Getting to Sailors Thai

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

Six years ago when we were last in Sydney I found myself in a bookshop and in my hands I held a vast signed copy of David Thompson’s book on Thai Street Food. I bought it and took it back to England although it probably took up a sizeable portion of my luggage allowance. It is a beautiful book full of full page pictures of food being cooked and eaten on the streets of Bangkok and in between the pictures there are detailed descriptions on how to go about cooking the food.

Over the years it has come off the shelf and I have cooked from it but have always been left with the sense that I could be eating a lot better from the street stalls in Thailand or even better from a table in Sailors Thai, the restaurant that David Thompson started off in which sits just under the heavy buttresses of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

We had to give it some time before we got there for lunch as the guesthouse we are staying in lays on a thick breakfast which included three different types of sausage, bacon and beans ans endless rounds of toast – all of which meant that an appetite had to be worked up.

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We did this by wandering slowly around the Opera House and into the Botanic Gardens and then through the streets to The Rocks under the Bridge. When we got there the consensus was that we were not hungry yet. Fortunately we were opposite The Museum of Contempory Art, and even better, they had on an exhibition devoted to the works of Grayson Perry. So we bought our tickets and went in and spent an hour amongst his pots and tapestries trying to tease out the subtle line that he was drawing between himself and the world around him.

We were then ready for Sailors Thai Canteen and made our way into the dark room and the long wooden table that ran parallel to the bar and kitchen. We were not disappointed.

I had a plate of stir fried spicy holy basil with minced chicken, others had deep fried trout with coconut cream choo chee curry with lime leaves, spicy deep fried sweet and sour belly of pork, veg pad thai and chicken with noodles.

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On the way home Galen and I found a micro brewery filled with men with big beards and tattoos. They were in the process of putting a large poster up on the wall. There was a temptation to stay there drinking beer until they had got the poster up. But that would have meant that we would still be there now which might not have been such a good idea.

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Lost on trains

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

There is a horror story by Clive Barker about the terrible things that befall a man stuck on a subway train late at night. He finds that he can’t get off the train as it rumbles on to some unknown destination and as he waits in his seat he is beset by strange apparitions dripping blood and other such things.

There were times last night as we tried to navigate the myriad complexities of the Sydney urban transit system when it felt as if we would never got off.

We are now staying closer to the city centre in an area called Newtown round the corner from King Street which was described to us as being the longest shopping precinct in the world. We had a bit of a walk down it yesterday and had lunch in a place called Buzzzbar where we could have felt out of place for a lack of tattoos, black leather and a same sex relationship. As it was we felt quite at home tucking into our burgers and chips. We could have been in Brighton.

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King Street was a long row of interesting shops and places to eat. Both sides of the street were covered in awning. I assume that these are to help give some shade to the pavement but yesterday they helped to keep out the rain. Hopefully we shall have another chance to wander down it.

In the evening we had to make out way back to Campsie to help make up the audience for a nationalisation ceremony. We gave ourselves plenty of time to navigate the vagaries of the train system but this was not enough. We had been warned off the express trains that would bypass the station you needed before dumping you at some obscure destination in the suburbs. As we tried to avoid these we were distracted by tannoy announcements for trains to Liverpool via Sefton. Hadn’t we just travelled round the world to get away from there.

Then the tannoy was telling us that the train on the tracks in front of the platform we were on would somehow take us to Campsie despite it being one of the warned about express trains heading for an obscure destination. Putting our trust in the tannoy we got on.

It turns out that an express train in Sydney rarely raises itself above a trundle. And so we puttered out slowly to some obscure destination in the suburbs as night came down. Urgent texts passed between us and those going through the nationalisation ceremony but it became clear we were going to miss it as the train drew to a halt outside a station and the driver announced that we were going to have to stay there a while to allow the trains in front to clear.

Once we got to a station and jumped onto the platform frantic to find the train that would take us to Campsie. Two minutes later we were back on the same train as it started its slow trundle back into the the city. That trundle then drew to a halt and there we sat still for ten minutes . The driver was good enough to announce that she was keeping her fingers crossed that we would get going to soon.

Two hours after having started off we made it Campsie. Wehad missed the ceremony but were compensated by a meal in a Japanese restaurant. Plates of food off a sushi train and a bowl of sustaining udon noodles in broth with breaded chicken.

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We then made the slow trundle back home to our beds.

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Alternative careers in Campsie

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

First day in we walked up the road to Campsie town centre and were pleased to see one or two buildings offering the possibility of an alternative career in Sydney.

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A few hundred yards along we came across an indoor fruit and veg market almost as good as K & N in Birkenhead. Five rows of deep shelving stretching back into a long room each rack given over to a particular type of fruit or veg which in turn gave rise to a great block of bright colour.There was nothing different or that unusual in there apart from lemon grass almost 18 inches along and and apples stained pink with Chinese lettering.

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Further along we came across shop windows filled with deep red duck and chicken hanging over trays of tripe and duck heads, jelly fish and what looked like the various innards of pig. In Between the shops there were restaurants from every corner of South East Asia, Malayasian,Vietnamese and Chinese with some of the Chinese places selling brilliantly white buns.

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Above all this the tops of some of the shop fronts could have come from Birkenhead.

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We may need a bigger pond

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

I need to spend some time reading up on the life development of a frog.

Two weeks ago there were half a dozen of them in the pond. They were no more than an inch or so long and if I made too much noise or came too close they disappeared under the water.

This Friday they all seem to have grown by another inch or so and although they might skedaddle if I get too close they are soon back again, basking on the surface of the water, and getting up close and personal with each other and the water is taking on a porridge like consistency thick with spawn. If next years brood is as successful there will not be room for them all.

It must be something to do with the weather which was just about warm enough for us to have lunch outside. I was even tempted to light a BBQ but was quickly told there was too much packing to do for that.

So lunch was using up most of the remaining veg in the house including two fat beetroot. They were peeled and went through a grater together with some carrots, an apple and half a bulb of celery. Some chopped parsley was mixed in along with olive oil, sherry vinegar and salt and pepper and a dozen raisins for sweetness. We had this with burgers the recipe for which is worth repeating.

Bread crumbs were made. As they were ground ever finer I tipped in a whole red chilli, a clove of garlic, some spring onion and a good handful of green herbs. This all came out as a thick green bread crumbed mulch which I mixed with my hands into a pound of mince together with more salt and pepper, a dash of Tabasco and a dash of Sriracha sauce.