Open Day at the Sydney Opera House

Last Sunday was the open day for the Sydney Opera House, and I trekked through the rain to go there with Eric, followed by a nice lunch at the Guylian Belgian Chocolate Cafe, and of course Sunday Dinner. The opera house was awesome. They had three tours, where basically you just followed a route through the building and got to look at things. Very little guidance. The first route we went on went through the opera and concert halls.

The second your went through some of the five theaters in the opera house (there's a lot going on there), and we saw some of the remaining theaters during the last of the three tours. Every space had something going on. Whether it was just scenery being laid out, some sort of music, or performances. We saw an acrobatics group, a kids ballet class, and more.

And in random spaces like stairways they had small things going on as well like a cellist playing, or some crazy unicyclists outside while we waited in lines. This third tour was centered more around the backstage area, where we happened to encounter some gargoyles. We didn't get to be in the wings of the performance spaces or really see how each space operated, which was disappointing. What can I say? I'm a theater techie still even if I don't work in the theater these days. Certainly missing it as I go to see lots of performances and spaces in Sydney.

All in all it was really fun. I definitely want to see some shows here before I go. There were adds for some dance and theater performances that looked interesting. The opera Cosi Fan Tutte is playing, which I actually worked on when I was at the Santa Fe Opera.

Ki - ow

So I'm still doing Karate, though there were times during tonight's class where I was questioning my sanity. There is some big even at the end of November where a lot of students / schools come together and tons of students are grading (I will sadly miss it to be in the US, and will stay a white belt for a while longer since Christmas breaks will follow). But, class is stepping up as we approach and we're working on grading requirements a lot for the next belt.

This means more push ups and crunches than I ever thought I'd do in an evening, interspersed with grappling of many variations, sparring, self defense, and maybe even some ground fighting. All in all enough to really work up a sweat. I'm ashamed to say that I had to stop and take a little break having gotten light headed and a little nauseous. When I got home my arms were used up enough that it was difficult to grate cheese for dinner, and shower. And I didn't even do the whole thing! Everyone else had it worse. I definitely got through more than I would have a month or two ago though. And it's only going to get harder over the next month. Well, I wanted something to help me stay fit. This is definitely doing a good job. And at the end of it I'll have a nice colored belt of some kind, and hopefully be better at self defense.

Sunday Dinners Awesome, Foodery Blog Fail

Sunday dinners are a resounding success. Last week we had eight people, yesterday had ten, if we grow any more we're going to have to institute a kids table to hold everyone. And we might have a severe place setting shortage. And we've cooked some great stuff.

Nothings perfect though. On one front, our dinner blog Sunday Foodery seems to have gone no where. Basically everyone is busy so no one takes the time to write posts. I've started drafting a few, but wanted some help finishing them, so they're off languishing in a draft form in the ether that makes up Google Wave. I'm not sure if we'll start it up again. Maybe once finals are over for my house mates. Though we also seem to have trouble following recipes, so anything we write down will be more of a guideline than a perfect recipe of what we made. I'm beginning to have more sympathy for my friends and family who cook similarly, and then get hounded for recipes. How do I know how much I put in, I just threw stuff in and it was good!

Yesterday we recreated (coincidentally) the first meal that Ginny and I cooked together: bruschetta, vegetarian lasagna, and apple pie. I guess it's a good menu (I'm sure someone better at pairing foods would disagree, but we've liked it twice now!). For the lasagna I made a cheese sauce. This consisted of me making a rue, throwing in some large quantity of milk, some butter, a ton of ricotta cheese, and then a mixture of cheddar, parmesan, and mozarrela, and a little corn starch and heating it until it simmered and the cheese melted. It was really tasty, I could barely hazard a guess as to exactly how much of anything we put in.

The other problem we face is finances. I might be able to stand paying a little extra to make dinner for my friends, but Christie and Brendan (who I split a grocery bill with) are poor college students who have to be fairly conservative with their spending. They probably could to throw dinners every week (I'm by no means familiar with their finances, just guessing from what I remember of being a poor college student), but they shouldn't have to. We've instituted a policy for dinner that guests should either pay $10 or bring a bottle of wine. This will help us pay for dinner, since feeding ten people isn't cheap, especially when you're making a meal with a fair bit of meat. We've been pretty lax on collection so far though. Gotta step that up so we can afford groceries, though I feel kinda bad asking for money when people are just friends coming over for dinner and hanging out. I try to justify it that it's a good deal, and tons of fun, and so far good food (at least in my opinion).

So, since Sunday Foodery has yet to get all the posts up, I thought I'd at least give you guys a rundown of what we've made so far. The first post on Sunday Foodery has our first dinner, homemade gnocchi with a tomato vodka cream sauce.

