(continued from October is the best month - part 3)

That's pretty much the end of all my birthday stuff. Everything else that made my October so special for me was just all the events and gatherings that kept me busy pretty much every weekend in that month.

One thing was having 2 friends who had gone overseas, to pursue lives and careers, come back to New Zealand for a short visit, and the opportunities I had to see them again after all the time between then and when I saw them last (months for one, years for the other).

Another was that I managed to create a lot more baking successes in October than previously: a chocolate mousse cake to finish the last of the dark chocolate I had accumulated, a coffee cake, parfaits for the family, and a practice sponge cake for my guitar buddy whose birthday is this month.

I also managed to go to the temporary ice skating rink that the city had brought in for October. I hadn't been before and was hoping that my skiing ability would translate into making me somewhat competent. I did manage to fall over once towards the end when I wanted to see how fast I could go. I was just grateful my fall wasn't anything like my brother's, who, last time the city had an ice skating rink, broke his face open across one of his eyebrows and now wears a scar from the experience.

And of course, there was the Simply Ceroc ball and showcase over the long weekend, as well as all the Rugby World Cup games, both of which I've blogged about already. One thing I didn't mention was that one of those games where I watched and then went out with a couple of friends, ended-up with a video of me singing loudly and drunkenly somewhere on Facebook.

All of the above, and all I've written in the previous instalments of this blog post, (and maybe a few other things which have completely slipped my mind,) combined to create a memorable October for me. So when I see the ticker tape still draped about on the overhead power lines throughout the city, a reminder of this country's biggest sporting achievement in a long time, I let it remind me of the month that was, and smile a little more than I used to. Hell I even skip through a bunch of the more melancholy songs on my MP3 player (favourites of mine just months and years before) when I'm listening to it now.

I've found I can easily be broken from happy little trance though, like when I find myself walking behind a smoker and one of their puffs of smoke makes its way to my face, I instantly become annoyed, silently mouth the word 'motherfucker' behind their back (man or woman, I don't care: I am an equal-opportunity hater), and wish that their lungs would explode then and there.

Some things never change :)

(continued from October is the best month - part 2)

Further into October, my birthday a few days behind me now, I was spending the weekend with my family. Well, just my dad and brother - my mum had flown to the Philippines to visit grandma a week and a bit before since grandma wasn't feeling all too good then. It's been almost a year since granddad died and everyone's a bit worried for grandma, so away my mum went to check-up on her side of the family.

So it was just my dad and brother left in the family house in the suburbs, and my mum and I always joke about leaving the house in their care. Sure they can take care of themselves, but they're not the most proactively responsible members of the family when it comes to chores and general maintenance: meals are always eaten later because they start cooking when they get hungry, the washing/laundry never seems to be done as well when it gets done at all, and the fridge/freezer/pantry always runs dangerously close to being empty. I also doubt that they vacuum the house, or even clean the bathrooms in my mum's absence.

In the times I've visited when my mum's away, the house has never really been that bad, but there's always something missing about the way the house is held together when it's just my dad and brother, like the shiny veneer put in place by my mum's cleaning schedule is dulled without her care and that cracks start to show when the house is no longer receiving the same level of care. I jump to a worst-case scenario in my head, in that after an extended absence, my mum would come home to a broken home: the front door not closing properly, a large puddle of water not cleaned-up from a recent heavy rain, a corner of the rumpus room perpetually on fire, a family of wild animals making a nest in one of the rooms, and shit all over the place with the words 'there is no toilet paper' scribbled on the walls with faecal matter...

During this latest visit, I got the following text message from an unknown number:

Happy cake day. Look in your letterbox

Intrigued by the anonymous sender and their message, I went outside to the letterbox, and inside was a cake! It was in the shape of a meatloaf, but it was a cake! (some kind of lemon cake I would later discover) I sent my thanks back to the unknown number, and as I did, all sorts of questions came to mind:

1. Who sent the cake?
2. Who knew I was in the suburbs that weekend so as to deliver it to my parents' house?
3. Who knows where I live?
4. Is the cake poisoned?

A lot of my long-time friends would actually know the answer to question 3 - I had lived in that house with my family for almost 15 years before I moved out - and anybody with access to the internet knows the answer to question 2 since I publicized my location on Twitter the previous day. Suddenly the suspect pool got a bit too large for me to investigate, and thankfully the cake was not poisoned, otherwise I would have gone through my list of suspects much more earnestly.

So my birthday extended to the weekend that followed it with the mystery cake, and when my mum came back from the Philippines several weeks later she brought back a bunch of presents for me from a few of my cousins as well. We even had a belated family birthday dinner at the place we dubbed 'the new Maria Pia's' (Maria Pia's was the Italian restaurant I kept going to for my birthday, and the restaurant that had taken its place is also Italian).

Birthday day became birthday week, and birthday week became birthday month :) I was really liking where this month was going.

(to be continued...)

(continued from October is the best month - part 1)

I hadn't seen Katrina in a while. The last time I had was at her place when I tried to help her out by cooking dinner (one of my pizzas) since she was still just out of hospital and couldn't cook herself, and her family weren't yet home to help her out. That was at the start of August, while I was still in some sort of deal with my work that I could spend my Monday afternoons visiting her in the hospital.

Katrina has just been discharged then. She put out a plea for help, and a tonne of her friends answered the call. I thought to do my bit too, so used my last Monday afternoon off to visit her at home and make her dinner.

It's always weird cooking in someone else's kitchen: nothing is where you expect it to be, the microwave seems to operate on some completely foreign logic, and the knives are always too sharp or too blunt. I planned to make one of my pizzas there, and brought a tonne of my own stuff along since I was warned beforehand that Katrina's family's kitchen isn't the best stocked kitchen on the planet. So with some help from Andrea, long-time friend of Katrina and someone who I had talked to a bunch but never really hung-out with a lot before that day, she brought over some extra things: rolling pin, oven tray, baking paper because the oven tray had been severely 'seasoned', like a wok from a lifetime of use.

I had never used baking paper with my pizzas before, and the pizza base I rolled was a bit thinner than I'd normally make, so I think it was those 2 things that combined to create my stuff-up of the day: cooking the pizza and having it stick so hard to the baking paper that the 3 of us spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away from the pizza base rather than eating it, and because the base was so thin you actually ended-up losing a lot of it in the tearing process. Actually, Andrea and I spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away, Katrina had only 1 fully functioning limb (a left arm) so Andrea spent even more time tearing paper away from Katrina's pizza, and I eventually gave up and just ate the damn paper. Hey if red pandas can eat bamboo, then I can stomach a re-purposed tree.

Om nom nom

I felt pretty bad about what I'd done afterwards. I went out there with the intention of helping out, only to add some unneeded plant fibre to a cripple friend's diet. It didn't help that Katrina spent the next couple of days telling everybody about it, and Andrea made it a point to rub it in my face the next time she saw me.

So that's how my last encounter with Katrina went. I'd been meaning to visit again, but the fresh guilt from that last incident kept me away. With over 2 months since then, what better time to try make amends than with my day off?

I met both Katrina and Andrea for lunch at a bakery not far from the hospital where Katrina would be finishing one of her physio sessions - just one of many she was undergoing those days to help put weight back onto her legs. When we went to order lunch, the girls surprised me by paying for my meal :D

As I was eating my free lunch, they surprised me again by giving me a birthday card and presents - a cookbook written by Pete Evans, one of the hosts of My Kitchen Rules (which is a show I watched very closely this year and mentioned a couple of times), and a book about chocolate which is part recipe book and part history/background of chocolate. I was actually reading through the chocolate book last night and it made me so hungry for some sort of dessert that I went out of my way to make a chocolate cake at 9:30 in the evening!

And just as I finished my lunch and thought all the surprises were over, one of the bakery folk came over with a slice of chocolate cake that had a birthday candle in it, and the girls started singing Happy Birthday.

I went home happy that day: a bag of presents in one hand and a birthday-boy grin on my face. The feeling followed me all the way back home. Once I got back home however, the sickness I had been pushing away and ignoring all lunch time pounced back on me. Suddenly I had only enough energy to make it to close the door and collapse on my bed, bag of birthday presents still in hand, and sleep for the second time that day.

I woke up maybe an hour later, still feeling tired, the stuffy nose really sticking this time around, and with a new symptom: a sore throat. I went to my computer, answered all the birthday messages / e-mails / text messages left for me, and that pretty much concluded the day of my birthday.

(to be continued...)

The Rugby World Cup was over a week ago, but remnants of it still remain throughout the city: the World Cup logo still flies prominently beside street lamps, country flags are still visible in shop windows, cars still carry the All Blacks flag proudly attached to passenger-side windows, and the aftermath of the parade - ticker tape and streamers all the colours of the visible light spectrum - occupy cracks in the footpath or are still tangled in the power lines that give life to our fleet of electric buses.

