Greetings from San Francisco (Confessions of an Instagrammar)

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So, I’m in San Francisco.  And I forgot my phone.  I realized this on the way to the airport, at the precise moment where we could no longer turn around to get it.  Apart from the whole keeping-in-contact-with-my-child-and-husband thing, the lacking phone is inconvenient because it is my only camera.  And so I have been wandering around here for the last two days and nary a snap to document my travels!

Normally, I quite enjoy instagram.  I enjoy looking at other people’s photos – both of everyday life and glamorous travels.  I enjoy the desire to find the beauty in every moment, every day.  And I was really looking forward to instagramming this trip.  As I walk around though, I’ve been thinking – why?  Is it really because those bunches of little red chillies at the UN Building Farmer’s Market this morning ($1 a bunch! Very hot!) were such a beautiful contrast of little bullets of shiny red against branches of green leaves?  Or is it actually just me wanting to show off? Look at me, I’m in San Francisco! I’m important! I travel.  I don’t just stay in Canberra all the time.

Shamefully, it is both.  The chillies were very pretty, and probably would have made a nice snap.  But I can’t deny there is an element of wanting to portray the exotic parts of my life.  I don’t instagram the laundry, or the daycare run, or the weekly grocery shop (ok, sometimes I do the latter.  I obviously am a sucker for fresh produce).  But for this – my first conference, my first trip to San Francisco – I want to be able to just drop it, ever so casually, into the photographic conversation.  But I can’t (so I’m doing it by a blog post instead. I’m aware of the irony.).   What I’ve come to realize though, is in a way, being camera and phone-less has been strangely liberating.  I can’t document this trip, and I can’t show it off.  So I just have to observe, and absorb, and be content in my own memories.

Of course, there are moments – like the Chihuahua in a baby bjorn – that I really, really wished I had that phone.

Anatomy of a Sunday

Today we...

Felt that fairpalooza had been a bit of a bust, so decided to swing by the Hawker Primary School fete.

 We decorated cupcakes, and then spotted on the horizon...

Both boy and father were bitterly disappointed the cut off age for the hot air balloon ride was 4.  I suspect we'll be back next year for that if nothing else.

Other verdicts: as a school fete, it was pretty big, with quite a bit to do.  Thanks to daylight savings and my inability to realise that while some of my devices change automatically not all of them (hello oven!) do, we arrived as the very beginning, and it was still quite crowded.  A truly bizarre white elephant stall could have revealed some treasures, but Toby entered melt down phase so we headed off for the markets.

To puzzle over this one.  Mighty Perky Nana chocolate bars.  I .... I just.... I don't...   Part of my problem is I keep thinking of Nana as Nanna, not as (ba)nana, which leads to all types of questions about what exactly is perky.  And leaving you with that image,

Smoked meats!  I love a good deli.  But we abstained this week and came home to clean, and to make a muti-layered Indonesian spice cake.

And Toby did his first watercolour painting.

Not bad, kid.

Finally, I headed outside, lured by a flash of colour.  You see, we bought these nasturtiums at least 4 weeks ago.  And then failed in the whole planting stakes.  But they grimly held on despite our total neglect, and have even decided to flower, still in their pitiful little pot.

So I planted them into the flower bed.  What's the bet they're dead by tomorrow?

PS - The cake is delicious.

In defence of Canberra

I was driving into work this morning listening to 666 ABC, and heard a few comments by one the guests disparaging Canberra.  It's sort of trendy to Canberra-bash.  We moved here from Perth 5 years ago.  When people found out we had just moved, the inevitable question would always be (often accompanied with a look of pity) 'Ohhh.  How are you finding it?'.

You know what? We love it!  We weren't expecting to (my husband particularly) and for a couple of sand gropers the lack of an immediately accessible beach still grates sometimes, but overall I love this city.  For its body and its brain.  Where else would you have the stunningly beautiful sight of hot air balloons over Lake Burley Griffin at dawn coupled with a city that buzzes with so much politics that even the local baristas have their opinion on the latest spill saga?

