I think I’m going to go on a braised food bender, because searing the curry ingredients on the stove in a Le Creuset French Oven and then chucking the lid on and putting it in the oven at 180 for an hour-and-a-half is so easy, and produces such wonderful results. Now, time to clean up, and then it’s gaming until sleep.
Tonight I cooked twice. I didn’t plan for that to happen… it just did. D. had gone shopping during the day, and bought enough to make lamb cutlets on a bed of fusilli with a garlic and wine tomato sauce (one of our favourites), and to make a hearty Indian curry. Curry is so much better the next day, so I thought “what the hey”, and prepped ingredients for both dishes, cooking both simultaneously, using all four burners on the stovetop and the oven. The lamb was sensational, washed down with a few brewskis, and the curry is cooling in the oven as I type. Most importantly of all, and something very necessary to my general well being and happiness – the kitchen is clean and tidy.
I checked my personal records. I purchased my first-generation, “stick’o'gum” iPod shuffle on Saturday April 23, 2005. It probably cost $150 or something outrageous like that. On the same day, we ate barbequed corn and “shaking beef”, played “Lost Cities” and “Carcassonne”, played the demo of “Meteos” on the DS and watched “Iron Chef”, which still seemed like a cool thing to do. I was also busy working on a game, “Quantum Lightcycles”, for the one-key competition.