Things you've never dreamed of

June 15th, 2014

On being sick

I’m one of those people who go a year or two practically immune from the cold then BAM the flu hits me in the face and I’m down for several days. I think the long spell of good health actually works against me because I’m nowhere near prepared when I do get sick.

Since I was housebound for the last couple of days I had to resort to home remedies to make myself feel better. In the interest of science, I present to you my somewhat drug-assisted home remedies in order of “no help at all” to “all of this all the time”:

1. Sleeping it off

This has worked for me in the past for “baby” colds. I’d feel a bit of a cold coming on, have a good night’s sleep and hey presto fresh as a daisy the next day. This doesn’t work for my bi-annual plague. I came home early on Friday, took a sleeping tablet and was all yeah I’ll feel better after 18 hours sleep. Oh no. The onset of a fever meant I was too cold to sleep, then was too hot when the fever hit and couldn’t get comfortable cos my joints ache.

2. Hot water with lemon and honey

Kept me warm but tastes like ass.

3. Tea with honey

Kept me warm and tastes less like ass.

4. Chicken congee

The ultimate comfort food when I’m sick. I don’t expect it to be anything other than bland cos I can’t taste anything anyway and so good on cold winter nights. My go-to food once I feel like eating again.

5. Cold and flu tablets

This sounds really weak but seriously… this shit is the bomb. I normally get the Chemist’s Own day and night flu tablets (found them as I was rummaging through my kitchen drawer looking for paracetamol) and they are the best. Why be stoic, pharmaceuticals are there for a reason.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor so get medical advice and be sensible. Just trust me on the hot lemon and honey, it’s gross.

February 17th, 2014

Things I like about hipster boyfriends

(from a shallow, hetero biased, inner-city-dwelling-hipster biased POV)

  • Essentially doubled my wardrobe size
  • BEARD
  • Fearless when it comes to bright colours
  • Helpful when trying to put together an outfit
  • Wow I didn’t know that Mac shortcut does that
  • Creative romantic gestures
  • Relatively easy to buy gifts for
August 27th, 2013

The weekend in haiku

Pimento made this
Amazing arcade table
He’s a genius

Arcade table motherfuckers

Oh but wait there’s more
He also made sausage rolls
Ladies, he’s single

Sossij rolls

Yeah that’s right bitches
Braised pork belly in a bun
Jealous? You should be

Braised pork belly inna bun

Mr Gif chipped in
Made him chop all the chillies
Because I’m a wimp

Motherfuckin chillies

Although, looking back
Wasn’t the best idea
That stuff really burns

July 4th, 2013

Rozelle Cafe Crawl

It was a dark and rainy day when

The hardest thing about

The road to hell is paved with

Fuck it, am so out of practice. So Sara and I went out to breakfast one Saturday. It was that rainy Saturday a few weeks back – you know the one, the one where you went “aaargh” when you woke up.

The plan was to go to Manly, but we settled for Rozelle as we were both on a quest to find a dress for a 50s night. We hoofed it to La Grande Bouffe first and only just made it in time for breakfast. La Grande Bouffe, being quite civilised, finishes its breakfast service at 11.30am – there are a few all day items on the menu but the options for these aren’t as ridiculously plentiful as the all day breakfasts from most places around here. So with 5 minutes to spare, I ordered:

Oeufs sur le Plat with Wilted Spinach and Truffled Mushroom Duxelles

Oeufa sur le Plat with Wilted Spinach and Truffled Mushroom Duxelles – yeah I totally copied and pasted this from their online menu, you wanna make something of it? Duxelles, if you’ve not had it before, is a sautee of finely minced mushrooms. You may recognise it as one of the primary components in beef wellingtons.

Sara had the croque madame with fried egg:

Croque madame

This filled me with breakfast envy. Even more so after she kindly let me sample it.

Then we went to the vintage clothing store where Sara scored a couple of shiny clutches. Flush with shopping success, Sara suggested that we continue eating the rest of the day. I wasn’t going to say no but the back of my brain did go “hold on, aren’t you going to Tommy’s beer cafe tonight?”

I drowned the concerned voice in sangria and a smoked salmon bruschetta at Rosebud.

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Sangria was delicious, bruschetta was only so-so. The last time I was here (granted, it was probably last year), the bruschetta was served with white anchovies and I preferred that version by miles.

Ignoring the increasingly high pitched shrieking of my sense of self preservation, we continued on to Corner Bar, one of my favourite locals. Open for all three meals with WINE (possibly not for breakfast though).

We had:

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Pulled pork sliders awwww yeah. These had jalapenos, some sort of spicy mayonnaise thing, cheese and crushed corn chips on top.

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Crispy chicken wings with barbeque sauce

Totally as good as they look. They also have one of the best bathrooms I’ve seen, though I have to admit I did wince at the ultra-hipsterness of it all.

We only stopped eating because both of us had dinner plans. I rolled home, took a nap, braved the rain to Tommy’s Beer Cafe and had this:

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THE END.