(picture from the ABC)

The thing I increasingly come to realise about Canberra is it's not really one city - or if it is, it's a split personality.  There's the Canberra that is the national capital, and there's the Canberra that is just a big country town.  The national capital Canberra is centered around the parliamentary triangle, and is populated by a mix of fly in/fly out politicians and their staff, and public service types doing the requisite three years at DFAT before they can score an overseas posting.  It is by its nature impermanent and transient, and I'm not sure the people who live in that Canberra ever really consider it home.

Canberra the big country town is another place all together.  It's a place of the EPIC farmers market and Murrumbateman field days.  (Being a country town, a lot of what is great about this Canberra is actually in its surrounds - though there's a lot within the territory borders as well.)  It's a place where the local radio station has a jam making afternoon and invites listeners to drop in with a jar.  In this Canberra, we don't have just a plumber and an electrician - we have a milkman (yes, he delivers!), a chicken lady and a direct line to at least 3 local producers of alpaca fleece. 

It's not to say Canberra is perfect.  There is a lack of really good dining in the city itself - some good second tier stuff is pretty good (Italian & Sons, Pulp Kitchen, Dieci e Mezzo and the like) but a Flower Drum or a Quay?  No.  The funny thing is the actual produce here is fantastic, and most people I have met have been produce driven like I have never seen in any other city.  Backyard veggie patches are the norm, chickens a common accessory, and the various markets on the weekend (EPIC, Woden, Belconnen and Fyshwick) are always packed.  Perhaps all the really good cooking is just going on inside the homes of Canberrans.  Some of the complaints though always strike me as a little sheltered.  Housing affordability?  We bought our 3 bedroom, renovated, on a big block house in 2007 (well after the fabled boom) for a good deal less than we sold our 2 bedroom, somewhat renovated, on a smaller block house in Perth for.  Now, we're not in a salubrious suburb (*coughCharnwoodcough*) but even that seems overrated.  It's quiet, clean and filled with trees.  And at a 14.5km commute from my front door to my work at the ANU, it would be considered practically inner city in most other capital cities.

Canberra may not have the best nightlife in the world, and frankly I wouldn't know.  But I think it embraces a different rhythm.  A rhythm that includes incredible local fairs, which I'm determined to visit this year.  (They run sheep down the main street of Bowral, for goodness sake!  The Collector Pumpkin festival!  Cherries! Young!).   And the lack of fine dining?  Head over to Grazing at Gundaroo and it all starts to feel a little better. It's a city of stunningly blue skies and bitingly cold winters - all the better to snuggle down in your handknit alpaca scarf (you've got to do something with all that fleece you bought!).   And the national capital side has its perks as well - with the National Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia, there's no excuse for feeling culturally deprived.  In need of a political fix?  Head out to Griffith Vietnamese during a sitting week.  Or just hang out near Parliament House at around 6 or so to see all manner of politicians having their morning run.  (This may or may not appeal - a sweaty Tony Abbot is not perhaps the best thing early in the morning.)

I can understand for those who never venture outside of the Parliamentary triangle Canberra may seem a little sterile.  But for those of us who live in both Canberras, the city's pretty great.

A Fair to Forget

We've had a little bit of rain in Canberra lately.   A fairly wet end of Summer.

(Our backyard, where the chooks used to live.  Luckily we foresaw this and moved them while they were only damp, not sodden.)

 Sullivans Creek at ANU is flowing rapidly for the first time I can remember.

My mother's basement didn't fare so well.

All of this was ok (well, I wasn't the one with a flooded basement) until the rain began affecting FAIRMAGEDDON!.  You see, we'd had a busy couple of days last weekend ripping up carpet and building a bunk bed, so we decided to skip the Canberra Show.   Never mind, says I, there are lots of shows in March.  Why, next weekend alone there's 3 events that I want to go to.

And then it rained.  And rained.  And rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained.  (You get the picture).

And then:

It's the Crookwell Potato Festival I'm most upset about.  It sounds like it just walked off the set of Gilmore Girls.  I was going to go and revel in all things potato.  Eat potatoes! Dig potatoes! Throw potatoes! Potato prints! Potato sack races!  It was going to be a glorious, spudtastic celebration of everyone's favourite tuber.  

But, that rain.  By this time Canberra was starting to feel limp.  Grey and drizzly and soggy.  It felt like perhaps it would never stop raining - that this was just the way it was from now.  So I decided to embrace the weather and cook something for dinner that longed for rain and damp as a backdrop.

