#257: Mix it up
I have an Indonesian uncle, and he and his wife called me this morning asking if I was free tonight. I’m not – I’m so very not. But they live in Perth, so. . .
Tonight my aunt and uncle are coming to my sushi/Bible study/cake-and-chopsticks extravaganza. So is an atheist friend of mine. (If memory serves, my uncle is Muslim.) My aunt and uncle, like all my relations, are charmingly eccentic. My uncle speaks with a strong Indonesian accent. One of my friends has a habit of loudly moaning and/or sighing and then contemptously “correcting” anyone – and I do mean anyone – who disagrees with him.
This should be interesting 🙂
S#93: Collect Something Interesting
This one had me stumped for a while, since I dislike collections of physical objects. I decided to collect the “Samurai Kids” series by the brilliant and compassionate Sandy Fussell (books have a clear and excellent function, so I like collecting them), but then I had another idea.
As you know, I recently had a sushi epiphany. I’m still flying high.
A lot of food is international, no matter where in the world you are (but perhaps especially in Australia, where we’re linked historically to Europe, politically to America, and physically to Asia).
Here is a list of the meals CJ and I regularly cook (usually mangled beyond recognition, because that’s the multicultural way), with the country that instantly comes to mind (this is my mind, which is going to be wrong on plenty of these):
-Lasagna (Italy)
-Stir fry (generic Asia)
-Soto/Javanese chicken soup (Indonesia)
-Ravioli (Italy)
-Fish and Chips (UK)
-Hamburgers (USA)
-Sushi (Japan)
-Lamb chops (Australia, yay!)
-Tuna Mornay (actually, I don’t know)
-Roast dinner (UK)
-Fettucini bolognaise (Italian)
-Shepherds’ pie (UK, although it could be Germanic)
-Souffle (France)
-Fried rice (Indonesia)
-Beef stroganoff (Russia)
-Salad with fetta (Greece)
-Yum cha (China)
So I decided to collect famous foods from EVERY CONTINENT ON EARTH and serve them all at once, making sure the world is as well-represented as possible. Naturally, I’d only eat delicious things (eg I don’t like curry, so I chose butter chicken for India), and I’d have to fudge in places (Africa was hard, particularly since I cordially dislike most vegies) – but I’d try to be as stereotypical as possible.
Historically, practically everything we eat comes originally from the Americas – but from so long ago that we don’t associate most of it with America any more.
I had to make some tough calls for the UK, Italy, India, and China (sooooo much deliciousness), and leave out a lot of Europe for the sake of variety.
This is one draft of what I came up with:
Isn’t it a beautiful thing? Making this map made me incredibly proud of how international our world really is.
I deliberately focused on dishes that are very much a part of ordinary Australian life (I have eaten absolutely every item on this map, and have cooked almost all of them).
Papua New Guinea makes a drink that is clearly lemonade – which it isn’t well known for, but it’s delicious and easy to prep ahead of time – and I wanted to represent PNG since I lived there for two years (but don’t have an underground mumu oven, which would be really handy right now).
Halva is a kind of sweet.
I actually plan to do this thing for real next month – and blog about it in detail, of course! How will sushi taste after a mouthful of butter chicken? Does satay taste good with mashed potato, or is it better with pate? I plan to find out.
For my own amusement, I did another map with stereotypical booze by continent (from roughly left to right: Tequila; a genuine South American phrase that means “the dregs of everyone else’s drink, given to some poor drunk fool who doesn’t know any better”; Baileys &Â red wine; beer in Egypt; vodka &Â sake; and white wine for Australia).
I don’t think I’ll ever try that one in real life though.
I’m working on a final list for the food that is as simple as possible (eg France is pate rather than souffle, USA is coke rather than hamburgers, and I’ll do caviar instead of beef stronanoff for Russia). Everything that requires cooking will be cooked by me or by my friends.
I can’t wait!
Can anyone else think of a food (like “Turkish Delight” or “Brazil nuts”) that we actually name after a country?
S#2: Sushi
This certainly was a long time coming.
I don’t like salty food. Salt – sure, I like it. But I hate olives, anchovies, pepperoni, and all that icky stuff. I also loathe spicy food, and have never voluntarily eaten anything that was pickled (yuck!). So I had a fairly good idea of what my reaction to sushi would be. There is absolutely no way I’d have eaten sushi if it wasn’t on the steffmetal.com list.
