simpak.

journalism student considering a career in medicine.


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Wednesday, February 9, 2011,6:13 AM
all things new.

I'm sitting here after a nice hot shower following a Zumba work out, with a pore strip on my nose, thinking about how I haven't blogged about anything optimistic or substantial in quite a while. So here shall be a blog of all things new and other random tales to document recent developments. And there have actually been a few.

Today I met Elena for coffee at Doncaster and afterwards we decided to walk around and try on clothes, particularly dresses. I, of course, found another dream dress that I really want but can't afford. When I got home I mentioned it in passing to my mum, hoping that she would take the hint and offer to buy it for me. No such luck - she spent a good five minutes lecturing me on the fact that I just purchased two new dresses which I have worn all but once. Of course, another new dress remains a requirement (especially before uni goes back), but it got me thinking about all the dresses I have purchased this summer.

Excuse the horrible photo, it's really dark in my house and the disgusting family room carpet was the only flat surface I had that could fit all of those dresses in line. Also, I did some pretty shifty editing trying to join the two halves of the picture but maybe if you pretend you don't see it you'll enjoy the following section more.

This summer has produced a great dress yeild. It has also produced a great jumper yeild because winter clothes are such bargains, and the weather has been fairly miserable (lovely for me), but let's talk dresses here.


From left to right:Tokito black ruffle dress, $90, Forever New day dress, $100, ASOS Petite jersey peter-pan collar dress in black/cream, $40, Quirky Circus floral dress, $59, Sportsgirl red pattern dress, $89, Bardot black maxi-dress, $110, ASOS tailored peter-pan collar dress in blue/cream, $70.


And of course, my two new ASOS dresses which arrived yesterday are my favourites of the minute, especially the blue one. I have worn it two days in a row and am already planning more outings for it in the coming week! The black one may be making a proper rendezvous come Valentines day, which I am looking forward to so very much.

I don't even want to think about how much money I have spent on clothes this summer, but it was so obviously essential. This is just the dress line up - there are oodles more purchases hidden away in my overflowing closet. But I do also want to share a new pair of shoes that I got the other day. At only five dollars, they were a steal and even though I'd prefer not to shop at Rubi shoes, my wallet seems to love them. And the ten dollar sandals I got there just before Christmas seem to be holding up okay.


These are the tan brogues they have en masse at the University Hill Cotton On superstore, with the common sizes. Only five dollars! I couldn't resist. I'm considering removing the elastic 'laces' and replacing them with real cotton or string so they can be tied and look less cheap. Apart from the traditional Rubi 'this shoe has absolutely no sole' issue, they seem to be holding up okay. A little slippery on the first wear due to Rubi's inability to provide any grip to wearers, but what can one expect for five dollars? God knows I wouldn't have paid 29.95 (the original full price) though.

God knows I couldn't afford that full price. I feel like since I started this new job a few weeks ago, I've been more broke than I was when I was unemployed. It's probably the horrendously illegal pay and awful working conditions (including an inability to inform me of the roster) which make me feel like I need to spend more money. But there is also the petrol scenario, a new wallet eater. And of course, I recently discovered that I won't be eligible for a transport concession card this year, which means even more money down the drain. A single three hour shift per week at 12 dollars an hour doesn't come close to sustaining the kind of lifestyle necessary for the poor, broke student.

Which reminds me that while I'm here, I should probably mention another important facet of life - my newly chosen pathway for next year. Sifting through my enrollment package and figuring out which sessions I'd like to attend at AAD II is making me really excited about starting a Bachelor of Science this year. After a few days of tears and uncertainty caused by letting the B-Bmed offer go, I came to realise that I had made the right decision for me. And while people might not think me as capable as I am when I inform them of what I'm studying this year (a mere 'oh okay' response, as opposed to the 'oh wow, medicine' response) I'm not regretting my choice in the slightest. I can still be top of the class in a less prestigious degree. It's probably even going to be easier.

I'm already slightly regretting the number of contact hours I'll be forced to have, though. After making a few bets where I convinced everyone I could be a Science student and still have two days off uni every week, I've made my life a little bit of a hell for the other three. 8am starts and 5:15pm finishes three days a week all semester, if my timetable goes to plan. We shall know on the 21st. At least I will get to be right, which is what matters the most!

Time will tell whether I will regret taking Physics: Fundamentals for GAMSAT preparation a few weeks into the semester. But until then, I can only hope that I enjoy Science a lot more than I did my media degree. I don't think that assumption is too far fetched at all.


Finally, I leave you with one of my most recent (actual) photos which will hopefully be making its way to a cd cover soon. This one was taken at a picnic in the car with my wonderful boyfriend, during which we ate quiche and scones and took photos of the sunset. The brief was: summer.

Monday, January 10, 2011,3:16 AM
the holidays.