An oxtail stew with bright spinach dumplings, cooked in lovely English ale, courtesy of Jamie Oliver.  It seems that all of Canberra had the same idea, because I couldn't find oxtail anywhere today.  I settled for osso bucco, and started chopping.  The brightness in my kitchen was a nice antidote to the washed out world outside.

So now the stew has been bubbling away for a few hours, filling the house with all kinds of depth of winter, comfort food aromas.  And outside?

Well played, Canberra.

Tanzanie Odyssey...

So, the family spoke and the chocolate won out.  So I cooked.  And cooked.  And cooked.

First off, the cast of characters.  It was actually not that varied a shopping list.

Chocolate, cream, eggs, cocoa and sugar were the main ingredients.  In very large quantities.  A few novelty items - gelatine and glucose syrup.  And a few things I didn't bother with (inverted sugar and pectin - more on this later).

Now, as you read the Adriano Zumbo book you will notice it is very precise.  69g of cold water precise. Heat to 103 C precise.  My task was made a little more difficult by one of the more... interesting features of our oven.

See that knob?  That's the temperature control knob.  See what's missing?

Yup.   Temperatures.

To be fair, it *did* have markings when we moved in.  But about a year ago, the fact that we actually clean our oven (sporadically) meant we no longer have markings.   I can guesstimate well enough for every day cooking, but I doubt Zumbo would approve.

Anyway, off we started with chocolate meringue.

I'm pretty good with meringue, so it didn't present too much of a challenge, except I didn't pipe it as instructed.  (My inability to follow instructions forms somewhat of an ongoing theme, you'll see.)

The chocolate jelly was next - I'm a fairly new convert to leaf gelatine, but I love it, baby!  I also liked the Zumbo tip of chopping the leaves up before adding the cold water.  Sensible, yes, but it didn't occur to me last time and I ended up dripping water all over the kitchen.

At this stage, vanilla creme brulee was also made, baked and popped into the freezer, but I forgot to take a photo.  Then I gave it a rest for the night, and started Saturday morning with the chocolate madness again.

First off was what Zumbo calls a 'chocolate flourless biscuit' but which is in fact a sponge.   I made two of them, coated one with melted chocolate, let it dry and popped it chocolate side down on the bottom of my square(ish) springform pan. 

 That got topped with the ganache I'd made.   The ganache was meant to be made with 75% cocoa tanzanie chocolate.  My local Coles didn't have tanzanie chocolate (quelle surprise!) so I substituted a mix of Green and Black's organic 55% cocoa mayan spice, beefed up with bit of Lindt extra dark (80%) to up the cocoa content.   I also made chocolate sea salt flakes (as directed), which were folded through the ganache.  A second piece of sponge then covered the ganache layer. 

Then came out the chocolate jelly (came out pretty well, except a slight cling wrap issue - but we overcame), which was topped with the meringue.

The meringue that cracked.  I then decided it was too thick anyway (ignoring the fact that if I had piped as instructed it probably would not have been too thick), so I tried to shave it down.   When it imploded. So then the meringue layer became a meringue crumb layer.  Topped with deconstructed vanilla creme brulee, because it refused to come out of the tin.

This, I might add, was the vanilla creme brulee I painstakingly prepared to Adriano Zumbo's exact (and I do mean exact) directions.  I weighed the egg yolks and cream.  I greased the pan.  I froze it the way he directed.  And yet it would not come out of the pan.  I ignored the concept that perhaps my oven temperature wasn't exactly right in the baking, and became increasingly cavalier with exactness in the next process.

Chocolate saboyan mousse.  Well!  I ignored my thermometer.   Melt chocolate and then cool to 45 C? I scoffed!  Forget it Zumbo.  I can tell if chocolate is too hot (it will melt the cream) or too cold (it will set too quickly).  Whisk sabayon until exactly 82C?  In your dreams!  I've made saboyan before without a thermometer.  I can do it this time.

So was I courting disaster?  Were the cooking gods going to teach me the importance of following instructions?  Was Adriano Zumbo going to descend into my kitchen in a fit of pastry pique?

Nope.  It worked perfectly.

So I topped off the whole shebang with the saboyan, put it in the freezer, and sat down for a cup of tea.