I’m also not huge on anime either (I like plots to make sense, and breasts to obey the laws of nature), but we watched “Read or Die” which has one of the best heroines ever invented anywhere. (She find and buys a rare book that it turns out the baddies need in order to kill all humans. They steal it, so she has all kinds of amazing magical action sequences, and as she’s flying through the air getting shot at she says to the baddie, “Excuse me, can I have my book back? I haven’t finished reading it.”)
Fay gathered the ingredients: sushi rice, sushi powder (basically vinegar), nori (seaweed sheets), some fresh vegetables, soy sauce, chicken, tinned fish, mayonaisse, pickled ginger, and wasabi. All of the ingredients were on the shelves in a major supermarket (which apparently used to stock Asian mayonaisse, but doesn’t any more).
We cooked the rice, fried the chicken in garlic, and chopped the vegies.
I was getting pretty hungry, but no more enthusiastic than before. Cucumber? Yuck!
Fay rolled out the bamboo mat and laid a sheet of nori on top. Once she’d demonstrated what to do, I took over. I spread out the rice, pushing it down, and put mayonaisse on top.
I laid vegetables long-wise, and pieces of chicken (thinly sliced), and rolled it up as tightly as I could, pressing down at the end so the empty bit of seaweed stuck to the roll. Then I sliced it.
I took a piece, added soy sauce and (gulp) pickled ginger, and. . . ate it.
Madness! Chaos! The destruction of all I once knew!
The world is cute and round and saltily wonderful. Sushi is delicious and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s as satisfying as eating chips, but with a symphony of flavours and colours that makes the saltiness sing.
Turns out I adore pickled ginger (strangely sweet in combination, but with a nasty bite when I tried it on its own), too.
We all had a go at the curiously satisfying construction, and tried different flavour combinations (avocado and chicken is good, but it’s actually better with more vegetables, especially cucumber – HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD???)
I gathered my scattered wits and courage, and tried one with wasabi and. . . luckily (for the sake of all that is solid in the world) I didn’t like it.
But I wants me more more sushi. Right now.
Actually, CJ and I will probably have some for lunch. That leaves just three more hours until I gets me some more sweet sweet sushi.
mmMMMMmmm
S#19: Bells
Today I wore bells around my ankle (not bells technically – two bracelets hooked together –Â but they jingle). Every time I move, they make noise.
The best part is how both my cats (who each have a bell of their own) freak out every single time.
Torturing cats: It’s what I do.
– – –
Many many years ago, when I was but a girl, some Japanese students visited my high school. The girls were tiny and adorable; the teachers joyfully mangled ocker Australian phrases; it was all going so well.
And then they hosted a party, and I ate sashimi (sushi with raw fish) for the first time. I’d never eaten any kind of sushi before.
That was not a good experience, my peeps. It was not good at all.
Tonight my friend Fay is coming over to make sushi for CJ and I (hopefully while we all watch anime). Fay is going to Japan herself in a matter of weeks, and she and CJ are totally thrilled. They’ve been looking forward to this for nine months – ever since I decided to partake of Every Single Item on steffmetal.com’s awesome list.
I’m still nauseous from going to Indonesia a year ago. Will tonight’s sushi experience redeem these “roundels of heaven” forever? Or will sushi make me hideously ill – again?
I’ll let you know. . . tomorrow.
PS Those Scott Westerfeld reviews I’ve been promising have been written and posted just below this entry.
T#256: Text to movie
 I used the site http://www.xtranormal.com/ to make a movie. Click through to http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8228129/ to watch it.
In other news, I’ve now made the donation to Heifer International. I rounded up the number of comments (at $1 per comment) to $300 and donated that.
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#255: Play Date
Today I introduced my 2-month old niece (she of the dark hair) to my friend’s 3-month old girl. They cast many suspicious looks at one another, and my friend’s baby kicked my niece in the head.
Kids can be so cruel*.
Tomorrow: I’ve written a rom-zom-com (romantic comedy with zombies. . . well, one zombie) which I’ll hopefully be able to post tomorrow as a genuine internet movie thanks to “text to movie” online.
*To be fair, she WAS giving her sass.
#102: Write a twitter tale
Clearly, this is something I do rather often. Still awesome, though.
