Mondays

  1. Did you know that a size 14 chicken only takes an hour and a half to cook in the oven?? So why not a roast chicken on a Monday? I usually do a whole clove of garlic mashed into olive oil flavoured with Old Bay seasoning, pepper and garlic-herb salt. Two hefty wedges of butter are inserted into each breast, just under the skin. I don’t normally do gravy, but since I’m having rice for this one, I’ve kept the juices and spiked it with a few lashings of Maggi seasoning.

  2. Ugh, the gym is starting to smell (uhm, from the people working out) because the temperature is a bit warmer.

  3. Spring is in full swing.

  4. Rice and chicken take-away meals at the supermarket! (we live a part of Auckland where the ethnicity is partial to rice).

The (working) Weekend

  1. Over-salted margarita glass

  2. HATE manual labour

  3. Do cleaners look at your stuff and judge you?

  4. Cambridge is a great town

  5. Indian without much of the omnipresent curry flavour is refreshing

This week

I must admit that I’ve always felt a little miffed when someone asks me how my weekend went because:

  1. Equally good stuff also happens on the weekdays

  2. A failure of imagination about how else to greet a co-worker

  3. I’m not really inclined to share how my weekend went (it has never, ever been my greeting on a Monday or Tuesday at work).

  4. I’ve never been curious as to how people spent their weekend.

But now, I’ve fallen into the habit lately of just highlighting my weekend (and sharing it to the world lol) because admittedly, we’ve been planning it a bit better which makes all the difference in feeling that not only have you accomplished something, but that you somehow triumphed over time itself and its ever fleeting nature (more so it seems when you’re absolutely doing nothing).

But I still wallow in not caring about time at all- I normally sleep past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, I wake up just before 9am, I take leisurely naps.

But weekdays are also a goldmine of pockets of time where you can move things along and not be stuck in the cycle of your 9 to 5 or 8 to 4:30 in my case. If you’re fortunate that you’re in charge of your own time, then get as much out of it as you can.

The Weekend

We’ve been a bit ‘remiss’ with our respective dieting regimens so we figured that ugh, before we went back to it again, we’ll have a great weekend eating anything we fancied which ended up more or less, actually still being healthy anyway.

  1. Cafe Koko is our go-to local for home-made Japanese food. Run by an actual Japanese couple whose relationship status we’re still trying to figure out as tactly as we could, the space looks like a typical Japanese neighbourhood eating place. You can’t fault the food for price, presentation or flavour.

  2. Restaurant Month 2025 has wrapped up (runs all through the month of August), and I won’t being doing another round of I could haves and should haves. But we did manage to get a good five-course meal on the last day at Hello Beasty; I dithered between their famous Prawn toast and sashimi, but I ended up picking the latter.

  3. There’s a shop called Martha’s Backyard that sells American food stuff and it’s funny how in a different lifetime, Cheerios, Hostess Twinkies, Lays, Kraft Mac N’ Cheese singles and Candy Corn were stuff you thought you’d be eating the rest of your life. I got a Butterfinger bar and a popular Chik-fil-A sauce which fulfilled its promise of being great on everything.

  4. Found a bag of glutinous rice flour after my pantry clean-up; so had to make mochi.

  5. Goodbye to winter, hello spring.

How are you?

I have an acquaintance who’s asked me regularly for years how I was- it was always, hey how are you? And for years, I replied every time with, I’m fine and just so busy. And that was that which is really so stupid if you think about how regular it is (once a month at least).

I could blame myself for reciprocating with such a lack of enthusiasm, but it was actually always the truth. I guess I could tell them of milestones or big events, but there are no such things in my life. I don’t have a family of my own for one thing, where a child’s achievement (or failure!) or a spouse’s adventure (or misadventure) could be passed off as my own doing. I could make things up- I’m good at this when I need to be - but elaborate fictions are probably better written down instead. I could say something about my day, how it’s almost always okay; how I look forward to dinner because it’s something I had planned for a week in advance; about how maybe I should try sleeping earlier, or reading a book instead of perusing what’s on offer on all the streaming channels as if I was on a night in town, hunting for a hook-up to waste two hours of my time on (and inevitably, predictably logging off because nothing caught my eye).

