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The seaside town of Arbroath is famous for many reasons:

• For the Declaration of Arbroath
• For its beautiful and incredibly history-riddled ye olde Abbey
• For being the home of the Arbroath Smokie, a tasty smoked fish that has Protected Designation of Origin status (just like Champagne, Parmesan and Newcastle Brown Ale) and its very own tartan!
• For being the toon where Mothership-in-law Mary is from!

When visiting Arbroath recently I found the above was the mere tip of the tourist iceberg. There was so much more to see, like the sandwich shop called Goodfillaz and the Macdougall Dentist Surgery:

We wandered round the town admiring the buildings, many of which were made from local red sandstone. Behind the Abbey was a bustling red sandstone bowling club.

"I cannae wait to be old," Gareth said almost wistfully as we peered through the fence, "I'm totally going to bowl. Grey trousers and everything."



I took a few photos of the Abbey itself but didn't go inside. It was £4.50 to get in and we only had a tenner on us. If we went into the Abbey we wouldn't have had any money for dinner. When choosing between stomach and brain there can only be one winner.

To me the jewel in the Arbroathian (?) crown was Peppo's fish shop. In my humble and gluttonous opinion it just may contain Scotland's deep-fried Holy Grail - the Best Fish Supper in the land! In my 4.5 years over here there have been two major contenders - the famous Anstruther Fish Bar (as graced by Tom Hanks and Prince William) and the fanbloodybrilliant Ben Ledi Cafe in Callander, but I think Peppo's has the edge.

Long-term lurkers may recall I moonlighted as a fish and chip shop lass during university, so whenever we're in line at a chippie I can't help provide Gareth with annoying commentary and analysis on their business practices.

• There were good signs right from the start - a queue of pensioners halfway down the block waiting for the place to open, and a gang of seagulls loitering across the street. If anyone knows good chips, it's pensioners and seagulls.

• When the doors opened the two charming fellas behind the counter greeted customers by name (except us two strangers, of course)

• There were framed poems on the wall written by satisfied customers. Poems with a dozen stanzas! Now that's devotion.

• Everything was cooked to order. Big deal! you may say, but in sooo many places over here the goods sit in a warmer getting all soggy then get resuscitated in the fryer upon purchase.

• Most places cook chips by putting them into a basket, then lowering the basket into the oil. These chips were free range! The basket was tipped out into the fryer so they could swim about, instead of being squashed up in their metal cage. They splashed and dove then fished out once they'd floated back to the top, all crispy and perfect.

• Once the fish came out of the fryer they stood each piece up vertically for a couple of minutes to let the excess oil drain. Such innovation!

It was bloody delicious too. Clean light crispy batter on succulent fish and chips that seemed the marry the best of Australian and Scottish chips - crisp on the outside but tender in the middle. Hubba hubba!

Earth-shattering events of 2007 thus far:

1. Chopped off my left thumbnail while wrestling with this stupid pumpkin. I knew a serrated breadknife wasn't the right tool for the job but persisted regardless
2. Broke a mirror
3. Fell asleep pants doon on the toilet after a big night out
4. Was violently ill for three days straight

The last one happened because I was trying to stick to my twin New Years Resolutions of Saving Money and Keeping In Touch With Friends. I was in the post office in the first week of January sending a whole bunch of cards to Folks Back Home. I was straddling the space between old bad habits and fresh resolve:

1. Wedding Card for wedding a month earlier
2. 2 x Baby Cards for babes born in November
3. Birthday Card for a birthday the next day
4. Anniversary card for February

So I was writing on my cards there in the post office and feeling good about the ones that weren't late and also because I'd bought a roll of Christmas wrapping paper on sale for £1. The Mothership used to buy all her cards and paper in the January sales and I felt proud to be following in her footsteps, rather than disturbed.

When I joined the queue there was two Australian girls in front of me. They were about ten years old and holding postcards. Australians are always running amok in Edinburgh but you rarely see them out here. It's like seeing a tiger in the supermarket or a nun in a strip joint. A truly novel occurrence.

"HELLO CANNOIVE SOME STAMPS FOR SENDING THESE TO ASTRAYA PLOISE?" Girl 1 bellowed to the cashier.

That melted my heart and made me all the happier for my renewed attempts to keep in contact with the Motherland. I floated smugly all the way home and it wasn't til I got to the front door that I realised I'd left my bargain wrapping paper in the post office. Oooh I was cranky. But far too lazy to walk back all that way for a pound.

So I started making my lunch, which was poached egg and a salad as I recall. Something thrifty befitting my resolution. I was still fuming about the wrapping paper as I took the egg out of the carton. I noticed it had a dent in the top, you could even say it was somewhat... pre cracked. Somewhere in the back of my mind a wee voice said, You're not supposed to eat broken eggs, dickhead but I said to the voice, "I can't throw it away! I'm trying to save money!".

I ended up spending the last three days of my holidays kneeling before the toilet and Ctrl-Zedding every meal, which proved far more costly that that one little egg. I'll try harder next month.

Now that Rhi and I are old and living on the opposite side of the world from the family, we have been forced to establish our own festive traditions. I'm not sure if the Christmas Stereo Speaker Tree will catch on or if I will get off my arse and buy a proper specimen next year.

Rhi came to Scotland bearing gifts with amusing tags. This one was for Gareth.

Here is the Christmas Coffee Table as decorated by Dr G, with casually arranged clementines as per Nigella Lawson's suggestion. She also said one should drape bunches of grapes over the table like a Roman orgy, but grapes are not in season so he substituted a stunted plastic Christmas tree, which really set off the designer plastic measuring jug/gravy boat.

Upon Gareth's treasured set of Australian Animal coasters we set out plates of assorted animals and vegetables. There was enough for ten people but the three of us managed to scoff most of it.

We allowed a couple of hours to digest while the booze-laden sticky toffee pud glowered away in the oven.

The toffee sauce was slightly traumatic. I hate making toffee sauce; all that bloody stirring and stubborn sugar that refuses to dissolve.

This is the bit where I got impatient and stuck my finger into the saucepan to see if the sugar had dissolved, forgetting that molten sugar has a temperature of approximately eleventeen billion degrees.

So I spent the next few hours with my throbbing finger in a glass of ice water while Rhiannon finished the cooking. And it all turned out bloody beautiful. That oven can perform when it wants to!

In 1999, I deep-fried my hand while working in the fish and chip shop in Bathurst. My most-loathed daily task was filtering the oil in the massive fryers. On this occassion a stray chip was clogging the drain, so I poked it with a big metal stick to dislodge it. But my greasy hand slipped and plunged deep down into the gurgling fat, right up to my wrist.

I never thought I would do anything that stupid again, nor would I ever feel worse self-inflicted pain. Yet somehow that tiny fingertip meeting boiling caramel hurt more. I think I lost a fingerprint!

I was soothed by the sympathetic reactions of Rhiannon and Gareth:

Rhi - What the bloody hell did you do that for, you goon?

Gareth - BWAHAAHHAHAHA!

I am fine now. I'm still in some sort of sugar semi-coma, but that's what you get for having pudding for breakfast.

Rhiannon came to stay this weekend and that was as good excuse as any to attempt another pavlova. You may remember the first one, a Delia Smith concoction that ended up looking vaguely obscene due to a poor arrangement of strawberries.

This time I did The Mothership' version. Her pavs were always perfect, but something went horribly wrong here. We followed her instructions to the letter but ended up with this squidgy chargrilled frisbee. The outside didn't crisp up at all. It looked and felt, as Rhi said, "a plastic dog turd from a joke shop."

I scraped it off the baking tray and Gareth briefly wore it round the house, toupee style.

