Expo. Euro. Daifuku n food. Verbiage. Bleach 172.
Hi, my name is Vayshti.
It's been almost a week since my last post.
Right Now / Today
I'm lying on the sofa, waiting for DB's Bleach ep172 to pop up. PLB is in bed, which is where I would be, if I wasn't full of yet more IMAGINARY gut-ache.
Leigh, one of PLBs friends (met 1990) came over today. It's his JESUS WAS THIS OLD WHEN HE DIED - HOW DO YOU COMPARE WITH YOUR LIFE? birthday this weekend. So we three (of occident are) are heading over to Ireland (no rubber cigar).
We shall be meeting a bush pig (I claim immunity. I can use this term, having spent my formative years as a bush pig - do not let the layers of snobbery and cultivated Australian accent fool you), and a couple of Saarlanders. Leigh has lived the last 21 months in Saarland. Apparently my German will be just as useless as my English, for the Saarlanders dialect is so odd, a third of the time they sound like they are speaking an odd form of English, and another third of the time the words have no obvious connections to Hoch-Deutsch either.
Anyway, Leigh navigated his way from Wimbledon, and I cooked. Both the boys loved it. Whereas I could barely touch my cooking, which again, is partially the evil stomach aches of doom, and may also be because my sense of taste might be a bit whacky, due to having a cold since Friday morning. I tried to ignore it, so it wouldn't interfere with my weekend, and was only moderately successful.
The meal was: Sake-steamed salmon with sesame rice cakes in sake butter followed by store bought Onde-onde mochi (coconut paste, green mochi, wrapped in dessicated coconut), shiro daifuku (adzuki bean paste filling) and kuri shiro daifuku (chestnut pieces in adzuki bean paste filling).
The sweets made us wax lyrical about the Central Markets in Adelaide, and the sweets counter in Maya's restaurant. Boiled milk wrapped in gold leaf? Yes Please!
My attempts at making a steamer basket out of foil did not work, and so we had sake poached salmon instead.
We have the hotel booked for Cork, and the car (yes, I'll be back behind the wheel - watch out all Irish cyclists!) for our Circle of Kerry roadtrip. Did I mention the stupid prices of plane trips to Ireland? If not... 1p. Taxes included.
The recipe. Scroll to next bolded bit if food bores you. But if food bores you, then I pity you
Sake-steamed salmon with sesame rice cakes
Serves: 6 Prep: 25 min, plus 1 hr to chill the rice
Cook: 35 min
Ingredients
For the sesame rice cakes
400g Japanese short grain rice
610ml cold water
2 Spring onions, sliced
4 tsp grated ginger
4 tsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp Sesame seeds, toasted
1 tbsp Fish Sauce
1 tsp Sesame oil
1 tsp lime juice
1 tsp sambal olek (chilli sauce), or other Asian chilli paste
55ml peanut oil, for frying, plus extra for greasing
For the salmon
1 stalk Lemon grass, split lengthwise
500ml water
500ml sake
3 cm root ginger, sliced into 3mm thick discs
2 Star anise
1 orange, zest only
4 x 175g wild salmon fillets
1 lime, cut into wedges
For the sake butter
2 tbsp grated root ginger
1 tbsp minced Shallots
1 tbsp unsalted butter
112g sake, plus 1 tsp
1 tbsp double cream
112g cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1/2 tsp lime juice
kosher Salt
Method
1. For the sesame rice cakes, place the rice in a strainer and rinse under cold running water until the water runs clear.
2. In a saucepan, combine the rice and water. Bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 20 minutes, until the rice is soft. Remove from the heat and leave on one side until cool.
3. In a mixing bowl, combine the cooled cooked rice with the spring onion, ginger, vinegar, sesame seeds, fish sauce, sesame oil, lime juice, and sambal olek.
4. Rub a 35cm x 25 cm baking tray (with a 2.5cm rim) with vegetable or peanut oil. Press the rice into the tray with a spatula. The rice should make an even, 2cm-thick layer. Cover with cling film, and chill for at least 1 hour. Cut into 6 squares.
5. Heat the peanut oil in a large non-stick frying pan over a medium-high heat. Fry the rice cakes on both sides until golden brown, about 3 minutes on each side. Keep warm while you prepare the salmon.
6. For the salmon, bruise the lemongrass with the back of a knife - this helps release the aromatic flavour. Set up your steamer with either a large saucepan or wok and a Chinese bamboo steamer set over it.
