it grows

You know that feeling the day after the day after. No more seediness, and the sun's shining. You come home and there's time to play in the garden, to transplant little lettuces and not worry about if they'll get torn up by marauding chickens. The shit that ate your head up last week seems to have scampered somewhere on the dancefloor and you don't feel the need to worry about if it'll come back.

The plants are in so you wash the dirt off your hands and pick the leaves off the radishes, and the young shoots from the pea straw. The nettles you rescued from another garden are growing faster than myspace and you manage to pick a handful without any prickles. So it's into the kitchen..

The greens are washed and wilted in the water that clings to them. They're tossed with chickpea sprouts* and a diced radish. There's lemon juice, balsamic and some of the really good olive oil mum passed onto me. Oh and sesame seeds.

You know the feeling when you're cooking something really good from things you've grown yourself? When you've done unhealthy things to your body all weekend and no matter how hypocritical you just love the feeling of looking after yourself with vegetables and sunshine and maybe a kick of the footy after?

Well maybe it's just me, I shouldn't try and universalise... but I hope you have some similar feeling.

*Chickpea sprouts are so easy and good I can't believe I never ate them until this year. These ones were made when I soaked chickpeas and never got around to cooking them. Instead of leaving them in water to go fetid just drain the water off and then rinse once a day or so.

...

Today I was looking for my favourite Need poster. I found this great story by Rachel from the Need. It fills me with hope, wonder, a measure of self-doubt and also much joy. Maybe you'll like it too:

But rather than go off about Olympia's amazing sense of community and so on, I'm going to tell you a story...so one summer night a bunch of pale-faced dyed-black punker-dykes were hanging out when a gang of lumberjack dykes (that's what we called them) crashed the party and tried to start a rumble. They got away with a trophy and a handful of underwear. Thus began the Olympia Dyke Gang Wars - The Sleazy Fuckers vs. The Scrawny Wusses. You can guess who was who.

There was a midnight face-off in the empty lot behind Gold's Gym. We chased each other with crowbars around the parking lot of the adult video store. A hideous painting of a girl fucking an octopus kept turning up on porches all over town. One night the Sleazy Fuckers took a hostage (she was already in her pajamas) and returned her late that night with a series of polaroids of herself tied up and blindfolded in a dog kennel. P.S. she really liked it...anyway we finally declared a flag code - white on the right if you were open to ambush, white on the left if you weren't. We started hanging out in the Safeway parking lot on thursday nights, car doors thrown open, stereos blasting, the dudes in hesher drag - bandanas, mesh, moustaches, camaro mullets - and the dolls in anklets and heels and halter-tops. We arm-wrestled. We strutted around and played air guitar. We drank coke in a can. It was beautiful.

But eventually we got bored of play-fighting and started talking...now the Sleazy Fuckers were more on the activist trip, and the Scrawny Wusses played in bands and went to art school. We all wanted to do something huge - and what came of our collision/collusion was The Transfused. An original rock opera that took a year to write and another six months of full production - besides working and re-working the music and lyrics and plot, there were auditions, rehearsals, benefits, planning meetings...and we raised almost $40, 000 without corporate sponsorship. Olympia was transformed. Kids moved here to work on it. Everyone got involved somehow - fundraising, sets, props, costumes. The closing show culminated in a parade that took over downtown Olympia. It was indescribable, really. The Transfused couldn't have come together the way it did in anyhere else...Mount Olympus! Whose gods and demi-gods play out the ultimate fictions. Small towns have a protoplasmic quality you can actually feel - it's like functioning at the cellular level. Germination, infection, chromosomal deviation...but the downside of small town living is that it's real easy (apparently) to get comfortable. To settle. I think Olympia's self-made mystique is, at heart, a product of its culture of boredom. It's enough to make you crazy.

Oh please can we all stop with this crazy real life crap, move to the same spot and stage a rock opera? Or make Sandy's queer cowboy movie?

tea with sweet potato!

Yesterday I finally got to go to the Ten Ren Tea House for tea and snacks. I'd been hanging for a visit since I found out they did fake meat.

This stylish little place on Swanston St (146, btw Bourke and Collins) has such an extensive tea list it was making us feel like dumb honkies. What to choose? I resisted Kumquat, though I love the fanta-orange colour. Considered date and chrysanthenum for our health. But went for Sweet Potato Tea Milk tea with Pearl because I couldn't resist. Yes there were pieces of sweet potato in our tea! And in warm tea the sago pearls go delightfully gooey in just the slightest of ways. Good tea.

The food was crazy. And you know I love my crazy food but this was almost crazy in the wrong way. We had vegetarian green tea noodles and vegetarian lemon fish. The noodles were a lovely green colour but covered in a fairly disturbing sauce. It was kind of a vegetarian bolognaise - bits of fake mince and vegies. I think in a skip place I would have rejected it outright but somehow in this context it mostly just amused me. The fish was pretty good - two big chunks of tender fillet with a bit of sauce. This was served with rice and then three little side dishes. Oddly one of the sides was scrambled eggs with tomato.

Yeah, so I'm excited about the potential of tea house. I want to try the tea jellies and I want to try more of the different teas. You get complimentary green tea cookies with a pot of tea. So take me on a tea date?

Meanwhile on the interweb I discovered the lovely Emmy over at Fangrrrl . Lots of music writing. This post about the passing of Sleater-Kinney is amazing. It really made me feel the big hole they're leaving. I almost got teary at work. But then, in the context of today that's not that surprising.

actually...

Hmm.. so actually the Q&A on Electronic Intifada turned out to be pretty dry. There's a lot of other good analysis on there though.

But today I'm really getting a lot from Shax, a blog coming outta Beirut. Really good stuff. Thanks for the link Ash.

Food soon.. I promise.

contagion

Today, for work related reasons, I was in a Salvation Army church welfare office. On the bookshelf there was a big binder, like one of those workbook kits. It was titled How to be a Contagious Christian. Do you think I might have caught something in there?

I have been wanting to post for a while on my felafel tour of Sydney. But yesterday, eating a fine falafel platter at Tiba's and discussing my quest with Sarah, we realised that now is not the time to be debating the merits of Israeli versus Lebanese felafel.

You may find the coverage at Electronic Intifada more useful. I haven't had the heart to read much yet but the Questions and Answers on Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah looks promising.

this dirty queerdo loves dolly

Ok, the sydney food wrap up comes soon… for now let’s just say I think I am fatter. And I think I like the sun.

For now, from the lovely interweb comes yet, another reason to love Dolly:

Throughout the show, the entire crowd was on its feet and the lawn was no longer a quilt, but a sea of people that stretched way into the distance. Some found refuge (and a great view) in the trees, prompting Dolly to say, "Are those monkeys or people up there?" A group of women towards the front waved a bed-sheet sign that read "Dirty Dirty Queerdos Love Dolly" to which she replied, "Well, I love you too."
From Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

This comes via gordonzola who went to a Joan Jett concert where the fans were holding a sign saying “Dirty Dirty Queerdos Love Joan Jett”. Sadly Joan didn’t respond as lovingly as Dolly. There's an argument in this somewhere I think...