I've been walking through the city a tad happier than I normally do, a small smile making its way onto my face if I allow my mind to wander and think about everything that happened in October.

The biggest thing for me was of course my birthday.

Birthday cat is not amused

Yes, I'm one of those October-born people, throwing all our birthdays into one month of the year to make peoples' calendars look super busy and to annoy gift-buyers. I passed my last birthday milestone a long time ago, which I reckon is the 21st. After that, card-makers stop being specific about your age and you find yourself receiving a lot of non-numbered birthday cards until your age starts resembling a new decade.

I didn't really know what to do this year for my birthday. I've already written that my normal birthday traditions have gone out the window, so I thought to do the only other thing I could still continue to do - take a day-off from work - and see what happens after that.

Melissa was in the country on the day of my birthday for the first time since... 2003? She took me out for breakfast, meaning that on my day off, I had to get up early. On any other day I might have complained, but I thought I better get as many waking hours as I can out of my birthday. That, and I'm not one to turn down free food.

Free breakfast on my birthday; a good start to the day :)

After I walked Melissa to her work so she could start her day of working and I could continue my day of not working, I went to my favourite place in the city to kill time: the library.

When I sat down to read through my current book, I found myself unable to stay awake. Sure waking-up at my normal time on a day when I would have normally slept-in might have taken away some valuable sleeping hours, but I didn't just feel sleepy: I was sniffling a bit more than usual, and I felt really tired already. Oh no, I thought to myself, don't be sick, don't be sick, not now, not today...

The only other thing I had planned for the day was to meet-up with Katrina, who I hadn't seen since she was discharged from hospital, at which time I tried (and failed) to make her dinner since she was unable to cook herself and needed help until her family were able to come home (they were all away at the time). I needed to be well enough to travel some 20km to visit her at the hospital after one of her physio sessions, and my stuffy nose was looking to ruin that.

I didn't catch-up on my sleep at the library (I didn't want to look like the homeless guy sleeping in the library since there was already one there in the far corner), and I didn't want to catch-up on my sleep on the train to the hospital either (I didn't want to miss my stop, which I had done several times before when I'd slept on the train), so with a few hours to go until I had to meet Katrina, I went back to my place, collapsed on my bed, and fell asleep.

I woke up with time to spare before the train I planned to catch, without that nagging fatigue I had at the library, but I still had that damn stuffy nose. So this is how it's going to be huh? Fine then. I told myself, and off I went to the train station with an extra handkerchief, just in case.

(to be continued...)

I made myself a birthday cake earlier this week (I did get other birthday cakes on my birthday - an anonymous cake in the letter box and a surprise cake on my birthday - so I don't feel like a total 'forever alone' sad sack by doing this), and one thing I've been doing with my more recent cooking endeavours is, once I have a product I'm actually proud of, I feed some to my guinea pig.

Awwwwwww

No, not an actual guinea pig, but a human test subject. A pregnant human test subject. If my food's good enough for a pregnant woman (a group who seem to be the fussiest eaters these days. I don't know what it was like in my mum's day, but I'm pretty sure the women of that age ate whatever the hell they wanted and babies turned out fine), then it's gotta be good enough for everybody else right? I didn't actually seek out my pregnant friend for this reason, it just happened that she works near where I work and I could get a hold of her for lunch to try the dessert I made that time.

When I made my birthday cake - a marbled coffee cake with a layer of chocolate frosting in the middle, inspired by that site and a chocolate history/recipe book I got for my birthday - I asked my guinea pig if she'd like to try some. Before I could even list the ingredients though, she had already made-up her mind:

coffee = ick
?

don't hate me

I was actually quite sad to learn that she couldn't stand coffee and because of it she wouldn't be going anywhere near the cake :( I mean, I don't like coffee either, but in any form that isn't a drink, I can enjoy it. I sat at my computer with a sad face for a bit too, glad that the facade of Facebook chat was sitting between us so she couldn't see my disappointment.

I needed to find new test subjects, so in my disheartened state I overcompensated for the loss of 1 person by texting/messaging way too many others.

The cake ended-up being shared between 5 other people with who I was so eager to share it with (maybe because I was still all *sad face* over my guinea pig not wanting cake) that I ended-up with just 1 slice for myself.

Only because I lied to myself

When I went shopping for all the ingredients for Black Forest Gateau 1.0, and knowing full well that I'd make the cake again right afterwards, I went and bought 3-times the ingredients needed to make the cake: 1 lot for the trial cake, 1 lot for the improved cake, and 1 lot for 'in-case-shit'. It worked well for the most part, and I was left with some extra cake ingredients that I could use in other baking. For the other part however... well let's just say that the recipe I was working off said it needed a block of dark chocolate, so I bought 3. I ended-up using about 5% of a block of dark chocolate after 2 cakes were done, leaving me with 2.95 blocks of dark chocolate and no clue on what the hell to do with it all.

Yes, there was the obvious idea of eating it all, but I'll confess right now that I don't really like dark chocolate that much - I'm more of a milk chocolate person. I can't really eat a square of dark chocolate by itself without having the bitterness of it trigger the neurons in my brain responsible for sending a signal my facial muscles to make a screwed-up face.

You should see the face I make when I drink something with a strong alcohol content

In an attempt to use the dark chocolate, the first thing that came to mind was to bake brownies. I did that, twice in the span of a week, each batch consuming half of the 0.95 block of dark chocolate. That left me with 2 more blocks to use.

Not wanting to make another 4 batches of brownies (if 2 batches in a row was making subsequent oven-cooked food smell of chocolate, I didn't want to know what doing that another 4 times would do), I asked around for ideas on what to make using the rest of the chocolate, and someone came back to me with some recipes that promised to use entire blocks at a time: a dark chocolate cheesecake, and a chocolate mousse cake.

These seemed like good ideas to me, so I looked-up recipes on the internet, set a time to attempt the cheesecake, and invited the idea-girl over to help me out (me not being all that great with baking, and she being a very experienced baker), promising a front-row seat to a surprising success... or an epic failure.

One thing I did try to plan was to have us try the cheesecake before we had to go (we both had a Rugby World Cup game to attend that night), but I never knew just how long a cheesecake had to spend cooking and cooling in the oven. Neither of us had a chance to try the cheesecake before we had to go, but all that waiting made my apartment smell almost like the brownies I made before.

Once home from the rugby game though, I went straight for the cheesecake, taking it out of the fridge and immediately not liking how it looked out of the cake tin: the top was tough, reminiscent of the edges of brownies (which in some recipes you have to cut off) and it kinda sunk in the centre. The inside looked better, but when I went to taste it, it was like eating a slightly soft piece of dark chocolate; bitter, and not at all sweet :(

I learned that night that substituting the white chocolate for the dark chocolate wasn't all that good of an idea since the original recipe relied on the white chocolate for it's sweetness and so had very little sugar in it which I didn't at all make up for when I switched chocolate.

I don't know what came over me, but after the dark chocolate cheesecake fail, I was determined to get it right; part of it being that I wanted to prove to the friend who came over that I can actually bake, and the rest of it just my usual stubbornness. So the next day during down-time at work, I collated cheesecake recipes and ideas to make my own cheesecake, no longer caring about using the dark chocolate, but just determined to not be beaten by a damn cheesecake!

This cheesecake is my proverbial cactus

I filled-up a page of one of my old drawing books with a recipe, some notes on lessons learned, and then made some mini-cheesecakes (I basically made miniature cheesecakes filling-up 2 or 3 spots in a large muffin tin instead of a full-on cake). When those didn't turn out according to plan, I took down more notes on what went wrong, what I can do next time to resolve it, and the next day I tried again.

This has been going on for every night this week since the weekend. I come home from work with a detour to the grocery if I need more ingredients, and then start on the next iteration of mini cheesecake.

Unfortunately, success is still out of reach.

Feeling a bit defeated, but still wanting something to show for my efforts, I put together a dessert from the leftover cheesecake ingredients and whatever the hell else I felt like using. What results was a sort of parfait: biscuit crumbs in the bottom, middle, and top layers, the cheesecake filling making up for most of the middle, and various leftover canned fruits throughout. Hell I even added sprinklings of the dark chocolate of which I still have roughly 0.8 blocks worth.

There are a few glasses of this hybrid dessert cooling in the fridge right now and, for something that's effectively the by-product of several failed cheesecake attempts, I'm feeling pretty good about it since without the failed cheesecake, all that's left in those glasses are the parts that I became good at in the last couple of days. It's basically everything that I didn't screw up.

I've asked another of my friends to be my guinea pig for tomorrow - we're meeting up after lunch to try this dessert. One thing that's worrying me about our meet is that my 'guinea pig' is pregnant - I'm praying very hard right now that what I've developed doesn't cause miscarriages.

My guitar buddy was making me dinner last Sunday - her reaction to an argument we had where I thought she had zero cooking ability and she was determined to prove me wrong - and some time during the making of the meal (potato gratin w/ chicken schnitzel and some steamed broccoli #NomNomNom (oh dear... I just hashtagged my own blog post)) she came to the following conclusion: that I'm very easy to please.

