Terrific Tuesday (PM)

I LOVE TERRIFIC TUESDAY! Way to turn a regular Tuesday into a terrific one, mate! You know what else, on top of me trying to add to the terrificness of this day, the Universe is really helping out too. Here's how my terrific Tuesday is going and will continue to pan out. Hopefully.

Great weather

Have you guys looked outside today? Or better yet, been outside?! The sun is shining, there is a cool breeze but a warm sun. It is basically the best kind of day!

Running in my new shorts

Guy's my new gold trim Adidas running shorts that I ordered from the Internet arrived today! Way to make this Tuesday terrific Universe. And I am going to run the heck out of them!

Eat an egg salad sandwich

Sorry guys, I have to split because I have eggs on the boil and am about turn those babies (not babies, them eggs have not been fertilised) into an egg salad inspired by this one

Terrific Tuesday (AM)

I feel like having another Terrific Tuesday. No idea what I'm talking about? Read this you guys. It will make as much sense as can be made from within these crabby pages. I guess wanting to have another Terrific Tuesday is code for here I am in front of the computer on a Tuesday morning and I can't think what to write because I am too busy thinking about things I am going to do with my day.
Which, of course, are things I think will make this Tuesday terrific. Which is why I'm telling you about them. Two birds: one stone, people. (Hello to all our duck hunting readers this morning! I believe your season opened on the weekend.)

Ok enough of the small talk. Here is some of the terrific stuff in store for me today.

Drinking a bunch of coffee
It's a Terrific Tuesday tradition, so I might have even more than usual. I can tell you for sure that as soon as I finish writing this I am going to pick one up to drink on the tram on the way to work. Serve it up, lets go!

Experiment with wearing shorts to work. 
It's a risky move, the shorts at work look. But is it as risky if you wear stockings underneath them and a blazer? Or is it just slightly muddled? I'm going to find out today.

Diagnose my knee complaint with the help of the internet. 
We all love the internet. And we especially love it when the internet can be our Doctor. Well today, I am going to ask the internet why my right knee hurts so much when I bend it, particularly on the outer perimeter of the right side. I'm not going to stop until it tells me there's nothing wrong and if I give it a few days rest I can go back to dragging myself around Princes Park like a wounded duck in a wetland in March.
Wish me luck, readers.

What an awesome way to live (PM)

Who know's why people say the things they say. That's something the character of Adriana said on an episode of The Sopranos I watched last night....and I think it applies here today. While that woman definitely sounds stupid, maybe she just loves land so damned much that she can't imagine the semi-aquatic life being satisfying. Anyway. Like Adriana said, who knows why she said that really stupid thing? I shouldn't waste my time trying to figure it out.  Her loss. Being a land and water beast - having a bit each way -  would be the best way to live and that's all there is to it. 

And while I don't want to take anything away from the hippo, I was watching a David Attenborough show last night and discovered that the iguana can hold its breath under water for an hour. 

An hour!

Incredible. 

The spirits are whispering to one of these iguanas. 

What an aesome way to live (AM)

Not actual hippo from Werribee Zoo

From what I can tell hippopotamuses are pretty cool. Yesterday I went to Werribee Zoo. It is a pretty cool zoo. You walk in and there, right in front of you, is an expanse of green and some gorillas just chilling. They are in an enclosure but it is designed in this great way so they feel right there. We saw lions ripping cow ribs from a cardboard box, giraffes frolicking in the faux savanna, an ostrich stuck his head in the bus and we saw some hippopotamuses. Eventually.

When we went to the hippo enclosure you couldn't really see anything. And then these eyes bobbed above the water. Later a whole head.

Hippos are semi-aquatic, they can hold their breath under water for 6 minutes.They spend all day in the water to keep cool then get out when it cooled down to eat. While we were watching the water to see these awesome dudes pop their heads up the woman next me said to her companion, "It's a pretty stupid way to live, really." Um, what?! Oh lordy! It is this kind of statement that makes me hate strangers. And I don't want to hate anyone, strangers or acquaintances, and yet sometimes I have no choice. Thanks a lot lady. Way to ruin my day.

So being able to live on land, but also essentially live in water is stupid? If you ask me it would be the motherflipping best way to live. The only way you could improve on that is to add wings, but there ain't no way a hippo gonna fly. Have you seen the size of those things?! Imagine living like a hippo. Sure, they may not have all the mod cons that we enjoy but they have it pretty sweet. Enjoy a refreshing dip all day long. Plus they are huge and super territorial so they are tough. And they can run fast, up to 30 miles an hour.

