I went to Jones the Grocer in Paddington (Sydney) with my friend Annie yesterday. They have a FROMAGERIE – a cheese room! Feast your eyes on this, ladies and gentlemen. And click the pictures for BIGGER pictures.

Oh yes.

Many diet plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig let you have virtually unlimited amounts of “free” vegetables – vegetables free from fat or carbohydrates. The rules are, that you can have these “free” veges but any extra delicious stuff like cheese, creamy or oily dressings, nuts, meats or croutons are just not allowed unless you sacrifice “points” or whatever from your other meals.

Surprisingly, even though these diet plans encourage dieters to eat huge amounts of these “free” vegetables, they provide hardly any recipes for meals made entirely of these “free” foods (with the exception of Weight Watchers’ “free soup”).

I’ve never been a fan of salads. I dislike lettuce, and am discontent with munching on other leaves such as rocket, mesculin and baby spinach. I’m alright with them combined with more delicious things, but on their own they’re just not right.

So my Mum helped me come up with a “free” salad that still manages to taste alright, without drowning it in vinegar-based dressing. The herbs add flavour and the finely chopped vegetables help to combine different flavours so you’re not just eating one vegetable at a time. Dieters, enjoy.

Makes 1 large single serve.

• 6 cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 1/2 red capsicum, seeds and stalk removed, chopped into small pieces (about 2cm x 2cm)
• 1 handful cos lettuce leaves, sliced
• 1tbs finely chopped dill
• 2tbs finely chopped mint leaves
• 1/2 cup finely chopped snow pea sprouts
• 2tbs crunchy bean sprouts (such as mung beans)
• 1 shallot, white part only, finely chopped

Once everything’s chopped, put it in a bowl and squeeze over 1/4 of a fresh lime, and grind over plenty of salt and cracked pepper. Toss to combine and serve.

This sandwich is inspired by the delicious chicken and walnut sandwiches you can get from Santos Wholefoods at Sydney airport. Most airport food is awful, but the stuff at Santos is great. I’m a sucker for these sandwiches but I don’t go to the airport all that often, so this is my attempt to recreate it at home. If you don’t own a food processor, just chop all the dry ingredients really finely (except the sprouts and bread) before mixing it in a bowl with the mayo and mustard.

• 500g cooked chicken breast (you can boil some raw chicken breasts from the supermarket, or take all the meat off a BBQ chook)
• ½ cup walnuts (without the shells of course)
• 3 tbs mayonnaise
• 1 tbs mustard
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• Soft white bread
• Snow pea sprouts, cut in half

Place all ingredients in a food processor and blend for 5 – 10 seconds. Don’t overblend – it doesn’t need to be a paste, it just needs to be chopped finely. Transfer mixture to a bowl and taste it. Add more mayo, mustard and/or salt and pepper if necessary. Stir until combined.

On a slice of bread, spread a large tablespoon of chicken mixture and add just enough snow pea sprouts to cover. Top with another slice of bread. Cut into three equal sized sandwich fingers. Repeat for as many sandwiches as you desire or until you run out of chicken mixture. Serve.

I figured this site needed a makeover. It just wasn’t *inspiring* me. So you might notice it looking different while I play around with different WP themes. Let me know if any take your fancy.

I’ve made a new blog – CakeBlog. As if I didn’t have enough already, right? Anyway you’ll like it, it’s all about cakes. Tell all your friends about it, I’m hoping it’ll become mega popular and then one day I’ll be a super famous cake blogger and my job will be to write about cakes all the time. Ah, dreams.

Apparently there are already a lot of cake bloggers out there. But that doesn’t matter, because I am the best one. Trust me.

You know those diets where they give you a list of foods that you go crazy on, and eat as much as you want? You know how those lists are always just full of vegetables? And not the fun kind of vegetables like corn and potatoes, only the non-starchy kinds of vegetables like carrots and celery. Well, I have been on a heap of these diets and I hate these lists of vegetables because the diet planners never tell you anything interesting to do with them. For some reason, they expect people who clearly have a passionate love affair with food, to start eating carrot sticks and “garden salads” with every meal for the rest of their lives. Fat chance!

Anyway, good news everyone, I found something tasty. Most of these diets let you have chicken stock, so here’s what you do.