If you’d like to do so yourself, here’s what I’ve learned (mainly by doing the opposite):
1. Readers need to clearly understand what’s happening – no matter how tiny the “chapters”.
2. Readers need to be emotionally involved (no matter how tiny the “chapters”).
3. Don’t have more than about three updates per day – it’s annoying.
4. If you use an account for stories, you probably can’t use it for anything else (too much explaining, too little space).
5. Be extremely careful what you say – even in the context of the story. Tweets can easily be misinterpreted, and they can’t be erased.
6. Twitter doesn’t have paragraphs, so dialogue needs very clear labels.
7. Use short names. Every letter counts. (First person narrative also saves space.)
8. Humour and action work better than anything else. Twitter’s one advantage is that you can tell a story in real time.
9. Use your own name wherever possible (including urls).
10. Don’t have an underscore at the end of your twitter name – computers can’t handle it.
11. Link your twitter account to a website for readers who want to know more. On mine I post the story so far each Friday, and the full story (in chronological order, with paragraphs) when it’s complete.
#11 is interesting because I’ve discovered that very few people actually read the entire tale – they enjoy the occasional dip into it, and that’s all. Which is great, because my aim is to be known as a writer, and that’s working. Plus it makes life slightly more absurd knowing that a few hundred people will be thinking, “Oh no! The pirates are attacking and I can’t remember why” or, “That was sweet how he got together with whatserface.”
I spent every spare moment in December editing a novel for the Terry Pratchett contest, which meant I was desperately scrabbling to write this month’s tale (Zeppelin Jack and the Black Diamond) from day to day. Today, I finally got ahead of the game.
Twitter tales are HARD to write. It’s not a good form for world-building, characterisation, or plot twists. But it IS good for a bit of fun (especially fanfic, oddly), and a surprisingly wide audience. I’ve been writing them constantly since August 2009, and it’s not easy to sustain the odd cast of mind required to squeeze a tale into such small spaces.
I post them on facebook too, at “Louise Curtis Books”.
It’s slightly disturbing that, with around 2500 followers in various places, my twittertales have more readers than anything else I’ve done. They’ve also garnered several radio and newspaper interviews, so I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll fulfil their ultimate purpose (which is to make me familiar to readers, so they buy my books).
If you’re interested in writing a guest twittertale, I’ll almost certainly say yes to anything G/PG in the specfic and/or humour genres. Leave a comment or email me at fellissimo at hotmail dot com.
Here’s the $2400 ring that inspired this particular story (I’m going to sell it at half price, if any of you are interested in that kind of thing – same email address as above).
S#4: Share the cookie wuv
This was one of those times when I used my skills of interpretation. The task of today’s awesomeness (from steffmetal.com) was to take a batch of cookies to the “local metal bar”.
I interpreted “local metal bar” as “parents house”. it might sound like a leap, but check out this individual:
She’s
-underage
-has a skull tattoo
-has crazy hair
-has crazy eyes
-is topless
-began cross-dressing* immediately after this photo was taken.
-flails a LOT
I was going to cook meringues but Mum** wanted me to cook cake instead. So I did.
I know, I know – it looks like I just vomited onto a plate. I promise it was actually chocolate cake, and rather good too.
*ie, she wore a blue onesie.
**er. . . the band?
2010 blog stats
Crunchy numbers
About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 378 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 547 posts. There were 931 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 217mb. That’s about 3 pictures per day.
The busiest day of the year was July 6th with 317 views. The most popular post that day was Cloud Wars: What is steampunk?.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, yesandyes.org, twitter.com, blogger.com, and Google Reader.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for steampunk, fantasy landscape, steam punk, steampunk building, and steampunk landscape.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Cloud Wars: What is steampunk? February 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,
Advice for Beginning Novelists September 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,
Three Things You Need to Begin a Novel October 2010
2 comments
#124: Frolic in a Fountain April 2010
7 comments
Dr Yes: Spy Suits for Women March 2010
It’s interesting what a hook steampunk stuff is – I’m glad Zeppelin Jack is back. I’m also pleased that two of my writing articles made the top five – there’ll be plenty more next year.
Not a bad result overall, especially considering the Daily Awesomeness only started nine months ago.
#254: Visit a pet shop
It’s like a free zoo and aquarium, but cuter.
If I had any artistic skill whatsoever, I’d love to be the person who paints the hermit crabs. Wouldn’t you?
This is definitely recommended for playing along at home.
Felicity Banks 