When I come back from travels, I always want to make something for my family from the place where I have been. Given that I couldn’t source the ingredients for a DC chili half smoke in Albury, and given that it is hot and summery here, I decided to make them a California style fish taco, cooked on the great Australian barbeque! And I reckon they turned out pretty tasty, considering I had to improvise a little. The biggest problem was that the limes were super expensive… apparently limes were one of the crops affected by the weird weather we have had in Australia this year, so to make enough of all of this to feed the hungry hoardes (seven people), it cost me about $8 just for limes! But oh well.
So the components are as follows…
Green leafy salad with shredded cabbage (I was lazy and bought the pre-cut stuff from Safeway/Woolworths)
Corn tortillas… you need to cook/warm these. Woolworths Select actually makes a generic brand of corn tortillas, and they were the only ones I could find in Albury, but they were fine. There’s a lot of different ways heat them and a heap of methods online. We put some on the barbeque and then microwaved some under a damp cloth. Both methods worked just fine.
Salsa… pico de gallo, to be exact. I made this up by just finely chopping onions, tomatoes, cilantro/corriander, some green pepper (aka green capsicum) and only a tiny bit of chili. Then it was dressed with lime juice. Just do the measurements of the various ingredients to taste. This is also great to eat on its own with corn chips!
White sauce… I have to say, this sauce was unexpectedly awesome. I made it up by mashing together a few different recipes and playing. While this isn’t the same as the genuine “crema Mexicano,” it was really yummy on the tacos. So basically, I took about 300mL of plain yoghurt, 400mL light sour cream, a tablespoon of mayonnaise (I know this sounds wrong, but it worked! PS. All the measurements are pretty rough), a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped cilantro/coriander and chopped fresh dill… then add a pinch of ground cumin and a fair whack of cayenne pepper (to taste) and lime juice to taste and to get it to a good consistancy (not too runny). Yum. I caught my brother eating the leftovers of this sauce on corn chips for breakfast haha.
And then, there’s the fish. As for the type of fish, I didn’t have any options except for the basic cheap fish in the deli at Coles (we do live 600km inland… and there has been a drought up until now, so river fish haven’t been that plentiful). I marinated it in lime juice, cayenne pepper, a pinch of cumin and finely chopped corriander and let sit for several hours, then grilled it up on the barbeque.
Then all you have to do it construct your tacos. It’s a super tasty, fresh and zingy meal option, especially great for summer… and a lot of the prep can be done in advance, all you have to cook is the fish and heat the tortillas.
Enjoy!
I’m sitting here on the floor at LAX waiting to check in my bags to go home. It’s a fitting end to a year where I haven’t been of any fixed address for more than four months at a time and have spent an absolutely incredible amount of time at airports, as well as bus and train stations…
2010 started in Jakarta on a sweaty night spent drinking with friends at a Kemang dive pub, then getting home on an ojek, darting through the small backstreets while people in the kampungs blew horns and let off fireworks. Then it went, if I recall correctly… Yogyakarta, Pangandaran, Jakarta, Denpasar, Kuta, Padangbai, Sanur, Ubud, Denpasar, Jakarta, Georgetown (Penang, Malaysia), Kuala Lumpur, Yogyakarta, Kaliurang, Yogyakarta, Solo, Surabaya, Probolinggo, Cemoro Lawang/Mt Bromo, Surabaya, Sidoarjo, Surabaya, Singapore, Batam, Medan, Tuk-Tuk (Lake Toba), Medan, Bukit Lawang, Banda Aceh, Pulau Weh/Sabang, Jakarta, Kuta, Melbourne, Albury, Sydney, Albury, Melbourne, Albury, Sydney, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Washington DC, Phoenix AZ, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Washington DC, Los Angeles (where I am now…). Then I’m on a plane… Sydney… to Albury… then to Canberra in a week or so. So this is my third international move of the year, not counting the months of backpacking.
Yeesh. Part of me looks at that and goes “wow, what a year.” The other part looks at that and goes “I’m really tired and now I can kind of understand why.” Add three months of full time work in Jakarta at the start of the year, three months of freelancing on the road, a couple of months working at the family restaurant and freelancing, four months working part-time in the US while completing my first semester of graduate school in a discipline I haven’t studied before, an intensive language program in Yogyakarta, trying to teach myself macro and microeconomics… a lot has been crammed in.