Then I lost a toddler,  (Bliss! No, I'm not that careless.  My mother took him.), had another cup of tea and made the chocolate mirror glaze.  No pictures of the glaze in progress or the state of my kitchen when I'd finished.

Emboldened by my success with saboyan, I strayed even more off the beaten path.  I couldn't find inverted sugar, so I used honey!  I couldn't find pure pectin, so I used Jamsetta!  (I did google extensively to find out the pectin-sugar proportions in Jamsetta and adjusted the recipe accordingly.  For the record, 50g of Jamsetta contains ~ 10g of pectin and 40g of sugar.)  When I accidentally measured out 3 g of water too much, I shrugged my shoulders and carried on.  I was living on the wild side.

Glaze made but not set, we packed the cake and glaze into a freezer bag and headed across to Mum's, to be greeted by this year's iteration of the Valentine's angel.

Unlike last year, when February was actually summer in the capital, it was a more clothed angel this time around.

People arrived, champagne was opened, and I had glazed the cake.  (Actually, I glazed the cake before the champagne.  I was taking no chances.)  Then it got cut up, and left to defrost for two hours.

It was, in the end, all ok.

Incredibly rich, incredibly good, and I don't think I'm going to need chocolate for the next 6 months.  The colour of my kitchen right now - brown.  Glossy, thick, shiny brown.

Roses are red...

We're having a Valentines' Day dinner with the extended family on Saturday night.  When we did this last year, the cousins were newly arrived from Hong Kong, and the boylet looked like this.

Now the kids have had a year of Australian school, weather and backyards and Toby is much bigger.  Bet we can still get him to wear the wings though.

I've volunteered to cook, because I like to, and because something fell into my trolley at Costco last week.  (Costco is dangerous that way.)

So the only question remains, what dessert to make?

I'm tossing up between a duo of pink desserts (the valentine theme is obvious):

paired with (because one Zumbo dessert isn't enough of a challenge...)

Or, if I want to go the also traditional chocolate for Valentines route, there's this little number.

Don't let the picture fool you.  This baby has 6 different layers and textures of chocolate in it - a flourless biscuit sandwiching a chocolate tanzanie ganache with salted chocolate flakes, a layer of chocolate meringue, vanilla creme brulee, chocolate jelly and a chocolate saboyan mousse.  All finished off with a chocolate mirror glaze and tempered chocolate.

(Yes, I am considering making this for 12 people.  I get kind of insane in the dinner party planning phase.  Luckily my husband accepts it as an adorable quirk.)

Or, to go non traditional and just because it looks delicious, there's always the more exotic barbados...

What to chose?

Many cultures, food on sticks

What else could this be then the National Multicultural Festival?  The first of our February fairs (the Canberra show is coming up soon - vegetable sculptures and all...), and it was fantastic.

Unlike the Lucky Dragon, the day didn't start with a toddler tantrum.  Rather, I got out of the shower to find a very happy toddler and a very patient dog.  It's amazing how she can look long suffering even when blindfolded.

She forgave him for the indignity.  At least, I think that's what the kiss was for.

After dress ups was over, we headed off to the festival.  Although we've lived in Canberra for 5 years now (I still can't quite believe that), we've never managed to get to the festival before.  And we have been missing out.  The festival takes over the city centre, and stalls from pretty much every country, each organised by region, more or less.  The embassies had their own tents, with information and displays.  But the food tents - oh, my, the food tents.  All kinds of community groups from many cultures have their own stalls (my end gozleme count was 6 stalls), all offering bits and bites at really very reasonable prices.

 We got into civic early(ish) - half an hour after we planned, so on toddler time that's a win.  It wasn't too crowded when we started, so we got right to the eating.  We had Cambodian beef satay - very lemongrassy, very good.  Then we continued the food on a stick with Thai chicken satay.  Very peanuty, very good.

Then a quick trip by the Iranian stall, to sample saffron and blackcurrant juices.  The saffron in particular was amazing.

Unfortunately the lamb spit roasting over charcoal wasn't quite done when we went by one of the Greek stalls.

But then Toby decided to get into the action with Chips on a Stick - a whole potato, spiral cut, battered and deep fried.  Tragically good.

