Landmarks of Sydney (AUS post5)

These are some of the Sydney landmarks that I visited during my month-long vacation last November 2007.

The Sydney Opera House in pink? Yes it is! Actually this was my last night at the Opera House and five days after, I came home to Manila. I think there was a concert that night with the proceeds going to a charity that helps women. So while savoring our last night of the Opera House view we decided to have some photos taken again.

It was our second week and second time at the Circular Quay area. This romantic view of the Opera House along with the Sydney Harbour view was taken from the Botanical Garden. The spot is also near Mrs. Macquarie's(wife of the governor in the late 1800's) Chair.

What's going on here? Well we're just posing and enjoying the beautiful lamp post near Park Hyatt Hotel, The Rocks – Sydney.

One fine day at the Botanical Garden.

Posters under the Sydney Opera House.

One of the performers in Opera House and he was loitering around the area. I forgot how I was able to have a photo op with him. He is too tall!

The Sydney Tower. Taken during one of our food trip nights at Hyde Park near St. James station. They had this food bazaar and there were stalls selling all types of Asian cuisines. There were also tables and chairs in the park with an exotic performance by Thai Girls. Soon I'll post the food bazaar along with the food I ate and cooked during my stay in Sydney.

Cahill walk is your way to the Botanical Garden and Opera House as the sign indicates. But we took the other way around. We crossed the Harbour Bridge just by walking until we reached the other side of the bridge which is the Kirribili. Kirribili is like Ayala Alabang and Forbes Park. An exclusive residential area of Sydney where the rich and famous can be found including the prime minister of Australia.

Across Kirribili and the same side of Sydney Harbour Bridge is the Lunatic LUNA Park. There's another one in Melbourne but we didn't visit it anymore when we explored the city.

Somewhere along the Darling Harbour Area after watching the expensive Dinosaur movie in IMAX. Then again the movie was worth it because of the free yummy gelato.

This was a late night visit at the Elizabeth Mall. We came from Kirribili and we stopped at Town Hall station because we thought 7:30 pm was too early for us to be home. But as we all know, malls in Australia close at 5:oo pm. So 7:30 was already late! The mall was still open but the shops inside were already closed. But more than the shops, the interior was the main attraction for me. I was impressed by how they preserve buildings with great architecture.

The Sydney skyline taken from the Kirribili area.

The Sydney University. Open to public and most especially for tourists.

Since it was open for tourists I got to see the majestic atmosphere of the university. Patterned after United Kingdom's Oxford and Cambridge.

Not a busy day during enrollment...

Classroom's Door.

Heading for my Art Appreciation Class.

With Reggie at Hyde Park.

Architecture of St. Mary's Cathedral near Hyde Park, St. James station and Dominion Road. Doors of the church are filled with banners announcing that Sydney is the venue of the next world youth day, which is this year already–2008.

About to go inside the cathedral, silence please...

The solemn interior of St. Mary's Cathedral.

How To Clean The Kettle

This is a video I promised Luz I would post for her to watch.

The rest of you can get your vinegar water and get to it.

Fatty ’Cue

March 13
The charming and barbecue-obsessed people of Grub Street dropped a Leap Day bombshell a couple of weeks ago that Zak Pelaccio would be opening a barbecue joint with Robbie Richter, the former pitmaster of Hill Country, a barbecue restaurant in Manhattan that has adoring fans.
Zak has his fans, too, of course, particularly for Fatty Crab, his mostly Malaysian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. But he has been picking up some local detractors, too, for all the consulting work he has been taking on.
I was poking my nose around one of those projects — a vaguely mused-about venture, perhaps called The Windsor and also maybe involving experiential pastry chef Will Goldfarb, Japanophile Josh DeChellis, and Robert Truitt, a former pastry chef at Will’s former restaurant, Room 4 Dessert.
The vague musings seem credible. A blog called The Life Vicarious noticed a listing in The James Beard Foundation’s event calendar that promised to introduce us to “the Windsor, the cozy yet elegant collaboration they [the chefs above] hope will become a hangout for chefs and food lovers alike.”
But the principals are mum. I called Josh, who said he’d keep me posted once there was something to keep me posted about. I e-mailed Will. He e-mailed back:
rumours abound
thats all they are
its a concept that we are working on

Zak heard I was snooping and he e-mailed me this (boldface added by me for your convenience):

I'd like you to know...and feel free to spread the gospel...that i will not be involved as consulting chef in any more projects for quite a while and I will only be focusing on fatty related projects: Fatty Crab and a new concept: fatty 'cue (bbq with a southeast asian palate, with a particlar focus on thai and malay flavors).

The address will be 91 South 6th St. in Williamsburg, and Zak hopes to open it by late spring or early summer.
Oh, he's also opening another Fatty Crab, on Broadway near 77th street, in June (2170 Broadway).

I'm a little short (part two)

Shortbread should be easy to make. It was the first foodstuff I was ever taught how to create in my very first home economics lesson at school and is a very basic combination of butter, flour and sugar with optional assorted flavourings. After some web-based research I found so many conflicting recipes that I just decided to try and use my intuition and spend a couple of days trying different ratios and different ingredients. I chose to ignore all recipes I’d seen and leave out the sugar as I wanted a savoury biscuit and opted for a pasta flour to keep it as light as possible. So, shortbread v. 1.0 consisted of little more than flour, butter, salt and finely chopped rosemary.

