Easy Tiger

Mmmm I was out of form tonight and in the rush of leaving the house, forgot to take my camera.  Hence there are no photos to accompany this blog about our dining experience at Easy Tiger.

Tonight was going to be a good night no matter what.  First of all it was a Yetapee Appreciation Society meeting.  All hail the great Yetapee.  Where would we all be without Yetapee?  I wouldn't have graduated from my university degree, that's for sure.  Not only that but I was actually going to physically be in Yetapee's presence along with Mischka, VT and Dr. R - all of whom I hadn't seen in months.  The other thing was that I was going to be dining WITH PEOPLE.  Something I had been deprived of while staying in Rad-City.  

The food at Easy Tiger is South East Asian/Thai influenced and the trendy contribution of 'eating Asian-style' is communal dining.  Or platter sharing if you will.  This ain't new - I've had to share food my whole life!  We happily settled on the banquet between the five of us.

Our dishes comprised of the following:

• Ma hor (prawn, pork & chicken mince cooked in palm sugar, served on fresh watermelon).  Very tasty bite sized starter.  
• Seared hervey bay scallop with fermented yellow bean dressing.  Tasty too. 
• Betel leaf with prawn and fresh coconut.  Very nice too.
• Coconut and galangal soup with shimeiji mushrooms.  Nice at first but starting tasting a bit too salty halfway through.
• Son in law eggs.  I like my eggs with a soft yolk and these were definitely runny.  I like runny eggs on rice but I had always thought that son in law eggs should have a slightly harder yolk?  
• Duck curry - can't recall the details.  Quite nice, I love duck.
• Beef curry - can't recall the details.  A bit too salty. 
• Iceberg, witlof and chive salad.  It's iceberg people, it's not exciting.  For some reason the dressing was a bit too salty.  
• Coconut sago pudding with agar agar, banana fritter and palm sugar sauce.  Well bananas are a premium product nowadays ($12/kg!!).  Yes I did like dessert.  Nothing like a sago pudding to end the night. 

Service was friendly if somewhat a bit superfluous at times.  I'm sure it's a case of the waiter has an instructive spiel which is repeated to all tables but dude, if the dishes have been brought out, if we've already started digging in and if 3.5 out of 5 of us are Asian, there's no need to come over and tell us how to eat rice and curry.  Mixing curry with the rice is like a reflex action.  It was nice of him to not assume though.  Good to see you're doing your job! 

Overall the food was nice enough but there was nothing really outstanding for me.  Some dishes were a fair bit over-salted which left my mouth dry by the end of the night.  It's not enough for me to have a huge whinge but enough for me to take note.

The staff were nice, the food was edible and had it's tasty bursts but I'm feeling quite neutral about the whole experience.  I can sum it up like this: Not bad enough to tell people to avoid the place, but not good enough for me to rave and recommend.  Easy Tiger is not going on my 'must return' list but I'm not averse to eating there again - I'm just not in a hurry to do so.  

Things You Eat When You're Alone Part XI

I try to eat healthy most of the time.  I like to hit up the brown rice, brown bread and organic stuff when I can.  But I'm not a masochist - why deprive yourself?  Eat, drink and be merry!

I had seen McDonalds' new Oven-Baked range on TV.  Fish bakes, chicken skewers, maple McGriddles and a fondant-like choc pot!  Hmmm I was sold.  I wanted that choc pot dammit.  I informed Moo of the new range and she was immediately envious and felt sad that she was missing out.  I dunno what she is whining about - Europe have some pretty good Macca's specials.  She gave me the extra shove of approval I was seeking and off I tottered to McDonalds.

My intention was to go get the choc pot and then come back to my apartment and eat it.  I had assumed that the soft serve which was included with the choc pot would be served on the side.  But no, it was put directly onto the warm choc pot and immediately started melting when it was handed over to me.  So as I shuffled as fast as I could back to my apartment, I had to shovel choc pot and soft serve into my mouth.  I hope this activity made my choc-pot calorie neutral.

This is what the choc pot looked like by the time I got back.

This is how it is advertised.  It looks like for about 5 seconds and then the soft serve starts melting into the warm, warm cake.  

Anyway, by the time I finished the choc pot I kinda felt sick.  I told Moo she wasn't missing out on much.  If anything, eating this choc pot reminded me to stop eating crap.

Not Much Happening (except for some template issues)

Yeah.  Nothing much is happening in Pooeytown.  I am counting down the work days until this stint in Rad-City ends.  Just five more days to go.  Only five.  But the last two weeks have really been dragging on....  Boooo

On the blogging front, I've had a problem with my template for a few months now and it is really bringing out the OCD, anal retentive side of me.  As loyal readers (I like to call them fans) of this blog will know, I changed my template almost two years ago.  I thought I was pretty smart because I managed to tweak to the HTML code of my chosen base template.  It wasn't very fun.  I also managed to modify the HTML codes for the 'Recent Comments' and 'Label Cloud' widgets.  The 'Recent Comment' widget supplied by Blogger does something weird and doesn't colour co-ordinate the font colours (very important for aesthetics!) and the standard Blogger 'Label Cloud' widget wasn't 'cloudy' enough  for me.  Compare my cloud with Mooey's and Kahoon's cloud - you'll see what I mean. Anal, indeed.

