Entries Tagged 'Notices and Announcements' ↓

More info about the program.

Fluffy As A Cat is a disgruntled worker bee who secretly harbours a dream in which the whole world simultaneously realises she is the Earth planet’s only hope for survival. Her superpowers include a naive fearlessness of all things tech related, the ability to turn a jumbly chaos of things into an organised and pretty arrangement of things, and a staunch refusal to admit that there will one day be an occasion where she falls off her motorbike.

Since discovering Facebook, Fluffy has become an ex-blogger, but you can still experience the culinary joy at gut feelings, the gardening joy at A Rake’s Progress and the joy (or otherwise) of spa sex at Reasons You Will Hate Me. She still writes at DAMNdotcom.

Fluffy’s piece Fondant Icing: More Than Meets the Eye first appeared on Facebook.

You should never underestimate the decorative potential of vegetables. Just ask Uncle Monty, from whom I’ve borrowed the post title.

School holidays have led to a bit of a pause in blogging, but hopefully back soon. In the meantime, those who are burningly curious about my eating habits can see what I’m cooking on the sidebar.

Spring “officially” starts in Australia on 1 September, apparently because the colonial soldiers were so desperately hot in their woollen jackets they couldn’t bear to wait until the vernal equinox, when it was properly Spring, to be allowed to wear their hot weather uniforms. It’s never really seemed right to me, so I’ve always waited until the equinox on 22 September to begin the new season.

Early Spring’s not that fancy if you pretend it’s three weeks earlier than it actually is. As Cath wrote at the beginning of the month at The Canberra Cook, even the real early spring was still pretty grim pickins if you were growing your own food. Because I mostly shop at Choku Bai Jo, I mostly eat fairly local and fairly seasonal food. I haven’t eaten a tomato (except for some cherry tomatoes) for months and months and months. But we’re inching closer, and now the Spring foods I’ve been missing are starting to appear.

All of a sudden the shops are full of asparagus and strawberries. The early bearing Camarosa strawberries that CBJ has for $3.50 aside, all the strawberries I’ve had have been pretty pale imitations of a ripe strawberry. Not to mention harbingers of the endtimes, which are fast approaching {⇐ Evidence}

We planted some asparagus crowns last year, and looky! Unfortunately that picture shows our entire asparagus crop for this year, thanks to the chickens. But what a spear!

I don’t much like that skinny asparagus that some people fancy, as I find they can be stringy. So when I saw nice big bunches of fat asparagus at 3 for $5 last week, I pounced.
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I’ve done a bit of fiddling about with the site while Harry’s been conducting his one man “Shock and Awe” Rolling Thunder campaign. (Yes, that’s what he called it.)

Firstly, the shiny new “Site Contributors” page which links to each author’s posts here and to other sites where their writing appears.

Secondly, the recipe index has been upgraded and now features … an index of recipes.

Finally, I’ve installed comment quicktags. This means you don’t have to know any html to style your comment, even though html is easy and will come in handy from time to time. Click the chevron button above the comment box and a row of quicktags appears, and click it again to get Even More. Probably too many in fact, but there you go. You’re welcome to have a play with them in the comments here.

Helen blogs at the Cast Iron Balcony, where you are most welcome to go and sit and have a glass of Rough Red or Bombay Blue, or perhaps a VB or Little Creatures ale, and chuck gumnuts at RWDBs and effing idiotic op-ed writers or bloggers passing in the street below. Although she describes herself as a political blogger, Helen often ends up posting on a whole lot of miscellaneous stuff. Small potatoes, you might say. Here’s a post on what to do with small potatoes.

I first encountered Harry’s writing at the now-defunct Back Pages blog during the 2004 election, and have been a fan ever since. He is very handsome for a nerd, which may explain his current employment as a part time scrotum model. Or not. I feel it’s proper to disclose that I have met him in person and, as it happens, have seen him with his trousers off. While I am able to vouch for his general good looks, I must confess to have paid inadequate attention to vouch for his employability.

He blogs at The Adventurerer, a travel blog about a boy who came home, where the following post first appeared, and also at the marvellous group blog For Battle! I would like to apologise for the number of commas in that sentence, but I’ve had some wine (like you hadn’t guessed that by now!) and it isn’t immediately apparent to me how to do it better. Suggestions gratefully accepted. Youse know who youse are.

Thanks this week go to the National Health And Medical Research Council, who have tentatively brought forward the deliciously ridiculous proposal to redefine binge drinking. Three glasses of wine or four middies a day puts you, reader, into the apparent same health category as trans-continental tinny-sinking legend David Boon. We can expect the legally defined binge to be separated from the capital-B Binge only by degree.

Drinking is a hobby engaged in by far more adult Australians than difficult, inconvenient and potentially dangerous sporting activity. Certainly Aussies might not know that much about health limits, but they know what they like. If Aussie-bender-friendliness wasn’t already a self-evident proposition, there’s evidence this week in the questions put to your Adversarial correspondent, largely having to do with gin, gin-based drinks and sex: all three the most popular historical pastimes of your national antecedents. I’d like to start here the people’s campaign against the NHMRC’s replacing the perjorative term “binge drinker” with the totally awesome phrase “elite drinker”. Get up off your couches, sedentary Norms of Australia, and life be in it! Get a cold can from the fridge, and c’mon Aussie!

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