No eating on an empty stomach, or with a bunch of assholes

I think I've cracked the riddle of why I'm not puking anymore, despite continuing to feel a little nauseous from time to time, and it does have to do with jet lag; since I'm not even close to getting an uninterrupted night's sleep and always have a little snack when I have to get up and around, my stomach doesn't get to that empty point where it starts puking. I'm avoiding, for the moment, that disgusting merry-go-round of empty tummy, puke, no appetite, more puke, try to eat, it's disgusting, empty tummy, et cetera. We'll see if this lasts but I'm pretty chuffed. Never thought it would feel so good to sleep so bad.

What I am a little concerned about, though, is getting as big as a fucking whale because I'm eating constantly. I already look like I'm showing, probably from a combination of water retention and having spent the last couple of weeks eating everything I could hold down and then falling asleep in exhaustion after something as easy as climbing three flights of stairs.

I'm not too concerned, though. My energy levels seem pretty decent now. And I'd rather be overweight than underweight while there's a bun in the oven, that's for damn sure. But I am a little concerned. Oh well. I'm just making sure that anything that goes down the hatch is wholesome, and I'll keep getting an hour of exercise a day, even if it's not all running anymore. The run yesterday was lovely. I think I'll keep going out for a half hour a couple of times a week until I'm too big. I take it really easy and my joints weren't playing up at all - they seem to get iffier when I'm moving around the house in a sudden-type of fashion.

Another thing on my mind is family, of course. How couldn't it be? Today it's the F-word's family. There's a whole big swathe he's become estranged from in the last year. I'm not getting into it, of course, but suffice it to say I don't blame him for the estrangement, and I'm a little surprised by how I wish it to extend to our children - I don't want my kids to have anything to do with this set of people.

That's not the way I ever expected to feel about members of my kid's extended family - I'm Italian enough to feel fairly strongly that family is identity to a very large degree - but there you are. They're the sort of people that I want my children to understand are not the sort of people you sit down and eat dinner with. I'm not talking drug dealers or slave traders or government assassins or merchant bankers or commodities traders. The world is more complicated than that, some of my favorite people are for-realsies fascists, and I'd sit down for dinner with a pig (although these non-vegetarian days, the pig'd probably be on the dish), because pigs can have quite decent dispositions. But these people . . . well . . .

Anyways, I guess the F-word'll be the one to decide if the estrangement continues or not, but in any case of course it throws my own family into relief. They're great. Not strange or estrange or anything. And they're so fucking far away . . . oh well. We'll get round to doing something about that before long.

Feeding the fetus, part 1

Well, vegetarianism, you and I will probably meet again. Godspeed and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Pregnancy continues carnivorously. Now that I'm back on my home turf and now that my rhythms of what's morning and what's not seem to have been utterly thrown off by massive jet lag, giving me a break from the really severe nausea I was feeling in Canada (I'll let you know if this continues as a cure; Diclectin is so fucking expensive that a trip to Australia could work out to be good value), I'm trying to control what I eat a little better. No more Cheez Wiz. But lots of organic meat, baked potatoes, and pasta carbonara, which, let's face it, is probably no better for me, but at least I know what's in it.

And now that I'm back in the tropics I'm eating more fruit, since it's tastier. The lemonades in our backyard are just about ready - still pretty sour, but always less sour than they start out as tasting, which is a really charming thing about lemonades. Bananas that always taste like bananas. Passion fruit. I'm not enjoying it all as much as sausages, but it's all going down a lot easier than the veggies, that's for damn sure. It's the cruciform ones whose bare idea makes me want to hurl up food I ate thirty years ago, but aside from cucumbers and red peppers, the whole institution is unappealing at the moment.

And joy of joys, the eight bottles of Mado's hot sauce I brought home survived the three plane trips unbroken. Last time I only brought two, and they lasted six weeks or so - the F-word and
I have a habit of spreading it on sandwiches so we run through it fast. Hopefully the eight'll last until someone indulgent visits us from Toronto. Get it at the House of Spice in Kensington, Indulgent Ones.

Give me the drugs

You know what's remarkable about pregnancy in modern media? Nobody ever tells you how miserable and rotten the first trimester is. From all accounts so far it seems nothing blows like the first three months and the last two weeks, when the baby is too big for the tummy and kicking the shit out of you, and otherwise it seems reasonably pleasant. But nobody likes the first trimester, I get told now that I'm smack in the middle of it myself.

First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.

Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.

Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:

1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon

You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.

So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?

Real jobs and real chocolate milk

Two things. First, the F-word got a real job, which is awesome. He'd been making ends meet and pulling his weight financially in the household, but had had to, you know, hustle a bit. Not like rentboy hustle, like bustle-hustle. A few days here, a few hours there, a few days of hoop-jumping to get government money; that sort of thing. All quite precarious, stressful, and boring. Some of it was very lucrative, like the supply teaching, which is almost 3 Cs a day here, but that was the most stressful of all, since it was generally with country teenagers.

The least lucrative and the least stressful was working at a falafel stand at a series of local markets, of which there are a plethora in the neighboring towns. He quite enjoyed that, but the guy who runs the stall is the one whose Canadian wife left him with their son for Canada, hence he's shattered, and she'd been the one mostly running the stall, hence it's not really running like a well-oiled machine . . . hence the F-word was making minimum wage (which, admittedly, is really high in Australia; around $15, and that's on par with the US and Canadian dollar at the mo).

Considering our taste for holidays, expensive cheeses, and paying off our mortgage super fast so we can move back to Europe in style, his unpredictable schedual and lack of extra money has been frustrating for both of us. I guess there was also a lurking fear of me suddenly losing my job, too, and what we'd manage to pull out of our asses then. It's not a very realistic fear unless I go mental at the next conference I attend and start writing poetry on the walls with my own poo. But what if I really want to and feel I simply can't? No, I refuse to feel so stifled.

So that's all great, but what's even better is that it's a real job, by which I mean a good one - adult education, socially useful, with a non-profit instead of one of the cunt cowboy schools he and I have both had more than enough of, non-ridiculous commute AND, best of all, only two days a week, which means he has his mental space for art without having to waste his time hustling for short jobs, and for afternoon sex. He was getting to the point of wanting a job so bad I think he would have accepted one that wasn't real, in the sense of good. So I'm relieved. It is fucking difficult to live with artists when they're not artisting.

