Braised Pork Belly - 卤肉饭

Original recipe in Chinese is linked here.

Ingredients: see original recipe for photo (you can use the photo to estimate how much you need)

• 1 big piece of pork belly (~250g)
• 4 Chinese mushroom (冬菇 - soaked to rehydrate it beforehand, you don't really need this)
• 1/2 and onion
• 1/2 a garlic
• 2 bok choy
• 1 egg (I use 2 because I like egg)
• rice

Seasoning:

• 1 tablespoon cooking wine
• 5 pieces of rock sugar (or just a few pinches of sugar)
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon five spices powder (essential for flavour!)
• oil

What the Tour Guide said about Vaucluse House

What follows will be a word dump of everything I remember of what the tour guide said and what I thought was interesting. This is more for my benefit than anyone else's, this is so interesting to me and I don't want to forget it. I wished I'd done something like this after I went to the Sydney Jewsish Museum in year 8 or 9.

I consulted the site of the Historical Houses Trust and Wikipedia during the writing of this to jog my memory and to get the upstairs rooms right, the upstairs area of the house is fairly twisty and confusing and I'm no good with building a mental picture of it when it's not really regular. When I quote the guide, that's from my memory, and it is fallible. The information I've got here may not be absolutely factual depending on my memory and the accuracy of what the guide told me.

Don't read this if you're not interested in the customs and houses of rich early colonial families. You have been warned.

Watson Bay, Vaucluse House, Double Bay ice cream

We had another one of those almost obligatory holiday family outing last Friday (6th July), and it's not the Fish Markets this time! Mum was really prepared this time, she had this old tourist book that the government prints, you know the ones that you get at the airport? She looked through one of those and she had been talking about all these locations for ages before this.


First stop: Watson Bay. Mum wanted to see The Gap, which is these two stone cliffs that you can go on and look out at sea. According to her convicts used to go and stand on those, and looking out at the ocean, it would really hit them that it's next to impossible to escape, so (you guessed it) they would commit suicide by jumping into the ocean. Apparently it still is a prime spot for people looking to commit suicide, because there's a couple of signs telling you there's hope and there's help, and there's a telephone booth with two buttons: one for emergency services, one for Lifeline.

It really is a beautiful place and my descriptions does it no justice at all.

Stumbled on a new radio station

I've just recently (by which I mean the day before yesterday) thought of using an Internet radio app with my iPod amplifiers to replace my actual, old and broken as anything radio. I like the smaller radio stations rather than the large commercial ones because there's literally no ads or segments other than music except the occasional reminder of the name of the station you're listening to.

Right now I'm listening to Light Digital, Melbourne's digital Christian station. Which, obviously, plays Christina themed songs. It's what I think is called religious pop or Christian pop or something, it's like regular pop songs, but they all have lyrics about Christianity. I really really like them. The melodies all fall squarely inside my most comfortable and familiar and most loved sort of music listening area (is there a word for this? they really fit my music tastes?) I like them much better than what most of the other stations are playing, I don't like rapping or really loud music with little to no melody. The music Light Digital is playing just sound really comfortable for me. Listening to radio is always hit and miss, but in the past hour I've only heard one song that I didn't care for (it got a bit too rock and roll with repetitive melody). That's pretty good for me, usually I don't really like one in three songs.

Some of the lyrics of the songs that the guys sing sounds like they're singing about relationships before you find out in the next verse that it's about Jesus. This says something about contemporary love songs with all their hyperbolic cliches like "eternal love" and everything. At least with the Christian songs they actually mean eternal love.

Trivia learnt in Chemistry tutoring

Learnt some fun trivia in Chemistry tutoring today:

People in poorer countries didn't jump on Coke as much as people in richer countries because they were taught to not drink anything that's not colourless. Coke, being brown, must have seemed a little suspicious. So they drink a lot of sprite and lemonade instead.

The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland was a parody of people who suffered from mercury poisoning from the mercury used to soften beaver furs used to make felt hats, which made people go sort of loopy.

That's all folks, I will try to go to sleep now.

Exam was not as stressful as I thought

This is what I did with my time on the train. Very rough, it started with swirly patterns and turned into this. I love the thing on Sketchbook Express on the iPad where you can turn and resize the layer with two fingers.

This exam period wasn't as stressful as I expected, maybe because Chemistry and Physics were both pracs, and now I'm hoping I didn't jinx it. One more exam left, and three days (really only two, but) to study for it. I'll be doing all the past papers for maths extension 1. Then I'll be doing an essay and two assignments for English, fun!

Footsteps in the sand

The "I" who stares back at me from further along the road of my life, what do you see? What mistakes will I make? These footsteps in the sand you leave behind, should I fit my shoes into them, or step out a new path?