Did I mention that the hippos we saw were completely submerged. Completely! It was awesome, these huge animals hiding underwater! Just chilling. Literally. (HA!) That stupid lady next to me is the one living the stupid way, what with all her stupidity.

That time of the month: March (PM)

Cauliflower on more puree

That Time of the Month! What a great invention. An excuse to eat some food! Yes please!

So, was our dinner at Cutler & Co great? Great question. Well of course. Eating a delicious meal with a sister crab! No doubt. But what about the rest. I have to say that for me the meal started on a high and went steadily downhill to a slightly lesser high. And I think it was the dependence on purée. Ok, those crackers at the start had a smoked eggplant purée on them that was so fucking good. It was really good. It made me think 'I'm always going to eat eggplant like this'. High! The next thing I had, that rye cracker with smoked trout, horse radish and caviar-like not caviar called avruga was so good. All the delicacy and wonder you'd expect from a fancy restaurant. Then bonito on puréed avocado, which seriously detracted from the avocadoness. Delicious fish, but why not let the avocado shine?! Next I had the gnocchi on cauliflower on some purée. Come on McConnell, give the purée a rest. It was delicious and all, but lacked specialness.  It was kind of like the high-end equivalent of the vegetarian meal at the RSL. An afterthought.

Still, great night. I liked our waiter. I liked the wine, and of course I liked the food, and company, I just wish my mind could have been bent the whole meal through.

Chocolate yum things that came with the bill. Serve it up let's go!

That time of the month: March (AM)

Miss Soft Crab likes to eat. And to talk about what we eat. So far I'm not telling you anything you don't already know

But did you know that Miss Soft Crab likes to eat and then talk about it so much that we invented a whole new MSC feature that will ensure we have an extra excuse to go out and eat together regularly just in case (a) the fact that humans need to to eat to survive, and (b) we usually hang out once a week anyway somehow fail to facilitate our eating and talking about it together? You know we did, crabfans, and today is it's debut performance!

Welcome to Miss Soft Crab's first ever That time of the month, an account of a time we went to a place and ate some things and had some thoughts about it.

Ok, I hear your questions, readers.

Who cares?  you seem to be saying.

What makes this time of the month any different from all the other times of the month when you go eat and then talk about what you ate?

They're good questions, readers, and I see you've been boning up on your haggadah questions in anticipation of passover 2013.  Kudos!

The difference is regularity, people, now we are going to do this with some mother flipping regularity. And sometimes we are going to invite guests, members of the MSC community that you may like to get to know better, and what better way than over some tasty nosh during that time of the month?

Ok, enough of the intros, lets get down to business. Here we go. MSC's first ever That time of the month. 

So...where did we go? 

We went to Cutler and Co. on Gertrude street.

Why did we go there? 
We'd been there for one of the TOYS dinners which was pretty great, but not the full C&C Music Factory experience so we thought we'd revisit it, traditional style.

Who came? 
This time it was just me and J.

What went down? 
We basically talked non stop for three hours like people who have known one another for almost 25 years do, which is to say I have no idea what we talked about. I suspect the following topics came up: love, hate (just kidding, we don't hate anything), the future, the past, food, clothes, our hair, running, current affairs (just kidding).

What did we eat? Well. We ate well. We started with a kind of rice craker dabbed with smoky eggplant. That was just a little amuse bouche or something and I can tell you my bouche was pretty amused.

Next, I had a Coffin Bay oyster and J had smoked fish sandwiched between crackers, which gave her crazy hands.

For entree, we had the same thing. Bonito sashimi with radish and avocado puree.

J then had baked gnocchi with tallegio, sweet sweet delicious tallegio. I had veal with sweetbreads and parsley purree.

Finally, there was a cheese plate and a dessert that included strawberry sorbet and some other yummy things that I can't remember that well.

What did we drink? 
Some nice sangiovese and maybe a glass of dessert wine? Given I can't remember the dessert that well, I'm going to say yes, there was dessert wine.

What was the highlight? For me, the veal. The bonito was pretty special but strangely enough, the avocado didn't taste like avocado and it really ruined my buzz.

Phew. That was a lot of food. See you back here this arvo for special comments from J.
 

Have a told you lately that I love you? (PM)

My doona knows I love it because even in the middle of these hot heatwave nights I take it to bed and hug it a little instead of getting under it. I just love that beautiful baby so much that I don't want to spend any night without it.