Also while in past conversations he's been fond of the idea of being a house-husband, when the possibility arose before him he couldn't do it. I understand. I couldn't be a housewife either. Not because of not feeling it'd be unfulfilling or whatever, but I just couldn't emotionally accept going down to only one income for two people in such a precarious world, which is his feeling, more or less. Maybe we'd feel differently about it if we both couldn't get real, in the sense of good, jobs, and our situations were either nothing or 50 hour weeks (I've done the 50 hour weeks; I'd rather do nothing). And maybe we'll feel differently when there are kids in the picture. Maybe we'll both want to stay home then even if we were still only working 16-20 hour weeks. Hard to say.

Anyways, the second thing. I've figured out the not-at-all-rocket-science of homemade chocolate milk. It's just like an iced latte; you mix together some sugar and cocoa in a few drops of hot water and then put in cold milk and ice. I can't believe I've been such a fucking shithead as to buy pre-packaged chocolate milk at the store like a fucking doofus for 32 years. Well, let's say 28 years, since 4 is the first time I remember agitating to be bought chocolate milk. That's 28 years of being a total shithead. Okay, let's say 24, because maybe my parents wouldn't have let me boil water unattended until I was 8 or something. 24 years of being a total shithead. Sometimes I fucking blush for myself. In the last year alone I must have blew about $100 from not having figured that shit out. And it's so much better, especially using that sort of cocoa with the superfine chili powder, so that it's a spicy chocolate milk. Try buying that shit in the store. You can't.

Parasites and prawns

So. Two things. First, I saw my accountant yesterday and discovered I'd saved more than four times as much as I needed to for my income taxes this year. That was mostly down to my paranoia and I had been pretty sure I was oversaving, but it was still good news. Thrilling news, in fact. But later, something was added to the thrill, as it dawned on me that the figure was really far too low. I ran a quick simulation to see what I'd have to pay if I was an employee instead of a contractor, and realized I would have had to pay twice as much - easily.

And that set me off, of course. I'd had an abstract understanding for some time that tax systems in the Anglo countries serve to wed the interests of the extremely rich to the - what would you call it? Entrepreneurial class?  Sounds too flattering . . . small business class? I'm not sure. I'm sure there's a real word for it somewhere.

In Australia I think it has the effect of sort of uniting the interests of everybody who owns a shop or service with cunts who are really, really rich - fixing things up so we pay very little tax. Which means we - the self-employed, the really really rich - are effectively being subsidized by proportionately higher taxes being paid by poor people and by employees. (Less so by poor people now because the tax-free threshold has just been tripled, this year, to north of $18,000, which is enough to live on, if not live on well in the cities - but of course raising that limit also benefits people making a lot more than $18,000).

I can see the arguments for it in terms of job creation but I think many small businesspeople are like me, with no or else very casual employees, and I can see an argument for it - a very theoretical one - in the breaks being offered for the self-employed to encourage them to get into something a little bit risky. But the thing is, in an Australian context being self-employed isn't really riskier than being an employee. This isn't Europe. Severance pay is poor, notice periods are short, and there's a perfectly adequate public healthcare system - from what I can figure out, all private coverage buys you in Australia is cups of tea when you're in hospital, where you'll still get taken care of by a public-system doctor if there's an emergency. The new mat leave scheme isn't something employers pay into, it's a government handout, and it's as available to the self-employed as it is to employees. Unless you as an individual or you as represented by a union (and unions catch MASSIVE fucking flack in the media here) can negotiate a really great contract with your employer (as does still happen, actually, since there's a labour shortage in so many fields in Australia), there's really no substantial benefit to being an employee.

There is one, actually, again in theory. Superannuation payments. Employers are required to contribute, I think, a figure representing 10% of their employee's base salary into a sort of retirement investment account - the sort of thing that's done in the US and Canada too, a replacement for a decent pension, and the reason why normal people's lives have got completely fucked up by financial markets over the last three years, and the reason why so many things suddenly seem "too big to fail" - if they do, an army of broke, angry pensioners will start voting Commie, or something. And of course nobody pays the self-employed superannuation benefits.

But the thing is, if I was an employee, there's no way by base pay would be this high. When I negotiated my contract, I asked for more money to make up for no super. And when jobs are advertised in my field and pay is mentioned, the super contributions are always part of the ad - you're expected to think of your pay as a combination of the two.

So. In conclusion. I've left the middle classes and joined the parasite classes. And I don't feel bad about it. Well, I do, but not bad enough to not keep the money.

Second thing. To celebrate me joining the parasite classes, we went for a run on the beach in Lennox Head last night, and then out for dinner to the Lennox Thai Garden. And shockingly, it was MARVELLOUS. I whine alot about the poor quality of rural Australian food, but there are three restaurants in L--- that are quite decent - I mustn't knock it too much. But this was the first time that we'd been outside of the big cities here that I'd had a meal where I actually felt that it was proportionately good to how fucking expensive it was. I had this sort of coconut soup and some king prawns in tamarind sauce, and everything was actually fresh - especially the king prawns - they were enormous and delicious. Good lord. I was really shocked. The idea of value for money when it comes to food is really something I didn't think I'd ever experience again in this fucking countryside. Top notch!

Life without kitchens

So did you know that in Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the apartments are built without kitchens? When I was told that I was too busy scraping my woppy jaw off the floor to make rational inquiries like whether or not the classic Parisian “coin-cuisine” counted as a kitchen or not in terms of my interlocutor’s standards. Because if they don’t (and really, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t; the only person I’ve ever met who made a coin-cuisine work was Portuguese, and we all know they’re the MacGyvers of Europe) then half of urban Europe doesn’t have a kitchen either.