Now Rhi's gone back in London. Sniff...

Remember my Nutella Obsession? I have now come one step closer to my ultimate dream of swimming in a vat of the stuff. My friend Julia sent me the most incredible Christmas gift all the way from Italy... a three kilo jar!

I haven't cracked the seal yet. I just want to look at it and hold it in my arms. For now.

I know a man who once swam in a vat of Nutella.

His name is John and he's the partner of Mum's lovely friend Trish. I met him the night before Wedding III, when The Mothership arranged a dinner with her Schoolteacher Posse. John was one of those easygoing guys you like immediately. Gareth was especially smitten because he was into motorbikes, but when he casually mentioned the Nutella Thing no other details mattered to me but the Nutella Thing.

John is an engineer for the company that makes Nutella, and one fine day the Nutella machine broke down. He had to be lowered into the big barrel o' choc-hazelnut goodness to investigate the problem. He alleged it wasn't very glamourous - the Nutella was warm and sticky and they had to haul him out afterwards and hose him down, and of course the batch of Nutella was ruined. But all I heard was, PADDLING IN A NUTELLA POOL.

If this happened to me, well, screw the repair work. I would dive deep, open my mouth wide and just wait like a shark. You know how they hover there, jaws agape, letting the hapless fish flow right down inside to their eager bellies.

I first met Nutella in the mid-80s when my Best Friend Katie brought some in for recess. It was one of those wee snack packs with the foil lid, complete with plastic digging implement. She was a rare creature whose Mum packed her delicious sweet things for lunch but rarely wanted to eat them. I, on the other hand, was hungry like the wolf but made my own lunch, and it was always some wholegrain homemade vitamin-rich crap as dictated by The Mothership. Thus much of our Best Friend conversations went like this:

"Are you not going to eat that [Spacefood Stick, KitKat, Wagon Wheel]?"

"Nah, I don't want it. Do you want it?"

"Well, only if you're sure you don't want it."

"Oh, I'm sure."

"Woohoo!"

I remember peeling back that foil and being punched in the nose by chocolate perfume. The Nutella gazed up at me, smooth and calm in its little box. It seemed a shame to disturb it. But ten minutes later I was licking away the last skerrick, wedging my tongue into the little grooves in the bottom of the tray.

I didn't encounter Nutella again for a decade. 1996 is remembered both as the year I left home and the year Ferrero brought out The Simpsons collectable Nutella glasses. I was swanning down the aisles, flushed with the freedom of grocery shopping without lamb chops, when the Homer glass sang to me from the shelf. I fully intended to stop at Homer - after all, how many glasses does a student need? But by year's end he'd been joined by Bart, Krusty and Maggie; then finally Lisa because I didn't want her thinking I thought she was some unworthy, uptight little bitch. And despite my intention to just have a wee spoonful of Nutella then scoop the rest into the bin, I'm not sure that happened very often. I'm fuzzy on the details; I fell into a sugar coma at some point.

I was clean for eight long years, before falling off last year while in Germany. I was caught in a moment of weakness, but you must understand, we'd been eating those vile little Russian sausages for weeks! So when we arrived in Berlin and found the youth hostel's bread rolls were not only not stale but they were accompanied by little foil packets of Nutella to spread upon them, I was powerless to resist.

Not long after I was staying over at Chez Gareth. We were cooking dinner when I spied a familiar jar up the back of the pantry.

"Is that Nutella?"

"Yep. Do you want some?"

"Oh no. I have a problem with Nutella."

"How can anyone have a problem with Nutella?"

"Oh trust me," I muttered darkly, "It can happen."

A few weeks later I was at Chez Gareth again and we were chatting on the couch.

"Sooo, I went to make a Nutella piece today," he began. Piece, incidentally, is a Scots word for sandwich.

"Yeah?" I searched for an innocent tone.

"Yeah. I took the Nutella jar from the shelf, and it looked like a normal jar of Nutella, three quarters full. But then I opened the lid!"

"Oh?"

"Much to my surprise the jar was near empty, except for a very thin layer of Nutella right around the edges and bottom. Like someone had very carefully excavated it, spoon by spoon, taking great pains to make it appear full from the outside, when in fact the lot had been scranned!"

"That's just ridiculous!"

"I know, can you believe it?"

"Maybe you have mice! Some very precise mice!"

"That's one theory!"

"Yeah! Well!" I bristled, "You shouldn't eat it anyway! It contains partially hydrogenated peanut oil, don't you know; and that's very bad for you. Very very bad!"

I assuaged my guilt by buying him a jar of Green and Blacks Organic Hazelnut Chocolate Spread, which is just as sugar/fat laden but unhydrogenated.

A whole month went by and he hadn't even opened it.

"Jesus!" I screamed out of the blue as we watched a movie. "How come you haven't opened that Nutella yet!?"

"Oh, I totally forgot it was there."

"How could you forget Nutella?"

"Well I dunno... I just did."

"But haven't you been thinking about it? Hasn't it been taunting you?"

"Has it been taunting you?"

"I'm just amazed that it's unopened. Don't you just crave it?"

"Well I tend to crave chips or cheese. I'm more a savoury tooth than a sweet tooth; that's your thing."

"Oh I have a sweet tooth and a savoury tooth. I have many teeth."

In the end I cracked, opening the jar myself and landing spoon first. But I managed to stop after one or two bites, then put the rest inside a double-batch of banana muffins as a delicious chocolately surprise, distributing the lot to friends and colleagues.

There was no mention of Nutella for a long while then one afternoon I dropped by Chez Gareth. I went into the kitchen to make the tea as per standard procedure.

"Oh, I don't want any tea," said Gareth.

"You don't?"

"What I really fancy," he grinned, "Is a Nutella piece."

"You want me to make you a sandwich?"

"Please?"

"Fine. Demanding bastard."

He just grinned some more.

I opened the cupboard and reached for the jar. And this is what I found.

"OH! Very funny." I sulked.

"Hee hee!" Gareth punched the air triumphantly.

"Your kangaroo is rubbish, by the way."

"It's my first one! Cut me some slack."

Bread Clips!
In Britain, loaves of bread are sealed shut with these infuriating strips of sticky plastic that, unless you have ten-inch talons, take half a bloody hour to pick open and then rarely reseal with any degree of satisfaction.

But in Australia, you get a miniature masterpiece -- the humble bread clip.

The simple twist-and-clip motion has dazzled breadlovers worldwide since American Floyd Paxton invented them sometime back in the olden days. And I was bedazzled all over again while back in Australia. So secure! So simple! So sensible! I smuggled a few back home, and plan to do a Daz/Napisan Doorstep Challenge-type of thing and bully my neighbours into abandoning their stickers and trying a bread clip for fourteen days.

Smug Bags!
Also called Alternative Bags or Go Green bags, Smug Bags are green woven shopping bags that put the standard environment-killing plastic numbers to shame. For just 99 cents you get a reusable bag that is wide enough for a loaf of bread and sturdy enough for a couple kilos of Australia's very affordable fresh fruit and veg, and a delightful feeling of smugness for your token effort towards helping save the planet. "Look at me," these bags scream to passers-by, "I may be a consumerist pig, but observe how I hold the loot in an enviro-friendly vessel!".

I was first introduced to Smug Bags last year when bemoaning the lack of affordable tracky dacks (sweatpants US, trackybottoms UK) in this country. The cheapest I could find were £30 and shithouse. I refuse to pay the equivalent of $70 AUD for Couchwear.

