At a Harry's Cafe de Wheels that we discovered by chance at the tail end of our op shop-hoppin' puppy car ride last weekend. We like how this one in Tempe is different - set up like an old-school diner - from their usual takeaway-only stands. Oh, the novelty! Haha.
Sharing a little bit of the cutesy chirpy-ness that the boyfriend sent me to break up the gloom around here - Crash, a power-pop number by The Primitives (a regular on my Walkman and those of my boy-pals who had big crushes on the lead singer Tracy Tracy in the 80s) twee-tified by Belle & Sebastian! Woooo! I've always been a sucker for covers (good ones) and there's nothing better than a favourite band from recent years re-working a tune by another band that I like from an earlier period of my life. Woooo-some!
When I left work late Wednesday evening and turned my mobile phone back on, it beeped with texts from people who know how much I love my #1 puppy pal, my surrogate pet dog. As morbid as it may sound, I've often imagined what walking down Crown Street would be like without having Dasher around to pat and tickle...he's quite an old pup, you know...but I thought he still had quite a numbers of years left so the bad news came as a big shock. It made me very sad too. Teary-eyed sad.
And I'm not the only one. When I went to pop a note and some photos of Dasher into his owner's mailbox yesterday afternoon, the pavement in front of the house was already lined with flowers and cards and chalk writing. Very much like the scene outside Buckingham Palace when Princess Di died.
Dasher was one special rockstar pup to all who had known him and he will be sorely missed. I'd like to think that Dasher is in another happy place now, frolicking in a vast green meadow under rainbows and a perpetually sunny sky, chasing bunnies and sniffing wildflowers with puppy pals.
A few hats from my stash (the vintage Stetson with the colourful feather is the boyfriend's but I'm sure he'll let me borrow it) that I'm looking forward to wearing when the weather gets suitably nippy now that I've got good hat hair!
"Hat hair" as in a haircut that's conducive to hat-wearing. Not the bad lumpy look you get after wearing a hat. Also not hair that looks like it's a hat or helmet, like my big fat beloved "mushroom" (which many have asked if it's a wig). Imagine wearing a hat on top of all that hair. Wahahahahaha! But that has never stopped me from buying cute hats that I think I'll one day wear, the naughty consumaterialist that I was.
And that day has arrived! The mushie/helmet is all gone now, as of last Thursday, and the good old Mary Quant+Erin O'Connor, from when my current hairdresser and I first met, is back to take its place. Hats that previously didn't sit properly on my bouncy head of hair now fit! Woooo! And hat-wearing wasn't even on our agenda. We were simply bored and wanted to have some snip-away-without-a-care fun. Good hat hair was a bonus (hairbands don't sneakily slide off too now!). And so is a different glasses-wearing face (brand new looks with old frames! Wheeeee!). A superb haircut by a brilliant hairdresser is a gift that keeps giving, man!
1. At the recent Jil Sander A/W 2012 show: I'm a girl who prefers a good floral print to the real living things (unless they are the non-delicate kind like those below) so I find it quite strange that I haven't been able to get images of these arrangements by Antwerp-based florist Mark Colle out of my head.
The choice of flowers and the artfully-messy arrangements do not tick the right boxes in my books but plonking them in clear perspex boxes somehow made all the difference. Contained and framed like a still life. Or like the flowers we were made to press between plastic sheets for art and craft lessons when we were children. These bloom-filled boxes have sure made me look at flowers, those of the frou-frou-girly variety that I don't usually like, in a different light. And I have a feeling that they might soon be the most-copied arrangements for wedding reception centrepieces the world over.
2. On our dining table: The kind of flowers I like! Australian native blooms. Hardy (these are a week old) and always look good no matter what vessel you plonk them in. I'll miss buying them for cheap should we one day decide to not live here anymore.
3. In the kitchen: Chrysanthemum tea steeping in this oldie-but-goodie. I've got the bad head cold bug going around in Sydney at the moment and jugs of this fragrant tea + over-the-counter flu tablets beat yucky doses of anti-biotics. Every time!
Will Coles, "Britney" 2012, resin with iron dust, edition of 1, 23 x 33 x 19.5cm
In a gallery!
You know I'm a big-time Will Coles fangirl who loves going on "treasure hunts" for his street sculptures. Those of you who don't live or work in neighbourhoods that Will beautifies with his works, don't miss his current Nihilistic Archaeology show at the Brenda May Gallery! It closes this Saturday so make a day out of it - go have brunch or lunch at one of the many cafes along Dank Street and view the show of works that are too big to be cemented on public walkways.
I know I should have posted this the moment I received the invitation - Will gave a good talk at the opening two weekends ago - but it's better late than never, right? And don't forget to pop into the gallery shop! I love a good gallery shop and this one is chockful of goodness!
Will Coles' "Nihilistic Archaeology" From now until Saturday 24 March 2012 Brenda May Gallery 2 Dank Street Waterloo Phone (o2) 9318 1122 Website: brendamaygallery.com.au Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday :: 11.00am to 6.00pm // Saturday :: 10.00am to 6.00pm
Our pal Slow Loris' Pizza Dip from a party at Meeps' many weekends ago. It's basically all your favourite pizza toppings - he used salami, roasted capsicums + eggplants, olives, herbs, tomato paste and I think it was three different cheeses and load of them - all carefully layered and baked in a casserole dish. Eaten warm with crusty sourdough and chips or crisps as spoons. Even thin pizza bases, if you like. And washed down with beers.