I was just off to one side, watching her cooking and thought: Man, this is awesome. I need to provoke more people into cooking for me. Smiling happily as I watched dinner being made before me with minimal effort on my part, I got to explaining that free food - dinners, lunches, paying for a dinner/lunch - was something of very high value in my family.

Going out to dinner is often the thing my family would do come any special occasion, usually for birthdays or commercial holidays like Father's/Mother's Day. We'd pick some restaurant that we hadn't been to before or, as in the case of my birthday, that we'd been to every year since my 21st, and have an enjoyable night poking fun at the others' most recent fails (which is on-par for Rabina-family dinner conversation. It's like those celebrity roasts where they take turns digging into someome).

Then when it comes to lunches during the working week, my parents and I would meet for lunch every-now-and-then and take turns paying. You could tell whose turn it was to pay because one of us would be wearing a dour expression, while the other 2 would be grinning from ear-to-ear.

When I was the one organizing lunch with one parent and I'm ringing the other to ask if they want to join, the question is always the same: "Are you paying? :D" (and yes, I can hear the :D over the phone line)

And my brother's no different either: in a text last week for when he was asking to come over to my place to watch the New Zealand vs Japan rugby game, he wrote a follow-up text which read: "And dinner too? lol"

The Food Channel might be the only thing my mum and dad can agree on when channel surfing on those random weekends I decide to visit them in the suburbs, and I may have confessed to watching My Kitchen Rules on more than one occasion, but as much as we enjoy watching the wonderful and extravagant things those shows present to us, not one of us spends an exorbitant amount of time or effort on creating our meals. It's like we put as little effort as possible into creating a meal so that it meets the minimum for whatever health guidelines we're following at the time, and where the consumption of it wouldn't knock too many years off the end of our lives.

I used to think we were just lazy and other families had epic dinners all the time. Turns out that when you have to make your own dinner every day, you try not to put too much effort into it - something I quickly learned when I moved out of home.

Maybe that's what makes those meals - the free ones or the ones where someone else is cooking - so damn special? Maybe it's not the food at all, but the idea that you don't have to do any cooking, or spend any of your own money, and yet food just magically appears. If that's the case, then anybody can appreciate the value in getting a meal for free; my family just happens to take it to the next level.

So there I was, watching my guitar buddy cook dinner for me and thinking that this might be the best day I've had in recent history. Then I thought about it some more and remembered back to last Tuesday when I had lunch with my friend the hug nazi and she paid for both of our meals with the aid of one of her vouchers - now my budget spreadsheet is in love with her.

It might not be the food at all, but rather the idea that someone else is taking a little tedium out of your own life by using a little time and effort from their own. It may not be the most spectacular thing in the world, but framed like that, it makes for a pretty powerful gift I reckon.

So whether it really be that the way to my heart is through my stomach, or that I'm just easy to please; if you're buying or making me my next meal and I start to beam like I've just won the Lotto, know that I'm just really appreciative of the gift you're giving me, even if you haven't realized it yet.

Day 15 without the internet... Blatant company-bashing: Orcon Genius sucks / blows / is not fit for human use.

---
Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.

So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.

I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.

It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...

So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:

Cake Box 1.0

It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.

The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.

The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.

Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.

---
* harsh for a cake anyway

Continuing from my last post, I'm still without internet :( 14 days without internet, bringing the total number of days I've been with internet in this last month since switching to Orcon to 9. That's right: 9 out of 28 days. So a warning to people thinking of switching to the Orcon Genius plan: don't. Not yet anyway - give them a few months to sort out all the initial problems, and then decide.

(The first time I join the 'early-adopter' boat, and it sinks the moment I set foot in it. *sigh* Just my luck eh?)

Anyway, I've been keeping myself relatively busy without the internet, and to survive the last weekend without it I went to my parents' house to leech their bandwidth :P

That's wasn't the only reason though: Sunday was Father's Day for New Zealand, and for Father's Day I thought I'd cook him (and the rest of the family) a pork roast that I saw on My Kitchen Rules.

As well as distracting me from my internet-less life for 1 hour a day, 3 nights a week, My Kitchen Rules is just another in a series of TV cooking competitions that I've been watching for no real reason except that I find myself channel surfing on a quiet night, and then come across the cooking show such that I keep coming back to it the next time it's on until the season/competition is done. Much like with the last Masterchef Australia - I just happened to see an episode half-way through the competition, and before I know it I'm watching the final and rooting for some guy who I didn't know just a few weeks before.

When I was starting on the pork roast, a voice started replaying in my head: it was Dylan Moran from his comedy show I saw just 2 weeks before when he was saying that we've all been "Masterchef'd to death", and it's unfortunate I can't even remember the context in which that line was used.

But he was right: the original pork roast recipe when taken straight from the My Kitchen Rules website was so 'chef-y'/restaurant-ish that I had to dumb it down for my mediocre cooking skills and middle-class tastes:

• Duck fat? WTF, I don't even know where I can buy that! Replaced with butter and oil.
• Fennel seeds? Couldn't find it at the local supermarket. Removed from the recipe.
• Jerusalem artichokes? Out of season, so not currently on store shelves. Removed.
• Prosciutto? Whoa, I'm not on that kind of salary. Replaced with bacon (which we didn't use in the end).

So what started as "Pork Cutlets With Caramelised Apple Sauce, Peas, Jerusalem Artichoke & Apple Puree" became "Pork shoulder roast with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, baby carrots, and crackling". Regardless, the family was impressed, dad included. Although he was probably happier about not having to have to cook for the first time in... forever.

It's not very often that I bake, particularly after learning that it'd be near-impossible for me to blaze my own baking trail when I'm surrounded by so many other spectacular bakers. But a friend created a cooking event, which he dubbed 'the non-charred cook-off', after we all lost faith in his cooking abilities - he burned sausage rolls - and I was under the impression us invitees were to bring something to help teach the guy some cooking tricks. With so many others bringing mains, I asked if I could make a dessert instead.

My request was two-fold in its purpose: to participate in the cook-off with something different, and for the dessert, a cake, to act as a birthday cake for someone whose birthday it would be. So yesterday I went shopping for enough ingredients to make the cake 2-times over: one for the real cake, and another for a trial run (like I said, I don't bake often, so I could do with all the practice I could get) which I did today.

The cake was a black forest gateau, which was one of the coolest looking cakes in one of the two cookbooks that I actually own, and I made it once before, a couple of years ago... and it took me 6 hours to make. It's not a cake that should take 6 hours, but I made so many stuff-ups that I had to redo things. At one point I was so fed-up with trying to whip cream with my arm and a fork that I went to the local homeware store and bought a mechanical egg-beater. Earlier that day I had to buy more eggs...

Anyway, this time I had the ingredients, but my technique was as rusty as an oil tanker, so today was more about trying to get the steps right for when I'd make the birthday cake proper next week.

Appropriate symbolism for my baking skills

To assist, I invited my friend the hug nazi who, as well as being named for making tonnes of hugs, has made several cakes in her lifetime, and has a camera infinitely better than what came with my mobile phone.

I started off with what I did the last time I made the cake, and came away with 1 very flat looking cake base that wouldn't have looked out of place at the bottom of a cheesecake. With my friend's help, she reasoned that the egg whites weren't fluffy enough, hence the cake wasn't fluffy enough either. With that, I let her beat the egg whites for the second layer of the cake to what she thought would be much better. It worked, and we ended-up with a layer almost twice as thick as the first one. I'll remember that for Black Forest Gateau 1.1.

When she wasn't helping though, my friend was licking chocolate off mixing bowls and cream off the egg beater. I was glad she had to go do some volunteer work this afternoon, otherwise she'd also have dug into the dark chocolate block and eaten half the cherries/strawberries when I was decorating the cake.

When she left, the cake looked like a gigantic oreo. When she returned, it looked like this:

Caek

(Edit: Thanks mum, but the spelling mistake is legitimate. Google 'caek', and it won't try to suggest or correct you)

So lessons-learned, or things I'd like to improve upon for next time?

Firstly, beat the egg whites very thoroughly for a fluffier layer of cake.

Secondly, the cake lacked a bit of the 'black forest' part that I would associate with a cake of such a name, and so what I ended-up with felt more like a 'creamy milk chocolate' gateau. So maybe a lot more dark chocolate, a lot more cherries between layers, and a little less cream between layers too.

But for all its shortcomings, it didn't at all stop my friend and I from having an early dessert.

Nom nom nom

---
Edit: Bah, forgot to mention that the 'non-charred cook off' got cancelled the other night, but I went ahead and did this anyway. Maybe I'll still be able to get Black Forest Gateau 1.1 to the birthday girl anyway, we'll see.

