Take it off!!

I love food, as regular readers will know.
Some people like food, they way they like music (eg Coldplay, any U2 album NOT produced by Brian Eno and Rob Thomas) . By which I mean cardboard and fancy free range French cardboard will taste about the same to them. They have a narrow range of flavour and sensations and have aspirations of only slightly broadening their pallette depending on which News Corp or Fairfax media outlet they preffer to tell them what to do and think.

I love food. I agree with a passion with Brillat Savarin that a the discovery of a new flavour brings greater joy to mankind than the discovery of a new star. Replace the word 'mankind' with 'my tummy' and we are entirely of one mind. In fact definately replace those words because I hate being hungry, ordering a food favourite, only to be told that some cardboard loving-Coldplay listening-drone has eaten the last one.

I love food, but as I get older my ability to expend the delicious food energy I consume becomes challanged. Especially over Christmas, with its barbies, beer and chips and rich flavoursome meals 3 (and somestimes 4) times a day. Recently I showed some friends a picture of me 20 something years ago and we all laughed at the curly haired youth with the Pixies t-shirt. That person was about 25kgs lighter than I am now.
Some people might be upset y such a difference, I am thrilled. Growing up I was pale, skinny and nerdy. Nowadays I've filled out (still nerdy) and I am happy about that. The difference is I now have to watch what I eat and exercise regularly to combat the sedentary lifestyle of working in an office.
Awesome dosen't just happen people!

After this Christmas I gained 4 kgs, so I am on my second diet ever. Cutting back on sugary foods, processed foods and fried foods (includes beer). As I've stated previously, I love food. My challange, and I am meeting it, is to cook wonderful food from good ingrediants that meet my dietry requirements. Thankfully its easier than you think.

Hope all you Bubba's are off to a good healthy and fit start to the New Year!! Will keep you posted on my progress!

Honorable Mentions

Over the Christmas break I read a couple of John Mortimer 'Rumpole' case files. Jolly fun reading (though no exercise in the interpretation of the law). Rumpole spends his time in the courts of London and its environs, defending his clients by providing a reasonable alternative series of events that can in the very least provide grounds for reasonable doubt in a jury.

It has been a reading exercise I have enjoyed so much I have had to put the books down before the character of Rumpole subsumes me. I should mention that I was meandering with out of town friends amongst the stalls and hippies of the St Andrews market when I spied a collected works bargin. Three books of Rumpole for $3, how could I refuse!!

Killer Robots

Don't know much about the guy who made this awesome short film.
It's 5 minutes of giant murderous robot rampage!!!

Link HERE

Could Giant Robots be the new craze to replace our waning interest in Zombie hordes? I hope so, roll on battling mecha hero's and villians!!

Housecleaning

Over the weekend we cleaned out the fridge and the pantry. I know it doesn't sound like a Epic Win for the weekend but we learnt a lot from an archaeological perspective.
For example:

• Once upon a time we had a problem with the house Alpha Male eating any and all chocolate biscuits that were left in the fridge as a votive offering to his AWESOMENESS. Thus denying the Alpha Female any gifts for visitors who drop by. Solution, buy these Griffins Orange Choc Biccies that are made entirely out of an inedible industrial grade orange substitute. Result: We have 3 month old foodstuffs to serve guests.
• We have doubled up on nearly empty tomato sauce bottles.
• There appears to be no rule for when to discard jam and other preservatives that both lack mold and were placed there last ski season.
• The Back of the Fridge is a place where food goes to become a permanent resident. Once its at the Back of the Fridge, there it stays. Immortal and undying in a sleep of a thousand years or until we have another power blackout.
  

The freezer section is a whole other realm of frozen curiosities. Therein lies a plethora of leftovers and soups, empty iceblock cartons and frozen blueberries from last year. We don't often eat the food we freeze as it turns out we don't own a microwave.

To be honest we cleaned out an enormous amount of foodstuffs unfit for human consumption (but not those horrible, horrible Orange biccies) and it was at least a cleansing process. Liberating almost.

So if you are in the neighbourhood, drop by and enjoy our hospitality and eat the last of those awful biscuits so we can get some new ones.

Good Advice

Good advice is something that you only realise when you don't take it. It's one of those moments of clarity where you smack the palm of your hand against your forehead and utter the immortal 'D'oh!'.

Then there are those moments when you do take someone's advice and wonder why you didn't do it sooner. In this particular instance I took my Guitar Mentors advice and got me a Lucinda Williams album (Car wheels on a gravel road).

Every song is fantastic. It just fits the mood I'm in musically at the moment. Now I see why we've been playing so much of her music at band practice. So while this may not be everyone's particular cup of tea, it is mine.

There is a lot to be said for giving advice, particularly good advice. So I owe a huge thank you to my Guitar Mentor.

Off to a good start

Welcome to 2010 Bubba's!! Who'd have thunk it. 2010 sounds (or sounded) so very futuristic. A pity then we don't have spaceships and moon bases yet. I'm only slightly encouraged by the current PM's funding of the Australian space industry. So probably highly likely we won't see such sights any time soon.

On the other hand we do have a lovelly baby girl who is getting bigger and prettier by the day. My lovelly little girl is also a seasoned traveller who handled a trip to Sydney with ease and a car ride to Canberra without complaints.

Which reminds me, as part of my ongoing and irregular rant about pub food, I would like to thoroughly recommend the kitchen at the Mittagong Hotel (in Mittagong, NSW) for their excellent Chicken Schnitzel and Lambs Fry and Bacon. I'll let you gentle Bubba's decide for yourselves who had what. Both dishes were superb, the chicken was wonderfully dry on the outside yet tender within and the Lambs Fry was frankly as perfect a dish as I would have liked it to have been.

So I recommend with extreme pleasure the Mittagong Hotel. Know this as well, the Mittagong Hotel also serves Catalan style Tapas and the dinning area is festooned with gorgeous flags from the Catalan region. Not bad for country-regional pub.

The Mittagong Hotel gets multiple well feed Ninja Stars of approval: ************