When you are

severely unemployed, it is thirty one degrees, your mother and her mother have driven you insane, you


a) watch them eat lunch
b) call your wife
c) cause havoc at David Jones
d) wear only a swimsuit out in public with Docs
e) drink ridiculously priced booze on a roof
f) all of the above, there are too many options, for fuck's sake.

If you guessed f, you actually read all of the options, and you should take a photo of yourself at this moment for posterity.

But really, when I see my father's side of the family, it is great, calm, relaxed and makes some sort of deaf sense. With my mother, all I hear are inaccuracies, uncalled for injustices, bitching and aggression.
Oh, and bullshit.
Things get lost in translation and all of a sudden I am an awful daughter who is overweight and talking only perpetuates my feeling that I am in a slapstick.

Thankfully, after calling my wife to regain my brain and watching two old women eat three dishes, I arrange to meet her at Rooftop Bar.
I look at homewares for thirty minutes because I am secretly a hundred-and-twelve and then make the slightly evil people of David Jones panic for a while by not-really-but-kind-of setting off an alarm by ripping the tag off a dry-food and slapping it on a tray of witlof that got bought by a suit.
That sated me.
But let me get this straight, I hate Rooftop.
I hate the hipsters.
I hate the crepes (they have a peking duck crepe where they list the ingredients of peking duck along with the duck, calling the duck itself "peking duck" (how fucking inaccurate), as well as serving a bolognese crepe. Um, gross).
I hate that they overcharge. Who the fuck pays $9.50 for a pint of Coopers PALE (let along sparkling)???
I hate their inattentive staff.
I hate that their inattentive staff short-changed me in my dirt-poor (literally coin stacking now) state and didn't squeeze the lime in my vodka soda.
I hate that they serve everything in plastic.

Am I done?

You're asking me how I can be unhappy with that view, and sun, and booze, and free afternoon on a Tuesday, aren't you?


Well, it is simple. I am a wench. I am a poor, poor, wench.

And I am sick of being unemployed.
The only good thing about Rooftop are the people that I run into that buy me beers in return for my mothering them in their states of poverty.


My wife got hungry so she ordered a salami Piadina. I think it was $8.50, but I could be lying. She was still hungry after this, if that is any indication of the size.

And her housemate (the random dude with the giant 'tasche, whose name I cannot reveal) ordered one with olive tapenade and then chugged half a pint to get back to work on time.

He is a champion, even though he doesn't know it is no longer November.

Christmas part 1

Well, this is strangely the first family Christmas I have had and it went for the whole four days. I'm kind of tired.

Really tired. And I am working every day this week except for New Years day and I am ready to curl up and sleep. But alas, I shall post the meals.

This is the meal that I had at my brother in law's mother's place. She is currently housing her nephew and future niece at her house before they take off and get married three times. They're getting married in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Melbourne...just to make sure everyone in the family knows about it. But, the point was raised about whether or not you could run away at the second one if you got cold feet.

Anyway, I will shut up. Here is the food.

The future bride also did hospitality and she was very delicate with her presentation. This is also good for another reason, but I will get to that later.
(clockwise starting from top left)Salsa in a filo cup, soba noodles, grilled mushroom with cheese and bacon and a mushroom and zucchini kebab.


These oysters were really good. I asked my "aunt" where she got them from and surprisingly, Box Hill market.


Salmon sashimi. Was a little lack lusture, but we noticed that some of the plates were better than others. We make a joke that my "aunt" doesn't actually cook. She makes her famous phone call to the local fishmonger or sushi bar. Really.
Her interpretation of Italian is when you steam cauliflower, eat it with pasta and put a fried egg on top. Chinese is when you steam cauliflower, eat it with rice and put a fried egg on top. "Aussie-style" (as she calls it) is steaming cauliflower, eating it with toast and putting a fried egg on top.
This is actually not a joke and her son will confirm that.


This is a third of the turkey I made. I brined it overnight and roasted it with onion and celery in the cavity, salting the inside and outside and putting butter between the skin and the flesh. I roasted it breast side down, at 180 for 3.5 hours. Guess how much it weighed?
The reason why the future bride is so useful is because after transporting the fucker to my "aunt's" house, we were all trying to pass off carving the bird in fear that it would eat us. She thankfully has to carve one up every week when they serve at the TAFE restaurant, so she saw it as practice. It is also good, cos I would have otherwise treated it like a fucking giant chicken (well, that is how I cooked it, so meh).
Also, used the pan juices to make a gravy. Hmmmm, gravy. The condiment I missed during my vegetarianism.


The sides.
I steamed carrots in a foil bag with wine, butter, honey, garlic and almonds. I also roasted a pumpkin with chili flakes, brown sugar, garlic and sage.
Roasted potatoes and prawns. There was also a giant salad, but it is out of the frame.

This is my brother in law's cousin. My sister asked him for a knife to cut the pear and custard crumble cake that she made and he ended up giving her a butter knife.

Well done, Vincent.

The best part of this is how Honky my parents are. When I told them the bones of the bird would be good for rice porridge, as well as the meat, the literally collected it all, as well as the carcass and (also literally) fought my "aunt" for the bone attached to the drumstick she wanted to keep for later.
It was a Flinstones moment that was rectified when my "aunt" said that she promised she would bring the bone over to their house after she ate it.