look at moi (II)

I said to Carney recently that I was going to use my maiden name as my writing name and my married name as my normal name.  This is for self important protective reasons - i.e. in case I become brilliant/controversial and people want to kill me aka Steig Laarson, etc., but mainly because I miss my old name.  It was a good name.


Anyway, that was before I send this into Onya Magazine:
http://www.onyamagazine.com/lifestyle/the-year-i-became-polish/ 


Kitty x

wednesday night at the vegie bar

gen is a vegetarian that eats bacon when on first dates. she reminds me of nina from offspring but in a good way. i won't add that she's one of 12 and grew up on a dairy farm because she gets that all the time. she's a technophobe without a facebook account. this is for reasons of living in the dark ages and not fear of terrorism or bad photos; i think she uses a typewriter at work. if you google gen there is a different gen of the same name who's written 'i am gen i hate school'. this gen would prefer people didn't speak to her while she eats her breakfast.

tara 'brown eyes-blue eyes'/'five fingers' is an early adopter with a thermomix and a hair dryer purpose built for curly hair.  she gets up earlier than the sun and stole clothing as a child.  it was from her sister though, so not actually a criminal offence (just offensive from the sister's point of view).  she's got lovely skin and her teeth/mouth are not nearly so prominent as this picture suggests.  she likes to speak to people while she eats her breakfast.

last night we three went to the vegie bar on brunswick st, fitzroy and had many interesting conversations.  


kitty x

the usual, pictorial version

Refer this post.

This is what that shit looks like:

uugghhhh.  and chef nagaskai brought it out.  

Kitty

hunter gatherer-ing at the preston farmers market

Nothing feels more virtuous than rolling your calico bags, preferably with a dog in tow, to a market of a Saturday morning (except, maybe driving past Revolver on your way home and staring superiorly at people smoking while they queue to get back in).

We used to hightail it to the Vic, but now the mountain comes to Mohammad; the Preston farmers market is on at the primary school two or three streets over.  I like it - it's small but big enough and the stall holders are all chatty, genuine farming types...  The butchers are especially nice.   

Probably the best guy though is the egg and mushroom man.   

 

image credit

He's curious looking with big oogly blue eyes and is uber enthusiastic about his eggs, and so he should be - you can buy a dozen double yolk eggs for like, $6.50 and he has photographic evidence of triple yolk eggs.  I like to have the same conversation with him each month about the lack of regulation in relation to 'free range' status.  It's a pretty good conversation, definitely worth repeating - I've a few interesting facts I like to relay and he listens patiently.  Sometimes I re-imagine this conversation in my head.

The other goodie is the chai lady, I'd wager best chai in Melbourne.  She sells it hot and in tea/concentrate form.  The concentrate is as distinct from syrup and doesn't have any sugar/honey/sweetener in it.  She tells me it is easy to make too, but turns out chai isn't half as appealing when you have to make it yourself.  Bit like rice paper rolls I suppose.

Kitty   

the great wall

As promised:





I love that Sydney Olympics poster.  My mum got it for me after I volunteered in the pavilion that held the rhythmic gymnastics and basketball.  It was pretty awesome - I got to meet the US 'Dream Team' (flagrant exaggeration - saw them from afar) and rather insensitively asked a crying Romanian gymnast to let me hold her bronze medal while gushing 'You're amazing.  No seriously, I can't even touch my toes.  Can you take a photo of me?  Maybe one more?  I have a double chin...  Angle it downward'.  Fact is, I had a double chin in most of those photos and chronic camel toe on account having porked it on in the time between I got my uniform and the  Olympics actually rolled around.  They were beige pants too so it was particularly camel-y.  Unfortunate.  


Kitty 

canned goods = very good indeed

K-Dog and Bel came over on Saturday and we ate/drank/were generally merry.  The merry-ness extended to the consumption of fois gras-in-a-can Carney and I purchased on our honeymoon:  

It was delicious, you have no idea.  


Kitty

eating rawsagne, etc.: yong green food, fitzroy

When I asked my friend Geeta if she wanted to come eat raw food with me, she was all like: ‘For shiz – lets rip raw meat from the bone with our teeth’.  And I was all: ‘Nah, man –vegetarian-like’.  And she was like: ‘mmm... sounds lame’, and I was like: ‘whatever, just come watch me eat’.  And she did and it was awesome.  Not just because of my mad knife/fork skills, but because we went to Green Yong Food.

