Pulp Fiction

One of the first things I bought while on our book buying binge in the Southern Highlands was a diary for next year. It's usually the kind of thing I like to wait until Christmas for but unfortunately it seems that nowadays Christmas is too late to start organising next year.

The selection of diaries was not great. I considered getting a Sydney Morning Herald Good Food diary, but it seemed a bit superfluous when we have The Book and it was quite bulky and irritating. In the end I settled on a dictionary, which, while very exciting, was not good for subsequent book buying levels: The Granta Classic Crime diary.



Diary

Every week there is a new photo of a crime classic, and a interesting fact on one of the dates either taken from a book (e.g. "Solomon Moretsi signed a sworn statement, as witnessed by Jesus, about his bicycle accident on 10 May. Ma Ramotswe is asked to investigate.") or about an author (e.g. "Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse, was born in Stamford, Lincs., on 29 September 1930.").

This prompted to me to buy trashy crime novels, firstly to collect all the books featured in my diary (I found none of them) and secondly to buy all the winners of the yearly prizes listed at the front of the diary (I don't think I found any of these either). Still I managed to buy a lot that weren't on either list but looked exciting. And that was after turning the vast majority down.

I've just finished reading the first of these. This was particularly exciting as it was written by Jacqueline Wilson, who is now a famous children's author.



Snap!

It was quite a cute book, although more a thriller than a who dunnit (I guess it was more of a whosgoingtodoit). Just another 20 or so to go....

Running / swimming

We were a bit slack for the first few weeks after we came back from the UK with regards to running and swimming i.e. we didn't go at all.

However as of last week we are under a new regime which means that we go every day! We go when Sean gets home from work or before he leaves if we get up (we haven't managed this yet). We managed to stick to this last week although we had what we feel was a well deserved day off on Friday.

Sean's also been investigating outdoor runs. He found a good one on the internet here and we walked it at the weekend to see exactly where it went. It took us two hours to walk. It's a really lovely route especially round by the Opera House and the Botanic Gardens. We're going to try and find some shorter routes as well.

It's going to be a bit strange if Sean goes running outside though - he'll have to drop me at the pool and come back and get me when he's finished!

A new Mezerama

Mezerama was our local Turkish restaurant that was sold to become a dodgy pizza joint. We are still very sad about this.

However our lives have been brightened since we visited Sumac restaurant in Darling Harbour yesterday. This is a bizarre mixed Mediterranean restaurant (from the book obviously) including dishes from every country around the Med: Italian (pizza), Spanish (chorizo, paella), Turkish/Greek (grilled lamb chops, falafal, shish kebab) and North African (harissa, tagine).

I had a bit of a tizzy moment when ordering. I had decided to order the calamari stuffed with chorizo and halloumi (too exciting) but was distracted by the Moroccan rabbit stuffed pastry cigars at the last minute. This confused my brain so much that I actually ordered the falafal! I had whole baby snapper for my main course and Sean had grilled lamb chops, followed by swordfish.

The falafal were great and Sean commended the lamb chops as well. My fish came in a kind of herb crust, which was delicious and also with a kind of creamy chilli sauce, which was good in small quantities (I think it may have been a bit sickly if I'd eaten all of it). I also tried Sean's swordfish, which was heavy on the cumin. I mention this as a good thing.

The whole atmosphere was very "Mediterranean", it reminded me simultaneously of Turkey and Tunisia and by the time it came to dessert I was gasping for baklava. In some ways this was a shame as the desserts were extremely exciting: turkish delight, turkish coffee or halawa (not quite sure what this is) ice-cream and loads of other exiting things including at least two that I had no clue what they were. Perhaps next time I will order the dessert tasting plate, but as it explicitly says "for two" on the menu and I know I can't rely on Sean to help me so it seems a little ambitious.

The "baklava and petit fours" option also said "for two" but I reckoned I could manage two servings worth of petit fours. In this case I may well have been wrong but we will never know as Sean ate his whole half of the baklava! I was astounded. We got 6 large assorted pieces of baklava and cut them all in half. They were all fantastic although I had a couple of favourites. I have no way of indicating which these were though as I'm not even sure what each was made of, let alone what they are individually called.

We finished with mint tea, which was surprisingly (and pleasingly for me, not so for Sean) unsweetened with complimentary turkish delight. The service was a little crazy throughout the meal but the food was so good I could forgive them anything.

In other news: I made chocolate truffles (and hence myself very sick) and we visited a local Italian (also in the book) which was OK but a bit disappointing.