Prepare yourselves for a long-winded, long-awaited 'what I've been doing' blog post, which may span Christmas, New Years, my nineteenth birthday...and well I guess that's about it. We can celebrate about some exciting things though because the fact that I'm writing a real post today that isn't a depressed rant means that I actually feel like writing for the first time in ages.

Christmas

I'm kind of not a fan, but this year I got the greatest christmas present of all! Freedom in the guise of a probationary license. Okay, so really it's not the greatest present at all because it just means I get to drive a lot of people to a lot of different and far-away locations, beginning with my brother and the McDonalds drive-thru. Constantly. And I can only imagine that in a month's time when he returns to school, I'll be the one making the hour round trip to his campus because he was too lazy to get up in time for the one bus that runs a day. I'm beginning to think I should spray paint my car yellow and whore myself out to pay for all the petrol I've had to buy.

But despite these pitfalls, driving my car around is pretty great. The obtaining-of-the-license may have not gone so great with two critical errors on the test and the shocking news only a week prior that I would have to drive a car I had never driven and then an almost-crash while driving from Camberwell to Templestowe was a little scary but otherwise things have gone surprisingly well. I am a fan of driving my car to the station rather than catching the bus as it is always late and all the drivers are very grumpy. My iPod, however, is never grumpy and always happy to see me and sing songs through the car radio. And I'm promise that I'm not as bad at driving as the above spiel makes me sound.

Festivities really began with the annual family lunch at my Aunty's house - she is rich and likes to pretend she has room in her Bentleigh townhouse for our ever increasing family. Somehow at least ten more people decided they were a part of our family this year, beginning with my own boyfriend whose mother was in Adelaide and also including my brother's new fiance, some people I had never met before but was forced to 'buy' a Kris Kringle for (actually I never purchased one because I didn't get time and the woman was incredibly cut, either that or her face is scrunched always) and also the soon-to-be lovechild belonging to my cousin and his partner which counts as an extra head at the lunch because it certainly ate like an existing person. While that lunch was incredibly fun, as you can imagine, we all moved on shortly to my own house for continued festivities at dinner which I enjoyed a lot more because my other Aunty made sushi and non-alcoholic desserts were involved.

Gifts included my long awaited Chanel No. 5 which I enjoy very much and some other crap including lovely Turkish Cherry tea from T2 and my favourite eyeliner pencil. Very exciting.


I did get what I think is an awesome diary that you can kind of see in the picture above. I had wanted it for a while, and I think it's the cutest thing ever. Each page has a different pattern of bunnies or flowers or ballet dancers along the sides and cute notes pages at the end, sticker sheets and an address book at the back. I even got Kathryn one for her birthday.




Attached to the actual Christmas day was a dinner party that Ony and I held for a group of friends while his mum was still away. Although I kind of wish I had photos of the amazing food creations we had concocted I was so stressed and busy that I didn't get time to take any at all. Aside from this one photo the next day of the leftovers, which I will just put here.




Anyway, our entre consisted of Ony's omelette/nori/mushroom rice MOUNTAIN thing and also prawn and herb mayo handrolls which I really cannot recommend enough. They were amazing, and I can say this without being conceited because I didn't cook the entre. I did cook a disappointingly bland pot of ramen and a green tea cheesecake whose waterbath decided to permeate its cheese mixture. Despite these mishaps I'd like to think the food was edible and the company enjoyable. What really made the night was a pack of cat bonbons I picked up from Big W for 2.96, because they had cats on them.

New Years

Taking a long look at my hard and miserable life a couple of days before New Years Eve I came to the realisation that my lack of plans wasn't acceptable and I'd have to try and concoct some party plans for everyone. This idea was fully supported by my parent's decision to go away and stay at a friend's place down the beach for a night. The house to ourselves and a table full of various alcoholic beverages spelt a good time for all.


The seven-or-so of us played the Hammond organ and danced on Chat Roulette before abandoning a game of Kings and watching the fireworks on television. Or dancing in front of the fireworks on television while wearing a collar and drinking from disgusting alcoholic test-tubes, depending on which crowd you circulated in.


I did not remember much.

Turning 19
On the third of January I turned 19, which is too old. I was quite depressed with the premise of being in the last teen year and briefly considered a wasted youth and premature adulthood, what with all my ridiculous university perfectionism. This soon passed, and I drove my mother and I to Warrandyte for a nice birthday lunch at Thyme on the Terrace. We walked around and looked inside the shops for a bit, drove to Greensborough, fought for a while - the usual. Then Ony came over and we prepared to leave for the Shout Out Louds show and a birthday dinner for me at the Vegie Bar in Brunswick St. Only communal seating was available when we arrived but that was fine and I enjoyed my usual favourite, the mexican burrito. Then we took a tram into the city and a tram out of the city to East Brunswick Club before deciding we should be back in the city for birthday drinks. So we went back to the city again and went to Cabinet, a bar which looks out over Swanston St from a height. I had an amazing cocktail and I wish the recipe for it was on the internet because I don't want to pay 16 dollars for it again.