It's not the best-looking thing* but boy, oh, boy, does it taste good! So good that I broke my no-meat-off-the-backs-of-four-legged-animals rule many times that evening (I didn't eat the salami but I did ingest spicy salami grease which usually is a no-no for me). I'll be adding this dude food dish, a chicken chorizo version (it needs some flavoursome meat grease to work), to my Winter comfort food repertoire! Girly-fied a little, of course, in single-serve bowls or ramekins.
*When I was taking the above picture, a pal at the party said we should send it in to Cook Suck. Not for the bad picture quality but for the ugliness of the dish. That suggestion made me think of this post on a photography blog (read also the comments and the follow-up post) that I had read earlier on that week about honesty in food photos.
The author wrote: "I’m tired of taking photos of food, and I’m really tired of looking at photos of food online (perfect meals and those perfect table settings). It all looks the same. The faux-urban-rustic aesthetic, with mason jars for glasses and twine-wrapped napkins. The perfectly placed spoonful of brown sugar on the table (in a vintage/antique spoon, please), the sugar crystals artfully scattered around the spoon. You know what I’m talking about...". Tee hee hee. I sure do know what he's talking about!
He also said, "Food is about so much more than the actual food itself." Like a scent or a tune that can instantly transport me back to happy days that I've had, the food that I have eaten acts as markers of experiences too. I wanted a picture of that not-too-pretty but bloody delicious pizza dip to remember the lovely evening by - good pals at a cosy house party, not unlike those from our teenage years, except we are now old enough to not have to drink on the sly, to make better food and have less random boys/girls around to snog but more intelligent conversations. If that party was to have a mascot, the pizza dip would be it!
And I'm not taking this opportunity to make excuses for the no-frills no-skills food pictures that I put up on this blog. I have nothing against those artsy-fancy or heavily art-directed pictures but I like shooting close-ups and top-downs of the food that I make because I see my food photos as clear simple records or documents, almost instructional, like picture recipe cards that I can refer to the next time I want to cook the same dish because we all know that I make up a lot of recipe-less things. Telling a story is more important here than looking pretty. Besides, the food that I make are real meals, usually dinners to be eaten the moment the boyfriend gets home so we can fit in more internet TV-viewing before bedtime and as we say in Singlish, "Where got time to make everything look nice-nice?".
This was last week when we had that freak storm that blasted noisy rain on our roof the whole night. It was still coming down when I woke up the next morning and I thought, "A good day for some soup! Yeah!".
I bought and roasted some cauliflowers, made some chicken stock and just when the soup was about ready, the sun decided to come out to play. Shooting the type of rays that were ideal for a spot of lazy afternoon sunbaking on the balcony. Definitely not soup-slurping weather but we had it for dinner anyway, lukewarm. With crunchy cornbread croutons smeared with gooey roasted garlic. The weather has not permitted us to have soup since. And I don't mind it one bit (I like soups but not soup-slurping weather) - I'd like to think that it's making amends for not giving us a proper Summer.
At Petaling Street. We've been back, working our way down the menu, nearly every weekend since we discovered it and have been feeling really guilty for not eating as often as we used to at our go-to weekend eatshop. But Petaling Street's fish head curry - it's a cross between those that we're used to eating in Little India back home in Singapore and a Malaysian-style laksa gravy - made us forget our disloyalty today. For a little bit. *fishy curry kisses*
I knew Kermit and Miss Piggy were going to do one of their duets but I thought, this being a 2011 Muppet Show, they would do a number that had been a recent chart-topper or something? I really wasn't expecting this tune and when Kermit plucked the first few not-hard-to-recognise notes, the floodgates to my reservoir of tears flipped open. The gates that quite a few number of scenes before had slowly nudged loose. Those scenes and the happy days that I associate with the original weekly shows of my childhood - coming home from school...being greeted by the very first puppy that I own (she was one special girl, man!)...refreshing cold showers...warm dinners with my folks...and settling down to watch the Muppets on TV.
I love a good cry at the movies. In between "maniacal laugh" and going "Wocka Wocka".
PS. Have you seen Being Elmo? It's another Muppet tearjerker!
This time last week, our little pals soaked up what was to be the last few rays of rare Summer sun after a tumbling fun time at the Washing Machine water park.
At a Harry's Cafe de Wheels that we discovered by chance at the tail end of our op shop-hoppin' puppy car ride last weekend. We like how this one in Tempe is different - set up like an old-school diner - from their usual takeaway-only stands. Oh, the novelty! Haha.
Images from Dasher's Twitter homepage
A few hats from my stash (the vintage Stetson with the colourful feather is the boyfriend's but I'm sure he'll let me borrow it) that I'm looking forward to wearing when the weather gets suitably nippy now that I've got good hat hair!
1. At the recent Jil Sander A/W 2012 show:
Will Coles, "Britney" 2012, resin with iron dust, edition of 1, 23 x 33 x 19.5cm
Our pal Slow Loris' Pizza Dip from a party at Meeps' many weekends ago. It's basically all your favourite pizza toppings - he used salami, roasted capsicums + eggplants, olives, herbs, tomato paste and I think it was three different cheeses and load of them - all carefully layered and baked in a casserole dish. Eaten warm with crusty sourdough and chips or crisps as spoons. Even thin pizza bases, if you like. And washed down with beers.
The same soup. A different Autumn.
At Petaling Street. We've been back, working our way down the menu, nearly every weekend since we discovered it and have been feeling really guilty for not eating as often as we used to at our go-to weekend eatshop. But Petaling Street's fish head curry - it's a cross between those that we're used to eating in Little India back home in Singapore and a Malaysian-style laksa gravy - made us forget our disloyalty today. For a little bit. *fishy curry kisses*
This time last week, our little pals soaked up what was to be the last few rays of rare Summer sun after a tumbling fun time at the Washing Machine water park.
