Crude, to be sure, but the truth.
All the same, we have had many adventures in trying new and exciting foods together, already. We've had yum cha, a family feed, dinner with friends, sushi train trials and a whole Japanese festival of goodies. Today, I get to tell you all about the awesome food we've had the last few weeks!
Last Monday, as usual, we went down to Wollongong to take out (yet more) trash, but also to pick up some things to bring back to the Geekden at Gymea. We also took the opportunity to meet up with Wes' friends Sally and John for dinner at Samara's, a Lebanese restaurant. Apparently, this place isn't the "usual" place that they like to go for Lebanese and I quickly learned why.
While the food we ordered was really very tasty, the service we received was sub-par even for Australian standards.
One of the things I've had a hard time coming to terms with in Australia is the lack of customer service, particularly in restaurants. Because gratuity really isn't part of the system here, servers tend to be less anxious to please--this can be good and bad. One one hand, it means you don't have someone hovering over you every five minutes offering you refills or asking how your meal is. They don't show up to try and make friends, interrupt your conversations or generally make pests of themselves. On the other hand, it also means that they really couldn't care less whether you have a good time at their restaurant.
Sadly, Samara's ended up falling into the territory of the latter point rather than the former two.
They appeared to be rather understaffed for the night, with only two waitresses that I saw working both the inside and outside tables. We saw our waitress rarely during the meal and we were there for three hours. She brought us menus when she saw us to our table, she took our orders, brought our food and disappeared until the end of the night when John was finally able to flag her down to take orders for coffee and hot chocolate.
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| At least the food was good. |
We ordered two platters, one of mixed meats (lamb and chicken mostly) and one of mixed vegetables. On top of that, we ordered Beirut Chicken. All three were really quite good and more than enough for the four of us (especially because John was feeling a bit under the weather and taking it easy on food). The meal included flat bread and two different types of spread to eat with the platters.
I also enjoyed my hot chocolate, though Wes' coffee kept him awake most of the night after we got home.
The best part of the meal was getting to know Sally and John, though. Wes had already told me a lot about the both of them, but that doesn't compare to meeting someone in person. They're a very amusing couple and a lot of fun to be around. There were no awkward silences or pauses, ever, and I got along really well with both of them.
Sal was also kind enough to buy us a new tea pot as an early (or late, however you want to look at it) housewarming gift. She also gave us two, double-glass mugs to go with it. Since then, I've ordered some snow dew tea from Korea--a floral tea to deflower the tea pot. Harhar.
A few nights later, Wes finally got around to cooking the two mud crabs that his sister's husband had given us.
He decided to do a simple sweet chili stir fry for his first go at mud crab, as it would be a simple dish to prepare and safe for me to eat. Since I'd never had mud crab before, he gave me the three crabs that came through the cooking safely. The fourth he saved for himself, having mauled it brutally with a hammer before cooking.
He also squealed and squirmed the entire time he was cleaning and taking them apart, due to the many, many inedible things that came out (like gills and eggs and guts). When he'd finished, I casually let drop that I had dissected shellfish in class in the past, along with many other specimens, and could have helped him out if he'd just asked.
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| Mauled, but ready to eat! |
He was displeased by this fact.
Now, something that has been pointed out to me multiple times is that mud crab is an amazing delicacy. It's sweeter than regular crab and demands a seasonal price which can reach forty dollars and up per crab when charged by the kilo. That said, people pay a lot of money to eat these guys at high end sea food places in Australia ...
... how they manage this in fancy dinner attire is beyond my comprehension for one reason:
Mud crab is messy.
Really messy.
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| How I eat crab. |
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| How I open crab. |
We ended up having to take a hammer to the various bits and pieces to get them open and were covered in chili sauce and crab flesh when we were finished. It's really hard to be dainty about eating a mud crab, the same as any other crab, but I did a pretty good job. At least, Wes seemed to think so. He laughed at the "bowl" I made from one of the crabs' claws.
It's also really hard to eat them without getting sliced, diced, cut or pricked, though. Wes and I both suffered some small wounds against the crabs' claws, though nothing serious.
On top of the exotic little jaunts down the food-strewn lanes, I've also had some more mundane and regular experiences. In particular, a fresh fruit market near here has a yogurt counter out front. They have fresh yogurt made daily and mix in their produce for flavor. So far, I've tried the mango and the mixed berry types and both have been awesome.
During weekday afternoons, I often see local students (especially the girls) sitting on benches along the main road, eating cups of their yogurt. It's rather encouraging, really. You don't see that sort of thing happening in the US all too often.
At the end of the week, we put together a dinner for Wes' mother, grandmother and Jeff. I'm not sure what possessed me to do it, but I decided to make risotto without a recipe. Everyone was either out of town or busy watching baseball, so I didn't get a copy of the recipe in time and had to just flub it from a combination of memory, old emails and online recipes.
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| Stirrrrr ... |
Luckily, things turned out pretty okay! The bottom of the pan definitely burned a bit, but the actual risotto that we ate tasted just fine.
Wes' mother also made a sort of cabbage and apple sauer kraut bake. I'm not sure what else to call it, since it wasn't really the same thing, but neither was it a crumble. It was tasty, regardless. She also made gingerbread for dessert, with cream and apple sauce.
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| Mmmmmn...! |
Now, I'm sure that my food adventures will continue into the future. Wes and I have made it a new habit to go to Miranda Fair once a week for grocery shopping and try a new restaurant for lunch. There's a wide variety of restaurants in the area, so we should be able to keep it up for some time!