(Turns out, I’m a bit shit at writing endings to blog posts too)

April 11th, 2010

Bodega Tapas Bar, Surry Hills

The SO and I were invited to a delightful dinner at Bodega Tapas Bar last Tuesday by a similarly delightful couple, Daniel and Chika. Bodega is a tiny place tucked away on a side street in Surry Hills – but its reputation is such that there is apparently a line of people outside the place most nights (they don’t accept reservations). Being a Tuesday we scored a table quite easily. Well, I say table, but they’re really seats at the long communal table in the middle of the restaurant. We were asked if we wanted our own table or if we wanted to sit in the middle table and being the social butterflies that we were, we took the communal table.

I didn’t take any photos of the place because I was a bit self conscious about taking pictures (I think my mistake was asking if I can take photos first, the dude was like “for personal use?” and I’m like “yeahhhhhhhhh” then I was a bit worried I’d look like a price comparison undercover person or something but uh this counts as personal use right?), but the restaurant is awesome. Not gonna lie, it was a bit cramped and noisy, but service was friendly and well, they’re all hot. There’s a rockabilly vibe in the place with almost everyone rocking 50s hair styles and clothing.

You know what though, I came home and looked at my collection of photos and was like, why did I even bother taking photos if it looks like I took photos of everything with my eyes closed? I’m disgusted guys, disgusted. It’s the opposite of my sentiments on actually eating there, which I’ll get to in the next paragraph.

Man I can’t ever think of a clever way to start a paragraph, so let’s get right to what we had:

Eggplant en escabeche and complimentary bread. I forgot to turn on my macro setting for this shot. What the fuck, indeed. Anyway, I can always get behind a place that gives you a crapload of delicious fluffy bread and olive oil free of charge. Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge says that an “escabeche” is a thing what’s marinated in something acidic. The eggplant was nice and slippery with a strong hint (is that an oxymoron?) of fennel.

OYSTERS. Not much to say there except OYSTERS GODDAMN. They’re $3.50 each. At first I was trying to appear demure or some shit by saying I only want one, but then everyone got two and I was like fuck it I want some goddamn oysters. So I got two, and it was double the deliciousness. The SO only had one because he is very secure about his testosterone levels.

Spiced pumpkin and feta empanadas with yoghurt sauce. It was crispy and not at all greasy. I didn’t think the yoghurt sauce was really necessary but was happily proven wrong when I slathered my bite of empanada with it.

Oh god this is just tragic. I stared at this picture in Photoshop for ages thinking, I’m never gonna salvage this piece of crap. Then I was struck with a brilliant idea – I’ll just resize it really really small and it won’t be too obvious that the picture’s shit. Obviously, it didn’t work. These are the deep fried spiced calamari with aioli. It was slightly too salty for me, but the bits of calamari are perfectly tender. Just one thing though… they gave us enough aioli for a bucket of fried calamari. I would love a bucket of it, just FYI guys.

These are called fish fingers, but they’re not the bright orange processed stuff you get in a box. From the site: “sashimi Kingfish on garlic toast with cuttlefish ceviche and mojama“. It’s a bit salty, a bit sour and a bit sweet from the onions. I’m a huge fan of this.

Steamed pork belly with warm salad of onion and shiitake mushroom. See, my experience with pork belly usually involves the crispy crackling or highly flavoured braise, so this was something very different for me. The steaming produces very silky, melt in your mouth delicate thin slices of pork. Daniel left the rind on his plate. If I wasn’t so concerned about looking like a rude arsehole I would have shamelessly asked if I can have it. If I’m trying to describe the dish by picking a passage from the well worn pages of purple prose analogies, I would liken it to your lover’s breath against your cheek as you sip a glass of wine, discussing philosophy in a buttercup-filled meadow with white doves flying overhead, while the advancing army of soul sucking robots move throu

Just as I was lulled into a trance-like bliss by the wispy carress that was the pork belly, the gutsy chorizo with sofrito paste came along and sucker punched me in the mouth. Pow, motherfucker!

I was a bit confused as to why the salad came later and not at the beginning of the meal, but it was not my place to ask such things – just to eat with relish. In hindsight it was a great way to end the savoury dishes and cleanse the palate for dessert. This was beetroot, labna, witlof and orange salad. I’ve always been kind of ehhhh when it comes to beetroot, but it was gorgeous here with the sweet oranges and tangy labna. I still can’t do witlof though, sorry. Evil little things. I ate them anyway because I’m polite.

The dude who took orders from our table said I can have dessert if I finish all my vegetables. I even ate the fucking witlof so this amazing plate was well deserved. This is the “banana split”, but like the fish fingers the name doesn’t really describe what it actually is. The plate consists of a cream flan, dulce de leche ice cream (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE), ginger biscuit (assume this is the thing on top of the flan?) and a fluffy banana puree thing. I’d eat another witlof leaf for this.

This was a dessert on their specials board so I don’t actually know what they call this. But it has a pastry thing with some sort of vanilla creamy custardy thing in it, a quince… thing and a scoop of very chocolatey ice cream. I liked the vanilla thing enormously though SO found it a little bland.

This meal (we shared three desserts between the four of us), plus beers and bottle of sparkling water came to about $60 per person. I was completely stuffed at the end of the meal and felt like I had to be rolled out of the restaurant.

Bodega Tapas Bar
216 Commonwealth St
Surry Hills NSW 2010
(02) 9212 7766