So, when Blogger introduced their template designer about a year later, I pretty annoyed.  About frigging time!  I had a play around with the new feature and saw that it very user-friendly.  Excellent for non-IT folk like me.  Where were you 12 months ago?  I was so impressed with the designer, I told Moo to change her template.

Anyway, so the problem with my template now lies in the blog archive.  See those little triangles?  When you click on them, they're meant to expand and list the titles of my previous posts.  I noticed they stopped working on my blog sometime last year.   I thought it was a Blogger issue, but nope, the archive expands on other people's blogs.

So I googled for an answer.  It seems I'm not the only one with the problem but I can't seem to find a way to rectify it.  I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling the widget.  I've tried altering the style of widget to drop-down and flatlist, saving it, republishing, exiting and then going back to change it to the original hierarchy style.  Nup, didn't work.  I tried finding a new HTML code.  Gave up cos I couldn't be arsed reading all that technical stuff.

I think it's got something to do with the Blogger Template Designer and the new templates having different basic HTML design to their predecessors.  Of course, my template would have been based on the older format.  Who bloody knows, I am not a programmer, IT person, computer script writing person.

If I can't find a way to fix it soon, I might have to use the template designer to change the look of the blog again.  That should fix it!

Wigs

I have a spiffy bit of software on my laptop which allows me to use some 'special effects' on my webcam.  Some of them are a bit lame, most of them are quite farnie.  My favourite effects are the wigs and hats.  The camera has a face detection mode and so your accessory of choice follows your head movements, making it all that extra convincing.

Here are a few samples:

Rastafarian Pooey. 

Whitney Houston in her Bodyguard days Pooey.

1980s boyband/Kevin Bacon Footloose Pooey.  I am actually wiping away a tear of laughter here.

I should have taken more snapshots but I was too busy laughing and crying.

RIP Knut

I woke up this morning to some very sad news.  My beloved polar bear, Knut had tragically passed away :(  He was only four years old and very young for his species which can otherwise survive up to 30 years in captivity.

I'm glad that I managed to visit him back in 2007 shortly after the initial Knut-mania.  By then, he had definitely grown out of his puppy-like phase but he was still Knut and I was still happy to see him.  I'm not going to delve into it, but his life was not without controversy.

Knut had recently been put in an enclosure with a few other bears (including his mother who had rejected him) and he was supposedly subject to bullying.  Witnesses who saw the moment Knut collapse report saying it looked like he was having a seizure.  I'm not going to post up the footage, but you can view it here.  It is pretty traumatic to watch :(  Theories are rife that his seizure may have been stress-induced :(  I felt even more sad after reading this German paper's obituary.  :```(

RIP Knut.  I hope you meet your keeper in the Berlin Zoo of the afterlife.  

[Note - It has now been confirmed that Knut died from epilepsy which correlates with the apparent seizure witnessed.]

Understanding Wine - The Final Class

Tonight's class began with blind tasting four wines and a quiz.

The first question was a toughie - is it a red or a white wine?  Super hard question!  Hehehe.  Some other questions included:
- Is it a varietal (one grape type) or a blend?
- Identify the grape.  Chas made it a bit easier by giving us a few grapes to choose from.
- Is it oaked or unoaked?
- Where is it from?  That was one damn hard question.  No one can ever really guess.  But based on chance, we should always guess it is South Australian as they are responsible for 50% of all Australian wine production.
- What vintage is it?  This one did require a bit of analysis of the wine's colour and taste.

Anyway, I fared ok.  17 out of 24!!!  But our table was cheating and discussing answers between us.

The second session was a free for all.  We were meant to bring in any wine we pleased and present them for tasting.  Obviously one bottle of wine can't be tasted by 30 or so people, so we each went up in threes or fours to judge one of the random bottles.

Of the eight bottles up for tasting tonight, three were deemed faulty.  Wow, that's a pretty high strike rate.  It just goes to show that plenty of us are buying and drinking bad wine.  Chas reminds us that you should never be embarrassed about sending a bottle of wine back in a restaurant.  The restaurant doesn't make a loss because the wines are bought on consignment and the winery collects any unsold bottles after a period of time.  But don't make an idiot of yourself, says Chas.  You can't claim a wine to be affected by cork-taint if it had a screw top!

We all snacked on cheese and chocolate and we even got a spiffy little certificate at the end.  Here's to more drinking!!  Cheers!