Miss Backgammon

If anyone would like to see me in my vague stab at fame, my photo is now up on the Miss Backgammon site (click twice on "View the Entrants" to see me). I sent them another photo as well but they haven't used that one (if you look at the other girls, you will see that a couple have different pictures for the thumbnail from the main photo). I think this is because they are a bit pushed for time at the moment compared to when they put the first photos up; it's taken them nearly 2 months to put my photo up at all (although they did apologise for this by sending me a t-shirt).

I think my plan of using this as a stepping stone to celebrity status is not going to come to fruition. The first draft of the T&Cs said that the winner would get a professional modelling contract, which could have been my way into the big time, but they've since taken this down. Obviously the quality of entrants isn't high enough :(

Tanya Reinhart

We went to another lecture last night at Sydney University. This was in the same series as the lecture given by Bjorn Lomborg and was by an Isreali linguistics professor called Tanya Reinhart. She was speaking in her identity as an Isreali rather than a linguistics professor; she also writes for the "Yediot Aharonot" newspaper in Israel and has written two books on the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Her latest book has just been published and is called "The roadmap to nowhere". I would like to read it but forgot to buy a copy. This is just as well as I should concentrate on reading the books I have already.

The basic theory of Professor Reinhart is that Isreal is actively pursuing a strategy to drive the Palestinians out of Israel, basically by destroying their economy and way of life. She claims that this is being undertaken by a military elite, without support from the Isreali public. I'm not very good at explaining things and this lady is famous enough to have her own wikipedia page so if you're interested in her theories I suggest you read more about it here.

The audience were mainly students from the University, and as such as pro-Tanya as they were all anti-Bjorn. This meant that the questions tended to be lacking in content. It would have been more interesting to see her debate with someone with opposing views.

Back in the swing of things

Since coming back to Australia, the weather has been getting warmer. This has induced me to start making smoothies again (and I suspect that my fondness for soup that I discovered over the winter will disappear) and to this end I have bought myself a new blender.



New blender

I've also posted another recipe to the smoothie blog and I suspect I will keep doing so, but on a very irregular basis i.e. less than once a week. I have lots of ideas (especially involving custard) but not enough time to try them out.

Yesterday it was time for the farmer's market again and we bought some cheese, some strawberries and some cakes from the French patisserie stall. We are less enthusiastic about the farmers market now we know what it sells.

We also went to the cancer shop to buy a hat for Sean. He chose a typical Aussie bush style hat. I also bought a straw hat that ties under my chin. It's not as nice as my other hat but it was the only style they had that I could tie on against the wind.



Hats

I also discovered another problem with it on the way home - the brim is not as wide as my other hat and lets more sun under. I'm not sure whether this was exacerbated by the fact that it was 4pm (i.e. the sun had started getting slanty). I shall try it next week and decide whether it is better to have more shade or more hat security. I suspect it will differ according to circumstance.

Last night we managed to get a table at Flying Fish a local restaurant with a single hat rating in the SMH Good Food Guide. It seems that if you are flexible (i.e. willing to eat at 6pm) then getting a table at a top restaurant at the last minute is not too hard.

We had the degustation menu and I took a photo so we could remember what we had. This didn't turn out too well. Don't get too excited about the fact that I remember the camera though. You will notice that despite taking it out of my bag and leaving it on the side I did not manage to take a single picture of any food. I know what the problem is now though. Food arrives and my first thought is "EAT".



Menu

Luckily the menu is on the website so I can reproduce it in full:

• Seafood tapas


• Yellow fin tuna with sweet crackling pork and ruby grapefruit


• Seared sea scallops with green pea puree, Jerusalem artichoke and horseradish cream


• Grilled green banana prawns with shaved green lip abalone and roast duck broth


• Lemon sorbet


• Seared John Dory fillet with " Pescadillos Salados" capers and parsley Served with hand-cut chips and green salad


• Pyengana cheddar with Japanese radish


• Dessert tasting plate


• Coffee tea and petits fours

The seafood tapas was basically seafood based canapes, all of which were nice but the best was the Kingfish Carpaccio. The artichoke in the scallops dish had been replaced by pancetta, which I think was unfortunate, although they were great scallops. I thought the lemon sorbet would be unexciting and rather irritating but actually was rather nice and a kind of mid course pudding.

The John Dory was great and the chips were very good. They add their signature chilli salt to them, which I was looking forward to. Unfortunately it was very disappointing but the chips themselves were magificent (thick cut real potato perfectly fried). We were both disappointed by the cheese, which was a couple of thin slices of a very dry, almost parmesan-esque cheddar.