7. Place the lemongrass, water, sake, ginger, star anise, and orange peel in the bottom of the steamer and bring to the boil.
8. Lay the salmon fillets in the steamer basket and cover with the steamer lid. Steam until the salmon is tender - about 4-5 minutes; keep warm. While the salmon is cooking, prepare the sake butter
9. For the butter, soften the ginger and shallots in butter for 2-3 minutes over a medium heat.
10. Pour in the sake and bring to the boil. Cook down and reduce by two-thirds before adding the cream. Bring to the boil and reduce by half.
11. Add the chilled butter pieces to the sauce, little by little, whisking constantly. The butter will emulsify and make a thick, creamy sauce. When all the butter has been incorporated, remove the pan from the heat and whisk in an extra teaspoon of sake and add the lime juice. Season with salt to taste.
12. Serve the warm steamed salmon with the rice cakes, and pour over the sake butter.
Turning the clock back to Friday...
Highlight was going to the recording of Bleak Expectations. I wound up with two sets of tickets. Had every intention of keeping the Monday set for ourselves after Friday, but Matt wound up with my cold, and so Monday and Tuesday turned out quite different to expectations - ended up quite bleak, one might say.
We had tapas after the recording. But back to the recording... Anthony (Stewart) Head got to voice not just the most evil McEvil of Evil Nasty Town, but he also got to voice Tahlulah (Ohmygod, Icantbelieveyouhaventitworkedout, Ima, Transvestite) Nottaman.
It's always a good sign when the cast are laughing when the lines are delivered. We also had David Mitchell cameoing (sp?) as Reverend Golightly, and his turn was also very nicely done.
My cold by this point was in full swing but I was hiding my woe so that PLB would have no excuse to beg off -
London Expo. Eurovision
London Expo
I know misumaru did not enjoy Expo as much as she'd hoped (I did look for you! But there were other big Kons and Nanaos with the Rukias and, well :-( ), but for a first timer, I couldn't have been happier.
Even beforehand I was getting excited - hopping on the tube at London Bridge and meeting peeps from Sailor Moon was enough to make me bounce.
Okay, I could have done without the two-hour queue, but still, I was so pleasantly surprised and happy to people watch whilst in said queue.
Reason for my surprise? I had completely different expectations of what the Expo was going to be. With the high focus on Sci-Fi guest stars and film previews on the website, and with the words 'Movie', 'Comic', and 'Media' in the title, I was expecting the usual bunch of musty anoraks and testosterone-driven skin complaints of the comic and sci-fi sets. I was really not expecting the anime and manga set to dominate. I was certainly not expecting to see such a high cosplay contingent. And I wasn't prepared to drive the median age UPWARDS, but that was nice in a way as well.
Some of the costumes were bad. Some of the costumes were good, but were poor choices for the people in them. Some costumes I couldn't identify, even when they were travelling en masse, so i clearly need to bone up a bit more on my anime. I saw three Rangikus and I'm still thinking 'I might have ten years on you chickies, but I can still do her better.'
PLB found himself being eyed off by some of the Droo cosplayers. They couldn't seem to work out if he was in costume or not. The K-9 badge and velvet jacket with the Converse red boots seemed to confuse them. (It wasn't a costume. He just always looks like he raided Pertwee's wardrobe, minus the pirate shirts.)
I should have looked for Hollow Fields, given one of the companies I know distributes it had a stall. I should have bought myself another phone swing. Didn't.
Listened to the Battlestar Galactica Panel. All good fun. Wandered past Alessandro Juliani signing for Death Note a number of times - he was there for hours.
Boggled at all the 'free hugs' and 'glomp' signs. It's a good thing it was dominated by the younger set, otherwise that would get really skeevy. Mucked up and didn't get tickets for the cosplay show, so we left around 4.30 and headed to -
Eurovision party
We were given a country we were supposed to dress up as and get food and drink for. Matt and I begged off the clothes, but we took Maple and Pecan Danishes (nyuk nyuk) for Denmark and Beck's Beer for Deutschland.
My cold was yuck. I sat at the back drinking Buck's Fizz (hey! Its Euro!) and being antisocial. Stayed until the tally was done and then left. I imagine the party kept going a long time afterwards. It's too late to do a review, or comment on block voting, so I'll just say that Azerbaijan's entry was like someone had read The List of Fanfic Crack Cliches It has wing!fic for gawd's sake And Vamp!fic. I announced with all sincerity that I expected the Ukraine to win. The song was not 100% awful, and they had a reasonable stab at stage presence.
