Walking the Line February 6, 2010
Posted by Weng in Addictions, Drinks, Epicureanism, Rants, schadenfruede.Tags: alcohol, booze, carnegies, cocktails, divinyls, economic tightwaddery, gym, money, parking, sales, tightarse, unit pricing
1 comment so far
There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, once you’ve done it once, you can do it again – Chrissy Amphlett
Having the economic genetics of an Asian, is actually amazingly handy a lot of the time. I was fortunately spared from the need to try haggle down the price of everything, especially handy in a society such as Australia’s where it’s not the norm and you’re looked at as a complete jerkoff of a bad customer if you do. Other than that though, everything is deconstructed based off how cheap it is, I park in the cheapest place possible, even if it means walking aeons.
Afterall, that walking is exercise. Who needs a treadmill or a gym membership (both of which cost you money) when you’ve got a stupidly long walk to do it for you? The money you WOULD have spent parking can then be spent on a GOOD coffee, a coffee that happens to be en-route to everywhere I happen to go from said parking spot.
Epicureanism is basically the one over-riding factor over cost-effectiveness. Quality can, on occasion, over-ride price. That’s the reason I’d get a Grand/Mighty Angus over almost anything else at McDonalds. It’s the least bad, and generally the most edible burger there.
I just bought a whole load of Dry Ginger Ale simply because it was on special for $2 for a pack-of-4 bottles, despite not having the spirits to mix it with at present. I’ve been drinking it straight, since. Great times.
Supermarkets with unit pricing are actually the greatest thing ever, it does all the mental math needed to be a massive tightwad by giving you a handy cost-per-unit. This then allow you to consider relative cost to quality. (e.g. Do I want to pay $2.30 per 100g for this fancy imported French marmalade or $0.69 per 100g for this Radioactive Bio-Hazard of Black and Gold brand Imitation Orange Flavored Goop?)
Woolworths - Almost Redeemed by Unit Pricing, but just not.
I had my heart set on an orange Wolverine t-shirt I saw in a stupidly expensive boutique store in Claremont (my love-hate relationship with the suburb being another potential topic of interest). It was $50, I went back to see whether Epicurea/General Awesomeness over-ruled Economics, it was on sale for $30. It was the happiest day of my life. Then they offered to take ANOTHER TEN PERCENT OFF because in taking out the security tag, there was a tiny pinhole I could barely see.
I very nearly made some sort of ridiculous SQUEEEEEE of delight. I may have actually exclaimed “This is quite possibly the best day ever” to the shop assistant serving me.
Whilst it is generally a brilliant trait to have, there are moments when economic rationality has it’s negatives. And no, this doesn’t eventually lead to some moral story about how being tight leads to all of your friends and peers thinking you’re a total douchebag, that’d be far too Ebeneezer Scrooge.
Where the positive becomes a negative is when it comes to booze.
Drinking alcohol whilst out is a costly exercise, most of the time. $8 for a shot of (decent-non-Bundaburg-or-Bacardi) Rum and Coke? I could buy like a whole bottle of QUALITY rum and the equivalent of many Rums-and-_____ for the cost of say… five at a bar.
But then, when you get cheap booze, that inverses. Carnegies on a Wednesday night is not a good place to be. Three words sum it up.
Half price cocktails.
Half-price cocktails.
HALF-PRICE cocktails.
Things are usually cheaper in bulk, this applies to meat, toilet paper, subscriptions to Girlfriend magazine, this also applies to alcohol.
A Long Island Ice Tea – 5 shots of god-knows-what with Coke and some kind of lemon cordial to drown out the taste is normally $22. The magic of unit pricing means this is maybe… $4.40 per shot, about twice as cost-effective as a Rum and Coke. But then you go on half-price night and it drops even further, to $11, or $2.20 per shot.
However, unlike with buying say… 10 kilos of diced bacon pieces from a market where you can freeze said bacon and use it over a long period, you have to take that bulk-efficient-alcohol there and then. And, just as the general rule of buying in bulk applies to many things, so does the quote from the Divinyls.