So my ever thoughtful friends Monkey and Matt sent me two pairs of top quality 100% cotton Bonds trackies (one pair Traditional Grey, and one Black for more formal occassions. Bonds incidentally are also the makers of PURPLES!) She had nestled the precious garments into what she'd dubbed a Smug Bag. I thought the Bag was a bit weird at the time, but when I was in Melbourne last month I finally put it to use. I swanned smugly around the CBD with a green bag full of non-essential foodstuffs, lost in my apartment-dwelling, cafe-breakfasting, non-working, chocolate-scoffing vacation fantasy world. Back in the UK I tried to recapture the feeling with an ASDA Bag For Life, but when it's made from plastic and holds your stinky gym clothes it's just not the same.

Balls!
Along with the Smug Bag and superior trackies, my friends had also sent me a bag of Mint Slice Balls. They were all the goodness of a Mint Slice biscuit distilled into a Malteser-size ball, the perfect ratio of chocolate biscuit to zingy mint to dark chocolate coating. Imagine my delight to arrive in Australia to find the whole country had gone BALL CRAZY. Cadbury Dairy Milk Balls, Crunchie Balls, Cherry Ripe Balls, Clinker Balls, Ski Yogurt Balls, Fry's Turkish Delight Balls. They weren't all actually called balls - some were Bites or Chocettes or Minis, and the Cherry Ripes were decidedly cube-like; but to me it was just balls balls balls!

Unfortunately I didn't get to sample the mother of all balls - TheTimTam Ball! I still tremble at the thought of what sweet and faintly salty delights they would have been, but by the end of the trip my jeans were tighter than a Scotsman's purse strings so I thought I'd best not partake.

Sometimes I go searching for non-existent cracks and crumbles. It just can't be right that there's nothing wrong. I've watched a lot of marriages come and go, and grew up thinking they all had to have a certain style and flair. So why aren't we throwing things? Where is the screaming? Where are the divorce papers? Where is the adultery? Where is the bit on the side that doesn't speak English?

Luckily when I fall victim to paranoia and cliched woman-making-mountains-from-molehills behaviour, Gareth is incredibly nice and patient. He's also not afraid to point out when I'm being a moron, as I was the other night with the bread.

SHAUNA:  Hey, I am just going to open up this new loaf of Tesco Multigrain loaf, I think I've had enough of the Warburtons Seeded Batch.

GARETH:  Oh good! Throw it away because it's boggin'.

S:  What? You don't like it?

G:  Nah not really.

S:  What? You don't like it at all?

G:  It's alright, but I like the Tesco one better.

S:  You do? But I used to have that bread at my old house in Edinburgh and you'd eat it for breakfast for over a year!

G:  Well I didn't hate it right away, it just sort of developed over time!

S:  But WHY didn't you TELL me? You have to TELL me if you don't like something so I can FIX it! Before it escalates into something worse! If I don't know about problems how can I solve them!?

G:  It's just bread!

S:  But for all those months you ate your toast and acted like you liked it when all along you didn't!

G:  It's bread!

S:  I wouldn't normally buy the Warbutons, you know. It's really like my Last Resort bread. I wanted to get Hovis Country Grain which is my Agreeable Substitute bread if we can't get to Tesco, but they were out of that... OH! What about the Hovis Country Grain? Do you not like that either!?

G:  It's great!

Later on, around midnight, I was drifting off to sleep when Gareth suddenly mumbled in the darkness.

GARETH:  I can't believe they did it!

SHAUNA:  Can't believe who did what?

G:  I can't believe the other Beatles let Paul McCartney record Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. It's so fucking shite!

S:  Oh I agree completely.

G:  Mmmhmm.

S:  So... you really don't like that Warburtons.

G:  Oh man!

S:  Well?

G:  Nah. It's just too squishy.

S:  I don't really like it either, you know. The bread is almost like white bread with a few seeds tossed in to pretend like it's healthy, but they're not fooling anybody.

G:  Yeah. It doesn't toast well.

S:  I still can't believe you didn't tell me. All this time I've been buying this bread, all this time you've been unhappy!

G:  I'm not unhappy!

S:  But don't you SEE? If you can't tell me you're not happy with the bread, who knows how many other shitty things I'm doing but you're too polite to inform me about? If you don't tell me what I'm doing wrong you'll be stockpiling all these resentments for years and years until one day it bubbles over and you run off with some blonde!

G:  You really worry about this blonde, don't you?

S:  Well!

G:  Hehe. Well Oprah, it all started in 2005 when he confessed that he didn't like the Warburtons Seeded Batch! But it really wasn't about the bread at all!

S:  Arrgh!

G:  It was a symptom of something far deeper! A festering boil in their marriage!

S:  !!!

G:  I call it, the Warburton Effect!

S:  Ahh, shut yer guts.

The ONE TIME I didn't Draft in TextEditor first and wrote an entry straight into Movable Type, I hit Save and I got an Internal Server Error so I clicked the Back button and then the entry WAS GONE and it's 10.14PM and I cannae be arsed writing it again so... BAH!

Speaking of being an idiot, I had a startling revelation yesterday upon reading this divine entry. Banoffee pie - a deliciously sickly combination of bananas, cream and caramel - is as commonplace on a Scottish restaurant menu as haggis, neeps and tatties. All this time I thought 'Banoffee' was either an ancient highland clan or obscure swear word but... DERR! It's BANana + tOFFEE! I have never felt like such a nong, except for when I was a kid and found out people committed 'suicide' and not 'silverside'.

It's important with intercontinental marriages to educate your spouse on your native culture. So I explained to Gareth that tomorrow is Anzac Day, when Australians and Kiwis honour the bravery and sacrifice of those who served us in war. It's an important day, one of reflection and rememberance. And watching the news for the annual How Many WWI Diggers Have We Got Left Now report.

I decided to make some Anzac biscuits. I think I made my first batch when I was 6; in our house if you were old enough to walk you were old enough to cook, clean and herd animals. I've never been confident with Anzacs, especially after we made them in Year Seven Home Science. My batch huddled like angry little dog turds, but my friend Joanna's were the most uniformly round specimens the world had ever seen. The teacher gave her 10 out of 10 and I just gawked at them, marvelling in their perfection and seething with jealousy. How did she do that? Had she used a compass?

Today's batch were a bloody disaster. I should have realised that cramming sixteen on one tray was too ambitious. I peeked into the oven after ten minutes to see they were advancing faster than the Germans in WWII. It ended up blurring into one giant mutant biscuit, clinging steadfast to the tray. So I hacked away with a big knife and told Gareth how the ladies would bake these for the troops. They'd travel well and last for months thanks to the lack of eggs.

They're not pretty but nothing I cook ever is. But Gareth was quite happy to eat them, saying they were a good example of what could happen to a tin of Anzac biscuits if shot by the enemy. Behold the biscuit shrapnel!

And there we were in the fancy restaurant, poised to celebrate. I chose the chair that gave me the best view of the other diners, leaving Gareth with only myself or the specials board to gaze upon.

"Soooo," I said as we waited for the entrees. "How ya feeling about this marriage stuff? Nervous? Nauseous? Totally shitscared?"

Just as the words left my mouth, a Very Old Man behind us leaned forward over his dinner plate and threw up all over the table.

It was silent, discreet, almost dignified. The poor fella was pushing 90, he had on those baggy Old Man Trousers that come up near the armpits and are held up with braces. He was dining with a dour middle-aged woman dressed in black, who was patting her mouth with a napkin like she'd seen it all before. There was a younger blonde woman too, who stood up and shuffled from foot to foot as waitresses appeared with teatowels and dabbed at the deluge.

He sat back in his chair with a faint smile, hooking his gnarled fingers around his braces.

Pause. Pause.

Lean over.

Spew.