If you go to the dentist on a regular basis (yearly for me, mainly because I've never been able to say 'no' to them scheduling me again after another visit. That, and they take much better care of my teeth than I do) then you're familiar with a routine that they follow. Mine goes something like this:

1. Sit in the chair.
2. Update my contact details.
3. Ask me if I've been taking care of my teeth (regular brushing, flossing).
4. Take x-rays (every second year).
5. Remove tartar from in-between teeth with a vengeance.
6. Gargle/rinse with toothpaste-tasking liquid.
7. Reschedule to do this again next year.

I've never had that fear of dentists - knowing that they're doing and how they go about it helps (if they have to remove tartar from between my teeth with a metal pointy thing because the only thing tartar will respond to is a metal pointy thing, then so be it) - and actually enjoy getting my teeth cleaned-up. It's like that feeling after a new haircut where you put your hand to the short hair at the back of your neck and push up against the grain of your hair - a feeling you only get after a new haircut. The dental equivalent is that when the gunk from between my bottom front teeth gets removed, I suddenly have a small gap between my teeth that I can feel with my tongue and spend the rest of the day just trying to see how little of my tongue I can actually squeeze between that gap.

Anyway: the clean-up I like; the asking me if I floss daily and then me having to be honest and telling them that no I haven't been flossing regularly and have been neglecting their advice for over 20 years: I don't like, mainly because it then makes me feel guilty for not listening to them and that I'm now making their job harder than it should be and that it's attitudes like mine that make up all those terrible dental hygiene statistics and blah blah blah...

(Seriously, my conscience reacts to the smallest things and has way too much say in how I live.)

Fuck you Jiminy Cricket!

I'm just glad that I only have to do this once a year, because any more often and I might just have to start avoiding my dentist. My teeth would not be happy about that.

Now, on a completely related tangent (bear with me), I go to Subway on a regular basis; much more often than my dentist, like every week. There's a routine there too, and it goes something like this:

1. Ask what bread/meal you're putting together.
2. Ask which cheese you want in it.
3. Ask if you like your sub fresh or toasted.
4. Ask what salads you'd like in your sub.
5. Sauces?
6. Salt and pepper?
7. Any other things? (turn it into a meal, buy cookies, etc)
8. And if you swipe a SUBCARD®, ask if you've registered it online.

It's that last one that gets to me. Why? Because I haven't registered my Subcard.

The last 3 times I've been to Subway, I've been asked if I've registered my Subcard and each time I've had to say 'no' and each time I've felt slightly worse about not registering that I actually avoided Subway for a bit just so they wouldn't ask me to register.

It reminds me of the dentist, when the nurses ask if I've been flossing my teeth, because it's advice I should be taking (keeps my teeth cleaner / is really the only way to check what's on your card), and takes virtually no time at all to do (5 minutes each night? / 5 minutes once and that's it!). I can't get angry at the nurse/cashier either because it's their job to make sure I'm flossing/registering and I can't just hate someone for doing their job (unless their job is evil, of which dental nurse / Subway cashier is not).

So today, sensing I needed to eat something relatively healthy because all I've got waiting for me at home are meat and potatoes, I decided to go to Subway for lunch, but first, went online to register my Subcard. Then I went to Subway, worked my way through the sandwich-making queue, got to the end to pay for my sub, swiped my registered-only-20-minutes-ago Subcard, prepared myself to say "YES OH YES THIS CARD IS REGISTERED MWUAHAHAHAHAHA" (or something like that), and...

...didn't even get asked if I registered my Subcard.

This morning I was wondering what to eat for brunch after a trip to Moore Wilson's (think grocery-slash-specialty-store. It is a supermarket, but it's got a lot of the good stuff that you won't find in your normal supermarket, like special ingredients that you'd only find in restaurants or mentioned on the Food Channel). I skipped breakfast since I woke-up pretty late, and I did kinda want to eat out anyway. So across the street from Moore Wilson's is the Brooklyn Bakery, and it was in their cabinet of delicious-looking sandwiches that I was searching for my between-breakfast-and-lunch meal.

While the picture above wasn't taken from the Brooklyn Bakery, what they had on display was very similar; lots of breads/buns/paninis filled with all manner and combinations of cuts of food. The one I eventually settled on was right next to an egg and bacon roll (which, when I looked at it, decided not to have because I had eggs for breakfast yesterday), so I went up to the counter and asked for "a roast vege sandwich please".

I also asked if they had any nice cold drinks (it's been very hot the last couple of days) and they suggested an iced chocolate. I didn't even know they did those, but it sounded like a cold version of a hot chocolate (which is what I usually get at cafe-type places instead of coffee because I'm not a coffee person) so I thought to roll with it and come what may.

When I sat down at a table a thought struck me, I ordered a vegetarian sandwich didn't I?, and it wasn't the first time in my life that I mentally smacked myself for choosing the meatless option.

My history with vegetarian food has been very hit and miss. Examples of misses include:

• eating falafels on World Vegetarian Day - they look delicious, but they taste so very bland
• choosing this pasta dish at a family dinner - it ended-up being basically tagliatelle pasta with nuts and spinach in some indistinct sauce
• there was a lasagne and I can't remember exactly what was in it, but it was mostly tomato sauce

There are more instances which I can't remember, but in each one I chose the meal on purpose - either to expand my eating options or to just try something new - and in each one it was followed by a feeling of still being hungry maybe 2 hours later: a tell-tale sign that my appetite wasn't satisfied. Disappointment came soon afterwards.

Those experiences have tainted my view of vegetarian food and always makes me reluctant to try again.

As for 'hits', there have been so few that I can remember all of them:

• ordering the 'Tuscan' bagel at Wholly Bagels - eggplant, pesto, mushrooms
• eating non-meat sausage rolls at a friend's flatwarming
• picking the spinach and feta omelette for lunch with a friend

Yes, that's it. Just 3. In my entire life.

What made those moments positives in my impression of vegetarian food in general is that they tasted really good, and they didn't make me hungry soon afterwards. And in each of those 3 cases, I picked them completely by accident.

With the Tuscan bagel, I thought the eggplant was some sort of special meat I hadn't eaten before (I've eaten eggplant, but not presented in that manner). With the fake sausage rolls, they did such a good job of imitating real sausage rolls that I didn't know they were vegetarian until I had gone through at least 2 of them and the friend who was cooking them up told me. As for the spinach and feta omelette, it was the nicest looking thing in the food cabinet at that time and place that wasn't a salad.

How I discover good vegetarian food

What was the roast vegetable sandwich going to fall under? Well it wasn't a complete accident (there were meat options right beside it after all) and I chose it because it was the most colourful of the sandwiches there*.

Did choosing it for the colour make it an accident? Not entirely. I hadn't had breakfast yet, so was it going to fill me up? I didn't know. So when the sandwich arrived, all warmed-up from the toaster, I was hesitant, but I was hungry. I dug into it, and... it was one of the best vegetarian meals I have ever eaten.

---
* I'll explain that in a future blog post; it needs a whole new entry for itself

Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.

Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.

If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).

Nom

Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.

I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."

Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.

I didn't hope hard enough.

The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.

I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.

(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)

Get in my belly, I'm a terrible person

I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.

Have you ever rung those toll-free phone numbers that food companies put somewhere on the packaging of their products so you can ask questions / give feedback / make complaints? Well, for the first time in my life, I actually rung one of those today: I rang Nestle/Maggi to find-out what happened to their Devilled Sausages Mix.

Devilled sausages have been a mainstay of the family dinner table for as long as I can remember: a meal enjoyed by all with its sweet sauce and soft apple slices, and a meal which I've taken to cooking for myself when I'm out of ideas yet still want to feel good about putting a little effort into preparing my own dinner. Using the sachets provided by Maggi (and yes, that specific brand after some time spent trying-out the others and not liking them so much), my family, and now I, have been able to churn-out a delicious meal within a short time and with almost minimal effort.

(OK, that last paragraph reads like something one of those advertising personalities that gives you meal ideas during the ads just before dinner time would say)

I thought I'd make devilled sausages for myself some weeks ago when I noticed some flavoured sausages at the back of my freezer that hadn't been touched for a looong time (let's just say the word 'months' is adequate to describe it; thank God for the refrigeration/freezing process!). Looking to the pantry, I couldn't find any devilled sausage mix, so added it to my shopping list and resolved to buy a few packets of the stuff the next day.

There wasn't any at the grocery either, and all I succeeded in doing was spending countless minutes standing like a statue before the section of the isle dedicated to all of those just-add-hot-water meals and sauces while I looked for something that just wasn't there. A trip to a larger grocery in the suburbs when I spent the next weekend with my family also proved fruitless, and when I relayed my story to my mum, we both started to worry that Maggi had discontinued the product.

Another pass at the local grocery gave me the same results, so I finally decided to ring-up the company and find-out what happened to one of my favourite meals:

"Unfortunately, the site we use to check stock availability is down at the moment, but I can ring-around, find-out if any stores in your area still have some." said the lady on the phone.
"OK, thanks." I replied.
"But don't worry, it hasn't been discontinued because it's one of our most popular products." she assured me.

