27 April, 2008

Hot Fudge

My chilli chocolate refuses to set.
It has become chilli chocolate fudge.
I am officially a genius.

25 April, 2008

Hot Choc

I was really supposed to be chipping away at some of the massive pile of work I've managed to get myself involved in but instead I found myself once again in the kitchen, this time making chocolate.

I did this because cooking is one of the only things that makes me focus entirely on one activity (doing the crossword is another, as is swimming). I decided it wouldn't be too bad if I just spent an hour or so making chocolate as a kind of break from work, considering I've been doing the hard yards for about three weeks now.

Why chocolate? Because after Easter I bought a 1kg bag of Priceline Easter eggs for $3 and soon found out why it was cheap and the last thing on the shelf. So I wanted to melt them down and add a couple of flavours and see if I couldn't make the chocolate better. The eggs were just sitting in the cupboard, waiting to be transformed. Besides which, I'd run out of flour and butter for other baking activities.

I ended up creating three batches, a couple of trays of freckles, a mocha-flavoured batch and a chilli chocolate batch. When I started out melting the chocolate (miraculously remembering my high school food tech teacher's warning never to heat chocolate directly but put a bowl above boiling water instead), my mouth began to water, thinking of all the bowls I would have to lick at the end.

When the chocolate was liquid, I sifted in a couple of tablespoons of pure cocoa and then some organic milk to make the chocolate more flavoursome. For the first batch I poured the mixture into muffin trays that had been lined with hundreds and thousands so that when you tipped them out they'd be all colourful on top.

For the second batch I sifted through mocha flavouring (shh, the powder actually expired last month but I didn't think it would really affect the chocolate). This was actually a bad idea because while I love drinking mochas, I don't really like coffee-flavoured chocolate to eat. This I only realised later on.

For the third batch I sprinkled chilli powder (god knows how much) until I could smell it had chilli in it. I ended up pouring this lot into an oblong container so I could eat it as a block.

However, by the end of the exercise – and I'd barely touched any 'spare' chocolate – I felt ill at the thought of eating chocolate, despite the fact that it all smelled so good. It was like that time I went to Estonia with my Finnish friends and we ate at a chocolate cafe and afterwards I vowed I'd never eat chocolate again. (The funniest thing was the very next day we made a special trip to Fazer, a chocolate shop in Helsinki...).

So now I have almost a kilo's worth of chocolate just hanging around with no one to eat it. What a fool am I.

Even worse, the clean up was a nightmare. Everything I touched turned to chocolate and the stuff really was everywhere. What was supposed to be an hour-long break turned out to be a three-hour kitchen odyssey, with results I can't even bring myself to eat. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

No such thing as Anzac cookies

The first thing I ever made all by myself was Anzac biscuits. I was driven to do my own baking for two significant reasons: one, most commercial Anzac biscuits were crunchy; and two, all commercial Anzac biscuits contained coconut.

With the help of Family Circle: Irresistible Biscuits, Cookies & Shortbread (Murdoch Books, 1993), I developed a modified recipe for chewy Anzac biscuits consisting of no coconut but more oats and half the sugar but an extra 1/2 tablespoon of golden syrup. I brought these into work on Tuesday and they were enjoyed by all.

The other day a gift arrived from a PR company. The package contained Anzac cookies. Now, I'm the kind of person who calls a spade a spade and a cookie a cookie. Anzac biscuits ARE NEVER COOKIES. This is not some anti-American spiel against cookies, it is a recognition of the sad indictment that is poor education encompassing both the meaning of words and culinary difference.

In general, biscuits are hard and you should be able to munch on them noisily (unless they are chewy Anzacs...). They are generally flat in appearance as their ability to 'rise' is NOT a key factor in their making. If you were to break them, you would be able to snap them off. Biscuits can be sweet or savoury.

Cookies are 'little cakes', which means they are doughy. They are always sweet. If you were to break them they would crumble. Their key characteristic is that they have more 'air' in them and thus tend to be puffy or chunky.

Anzac biscuits are never and have never been cookies. When the recipe was developed last century, the women who invented them didn't even know what cookies were, as they would have come from Anlgo-Saxon stock which exclusively dealt with biscuits. Even mine, which are chewy rather than crunchy, do not become cookies because of that trait.

What would need to happen to Anzac biscuits to turn them into Anzac cookies? Well, the Anzacs never ate cookies so whatever modification made to the biscuit recipe to make cookies would render the Anzac adjective redundant. Perhaps Anzac biscuit-like cookies would be more accurate? Oatmeal cookies are probably most similar to Anzac biscuits and the main difference in the result probably comes from the beating of the butter and sugar (making the mixture fluffy) before adding the other ingredients.