I missed seeing the sparkly, waxed, and over-tanned chests in the white linen suit - in fact only Russia came close to that classic Eurovision fashion ensemble.
However, to make up for that tragic loss, in next year's drinking Euro-bingo, I think I will have to add 'Excessive use of a wind machine,' 'tassels pretending to be a skirt' and 'poorly executed belly dancing by the singer' as squares.
Sunday and Monday = Bed (So no Bleak Expectations or Death Note after all *sniff*). Tuesday = odd.
PLB worked from home due to cold - first time since we moved here in Oct 2006. Remote desk capabilities on my laptop, so I was relegated to his machine. So I was sans manga, sans decent net (he's got really basic Umbuntu on that machine), and sans MOUSE. It's wierd how much changing machine made the whole writing process feel odd.
Still, I've typed up 6630 words this week, and written more on actual paper, even though I feel like I've been sleeping most of the time.
Writing and Beta-ing
One thing I forgot to include for Friday was I did a bit of beta-ing. Which I like doing, and if wonderdog's return visits is anything to go by, I'm pretty good at it.
I often angst that I am better as an editor than I am as a writer, but that's an emo!walrus issue for another shaky day.
At any rate, after a pleasant chat with annieroo2 about the joys of beta-ing, and being beta-ed (seme or uke - you decide!) I've decided to put myself on the line, just for my flist and any lurkers (pretty safe that I'm not going to get bad!fic or drama!Sues by doing this, it's not like this is a public comm). Gimme something under 12,000 and I'll beta it. There's a caveat or two, but we can talk those if you're throwing something my way.
I also would like it if someone was willing to take a squiz at a 2790 word piece. There's something not working in it, and I'm not having much luck pin-pointing the causes. Getting referrent pain only. I have my thoughts, but it'd be nice to have them confirmed, or my head exploded in some other way.
Today was Wednesday Writers. wonderdog put my draft of Skating over rooftops up for critique. But I didn't ask his reasoning for choosing it. If you're reading this, how random was it? Weekly themes and exercises are still nicely varied.
Hmm, still no Bureach. So do I go to bed, play Scrabulous, write something, edit something, or make a pretty list?
Pretty lists might be all I'm good for right now, actually. It is 2.10am after all.
It's been almost a week since my last post.
Right Now / Today
I'm lying on the sofa, waiting for DB's Bleach ep172 to pop up. PLB is in bed, which is where I would be, if I wasn't full of yet more IMAGINARY gut-ache.
Leigh, one of PLBs friends (met 1990) came over today. It's his JESUS WAS THIS OLD WHEN HE DIED - HOW DO YOU COMPARE WITH YOUR LIFE? birthday this weekend. So we three (of occident are) are heading over to Ireland (no rubber cigar).
We shall be meeting a bush pig (I claim immunity. I can use this term, having spent my formative years as a bush pig - do not let the layers of snobbery and cultivated Australian accent fool you), and a couple of Saarlanders. Leigh has lived the last 21 months in Saarland. Apparently my German will be just as useless as my English, for the Saarlanders dialect is so odd, a third of the time they sound like they are speaking an odd form of English, and another third of the time the words have no obvious connections to Hoch-Deutsch either.
Anyway, Leigh navigated his way from Wimbledon, and I cooked. Both the boys loved it. Whereas I could barely touch my cooking, which again, is partially the evil stomach aches of doom, and may also be because my sense of taste might be a bit whacky, due to having a cold since Friday morning. I tried to ignore it, so it wouldn't interfere with my weekend, and was only moderately successful.
The meal was: Sake-steamed salmon with sesame rice cakes in sake butter followed by store bought Onde-onde mochi (coconut paste, green mochi, wrapped in dessicated coconut), shiro daifuku (adzuki bean paste filling) and kuri shiro daifuku (chestnut pieces in adzuki bean paste filling).
The sweets made us wax lyrical about the Central Markets in Adelaide, and the sweets counter in Maya's restaurant. Boiled milk wrapped in gold leaf? Yes Please!
My attempts at making a steamer basket out of foil did not work, and so we had sake poached salmon instead.
We have the hotel booked for Cork, and the car (yes, I'll be back behind the wheel - watch out all Irish cyclists!) for our Circle of Kerry roadtrip. Did I mention the stupid prices of plane trips to Ireland? If not... 1p. Taxes included.