 

Green Yong Food, located in Melbourne’s inner north, is an herbivore’s delight.  The vegetarian, vegan-friendly menu includes raw Mexican, Italian and Japanese-inspired dishes as well as cooked Korean fare.  Dispel any fear of carrot sticks because there’s an impressive gastro-sleight of hand at work; soy masquerades as beef, chicken and fish, and vegan cashew cheese, the standout of the zucchini-noodled ‘rawsagne’, tastes like it’s harvested from hand-milked grain-fed organic cows.  Top the savoury stuff off with raw, gluten free, vegan cheesecake and you will just wish you had allergies.   

Yong Green Food - 421 Brunswick St, Fitzroy 

Kitty 

yoga review: the ashtanga yoga centre of melbourne

FYI - The yard is back to normal as we don’t think Carney’s parents want to buy the house next door after all. Hopefully no amazing potential neighbours were put off by the garden being temporarily turned into a tip (see here). Maybe we’ll bake something and stand in the yard trying to look friendly/not deranged during the next inspection. That wouldn’t be weird at all.


This weekend I missed my Studio Yoga class for terribly un-zen reasons, involving cocktails and (critically) not involving dinner (unless you count cans of tuna desperately and rather unsatisfyingly inhaled at 1am ‘dinner’. I certainly do not). So Sunday morning, recovered, I went to the Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Melbourne in Fitzroy. In fact, I nearly missed the AYCoM class as well because it’s upstairs and I queued behind two girls standing, chatting at the front door. This would have been fine had they also been queuing, but I was the lone ranger on that count and consequently looked like a sort of desperate, lingering eavesdropper.


The awkwardness continued upstairs when the instructor informed me I’d managed to bowl up for a make-up class for people doing their Intro 1/Intro 2 program. This appeared to be big deal and after lecturing me on how little I’d know (nothing) relative to how much everyone else would know (everything) the instructor finally said ‘we’ll just take it easy’ in such a way so as to convey that she was doing me a favour and that she disproved of me generally. She made this point even more apparent by asking, at the start of the class, the ‘intro one’ people to put up their hands, then the ‘intro two’ people to put up their hands, and then – pointed look in my direction - ‘those who just came along’ (of which there was one) to put up their hand. Undeterred, I vowed to impress her with my downward dog (which is impressive) and generally awesome yoga skills (grossly overstated).

That said, WOW. AYCoM is awesome. For all her fastidious intro 1/intro 2-ing the instructor was fantastic. She touched me several times (tick, tick!*) but even if she hadn’t I’d still be singing her praises. There was lots of movement, no pretending to be a potato and minimal blanket work. I expect it would be a good place for advanced yoga too – their most senior class is the aptly named ‘MySore’ and runs for between 1.5 and 3 hours. Personally, I think three hours is a bit long in the tooth, but nice to know such options exist (pending achievement of respective intro courses I hasten to add).

Four and a half stars. Great workout. Polished floorboards. Slight Nazi vibe on check in.


Kitty

*In a posture adjustment way. Refer 5 star rating systems. 

a rather effective deterrent

The house next door is up for sale and Carney's parents are interested in buying it (as an investment).  In a bid to discourage others Carney has transformed the front yard:

Kitty 

top five: links

1. The $120 Food Challenge. Sandra (we got on a first name basis about 5 minutes ago) started this healthy/budget cooking blog when she was unemployed, on Centrelink and had a family to feed for $120 a fortnight. Which is $60 a week. Which is nothing; if Carney and I ate on $60 a week we'd be millionares. Now I think Sandra has a job teaching people about cooking and her blog is being made into a book. Nice story, eh? Also she has a whole section called 'make it with mince' - a cooking category most under-utilised.

2. This awesome website Do yoga with me has free online yoga and pilates workouts.  It's great - I've been doing some of Fiji McAlpine's (this and this) - but there's a heap to choose from.  You pick from level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), from intensity (relaxing, vigorous, etc.), and also type (power, vinyasa, etc.). 

3.  Food/wellbeing blogs can be a bit nauseatingly ethical/'Pollyanna'-ey, but I luhrve Sarah Wilson's. Because I lurve Sarah Wilson.  We have a one way relationship in which she  says things like 'eat organic sheeps milk yoghurt and meditate' and I talk about doing it.  She's just written and released an e-book about quitting sugar.  The 'sugar' includes fructose, which is the sugar in fruit.  Her book makes the bold and outlandish promise to make you a nicer person, so I've gifted it selectively.           

4.  My secret shame.  Links to all kinds of free tv shows.  Like America's next top model. Like Jersey Shore.  If you're into that sort of thing, which I am like, totally not. I only watch documentaries about the middle east/Palestine and other such things dripping with educational value.  


5.  The Brick House.  I wish our house looked like this. Instead our combined style orients more in this direction:

I am mostly to blame. 


Kitty