But then I went to Singapore and traveled elsewhere in Asia where space is expensive and labor is cheap, and understood that a life where you ate and drank everything except ramen noodles out of a shop could still potentially be a life. Not my life, mind you. There have been periods of – let’s call it “violent self-actualization” - when, if I hadn’t been cooking, I probably would have somehow left this life either literally or figuratively. When I imagine a me who doesn't cook, I just get this vertiginous vision of bobbing off into the ether like an untethered balloon. As tedious as something like, say, clementine marmalade is to make, there’s a special significance in that tedium for someone like me, who does too much living in her nerves. I hesitate to use “earthy” words because my clementine marmalade is out of this world, but there is something grounding about coaxing some raw ingredients into a marvelous symphony of deliciousness over a period of several hours or several days. You wouldn't believe what I can do with tapioca now, of all things.

But not having a kitchen could be a life – but only if you had enough Asians around. For some it’s THE life, and not only in Asia. There is a Cantonese branch to my family tree, the older members of which have a lovely big house with a lovely big kitchen in a lovely Toronto neighborhood, where they don’t cook a damn thing. Instead – and since they have the disposable income to manage it, let me make it clear this is a choice I whole-heartedly applaud – instead they eat at this place. Even better, they bring me with them. Lai Wah Heen is the first place I had lobster dim sum, and the first place I had Peking Duck. It’s the first place outside of China that I had sea cucumber. And it’s the first place I’ve been to that made darling little dim sums that looked like piggies. Their dim sum chef is specially qualified in making life-like dim sum. This restaurant is so awesome; I’m not a frightfully materially conscious human being and as stated probably wouldn’t have much of a life without cooking in it, but I think Lai Wah Heen and the possibility of eating there all the time is probably quite a good reason, in my books, for seeking to be stinking rich.

Anyhoo. If you're ever stuck in downtown Toronto with an expense account, now you know where to go.

If you can't say anything nice, write a fucking blog

Readers, I like you. I like that you read this blog. It’s really touching. I've been raised to believe nobody is interested in all of my fucking whining - to just not say anything if I can't say anything nice, etc. - and as such am actually quite a quiet person in the flesh as most of the thoughts that are manifestable in vocabulary in my brain run along the "fuck you!" lines. I'm given to responding to questions like "so how do you like Australia?" with some brief, rather guarded positive, like "we enjoy our lifestyles there, and we have a lot of good friends in the expatriate community" instead of a more specific, more negative statement - "the weather's good and we have jobs that give us a lot of time to work out and have sex, but Australians make me and all our friends want to puke and I can't wait to leave."

So the fact you read this blog when it's almost 90% whining is really nice, and I like you for it. And as a token of my liking you, I’m about to improve your life. You can use a commercial pie crust for the following, or make your own, or get fancy – just make sure it’s something that will stand about 30 minutes of baking, and is about the size of a standard pie, if you catch my drift.

Take two cups of ricotta. Put them in a bowl and grate the zest of an orange or lemon or some other citrus fruit into it. Put in a couple of tablespoons of the sort of sugar you like: I use evaporated cane juice, being a hippie. You could use anything on down to icing sugar, which would probably be the most “authentic” as far as that goes. Put in little pieces of chocolate. You can please yourself here with how much you put in, but this doesn’t have to be a very sweet dessert, so no need to lose your shit; a little goes a long way.

Put in a couple of spoonfuls of a liqueur of your choice, probably a fruity one. Even limoncello will do. Mix it up, exhaustively. Beat a couple of eggs, and then mix them up exhaustively into your ricotta mixture. Dump the mixture into the pie shell, and bake it at 200° C for about 25 minutes, or until it looks, you know, hearty. Sort of a lovely pale gold. Let it cool down, and then comes the most important step – eat it.

The process is simple and the product is simply bewildering. The first forkful, and for all but the piles of garbage, the stray cats, the Mediterranean, the gypsies with their noses sliced off, the slightly sickening Baroque churches, and actually a lot of other things besides the ricotta desserts, I was back in Naples.

I’m particularly pleased with this recipe because in the Australian countryside so many Italian cheeses are impossible to come by in anything like a pleasing form.We have (and if you told me we’d even consider such a step a year ago, I’d have laughed in your face) given up on the shit pecorino romano and reggiano and parmigiano and whatnot that gets flogged there in favour of very old cheddar as a condiment for our pasta. What the fuck! Even in England, the Netherlands, Scandi-fucking-navia, I’ve never been driven to such a fucking extremity as that. But in Australia it seems like the only decent cheese they can produce domestically is cheddar, and European exporters only seem to deign to send their shittiest products to us on the end of the Earth.

Luckily, LUCKILY, though, the other exception is ricotta. Fresh, decent-enough ricotta, we can snag even in the sticks. Maybe I will be able to make it through – yurgh – six or seven years there.

That's not a cultural vaccuum . . . Now THAT's a cultural vaccuum.

Going from L--- to Shanghai is, I think, at least as refreshing as going from Shanghai to L--- would be for a Shanghaiese. Going to a place where the entire population of my present hometown could be accommodated on a single block is a good antidote to a lot of things. The truth is, as astute readers will no doubt have noticed, I've hit a pretty vicious wall of culture shock as far as Australia goes. If we were in one of the big cities it'd probably be different, but this place is the equivalent of my real hometown - the Australian equivalent - which means even more insular and even less cosmopolitan.

On the way home, I got stuck in Singapore for the night because of delays out of Shanghai. But as I was flying with Singapore Airlines - which I advise you to do if you have any choice in the matter - that meant the airline arranging for me to spend the night in a five-star and have a delicious multi-ethnic breakfast (and yes, the Asians have utterly won me over to the wisdom of a noodle or dumpling broth for breakfast), and then some time to chill out in Changi Airport which contains, I shit you not, a range of gardens, including a butterfly house. It vies with Vancouver Airport as the nicest I've ever seen, and I'm reasonably confident that I've seen a shitload of airports. I've just tried to count how many, and I can't. To put that in perspective, I can count the number of men I've had sex with and I used to be a card-carrying roundheels.

Anyhoo, I remember when the Singapore Airlines guy met us coming off the Shanghai plane around 1 am on Sunday morning, and handed me a pre-prepared envelope containing the boarding pass for my replacement flight and my Grand Hyatt voucher - I remember thinking as I stared at him, are you the same fucking species as an Air France or KLM or European or North American airline worker? If you fucked one of them, could you produce offspring? And if so, could you please have custody of it, you beautiful, beautiful Singaporean man, and raise it in your ways?

