In the mood for firsts.

One long endless stretch of road (otherwise known as the Sturt Highway), large open spaces dotted with cattle and tinged with red dust. You are alone, music on full blast with Mary, the voice of your GPS, keeping you company. All of a sudden, you see wisps of smoke coming out of your bonnet and you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. You pull over, reach out for the phone, only to realise you have no reception. There are no houses or buildings in sight and there is nothing to do but to trust in the goodness of some passing motorist to help you out. You suppress thoughts that they may be the next Ivan Milat.

These thoughts raced through my head as I realised my engine was leaking some unknown fluid this morning just before the drive to Griffith. Some phonecalls to dad and I find myself at a service station with my manual out. I deduce its probably water (after some sniffing and all) and consider the possible causes: air con, ruptured hose or phsyiological secondary to temperature changes. Since I have trouble locating my water tank (I tried), I err on the last and hope nothing happens to me from Wagga to Griffith.

2.5hours later and after several bugsplats on my windscreen (remember those highschool Physics questions on Newton's laws?), my trustworthy baby has delivered me safely to Griffith - nope not the one in QLD but the one 2.5hours further inland than Wagga and the proud home of every single pickle you find in your Macca's cheeseburger!

A house decked out in homely country style welcomes me:




In other news, I forgot to record my first time doing my washing. It is a significant milestone each of us have or will come to at one stage of our lives. Of course we will overcome it with our usual self-resourceness but for some lacking in that then the good advice of our mum and friend(s) (in my case i have to credit it in part to Mr Maybe, yes you saw right a mister). However, I did not come out unscathed, my super domestic abilities could not prevent me from burning the first shirt I ironed *cry*.

And if you were wondering, just quietly, I did turn my back on my weekly Delia Smith's challenge...but in favour of a baking bonanza with headchef Sexy Lady and co-sous chef EnergizerBunny for our dear Pyschopathwitch's birthday (you may wonder re: her pseudonym but it's justified seeing that she answered our 2 psychopath screening questions with deadly accuracy - much to our mortification. Angelica if you're reading this - she got your psychopath question right, yes the one that no one gets, and it only took her a minute!!). Jam drops, cupcakes (50 among 6 - great ratio!) and a cake.


Cupcake production factory!


My dodgy heart shaped cupcake and decorating fun


Some jam drops on the side.


Safe to say that Psychopathwitch is happy with the flattering age she's turning?

Oh oh! How can I nearly forget. I broke my rice-drought, final tally of 6 weeks before I have cooked my first serving of rice and Asian food (excl mie goreng).


Happy potplants - X, peppermint, marigold and JAK.

Time to explore my surrounds. Next post will have more on this little town :)

100m oxytocin stat

Top 5 things I’ve enjoyed from my 1 month attachment in Wagga ED:

1. It’s the closest thing we get to Gray’s or ER - triage 1 category MVA (motor vehicle accident) patients next to your category 4 superficial lacerations, the psych patient and the lady with RIF (right iliac fossa pain), the man with chest pain and your kid with the fall. What's more, the romance side does exist - consultant-reg engagements, doctor husband & wife teams and so on.

2. Not having to maintain long attention spans with the constant turnover of patients and turfing them to ICU/med/surg/gynae/ortho reg once they're stabilised.

3. Masquerading as a super keen medical student coming in at the nightshift purely because I can sleep in and enjoy my day + the 24/7 brightness of the place which makes you oblivious to the passing of time at night.

4. The interns, regs, nurses and consultants who took me under their wing and were keen to show me things, let me do assessments even if it meant taking that much bit longer.

5. Being able to do basically anything - clerk patients, write up discharge letters and putting a catheter in a conscious man despite the fact I’d never done one before “it’s ok love, just give it a go and i'm sure you’ll get it right...” (yes this was very reassuring)

Some moments in ED:

1. My first cannulation (which I got in *yipee) stolen right under Mr ChinUps nose.
2. The girl involved in the MVA with 2 deceased on the scene. My first trauma call and realising how she was my sister's age.
3. The 7 year old kid who required 3 nurses to restrain him at the referring hospital and spent 3 hours yelling and not letting anyone come near his abscess. We fixed him up under some very high doses of NO...
4. The middle-aged man in and out of consciousness with decompensated liver failure and his tearful wife (who I randomly found out was good friends with Miranda Kerr's mum at Gunnedah, good as in running around in each other's lawns as a child and so on).
5. A psych kid who I didnt talk to but was asked to supervise for a couple of minutes while the security guard took a break. His smile reminded me of something that came straight out of a psycho horror movie.