When I say the whole of the city centre was taken over, I meant all.  Public art doubled as dumpling price holders:

Not pictured: the nepalese momo and the cannoli we also took on board.  If we had wanted to (and perhaps if it had been a little later in the day), there was also beer from many countries and vodka from the Russian tent.  It wasn't all food and drink though.  Toby got up close with a police motorcycle.

We also sat in on a Bollywood dance workshop.

The audience (including me) gamely tried to follow the instructions.  Toby wasn't too impressed.

By about 12:30 the crowds really started to increase, and moving about with a stroller became challenging.  Toby decided this was the time for his tantrum (like we were going to escape without one!) and although there were still many, many things I wanted to see (eat), we decided to call it a day. Lesson learned for next year:  go early, go hard.  Or leave the kid with his grandmother and go in the evening - the festival was open until midnight Friday and Saturday nights, and I think it would be great fun.  Overall, good fun, cheap (everything free except the food, which was very nicely priced) and the potential for educational.

Law Chicas and Geek Girls

A few friends on facebook linked me to an issue with Google Ads.   Google Ads is that nice bit of Google that tracks every site you visit, so they can target their ads to your demographic.  It's really not an invasion of privacy.  (All hail the new google overlords!)

Actually, I don't have such a problem with targeted advertising, and there are easy enough ways to escape your web browsing being tracked.

However, I do have a problem with the algorithims google is using.   Google Ads Preferences infers your age and gender, based on your browsing history.  It seems that if you are the slightest bit geeky as a girl, google thinks you are a man.   Now, I'm more an old school nerd than a geek (with a bit of dag thrown in) so I was interested to see what google thought of me.

At my home computer, I'm a woman.  At work - I'm a man.  The primary difference?  I do most of my legal research (you know, my job) at work.   The other browsing is pretty consistent between the two locations.  Including my more 'girly' interests - knitting, cooking, is-the-latest-toddler-rash-life-threatening?, asos.com, gossip sites.*  Apparently the fact I look up the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties twice a day at work (I know, I should know the darn thing already) is enough to push all of that over to the masculine side of the spectrum.

So there you go.  Law, in google's eyes, is still a boys club.  My little wooden lawyer girl is sad to hear it.

* I know there are men who knit, and cook, and are paranoid about their kid's rashes, and browse asos, and read gossip sites.  And if you are one of those - well, more power to you!

PS - For both computers, Google puts me 5-15 years older than I actually am.  I'd protest, but given my reading and hobby tastes, I suspect it's a fair enough call.

Lucky Dragon, Crying Toddler

We decided to start off FAIRPALOOZA (how many bad made up words do you think I can come up with?) with a festival with a cultural bent:  The Lucky Dragon Family Festival at the National Museum of Australia.

On the way, Toby initiated a conversation about all the activities we had done in the past month or so that ended with him having a tantrum.  Oh-oh, we thought.  This does not bode well. And sure enough, as soon as we got out of the car, the meltdown started.  Fast forward a running away, a telling off, some tears and finally a kiss to make up and things started to look better.

The Festival wasn't a Fair really, more a gathering at the museum with crafts for the kids, and performances.  It was billed as family friendly, and held on a public holiday, and it seemed every parent with a toddler in Canberra had decided a little appreciation of other cultures was needed on Australia Day.  We managed to squeeze into the craft tables and Toby made his own lucky dragon.

Then he posed with it.  The meltdown was still fairly recent, so smiles were not forthcoming.

However, the icecream changed that.

The ice cream was excellent actually - big cones of really nice ice cream for $3.50.  The raspberry sorbet did stain quite impressively though, and Toby managed not just to dye his face, but his belly also.  The scarlet splotches all over his torso caused momentary concern later in the day, before I worked out he hadn't actually come down with a sudden and virulent rash.

The festival itself was fairly small in what it offered, and I do wonder if the organisers expected quite the crowd they got.  The performances were good (the Choy Lee Fut Lion Dance troupe in particular) but it was so crowded it was impossible for us to see properly.  (Those of us not on Daddy's shoulders, that is.)

Still, in value for money terms (read: free admission, cheap ice cream and quite tasty sausage sandwiches for $5) it was a cheap, fun way to spend a few hours.  And sitting on the grass outside the museum with friends eating our lunch and watching the dragon boat races was a lovely, low key way to celebrate Australia Day.