Thursday, April 10th, 2008...4:50 pm
Me and Mal Meninga
Firstly, I should mention that any comparison between my blogging “career” and Mal Meninga’s football career make it very clear that Mal’s well in the lead achievement-wise.
Anyhoo, I’ve been thinking (for a very long time) about a cookery blog - they’re aren’t really any funny ones*, and I make many culinary errors which I find amusing. So lovely Liam organised some space for me, and I’ve been developing a design, and making notes and thinking about posts a lot. And there it is, almost all ready to go (except that my lovely firefox friendly comment boxes bork out in IE which is driving me a bit mental), and …
I read the cookery blogs and there is EXACTLY the same conversation that has been occurring for the last two or three years in the political blogging world about professionalism//journalists are good/bloggers are teh evil and would never get “properly” published as they have no technical expertise, etc, etc blahdy blah. I can’t be stuffed, you know?
So I start writing a post about recipe substitution and Nigella Lawson’s breakfast bars and the amended ingredient list is so staggeringly wanky I can’t bear it and have to stop. Which is when I remembered Mal’s entry to local ACT politics in 2001. 28 seconds he lasted. In his first interview as a candidate he just folded:
MAL MENINGA: I was … I’m buggered. I’m sorry.
COMPERE, CHRIS UHLMANN: That’s all right.
MAL MENINGA: I have to resign.
COMPERE, CHRIS UHLMANN: Okay. So Mal Meninga is leaving the studio. And he says that he can’t do it.
The more I think about it the more graceful and sensible his approach seems.
* Except, of course, spiceblog, of which one cannot speak too highly. And no doubt there are more - leave a link if you’ve a fave.
15 Comments
April 11th, 2008 at 9:41 am
have to nominate Michelle’s blog http://thursdaynightsmackdown.com/ as a uniquely hilarious food blog…
Thanks, Jess - I was hoping for something like this - Zoe
April 11th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Hi Zoe, I read this post at first with excitement, and then some dismay. The first was prompted by the thought of you drawing on that vast cook book collection I’ve heard about and, of course, my second reaction was to learning that you won’t be doing a cooking blog after all. I’ll admit that I don’t read a lot of cooking blogs–not sure why, even I would have thought I would–but I would have read one by you which would almost certainly have been irreverent in the face of the most pretentious produce.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Don’t you find, Kirsty, that these moments beset every endeavour worth undertaking?
I’ve got over myself and realised that the cookery blog has to be like this one (ie entirely for my own pleasure) if it is to be worth doing; then it’s always a pleasant surprise (a happy accident) if anyone else likes it. In fact I’ve been planning to email you soon to ask if you’d like to crosspost some of your gastropod posts - check your email.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Thursday Night Smackdown is ace. You can do it, Z.
Food, humour, add a dash of political nuance and it’ll be totally YOU.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
We need Zoe’s cooking blog. I need inspiration. If you can do it with two little ones, then so can I. Can you just promise the food will look real, not perfect like in a magazine?
April 12th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Food…. food with meaning….for those of us for whom the kitchen is the third stage of Hades….please.do.cooking.blog
April 14th, 2008 at 8:46 am
I use and recommend The Art of Drink, and even though it’s pretty US-centrica and they’re kinda wankers, regularly browse Modern Drunkard Magazine.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
I’m with the others, I’d like to read it, while I don’t usually read cooking blogs (nor professional journalists writing about cooking neither, though I do like looking at the pics, ’specially if there’s chocolate involved…).
April 18th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Well I’d like to think that mine doesn’t take itself too seriously… !
April 21st, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Why start a new blog when you can just add an ongoing cookery subsection here? You’ve already been doing it in a defacto kinda of way anyway. Sorta like a very modern Ms Beeton for the 21st century.
You really think some of the Aus blogosphere’s suavest commenting blokes like moi, Fyodor, Liam, and even Tony T, end up here like bogong moths around a patio light just for the Rosalind Russell impressions?
Au contraire mon cher. We’re all here for handy tips about how to freshen up that chunk of aging cheddar and wilting broccoli lurking in the distant corners of our fridges too.
Any exciting things you can suggest to do with half a forgotten onion, 18 month old tomato paste and a dusty packet of angel hair pasta is just a bonus.
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Throw them away, Nabakov, is the answer you had before you asked it.
Then, confiscate a bottle of Midori from the nearest teenager on a binge, find an orange and a carton of pineapple juice from a convenience shop (you’ve wondered why they stock it? It’s for this recipe), unearth from the sink cupboard that dodgy tequila bottle with the plastic five-legged scorpion at the bottom, grab from your grandmother’s glass “nice things” case the bottle of duty free Cointreau, and sink my Japanese slipper:
2 parts midori
1 part tequila
Squeezings of half an orange per person
Pineapple juice to taste.*
There’s no art. Add everything to a shaker with ice, shake it, pour it, make another one.
Go you green machine (to keep with the Meninga theme).
*We all know what this means. Splash, save, savour.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Hiya,
oh well - I knew where you were going as soon as I read the Mal Meninga bit in the title.
According to the ABC link, “Mal Meninga was, in his time, the best rugby league players in the world.”
Some would agree, perhaps.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
[...] I first heard about Zoe’s new blog venture it was in the very same breath that I heard of its demise as well. [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Oh you’re not going to stop doing the Progressive dinner party because of that wanker, are you? Stuff her. Please keep doing it! I’m going to blogroll it anyway, so there!
May 28th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Nah, Helen, It takes a nation of a million wankers to hold me back ; )
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