So can I picture myself as an ED specialist doctor twenty, thirty years on? Possibly. Door remains open for this particular field.


PS. Seriously craving decent Asian food at the moment. Even MSG. Hit me with it. Probably explains my mis-hearing of "peking duck" for "picking careers" this morning....guess this calls for mie goreng time!!

La dolce vita - cooking Italian.

They say that you can learn alot about yourself from what others perceive of you. But I've found that you can also learn alot about yourself from cooking.

Heading to Griffith next week for a fortnight placement I thought it might be a good idea if I got in touch with my Italian self for some transient de-boganisation time as well as seeing that Griffith used (or still is?) to be one of the drug capital of NSW complete with Italian mafia* and all. This aside, apparently it has some great Italian restaurants which I am quite keen to taste when I get there.

So I guess it doesnt get more Italian than to try and make your very own tomato sauce from scratch (yes think barefeet thumping tomato squelching time...minus the barefeet), meatballs + spaghetti time!






All sorts of tomatoes!

Starting the cooking process, I quickly learn that 1) I suck at finely chopping onions and 2) most likely because I can't see what I'm cutting on account of the waterfall of tears springing out of my eyes. Confession, I cried cutting shallots during Year 8 food technology. On a brighter note, the highlight of the cooking was in fact de-skinning the tomatoes which is analogous to tearing apart those oh-so-easy plastic wrappings (think Ferrero Rocher type) as compared to ones that require teeth and key. Though, on a more medical note it morbidly reminded me of 'de-gloving' injuries. However, I will choose not to divulge on this particular term and instead let you curious people google/wiki that one up.


My favourite part of the cooking - deskinning tomatoes...




Tomatoes, basil, onions and garlic on the stove to simmer for 1.5hours...I get started on the meatballs. Instead of just ordinary pork mince, I decide to opt for veal/pork mince though not sure if my tastebuds are trained enough to even tell the difference (in retrospect, no they aren't) but they sound fancier to a tee so it's all good. And here comes the part where I get to the usual uh-oh skipped that line part. Except that this time, I don't (amazingly!). Instead, accounting for my amazing cooking knowledge, I somehow mix "mixer" up with "blender" as was pointed yet again by Ali, my fountain of wise cooking advice... also known as common sense. However we figure that the recipe shall survive, considering that we actually don't have a blender around anyway.



I forget to mention that at this time there are 4 other Wagganians bustling about the kitchen and it is a bright spark who decides to bring in the pod-stereo and we start humming and a dancing to the velvet smooth tones of Michael Buble's new album. And it is at this stage that I can imagine cooking (maybe less frantically) middle aged (but 40 is the new 20?) with a glass of redwine and good music in the background...imagination says somewhere Spring time in Tuscany! 3) I like to move it move it (in the kitchen) :)

Back to reality and I venture out to inject something new to Delia's recipe. Gasp. Me a stickler for rules and gram-for-gram recipe reading? You betcha. As I'm rolling up the meatballs, I decide to put a teaspoon of parmesan in the middle theorising that when I grill them, they will hopefully have melty centres! I also figure that as I have spent the last 2 hours cooking and progressively gotten hungrier, bigger meatballs = quicker prep time (in my defense one can say it's all for research purposes...with the question being what's the best meatball size?).



The finished product

And here you go, home-made tomato sauce, meatballs and spaghetti. I have to admit that my tomato sauce is the first recipe turn-out to look somewhat dodgy next to Delia's (will require fine tuning in the future) and I deduce its from my sub-optimal simmer temperature that has incompletely evaporated the juices to leave something less than a "jam-like consistency" as it should have been. Nonetheless, at this stage I'm just happy to sit down and enjoy my meal, with or without my red wine and Tuscany backdrop.

PS cheese in meatballs is a win. highly recommend it!


* An interesting hypothesis proposed by MisterChinUps: the gangster walk may have some medical pathology underlying it. Given gangsters tend to bust caps in gangster asses, injury to the gluteus medius muscle may produce a Trendelenburg gait. However such a gait could be interpreted as 'cool' and hence picked up by the rest of the gangster community giving rise to the 'gangsta walk'.

Canadian Buttermilk Pancakes with Maple Syrup

I learnt at a relatively early age (Year 8) that breakfast was actually good for you. Well the main point(s) I retained from that Food Technology lesson was how breakfast can improve your concentration and attention spans (being the nerd that I was/am this was a good key point) and how it jumpstarts your metabolic activity for the day and you can get away with lower portion sized lunches and dinner (generally a good point for any girl).