And then when I went to the Grand Hyatt, like so many Singaporean buildings, the hallways going to the room aren't hallways, but extended balconies. And I stepped out into the balmy deep night - I sniffed that baffling and deeply Singaporean smell of a tropical city that isn't dirty - and I regretted that the F-word and I hadn't moved there instead of here.

The sentiment probably shouldn't have come as a surprise going by what I've written in the past, but it did. The thing is, when were in Singapore in November, everybody told me it was an anodyne place, an uninteresting place, a culturally vacuous place. I believed them. I still believe them because even the Singaporeans said so. And you know what? Maybe it is, but there is no way Singaporean culture is more anodyne, uninteresting and vacuous than Australia's. As I was walking down that breezeway or whatever I remembered every person who'd said Singapore was culturally bland as hell and had a little mental fit thinking about that idea of vacuity versus the Australian cultural vacuity.

The port mentality of Singapore - its cosmopolitan, outward-looking quality - suddenly provided such a gut-wrenching contrast with the deeply insular quality of Australia. The contrast got even worse when I read the Singaporean papers the next morning, and realized that despite the country not having a really free press, the papers have immeasurably, immeasurably better foreign news coverage than Australia's do - that fucking monopolistic mess of what they call a media here, this damnable Velveeta of a national newspaper industry, compares poorly with the newspapers of an authoritarian, undemocratic state that canes and executes people.

Well, I'm still in the boat of not regretting moving here; I'm making a shitload of money, we have a big garden, good friends, kayaking, etc. But at that moment - if not for the garden, actually, it's the garden that stopped my hand - I had a real temptation to call up the F-word and tell him to come meet me, cos' I wasn't going back if he was willing to do so.

I suspect I'm mostly feeling this way because of weather - Singapore is endless summer, while Australia is having winter, a hard one for me to tolerate because everybody has spring and summer back home, and also because this place is even worse than Belgium when it comes to notions of keeping your house warm in the winter. As I type this I'm wearing five layers of clothes, despite feasting on animal fat in Shanghai, whose cuisine rivals that of northern Italy in terms of making animal fat deeply, astonishingly, mouth-wateringly delectable. But we'll see.

A bit of culture

It was the F-word's birthday recently so I treated him to a few days in Melbourne as a kept man. It was a bit of a backhanded present though, because fuck me sideways, did I ever need a few days in a city. I needed a few days of Asians and music with basslines and beautiful man-made objects and people who aren't staggering pisspots still out after 6pm and different kinds of food that I'd never tried before.

This past weekend I had my first durian. I should have done that in Singapore but we were with my boss all that week, who considers durian about as appetizing as baby shit, and I was having all sorts of other firsts that week too, most remarkably my first full week eating only fucking marvellous food . . . oh fuck me Singapore . . . I'd take a caning for ya. Anyways. Back to earth. I ate my first durian in Melbourne at a Thai restaurant, or rather I drank it in smoothie form, and it was good. Probably not representative of a nice fresh durian though, because it was also unremarkable, utterly unremarkable - like a creamier sort of honeydew flavour - and from all I've heard elsewhere durian is nothing if not remarkable.

So anyways, in Melbourne we ate beautifully, the best we've eaten since that week in Singapore, and all of it various sorts of Asian of course (a Malay restaurant in St. Kilda's topping the list - ginger fucking salsa, fuck me), except for one pizza with some of the F-word's family on Lygon street after a really, really emotional Aussie Rules football match. Wow, was it emotional. I never think of myself as someone who is into spectator sports, but when I actually make the effort to go to a game I always get sucked into it. When all those people are there in the field performing their little hearts out for crowds more populous than my whole hometown, I get utterly sucked into their human dramas.

Also Aussie Rules is a ridiculous thing for humans to do. In the game we saw, two guys, within five minutes of each other, tore their ACLs, an injury I've experienced myself and which was, you know, really shitty . . . and there those poor boys were being carted off the field. It was gladiatorial. Which of course calls to my disgusting, decadent Roman blood.

So I won't go to another such game for another year or so, not only because the human drama was so intense, but also because I can't fucking stand sports fans. So many fucking retards in such a small space when you're in a stadium. I mean, there are all those poor boys on the field, playing their hearts out and ripping their ACLs and doing really astonishingly physical and co-operative feats of awesomeness, while a bunch of stupid fat drunk assholes who wouldn't be able to jog around a cricket pitch without taking a break to suffer a fucking coronary yell insults at thier own team whenever something they don't like happens. It gives me the fucking shits, I'll tell ya.

Jié xi kǎ kěyǐ zàicì yùnxíng

Ahhhh. Back to running again. That cold or whatever it was couldn't stand up to a day of kim chi brine and hot chicken bone broth. In fact I don't think anything except the human spirit can survive a day of kim chi brine and chicken bone broth. But that combo is the shit. I'm pretty sure it can fix most ailments if combined with a hot toddy the night before. Gosh, with this sort of home medicine philosophy, I am gonna have some drunk, smelly kids during cold-and-flu season.

Anyways, I'm running again, and after the three day break it wasn't harder than usual, and I've decided I'm going to do the one-hour-running programme since I don't really care about races or running fast or things like that. I'm perfectly happy with my stately little trot. Truth be told I'm scared of running fast. When I trot my stately little trot, I can pay attention to my dicky knee and to my posture and to not falling over on wet grass and things like that. If not running for three days was such a pisser, I hate to think what'll happen if I blew out my knee again and couldn't run for weeks.

Anyways again. Yesterday whilst interminably practicing the pinyin table, practicing counting to ten, drinking kim chi brine and making bin dae duk, I've realized the persistent lack of Asians in my life since leaving Toronto four years ago has finally made me crack and start wanting to actually be Asian. Sort of like how South Park did that great episiode about how Michael Jackson's whole problem was wanting to be an 11-year-old girl. This better not play out into some sort of psychosomatic lactose intolerance. We are negotiating to buy a house here - to really commit ourselves to a good four or five years in this town - and that'll be four or five years almost completely without Asians. There are a tonne of Chinese kids coming through town for university, but they're all young, transient, and none of them cook for me.

Part of what is helping me stay cool in the negotiations for this house, which I actually really really want, is knowing that if it doesn't work out our options are open in terms of moving to a different city sooner than that, which actually offers some fucking culinary variety.

