StreetSmart
You might have noticed the StreetSmart logo in the right sidebar. The annual StreetSmart campaign, which raises money to help the homeless, kicks off tomorrow. It’s one of those ideas that is so simple: participating restaurants add a small donation to your bill (you’re welcome to increase it from the standard $2, but don’t forget your usual tip!). As they note on the site – this isn’t even the cost of a cup of coffee, these days. I’m planning to restrict myself to only eating at StreetSmart supporters for the duration of the campaign. Restrict, though, is probably a misleading word – check out the list of supporters! It’s certainly no hardship to eat that list.
For those of you following @StreetSmartAust on Twitter, you can also eat, tweet, and (perhaps) be treated. (Remember to use #SSEats for your entries.)
Thanks to Ed at Tomato for revving up the Twitter and blogger communities to support this!
Recaps
I’ve been busy over at Reality Ravings this week. Hell’s Kitchen is winding up, Beauty and the Geek is hotting up, and The Amazing Race is… really a tad boring this season.
Reading
I’ve finished Swallows and Amazons. How did I not read this in my childhood? Perhaps I got into too much of a Jill’s Perfect Ponies rut, because I know it was always on the bookshelf at the Mornington house. It certainly would have fuelled some of the adventure fantasies during all those canoeing-fishing-campfiring Gippsland lakes holidays… Next up? Lord of the Flies, which I’m sure I’ve quoted and successfully answered trivia questions on, without having read it.
The second-last episode of Hell’s Kitchen (UK) aired here on Monday. I’m not sure what I’ll do without my weekly dose of Marco once it’s over. Great British Menu will be winding up at around the same time, I think, but there are three Anthony Bourdain series that arrived in the most recent Amazon shipment to get into, so I’ll cope. Anyway, I’ve recapped HK(UK) over at Reality Ravings.
I’m still watching The Rachel Zoe Project and doing blitz recaps of that, as well. It’s such a fun show to watch, but I hope there will be some personnel changes soon. Taylor’s constant moaning is starting to get me down. When it was directed at a floundering Brad last season, it was novel, but he’s found his feet and is one of the programme’s highlights so the carping is now just sad.
Reality Raver was talking up Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and I caught it for the first time today. I’m not sure how I’ll fit it into the weekly schedule, but it’s definitely worth a look. It’s Kitchen Nightmares for hairdressers, and loads of fun. Jeff Lewis is back with Flipping Out, but his meltdowns seem to have been curtailed a bit by the Global Financial CrisisTM – it appears he can control his personality when he needs to. Pity.
It’s not all television, though. After my reading list post, where I realised that 12 months of reading hadn’t reduced either of the 75 lists, I decided I had to make an effort to fit more real reading into my life. Since posting the Guardian list, I’ve read two books (ok, so they were very short books) and I’m starting to catch up on my backlog of New Yorkers. My copy of Middlemarch has been found and I think that’s the next project.
I’m not making much progress against either the Esquire 75 or Jezebel’s alternative 75 “must reads”1. That’s not to say that I haven’t been reading, or that I haven’t been enjoying what I’ve read, but my belief that I am a reasonably “well-read” person has taken a bit of a hit from these lists. That’s why I was pleased to see the Guardian’s Books you can’t live without: the top 100. It’s even got The Magic Faraway Tree on it!
This, therefore, is the list I’m going to try to crack (although… The Bible? Really? I’m going to make an exception for that. Oh, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I mean, honestly.)
Anyway, the full list – with strikethroughs – after the jump.
Before heading off on our holiday, I did wonder how long it would be before I craved eating something “not Chinese”. I was particularly certain that I’d miss the lovely, simple goats cheese and lettuce rolls from Fatto a Mano in Gertrude Street.
Of course, “Chinese food” covers such a range of cuisines. Sure, I enjoyed my first lunch back at work, but we have been to both Hutong and Dumplings Plus for dumpling fixes, Nam Loong for buns and Noodle Kingdom for soup. Re-reading “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper” also fired us up for some Yangzhou cuisine, so on Sunday we got cooking.