But it's good to be back under it. So good that last night, one of the greatest things that can happen to a person happened to me. After going to sleep relatively early, I woke up, like I always do, at what I thought was about 5am and feeling like I could use another million hours in bed. I felt disappointed for a second because I knew that in a bit over an hour, my alarm was going to go off and I would have to get up. Then I dared to think....imagine if it is actually only 3am and I have heaps more time to sleep. I allowed myself the tiniest bit of hope and looked at the clock and readers....it was half past midnight.
I had the whole night's sleep ahead of me. I still can't believe it happened to me.

Have I told doon lately that I love you (AM)

Did everyone in Melbourne have a beautiful reunion with their doona last night? Lord knows I did! In case I have not made myself clear in the past, I love bed and I really love my doona. It is really the icing on the cake.

Oh, sure when I got into bed last night I was looking forward to a night where I didn't have to lie in such a way where my limbs weren't touching and I was pretty confident I would sleep through, like the proverbial baby, but not like any real baby, who are notorious for not sleeping through. I wrapped myself in doona, knowing I may kick it off in the night but was unlikely to awaken, as I had the previous two nights, from a dream where I was looking for a blanket or jumper, freezing, obviously because the fan was working too well in real life only to wake and find that the cold in the dream had been nothing but a dream and it was still hot as a mutha! Capiche? Neither!

In truth I have found the famous March heatwave of 2013 entirely manageable. Saturday was kinda unbearable, but the other days have been fine. I could barely believe Monday and Tuesday were over 36, they felt like nothing more than a classic 32, and who can't handle that?! But the nights, oh brother, the nights have hurt a bit. And yet, they were ok, just knowing this too shall pass. But I guess what I liked most about the end of the heatwave was getting back under dooney. My sweet, sweet dooney. Distance truly does make the heart grow fonder.

Strange baking: Vanilla and coconut cake truffles (PM)

Are you kidding me? You made a cake, smashed it up and mixed it up with icing just so you could taste some blonde balls?! Sister, you is crazy. I do not want to come down on a sister crab, I guess it's not your fault you can't resist the lure of a ball recipe. It's the recipe author that is the idiot here. There is nothing even interesting about that recipe. Sure, I love vanilla , but come on...

You know what is good about cake? Its cakiness. Usually its flavour, very occasionally its icing, but if its a good cake it is also its cakey texture and the whole thing about having a piece of it. Mmmmm, cake. To get blonde balls why wouldn't you just make your Grandma's snowball recipe but replace the cocoa with vanilla or lemon juice and zest or all of that. Now that could make for some delicious balls!

Strange baking: Vanilla and coconut cake truffles (AM)

When I was little, my grandmother used to always make a little something she called snowballs but were in fact akin to something you might know as 'truffles'.

I realise that's not a very helpful distinction, because a truffle can be something like this:

this:

or like this:

What we're talking about here is the last kind of truffle. A treat made from crushed marie biscuits, butter, cocoa, condensed milk and coconut. She used to make those delicious bastards all the time, such that my school lunchbox pretty much always had little bits of coconut in the bottom. This is something I look back on very very fondly, and makes me wish I still got to eat them and that my handbag had little bits of coconut in the bottom, instead of tampons, information leaflets from tampon packets, and general bag detritus stuck to chewing gum stuck to loose change.

But I digress. The reason I tell you all of this is so you will understand why I sat up and took notice when I found this recipe the other day for Vanilla and coconut cake truffles.

I got excited thinking these truffles must be like a blonde version of the snowballs my grandma used to make, just as the blondie is the blonde version of the brownie and the white chocolate mud cake is the blonde version of the chocolate mud cake (Pickle made one once, it was delicious). But then I read the recipe and realised...what this is, is not a truffle. It is some kind of cake bite. This is basically crumbled up buttercake, mixed with vanilla buttercream icing, rolled in coconut.   

What the eff , people. What the eff??!!. Obviously I decided I had to make it immediately.  

It starts with making a whole cake. 

Then crumbling the whole thing up, and making vanilla buttermilk icing.

Then combining the two and making them in to little balls and, as you may have guessed, rolling them in coconut. 

All through this process I couldn't help thinking how idiotic it was. Making an intensely buttery cake only to destroy and then try to rebuild it with icing that really could have just gone on top with a sprinkling of coconut? Why would you do that? No really, why? I needed these blonde snowballs to be super delicious so the questions would stop.