And so on, a dozen times over. It was orange and vile but hypnotic. His motion was so quiet and steady that the entire room, except Gareth with his fortunate choice of seat, had our forks hovering mid-air, unable to tear our eyes from the man and the steady stream he produced.

"What are you looking at?"

"The old guy behind you is spewing on the table."

"Behind me?"

"Oh, yep, here he goes again!"

One waitress arrived with empty ice cream tub for the old fella as another deposited Gareth's entree in front of him. He went a little grey as he looked down at the half dozen barbecued shrimp, sprawled around a chunky puddle of pink dipping sauce.

At that the point the old guy didn't have much left in the tank. Even the direness of the Dido on the stereo was drowned out by the steady BLURRRK BLUUUURK BLUUURK of the last of his dinner returning to the table.

I rearranged my entree on the plate and decided the staff were handling the spectacle pretty well. I mean, if someone started hurling in your crowded dining room, you might be tempted to chuck them into the street. But this particular creature was not built for speed. Who knows how many customers he'd anoint during his long journey to the door? It's important with biological disasters to CONTAIN the danger.

Finally he seemed done and asked for the bill. He plucked a wrinkled envelope from his back pocket and counted out some notes. His strangely silent companions got to their feet as the waitress appeared with their coats.

"You forgot my stick, hen, my stick!" he trilled, "And my umbrella. It's the tartan one."

He stood very gingerly. The whole room gave him nervous but sympathetic smiles.

"I hadn't eaten in 24 hours, you know!" he explained to the crowd. "And I ate everything tonight! Everything! Entree, main, dessert! AND wine! It was very very rich!"

It took him ten minutes to walk to the door, but of course Gareth couldn't see anything, only hearing the slow shuffle of sensible shoes riiiiight behind him. It wasn't most romantic evening, but definitely worth it just to watch Gareth hunched over our table in fear, praying the spewnami would spare him.

We've already established I'm stingy and not fond of traditional holiday souvenirs. So while my Contiki comrades were gathering up matryoshka dolls by the armload on Red Square, I was more guarded with my precious roubles. I was inspired by Rory's wife Jane who has amassed an impressive collection of international candy wrappers from her travels, from Melbourne to Madagascar. For the sake of my hefty butt my policy was usually to take one bite, spit out and scream, "They used to QUEUE for this shit?!", then carefully fold up the wrapper.

Here is a smattering of sugar from Scandinavia, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Purchased in Stockholm at sunset, just after I took the dead rat photo. "It was poor taste," declared Rhi. "Unlike these Non-Stops. You know, I really can't stop. Damn Swedes."

This is when I decided that Finland RULED! If you see one of these in a shop it's compulsory to yell, "A HAA!" like you're Hercule Poirot and you've just cracked the case.

Another Finnish delight.

Purchased in the same Helsinki spree as the above. Pretty kacky indeed, unless you're a licorice lover.

Finland had the best chocolate of all the countries we've flitted through this year. How can you go wrong with a chocolate bar called I LOVE CHOCOLATE? Because we all do! If you're ever in that part of the world be sure to sample the delectable hazlenut goodness of a Geisha or the squishy malty whatever-it-is of a Tupla.

Meanwhile dirt, gravel and perhaps the cremains of former dictators are essential ingredients in what passes for chocolate in Russia.

 

But you get a nice picture of the Kremlin in your choice milk or strawberry.

Did you know that polar bears love chocolate?

And so do grizzly bears!

My first bar was destroyed when I left it on the coach, having lived in the UK so long I'd forgotten the effect that direct sunlight has on chocolate. Fortunately the Startled Baby Chocolate was widely available.

Purchased in Minsk for 740 Belarussian roubles (18p). Truly, truly vile.

Meanwhile in the Baltic States...

From Estonia, this short and stumpy sellout. I mean, chocolate covered yogurt thingo.

From Riga, Latvia. We imagined this to be some Soviet relic, as if saying to the comrades, "Dude, you don't want to be going to the Bahamas. It's all brown and shitty there."

In sharp contrast to the Baltic Binge were our Russian Rations. The Big Red Machine has come a long way since the days of the lengthy food queue, but if you're seeing the country on a Contiki tour you don't really encounter the gourmet stuff. Our guide warned us at the border that Russian tourist accomodation was expensive so we weren't to expect much for our included meals. But the guide had a habit of lowering our expectations so we thought we'd end up being pleasantly surprised.

Our first meal in St Petersburg started with local beer and delicious salad of tomato, cucumber and dill. "Woohoo!" everyone crowed, "They have vegies here after all!". Little did we know that was the first of around fifteen tomato, cucumber and dill salads we would be presented with over the coming weeks. The scent of dill still makes my stomach flip like a cossack.

We also ate a lot of mysterious crumbed meats accompanied with fried potatoes. It was fun to poke at the pinky grey strands and ask your dining companions, "Chicken? Horse?". By the time we got to Warsaw my mouth was full of ulcers and my gums ached. But who cares when the vodka is so cheap?

My favourite meal was one morning in St Pete's, when an expressionless waitress plonked the following breakfast before me:

The next day the little sausages were accompanied by cold peas instead of cold corn. Don't go thinking we didn't appreciate the variety!

Rhi and I are perfectly suited travelling companions. We have developed an uncanny ability to turn to each other at the exact same moment and say, "It's food o'clock!" Nine times out of ten we will also be craving the exact same dish. For us, famous landmarks and cultural experiences rank far, far behind FOOD when it comes to our globetrotting priorities.

This obsession stems from Our Wacky Childhood. Long-time readers will remember the jelly fruit, the brown orange juice and the onion-flavoured ice cream that the Mothership dished up over the years. It didn't get any better when we were on vacation. All my friends' parents would bring a hefty supply of snacks to shut up their kids on long car trips, not so in our family. We had strictly-rationed Lifesavers.

Once every two hours or 250 kilometres, whatever evil criteria the folks had chosen that day, we would be handed ONE (1) Lifesaver. This provided approximately 37 seconds of sugar in your mouth before it dissolved and the gnawing hunger returned. And of course they were the most BORING Lifesavers - Five Flavours or Peppermint, the only ones available in budget multi-packs.

To make it worse, my stepfather wasn't fond of pit stops. And why would he be? He was allowed to have a Lifesaver whenever he bloody wanted. He usually had two, a Five Flavour and a Peppermint at the same time! The freak. One time we'd been on the Road To Queensland for five hours, a total of six hours since we'd had breakfast. We whined over the din of our roaring stomachs, "When are we stopping for lunch?"

"Don't be so impatient! I want to make the border by sunset!"

When verbal badgering failed to deliver, we'd scribble signs and hold them up in the rear view mirror: IT IS NOW: SIX HOURS AND TWENTY THREE MINUTES SINCE WE LAST ATE! The sign was updated every ten minutes in scrolling tickertape fashion. We even took the liberty of writing the message in reverse to make it easier for the front-seat fascist to read it. Finally at the seven hour mark he'd pull into a Kentucky Fried (as it still was in 1986) where we would be allocated one withered wing, 3 chips and a thimbleful of water to sustain us til the 5 o'clock Lifesaver.

Consequently since fleeing the iron nest, Rhi and I have made it our Vacation Policy to eat what we want whenever the hell we want it. This was easy to do in the Baltics where restaurants were cheap and plentiful. We had an incredible three course Italian meal in Vilnius with wine for the price of a deep fried Mars Bar in Edinburgh. Well maybe not that cheap, but dining out is an extravagance when you're on a shitty temp wage in Britain. So we took this holiday as an opportunity to live it up and scoff the local fare. We pretty much resteraunt-ed it every night.

