Bakery Trade Show 2010- Food Service Australia

I was lured by the promise of food-lots and lots of it!, bits of cool machinery and exciting new products out in the market. And yes, the free entrance.

Bakery Competition.

A competition using breads as medium to create almost life-like sculptures. There seem to be a recurring theme too. I think it has something to do with this guy called Ned Kelly. Apparently, he is a bushranger/ outlaw... Strange theme. Anyway, it was interesting to see all these bread sculptures and taste all the excess breads, generously given away by the chefs.

Decorative cakes.

Freebies. Yes, that is why we're here.

It was interesting to see that there were quite a variety of machines on show. Apart from your standard deck ovens, there were huge rotating ovens that can bake an entire push-cart of baking trays (abit like in the airline kitchens), hi-tech cleaning equipment to automated piping machines (for choux, shortbread, macarons, you name it), and automated doughnut-maker (from start to end-piping, frying, glazing). There were so many automated this, automated that, that, to tell the truth, I started asking what is the point of a pastry chef, of a human being? And is Australia heading in that direction? In a world that is fed by machines? I hope not. I still want to be fed by humans.

End.

Macquarie Visions. Vivid Sydney

From 21 May to 21 June, Energy Australia and Vivid Sydney has put together a series of light installation by projecting light images onto monumental buildings. It starts From St Mary’s Cathedral and Hyde Park Barracks to Parliament House, the State Library of NSW and The Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

My first impression of St Mary's was eerie. It looked like a ghost church from far. Then as I advanced, it looked like a church on fire because of all that red, fiery light. I liked it best when it had blue and white colours projected on. It looked like the starry night. You get to enjoy this weird mix of aboriginal and classical music playing throughout the light exhibit too. =)

End.

Class Excursion to Fish Market

Happy Birthday Chocolatesuze

29th June 2010, I was invited to Chocolatesuze's birthday party. The invitation was extended to all Sydney food bloggers. I felt honoured to be invited, after all, my blog does not strictly qualify as a food blog. It has bits and pieces of my personal life too. And I was excited! Excited to meet a bunch of people who likes to eat, shoot and share, like me! Who cares if I have never met them before? I reckon since we speak the same language (that is food), we can talk about food for the entire time. For example, "Hi I'm Heidi. What do you think of Adriano Zumbo's.....?"

Ja and I got a box of chocolates from Belle Fleur for Susan. I got a few extra salted caramel chocolates for us to taste. Row strongly recommended them. I'm totally for salted caramel chocolates now...

At City Hotel, Kent Street. Bloggers started to fill the space by around 3.45pm. Blogger count: 60 in attendance. It was interesting to see the different kinds of people that make up Sydney's blogging community. My observation shall end here for I have yet to learn the tactful way of presenting my opinions so that I do not offend people.

The blogger community is like college. You have the popular crowd, the intellectuals, the party animals, the nerds, the silly bunch of girls and a few clueless people like us: Heidi, Ja and Monica. I guess you can call us the outcast...

With Susan, the birthday girl.

Susan's giant birthday cake. Chocolate flavour, is it any surprise?

Generous serve of finger food.

In case you are wondering why everyone dresses so strangely. The theme for the party was: Back to School. The strangest so far is the lady below. She is a blackboard.

End.

Out of routine

I went through a forest to get to school. How strange does that sound? Why did Heidi want to get to school that badly that she had to trek though soil, fallen dead leaves and tree roots?

To be honest, I did think of giving up and returning home. Twice. But since I am such a goody-two-shoes, I stuck out to the end. Now you know the end of this particular story, you might be wondering what led to it. Don't worry, you won't have to back-track far.

You see, as with all typical Mondays, I slept in. It was a cold morning (as with all other mornings of the week..) and that is all you need for an excuse to stay nice and warm under your blanket with the electric heater turned on. As a result, I was late for my bus. (though I suspect the 518 bus arrived earlier than usual- I was at the busstop only one minute late..) I took the 501 bus, which arrived 15 minutes later, an awful long time that I spent debating whether if I should return home and slumber on. I did not, however.

The 501 bus, unlike 518, brings me to the back of my school, which usually requires a walk through the meandering gardens of the horticulture faculty. I quite like the gardens actually, and would gladly take this route if I could wake a little earlier to catch the early 501 since the garden route takes abit more time. I think by this time it is quite obvious that I was late for school.

Coincidentally, the gardens were closed for a huge make-over, the entire horticulture section was walled-up. One of the construction worker, on his way out, had kindly told us the alternative route to school. Now enter Chris, my classmate who was in the bus with me. While following the given advice, Chris had discovered a little path which looked like a short-cut to school. Perhaps it was our over-eagerness to get to class, we dumbly took the short-cut. It wasn't before long that we realised something was wrong.

The short-cut itself was under construction as well. Great. Faced by a dead end, my only natural response is to turn back and continue with the advised path. Chris thought a little differently and for that I really admire him. He gave his surroundings a good scan-over and said to me: okay, now, we create our own path. Just like that, relying on Chris' sense of direction, we deviated from the stone path and headed for school.


Yes, and that was Chris' chosen path, the fastest way to get to school. He chose to climb a rather steep slope. (above) We stood there for a while, contemplating. This was when I thought for the second time: I want to go home... Then Chris turned around and said: "well, I can climb this. But I don't know if you can..." I wished I said something along the lines of: Of course I can, lead the way! But at that moment, I think I muttered: "let's go..." in a small small voice.

