Posts by Amy Gale
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Ok, seriously now NE-ers - shall we have a PAS holiday get-together?
-
Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to Paul Williams,
died in the arse” remains a favourite and simply means to fail
Is it definitely "died" and not "dyed"? Because the latter could be a sheep-farming metaphor.
-
Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to Danielle,
You're in the cold bit? Come on over. I'll make Neenish tarts.
(See what I did there?)
-
I do love old NZ cookbooks. Plainspoken names. Watercolors of jellies. Disturbing foodstuffs. All of it.
One of my occasionally-repulsive specimens is a post-war Aunt Daisy cookbook. In a world where all the butter is going to the UK, afghans apparently have to be made with cod fat.
There were only a couple of million NZers. Would it REALLY have made such a difference to let them all have as much butter as they wanted before shipping the rest off? After all, there was apparently plenty of cod fat to send if they needed more lipids.
-
Although I have code-switched to "tan square" in deference to the existing conversation, it's always been "caramel cake" in my sub-dialect. This sounds substantially more delicious, although does require the insider knowledge that cake qua cake is not actually involved.
-
For tan square, as for cheese-n-onion sandwiches and other nearly-lost cultural artifacts, your best bet is the smaller regional towns. My best recent lunch stop was in Hawera - lots of the trad treats. I can't say that I recall tan square specifically, though, since I had a Neenish tart in accordance with the informal survey project I was then undertaking. My family found said project (and its custard square co-project) hilarious, although they did manage to stop laughing now and then to participate.
Dear every bakery in NZ that puts buttercream in their Neenish tarts instead of gooey lemony goodness and/or instant pudding in their custard squares instead of custard: please don't kthx.
The other side of things is that tan square is at least relatively straightforward to make for yourself and the ingredients are available even in exotic locales such as London (and Ithaca). Ditto on Neenish tart ingredients, I suppose, although there are more components and I generally end up deciding that I'd rather expend the effort on something with better payoff.
-
Parked cars seem to be a significant part of the menace equation here. Maybe … there just shouldn’t be any. No, really. No on-street parking at all. There’s no reason to take it as a basic assumption that the public roadway should include free vehicle storage.
Then nobody – not people on bicycles, not people in cars, nobody – would be endangered by doors opening or by people pulling out without indicating or checking. Roads would instantly be wider – for free! The edge of the road would become a much more viable location for a cycle lane. And more of the true cost of parking would fall on the vehicle owner, where it belongs.
(Disclaimer: I don’t ride a bike; haven’t since I was a teenager. I’m too scared. Not just of motor traffic, although it certainly doesn’t help. Sometimes I’m a ^%# motorist and sometimes a *^$# pedestrian.)
-
Heh, Danielle beat me to it. Nothing resonates with Hyperbole and a Half better than cake derangement. (Except the effort of adulthood.)
-
The GQ shots, on the other hand, IMO, stepped WAY over that line into soft porn and I HATED them. Very creepy and completely squicky.
Yeah, it's pretty impressive when you can make American Apparel clothing look even creepier than their own ad campaigns do.
-
Lots of parsley --> tabbouleh!