It mixed together nicely and formed a reasonably workable dough sausage which I left in the freezer to harden up. And then forgot about it. It emerged an hour later (when I say ‘it emerged’, I don’t mean it managed to extricate itself from the freezer by itself, obviously I removed it) looking and feeling like a pebble so I used a knife to cut a few of bite-sized discs from it which I baked gently. They were brittle and quite tasty but not quite right so I took advice from Heston Blumenthal and added an egg yolk into the remaining dough mix. I had confidence in Heston’s recipe and cut the new dough sausage into about 15 small discs ready to bake. Surely these would be delicious? Crumbly, crunchy, buttery yet meltingly delicious in the mouth with a hint of woody rosemary – the perfect foil to the sweet fig and onion and sharp, creamy goats’ cheese? They baked slowly and once they were ready my excitement grew at the possibility of trying one. When they were cool enough to handle I popped one in my mouth. And promptly spat it out again in the manner of a small child eating mud that they thought was chocolate.

Putting egg into shortbread is disgusting. Don’t try it. v.1.2 was a disaster fit only for the compost heap.

The kitchen was slowly becoming littered with the corpses of failed shortbread and I was fast losing the will to bake. Perhaps there is something in tradition. I should know by now that baking relies on strict principles laid down by generations of housewives and only the foolhardy or those very, very good at science should attempt to re-write the rulebook (for the record, I am not very good at science). The last resort was to relent and add sugar to the mix. With a heavy head and aching fingers (the ‘rubbing method’ can be hard work) I began to craft v.1.3, tipping quantities of flour and butter and sugar and salt and rosemary into a bowl with reckless abandon. With trepidation I worked the resultant dough into the now mandatory sausage and trimmed off a succession of little shortbread rounds which went into the oven at about one o’clock…

…And came out half an hour later looking and smelling exactly like I expected rosemary shortbread to look and smell. They were brittle but able to sustain a hefty quantity of fig and onion jam as well as a generous amount of cheese. But most importantly they were terrifically tasty, which you’d expect after a mere four days of trying. Now all that remained was to decide what to have for lunch.

www.justcookit.blogspot.com

I'm a little short (part one)

There are certain times in life when one does not wish to be wracked with indecision: moments when you’d rather be able to make a choice and stick with it with the tenacity of, well, of someone who has absolute faith in their base convictions. I imagine that waiting at the end of the aisle is not a place to have an internal dialogue with the two opposing forces in one’s head, nor would it be wise to have second thoughts when halfway across a rapidly flowing, dangerous-creature filled river thus rendering you unable to head to either bank, instead flailing like a spider caught in the whirlpool of an emptying bath. As a general rule I’d class myself ‘not bad’ at making decisions although I do tend to be a bit erratic, if it were a subject at school I think my report would say something along the lines of ‘not bad at making decisions, tends to be a bit erratic. C+’.

For example, I have been known to agonise for far too long over what to drink in a pub and the inevitable appearance of a waiter at my table can send me into a flustered panic but I guess all those minor ums and ahs have been cancelled out by the quitting of job (about 0.4 seconds to decision made, or DM) and buying of cottage with girlfriend (similar DM). See? Erratic.

Anyway, this brings me neatly on to what I wanted to say about food and cooking (there is always a point to my clunkingly ponderous meanderings even if it is not immediately obvious). Last Monday I received a call from a researcher at the production company behind a well-known BBC food series in which members of public compete to become the master of all things cheffy (I’m not sure how much I am meant to say, so I’ll keep it vaguely cryptic). After a telephone interview I was invited to the casting day and was asked to bring myself as well as a dish that could be eaten cold, ‘most people bring desserts because it’s a bit easier,’ I was told. Cue four sleepless nights deciding what to cook and how to cook it. Every time I tried to close my eyes I had possibilities running through my mind like a cinema screen onto which a demonic projectionist was displaying a visual representation of food Tourette’s. One moment I’d be staring at a piece of pork pie, the next it would be a slab of Valrhona cheesecake rapidly followed by a butter poached langoustine, venison loin with blueberry sauce and hundreds of meals I didn’t even recognise. I felt less like Alex, me Alex, and more like Alex from A Clockwork Orange Alex, only marginally less keen on milk.

I became fixed on the idea of cooking pigeon but was unsure whether it would benefit from begin served cold. The resultant dish (pan-fried pigeon breast with a savoury pigeon baklava, (similar to a pastilla) was tasty but lacked the depth of flavour I was after and so I returned to the drawing board, attempting to delve into the depths of my imagination to come up with a suitable dish that fulfilled the necessary criteria. I was loathe to do a dessert partly due to my ineptitude at most things pasty related and partly because I felt that doing something savoury would put me into the minority. After much head-scratching and discussion, I eventually settled on a canapé type morsel consisting of rosemary shortbread, fig and onion jam, goats’ cheese, and rosemary infused honey.