But my favourite meal cost the equivalent of £1.50 and was bought at this strange little shack at the side of a highway. According to Kristi, Nehatu was Estonia's burger joint of choice long before the Golden Arches were on the scene. Now that the country is over-run with foreign fast food, she says there's a certain retro chic/tradition/rebellion to stay faithful to the local chain.

After staring blankly at the menu for ten minutes, we ordered some sort of beef burger. Unlike Western fast food joints, there just one spotty teen behind the counter. She took the orders, dropped the meat into the fryer, scooped the chips, poured the drinks then assembled the burgers. She slid them into waxy bags with a slit down the side, like a paper cone. I wondered why this was necessary until she squeezed half a bottle of mayo onto the bun.

Kristi explained that they like their burgers saucy in Estonia. On the first bite, mayo came splooging out all over my hands. As I gnawed at the greasy meat the lettuce and mayo slid out of the bun, plopping into the paper cone. By the time I finished there was a good couple inches of lettucey cocktail gathered at the bottom. You could either slurp it down like a burger chaser or mop it up with stray fries. It was certainly different, but more infinitely more satisfying than a Lifesaver or a scrawny chicken wing.

Can this intercontinental relationship really ever work? A recent encounter:

THE AUSSIE:  So I'm really missing Weet-Bix with brown sugar...

THE SCOTSMAN:  Weet-Bix? Weet-Bix!?!

A:  Yeah, you heard me. Weet-Bix!

S:  It's WeetAbix!

A:  Not where I'm from, buddy.

S:  That's just pish! It sounds wrong!

A:  It does not. It's streamlined.

S:  You Aussies are just too lazy to say the A. Just like you say "arvo" coz you cannae be arsed with "afternoon"!

A:  Nooo! We say WEET-BIX coz we're sleek and efficient with no time for superfluous vowels -- we have to get on with the business of wrestling crocodiles and being a sporting powerhouse. While ever you're mucking about with your Weetabix, we shall remain the superior nation!

S:  Weetabix! Weetabix!

Don't get me wrong, I can't take my eyes of Nigella Lawson's magnificent rack either. But I am increasingly irritated by her over-the-top commentary. Just cook the damn FOOD, woman!

Last night she dished up a horrifying black rice concoction with prawns and chillis. It looked like scrapings from the bottom of a sewer to me, but no, she wanted me to behold the "marvellous black pearls of rice studded with ruby chillis". For a vegetarian variation, she invited you to try it with some "soft, jade hunks of avocado".

Next she bunged a bit of marinated steak on the BBQ, black on the outside but moo-ing within, chopped it up and called it a "quiveringly-rare, plateful of spice-seared, ruby-fleshed rags". To finish off, her limoncello-drenched trifle featured blackberries "peeking through their blanket of marscapone cream".

Her flowery descriptions are making me long for the last series, with her patented deep-throat taste testing of elongated vegetables. She seems determined to make the even the most unremarkable foods sound gloriously decadent and sensuous. Perhaps she cut a deal with some farmers, "Luv, if you can make this here cabbage sexy, we will keep you in bosom-hugging twinsets for life".

You can just imagine her brushing her teeth at night, whipping her tongue over her choppers and marvelling, "The pristine minty freshness of toothpaste evokes memories of prancing barefoot through a meadow in the summertime."

Or buying new tyres for her car, she'd be groping each one like a ripe melon and purring, "O the charcoal curves, the tangy aroma of rubber, the deep and twisting tunnels of the tread, how they surround the shiny wheel like a lovers embrace."

Next week I will turn the volume down and just oggle.

NIGELLA UPDATE:  Last night, when chopping up a watermelon, she said, "Make sure the pieces are big but not so big you can't fit it them your mouth"... then she paused and gave the camera a saucy look, "Not that it would be a problem for me!". Rhi and I shrieked, "YOU DIRTY BITCH!" in unison.

Sometimes you know it's not a situation where you should be laughing, but you laugh anyway. Standing in the corner of the ward, whispering and watching my grandfather:

SHAUNA:  His face is so smooth. Not a single wrinkle! At least we can be reassured that when we get old and are about to depart, we're gonna look good!

MOTHERSHIP:  That's the Parkinson's, you twit. All the muscles in his face have deteriorated!

SHAUNA:  Oh! Shit. Whoops.

And then Rhi and I couldn't help cracking up at the grandmother. She is diabetic, and loves to take all opportunities to remind us of her brave battle with the blood sugar. She is rabbiting on about the Glycemic Index and the Times She Is Naughty. She speaks of a mouthful of cheesecake with the same forbidden glee one would reserve for skinny dipping or shoplifting. We sat there bug-eyed as she recalled the dearly departed family members of 2002 (it's been a rough year) and what she ate on each occasion.

"When my brother Mick died, I ate half a family block of chocolate. And it was damn delicious.

"When Colin died, I had a packet of chips. Salt and vinegar, I think... ooh I do love chips.

"And when Rick died the other day, what did I have? Hmm. Let me think. Oh yes, I had a Kit Kat. That's right."

She is holding my grandfathers hand, talking and talking and talking over the top of his fractured breathing.

"If something else traumatic happens, I think I might eat a whole cake."

"It tastes like real meat, honestly. You'll love it!"

Thus spoke our earnest vegetarian dining companions. Pete had asked me tag along to a dinner, and seeing an opportunity to eat food that I didn't have to cook, I happily obliged. When I asked where we were going, she said "It's some vegetarian place where they have stuff that tastes and looks like real meat but it isn't."

Hmmm.

While the others carefully pondered the menu, Pete and I sniggered at the illustrations. There was a photo of the chef with a big fake grin, his arms spread wide displaying his delightful range of big fake food. There were chicken drumsticks, prawns, spare ribs and even lobster! All carefully moulded into the appropriate shapes from tofu and whatnot.

There was something interesting on the menu called Mocked Chicken. Prepared fresh from their big vat of Mock out the back I suppose. Or as someone suggested, maybe the chef yells at the poor little fakeass chicken, "Oh you are crap! You're not a real chicken!" and that gives the dish its mocked goodness.

We let the vegetarians pick the dishes, but had to choose our own entree. I went with the Curry Puffs, nothing in those would need to be imitated. But brave Pete chose the "Chicken" Drumsticks.

And what a bizarre concoction they were. Layer upon layer of something that resembled a bandage wrapped around a paddlepop-stick drumstick. Pete ate very slowly and carefully and smiled very slowly and carefully.

"Isn't it great!" beamed one of the vegetarians, "It's just the real thing, the texture, the skin..."

(... the paddlepop stick!)

"Yes!" said Pete with alarming conviction. "It really does taste like chicken!"

The mains were interesting. There was Honey "Chicken" and Mongolian "Lamb" and Asam "Fish". It was even moulded into a fish shape. I expected they'd put a thousand toothpicks inside it to simulate pesky fish bones, but no. It looked quite fishy, but no fish I know wobbles back and forth in spongy fashion when you try to cut it.

The "chicken" was actually alright, except for the way it dissolved in my mouth after one bite. The "lamb" wasn't very lamby but not too bad.

Then they urged us to try the Chili Mushroom dish.

"This one is so wild and hot, you'll have really wacky dreams tonight. And it's funny, the mushrooms taste more like beef than mushrooms."

Urgh. It was like a mouthful of shoe. Hot chilli shoe. Why did they feel the need to fake a mushroom? What's wrong with a real mushroom?

But overall it wasn't too bad. Before I knew it, the impatient waitresses had snatched our plates away and we were out in the chilly night, chatting away. I felt my stomach twinge slightly.

Back in the car, I asked Pete how did she like her drumsticks.