I left my details with her and hoped for some good news.

Good news came in the form of a phone call the moment I returned to my desk after lunch.

"Hello." I said, answering the phone.
"Hi, is this Emanuel?" said the lady - the same Nestle/Maggi customer services lady who helped me earlier - on the line.
"Yup, that's me."
"Hi. I still can't check stock as the system is still down, but I checked our staff shop and we have some there which I can send to you to help you out in the meantime."

!!! I was excited! I gave her my address, thanked her at least twice, and put down the phone thinking ohmigod they're gonna send me free stuff!!!

I feel almost silly being so happy to receive a few packets of what is essentially powdered ingredients, but it's free stuff, and it's free stuff that I WANT. After all those weeks of trying to find this particular combination of powdered ingredients, and given my recent disappointments, it feels good to end on a high note for once.

I believe the sound I should be making at this very moment is *squee* :)

(Taking a short break from all those zombie book posts as of late, but I promise it won't be a long break; I still have plenty to say. Also, this is a continuation of Pizza 1.1 and Pizza 1.0.)

Holy smokes Batman! I've finally done it!

After Pizza 1.1, the only improvement I wanted to make was to bring-out more of the cheese flavour in the cheese-stuffed-crust (previously it was overwhelmed by the taste of the herb-infused base which was too thick around the crust), and with Pizza 1.2, which I made over this weekend, that cheese flavour really came out to play.

The first thing I did different this time was to make the bread around the crust thinner; that was easy since all I had to do was roll-out the edges until you could almost feed it to your printer. The next thing I did was a suggestion from amazing-baking girl: add to the mozzarella that would go into the crust, a more aromatic cheese like parmesan since mozzarella by itself is typically quite plain in taste.

Now, if you've been following the evolution of this experimental pizza from Pizza 1.0 up to now, this whole thing is turning-out to be less about making pizza and more of an exercise in buying cheese! I already use cheddar as a base for the toppings since it's the jack-of-all-trades cheese that I keep in the fridge for everything from toasted sandwiches to nachos. With Pizza 1.1 I added mozzarella to my arsenal since it has that elastic texture that I normally associate with cheesey-crust pizzas. With this latest incarnation, I went and bought a block of parmesan.

So that's 3 different cheeses, each of them about the same price for an increasingly smaller amount of cheese: the cheddar I get in 500g/1kg blocks, the mozarella came in a roughly 250g 'block' (it's more of a quantum sponge though, given its uncanny ability to change shape when you pick it up), and as for the parmesan, I don't even know how little of it I got, but it's roughly the same size/weight as my mp3 player which is neither large nor heavy.

This much cheese

Regardless, I made the pizza with all of those little improvements.

I scaled most of the recipe down this time so I could use the smaller circular pan. I say 'most' because I made the rookie mistake of not reducing the amount of flour I use in the base to match... whoops. When I placed the base in the pan and removed the excess (which I normally use to make something resembling a snow man), I found I had enough of it to give Pizza 1.2 a little brother: a small Hawaiian pizza.

"Say hello to my little friend!"

Both those pizzas went into the oven. When I checked-up on them the first time, the opening of the oven released that wonderful pizza smell that lingered in my apartment (since the initial chills indicative of the coming winter mean I keep many of my windows closed) and stuck to my clothes. They also fogged-up my glasses which I had on at the time, causing temporary blindness and swearing.

After more intermittent checking-up on the pizza and more loss of sight and shouting expletives at things I couldn't see, I finally got to sit-down and eat.

The result: everything I hoped for.

My brother was able to eat the leftovers when he came by later that night. He left the following comment to my latest pizza-related tweet / Facebook status:

This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction :)

(continued from Pizza 1.0)

To recap, Pizza 1.0 was an attempt to create a pizza that contained everything I ever wanted from a pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

Of those points, the cheese-stuffed crust one was going to be the challenge since I had never attempted it before creating Pizza 1.0. In my first attempt, while the rest of the pizza was absolutely delicious, the cheesy crust was very weak: I used the wrong cheese or not enough of it.

With Pizza 1.1, I aimed to improve on the cheesy crust aspect of it, which was to use the correct cheese. After several discussions about it with amazing-baking girl, I settled on mozzarella cheese (other options being pre-made cheese sticks/string) and went out to buy some.

I also planned the afternoon that I'd be making Pizza 1.1 so that I could invite others to eat the pizza with me. I asked what toppings people would like, and the list that came back pretty-much amounted to an apricot chicken pizza, so I went with that.

Nom? Nom.

There was one surprise that came out of making the pizza, and that was the use of canned apricots when in the oven caused the juices to ooze out all over the pizza, adding a subtle and lovely apricot taste to the base.

As for the cheesy crust, it was MUCH better than last time: the mozzarella didn't thin out when cooked so stayed thick enough in the crust for it to be actually tasted. When I tested it while it cooked by cutting into a section of the crust, it gushed out of the resulting hole just like it does in the ads. Mmmmm...

There is still room for improvement though: the bread of the crust itself was a bit too thick in places, weakening the overall cheese taste. That's a side-effect of the way I roll-out the dough however, so for Pizza 1.2 I'll have to figure-out a way to keep the edges thin.

A couple of weekends ago, inquisitive guitar girl invited people to come along to one of her first art exhibits. It wasn't exclusively her exhibit (there'll be one, but that's not for a while); she was one of several local artists who brought their stuff to be a part of a larger Waitangi Day (New Zealand holiday) festival. The festival is quite a distance from where I am, but I was staying with family that weekend who live closer to where the festival was being held. So, I selected 'Attending' on the Facebook invite, and told her I'd show up for a bit.

The festival itself wasn't huge (neither is the city it was held in, even by New Zealand standards), but it doesn't take a huge festival to draw in the fast food stalls and carts. Even small events manage to rope them in - I'm reminded of a hot-air balloon festival I went to around Easter last year which was pretty small, but the food carts all made an appearance: hot dog stands, hot chip stands (basically anything you can add tomato sauce to), hot drink and coffee carts (or anything that's best served at high temperatures), cold drink and ice cream stalls (OK, so there are some exceptions to these rules), and lots of candy stalls. Basically, if it can be served within minutes and doesn't reside anywhere near the bottom/healthy sections of the food pyramid, you will find a cart/stall for it.

If these guys had a cart, they'd be there too

One cart at these events always catches my eye, and that's the Lil' Orbit donut cart.

In my search for decent images of these donut carts, I stumbled across their website which is, well... it's a bit shit. OK, it's quite shit. The Lil' Orbits site is very much stuck in the past with it's tiled background, animated images, and inconsistent use of several fonts. In these days of clean lines, smooth corners, and easy-on-the-eye colours, seeing the Lil' Orbits site with it's sharp edges and large red Times New Roman links of the late 90s is enough to make the web designer in me cry. Here, take a look and judge for yourself:

• www.lilorbits.com
• www.lilorbits.net

*shudder*

Image courtesy of my friend, NOT the Lil' Orbits website

The donut cart occupies a very positive part of my memory; the section of childhood memories that is always seen through rose-tinted glasses and can't be sullied by things like time and outdated websites.

A looong time ago, when my age could still be counted on one's fingers, shopping was one of the least-exciting activities you could subject me to. It meant being taken to several places for reasons I couldn't then understand, often resulting in not coming back with anything after hours of 'just looking'.

Subjecting a child to hours of nothing leads to restlessness and whining. If one of the stores we frequented during these trips didn't have a display model Gameboy with Tetris running on it, I couldn't be held responsible for what damage I might have caused. As a deterrent to bad behaviour from either my brother or I, my mum would reward us with donuts from the Lil' Orbit donut cart that was outside Deka (a department store chain in NZ that isn't around anymore) at the end of the shopping trips.

Those donuts are probably the sweetest, fluffiest little treats I have ever had, and the taste is something that has imprinted itself on my senses since those days. Nowadays, when I see a donut cart and am feeling the need to satisfy my sweet tooth, I always end-up buying a bag of donuts for old times' sake.

When I bought a bag at the Waitangi Day festival after finding my friend's art exhibit and doing another round of wandering, I realized several things about childhood memories:

1. Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)

The same sort of phenomena as believing that your dad was really tall, or that the walk to school was really long: your sense of scale was very different then. I remember those donuts being large enough to hold in my hand. Now, they're about a quarter the size of my palm.

2. You never cared what it was that made something sweet, sweet. You just cared that it was sweet.

Looking at the bag of donuts, I could see now why those things were so sweet: the donuts were thrown into a bag filled with brown sugar that clung to the donuts like a stubborn food stain on the crotch area of your pants. I found myself shaking some of the sugar off the donuts, just so I could tip the donut:sugar ratio in the donut's favour.