Culture shocking

This weekend at a local market, I came across a book about Gaudi and burst into tears as I realized how fuckin' far away Barcelona is, and how unlike Barcelona L--- is. The nature is beautiful here, and as I learn to accept all of the creepy-crawlies, only getting more so. But down there in the market, which the city holds in the parking lot of a local shopping centre, I just felt so surrounded by civilized ugliness and people who don't give a fuck that their city is a million times uglier than Barcelona that I just got overwhelmed. I'm planning to see my family and friends in Canada soon and I'm not missing most of Europe, but these days missing Spain and Berlin is just fucking gutting me.

The culture shock has well and truly hit, as you can tell, and having expected it in the abstract doesn't feel like it was actually any sort of preparation for feeling it. Oh well. Still reasonably happy to be here and even if I wasn't I'd stick it out, if only to spite the people who reckoned I couldn't and that I'd be crawling back to the crowded, dirty, annoying, but beautiful cities of Europe within a year. And of course keeping the lines of communication with the F-word well and truly open about the mental turmoil. If I can't hack it here he's suggested we try one of the cities that aren't Sydney before calling it quits on the country, which is a reassuring fallback plan; Melbourne, during my brief visit there, resembled a much prettier and warmer Toronto, which was charming. Anyways.

In other and better news, jogging is still fun. The best thing about being a winded maggot is that once you get going the payoffs are so immediate and dramatic; scarcely two weeks in and my tummy is already clefting in two in the promise of a future six-pack (I really don't want one though, I reckon they're ugly on girls - on boys too for that matter except for the ectomorph, heroin-addict types I think are just fucking beautiful during the last five days of my menstrual cycle - thanks for fucking me up in pre-pubescence, early 90's grunge) and I have more energy generally, although I'm just jogging 15 minutes a day, and that still in reps.

And another good thing about being here: the sub-tropical climate is fucking beautiful. I love it. It's perfect for me - the humidity makes my hair and skin feel like they've been let out of jail, the temperature is perfect, and I can wear sarongs and mumus all the time. And enjoy smoothies every morning - finally the right climate for it - and I've figured out that if you put some hot chili flakes into the smoothie it makes it a good bit better.

So complaining, complaining, and complaining will continue, and I doubt I've shed my last tears over the prospect of not seeing the moon over Barcelona from the Guell Park for many more years, but life is still better than a kick in the tits.

You're the condensed milk in my coffee

Singapore gave me the best culinary week of my life; fuckin' beautiful memories, and a real motivation to keep my job so I can make more trips there on the company dime, and hopefully eat much, much more. Also would like to reserve the option of moving there for work if the F-word ever dumps me. Australia is good in many ways but if I can't have him I at least want fuckin' unlimited Asian food, and this place, as mentioned, is so. Goddamn. Caker.

(And Australians care about food the way cakers do, which is, they fuckin' don't. Their national dish is fuckin' 'meat' pies whose fillings are guaranteed to be at least 25% flesh, and if there's anything less fucking suitable for this climate than those disgusting little hockey pucks, it's roast lamb - the other national dish. And don't get me started on their fucking desserts; if all you saw of Australia was its dessert tray you'd reckon you were at a fuckin' church social in the Hebrides or one of the poorer parts of Scandinavia after the local Nokia factory packs up and moves to China. Well. Anyways. The Australian cities are apparently way better, with enough Asians and olive-skinned types in them to get to that critical mass where the food is really good, like in Toronto or Vancouver. But being babied and cosseted in Singapore after the annoyances of Brussels, etc., may have ruined me for any other urban conglomeration.)

Anyways again. Now is not the time to speculate on Plan Bs in the event the love of my life breaks my fuckin' heart and consigns me to a cold-hearted but pleasure-saturated life of lascivious gluttony, wherein I jog along the sterilised beach all morning so as to eat all afternoon and get a little work done in the evening in a country where almost everybody loves food as much or more than I do. Now is the time to tell you that one of the more tangible gifts Singapore gave me is putting condensed milk into my coffee - I thing I learned from the Vietnamese restaurant close to my boss's old office, Viet Express, which is one of only two restaurants I made two trips to during the week, it being so fucking good*.

The Spanish do something similar, I know, though I didn't try it when I was there - a cafe bonbon or bombom or however you say 'candy' in Spanish, which is half espresso, half condensed milk. At the Viet Express, they served a sort of strong, espresso-ground drip coffee, with a dose of condensed milk next to it - not quite half/half but almost. As for me, I just add a big oozing tablespoonful of condensed milk to the equivalent of three shots of espresso and that makes my afternoon fucking magnificent. The coffee gets exactly the right sweetness with an added caramel velvetiness. I recommend it strongly if you're a sugar-in-your-coffee sort of person.

*The other was the Thanying Restaurant, a fucking delectable Thai restaurant in Amara hotel which honestly - my family's finer efforts excepted - debatably served me the best food I've ever eaten. Ever. And I have eaten a lot of food. We took a business contact there for lunch and I nearly died of pleasure, so I took the F-word back in the evening. Going there also gave my boss the chance to deliver one of the funniest bits of attempted cultural education I'd heard since 2003: "Thai people are the nicest, warmest, gentlest people in the world, until they start hitting you."

The waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flavour

I don't know if I mentioned but a few months ago I dreamt there was a blight on garlic; that almost overnight, all of the fucking garlic in the world shrivelled up and rotted away, and the fucking day dawned bleakly on shops emptied of their fucking garlic. It was the closest I've ever come to encompassing an idea of Armageddon in my head, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Amageddon, and I actually woke up screaming. It was one of those nightmares where you wake up believing it's real, and you have to sort of come to realize how unlikely it is, how somehow the world is still turning around you, etc., so it must have been a dream . . . and then gradually calming down. Previous to that, I think I'd only had those sorts of nightmares about having murdered someone.

Anyways, the F-word and I had a good laugh about what fucked up priorities I have if I'm having a fucking brutal nightmare about something so unlikely. And then we moved to Australia, and the fucker started flooding, and the other day we went to a huge grocery store and THERE WAS NO FUCKING GARLIC. Nor was there any at the grocery store on the other side of the shopping centre*. It's because of the fucking floods. The farmers can't get the garlic dry enough to ship. And for the first time in my life I had a vision of what it's like when your nightmares come true, it was like a fucking slasher movie.