But that takes a lot of energy that I honestly, simply don’t want to spend. Sorry D, you could always read my blog you know.

But I am willing to spend energy for the precious few friends that I have, so…

  1. Yes Lei, I have been truly busy..

  2. With work (before end of financial year housekeeping stuff), and with pre-spring cleaning stuff. Had to sort the burgeoning pantry and found a) duplicates of condiments; b) unopened condiments more than two years old; c) strange condiments such as blue-berry and orange liqueur sauce and creme de menthe flavoured miso.

  3. Have you ever tried ‘tricking’ your body by having meals that you would normally have for breakfast or lunch as dinner, such as French toast and granola with plain Greek yoghurt? The trick there is that you feel less guilty because you had the naughty food earlier in the day and would have had a chance to burn it off.

  4. I have spent enough on glasses to buy a 2nd-hand shitty car.

  5. Apparently, there’s such a thing as sustainable cycling. There’s a local place run by cycling enthusiasts where you can bring your bicycle to get serviced, as well as sell it if you don’t have any use for it. The bikes are nothing fancy, but we could tell after testing them that they’ve been soundly fixed and have a few more good years left. As someone who’s had really good (read:$$$) bikes, I feel a bit ambivalent about hopping onto a $65 beauty. They also sell helmets for just $40 if you feel like cycling home with whatever bike caught your fancy. That’s just over $100 for the whole lot. In contrast, the sneakers I was wearing that day were over $400. So am I a bike snob?? Is it fair to equate its quality to its price?? Probably, but does it really matter when you’re just using it around the damned neighbourhood??

The Weekend

  1. We had to drive over 30kms to get to this food truck that sold pork-belly slices. It was great. It was deceptively hefty, well-seasoned and warm as if it had only come out of the deep-fryer minutes ago. I’m done trying to fry pork-belly. I’ve boiled it first, kept it in the fridge overnight, to disappointing results. And a pot full of oil ends up sitting on top of the stove until I eventually throw it out because I rarely deep fry anything.

  2. Made marmalade for the first time. The experience is akin to that of diving over a cliff, surviving it as you would, only to realise that you could have done it correctly, a hundred million ways. Well, FUCK THAT. It tastes great - I like the rind and the slight bitterness- and I will only ever try to eat it once or twice anyway because it has too much sugar (10 CUPS) and we rarely ever eat bread.

The Weekend

Such a struggle to find JUST protein. And the cravings. The depression (!). The falling off the wagon (who knew the Chinese bakery made really good pork buns, well-seasoned filling, really fluffy dough).

And then we found high-protein pasta! (will try it next time for sure).

I’ve always liked tofu, but I never really went out of my way to buy and cook it. I tried it on Friday and just free-styled it with shrimp, butter and gochujang- sort of like this recipe

Packing up

As someone who’s not really crazy about traveling, I spend a lot of thoughtful time preparing for when I do. For me, the anxiety and hassle of the airport, of immigration/customs and packing the perfect luggage is far more exciting than the actual destination (because when you get there, it’s just alright).

There are a lot of things in your life you can’t control, but the closest thing to perfect control is when you’re able to handle challenging events and situations that come your way because you just happen to have the right stuff in your bags- a condom (joke!!!), swimming trunks, a Covid test kit, toiletries specific to different climates, extra undies, diarrhoa tablets, oral care strips, a Peter Thomas Roth gold mask, three styles of sunglasses, a fully paid-off credit card.

I’m not a naturally organised person by nature, but I suddenly become one when I pack.

December is several months away, but I’m halfway there through my lists- Christmas gifts (must be small and weigh next to nothing!) and outfit list (what to wear on the flight, what to change into when we land, etc.). I’ve learned a lesson from last year’s trip; it’s way too hot for hoodies, pants and even underwear, so the shortlist for what to bring is very short.

Inexplicably, we only get one (massive) single checked luggage, but there’s a silver lining to that; that’s your lot. You have exactly 30 kilos to work with.

Well, if only life in general were that specific, we’d all be better off!

(Getting a new backpack and trying to pick which one will work best).