So what did I learn about my childhood memories? That they lied to me? Sort of. If anything, I lied to myself, but only because at that age I didn't know any better. Regardless, I still find myself drawn to the donut cart: no matter how bad the company website is, no matter how much smaller those donuts seem to get, and no matter how much I learn about health and nutrition, I am willing to put up with crappy site design, tiny donuts, and bags full of sugar, to sample a taste of childhood.

I went to Strawberry Fare last night! :D

OK, so I guess I should explain why that is such a big deal for me. It started a long time ago, back in high school...

*cue flashback sequence harp tune*

Back then, I had a friend (still have, although I don't see her much nowadays since she moved city, although I'll be attending her wedding come April!) who often went to Strawberry Fare. Now, her family didn't go there so often as to think that Strawberry Fare was all they ate every Saturday evening, but enough times to make you think that it was one of their favourite places.

Strawberry Fare is a dessert restaurant, specializing in gigantic meal-sized desserts - yes, you can swap-out your dinner for one of their desserts and feel full. Every time my friend would come back from this place she'd regale us with tales of how decadent the dessert was, or how sweet the cakes were, etc etc ad infinitum. The stories fed-upon my curiosity and my sweet tooth, building atop each other from high school through university, and eventually my mind painted a picture of a place bathed in glowing reviews and surrounded by an aura of good times to be had.

The details of the stories faded once my friend moved away, but the feeling they left inside me stayed for a long time, and were still with me when I would finally eat at Strawberry Fare in late 2008.

(Note: I have mentioned the Strawberry Fare story before in my post: Too. Much. Food. as part of Blog Every Day April 2009. If you've already read that one, then think of the following paragraphs as filling-in the gaps of that story)

I was with a bunch of people who I knew mostly through work. We had eaten dinner at a nearby restaurant already, and were actually pretty full (we ordered and shared food expecting 1 extra person who didn't turn up until near the end). That late guy though, having not eaten as much as us, said he'd stick around for dessert. Somebody came-up with the idea of going to Strawberry Fare for dessert, and all of my senses heightened (imagine a dog's ears going up in alert) and focussed on that suggestion.

"Yes!" I said, not heeding the fullness of my stomach. It's only dessert, I thought, it can't be that much, despite what everyone else has been telling me for last almost-decade.

So the group all headed for Strawberry Fare, anticipation building inside me like a child on the eve of Christmas.

The desserts all looked pretty expensive, so at first I thought this place was overcharging. I stuck with a pretty safe bet - a cheesecake, elegantly described in a blurb that contained more words than there were actual ingredients in your average cheesecake - and when I made my order the little cynic inside me started disbelieving that a cheesecake could cost so much.

The little cynic quickly shut up when I got served THAT MUCH cheesecake.

Not the cheesecake I got, but to help you with the scale of things, imagine each pixel up there is a centimetre in real life, and that the plate it's on is the size of the moon

I was full, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. I had to go on because a) I was finally at Strawberry Fare and was learning that all the legends were true, and b) I am going to have to pay for this at the till later.

So I ate. I got through half of the cheesecake before my stomach reached capacity and started calling-in favours from the nearby organs to use them to store any excess food.

*return from flashback*

So what was I doing there last night? I was there for a goodbye dinner/dessert for an overseas friend returning to their country of origin (USA); the second overseas friend I've had to say goodbye to within the span of a month...

(to be continued, because I really shouldn't be up this late when tomorrow is Monday and I gotta go to work; Monday is bad enough already without me adding sleep-deprivation to the mix)

A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.

Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.

Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.

Coping mechanisms developed:

• talking to myself
• singing out loud
• blogging more often
• watching Home and Away
• joining, using, Twitter

Hobbies developed:

• baking
• giving-up on baking
• bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
• renewing my guitar playing
• making meals, and having some pride when doing so

So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.

Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

My epic pizza prototype: Pizza 1.0

Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.

(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)

The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.

A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.

*sigh*

It wasn't too long ago that I said I'd given-up on baking. From then, I had let my baking utensils collect dust (as well as things can collect dust being stuck in a kitchen drawer anyway), and even looked a bit sadly at the silicon muffin tray of mine when I put it into a new drawer with my move back into the city; remembering through a sepia memory flashback of an era long gone.

But this week, hug nazi announced that she was going to the Carols by Candlelight this year, and unable to find anybody else to come with or bring their own baking to complement the scones she was going to bring to it, I thought I'd rise to the occasion. This meant baking...

After a trip to the supermarket for baking ingredients and a trip to a department store for mixing bowls (and a colander I found-out I didn't have when I went to drain the pasta I made last night for dinner; it was a very LOL moment), I arrived at my place with all I needed to make quite possibly the most basic baking recipe I know to do: chocolate chip cookies.

This is why I need a new phone w/ camera: so that I can take my own photos and not have to link to stuff that sort-of looks like what I'm trying to show

My mum has been baking chocolate chip cookies for the family since the dawn of time, and I didn't need the instructions to put it all together; my visual memory of having watched her make them a million times and my muscle memory from my baking days took over. It didn't take long, or much effort, and within minutes, before the slower thinking part of my mind had the time to catch-up to what was happening in the kitchen, I had 28 chocolate chip cookies sitting in the oven.

So I should renege on my earlier blog post: when I said that I'd given-up on baking, I should've really said that I'd no longer have myself compete against the amazing cakes/treats/gingerbread-houses that everybody else around me seems to be able to pull-off. I'll just stick to what I know and can do, which in this case means going back on silly promises I made, and accompanying a friend to an event, so that she's not all on her lonesome.

As things like lifestyle and circumstances change, I've had to discard many of the hobbies or interests I've picked-up along the way. It's always a bit sad to throw these things by the wayside or put certain others on hold as I make room for the things I want to do or focus on, but if you want to be good at anything, you can't be good at everything.

For example, some things I've given-up:

• origami
• model planes (the glue-together kind)
• rollerblading
• biking

And some other things I've put on a long hiatus:

• piano
• sketch drawing
• and a certain game programming project

Soon, the list-of-things-I've-given-up will grow by 1, and the thing joining that list: baking.

Baking was always a talent from my mother's side: weekly she'd bake something often for her afternoon teas or something my brother and I could use for breakfast, and just as often she'd bake more delicious things, like a cake, simply for the hell of it.

It's something I've picked-up from her and have always been alright at (just alright, no more) as all I see it as is the process of following instructions with a little bit of artistic flair - things I'm both good at. But recently, I've been discouraged from the art. You know that saying "too many cooks in the kitchen"? Well, amongst the people I know, there are too many baking gods and goddesses to compete with.

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First and foremost: amazing-baking girl, who I've mentioned a few times in this blog, is a force to be reckoned with. Her kitchen is lined with jars of truffles and, for some parties, tiny Chinese takeaway boxes full of little treats inside. Raw ingredients overflow from the kitchen counters that, despite their combined surface area, lack the necessary room to hold everything.

Remember that saying about how to never trust a skinny chef? Well, amazing-baking girl would be the dessert equivalent of that saying; she's diabetic. Talk about irony.

A victim of her own creations

Next up: Melissa, aka: hug nazi, who I've also mentioned many times in previous blog posts, is the loose inspiration for one of my story e-mails, and is credited as the photographer to my McDonalds chicken burger review.

I don't know what did it, but she's decided to walk the path of the housewife/homemaker, and in doing so has had several opportunities in recent memory to show-off her new-found skills. These include, a Cookie Monster birthday cake, a Hogwarts spellbook birthday cake, and tiny hamburger cupcakes. "Hamburger what?" I hear you say? Well, I'll let the photos do the talking:

Looks like something else, always tastes like sugar

And the final nail in the coffin? A few Facebook photo albums from fellow ceroc'ers showing creativity and baking talent flourish amongst them too:

It's a gingerbread mansion!!!111

Upon seeing those last 2, I thought, Fuck it! I'm done with baking! Too many wonderful sugary treats to compete with - I'm hanging-up my piping bag. I can't do this anymore.

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Thus ends the story of my short-lived baking career path. The most spectacular baking thing I ever did? A Black Forest Gateau. Unfortunately I don't have any pics of it (like I've said elsewhere: I have no digital camera of my own), but here's what I gleamed from the internet, which sorta looked like what I made:

Once, and never again

Those in the Australia / New Zealand part of the world are likely to be familiar with the words three thrityitis. It's a term used by the Continental cup-a-soup ad campaign in these countries to promote the drinking of their soup products at 3:30pm - the time of day when concentration in the work place hits a low.

It may not be the exact time of day for everyone, but it's in that mid-afternoon slot where things just seem to slow down and mistakes are often made. One time I saw it in effect was a few years ago when I was getting my degree framed.

It was a Thursday afternoon and I was at my desk when my cellphone started ringing. I answered and was greeted by the voice of a young lady ringing to let me know that my degree had been framed and I could pick it up from their shop.