"They were fucking disgusting!"

"Oh! Thank god!"

"What about that bit where they said I bet you could put this food in front of a meat eater and they wouldn't know the difference!?"

"Ha! Yes! If it wasn't for the paddlepop stick, I wouldn't have known!"

So we fled to the pub to cleanse our palettes, but this only increased the tumbledryer turbulence in the tummy. I feel much better today, but I think I am all Mocked out for the rest of my life.

Before every meal I look down at the food and say a small prayer. Please allow me to get through through this feast without half of it leaping onto my chest.

It never turns out like that. I try to eat carefully, only loading the fork with small amounts, raising it to my mouth at snail's pace. But I'll laugh at something or my mind will wander, and next thing I look down to see I am wearing broccoli or a hunk of icecream. Many meals end with me yelping fuck fuck fuck and pulling off my shirt as I run for the laundry and my trusty can of Preen Stain Remover.

One day we were eating Whizz Fizz and I blissfully shovelled sherbet with that stupid plastic spoon and noone pointed out until way later, Hey you've got it on your boob.

I once knew a guy who got so tired of me being a slob that he suggested I not bother getting dressed and stay wrapped in my towel to eat breakfast, so I could just jump right back into the shower to clean up. Patronising ass.

It's not just with the eating of food, the preparation is even worse. For the three and half years I slaved for Colonel Sanders in high school, I was continually smothered in eleven secret herbs and spices. When I later toiled in a fish and chippie, flour and oil and flour would mysteriously weld themselves to my face and shoes. At least when I worked in a coffee shop, the mess smelled so earthy and vaguely chocolatey.

Today it was laksa at Asian Noodle House and I showcased my awkwardness with the chopsticks. Just take it easy, I told myself. I stabbed at the squishy tofu and slowly reeled in the noodles. But I lost control of the chopstick. It flew across to the next table and landed on someone's shoe with a plasticky clink at the same time I schlooooped up the noodles. Dots of spicy liquid pelted my t-shirt like tiny gunfire.

"You wouldn't want to have laksa on a first date, would you?" commented my dining companion. "It's not particularly elegant."

At this rate, I won't have to worry. By the time my next first date rolls around, I will be toothless and batty and we'll have to be chaperoned by a nice young nurse who will feed me spoon by spoon. And I can legitimately wear a bib.

My sister and I have bought a new car. Well, an old car. Well, not old. Made in 1998. It's my third car and finally I have one made in the nineties. I have come so far!

Anyway, we're getting a joint loan. It will be nice to share the expense of having a car. We decided to celebrate getting into debt by spending $80 on dinner.

The cute and sweet waiter greeted us (as opposed to the cute and funny waiter). He had a big smile and said, "Well, I haven't seen you two in here for awhile! Table for two?"

We had ordered some drinks when Rhiannon said to me, "Did you think there was anything weird about how he said table for two?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think he thinks we're like... together?"

"Together? You and me? Ewww! That's freaky!"

"Well I don't think he realises we're sisters! I mean, we don't look anything alike. And we come in here all the time, just you and me."

"We come here with other people sometimes!"

"Yes but who have we come here with? Emily! Bettina! Jenny! Always girls!"

"Well Andrew came with us for my birthday remember?"

"Yes but he was clearly with Emily!"

"Well I spose next time we come here we'll just have to hire some male escorts."

"I say tonight we make a point of letting the waiters know that we're just sisters."

"Okay, but how do we do that?"

We were interrupted by Funny Cute who took our order. Rhiannon ordered the chicken something-or-other. I asked for the lamb rump with the exotic potato thingo.

"Okay, but it's actually not lamb rump anymore, we're using a different cut now because we weren't happy with the quality of the rump."

Rhiannon looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I tried to mentally calculate the impact of me saying "Oh, what a pity, I do enjoy a bit of quality rump". Would that establish my heterosexuality or just make me sound like an idiot?

Instead I just said, "Well. DAMN!"

Funny Cute went away and Rhiannon said, "I know what you were going to say there, something about liking a bit of rump!"

"Ahh, you always know what I am going to say."

"See! See what I mean? Just like an old couple! We can finish each others sentences, we're living together, we're buying a car together, we go to the gym together, can you see what impression we must give people?"

"I say we give the impression of two sisters who are just unusually in tune with each other as a result of a rather colorful childhood featuring questionable parents, a close bond developing between us as a means of survival. The only two sane ships in a sea of dysfunction, if you will."

"Can we just try and work it in somehow that we're sisters?"

"Okay."

Sweet Cute comes over with our garlic bread.

"You know," I said loudly. "Our mum really likes garlic bread."

But he'd already moved on to the next table and out of earshot.

"Dammit!"

Later on, I was umming and ahhing over the dessert menu. Sweet Cute came over and I gave Rhiannon that look, you know the one where you're trying to give someone their subtle cue? But with tortured eyebrows and twisted mouth, you end up more looking like you're constipated.

She understood, however, and spoke loud and clear. "So what are you going to have, sister dear?"

I tried not to snort from laughter and ordered the apple blackberry crumble. Sweet Cute went away and I hissed, "Do you think he'll understand what you mean by sisters? Like sisters as in we have the same mother?"

We pondered this for awhile, but then I overheard Sweet Cute talking to Funny Cute, "Hey, they're sisters! I never knew!"

We go down to the greasy little shop behind our building to catch some lunchtime sun, maybe catch a little drug deal going down. The shop attracts a strange mix of customers. Suits sitting at the tables with jam donuts and Important Documents; unsavory types pacing barefoot along the side of the road.

The phone booth is where it all happens. It's the busiest phone booth in town. You can hear them shouting down the line, "Yeah I'm at the phone booth! Five minutes? Okay! Hurry!"

I have a greasy chicken wrap that I regret before even the first bite, she has a salad roll.

"So have you heard any more news?"

"Bloody hell, I said no onions. Now my breath will be feral all afternoon."

"Bugger."

"Anyway, nothing concrete yet. But I think it's safe to say that our jobs are unsafe."

A car pulls up and a girl with long spaghetti limbs jumps out, runs over to the phone booth and starts tapping on the door.

"But you know that neither of us belong here, we don't want to be here. Maybe it'll be the kick in the butt we both need."

"True."

"Don't worry, honest. You don't have to look so bloody scared."

A car comes rattling down the street, thick smoke pouring out the back, every door a different colour of blistered paint. It lurches to a stop opposite the phone booth. Steam starts spewing out from under the bonnet.

A tiny barefoot woman gets out with a big bottle of water. There's sizzle and spit as she pours it in. Spaghetti girl runs across the street and pokes her head inside the car, chatting to someone inside. We try to be subtle about watching as the water starts dripping straight back out under the car all over the road.

Suddenly the back window winds down and yet another chick sticks her head out, fixing her big wild eyes on us.

"HEY! AM I FUCKIN' STARIN' AT YOUSE AS MUCH AS YOUSE ARE FUCKIN' STARIN' AT ME?!"

"We're not staring, honest, it's just the water is coming straight back out..."

"RIGHT!"

She gets out, starts walking slowly and deliberately across the street.

"Umm. Is it okay for me to look bloody scared now?"

We scoop up our purses and the remains of lunches and try to look casual about fleeing back to the office. Now, back to fuckin' starin' at nothin' til 5 o'clock.

The humble onion, while tasty, really shits me. Once they're all cooked up they're so harmless and delicious. It's the raw form I have problems with. And I'm not talking about the crying, I can handle the crying, in fact I quite enjoy the crying, it makes me feel all melodramatic and fuzzy inside. I just hate how one small touch of an onion and its stinkiness sinks into your fingers. The pores soak it up like red wine to expensive carpet. And no amount of soap and scrubbing seems to get that smell off your skin.