We got back on the tram and went back to East Brunswick Club just in time to grab one more drink before Shout Out Louds took the stage. I thought they were very good live, better than on their CDs. This was refreshing. And they played Hard Rain, which is one of my favourite songs of all time - it was a nice birthday treat. We will skip over what happened once the show ended as it wasn't very pleasant but if you must know it involved street number mix ups and wandering around lost in Lygon St for 1.5 hours while being yelled at over the phone before having to pay for a taxi into the CBD and be yelled at some more.

And then a couple of nights ago I invited a large group of friends around for a birthday gathering at my place and then a smaller group to After Dark Social Club later on. I had never been to Roxannes, so this trip was intriguing and I now know most of my friends aren't really a fan of it. But I don't really care, because I had a good time there and it was my birthday.

When everyone started bailing, we tried to go to Cherry Bar but didn't want to pay another 10 dollars entry so we went to Pony instead which was an awful decision because it was entirely depressing and bad. So we went to Pieface instead and got pies and a taxi and 8 hours sleep.

A successful holiday period? Most certainly.
Sunday, January 9, 2011,5:40 AM

Most of the time, the thought of tomorrow or any kind of future makes me feel violently ill.
Monday, November 29, 2010,11:48 PM
macaron massacre.

So today marked my first and, not surprisingly, relatively failed attempt to make a batch of macarons. Feeling accomplished after making an amazing bowl of miso ramen without miso paste and using no recipe last night, I felt I was ready for a challenge. I clearly wasn't all that ready after all.


I don't even bake cakes let alone little nightmare biscuit things. And I hate meringue so it's not often that I make anything at all similar to it, like a macaron. I think if I can take one thing away from today's cooking experience it is that I am not good at baking. At all. And that I should stick to making meals that don't involve ovens or frying eggplants.

After making my ramen last night I separated egg whites from their yolks and left them to age overnight (which, in retrospect, was nowhere near long enough). You would be amazed at how hard it is to separate egg whites from double yolk eggs - the only kind of egg we have in this house. Juggling around a yolk between two halves of shell is tricky enough for my jittery hands when just one orange blob is trapped inside the goo but when there are two the task becomes nearly impossible. I spent about half an hour fishing out yolk from my whites before I could leave them to sit.
I'm surprised I even gave in and let the egg yolks age considering how fanatic I am about use-by dates and food hygiene. But eventually I did decide it was probably the best shot I had at being able to bake something that wasn't found in a Greens cake box.

After following the instructions found here it became clear that I had completely over-beaten my mixture. Either that, or my dodgy scales (which are the type that you have to set to zero yourself by moving the casing manually and that jump from zero to 100 grams without hitting anything in between) had failed me entirely. Upon piping the stuff out it would just ooze everywhere and into one another and didn't sit in little 2.5cm circles as it should. Pretty much a nightmare goop. So much so that, in the end, I found myself with this ridiculously large macaron because four shells had melded together while I was piping (it tasted good though - macaron cake!).



I put the shells in the oven and I honestly didn't think they were going to form feet at all so I was surprised when they appeared. But my old fan forced oven seemed to cook only some macarons and not others and the tops became puffy and were easily cracked. I managed to salvage only two good looking macarons (four shells in total) from the batch but continued to pair up the gross looking ones anyway.


Oh yeah, and while the macarons were cooking in the oven I made something that I am capable of cooking! Chocolate ganache! It was a relief to find that I could still break up some chocolate and heat up some cream and end up with a thickened liquid. I would be slightly worried if my aversion to baking were so great I couldn't stir and refrigerate.





Once the ganache was thick enough, I began piping it into the shells and pressing them together, breaking a few in the process. Then I put some blueberries on top to mask the horrible cracking and make them more delicious because hey, who doesn't love blueberries and the only preparation they require is rinsing under a tap.





Voila! Not entirely fantastic looking but they sure do taste great and I have 11 of them remaining so you should come over to my house and have some. If you don't I am likely to end up with diabetes from eating them all, however, my brother is coming home from Thailand tomorrow and I'm sure he will be dying for food that isn't Thai or McDonalds. Ha, who am I kidding?




So yes, raspberry and blueberry macarons with chilli chocolate ganache. Enjoy! The pictures, that is.
And after my failed baking attempts I settled on instant pasta for dinner.
In other news, I am a complete and utter failure every day.
10 previous posts
all things new. ★ the holidays. ★ Most of the time, the thought of tomorrow or any k... ★ macaron massacre. ★
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November 2010 ★ January 2011 ★ February 2011 ★