Ora-Thai: don't go there

OraThai is a traditional Thai name, apparently. That is where the authenticity ends. I knew it was a bad sign when I went to pick up the take away and there were curries in a bain-marie. Think: Thai restaurant meets 1990s Fish and Chip shop and you have a sense of the mood.

Their walls are plastered with signs about how they don't take credit card for their authentic Thai food. It seems odd that a) they would not take credit cards and b) this would be the thing they make front and centre of their advertising.

The chilli chicken with cashew nuts was light on cashew nuts and chilli.

The mee goreng didn't look like mee goreng, frankly.

It was all okay. I cannot wait to move back closer into the CBD so that my take out experiences can be elevated from this crap-house average standard that pervades the burbs.

Caveat: apparently there is some all-swank Thai restaurant in Ivanhoe. It is far too pricey for weeknight snacks. However, I feel I should acknowledge that there is good food beyond the tram line boundary.

Cooking for Partees, part deux

Cooking with 'gas', in the form of panadol and gin/tonic

So I cooked a crapload of food on the weekend. I am traditionally not a baker, but rather, a thrower-together of foods for dinner, and sometimes, a recipe follower. Of foods that can or should be consumed as a meal, that is. I generally avoid things that need to be measured. So my baking was a bigger enterprise than I anticipated because it turns out all that measuring requires a rather large assortment of stuff. Things you need if you are going to bake a clafoutis, some cup cakes, and some ginger bread:
1) a tray that fits in your oven
2) cookie cutters (these are an ARSE to do cutting with). Really incredibly time consuming bizzo. And still looked basically absurd, and not at all like a baby's hand and train, as was intended. In fact, it looked like it was made by a baby. But it was couched in a lot of celophane, so okay mostly
3) a rolling pin. Really, this felt like it was taking things up quite a few notches but I used it a few times
4) some form of blender/mixer. Because hand whisking the eggs really made my husband impossibly grumpy

However, in general the cooking was quite fun, and accompanied by lots of exclamations from said husband, mostly on the subject of how shocking it was that I was this kind of person. Actually, I was feeling pretty smug about being This Kind of Person, even if it was news to me that baking soda and powder were different things, and even if I did give up and roll out my pastry and gingerbread with the sticky glue from the label on the cheap rolling pin still semi-attached.

I figure I'm only about 24 steps away from having competitive dinner parties with exotic mushrooms served in shot glasses as cold soup (this is really happening in the lives of my older colleagues. She even admitted that it was competitive cooking.)



Because I am a substandard baker I get all my recipes from the internet. Sometimes this means you have to get things that are super-common in the US but ridiculous to get here. Like unsulphured molasses. When I asked for molasses at the supermarket they took me to the mussels.



Because I'm watching The Renovators I'm going to call these 'the heroes of the room'. But actually, I mostly am thinking, looking at them again, that they look a hell of a lot more lurid than Nigella's do. Less red velvet and more red psychadellic.