Raw onions also trigger serious flashbacks. One whiff and I'm back at the dinner table and my sister is sitting across from me and we both have tears in our eyes.

— We don't want to eat the icecream, Muuum.
— Eat the bloody icecream! There's nothing wrong with it!
— I'm telling you Mum, it tastes funny.
— I'll give you funny in a minute.
— I will plunge this spoon into my heart if you make us go on.
— EAT!

It all started with the margarine. It had been on special for 99 cents a tub at Woolies, so we had 8 tubs of it in the freezer. One morning I gnashed into my vegemite toast and almost choked in disgust. Vegemite is a pretty domineering kind of flavour, but something about the margarine was purest evil. Margarine isn't supposed to taste like anything, it's just the essential sludge for the vegemite to melt into. But this margarine tasted faintly savory. I whinged to Mum but she commanded me to "EAT!".

Months passed and we slowly made our way through the margarine stockpile. By then we complained bitterly that it tasted like "something had gone feral in the tub".

Then came the chocolate chip cookies. We'd made a double batch yonks ago so we had to put some away in the freezer. When finally ate them, it was like swallowing death. To this day I still go pale at the sight of a cookie. One expects a mouthful of buttery chocolately goodness, but these cookies had surely been marinating in a footballer's armpit. The putrid after taste lingered for days.

You'd think Mum would have believed us after we rolled round the kitchen floor clutching our stomachs for a full hour. The Vile Taste had penetrated almighty TUPPERWARE for heaven's sake. If evil could invade solid, practical yet overpriced plasticware, surely the end of humanity was nigh. But instead we were forced to continute eating weird-tasting peas and pizza and lambchops, fresh from Satan's icebox.

It's been well documented that I come from a family of tight-arsed waste-not-want-not bargain hunters. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the source of the problem encompassed all these qualities. When even the family dog refused to eat a rather pungently flavoured lamb roast, Mum finally admitted there was something wrong.

I was sent in to investigate. It was one of those massive chest freezers, big enough to fit a whole cow if it so pleased you. I felt like a deep-sea diver, legs flailing as I plunged down, scouring the ocean floor for ancient shipwrecks. The deeper down and closer to the stinky source I got, the more I wish I really did have some sort of oxygen device.

Finally I found it, stuck to the bottom. An innocent looking plastic bag. But stuffed to the hilt with chopped raw onions.

"Oh! I forgot about those!" said Mum sheepishly.

Never one to resist a freebie, Mum had been given the onions at a school fete, leftovers from the sausage sizzle. She'd thrown them into the freezer For Future Use, and hadn't given them another thought until long after their evil scent had invaded every last bit of food in the freezer and bludgeoned our tastebuds.

She was going to make us keep eating the remaining six loaves of bread (on special, $1.20), but we went on a hunger strike until she relented. Let this be a warning to you kiddies, onions are the devil's vegetable.

The Mothership is closer now. Before we had a nice buffer zone of 2.5 hours, but now she's moved to Goulburn so she's a mere hour away. Close enough to swoop in unannounced for a routine inspection/nagging session. Quelle horror.

You may recall the last time I helped her move. Well, she went off to a patchwork class and I did the moving. After that ordeal I vowed next time she moved, she was on her own.

When I move house, I take it as an opportunity to purge unwanted items. But Mum doesn't do that. She brings everything. Last time she didn't even empty the fridge.

We discovered this gruesome fact over a year later, on Christmas Day 2001. Rhiannon went to make the pasta salad and found in the fridge door the salad dressing from Pasta Salad Christmas Day 2000.

I fear for my life when I open Mum's fridge. You never know what buried treasures you'll uncover. The problem arises because the woman buys shitloads of food, but never gets around to cooking it. So it sits in the fridge slowly morphing into a museum piece.

One cannot just pluck something from the Mothership Fridge and eat it. There's a lengthy examination process, in which you check for expired use-by dates, wacky odours, strange growths, etc. Then you have to interrogate The Mother. A typical scene:

RHIANNON: Mum, when did you buy this cheese?
MOTHERSHIP Last week!
R: Last week as in the week just been, or 1986?
M: Last week as in LAST WEEK, you little smart arse!
R: It smells funny.
M: It does not smell funny!
R: It doesn't look so good either. Have you go any other cheese?
M: You two are so obsessed with freshness!

But we have good reason to be obssessed, especially after the Gravy Incident. Mum wanted to prove to us once and for all that she could actually cook, because we didn't know, having cooked almost every family meal since we were seven years old. She got out the pots and pans and roasted us a chicken and some vegies. But she was spent from all that effort and asked Rhiannon to make some gravy.

Her ill-equipped kitchen could only offer us a box of Gravox. Rhiannon was stirring away at the stove when she observed:

"Hey Mum, this gravy looks kind of lumpy."
"Nonsense!"
"It does, I tell you. It's got flaky bits in it."
"Oh! It must be that new onion gravy stuff. It's onion flakes."
"Are you sure it's not old?"
"Yes I am bloody sure! You two are obsessed with freshness!"

It wasn't until she'd poured gravy all over my food that she noticed the gravy was actually MOVING.

"Oh look! There's weevils swimming in the gravy! Ooops!"

Of course everyone else's meal had been spared from the bug bath but mine. Grrr.

And then the Orange Juice incident, again Christmas 2001. I live for Orange Juice. Mum's too stingy to buy fresh stuff but she does keep some of that long life Berri stuff for me.

"Mum, this orange juice is brown."
"What?!"
"Shouldn't orange juice be orange?"
"That's long life juice! I only bought it the other day!"
"Bloody hell! It expired in May! Are you trying to kill me?"
"There's nothing wrong with it. You two are obsessed with freshness!"

Then there's the organic vegies. She has a friend with an organic vegie farm. She calls us up all time, "Do you two want some organic vegies? They're organic, you know! Organic! So fresh and tasty! ORGANIC!"

But the time she gets down to Canberra to deliver the booty, they're not so fresh and tasty. The bag of Organic Mixed Salad Leaves have become a bag of Organic Green Sludge; the carrots have taken on a deformed twist; the Fresh Organic Lemons are mistaken for limes because they've turned powdery green from age.

A particularly disturbing moment was when I went to make some guacamole, and digged through the pantry for some Tabasco to give it some kick. The Tabasco use-by date was June 1982. The current year was 1999.

But just like the bargain shopping, it seems Mum inherited it all from her mother. When I was I kid, I once found a can of pineapple in Nanny's cupboard that had a faded green price sticker that read 5d. Decimal currency was introduced to Australia in 1966!

My sister and I chose to stop the insanity there, and take a minimalist approach to fridge stocking. Two or three items per shelf at the most. And the orange juice is always orange!

Who invented the Hot Dog Maker? How fucking difficult is it to heat up a bloody hot dog?

Have you looked at the kitchen appliances on offer these days? There's the Muffin Maker, in which you can make a grand total of three muffins at a time. Ditto for the Pie Maker and the Omelette Maker. Then there's the Popcorn Maker, Sandwich Grill, Health Grill and Rice Cooker.

I always thought you could achieve all those bloody things and more with a normal old stove and a frying pan. But no, it seems you need a different applicance for every dish and your shiny new applicance is guaranteed to make the job Quicker and E-Z and 97% Fat Free!

Chances are, I'll come home from work tomorrow, fling my bag down in the hall, scratch my chin thoughtfully and remark to Harry, "You know Harry, I really feel like prime beef fillet served on a bed of dirty carrot tops and poached hummingbird eggs with a rosemary and deer antler jus."