Chop up 1 leek (white part only) and slice a heap of mushrooms. Better yet, buy them already sliced from the supermarket. Get some baby spinach leaves while you’re there. Put a half a teaspoon of chicken stock powder into half a cup of boiling water and stir well.

Spray oil into a frying pan on medium heat. Add your veges, then pour over the chicken stock. Cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the stock has been absorbed by the mushrooms. Serve immediately.

The mushrooms soak up the flavour from the chicken stock and become delicious, while the baby spinach wilts so it’s smaller and the leek bulks it out to keep you more full. Serve as a side dish, or stir into your diet pasta.

All good recipes evolve, this one does too. Try out my famous corn and bacon chowder recipe and keep your belly warm this winter.

For Americans and other people in the Northern hemisphere who are currently in Summer, not Winter, this soup is so delicious that you should just brave the heat and eat it anyway.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson. I’ve always been a fan, but I’m not going to write a big lengthy piece about his greatness, plenty of others have done that in the last 24 hours already. I’m actually writing to let you all know that today I found something GREAT.

Michael Jackson’s “You Rock My World” video is one of my all-time favourite videos. I love the song, but I also think it’s one of the most hilarious videos I’ve ever seen. Michael Jackson and Chris Tucker go to a bar, see a pretty woman who’s “dangerous” for some reason, Michael tries to hit on her through a series of ass-slaps and crotch-grabs (his own crotch, thankfully), then at some point he just start smashing up the place for no good reason and sets it on fire. This impresses the girl so much that she pashes him and jumps in Chris Tucker’s car.

Imagine my JOY when I discovered that there is a full-length short film version of this video!

Finally, all the burning questions would be explained – why did Michael start smashing up the place? Why is the girl dangerous? Why did the bar have to be burned to the ground in order to pick up the girl?

Okay, none of these questions get answered, which makes it all the more hilarious. But it raise even more questions, involving Marlon Brando, and introduces a whole lot of “Bad” references (see what I did there? ) to Michael’s previous hits, like “Maybe we should just Beat It!”, “Is that all you got? You ain’t nothin’! You ain’t NOTHIN’!”

Keep an eye out for the worst fight scene you will ever see in a music video. A badass asks if MJ wants to “play”, and MJ magically summons henchmen from the sky. Everyone’s watching to see what Michael’s “got”, and it turns out what he has is a series of synchronised dance moves with his henchmen. I guess this isn’t what the badass meant, because he’s not impressed, so Michael starts throwing furniture around.

Then, in an amazing display of villainous fighting skill, some thug spins around with a flickknife that *hasn’t been flicked yet*, stops it in mid-swing about half a metre away from Jackson, then flicks the knife out rather threateningly, just leaving it hanging there for a while. I guess he was hoping Michael would dance forward a bit and stab himself with it – a cunning plan. However, MJ flips the guy over and steps over him, then starts the synchronised dancing again, which I guess would freak anyone out. At some point he gets a punch in, this knocks over a lamp with sets the place ablaze. Then MJ starts squealing for Chris and….then it gets really weird.

The big boss comes downstairs, and a shot of some bodybuilder in a fire is displayed on screen, and MJ says “I know who you are…” He does? What the hell?

Anyway, this video is not exactly from Michael Jackson’s heyday, as you can probably tell from his lack of skin pigment, so if this video has made you think less of the guy, may heaven rest his weary bones, then I suggest you take a look back at some of his previous work and remind yourself (or discover) why he was and always will be a legend of our time.

“Billie Jean” - Probably his best song ever and historic for many reasons.

“Smooth Criminal” - Very weird music video. No idea what the hell he’s meant to be doing but he looks like he’s on a mission. More terrible dance-fighting, but some fantastic dancing. There was a great modern cover by Alient Ant farm quite a few years back, which had a bit of good parody of various Michael Jackson things in the music video.

“Thriller” - I was at a club last night and this came on, and NOBODY knew how to do the dance. And here I was hoping for a scene like this.

“Bad” - full version. The full version is a bit weird, but worth seeing if you want to understand some of the jokes in Weird Al Yankovic’s hilarious parody.

“Beat It” – Also parodied by Weird Al Yankovic.