The recipe. Scroll to next bolded bit if food bores you. But if food bores you, then I pity you
Sake-steamed salmon with sesame rice cakes
Serves: 6 Prep: 25 min, plus 1 hr to chill the rice
Cook: 35 min
Ingredients
For the sesame rice cakes
400g Japanese short grain rice
610ml cold water
2 Spring onions, sliced
4 tsp grated ginger
4 tsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp Sesame seeds, toasted
1 tbsp Fish Sauce
1 tsp Sesame oil
1 tsp lime juice
1 tsp sambal olek (chilli sauce), or other Asian chilli paste
55ml peanut oil, for frying, plus extra for greasing
For the salmon
1 stalk Lemon grass, split lengthwise
500ml water
500ml sake
3 cm root ginger, sliced into 3mm thick discs
2 Star anise
1 orange, zest only
4 x 175g wild salmon fillets
1 lime, cut into wedges
For the sake butter
2 tbsp grated root ginger
1 tbsp minced Shallots
1 tbsp unsalted butter
112g sake, plus 1 tsp
1 tbsp double cream
112g cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1/2 tsp lime juice
kosher Salt
Method
1. For the sesame rice cakes, place the rice in a strainer and rinse under cold running water until the water runs clear.
2. In a saucepan, combine the rice and water. Bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 20 minutes, until the rice is soft. Remove from the heat and leave on one side until cool.
3. In a mixing bowl, combine the cooled cooked rice with the spring onion, ginger, vinegar, sesame seeds, fish sauce, sesame oil, lime juice, and sambal olek.
4. Rub a 35cm x 25 cm baking tray (with a 2.5cm rim) with vegetable or peanut oil. Press the rice into the tray with a spatula. The rice should make an even, 2cm-thick layer. Cover with cling film, and chill for at least 1 hour. Cut into 6 squares.
5. Heat the peanut oil in a large non-stick frying pan over a medium-high heat. Fry the rice cakes on both sides until golden brown, about 3 minutes on each side. Keep warm while you prepare the salmon.
6. For the salmon, bruise the lemongrass with the back of a knife - this helps release the aromatic flavour. Set up your steamer with either a large saucepan or wok and a Chinese bamboo steamer set over it.
7. Place the lemongrass, water, sake, ginger, star anise, and orange peel in the bottom of the steamer and bring to the boil.
8. Lay the salmon fillets in the steamer basket and cover with the steamer lid. Steam until the salmon is tender - about 4-5 minutes; keep warm. While the salmon is cooking, prepare the sake butter
9. For the butter, soften the ginger and shallots in butter for 2-3 minutes over a medium heat.
10. Pour in the sake and bring to the boil. Cook down and reduce by two-thirds before adding the cream. Bring to the boil and reduce by half.
11. Add the chilled butter pieces to the sauce, little by little, whisking constantly. The butter will emulsify and make a thick, creamy sauce. When all the butter has been incorporated, remove the pan from the heat and whisk in an extra teaspoon of sake and add the lime juice. Season with salt to taste.
12. Serve the warm steamed salmon with the rice cakes, and pour over the sake butter.
Turning the clock back to Friday...
Highlight was going to the recording of Bleak Expectations. I wound up with two sets of tickets. Had every intention of keeping the Monday set for ourselves after Friday, but Matt wound up with my cold, and so Monday and Tuesday turned out quite different to expectations - ended up quite bleak, one might say.
We had tapas after the recording. But back to the recording... Anthony (Stewart) Head got to voice not just the most evil McEvil of Evil Nasty Town, but he also got to voice Tahlulah (Ohmygod, Icantbelieveyouhaventitworkedout, Ima, Transvestite) Nottaman.
It's always a good sign when the cast are laughing when the lines are delivered. We also had David Mitchell cameoing (sp?) as Reverend Golightly, and his turn was also very nicely done.
My cold by this point was in full swing but I was hiding my woe so that PLB would have no excuse to beg off -
London Expo. Eurovision
London Expo
I know misumaru did not enjoy Expo as much as she'd hoped (I did look for you! But there were other big Kons and Nanaos with the Rukias and, well :-( ), but for a first timer, I couldn't have been happier.
Even beforehand I was getting excited - hopping on the tube at London Bridge and meeting peeps from Sailor Moon was enough to make me bounce.
Okay, I could have done without the two-hour queue, but still, I was so pleasantly surprised and happy to people watch whilst in said queue.