And Harry will turn to me and say, "Well it's funny, today I just popped down to the shops and bought the brand new Breville Easy Prime Beef Fillet Served On A Bed Of Dirty Carrot Tops And Poached Hummingbird Eggs With A Rosemary And Deer Antler Jus Maker! It's so easy that even me, your flea ridden companion, can be a gourmet chef! I simply throw in the ingredients, press Start and walk away. Twenty minutes later you'll be dining in style."

It's hot today and I'm cranky. Mission Impossible 2 is one of the worst movies ever made.

Imagine a world without bacon!

Back in the day, when we had a hankerin' for a Red Rooster dinner, we would say, "Let's go root the Red fella".

I'm very messy. It was such a short journey, from the takeaway container to my plate, some leftover fried rice and honey beef. But I lost control of the spoon and half a dozen glossy chunks of meat went flying through the air and despite diving to catch them, they landed into a laundry basket full of my sisters clothes, still warm from the dryer. Sauce flecked over her socks and bits of beef rolled into undies. MSG is a real bitch to get out.

You non-metric fools can now indulge in what Aaron described as "the richest, most sinful things I have ever tasted". This brave young lad emerged briefly from *lurk mode* to inform me that 200g of butter equates to roughly 2¼ sticks. Also, be sure fire up your ovens to 350° F for guaranteed success. That's the only fiddling you'll need to do, just follow the rest of the recipe as normal.

Ooh er! Miss Fran took the Midnight Brownie Challenge! That's TWO people who've made them now. It's a culinary phenomenon to rival the heady sun-dried tomato days of the early 90s!

Somebody actually cooked my Midnight Brownies! I can't believe it. It was none other than Miss Pea. She did the strawberries and cream thing too. Mmm mmm. Will you take the Midnight Brownie Challenge? I promise you, they're good.

Mmmmm, pizza. We wanted it bad last night. Or rather, we were too lazy to cook. Plus it's a good 5 degrees colder in our kitchen than it is outside. I'd got home late and my sister was parked in front of the heater in her pj's with no intent of moving. So we decided on pizza. Not the greasy home-delivered kind, but the yum and cheap Zeffirelli kind. So I called them with our order and then we headed out to pick it up.

"I'll drive and you run in and get it," said my sister, "coz I'm in my PJs"

"Okay."

"Is it legal to drive in slippers?"

"Sure it is."

She double parked while I ran in and grabbed the large San Luca, only $8.80! The place was packed as usual so it took me awhile. Finally I was outside again and Rhi had managed to find a park. She licked her chops and eyed the pizzas as she started the car.

The headlights flickered, once, twice, then nothing.

"Faaaaark!" I announced to passing strangers. "Not again!"

She turned the key again but nothing. Not a single light on the dash, nothing. "That's a brand new battery!" I ranted. "I paid $110 for that!"

"And I'm in my pyjamas!"

"But even if the battery had died it would still try to start, it'd make that dying cow sound like last week, so it can't be that..."

"I've got ugg boots on dammit!"

"I'll have to call the NRMA. Can I use your phone?"

"My phone's at home, don't you have your phone?"

"You know I never take that thing anywhere!"

"Well either do I!"

"There's no public phones around here, we'll have to go look for one"

"YOU have to go look for one! I've got blue PJ pants with clouds on them!"

It was too bloody cold to traipse around looking for a phone, so I took my chances at Ocean Master Seafood. It's a local, dodgy chain - a poor man's McDonalds, except with fish instead of... whatevers. The guy behind the counter beamed as I walked into the empty shop, behold! a customer! He was crestfallen when I said I just wanted to borrow the phone, but was kind enough to let me. The NRMA chick cackled at our predicament and said someone would be there in an hour.

"Look at this as an opportunity for us to have meaningful conversation," said my sister.

"The pizza looks good."

"Yes, yes it does."

The guy arrived at about 8.30. Rhiannon dived into the back seat. The guy poked and prodded around the battery and asked, "Who the hell installed this?"

"Some place that the last NRMA guy I saw recommended to me!"

"Oh. Well, they didn't do it properly!"

"Bah!"

Five minutes later he was gone with a slice and we were on the road again. Incidentally, the pizza was lovely.

You know what shits me? Kraft Parmesan Cheese. You know the kind. In the bright green packet? Me and Rhi would call it PONG CHEESE when we were kids. Why? Because it pongs! Stinks! Reeks! It is a most offensive odour! Think mould and vomit and eau de sportsmans armpit. It's a noses worst nightmare. The consistency is something like sand meets canary in a blender. As for the taste, I'm sure licking the bottom of a urinal would be more pleasing to the palette. Yet my mother would stubbornly scatter it across our spag bol or lasagna in vile yellow molehills. Thank god we grew up and discovered the real stuff that comes in blocks and not butchered into soulless granules!

Mmm, mango.

So yesterday I did something really bloody stupid, which is not entirely uncharacteristic of me. I arrived at work half asleep, being Monday and all. I went to put my lunch in the fridge, and what a pathetic lunch it was. Our pantry had hit rock bottom so all I had were a few half-stale crispbread and a suspect looking piece of cheese. On opening the fridge, I was hit with that usual WHOOSH wave-of-stink that comes when a dozen people shove random things in there and forget about them for months on end.

But I am actually one of the worst offenders. When I opened the fridge I saw one of those frosty-coloured tupperware containers and realised it was my potato salad from the Monday before. I'd opened it up at the time and thought, "Blah, salad. I want a cheese and bacon roll from Bakers Delight" then promptly threw it back into the fridge. A week later, it didn't appear to be too healthy. From what I could tell without opening the container, it was all pink and green from various mouldy things. So I threw the container into the bottom of the bin and covered it with a pile of old Canberra Times

Then it's lunchtime, and a colleague of mine goes up to the fridge to get her lunch out. There's the sound of much shuffling and rearranging of things then "Who stole my lunch?!"

"What!?" we all said. "Noone would steal your lunch."

"I TELL YOU, it's not in there!"

This woman is a particularly stern kind of lady and within minutes she was charging around like the Spanish Inquisition, grilling everyone to find the supposed Lunch Thief. So I went up to the fridge to look for it myself. Our fridge is only one of those crappy little bar ones, but we manage to pack a lot in there. I sat on the floor and started pulling things out of it. Sandwiches, wine bottles, a tub of margarine that was there when I started over a year ago, pieces of fruit slowly turning green, three jars of salsa. Finally there was only one thing left. One of those frosty-coloured tupperware containers. It had my mouldy old salad in it.

"I can't understand how it just could have DISAPPEARED!" ranted my colleague. But I could understand, it's quite easy for your lunch to disappear when some moron throws it into the bin.

I could have explained what I did to this woman and offered to buy her some lunch and perhaps she could have forgiven me in a few months time. But that would be okay for someone not quite so gutless. I fished the container out of the bin, wiped off a few headlines smeared on it from the newspaper, then put it back into the fridge.

"Hey, I found your lunch!"

She charges over. "Where? Where?"

"Erm... it was right here. Under this stuff. See?"

"I swear I looked there!"

"Well, there it is. So... here you go."

"Hmmph! It's not very cold!"

"Well. You know those bar fridges. They don't work that well."

In my usual guilt-ridden Make Mountains Out Of Molehills way, I tossed and turned about this all night. What if she drops dead of food poisoning? What if she works out what happened?

"Yeah, I am sure she'd think to herself, 'hey maybe some idiot threw my lunch in the bin and covered it with newspapers then stealthily returned it to the fridge hours later!'. Not likely," my sister reassured me.

The woman in question appears to be in good health today, thank goodness.