The next week we recreated from memory a roast chicken recipe I made back in San Francisco with Matt, and of course improvised (I've been doing a lot more of that in my cooking and baking here than I did in the US). The full menu was:

Potato & broccoli soup

Followed by:

Roast Chicken Wrapped in Bacon,
Stuffed with a mixture of grated apple and onion,
which was roasted over a selection of root vegetables (getting all the yummy juices)

Additionally a side of roasted asparagus. You can see that here:

Then for dessert we had:

Chocolate mousse cupcakes (dark chocolate mousse) and
Milk Chocolate mousse

Then a little over a week ago we decided to go with a soup theme. We had:

roasted tomato soup with garlic and a side of grilled cheese sandwiches.
sweet potato caramelized onion apple cider soup (that's probably missing some punctuation), followed by a dessert of
vanilla & chocolate pudding parfait

You can see the whole dinner setup:

And a closeup of my soup and our stack of grilled cheese:

Then last night we had the bruschetta, lasagna, and apple pie dinner that I mentioned previously. Sadly, I forgot to take a a picture of it until after we'd eating everything. The apply pie was even nicely decorated. Ann cut slits similar to that of a zia symbol onto it (minus the circle), and then made a flower & petals out of dough and decorated the center. So wonderful! Then lasagna was impressive only because of it's massiveness. It was at least four inches tall, and filled a large oval roasting pan to the brim (the one we'd previously made the roast chicken in).  We ate most of it last night too.

So that's what the foodery blog should have on it! Maybe someday we'll get those posts written. And then I'll write about all the baking we've done not on Sundays, and how messed up measurements are down here, and all the other ideas I have. For now though, I'm going to go downstairs and see what's up with the dinner that I don't have to cook, just enjoy, made by Beth. Her last dinner was tasty, and the dessert looked amazing, so I'm excited!

We don't want your radiation!

They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'm going to try and start having pictures with my posts. I do think they look nice mixed in with these stories. And interesting sights might make some good blog posts. So to start off with, I wanted to make sure that everyone knew how lucky I was to live in a Nuclear Free Zone. Gone are my worries of radiation poisoning from everyone's daily activities. Here in Annandale, I know I'm safe!

I pass this sign on the to and from work every day. I'm really curious why it's there. Why do we need to make it exceedingly clear that Annandale is a Nuclear Free Zone? At the very least it provides some amusement and distracts me from part of my 2.4 mile walk to and from work. (I asked Christie on our drive home from the shops today and she said it might be part of some protests to nuclear power plants). 

Foodery!

Yes, I know foodery is not a word, but that doesn't mean I can't use it and you can't understand me and then it will be a word. So there.

At Sunday dinner last night the idea came up to start a blog about our cooking adventures. Enter Sunday Foodery. Who knows how it will progress, but we had fun writing some posts last night and plan to continue with both cooking and writing. I'll probably defer writings about our foodery adventures to that blog now for the most part, and everyone in the house or effectively in the house has posting permissions. Check it out!

One note, all recipes will be Australianified, so be ready to translate if you want to attempt them on your own. These crazy Australians have extra large tablespoons, metric measures, call yellow onions brown onions, etc. I plan a separate post on that sometime soon since it it's seriously messed with my head.

Apocalypse

So Sydney was rocked by what was apparently a crazy, unusual dust storm about a week ago. Everything was a reddish orange all morning. I've gotten asked about it by friends and family in the States quite a few times. You can read all about it, and how some people (hopefully not seriously) likened it to the apocalypse. I guess waking up to a red world might be a little frightening. Here are just a few of the zillion news stories:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/09/23/328403.aspx
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26113952-5006784,00.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/sydney-dust-storm-from-space/

Sadly, I don't have any pictures of my own to post, and I don't really want to steal photos from someone else. I've gotten this sudden fear of getting into huge trouble for copyright infringement and a brief search for a nice photo under a usable creative commons license has failed miserably. I suggest checking out the always good big picture: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/dust_storm_in_australia.html.

What can I say, either I take the apocalypse very calmly, or I just don't know what to expect out of Sydney. When I first woke up (sometime between 5-6 though I went back to sleep after that) everything was hazy and red and I just though that it was a crazy sunrise. When I woke up again and saw how low visibility was, I figured it was a crazy sunrise and fog. If I 'd thought it through I probably would have realized that absolutely everything being red for that long doesn't really make sense as part of the sun rise, but I didn't think about it. I was concentrating on getting to work on time and not missing the bus for our 3 day offsite to Hunter Valley. So, I somehow walked through the dust storm for 45 minutes, all the way into work, without really coming to realize what it was. It's only when I got to work and everyone was talking about the dust storm that I realized anything unusual was going on. I just got here, how am I supposed to know this doesn't happen in Sydney all the time?