It has been really great. I’ve seen some really amazing things and met some amazing people and I am super super thankful that I had the opportunity to do all of this cool stuff. But now I’m tired. And broke. So my resolution for 2011 is to roughly stay in the same place for at least a year. Sounds simple enough, right? That place will be Canberra… I’ve decided to transfer back to finish my master’s degree at the Australian National University (the reasons list is lengthy and complicated… those that know me in person can ask about it when they see me). I’m also resolving to keep up the good grades, and also to look after myself and to rebuild a bit financially etc after a crazy year.
But 2010 certainly won’t be forgotten in a hurry, that’s for sure.
So while I’m planning for a 2011 that is a little more sedate (but not toooooo sedate…), I wish everyone the best of luck for whatever adventure they have got planned for the year ahead.
Happy new year… or selamat tahun baru, if that’s more your style.
xxxx
Note: The picture up top is from a restaurant called “Bubba Shrimp” in New Orleans. It was a Forrest Gump themed restaurant… if you were fine and didn’t need service, you left the sign as “Run Forrest Run.” If you needed to catch the waitresses’ attention, you flipped it over to the “Stop Forrest Stop” sign.
Waiting to go on stage
I spent about six days of the last week at the Albury-Wodonga Festival of Sight and Sound (formerly the Albury Eisteddfod), one of the biggest youth performing arts competitions in the region. Two of those days were spent volunteering, and the other four were spent screaming and clapping for my sister as she competed her little heart out against some extremely talented dancers. It was great to watch and it is an excellent opportunity for these kids to build their confidence and showcase their talents.
My sister Brittany looking gorgeous.
When I was a kid and a teenager, I competed in the eisteddfod every year in both speech and drama and dance sections, and some years I also competed in the music section (for flute) when there wasn’t scheduling clashes. While I was far more successful in the drama section, given that I was probably the fattest little dancer in town, I enjoyed competing in the eisteddfod immensely and people were always supportive and friendly.
But stage mothers do reign supreme at times. My mum, who is very used to being backstage at these events, takes a pretty laid back approach to it all and supports all of the kids and is super positive… for others, the level of competitiveness makes me wonder if they’ve mistaken this regional eisteddfod for the olympic games.
Mum makes some last minute costume adjustments.
There are always scandals, runs in tights, missing false eyelashes, ribbons coming off shoes, costume malfunctions and judging upsets. Nerves run wild and meltdowns or forgetting routines on stage are always a constant threat. But the drama is all part of the game. At the end of the day, its about what ends up on stage… beautiful performances, exciting performances that get the audience clapping and cheering and some kids doing better than they ever thought they could.
So I guess the point of this post is to say that getting out there and supporting the youth arts, especially in regional areas, is a really great thing to do. Even if all the kids on stage aren’t technically amazing at their chosen art, the confidence they could gain from having audience support could help them in so many ways in their lives… and you’d be surprised at just how good some of these kids are. The tickets are always affordable, so get in there and support them.
But just quietly, this kid was the best. Not that I’m biased or anything like that…
Trees without their leaves at Albury’s Noreuil and Oddies Creek Parks.
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Savoury scones from the famous Beechworth Bakery’s Albury store ($2.90… very delicious!). We also had a piece of bright red Jelly slice, straight from childhood birthday parties. It was like the bakery had directly imported it from the 80′s.
I didn’t end up getting the time to go down to the pretty colonial-era goldrush town of Beechworth, about an hour outside of Albury, to have scones or pies at the bakery proper during this stay (or get lollies from the great olde-style sweet store right next to the bakery), but thankfully their Albury store is just as yummy.
What better place to enjoy some scones than down by the Murray River in Albury, the scene for so many of those sugar fueled childhood birthday parties? The Oddies Creek Off-Leash Park is one of Pogo (our fluffy silly dog)’s favourite places in town.
But like most of our family though, when there is food around, Pogo isn’t interested in exercise.
He has very poor table manners. At home, he knows he’s not allowed on the table, but he didn’t feel those rules applied at the park.
This jumping style is how he got his name of Pogo. (The park is partially sealed off in the background because they are building a new playground area)
Once the scones were gone, he finally decided it was time to have a run. He’s a scaredy dog though and will only play with puppies his own size. If there’s a big dog, he won’t stray far from his sisters.
When I was 16 years old, I went on my first overseas trip. I went to Vietnam on a history study tour with my public high school, Albury High, for 14 days.
My family didn’t have a proper camera then because nobody was into photography. It wouldn’t be for another two or so years until I would have a proper digital camera, so my photos were taken on two cheap disposable cameras with plastic lenses. Each camera had 24 exposures on it, and one had black and white film and the other colour. I had barely taken any photos in my life before this trip. Now it’s unthinkable to me that I travelled for 14 days and only took 48 photos!! I would sometimes take up to 150 photos a day in Indonesia! These basic sorta-blurry photos almost make it look like I was over there 30 years ago instead of only 8.5 years ago!