Following on from the community spirit initiated by M (we had our first communal/family dinner on Thursday digging in to some Vietnamese spring rolls and apple pie) I decided that I'd share the baton and throw a Sunday pancake breakfast. And it goes without saying that the recipe would be Delia's.



Now I had made pancakes in the past, but being a city girl and you know how it is living in the city, with no time and many lots of big and little things to do...I had always 'cheated' and took the easy way out - i.e. use of premade pancake batter. So to make pancake from scratch is quite exciting for me.

Maybe I said that a little too early. For we (I being the main cook, SexyLady my sous chef maker of the accompanying creme fraiche and Ali the provider of sage cooking advice) found that cooking by and with me is a slightly anxiety-driven experience. E.g. my slight neuroticism drives me to try and follow a recipe to the word (hence it was a moderately stressful activity getting 450g of flour right using cups of 140.867g to make up for a non-existent weighty thing). It doesn't help that I always seem to skip half a sentence in each recipe and hence proceed to do something half right (thank you SexyLady for helping me out on this occassion!). Funnily enough, throughout my usual mildly adrenalin charged cooking exercise, I still manage to find it soothing and comforting (definitely when it comes to the eat & enjoy part).

Batter made, now the fun part - frying the pancakes! It is at this point that I get greatly amazed at the perfection of Delia's recipe. The pancakes rise as the bottom comes together taking on the appearance of movie-worthy pancakes (which should make flipping easier....however due to our ah lack of flipping competence my amazement turned to momentary despair when the first pancake went splat onto the floor come flipping time). Not to worry, the perfection of Delia's pancake recipe persisted and the proof is in the photos below:





Needless to say it was well received with the 2 leftover pancakes gobbled up by one-who-shall-remain-anon come lunch-time (his 4th rounds).

And the community spirit baton was quickly taken up by another. Spoilt by a vegan chocolate cake* for afternoon tea, courtesy of MissLovelyP.



*No animals were harmed in the making of this cake.

Marinated Rump Steak & Aligot

It is interesting to note that here I am, thrown some 700km away from Sydney and the first cuisine I chose to have was from an Asian joint (the worst I've had, re: post #1). Now in line with adapting to the true blue Aussie feel of this place (I have to admit that yes I think my accent is getting that much stronger!), I've decided to pick a most Oz appropriate dish from Delia Smith's cookbook for my very first cookout....steak! (Beind the medstudent that I am, I figured this would also bump up my iron levels for a while *yipee).

Now, there is actually a story behind this series of cookouts from Delia Smith's aptly titled "How to Cook: Book One".



A friend of mine (whom I shall name MisterPanda), worried that I might end up raving mad by the end of my long banishment here without some sort of outlet figured that I might use a challenge to keep my sanity (and that I guess would also indirectly serve to help transform me into an actual domestic goddess...on the presumption that I actually manage to produce edible food!). Now this challenge is made all the sweeter given the conditions set by MisterPanda: cook a meal per week from Delia's cookbook (~40 for the 40 or so weeks I shall spend in Wagga this year) and get a meal shouted at a decent place by the end of it. How could I possibly refuse?

And so here begins my culinary attempts to cook. Up until this phase of my life, my prior cooking experiences were limited to baking (and admittedly there was an earlier experience where I forgot to put the flour in my biscuit mix...with disastrous results; but I digress) suffice to say that I am looking forward to: learn how to poach an egg perfectly (despite my egg allergy!), make the fluffiest roast potatoes and just cook to eat some hearty meals.

Now the first spot of trouble I had was grocery shopping. Prime example: recipe specified "Lancashire cheese" however I couldn't find this at the local Woolies so had to be happy with "Chesire cheese" which I thought would kindof be the same as they had the most similar sounding names....Next was the marinade which went well enough. However when it got to the aligot part (which is a fancy name for cheese + garlic mash), instead of whizzing out the blender (to produce silky smooth mash) I opted instead for the good old masher (I thought that it would be beneficial for my tofu arms).

Highlights included:
* the mashing of potatoes whilst watching the finals of Australian open males single;
* the juxtaposition in the kitchen of me, chinese girl, cooking my rump steak next to MrChinUps, Aussie bloke with his Aussie flag of a boardshort, making his Asian inspired stir fry complete with bokchoy + sesame oil; and
* the preparation/cooking time which went into 1.5hours but subsequent consumption of everything (inc plate licking) within 10 minutes (it was that DELICIOUS.)

So what my dish was meant to look like:



And the finished product!



Think I can safely say that this was an A-ok effort!