Her: Oh, but we'll be closing early in the afternoon on Saturday, so don't come in tomorrow."
Me: Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Friday. You're still open on Friday right?
Her: Huh? Oh whoops, yes you can come in tomorrow. The closing stuff was meant for Saturday.

After that phone call was over, I took a look at the time: 3:38pm. Roughly 3:30-itis time.

I went to pick up my framed degree the following day. I was so excited about it I almost went to buy the person who called me some of that Continental Cup-a-soup stuff, as both a thank you and a joke.

Nowadays I face a different sort of battle at around 3:30: staving-off sleep.

We learn that eating large meals can make you sleepy. I learned this lesson during my university years, where I would eat lunch on campus. I never brought my own food, so I would eat from the places that were on campus, which weren't always serving the healthiest food options available. Most importantly (but I didn't know it then) was that it was the stuff that I was choosing to eat and the amounts of it which made me fall asleep faster.

So there I was, eating too much of the kind of food that would in lesser amounts still easily knock me unconscious. During my first year at university, I was lucky enough to not have too many classes too close to lunch time, but when I did, I was often drowsy and using all of my remaining concentration from keeping my eyelids from closing. All I needed was a 15 minute nap, and on the occasions that I did succumb to slumber, at the end of it I would feel great and refreshed. The problem lay in the lead-up to the nap where I sometimes spent 20 minutes trying to not fall asleep.

20 minutes fighting sleep + 15 minutes sleeping = most of the lecture gone.

That could easily be me

To fight this problem in second year, I went to my friends' psychology lecture which was sandwiched between lunch and my afternoon classes. It was a big class, so 1 more person - particularly one who doesn't take psychology - wouldn't be noticed. There, I would sit with them, lay my head on the desk, and fall asleep.

This didn't always work however. I often found the psychology lectures quite interesting and at times stayed awake throughout the entire thing to learn a little. One time, they even brought in a hypnotist! That was cool. Suffice it to say, this wasn't my most successful solution to the sleepiness problem.

In my 3rd year, I tried to get a nap on the couches in this common area where my friends would often hang out. It was a bit noisy, so naps weren't always easy to come by.

In my 4th and final year, the 4th year BIT (Bachelor of Information Technology) students had their own computer lab, and there I would eat my lunch, and then take a nice nap afterwards. It was a relatively quiet environment, so sleep was easy to come by. It was the best solution I had come up with.

Unfortunately, I can't replicate this solution at my work. If I happen to make the silly mistake of eating too much for lunch and then have an afternoon with either not much to do or with a task that really isn't all that engaging, then the drowsiness starts to return, and I find it hard to fight back. Once, I had been caught-out by my team leader, and on a few occasions my work mates have jolted me awake, either by coming up to me and saying something loudly, or ringing my phone.

If I do eat too much sugars (carbohydrates and what not) I can get hypoglycaemic quite easily due to the over-abundance of insulin my body makes. I'm like an anti-diabetic according to my diabetic friend, but am still susceptible to the same problems she faces if she doesn't watch what she eats. The thing is, she's the one that takes the insulin shots; all I have to do is alter my diet - smaller meals more often, don't chow-down the carbs at lunch, etc - so I feel quite bad when I make the mistake and eat too much at lunch and then start feeling drowsy afterwards.

Now that I do know a diabetic, I feel I'm not doing the best I can with the luck I've been given, and so berate myself every time this happens. I really have to fix this and stick with it; if not for the approval of my diabetic friend, then for my own well-being.

Yesterday my dad and I were going to have lunch together, but we didn't know where we were gonna go. My dad suggested we try a place neither of us had been to: a place called Burger Fuel. So we met up, made our way to Burger Fuel, and having never been there before, I used my knowledge of other popular burger places to make a guess as to what might be a good lunch for me.

Big mistake.

What I ended-up doing was underestimating the size of the burgers they served, so was very surprised when I was given one of the largest burgers I had ever seen. I only just managed to eat it all, before walking ever so slowly back to work. OK, 'walking' is the wrong word for it; 'waddling' is a better description of the movement I used to get myself back to work.

Suffice it to say, I didn't feel hungry again until moments before a planned dinner with my friend... where I made the same mistake all over again.

This time the place was called Lone Star. Like Burger Fuel, I had never been here before, so it was a good day for me to try new places. And just like at Burger Fuel, I underestimated the size of the portions they served here. Despite being warned by my friend who sounded like a Lone Star veteran, I only had myself to blame when they placed in-front of me the largest plate of food I had ever seen.

This time I never finished my food, nor did my friend finish hers. It didn't seem possible for any normal human being (that is, a person with 1 stomach) to complete the meals they served here in one sitting. I must've made it only 1/3 of the way through my meal before my insides just gave up.

Enough! Enough! I could hear my stomach say. You've already had 1 huge meal that almost killed me, now you want to do it AGAIN in THE SAME 24 HOUR PERIOD!!!??

During the walk home I poured all of my concentration into not throwing up. I was probably waddling again, but I didn't care; I would have used any movement, no matter how ridiculous, that had the lowest chance of puncturing a hole in my stomach, and the highest chance of getting me home. If it's good enough for the penguins, it's good enough for me.

'sup cuz

So that was pretty much the recurring theme for yesterday. What makes this whole ordeal even stupider is that this isn't the first time this has ever happened to me.

Rewind to almost a year ago. I was being invited out to a group dinner by someone I had recently met through the ceroc dance classes I had just started attending (I've called this person 'amazing baking girl' in a previous post, so will continue to call her so here). Amazing baking girl took us all out to place called HK BBQ which I haven't been to before (seeing a pattern here? New restaurants must be a precursor to gluttonous behaviour). But it wasn't HK BBQ that killed me. You see, everyone wanted dessert afterwards, which HK BBQ doesn't do. Down the road however, was a place called Strawberry Fare - a place that had earned almost legendary status with me after hearing so many great stories about it from so many other people - and that was where we went next.

Not only was Strawberry Fare another place I had never been to, but it had one of the best cheesecakes I had ever eaten. Yes, I ate ALL of my cheesecake against the advice of my stomach.

Stop eating! it would say, You've reached capacity! We'll have to store any further food in your throat if you don't stop!

STFU stomach!, I would tell it, After all these years of hearing about this place I am FINALLY here so I am going to enjoy it and let this magical cheesecake flow through my veins!

Well, you can guess what happened next. Waddling was involved, as was concentrating on breathing in, breathing out, and entering the PIN for my card between breaths, so that I wouldn't collapse from the shock that my body was undergoing in reaction to my new weight.

It's a story that amazing backing girl remembers well to this very day. I remember it too, yet I never let the lessons learned that night guide my choices at lunch or dinner yesterday. It's like a blindspot in my knowledge, and something I may well repeat and may well be the death of me, provided my statistically short lifespan doesn't kill me first.

Repeat it enough times, it's bound to stick... eventually

So why do some lessons stick with us and alter our behaviour to prevent us making those mistakes again, while others get missed no matter how many times we repeat the mistakes?

Coming up with something to write about today is gonna be difficult: I wrote yesterday's item very late at night, then went to sleep, woke-up at about 10am this morning (yay for the weekend), had breakfast, watched the American Idol top 9 and the results show (yes I'm a fan, quit hating on me), and after a bit of cleaning-up around my place, have only 2 hours before I have to go to a birthday party which won't see me in-front of my computer to do any blogging for the day. So I have to come up with something now, and as you can see the number of things for me to draw upon is very slim.

Since I was talking about food in the last post, I might as well follow it up with more talk about food, which brings me to the topic I've chosen for today: breakfast.

Now in spite of hearing my friends go on about healthy food, one thing they often fail to get right, is breakfast. We've all heard the age-old saying about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. My parents drilled this fact into my head from a very young age, this country used to have an ad campaign about it in-case your own parents forgot to do the drilling, and whenever a report comes out that a statistically significant amount of children aren't eating breakfast before going to school, it makes headline news. So with all this talk about breakfast, I would've thought the advice had been heeded and is one of the things that every diet-talking person I know would follow and take to heart. But oh not so.

Your breakfast may vary

I most often used to hear my friends complain about crappy days because they missed breakfast during high school and university. Yet with both of those eras long behind us, the number of missing-breakfast-related complaints hasn't subsided.

Understandably, some of these people have demanding jobs with strict working hours that see them operate on the weekdays with minute amounts of sleep that have to be offset by popping back-alley pharmaceuticals. But others with the most flexible work-whenever-they-want-and-can-even-work-from-home hours still miss out. It's not as if they're being hypocritical of all the dieting advice they like to spout, but rather that they've mis-prioritized the advice and poor little breakfast has taken a back seat to sucking down omega fish oils or counting vegetables.