By the way, I make cookies too. I like them and I'm getting pretty good at making them. I just hate the term 'Anzac cookies'.

P.S: According to my analysis, this means that the 'cookies' you get at McDonald's – the little kiddie ones you get in the box that are shaped like McDonald's characters – are actually biscuits.

22 April, 2008

Rich Women

I received a call today from a lady named Kate who had rung on behalf of Naomi Simson, founder of Red Balloon Days, the experience gift company. Kate opened her spiel with a reference to the BRW Rich List (whichever one is out now, they have so many it's rather boring...) saying that of the 200 people on the list, only two were women.

I feigned some kind of interest, as the call was more appropriately addressed to my editor (to whom I passed dear Kate), but then I thought about it some more. Why would only two women be part of the mega-rich?

My theory is that women do not go into business to make money as their ultimate priority. If we want to take a more stereotypical view of women, it's their caring nature that may prove the driver for their business. If this is the case, some rich list is probably not as important as being a responsible business and, for example, being named in the top 200 of the most socially responsible businesses in Australia (if there was such a list).

From my experience networking with businesswomen, plenty of them start their own business not to make lots of money but to make enough money to be sustainable so they could control other things such as their work-life balance, or do something that other businesses, under which they had worked previously, wouldn't let them do.

If you want a 'tough woman against staid corporate world' scenario, it may be that a woman who was constantly denied leave to care for her chronically ill daughter found it easier to set up her own business than fight the existing system. Sometimes they thrive, sometimes they struggle.

The other thing about being on the rich list is that generally you need to be at the head of a fairly sizeable company, and very few of these are self-made; names like Murdoch, Packer and Lowy don't appear in the top five as sole traders or as owners of the corner store. So the problem isn't that women aren't earning a lot of money (surely some are earning a pretty good salary...), but that women are not promoted to the head of large companies that they do not own for whatever reason you care to explain.

There are a lot of female entrepreneurs starting small businesses. Personally, I think the number outstrips men. Their businesses may be profitable, but the owners themselves may not be one of the 200 richest people in Australia. And a lot of them, I think, would say - 'so what? Business is good and I'm doing what I want to do.'

15 April, 2008

The Black Balloon (film)

Long time since I've been here and I apologise. Never mind, I'm back for a very good reason, The Black Balloon. I went in expecting a nice little Aussie film, for aside from Wolf Creek and Rogue, I think most Aussie films have been 'nice' of late, which is to say pleasant, a bit ho-hum and nothing to write home about. The Black Balloon is different and here's why...

First of all, the casting is superb. I can even forgive (catwalk model) Gemma Ward's alien looks for what is a pretty good acting debut (barring a previous performance in another of director Elissa Downs' films way back in 2001).

The film follows teenaged Thomas to an anonymous suburb where he lives with his army father, pregnant mother and older brother Charlie, who is autistic. Moving around would be difficult enough without throwing Charlie's autistic behaviour into the mix and it is Charlie's unpredictability that gives the film its necessary tension.

Toni Collette is destined to play the mother of an unconventional family. She did it as ghost-visionist Haley-Joel Osment's mother in The Sixth Sense, and had a wonderful turn as matriarch in Little Miss Sunshine. As Maggie Mollison, she balances standard 'no-nonsense' authority with a clearly loving and almost endlessly patient maternity. Her dynamic with Charlie seems especially real.

Her husband looks like an army man but has his quirks too, for example, he takes orders from his teddy bear Rex. He's tough but soft inside, which makes the family dynamic heartbreaking at times.

Thomas (Rhys Wakefield) is sick of having an autistic brother (Luke Ford) he has to hide or defend, but he finds an unlikely ally in Jackie (Gemma Ward). While Gemma does well in the role (considering she's a renowned model, she pulls off teen gawkishness pretty well), the role itself is a bit of a let down as Jackie seems too good to be true — too understanding, too deep, too tolerant, and too quick to attach herself to Thomas despite the incidents that threaten to snuff their nascent relationship.

However, suspend your disbelief at Jackie's character and the rest works smoothly, with moments of beauty (the storm where Thomas, Jackie and Charlie need to take shelter at the army training ground) and bouts of ugliness (the climactic violence between Charlie and Thomas).

Other than the well-chosen cast, three other things stand out. The first is the very real portrayal of the average Australian suburb in the early 1990s. The attitude of the neighbours, the schoolyard tussles, even the PE lessons in the pool are uncomfortably familiar.