There's still no garlic if you're unlucky, because Australians are awfully rah-rah-rah in a hideously cringeworthy way about things being made in Australia (although all the garish nationalistic labelling on the products has those sorts of vague, Body-Shop-"Against Animal Testing" type compositions that mean nothing, like "Proudly Operated in Australia!", which could just mean that an Australian truck driver takes the product from the port to the supermarket), so the stores haven't just buckled and ordered it from China like everyone fuckin' should.

It is bloody horrible. Bloody horrible.

*Australians have two principal supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, basically indistinguishable in terms of prices and product range, which each occupy opposite sides of almost all the shopping centres, and are both fucking overpriced suck factories, and then they call this thing that walks, quacks and fucks like fuckin' cartel "choice".

Open sesame season

I'm lucky in my life partner in a lot of ways, but definitely one of the ones I feel smuggest about is that we can have a panicked conversation about how we're going to have to get a lady-goat or something for its milk so we can keep having some sort of raw cheese in Australia, where it's fucking illegal, and that any time we get a serious jones on for really stinky, artisanal raw cheese there we'll just a really fucking slap-up Asian dinner and count our fucking blessings. I took the F-word out his last night here for an attempt at a slap-up sushi dinner and it was fucking R-U-P-T rough. I'd never known before that tuna had gristle. That's fucking Latin Europe, man. Not enough Orientals.

Anyways, that segues me into two topics:

1. Last night I bought four kinds of cheese, in a wild bid to stuff so much into my tummy before leaving for Australia that I don't miss it as much as I know I will anyways. Most of them were hard so theoretically we'll be able to keep getting them in Australia, but I know from practice in Canada it just doesn't work that way - it'll be shitty knock-offs, the dregs of production, because the manufacturers will understand it's being exported to a country that's used to its food dead. Anyways: parmigiano reggiano, pecorino primo salata (a squeaky, soft sheep cheese, almost but not quite bland, comforting, and studded with peppercorns), Castelmagno (which I'd never had before and was a real success - imagine a parmigiano reggiano but with its soul still imprisoned in it, and only emerging with a holler of triumph as you take a bite), and then feta - but the feta was stuffed into pickled spicy green peppers. Holy shit. There aren't very many edible things that are better than pickled spicy green peppers stuffed with feta. It's a very pleasing combination. I think we can make that, after moving, though.

2. Today's oil (tying back into the slap-up Asian dinners we'll have when we miss the cheese too much): sesame. Sesame oil, and sesame seeds too, are important to me as a nut allergy sufferer. Sesame seeds, toasted, or sesame oil as a dressing, or tahini, or halva, that fucking priceless, delectable and horribly addictive ambrosia, can almost fool my tastebuds into thinking they're finally getting some peanuts or something, so there's an element of naughtiness to eating them - it just feels so deliciously wrong, like getting head from someone who's still doing their undergrad but who has figured out how to do it. So there's the naughtiness as well as an element of deliciousness. For delicious all these things are are.

Not only that. Sesame oil is a super-useful hair thing. It's been years since I demanded my hair suffer chemical abuse but back when I was rehabilitating it, sesame oil was the trick. Your scalp loves it. If you bias toward dryness, like I do, it's a rare and lovely pleasure to get a deep, langorous scalp massage with sesame oil; and then one quick wash later, or extended comb with a rough wooden comb to pick up excess goo, your hair looks ace for a week.

It's also reputed to be a cure for baldness. That, I couldn't say. My deductive instincts tell me that if it was I'd be priced out of the market by panicking men, and there wouldn't be any bald people. But it's hard to say. The thing is, once you've had a sesame oil scalp massage, you smell quite distinctly of sesame. To me it's rather nice to smell like a Japanese seaweed salad but I'm aware I may not be the voice of the majority on this one, more fool the majority.

Slick – Pumpkin seed oil

I love vegetable oils more than animal fat, and I love animal fat a lot. Butter is indispensable for some soups and sauces if you live in a wintry environment, and when it comes to fries – sorry, Hindus - cow lard is the fucking acest. But otherwise, vegetable fats are so adorable and various and smashingly awesome. So to focus on the positive this week, I’m going to write about all the vegetable fat that I love. Especially since I've realized that there's a range of things I've started consuming here that I don't remember in Canada (possibly from want of looking) and I'm worried I won't be able to get in Australia.

I’m the sort of person who feels stress in a) her brains and b)her tummy. At times like this, especially after the whole turning-bright-yellow following the massive self-abuse leading up to my thesis defense years ago, I pay careful attention to what my tummy is asking for, food-wise.

And lately it’s been asking for pumpkin seed oil by the shot-glass. God bless the fucking Germans for introducing me to it. Have already gone on about the glories of pumpkin flesh, and could go on about the delights of pepitas as well; pine nuts are off my radar at the moment until they get cleared by an allergist, so pumpkin seeds have been making their way into our pasta and salads and pizza and everywhere else – lovely little fuckers. (Really very, very versatile, but bear in mind they burn pretty fast, so if you top any oven-cooked thing with them pop them on or in close to the end).

But pumpkin seed oil; that’s a lovely fatty nectar of the gods. I drizzle it onto crumpets in the morning instead of butter now. And salad. Decorating soups. Vanilla ice cream and granola. Actually just about every other dish where I don’t have to cook it. Fuck, is it good. It has this sort of clean richness to it. It’s heavy, it’s almost like you can taste its colours, and its colours are one of the strangest things you can see in a food, because it looks like a straightforward green, but when the light shines through it, it turns wine-red. But while it’s almost as though you can taste the bizarreness, it doesn’t leave any clingy traces, like most oils; just a nice sort of mouth environment of “mmm, I just ate a bunch of pumpkin seed oil”.

Well, as you can read, adjectives are failing me. This shit is good, let’s put it like that. Also – and this is just second-hand anecdotal as, to my knowledge, I've never fucked a vegan man - its absurd amounts of zinc, which us normals tend to mostly get through seafood or other animal flesh/product, help vegan men fuck more enthusiastically and frequently.