Clutching at dried bushes, trees and Chris' helping hand, together, we spilled onto the bright sunny school field, with lots of soil and dried twigs in my shoes and a few weird stares from passerbys. Thanks Chris. We made it to class, slightly late.

Now you ask, why did I want to get to class so badly? There was a test, duh. Who would want to go to class?

Bits of My Mundane Life

Writing for the sake of writing is pretty lame, which is what I am currently doing because well... I feel compelled to blog, or rather I am bored and have nothing better to do and I am too lazy to transfer pictures from my camera to the computer, hence this is me recycling my old pictures. I don't think I have anything of interest to share with you guys, unless of course if you are family or friends. Now that you have been warned...

I'm going to share my tiny bits of mundane life with you.

As you know, I am a student at LCB, Sydney, in the middle of Certificate IV (Hospitality Management) term 2. I am well into my third week of school after my summer holidays, and I can safely say that school has been quite bland, like gooey porridge. Out of the three subjects I am having this term, one we have covered last term, and one I have covered in high school when I was 13. I am miserably miserably bored at school. You know what I do when the teacher repeat the slides from the powerpoint? I draw, scrawl, invent codes that only I would understand and write French curses all over my lecture notes...

On the other hand, my foodie life is good. I cook a fair bit.. either that, or Elise would cook and I'll head over for dinner. We always try to make the other happy, so you can imagine, dinner is usually quite good. Weekends are usually reserved for visits to bakeries/patisseries/cafes/restaurants. Actually I would love to go on foodie tours on every non-school days (make the best out of my remaining days in Sydney) but due to the lack of company, lack of funding and my desire to not be fat, I will stay home and read books instead. Although on the bright side, I do have a japanese degustation dinner planned at the end of the month. And maybe Tetsuya in July. Maybe.

Two weeks in Sydney now and I haven't had a cup of decent gourmet coffee. Don't know why but something always happen. Last week I had a cold, so no coffees since the caffeine dehydrates you. This week was too warm for coffees. All I wanted was a cold banana and raspberry smoothie. Well, I will be going to campos next week, and hopefully I will be in the mood by then.

I miss Japan terribly. The nice air, food, hot springs and many many things. And you of course, who had kindly taken the time to read this post. =)

Dinner by Myself

I had dinner by myself last night,
sitting by the seaside
looking onto the far side.

I had dinner with Schubert, Mozart and Chopin last night,
a march, a sonata,
a song and a waltz.

I had sushi and nutriwater for dinner last night,
watching dogs run by
and people running after their dogs.

Last night I had dinner,
with me, myself and I.

End.

Already homesick

I have this terrible illness.

It makes my heart ache, my stomach hurt and my eyes water.

The extreme uneasiness is there in my gut. I know somehow that something is not right.

All I want now is to go home.

To do list.

Scrap-booking to kill time.

I think I have drafted this post like at least 3 times. I have made up my mind this is going to be the last time before I change my mind completely and shut up. Well, basically, I am not exactly satisfied with myself lately. I have been feeling lousy about my performance at school. It just seemed that everyone in class is improving so rapidly, that being good at what I am doing to simply inadequate. I have to be excellent. Or at least the pressure is there.

In addition, my birthday is just round the corner. I acutely feel the need to re-evaluate myself. To account for what I have accomplished and what I have yet to accomplished. Which, is another concern in itself because I have not done much so far. I am indeed feeling very lousy.

Learning French is not something I can brag about, after all, I am repeating what I have learnt in Singapore.
Loosing weight is an on-and-off affair. I am not too pro-active about it which explains why the results are slow to show.
Searching for work is not successful at all. No one called. ._. I am an unemployed, non-contributing member of the society.

I need to stop feeling so negative. Bahh.. Screw negativity. I am not the mopping kind anyway. I'll get over this mess. :D (I have decided what I wrote was crap but decided to post it anyway because it did help me to straighten out my thoughts.)

Sawee has finished IAP and is feeling very relieved. Michelle is overworked in Beijing but at least it is ending soon. My brother has gone nutso with philosophy talking about milo and mega-watty smile. (go read his entries, I find them quite meaningful.) Aileen has a crush on her History teacher.

What am I doing?

Generally termed as resisting change, where one refuses change, for better or for worse. I am stagnating in my own nonsense. haha.

I am so bored that I am actually irritated! Help!

Library

I promised to show you guys the great-looking library I go to right? Here it is. Very un-library like. It looks like a court-house more than anything. But they have the most amazing collection of books. They even have Japanese anime DVDs that you can borrow home. Naruto, Inuyasha, Initial D... I am absolutely in library heaven. Haha. All my cookbooks, gardening books, art books, design books are here. Hell, they even have my favourite genre of fiction books. heehee.

People staying near the library gets membership for free. People like me who live not too close to the library, pays 15 dollars for the annual membership. I get to borrow 20 items (books, DVDs, CDs) and 5 toolkits for 3 weeks. Not bad eh?

12 bucks fish and chips of the stand. Fish is not fresh and not cooked. Calamari feels like it is coated in sand. Umm, not my ideal kind of fish and chips and a complete waste of my precious allowance. Urghh, looks good in the photo though.The library.

The balloon outside the library. It is a dome actually but I like to call it the balloon. You can go in and send encouraging message to Australia's Olympiads for free I think.

End.