True crime

Seen at my local Target, August 2013.

Been a long time gone...

Has it really been so long since I posted on this blog? Feels like an eternity!

I've been persuaded to have another go at the whole blogging thing, so brace yourselves cos winter is coming.  Just kidding!

  

Here's sweet little Clara tempting fate and climbing  into her favourite place :-)

 Brace for more chickens, more cats, and a lot of random stuff to follow.  I've now got less time, more animals, a Real Job, and a Masters Degree that's leaking out of my ears...  

Aussie slang

Budgie smugglers... (men's swimming trunks)

The very talented John Murray illustrates the term PERFECTLY!

 A mouth like the bottom of a cockie's cage... (dry mouth, particularly when hungover)

Dunny documents (toilet paper)

And other such phrases that are causing our current exchange student much confusion and hilarity (particularly the budgies, as her grandmother has pet budgies!).

I love Aussie slang, it's versatile, humorous, clever and irreverent, all the best things about Aussies.  It can also be impenetrable, head-scratchingly obtuse, rude and all kinds of wrong!

What's your favourite piece of Aussie slang??

Doctor Who?

How do you explain Doctor Who to someone who has never seen it before, or even never heard of it?

This may only make sense if you've seen the 2012 Xmas special!

I've been attempting this with our new German exchange student, and telling her 'it's about an ancient alien who travels through time and space in a blue phone box, and takes people away with him' makes very little sense and makes the Doctor sound a tad serial-killer/stalker-ish.  Also the whole regeneration thing sounds well suss. 

It is kind of hard to sum up this culmination of 50 years of British eccentricity in a few sentences.  It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so it takes a real cultural mind-set shift to be able to contemplate how you could exist without it in your life!

There's a young man on youTube called Charlie McDonnell (?) who has done a pretty good summary of why Who rocks, and why we love it despite and because of its faults.  Check him out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6H4gkErt4

If you're a Whovian, how would YOU describe Who to a newbie?
If you've never seen it, please consider having a go, it's got a lot to offer if you let it try :-)

And yes, I named my cat after a character in it. 

New kitten - best puppy toy ever

Jenny and Clara - BFFs

To add to the crazy mix at our house, and because of the time share situation with our middle cat, Lister, who has left home and now lives up the road, I finally allowed Darling Daughter to talk me into getting another cat.  So we trotted up to the Animal Welfare League and came home with little Clara, a 16 week old dark tortoiseshell, with a massive purr and beautiful markings.  Jenny is absolutely smitten, Clara is extremely tolerant, and they spend a lot of time chasing each other around the garden and wrestling.

Growing Clara in a basket

In a nerdy moment I decided to name her after Clara Oswin Oswald, the new Dr Who assistant (or companion, as they call them these days), who made a great impression in the 2012 Christmas special.  Geek attack!

Road Runner (Adelaide style)

This little fella lives in a street in Clearview, near a friend's house *waves at Ms C!*.  He saunters along the pavement, pecking for food, or waddles along the side of the road, blithely ignoring cars, who have to go around him. My thought the first time we saw him was that he was lost and needed rescuing.  But let me tell you, they are remarkably hard to catch, so I couldn't take him home!  Having seen him 3 or 4 times now in the same street, it seems that he lives there as a free ranger.

He (or more likely She) is a guineafowl, a species of ground-dwelling  bird native to Africa.  According to Wikipedia guineafowl have a long history of domestication, mainly involving the Helmeted Guineafowl. The young (called "keets") are very small at birth. The keets are kept in a brooder box inside the house until about six weeks of age, before being moved into a proper coop or enclosure. They eat lice, worms, ants, spiders, weedseeds, and ticks while on range, or they can also eat chicken layer crumbles (one kind of commercial bird feed) while housed in a coop. The cooked flesh of guineafowl resembles chicken in texture, with a flavour somewhere between chicken and turkey.

There is also a band in Sydney called Guineafowl, and you can like them on Facebook here.

Chicken + cola flavoured potato chips

I find the idea of these strangely appealing!  But only for sale in China, sadly...  Thanks to International Business Times for the story. 

Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted

BY IBTimes Staff Reporter | December 13 2012 2:35 PM

Crab, Seaweed, Pickle and Lobster. Bizarre flavored potato chips flavors are nothing new internationally. But Lay's has a brand new bag in town: Pepsi-Chicken flavored chips.

PepsiCo, the Purchase, N.Y., company that owns Pepsi and Frito-Lay, combined its iconic Pepsi flavor with chicken-flavored chips which went on sale in China.

The chips launched in late August in China and news of the new snack has finally made its way across the seas to the U.S. to potato chip epicureans. The Pepsi-chicken chips join the ranks as the newest flavor put out by Lay's, including lemon tea, cucumber and hot-and-sour fish.

While for many, the chicken and cola combo may seem odd, according to Ad Age, the flavors are prevalent in China. Cola chicken is a common recipe in China where chicken wings are tossed in wok then caramelized in soy sauce and cola.

And if you still think it sounds weird, IBTimes went on its own international adventure in chips in March, trying all sorts of flavors from Thailand's Hot and Spicy crab chips, to Spain's prawn, garlic and peppers (Gambas al Ajillo) chips to Thai Nori Seaweed chips, just to name a few.

According to Ad Age, the idea came about from PepsiCo's CMO Richard Lee during a recent researched and development session. Lee said Lay's was looking for a fusion-themed chip.

"We thought it would be really cool to have a cola combined with chicken. ... It's a very popular dish in China," Lee told Ad Age. "Also it would be very cool to involve one of our most-iconic soft drinks."

The combo of Lay's and Pepsi was a mutually beneficial collaboration, according to China Market Research Group's Ben Cavender, who said the cola company was looking to expand its brand in China.

“Coke and Pepsi have both stalled out in terms of growth potential in China," he said. "It’s important for them to be developing new products and driving into these growth categories. I think Pepsi is probably better-positioned with the packaged food that it has to really make some gains there.”

Smoked salmon tried to kill me

So, the amazing knives of the last post?  They're really REALLY sharp.

Note to self - don't try to pry frozen smoked salmon slices apart with a brand new knife, because it will slip and stab you in the palm, and you will have to phone your best friend to drive you to the hospital at 10 o'clock at night for stitches...  And then she will laugh at you.


(when labelling this post I found I already had all the labels I needed - accident, embarrassing, F Dick, funny, hospital, ouch, shame - which says a lot about my escapades, lol)

Knifegasm, or 'how I learned to love F. Dick' (it's a German brand of knife)

My lovely friend Mrs F has long been horrified by the 'quality' of my kitchen knives.  She's a chef, so she finds it particularly painful to see me try and chop things with the blunt metal sticks I've been using for years.  In my defence, I've never bothered with really sharp knives since the kids were big enough to pull over a chair and climb up to my knife block.  And when you find your largest carving knife embedded 'sword in the stone' style in a tree stump in the garden, there really is very little point in being precious about them!

This Christmas Mrs F finally persuaded me that my children are now old enough to respect my knives, and so she arranged for my hubby to get me some PROPER quality blades as a gift to us all.  Hence my new love for Herr Friedrich Dick of Esslingen, Germany, and his very shiny and very VERY sharp products.

I've got this one:

3 inch Kitchen Knife

 and this one:

8 inch Chef´s Knife

 

and they're amaaaaaaaaaaazing.  Carving the Christmas ham was an absolute pleasure this year, although I did feel a little like a serial killer (maybe I've been watching too much Dexter, hey?)!  Even Darling Hubby admitted that he could see what all the fuss was about after he tried them for the first time. 

Wunderbar!

The most romantic gift I got my hubby this Christmas...

...was the amazing, heavenly condiment that is Heinz HP Sauce!  We haven't had any in the house for years, and I found it at our local Asian grocer, next to the soy and sweet chilli.  Awesomesauce, indeed.

HP Sauce "The original and unmistakeable HP sauce. Used for generations in all styles of cooking. Its malt vinegar base is blended with fruit and spices, but the rest is a closely guarded secret. The name HP comes from the Houses of Parliament, a restaurant that first served this sauce. There’s nothing like it to give a kick to pies, grilled meats and burgers. It’s low in fat with no added colours, flavours or preservatives. Available in in a squeezy 372ml and 220ml glass bottle."