People have a ‘magic point’ with alcohol where they’re still sober enough to remember exactly what they’re doing and they’re still as amazingly witty and debonair as they always are, whilst lacking whatever inhibitions stop them from being fantastically awesome. However, when you cross that fine line between pleasure-and-pain, you enter a world where your stomach and liver wants to murder you and the answer to the question “wat up?” is “Throwing (up).” You then end up sitting down in a heap going “DEAR GODDD KILL ME NOWWWWW….” and generally being unclassy.
That line is very hard to cross if you’re drinking in bulk and in multiples of 5. So you were at the Awesome Phase at 11 or so, but where did it change? It certainly changed after you hit 16, it completely died when you hit 17 with that FREE JAGERBOMB YOU’D BE STUPID TO TURN DOWN! BECAUSE IT’S FREE.
But where was that line-in-the-sand?
Somewhere between 11 and 17 lies a magic mark where I actually think the world is a glorious, magical place AND I’m still sober enough to be a prick to random strangers in line, but that’s another story for another time. That time probably being in a blog I’ll probably write immediately after this.
S&M, ice-cream, booze, touching yourself, it’s all the same really. Chrissy Amphlett was right in so many ways…
Note to self, shoot for 13.
Recipe & Realization – Overly Elaborate Breakfast January 29, 2010
Posted by Weng in Epicureanism, Food.Tags: bachelor chow, basil, breakfast, cooking, eggs, Masterchef, pancetta, Tobie Puttock, tomato
1 comment so far
I awoke far too early this morning. In fact, it was a morning, as opposed to early afternoon and just in time for Oprah. So I figured it’d be as good a time as any to attempt to execute a test-run of a recipe I found in a cookbook that I borrowed from my local library. Seriously, libraries are awesome places. Not only do they have a small mountain of cookbooks that I can borrow for 3 weeks, have my way with and return without investing like $50 on, but they also have CDs and DVDs!
Ever feel like illegally downloading music but feel bad about the legalities of it? Well, you should. Artists are struggling to be able to afford their sex, drugs and rock & roll these days, and it’s all your fault. You bastard.
The library’s already bought the CD though so don’t feel too bad about copying that. Piracy is bad. I don’t condone or support piracy in any way, except for by LEGALLY BUYING PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN DVDS AND WATCHING MOVIES, LEGALLY AND OTHER LEGAL THINGS, I also legally drink rum, that’s a piraty-and-legal thing to do, please-don’t-sue-me. (This may possibly be the first true piece of IBM in IBMv5)
Anyway, after that entirely uninteresting distraction, the goal for this morning was to execute: Eggs baked in tomatoes with crisp pancetta, basil and soldiers. (Tobie Puttock, Italian Local, p9)
The glossy professional food-tography example of said recipe
Essentially, it’s an Italian twist on your typical continental breakfast of bacon, eggs and tomato. You’ve got your pancetta – practically Italian bacon, and an egg baked in tomato with slatherings of olive oil and basil, because it’s Italian and it therefore needs slatherings, and specifically slatherings, of olive oil.
It’s not exactly a particularly difficult meal to execute, unlike anything on MasterChef, there’s only ever really one “process” going on at a time and a fair amount of waiting around, but regardless, it’s experience either way. You essentially need to cut the top off of the tomato, scoop out the insides then turn it upside down to ‘dry’ for about 15 minutes. Then you get to slather a little paste of olive oil, basil and Salt-N-Pepa here and we’re in effect.
The recipe kind of specificed fresh basil, but (as I wrote about earlier) Woolworths is decidedly shit and I had to go with dried, so that in itself was one difference already.
Tomatoes post-slaterization, wrapped in pancetta.
Then this is where it all got shot down in flames and went to proverbial hell. In my sleep-deprived state/hunger, I strayed from the guiding light eminating from the recipe-torchlight of Tobie Puttock. I was then meant to put the tomato and pancetta in the over for 15 minutes or so, THEN take it out and put the egg in and return it to the oven for another 5 or so.