In fact it has so many touted health benefits that I'm paranoid that when I return to the New World the only place I'm going to find it is in horrid little new age 'pharmacies' that smell like mothballs, with the oil sealed into a animal-free soft-wall easy-swallow capsules designed to prevent you from actually tasting it when you consume it. Like this. Fucking travesty. More on that when I get to the flax oil, but for fuck's sake; the medicalization of society in general is a hideous enough prospect, leaving the medicalization of fucking food to one side. Pumpkin seed oil is a fucking delicious gift of the gods. Any company that suggests you consume it without feeling it is a bastard who's out to screw you out of one of life's unique, even transcending pleasures (I really like it, okay?). It's fucking evil.

Beyond the Thanksgiving pie

Pumpkin is a beautiful and generous thing, and makes a sauce with a versatility approaching tomato sauce. If I said that in front of my family, whose pumpkin techniques are limited quite strictly to casseroles or frittelle, I don't know whether they'd laugh or smack me one, but I do feel it's true. While tomato sauce can give you degrees of what I consider a feminine sharpness, acidity, and clarity, running the gamut from invigorating to heartburn, pumpkin sauce gives you a gamut I imagine as masculine, from strongly comforting and fortifying to stolid.

I suppose if God held a gun to my head and told me to choose, I'd choose tomato; pasta in tomato sauce is my eternal comfort food, and I don't think the world has ever come up with anything lacking animal flesh in it that's quite as good as gazpacho. But I'd miss the pumpkin fiercely, and part of that is because the truth is a tomato sauce or gazpacho can be ruined, while a pumpkin sauce can be poor in relation to other pumpkin sauces but it will seldom be a disaster - unless you simply don't like it.

Here's the process, it's basically the same as the process for pumpkin soup, and applies to most varieties of pumpkin I've came across.

1. Fry your base (onions, garlic, the white part of leeks, celery, maybe some seedy herbs, like cumin or coriander seeds, or peppercorns, or whatever your taste runs to). Pumpkin takes kindly to a base fried in butter if you're not averse to heavier flavours.

2a. Once the base is sizzling enthusiastically add chunks of peeled, diced pumpkin and fry them for awhile (do yourself a favour and bake the pumpkin for ten minutes ahead of time, and then the skin lifts off quite easily with a normal veggie peeler.)

2b.You also have the option of splitting the pumpkin down the middle, roasting it at high heat face-down in an oiled tray, and then scooping out the cooked flesh after about half an hour. I like doing that because I think it makes it rather sweeter, but it depends on your tastes; it also tends to make it heavier.

3. Once the chunks have fried for awhile, or immediately if you have used roasted pumpkin flesh, add water or something else wet, translucent and inoffensive, just enough to cover. Anything from a rich meat broth through a veg broth back to water. Once again it's a question of your tastes.

4a. If you have used raw pumpkin chunks, cover and boil at medium heat until the chunks are tender, and puree - then you're fundamentally done.

4b. If you have used roasted pumpkin, you can puree immediately, but I suggest leaving it on low heat for ten minutes or so to make sure it's all melded, if that makes sense.

And there you go. More liquid gets you a pumpkin soup, less gets you a highly goopy sauce that is very nice for pizzas, especially paired with stinky cheese. Whether soup or sauce, this base also takes very kindly to the addition of curry paste to taste. It is also lovely with roasted red pepper pureed into it towards the end of the cooking; you can stick one or two in to roast at the same time as the pumpkin halves, if you go the roasting route. Green herbs should go in at the end, after removing it from the heat.

It also takes well to the addition of cheese, but to avoid clumps and ugliness mix in the cheese in the form of a bechamel-based cheese sauce.

As a soup, it works well either on its own or with the addition of other features, like (pre-cooked!) chick peas, or chunks of potato, shrimp, or white fish cooked directly in it. During this last shitty winter, I made a big batch of it every other week, in alternation with tomato sauce, and then froze it in jars that were just big enough to serve as a base for a quick but hearty and delicious soup for two in the evenings, so long as one or the other of us remembered to take out a jar to defrost in the mornings.

Finally it can be enriched either with cream out of cows or goats, or with milk out of coconuts. In either case it should be added after the soup or sauce has been pureed and taken off the heat, or, if you freeze it in batches, after it has been defrosted and re-heated.

Good morning to me

The F-word made me breakfast this morning, before work. Considering he makes the vast majority of dinners I stick down my face I could understand that it would seem strange to be so touched, touched to the point of schmoopiness, over that, but I am. Part of that is that I've always been the breakfast top. As a morning person, I do all the work mostly because I can, as I'm typically clear of head by 8, once the espresso hits my tummy.

But after a turbulent red-eye back to London, pleasantly but blearily wandering around Kew Gardens for a few hours, missing my family and talking with colleagues in Singapore about colleagues in the States, and then the last Eurostar back to Brussels where my attempts to nod off where stymied by three fat Flemish chicks who DID NOT SHUT UP the whole fucking trip - seriously, if they weren't talking they were singing beastly Dutch pop music, and the pain of that language (besides its expectorant hectoring quality) is that I can understand just enough of it to understand they were talking about reality television - ARRGH! - followed by the realization I'm in this stinking mold-hole of a country for another month - well, coming home to the F-word was splendid and the fact that he, a non-morning person, spontaneously made me the lazy brekkers bottom this morning melts my heart.

The other thing that touches me about it is that it was awesome, and since he realized he's not the only person in the world who does this awesome thing, I can share the awesomeness with you: eggs poached in tomato sauce. They are fucking delicious. Part of that is that we get farm-fresh eggs and make our own awesome tomato sauce, but the concept is bigger than we are. So easy. And so fucking delicious. Obviously it doesn't need to be a tomato sauce, I've done it with pumpkin sauce and various cheese sauces, and it's lovely - especially the cheese sauces - but the marriage of the egg with a tomato sauce is a very harmonious, gendered, romantic one; or in more prosaic terms, the contrast of the thick, neutral egg flavour with the inevitable acidity of the tomato sauce is just right.

Anyways, try it, unless you're dating a fucknard, vegan, someone with an egg allergy or someone without a crotch it will get you morning sex.

Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland

You know, I honestly think I'm going to miss Germany more than Belgium. Seems strange but of course it's not strange at all, as Germany has been nothing but the scene of a series of pleasant holidays, undemanding, over-subsidized conferences and escapist weekends, all healthily soaked in reinheitsgebot beer. Whereas Belgium has been the scene of all of my travails and an embarassing abundance of incidences of alcohol poisoning as I kept refusing to understand the sugary, extremely strong beer was not intended to be drunk in the sort of quantities I'd previously considered satisfying. And we've been going to what is apparently one of the least charming bits of Germany at that - Dusseldorf - a sterile yuppie town, they say. Well, maybe considering how damn filthy Brussels is, the sterility was more welcome than it otherwise would have been.

We went to Dusseldorf last weekend - probably for the last time, as our friends there are likely to move to Brazil before the F-word and I can afford jaunts back to Europe, and when we make a jaunt back to Germany no doubt we'll prioritize and spend our time somewhere awesome like Berlin. That makes me a little sad. There are lots of nice things about yuppie towns, one of which is the fucking awesome international richness of their cuisine, and when those yuppie towns are in Germany there's the pleasant corollary of them not being overpriced. We had tapas and it was grand but we could have had any number of other things there and it would have been grand. Mind you the food in Berlin is fucking awesome too.

We also went to the track, which got old - I'd been expecting the vast and delicious buffets they offer in North American racetracks to keep the punters in - and we went to a couple of open air concerts in the Hofgarten, the memorable one of which was Oquestrada, a nice Portuguese band with a lot of flavours. You can listen here.

Not much else that's fit for print today. We saw Wolfman last night, a film I'd been excited about seeing. I know I don't read entertainment magazines or anything but I'm really shocked I hadn't heard about how bad it was. Not just garden variety bad, either, it was really atrocious. I've never borne witness to such a revolting waste of a big budget, fantastic acting talent, and concept, via an excruciatingly poor script and really indifferent direction. And what makes me angriest, I think, despite all the love I've got for Benecio del Toro, Hugo Weaving and good scripts, is the waste of a concept. I mean, fucking werewolves, they're awesome. And now that that turkey has came out and been all shitty, nobody's going to make another big-budget werewolf movie for a decade or two. Fuck.

Crack chi

Wow. The kim chi, which I thought went so badly, actually went really, really well. How well exactly I have a hard time saying because it's been a good four years since I had kim chi prepared by a Korean, and because I have another couple of days to go before the first symptoms of botulism would be due to appear, but it is damn good and I can't stop eating it. I think at the point where I'd tasted this batch before it just hadn't aged enough; it's still crunchier than I remember kim chi being but no longer burningly, insufferably hot - the right amount of hot now. I think for the next batch I'll make it less hot because the F-word isn't into super-chili anymore but still, for me it's ace.

So ace has it been, in fact, that on Saturday when I realized how much I'd eaten in such a short space of time, I had the kissing cousin of a panic attack upon realizing there was a risk of me being once more without kimchi. So I decided to blow off the hammam and run to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a new batch instead, which is currently stinking up our kitchen with goodness.

For the current batch I used this recipe, and for the batch that's aging now I'm using a recipe from a book Sam recommended, Wild Fermentation. I'm making ginger beer from a recipe in the same book. It's a good read - God, I love gay hippies, I wish there were more of them - and it's totally firing me up to ferment everything. I'm putting the F-word on the case today to make some peach vinegar while I'm at work, and I'm going to order kombucha gunk, and kefir grains, all of which home-raising of live food is starting to suggest to me that I'm insufferably broody (did have a dream last night about being five minutes away from going into labour). Anyways, I'll wait to second the Wild Fermentation recommendation as cookbook until I manage to prepare a few of the dishes all the way to the end, but it's a nice little read in the meantime if you find it.

Also wanted to flag up to you something I found when looking for more kim chi recipes: pay particular attention to the "shit needle" entry. Koreans, man. Holy fuck. The way the blogger breaks it down makes it seem like there's something, somehow, kind of awesome about that. In the abstract. I'm happy enough to not be subject to it here.

Slick

Still not sure how, though I believe it had something to do with completely ignoring the World Cup*, but this weekend magically managed to pull some extra hours out of my ass and make some things - moisturizing lotion and kim chi.

The lotion was the easy part. I seem to be trying to extend my food ethics - the 'don't eat anything you wouldn't kill yourself' - into my cosmetics ethics - 'don't put anything on your skin you couldn't eat if you were starving'. And it's dead easy to make a really lovely light cream with all the special treats you want once you have an emulsifying wax you're happy with. It's also somewhat necessary in our household, as the F-word, despite looking butch as all hell, has slightly fussy skin.

What is problematic - the only problem - is the preservatives issue. I'd rather just do without, make small batches, refrigerate, and use fast, both because of the abstract extension of my food ethics into my cosmetics ethics and because of the F-word's fussy skin. Which is for the best. Do a quick Google of all the 'make-your-own' etc. sites and it gets heated when it comes to preservatives, I think because people try to sell their own products and feel shoe-horned into using them. And I have to admit, the possibility of selling has presented itself to me too, because what I make is so damn lovely and wholesome. But I don't suppose I could do it without adding preservatives, and suddenly it's not so edible anymore . . .

Anyways, so that was fun, I always like making cosmetics, it's an excuse for me to mess around with beakers if nothing else, and since I haven't done that since OAC science about 14 years ago that's a thrill. Also the fussy little kitchen scale, which makes me feel like a low-level drug dealer.

The kim chi was the more difficult part, since it was a first effort and since it's still a work in progress, as it needs to finish fermenting. Also I think I burnt my right hand blending in the chili pepper but if it works it will be utterly, utterly worth it. When I was in Shanghai I had a few lovely cabbage dishes which were either pickled or fermented, and coming back here, to this barren land of overcooked European dishes, I realized I can't just hold out until I get to Australia - I need some fucking kim chi now. Patience, tummy, patience, soon you'll be filled with delicious spicy beneficial bacteria. Mwa ha ha.



*On Sunday morning after our guests scarpered, while the sound of Aussie Rules football filled the apartment while we vegged, I was absurdly proud to be one of the maybe 3 households in Benelux watching a different sport . . .