I’d also just like to say that I heart YouTube so much. It was so much harder to collect and share all these videos 8 years ago.

My husband will be both surprised and pleased to see me writing that title. But the reason for it, is that I found this truly misleading list on the internet, and I’d just like to set the facts straight.

“Why Cats Are Better Than Men” – See, already this list is stereotyping women who own cats as man-haters. I hate it already.

It takes little time to train a cat, but it takes a lifetime to train a man.
Little time to train a cat?? Have you TRIED training a cat? My cat April still shits on the floor when she’s pissed at us, drinks from the toilet, and will sneak onto the bench to steal food. I’m happy to say my husband does none of these things.

A cat left on its own can fend for itself, but a man cannot.
Then why do I have to put them into boarding every time we go on holiday?

A cat rarely misses the litter tray, which cannot be said for a man and a toilet seat.
I’m glad to say my husband delivers bodily waste into the part of the toilet where it is meant to go. The same definitely cannot be said for my cats, which scatter litter liberally around the bathroom and occasionally deposit faeces on the floor to explain to us that the tray is too dirty.

A cat provides unconditional love.
Yeah. As long as you continue to feed it.

When you are sick, a cat barely leaves your side, a man will only be there if he has to be.
Yeah, that bastard. Continuing to go to work every day to pay for food and medical bills while the cats laze around the house.

Cats aren’t obsessed with losing their hair.
Yeah they kind of are. They’re obsessed with putting it on every article of clothing I have.

It is expected that a cat sleeps all day, but a man that lays in bed all day is lazy and annoying and not at all cute.
Whoever wrote this needs to get cuter men.

After a hard day at work, a cat greeting you at the door makes you instantly forget the bad day. A man waiting at the door is wanting his dinner cooked.
True, the cat doesn’t want it cooked, it only wants it defrosted or possibly extracted from the tin.

You never have to question a cat’s loyalty.
Every month or so, our cats will change their minds about which one of us is their favourite and pretty much ignore the other person.

A cat doesn’t require constant attention.
What the hell kind of cats do you have? I’ve got one demanding attention from me RIGHT NOW, as I write this.

A cat matures when it grows older, a man reverts to childhood.
Cats don’t mature when they get older, they still knead you when you rub them to try to stimulate your milk-producing glands because they think you’re their mum.

A cat doesn’t channel surf when you are trying to watch your favourite TV show.
It does if it sits on the remote control. It’s happened.

There is no tug of war with blankets and doonas when you sleep with your cat.
Every night my cats park themselves between me and my husband so that it pulls the left side of the doona off me and I get slightly cold. Then in the morning, sometimes April will attack my toes so that I’ll move them and she can make a little space for herself under the doona for a morning kip.

Cats don’t care and don’t comment if you put on a couple of kilos.
No, they just sit on your big belly and make themselves comfortable there because there’s so much extra space.

You don’t have to pretend to like your cat’s mother. Nor do you have to regularly visit her.
No, but you do have to be your cat’s mother occasionally, what with the kneading and the grooming and the constant attention.

A cat knows that you are the centre of her happiness. A man thinks he is the key to your happiness.
Yeah sometimes your’e the centre of the cat’s happiness. And then next month it’s your husband and your’e bumped down to owner #2.

A cat’s brain controls their actions, a different organ controls a man’s actions.
Yet see what the cat does when it sees anything moving. Pow!

You only have to lightly pet your cat to satisfy him/her.
Really? If I lightly pet my cats they look at me like, what, that’s it? A solid 10 minutes of ear rubs, back rubs and tummy rubs is required before my cats are satisfied.

Cats don’t show love without meaning it.
Unless they want food.

Cats have no problem in expressing affection in public.
Or licking their groins in public.

Cats only expect food, water and a clean litter box. Men expect- the list is far too long!
And rubs, and constant attention, and games, and sometimes a different kind of food if they’re feeling fussy. Raphy has a thing going where he MUST have tummy rubs for at least 10 minutes between 10pm and 11.30pm every night.

When a cat is a little off colour, they simply rest and sleep and prefer to be alone. A man in the same situation ensures that you suffer along with him and tries to convince you that he is dying.
Man lady, you’ve dated some head cases.

Cats can be neutered if they stray. If only that also applied to men.
Yeah, and if only cheating women could have forced hysterectomies. You’re sick, lady.