Instead, I skipped a step and chucked the egg in the tomato straight away. And in that single mistake-y action, a puppy probably died somewhere and my timing was completely and utterly shot.
If you think about it from a quasi-analytical point of view, a tomato that has olive oil in it and has been in the oven at 180 for 15 minutes will be VERY hot internally. In fact, the oil probably would also most likely be bubbling. Bubbling oil + egg = fried egg = rather-quick-cooking.
Instead, the egg probably just SAT in the olive oil and the still-cold tomato and had to slowly heat through. What should have taken 5 minutes for the egg to cook took closer to like… 15-20 minutes and it probably didn’t turn out EXACTLY like it should have.
In fact, one thing I notice whenever I cook is a constant sense of imperfection and incontentness. Everyone eating your food thinks it’s perfectly fine and dandy, and it arguably was a fine (fine as in acceptable, not as in fine wine or fine dining) breakfast of bacon, egg and tomato. But the problem is, when you’re the creator yourself, you can just spot SO many minor niggling issues with it and spend the entire meal thinking about what went wrong and how to do it better next time.
Average cook, even worse Food-tographer - the best shot out of a totally shit bunch.
Realizations: Arguably, anything you do in life is a learning experience, cooking is no different. So, what have I learnt from today’s exercise?
- Read the fricken’ recipe. It cost Poh the title of MasterChef when she cocked up her Chocolate Half-Pipe, though she’s moved on to bigger and better things on the ABC with her own COOKING SHOW, where’s Julie now!?
- Dried herbs are just wrong. They’re often absolutely nothing compared to their fresh counter-parts. I really should invest in a multi-layered tower-pot and start up my own mini-herb-garden in my spare time (which I have an awful lot of at the moment)
- Basil seems to go decently with eggs, possibly even better with a little bit mixed in with scrambled eggs and it may also be the ingredient in pesto which seems to nauseate me.
- I need to actually add more Salt (Pepa can be ignored slightly) to somehow counter-act the potentially nauseatingly ick ‘sweetness’ of basil combined with that of the tomato. You can’t solely rely on the bacon to do that.
I actually have no idea about half the features on my digital camera, and I'm a really shit food-tographer.
This Episode of Weng’s Bachelor Chow is brought to you by: The number π and the word slathering.
Bachelor Chow is filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Staking Claims – Coffee and Cocktails January 21, 2010
Posted by Weng in Coffee, Drinks, Epicureanism, Rants.Tags: 80s Night, cafes, claimancy. Perth, claims, CNR, cocktails, Coffee, cranapple wave, EVE
1 comment so far
I have a long history of people taking things of mine and claiming them as their own. Jokes, stationery, phrases, whatever. Generally I’ve let it slide with the general kind of 180-degree angle laid-backedness that generally constitutes me, but I figure it’s time for a change. This, hence and therefore, is an internetual, persistent record that therefore stays as evidence of my originatorship of particular concepts or ‘spots’ or anything really.
If anyone ever goes “Hey, dude, totally go check out _______, it’s awesome!!!” I can then refer them back to this and be like “I’VE BEEN DOING THAT SINCE (insert relevant date here)! OLD NEWS, BITCH~!!!” before doing some ridiculous hand gestures worthy of a 90s rapper.
Edition One focuses on a cafe and a (non-alcoholic) cocktail.
Cafe Claimancy – CNR.
Corner of James and Lake Street, Northbridge
Near that big-arse TV screen there
‘Twas the evening of the 12th of December, I was off to go see Dream Theater, live at Metro City in all their PROG METAL GLORYYYY and waiting on meeting friends for dinner who were, as usual for everyone but me, LATE. I wander into Timezone, Tekken 6 is empty, nothing else worth doing. I look across the road to the Northbridge Piazza, see a little cafe there and decide to wander in.
What followed was a conversation with a barista, who now does that headnod/wave-of-recognition whenever I go there, and one of the best cappucinos I’ve ever had. Considering they’d only opened the Wednesday of that week and I’ve been frequenting it on a relatively consistent basis since then, I believe I have a right to stake claimancy and the position of Regularity.