The Vietnam trip was pretty remarkable for me. My family had never gone on any international travel. My dad had gallivanted around a little when he was in his teens on the scant money he earned from his odd jobs, but since then, nothing. In our small-ish “regional city”, back then we had two Chinese restaurants and newly opened Thai and Indian restaurants were pretty revolutionary. I’d never in my life tried Vietnamese cuisine and the population makeup of our town was far from being racially diverse. I’d also only been in a busy big city a couple of times in my life (but Australian “big” cities are obviously a far cry from Asia’s large cities, population wise).
At that stage of my youth, I thought I wanted to go to university in Albury and become a speech pathologist. I hadn’t really thought seriously about moving away to one of the more prestigious universities in the cities, though it was starting to tick away in the back of my mind.
I was honestly shit scared about going to Vietnam, even with my cool teachers and school friends, and at one point I almost thought about dropping out of the trip.
Sometimes, when I was on the road in Indonesia and even in Eastern Europe, I think about how lucky it was that I went…
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Our family owns a little red Hyundai.
For a while it was mine. I had it up in Sydney, zipping around to interviews and to take photographs, with my straightened newsreader cut hair in a snappy little outfit.
After a couple of years in an office job where I never had to leave the office, my snappy dressing toned down dramatically… but the car is the one that really let itself go while I was in the tropics. It was not entirely Mr Hyundai’s fault though I have to say.
When I went to Indonesia, the red Hyundai became my brother’s vehicle of choice. In fact, “when I moved to Indonesia” was the last time the car had been cleaned until I came back from Indonesia. It was filled with crap, and still jetlagged, I took it and cleaned it out so I could drive it up to Sydney. Hard yakka.
Five weeks later, my bro has filled it with so much rubbish and crap again that I would be ashamed to take any non-relative passengers in it again.
But tonight, when I was driving up to work, a new level of disgusting was reached.
A chip packet STARTED MOVING. Something was thrashing around inside it. THERE WAS A MOUSE IN THE DAMN CAR!!!
I squealed so much, thank god I was only a block or so from work. It was also fortunate I was at traffic lights when it started moving around, otherwise I may have crashed the car out of shock.
Regular readers may remember how much I hate being in enclosed spaces with rodents. I was not impressed.
I have no idea how it got in there. But at least my bro is cleaning the car now.
I always take lots of photos of my little sister when I’m home, and there’s a good reason. Not only is she a gorgeously beautiful ballerina type, she’s also the type of person who responds enthusiastically to suggestions like “why don’t we go and get that carnivale mask I bought you back from Venice and go to the park in the Albury CBD in the cold at night to take weird artsy pictures while bored bogans drive past and honk their car horns at you?” You’ve got to love that kind of attitude.
We had a pretty epic photo sesh tonight (I can’t find my damn tripod, making night photography tricky!), taking heaps and heaps of kooky snaps. There’s some more…
… if you clickity-click-click this linkety-link-link.
My nanna has dementia. It’s getting worse. Some days she is OK, some days she is terrible, driving my poor uncle, who is selflessly caring for her full time, understandably crazy.
It’s a sad disease, especially when it impacts younger people. But it can also be oddly hysterically funny. It feels wrong to laugh at, but until there is some sort of cure, those caring for someone with the disease deserve to be able to see the lighter side of it, I feel, if only to keep their own sanity. Answering the same questions over again every five minutes is frustrating even for just a few hours, let alone every day.
My grandmother’s sister suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I remember as a child thinking it quite hilarious when she would take dirty dishes, “dry” them with a tea towel and then put them away in the cupboard as if they had been washed, forgetting the crucial step of actually washing them. That being said, I wasn’t the one that had to go through the cupboards to find the dirty plates, often with chunks of food still on them, and clean up the mess. I also wasn’t tasked with having to try and tactfully dissuade her from helping out with the dishes anymore.
But my grandmother takes the hilarity to a whole new level. Nanna’s latest annoyance is the failure of my mother to return her bicycle, which my mother borrowed when she grew out of her child bike and needed a new ride up to the high school when she was aged 12, circa 1972. The bike got many years of use. When we were young kids, mum and dad took us out on rides on the bike, which by then had a child seat fastened on the back. But it is now 2010, some 38 years after the original loan, and Nanna wants the bike back. So she can go riding. Even though she is very elderly and has troubles hobbling around the house.
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