My own experiences with missing breakfast have always been bad, understandably, I feel CRAPPY for the entire day if I skip breakfast; I can't concentrate, my head aches, my stomach complains because it's schedule is all messed-up, and I'm much more likely to fall asleep at around the 2:30/3pm mark. Having skipped breakfast maybe once or twice during my university years was all the lessons I needed to remind me to never do that again. Nowadays, even if I'm running late for work, I will make a detour to the nearest McDonalds or Wholly Bagels and grab something from there before beginning my day. Everything else can wait; people rely on me to be focused when I do my work, and combating head and stomach pain while I'm comatose on my desk in the afternoon isn't going to help.

Now if only something just as cool can be said about greater/increasing age. No, I haven't started feeling the pinch of the years on me, but some of my friends definitely have, and it's their conversations on things like nutrition and fitness that make me think it's having an effect on them.

As we creep towards (or in the case of my older friends, pass beyond) a point that is equidistant with both 20 and 30 years of age, I've noticed they have an ever-increasing need to talk about their diets or their choice of food, or the number of kilometres they can run. Not that any of these things are particularly bad - putting healthy food into your body is always a plus, as is testing the heart rate - but they never really talked about these things before. It's like a switch has gone off in their heads that, now they have to tick a different age group tick box on surveys or censuses, an extra and conscious effort has to be made to cling to youth.

Topics of conversation

Suddenly, everybody is an expert in kilojoules, carbohydrate intake, the types of vegetables to eat, and the perfect weight-to-repetitions ratio on certain gym equipment. Should they be worried? Maybe. Should I be worried? Most likely yes.

A majority of my friends are of your white western-civilization type, whose chances of reaching a very old age increase with every year and every advance in modern science. Whereas I'm from a country where the average life expectancy will see me through my 50s if I'm lucky. But either through genetics or culture, despite being almost half-way through my natural life, that switch in my head hasn't gone off.

I feel no extra compulsion to eat any more healthy than I have already been doing, nor do I feel the need to supplement my existing activity with trips to the gym. I'd like to think that I have pretty good tabs on my body; that I can understand the signs of a past weeks worth of bad food or of not getting enough sleep, than I can predict how my health will fare in the following days when I'm struck with illness, and that I know the distances I can run or the number of stairs I can climb before collapsing on myself (hint: it's not a large number).

With good weeks in terms of the above, I tend to reward myself with a trip to McDonalds or a large thickshake (if I haven't had either in a while). Today I decided to have an ice cream after lunch, but made the mistake of underestimating the size of the scoops of ice cream when I ordered a double. The result was huge and looked to topple any moment if I didn't keep a close eye on incoming people or gravity.

We all scream for ice cream

Once I made it back to work and to my desk, I relaxed and thought now I can enjoy my ice cream. Yet just as I started to, all I could hear were voices of my friends talking about bad desserts, or the number of calories that might be in this ice cream. One voice, that of my diabetic friend, was rather prominent. I imagined her looking at the ice cream saying "Oh my God" in that "what the hell are you thinking" manner, and shaking her head as if I hadn't learned a vital life lesson.

Since when was eating ice cream supposed to suck?

While I was re-tagging my news posts, I noticed that I've never actually posted anything about the goings-on with the Writing section. The main reason for that being that it's mostly stories I've written to friends which require some level of inside knowledge, and thus it wouldn't go down too well with others. Although recently (a couple of months ago) I did write something which I think anyone can appreciate.

After being told something strange about a McDonalds burger, I decided to run a semi-scientific investigation and review of the burger. My findings and final write-up (complete with pictures) can be found in the link below:

• Review - McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger

[EDIT]: Arg, just found out something else while checking that the recent CSS-crusade didn't break anything: many of the Writing pages look messed-up in Internet Explorer 6. Seems I still have some work to do. Or, you IE6 folk could upgrade to IE7, or go get another browser :P

[Update]: IE6 fixed-up.

I was walking home with my dad one day, and he told me about how he tried the new McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger for lunch. Although with his 99%-complete English, the word 'seared' came out as 'shared'.

"What? Shared burger?"
"No, sheared."
"Huh? Like sheep shearing?"
"No, sheaared."

So it went like that for about 2 minutes before I finally resolved the dispute with my mind-reading powers.

Anyway, one of his claims was that the burger had a strong odour, not a bad one, but one similar to perfume. He said that the smell was strong enough that it actually distracted him as he ate it. That's a pretty strong claim. I mean, McDonalds smells like McDonalds, right? So at work the next week, I freed-up my lunch time, dialed my nose up to 11, and went over to McDonalds to see/smell for myself.

Service and ambiance

McDonalds doesn't really change over the years - it's a constant of city living; a rock against the tides of metropolitan change. So if you've been to McDonalds within the last decade, then you'll know what McDonalds looks like now. And it'll look like that in other countries too; even though it's all managed locally, regional management does a good job of following most of the same steps and guidelines as their foreign overlords. The only thing that really differs between here and the US is that the ads make subtle jokes about Australians, and the posters spell colour with a 'u'.

On this particular day, the staff were pulling out all the tricks to ensure that those waiting in line didn't have to wait too long, eg: someone was taking orders in advance, most of the tills were manned, and several other subtle things.

This initiative during the peak lunch hours would normally be applauded, but with all of the staff concentrating on this duty, they neglected to maintain the cleanliness of the eating area. Bins were piling-up with so much rubbish that patrons would just leave their trays around them, and my photographer had to exchange her seat for one that didn't have the previous occupant's drink spilled all over it. Even after doing so she had to put-up with what remained in the form of a sticky floor beneath her feet.

Anything else worth mentioning were factors purely beyond their control: crying babies, other patrons giving me evil looks because my kind took their jobs and brought disease, and a passing delivery truck whose sound system is trying to convert those nearby to the world of hip-hop and crunk music by repeatedly preaching the words "get out the way ho".

The product

The seared chicken burger is just 1 of 4 new chicken burgers from McDonalds; the other 3 being a version with bacon (add $1), and then crispy chicken variants of these 2. I opted for the non-bacon seared chicken burger under the advice that the bacon smell might mask or destroy the original fabled perfume smell of the burger.

The box it comes in, a tad larger than the quarter pounder box, looks quite inviting, and falls in-line with McDonalds' latest effort to improve their image as a fresh/quality ingredient user. Opening the box however reveals a hastily assembled burger with as many ingredients outside the buns as there are between them.

So what is supposed to be between its 2 wheat-germ-topped buns are a marinated seared chicken breast fillet, a slice of cheese, lettuce both green and purple, tomatoes, carrots, and a sauce that I'm just going to call mayonnaise to keep things simple. In comparison to the beef burgers, it's a much healthier choice in terms of standard and saturated fats. You can read the official nutritional data here, although any health benefits are somewhat displaced by the fact that the combo still comes standard with deep-fried salted potato and sweet brown carbonated water.

Well, I didn't come here just to stare at the burger, so I started to test the myths about its smell. A basic wafting test didn't reveal anything major, nor did putting my nose within nanometres of the burger. There was maybe the faint smell of the marinade used, and my photographer detected possible mayonnaise, but neither or us were hit with the life-altering olfactory epiphany that my dad had experienced whilst eating the burger. Maybe that was the problem; maybe I had to eat the burger. So eat I did.

In line with the smells that were detected, the marinade is definitely the most noticeable ingredient when you take a bite into the it, followed closely by the chicken and the mayonnaise. This combination formed some sort of strange yet pleasant taste that wanted to invade my sense of smell. Perhaps this was what my dad was talking about? It did strike me as odd that a large portion of taste from the burger was being picked-up by my nose trying to break through the roof of my mouth.

And then it occured to me: maybe I was doing the smell test all wrong. Maybe something that supposedly smells like perfume requires a perfume test? (See what I did there? Logic.)

The perfume test

So what does a perfume test entail? Being a total perfume-testing n00b, all I have to go on is what I've been taught in movies, television, and whatever top-10 results Google will send my way. And from what I have gathered, it involves skin contact, noses, and some well-placed rubbing... oh yeah, and perfume (a list that's only a midget and video camera away from an R-rating).

I believe the following order is also how it's done:

1. expose your upturned wrist
2. apply a sample to the wrist area
3. sniff the application
4. ponder thoughtfully

And so that's what I did, although exchange 'apply a sample' with 'rub arduously'.

The result? Nothing. No Chanel No. 5, no Calvin Klein, but just the vinegar of the marinade and whatever composed that mayonnaise to create something you'd more likely find in a fridge-freezer than the perfume stands at Farmers. I wasn't even able to test that last metaphor because the smell was so faint that I didn't think it would survive a trip to said Farmers store.

I'd been had.

The Verdict

Overall, good enough for the working-class crowd, and a nice addition to the McDonalds menu. A tad expensive considering what you get, but the extra cents go towards putting you on the slower path to a coronary. Don't believe the hype, don't expect perfumed food, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

6.5 out of 10.

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Seared Chicken Burger
Fast food burger, $8.70 NZD ($6.50 NZD for the burger only), available from participating McDonalds restaurants
http://www.mcdonalds.co.nz/

Photos by Melissa.