The Weekend

  1. Funny that we can stick with dodgy friends literally for life and yet totally disown something like white bread. Ruth’s up for a couple of days so the pantry and the fridge have been stocked up with her ‘essentials’ such as white (toast) bread, full-cream milk and spreadable butter; items we’ve put on the black-list because of a combination of second-hand information, possibly bogus ‘scientific evidence’ from social media and snobbery.

  2. I miss white bread. My go-to sandwiches are either a cucumber one with the crusts cut off, or toasted with mayo and a thick slice of cheese. Yum.

  3. When will we ever learn that lists don’t work at Costco.

  4. Wagyu beef ribs redux. I picked the wrong SKU- whole ribs- and there was no way I could cut them unless we had a band-saw or something. So they were seared on the George Foreman grill which worked quite well.

  5. Yes you can brulee a cheese-cake, recipe here

The week that was

  1. I’ve been mulling a four-day work week, convinced that it will dramatically change the way I work and live. I’m already envisioning Fridays when I can finish chores (leaving the weekends free), bake (but then I have to eat the darned things), cook (more eating!), write (more staring at an empty screen), draw (why is Procreate so hard??). The possibilities are endless, or I could possibly end up in bed the whole day, exhausted from the previous four days.

  2. Speaking of Procreate, tackling it is the same as going into an Indian supermarket. I want to buy a little bit of everything, attempt to do something, but then realise that I have little to zero knowledge of the ingredients, the culture and the history. Knowing how to cook (or draw), is simply not enough. Where to begin though?

  3. I hurt my shoulder and I don’t know how or where. I thought it was the same shoulder that I injured nearly two years ago but at the physio, it turns out that now it’s the other shoulder (my right). How do I even forget something like this? There’s a sliver of pain with such actions as raising and fluffing the (heavy) winter duvet blanket, or soaping my back with the $2 back-scrubber that I got from Temu. I could’ve ignored it. I could’ve brushed it away as something part of aging (and not necessarily an injury). It could have gone or it could it have gotten worse. But I didn’t let the chips fall where they may, which I used to do a lot in the past. I’m at a point in my life where I marvel at my capacity to be responsible for myself (because who else would??), to know that an intervention is the logical choice. Have an appointment this week for an ultrasound to see what’s up.

  4. I used fresh pasta the other day and didn’t realise how delicious it is. It’s something I normally shy away from. I would rarely ever pick an Italian restaurant - if I wanted to fill myself with carbs, I’d just get a double Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s or get a pizza from Pizza Hut (with two sides of chicken wings). But fresh is something else isn’t it?

  5. I love winter. It makes spending $7 for a coffee every morning at the petrol station justified and necessary.

Friday

The weather in Auckland is the weirdest. While you’re out and about enjoying window shopping in deserted shops with just a light rain outside this happens.

My sister does her hobbies on her days off work. On mine, I go to the city and enjoy its pleasures. The train is pleasantly warm even if we had to stand up the rest of the quick (it was an express route) 25 minute ride into the CBD.

Another weird thing about Auckland; people are not really keen on public transport. They’d rather drive and moan the rest of the day about how horrendous the traffic and the weather was.

Sam and I have coffees and a nice danish (tomatillo with passion fruit and cream) at our current favourite Daily Bread. I had my Surface with me so what do you do when you have one of your work devices with you? You just have to check your emails.

I take the train back to Newmarket; my go-to local label just dropped some more active wear. The trains are empty, the shops deserted which is perfect. The rain is falling heavily now and I realise that the shop opens at 10am, not nine.

I duck into the once bustling Rialto Centre where there are seats in the lobby. It’s nearly deserted of shops which is another weird thing about Auckland; retail shops struggle in a city that no one wants to visit either by car or by public transport! (how stupid is that?). I’m facing this shop that sells candles, postcards and kitschy decor and I wonder, do people buy enough of this crap to allow you to pay the lease?

I read a longish New Yorker article on my phone about the 33-year old wannabe mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani and by the time I’m done, it’s 10:20.

I’m an efficient shopper; I know what I want and I’ve already picked the stuff out from the website. I don’t try anything else which prevents me from buying more. I’m done in about 15 minutes. The rain has stopped a bit and someone is lingering at Aesop which is just next door. I could smell black pepper and cedar. Damn it.

I go in and buy a pottle of body cleanser, a hand cream and a lips salve.