A cat wears a collar and tag and is microchipped to indicate they belong to a loving family. A man can be single or married and wear nothing to indicate that this is the case. Maybe men should be tattooed with their marital status.
Errr, what about a wedding ring? Also, the reason is because you can ask the man “are you married” and the man can indicate “yes” or “no” instead of just “meow”.

When you go out on a girl’s night out, a cat is simply happy when you arrive home safely. A man questions you as to who you were with, where did you go, who did you meet, did anyone buy you drinks etc
MEOW YOU WERE GONE FOR SO LONG WHERE IS MY FOOD????

Looking after a cat is so simple. Pour out some dry food, cut up some raw meat. keep fresh water in their bowl, regularly brush them, and spend some quality time playing with them. There is no ironing, no clothes washing, no picking clothes up off the floor, and no spending hours in the kitchen preparing a meal.
You forgot the damn litter tray. Also, it seems like you are a man-hating feminist, but then we get to the bottom here and you’re whining that when you’re with a man you have to do his ironing and prepare his meals. Why don’t you try putting out a box of cereal and putting some frozen meals in the freezer and tell the guy to do his own damn washing. Then hey, you don’t even have to brush him or pick his poo out of a litter tray every day.

I’ve been listening to / watching a lot of John Safran lately (man it feels good to use a forward slash…ahh forward slash how I’ve missed you…) and I guess you could call the guy something of a theological researcher. Yeah a crazy one whose research is largely in the name of comedy, but his stuff can be thought-provoking nonetheless.

Anyway it got me thinking about my own belief system, or lack thereof. Generally if people ask me about my beliefs I reply that I am Agnostic. There are a lot of people out there who interpret “Agnostic” to mean “on the fence” or indecisive about the whole God / no God thing. But technically it means a belief that one does not know, and cannot know, whether or not a deity can or does exist.

That always sounded a little smug to me. “Well there’s no evidence one way or the other so scientifically, it means that you can’t know such a thing, and therefore you’re wrong to say that God exists or doesn’t exist. Ha!” (I added the “ha” for extra smugness, I guess most Agnostics wouldn’t add the “ha” if they were trying to make a point in all fairness).

But I don’t think that’s true at all. Really all you’re saying is that there is not enough evidence to convince YOU that a God exists or does not exist. Science’s rules of whether something is correct or not is all determined by, well, scientists. It’s pretty much a belief system in itself – after all there was a time when Christian teachings were the accepted truth and new scientific theories such as a round Earth were mocked as ludicrous and contrary to all evidence. Now that we’ve accepted science as the truth, who’s to say something we’re mocking right now isn’t going to bite us in a few centuries and reveal itself to be what’s really going on?

So as for my beliefs, I’m what Wikipedia would describe as a “weak Agnostic” – I believe that I don’t know enough to know if there’s a God right now, but I’m open to the idea that evidence could present itself in the future that persuades me to believe otherwise. However I’m not about to label myself a “weak Agnostic”, that just sounds ridiculous – why not a “lame Agnostic” or a “half-arsed Agnostic” hey?

I had 7 years of Catholic schooling so I’m pretty familiar with the Bible (or at least the “Good News Bible” which is largely New Testament Jesus-y goodness). I’ve had a bit of exposure to some Eastern religions, and talked to some people from various types of Christianity. I’ve read things about past lives, auras, spirits and ghosts with some interest, and find some of the stories intriguing and plausible.

Anyway, most of the people I know who follow a religion either do so because they were brought up to believe it and just continue to do so, or out of a personal need for the faith and clarity that it can bring to one’s life. Neither of those really apply to me, so the mysteries of the universe remain unexplained. Great.

On the other hand, most Atheists I know have embraced Atheism either because they have had a bad encounter with major religions and want no part of it, or because they are basically embracing science and Atheism is a by-product of that. I’ve met just as many nice and sensible religious people as crazy and annoying ones, so that’s not enough to drive me to Atheism, and science makes sense up until a certain point and then science doesn’t really know anything either. So no great revelations there.

I guess my point is, if anyone’s got any powerful arguments to persuade me one way or the other, I’m happy to enter into a lengthy and tedious theological discussion. Convert away.