The second is the truth in Thomas' journey of understanding about his brother's autism. It takes Jackie's tolerance for him to grasp that Charlie won't change and become normal, so it's up to him to make his peace with the fact. The journey is not easy, in fact it's fraught with layers of hard lessons, but his inklings of acceptance close the film nicely.

Finally, the balance of humour and discomfort is the right one. There is much that an Australian can identify with and laugh at (while inwardly squirming) and Downs has interplayed these moments with Charlie's misbehaviour and the havoc it wreaks.

All in all, an entertaining film that hits all the right emotions. And better yet, nothing to be embarrassed about when talking about homegrown talent.

Film rating: 8/10
Enjoyment rating: 9/10

14 April, 2008

Gold

funnyƂ pictures

The expression on this dog's face is gold

13 April, 2008

When consumption is good for you

Most people who know me know that I'm a pretty hard market to sell to. It isn't that I'm miserly, just that I'm not all that interested in buying stuff. In general. I'm more likely to spend a great deal of money on an experience, like tickets to a gig or travel or something other than stuff. But sometimes it's the simple purchases in life that can make you happy.

Yesterday I went to the North Sydney Markets to pick up my street signs. The proceeds from the sale of the street signs go to the community centre. I'd bought Doohat Lane and Croquet Club for $50 each (Doohat because I pass the street every day on my way to work and it always makes me laugh and Croquet Club for a friend who'll be hosting an Alice in Wonderland 30th Birthday party later this year). There were others that hadn't been sold yet and I managed to get Sirius St for $10. I'm not sure whether to give it to an astronomy nut or a Harry Potter fan. Buying street signs, for some strange reason, made me happy.

Then I hopped on a bus and went to The Good Guys in Chatswood to buy a washing machine that uses 50L less water than our current model and half as much energy. I won a $50 voucher courtesy of Jetstar (which I thought was from my Brisbane trip earlier this year but was actually from when I went to Hobart for work last October...) and managed to get the machine for $610 + $42 delivery = $652 - $50 voucher = $602. Of course it took me ages to save up that much in cash (and my flatmate won't pay for half of it because she's hopeless with money) but with the enviro benefits and the fact I'll be getting $150 in a Sydney Water rebate, that purchase also made me happy.

I was mostly buoyed by the fact that my credit card bill this month is less than $500 (when it is usually $1500), though it didn't include my recent Brisbane trip, which will be coming soon.

Then I caught a bus back to North Sydney Markets and bought some random secondhand goods including a 3/4 length pinstripe blazer, 'The 80/20 Principle' by Richard Koch, a mushroom coloured Portmans top and a Rif Raf crochet dress, as well as avocadoes and tomatoes from the produce people. And I didn't eat anything that would compromise my pants situation. And, for some reason, all that made me happy.

05 April, 2008

Pants!

My small pants are too big, my big pants are too small...*

I recently read a post by Neil Gaiman at his website about the 'jeans test' to figure out whether you've been putting on weight. This is a phenomenon currently sweeping my closet. My baggy jeans fit perfectly and my favourite cargo pants (ie my only cargo pants which are 10 years old because I cannot find a pair that doesn't have 'bits' - ie toggles and random zips and straps and shit - all over them), which were my 'comfy' pair of pants now leave marks on my stomach if I sit for too long.

At least Mr Gaiman has a winter to blame his weight gain on - I have nothing. In fact, I've been quite healthily eating plenty of vegetables and exercising a lot in the past couple of months. Yes, I do snack and I do eat out but no more than usual (ie, the last couple of years) so I can't really understand why I'm starting to pile it on now.

For confirmation, I saw my weight in numbers when I went to give blood because they have to weigh you to make sure you're in the eligible weight range to donate. Seems I've put on 6kg since the last time they weighed me (nine months ago), which was itself 3kgs up on my weight six months prior to that. Generally speaking, I need to lose about 10kgs to get back to my mass 18 months ago.

The thing is, when I look at myself in the nude I don't look fat, but the clothes test never lies (and neither do the scales) and damned if I'm going to buy clothes that won't fit WHEN I lose weight.

And the worst thing? The worst thing is not all the work I have to put into losing the extra kilos. The dietary discipline, the punishing exercise regime, I can handle. It's the fact that I have to become a cliche 'person on a diet' that bloody well shits me. Low fat everything, refusing biscuits with afternoon tea that no longer exists and fake sugar. Ugh, I hate fake sugar, I think I'll do without. Save me!

* By the way, this does make sense. It means even my smallest pants are considered 'large' size and what I thought were big pants are too tight.