Look, they were fine. But they are very very sweet. And they look so much like lemon slice that I found it disappointing that they didn't taste like lemon slice.

And they really needed to have some crushed marie biscuits involved somehow. They would have been so much better. I think I'm just going to make lemon slice next time. Or snowballs. 

About last night (PM)

Gosh.
Baby's first Led Zeppelin turns in to Mother's first disappointment. That's rough.
Give it another shot in a couple of years maybe. The kid has been listening to a lot of rave music at Chickpea's lately, right? It's hard for a 2 year old to shift genres like that. He'll come good though.

About last night (AM)

I've been thinking about Led Zeppelin a lot lately. I guess it is because Robert Plant is touring soon so there has been some exposure and then that old thing of exposure begetting more exposure... You know how it goes.

Also there is the fact that Led Zeppelin are one of the best bands of all time and I love them and every time I hear any of their songs I think, "WOW! This is the best song. I love Led Zeppelin! Why don't I listen to them more?!" When I was abut 18 I used to listen to them all the time. Actually it was exactly when I was 18. I know this because I know exactly why I started listening to them. But more on that another time.

So last night, I was watching a program about gay conversion therapy in the US. Possibly one of the most depressing and angering topics a program can be about and Baby was asleep on the couch. Towards the end he woke up, at least he opened his eyes and stirred and Zeppelin's 'Going to California' was playing. What a great song. I love this song.* So the show ended, we turned off the TV and Baby was still stirring, I gazed into his eyes, brushed his hair from his sweaty brow and sang to him, beautifully, lovingly, 'Someone told me there's a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair' and Baby looked at me and cried, literally CRIED "STOP! STOP SINGING!"

Philistine.

*If I were, say, an editor, if I ever, ever saw a word italicised for emphasis I would get infuriated, curse the author and always, always change it to roman. LOL! Seriously, I know how to read, deebags!

Almost that time of the month (PM)

Well readers, we didn't make it to The Windsor to try on dresses. 
Not because we thought better of our crazy idea, but because I decided I wanted to walk home to work off some of the mountain of food we ate at dinner, and going to The Windsor would have been backtracking, and while I wanted to do some exercise, I guess I didn't want to do that much. Instead, we went in to the first bar we found (we called it The Donkey Bar), marched in to the disabled loo and  swapped dresses.

It felt very natural.

J's dress looked pretty cute, but I felt like I couldn't make a decision about whether I wanted to wear it on Saturday without spending a lot more time in front of the mirror. And a disabled toilet at The Donkey Bar is not the place to spend that time.  We swapped back in to our dresses and retired to the bar for a little digestive.
The wash up from this scenario is I still don't know what to wear on Saturday.

Almost that time of the month (AM)

 

 

So last night K and I went out for a pretty nice dinner. We did it for you guys. For a new segment that will debut next Friday. But just so you know how an electronic pre-dinner conversation between the two of us may go, I have this for you. A little dialogue that took place Wednesday.

K: Hey girl. How's it going? I'm fine thanks. [Blah blah blah. I'm telling you guys, you are missing nothing by me ellipsising through this bit - J]...In other news, and in the grand tradition of me trying on clothes that belong to you thinking they will fit me but they never do, I have a favour to ask of you.

I was wondering whether you would let me try on the floral dress you wore to your 30th birthday with a view to potentially wearing it on Saturday night when I go to Hobart to see Appleheart's play.

No worries if not. But I thought I would ask.

 

J: Hey girl. [Blah, blah, blah, worthy ellipsis]...Of course I'd be happy to lend you that dress. But there is a problem. I'm at at the beach and coming straight up for dins tomozz. I actually have the dress with me because I planned to wear it to dinner. I'd swap it out for something else but I don't really have anything else appropriate to wear.

 

K: HAHAHA. That's a problem alright. But I have an idea. How about after dinner, on the way home, we go to the ladies bathrooms at The Windsor hotel and try on one another's dresses. It could potentially be an hilarious component of our post. We can take photos of one another and shit. I'll bring the other dress I'm thinking about wearing.Then, depending on the outcome of our assessment of what looks best, we could go home in one another's dresses! 

 

J: HAHA! YES! Let's try on each others dresses after dinner or, possibly more hilariously, during dinner finishing dinner in each others dresses. Yeah! 

 

I bet you guys can not wait until next week to see how this panned out!