I’ve mentioned my irritation with Lonely Planet’s city guides before. Why, oh why, couldn’t they include a map of the whole country inside the cover? It wouldn’t have added too much distraction to the “city” focus and would have drawn our attention to the fact that Yangzhou is actually quite close to Shanghai. Perhaps we could have tried their famous rice and the Lion’s Head meatballs there! Alas, we were reduced to trawling the internet for a decent recipe for the latter (Fuschia Dunlop kindly includes a recipe for the former).
I’m still going through the photos from China (slowly! Resizing for the web takes time, although I’m sure there are quicker ways – hints and tips appreciated!) and have decided to break the Beijing photos into categories. This should 1. take care of the is-this-Temple-of-Heaven-or-the-Summer-Palace-(or-even-Forbidden-City)? issues this end and 2. make the task seem less daunting for me.
Today I tackled the smallest subset of Beijing photos – the pics from our visit to the Dashanzi Art District (also known as 798). I was something of a reluctant visitor; the Wallpaper guide was all “oh, Dashanzi is so over, you’ve really got to go to [somewhere much less accessible]” and, to be honest, there was a lot of pretty kitschy stuff. There was, however, some really interesting work and it was wonderful to spend time wandering around a precinct so thoroughly dedicated to art. (Oh, and there was decent cake, too!) It’s definitely on the itinerary as a longer visit next time.
Chen Wenling’s “farting bull” – “Emergency Exit”, a commentary on the global financial crisis – was extraordinary, and Yan Pei-Ming’s “Landscape of Childhood” installation was truly affecting. The photos do neither justice, but do serve as an aide-memoire for us – hopefully they give you an idea of the work.
China wasn’t all multi-dish meals and dumplings, contrary to how it must seem from the previous post. Oh, no. There were also breakfasts. And snacks. Many, many snacks…
I always forget to take a notebook with me when I go on holidays. This means that one of the first essentials once a destination is reached is to find a stationery shop (the others being eat and find some tonic. The latter proved difficult for the second time in as many holidays – we need to rethink our duty free purchases). Travelling in Korea, Japan and Malaysia has raised my expectations of stationery but it soon became clear that I wasn’t going to find anything as cute as “Pochi and Mongi together forever, happiness always” in Shanghai (try a Morning Glory shop near you). After the supermarket in the basement at Times Square managed to achieve the ultimate disappointment – instead of not stocking tonic, it only stocked diet tonic – I realised I was going to have to settle compromise and bought a serviceable but mostly unremarkable exercise book1.
Flipping through my notes from the trip, I am struck by the contrast in detail. Each dish in every meal is recorded, but a whole morning in the Forbidden City is noted in two lines:
- eggy pancake b/fast on the run towards Forbidden City
- lots of ppl but many areas deserted – so huge
Clearly the most important aspect of our visit to the Forbidden City was the breakfast en route. No wonder Mao didn’t care to visit2.
So the highs, and not-so-highs, of the food in China…
I’m slowly working through the photos. Digital photography has made life much easier, in some respects – knowing that there won’t be horrendous processing costs for potentially dodgy pics frees you up to snap away. The downside? Over 200 photos from a two week holiday.
My Picasa account now has sets from Shanghai and Suzhou. Given that China is a heavily populated country, I was quite surprised by how many shots we have with no people in them. I was not surprised by how many photographs we have of buildings – that’s par for the course when the travelling companion is an architect and takes possession of the camera.
I will write more about the trip soon when I 1. find a minute and 2. get to a point where I feel I can articulate my thoughts properly. I am, however, constantly remembering amazing dishes and meals we ate while we were there, so perhaps food might be my starting point (who’d have guessed?!).
Having arrived back home on Saturday, I was sure I’d be well and truly blogged up on the trip by now. The past four days have disappeared in a catching-up (on sleep, washing, giving-cats-attention) frenzy and it’s back to work tomorrow with no post yet written.
So… why not cannibalise an email in the interim? The following, therefore, is adapted from some possibly inarticulate thoughts scrambled together after a couple of days in Shanghai.
I’m behind with Top Chef Masters, and I’m still behind with Hell’s Kitchen, too. This afternoon enabled me to catch up on episode five of TCM and the recap of that is posted over at Reality Ravings.
The Springboks are playing the All Blacks as I type this, so I will soon be losing the television to a delayed replay of the game. That puts paid to the plan of catching up today…