They are diagonally across the road from a Dome – supposedly the “World’s Finest Coffees“. That is a lie from a definition of “finest” meaning “best” simply because Dome coffees are comparatively shit, as is their service.
If they’re meaning finest in the definition of average-to-the-point-of-apathy-and-disgust, then sure, I’ll go with that definition, Dome.
For anyone who’s a coffee aficionado/elitist-jerkface; they use Five Sense beans, which are locally roasted in Western Australia as opposed to being foreign-roasted (and are therefore ‘fresher’), and have a Synesso machine. I don’t know the factual significance of this but I have a friend who wanted to know this info before he’d even TRY the place, supposedly being a ‘busy man with many cafes to frequent’ with no time to waste on half-complete information.
Anyway, CNR., go there, and don’t refer me to how awesome they are in the future unless you want me to glare at you and link you to this blog entry.
Cocktail Claimancy – The Cranapple Wave
Thursday the 14th of January @ EVE (80s Night!)
Supposedly every Thursday night is 80s Night at EVE, which means – it’s a Thursday so there aren’t a whole tonne of people, and there’s AWESOME 80s MUSIC! Supposedly there are cheap drinks too, I drove that night and wouldn’t know about the alcoholic variety, soft drinks were $2 though. There is a $5 entry fee but that’s possibly not important if you like 80s music and cheap drinks.
After going through countless Cokes, Sprites and Lemon Lime and Bitters, I went to the bartender with a bit of a difficult-customer/douchebag question and asked in almost these exact words:
“Out of curiosity, could you possibly recommend me an interesting non-alcoholic drink which ISN’T a Lemon Lime and Bitters?”
He subsequently put a series of liquids into a cocktail shaker, and gave me a somewhat watermelon-coloured drink at the end of it, and asked for $4. (There was a picture taken of the drink by someone else I was with, but I have no idea where it is thusfar or whether they just deleted it assuming it was just a dull and unimportant picture they’d taken whilst drunk. If you did, I hate you.)
I took it away and tried it. It was AMAZING. It’s fairly indescribable, but it was the kind of refreshing, citrusy drink you can imagine drinking on a white sandy beach resort, watching the sunset, complete with a little umbrella in it. I went back to the bartender and asked him what it was, and he essentially said he made it up on the spot for me and it didn’t have a name. I enquired what was in it, and he gave me a list of 5 component liquids which now has a house on my phone. He then said that considering I’d “invented it”, or arguably – Been his Muse, in the not-Matt-fucking-Bellamy way (Fuck Matt Bellamy), I’d get the honour of naming it.
I mulled on it. Tainted Love came on, I mulled. Hey Mickie came on, I groaned and mulled. Jessie’s Girl came on, I air-guitared and mulled. Living on a Prayer came on, I ROCKED THE FRICKEN KAZBAH.
(On a side note, I actually requested Living on a Prayer. I originally asked the DJ if he could play The Final Countdown, after he’d played We Built This City on Rock and Roll. He claimed it wouldn’t be a ‘good track to dance to’. I argued it’d be a good track to rock out to ala Bon Jovi and eventually we settled on Living on a Prayer.)
Eventually, the name CRANAPPLE WAVE (pronounced CREN-napple) popped into my head somehow, derived from 2 of the components of the mocktail and the fact it was a beach-y kind of drink. Also: wouldn’t YOU be curious to try a Cranapple Wave if you saw it on a list of Soft-Cocktails? Heh, soft-cock. Why are expletives hilarious?
The bartender liked it and thought it had a ring to it. I told him to run with it, he was onto a good thing.
So, if in 10 years time, you’re drinking some alcoholic variation on the Cranapple Wave, or are drinking a Cranapple Wave yourself as the new-fangled alternative to Lemon Lime and Bitters (the solid but aging Alpha Male of the Softdrink Kingdom), remember, I was there first.
Take my hand and we’ll make it – I swear.