The desert plate was magnificent. I had the usual advantage of Sean's lack of interest in anything that isn't chocolate. The only thing I left was the rum panacotta (I don't like panacotta and adding alcohol certainly doesn't help). The others were:

• Strawberry souffle with nougat ice-cream (this was not too insubstantial)


• Almond friand with banana ice-cream


• Passionfruit and mango tart


• Chocolate and raspberry layer cake with chocolate ice-cream

The chocolate cake and ice-cream were the best - the cake was really cakey (I don't think I can explain better than that) and the chocolate used was exceptional quality without being too bitter. The raspberry was just a hint of a flavour and didn't overpower the chocolate.

We also got petit fours (passionfruit jelly, chocolate nougat and chocolate and honey truffle) and tea. And all this for $125 (£50). We will be going back.

Today we are playing backgammon at George's (nice mediterranean restaurant across the water) so if I beat Sean in the final, expect a post from him later on about the injustice of it all.

Hat



Hat

It's starting to hot up now and so when we got back from the UK I managed to get around to buying a hat from the Australian Cancer Society Shop. Because it came from the Cancer shop it is certified SPF 30 (or something), which is very reassuring. I picked the one with the widest brim (10cm); the lady in the shop told me that the average was 8cm.

They didn't really seem to sell anything besides hats and suntan lotion. What I really want in addition to my hat are some lightweight long sleeved shirt similarly guaranteed to keep my arms safe. Still my arms are more durable than my face and neck.

I wore the hat to walk to dancing today and it is brilliant! My head and neck are completely in the shade at all times. It has a tendency to blow off as it's so windy here but that I can cope with. I might buy a less stylish one that ties under my chin for windy days.

A lot of things, but mainly books

This weekend was a bank holiday. We had been considering travelling up to Byron Bay for a weekend backgammon tournament. Byron Bay is almost on the edge of Queensland and takes 9 hours to drive to. Sean couldn't get Friday off work and we were booked in to see a play Friday evening so the only option was to fly. As we were booking at the last minute, the flights were quite expensive so we hummed and haahed and they sold out. Still we did some much more exciting things.

On Friday we went to see I am my own wife in the Opera House. I tried to book the Opera house restaurant but it was full so we went to a nearby Chinese that was in the SMH food guide. The food was really nice - we had lobster with ginger and spring onion, salt and chilli squid and king prawns in black bean sauce. All the seafood was fresh and really high quality.

Also on Friday, the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra was playing in the Opera house. There was a free screening of it outside so people were streaming past us in a queue as we ate. There were still quite a few hanging around after they closed the doors because it was full.



The queue to see the Vienna Philharmonic



The crowd outside the Opera House waiting for the performance to begin

The play was fascinating. It was a performed by a single gentleman, who did very well. However I have come to realise that although bad actors can stuff up a play, good actors can't rescue a bad one so although the acting was impeccable I feel that the real credit is due to the playwright.

The play was about an East German transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Russian occupation, while collecting 19th century furniture in a museum. The play was based around interviews that the writer had with Charlotte von Marlsdorf and there is a photo of her in the programme. One of the key aspects of the story was that while she was being feted as a heroine after the wall came down, the Stasi files were released and showed that she was not as resistant as claimed and in fact collaborated with the Stasi, even giving them information that led to the arrest of her friend and fellow furniture collector.

If you want to read more, Charlotte's autobiography is available under the title I am my own woman (I think this is the same quote with different translation of the German word Frau) or some notes on the play are available here.

As we had a whole weekend, as couldn't get flights for anywhere we wanted to visit, we decided to drive to the Southern Highlands on the outskirts of Sydney. We stayed in the Fitzroy Inn, a hotel with a restaurant in the the Food Guide.



A view from a lookout in the Southern Highlands

The Southern Highlands is an area consisting of several small villages. Mittagong, where the hotel was, was not very impressive but we went to Bowral a few times and Berrima, the oldest village, is quite cute in an extremely touristy way.

It's tulip season at the moment in the Southern Highlands so we went to one garden in Bowral. The queue was pretty long and the place was packed. The tulips were nice but we declined the offer to be bussed to more gardens to see more tulips.



Tulips

We visited three bookshops in Bowral and even better, a book barn on the outskirts of Berrima. We bought far too many books, including some Peter Ackroyd first editions. We'll be reading for a little while...



A typical antique shop in Bowral

We only stayed one night in the Fitzroy Inn, but the food was superb and we would definitely go back. We shared gnocci in burnt butter and sage and then Sean had lamb and I had a roast spatchcock chicken. We also shared a fantastic cheese platter.

We've spent today recovering from going away....