Reason for my surprise? I had completely different expectations of what the Expo was going to be. With the high focus on Sci-Fi guest stars and film previews on the website, and with the words 'Movie', 'Comic', and 'Media' in the title, I was expecting the usual bunch of musty anoraks and testosterone-driven skin complaints of the comic and sci-fi sets. I was really not expecting the anime and manga set to dominate. I was certainly not expecting to see such a high cosplay contingent. And I wasn't prepared to drive the median age UPWARDS, but that was nice in a way as well.
Some of the costumes were bad. Some of the costumes were good, but were poor choices for the people in them. Some costumes I couldn't identify, even when they were travelling en masse, so i clearly need to bone up a bit more on my anime. I saw three Rangikus and I'm still thinking 'I might have ten years on you chickies, but I can still do her better.'
PLB found himself being eyed off by some of the Droo cosplayers. They couldn't seem to work out if he was in costume or not. The K-9 badge and velvet jacket with the Converse red boots seemed to confuse them. (It wasn't a costume. He just always looks like he raided Pertwee's wardrobe, minus the pirate shirts.)
I should have looked for Hollow Fields, given one of the companies I know distributes it had a stall. I should have bought myself another phone swing. Didn't.
Listened to the Battlestar Galactica Panel. All good fun. Wandered past Alessandro Juliani signing for Death Note a number of times - he was there for hours.
Boggled at all the 'free hugs' and 'glomp' signs. It's a good thing it was dominated by the younger set, otherwise that would get really skeevy. Mucked up and didn't get tickets for the cosplay show, so we left around 4.30 and headed to -
Eurovision party
We were given a country we were supposed to dress up as and get food and drink for. Matt and I begged off the clothes, but we took Maple and Pecan Danishes (nyuk nyuk) for Denmark and Beck's Beer for Deutschland.
My cold was yuck. I sat at the back drinking Buck's Fizz (hey! Its Euro!) and being antisocial. Stayed until the tally was done and then left. I imagine the party kept going a long time afterwards. It's too late to do a review, or comment on block voting, so I'll just say that Azerbaijan's entry was like someone had read The List of Fanfic Crack Cliches It has wing!fic for gawd's sake And Vamp!fic. I announced with all sincerity that I expected the Ukraine to win. The song was not 100% awful, and they had a reasonable stab at stage presence.
I missed seeing the sparkly, waxed, and over-tanned chests in the white linen suit - in fact only Russia came close to that classic Eurovision fashion ensemble.
However, to make up for that tragic loss, in next year's drinking Euro-bingo, I think I will have to add 'Excessive use of a wind machine,' 'tassels pretending to be a skirt' and 'poorly executed belly dancing by the singer' as squares.
Sunday and Monday = Bed (So no Bleak Expectations or Death Note after all *sniff*). Tuesday = odd.
PLB worked from home due to cold - first time since we moved here in Oct 2006. Remote desk capabilities on my laptop, so I was relegated to his machine. So I was sans manga, sans decent net (he's got really basic Umbuntu on that machine), and sans MOUSE. It's wierd how much changing machine made the whole writing process feel odd.
Still, I've typed up 6630 words this week, and written more on actual paper, even though I feel like I've been sleeping most of the time.
Writing and Beta-ing
One thing I forgot to include for Friday was I did a bit of beta-ing. Which I like doing, and if wonderdog's return visits is anything to go by, I'm pretty good at it.
I often angst that I am better as an editor than I am as a writer, but that's an emo!walrus issue for another shaky day.
At any rate, after a pleasant chat with annieroo2 about the joys of beta-ing, and being beta-ed (seme or uke - you decide!) I've decided to put myself on the line, just for my flist and any lurkers (pretty safe that I'm not going to get bad!fic or drama!Sues by doing this, it's not like this is a public comm). Gimme something under 12,000 and I'll beta it. There's a caveat or two, but we can talk those if you're throwing something my way.
I also would like it if someone was willing to take a squiz at a 2790 word piece. There's something not working in it, and I'm not having much luck pin-pointing the causes. Getting referrent pain only. I have my thoughts, but it'd be nice to have them confirmed, or my head exploded in some other way.
Today was Wednesday Writers. wonderdog put my draft of Skating over rooftops up for critique. But I didn't ask his reasoning for choosing it. If you're reading this, how random was it? Weekly themes and exercises are still nicely varied.
Hmm, still no Bureach. So do I go to bed, play Scrabulous, write something, edit something, or make a pretty list?
Pretty lists might be all I'm good for right now, actually. It is 2.10am after all.