Chilli crab first-timers

Seems our fame for entertaining foreign dignitaries has spread. June spent the day camwhoring and shopping with her colleagues visiting from Indonesia. I provided the transport and the mopping up procedures at dinnertime. Yums!

Taste of a memory

Took a chance on a flyer I found stuck between M2's wiper and windscreen advertising a $7.90 set lunch at J's Bar and Grill.

Yes, I seriously needed a new place to eat at. Sadly, the place was dark and empty, with me as the only customer at lunchtime.

The set lunch offer was supposedly for any main course, but today it only applied to the beef gumbo (left). The set came with a starter onion soup which was a bit watery, but it was freshly made in the kitchen and not some canned cream of nonsense.

The gumbo was a nice surprise. The taste and texture reminded me of the vegetarian chilli I was fond of while I was a poor and starving student at Calumet College. It was the yardstick I measure all vegetable soups by -- not that it was exceptionally delectable, but that it was truly comfort food for a great price. It's a taste I've been looking for, but for many years haven't been able to find... until now.

Minus the beef bits floating around, this gumbo comes closest to a fading memory of some very good times.

Btw, Calumet calls it a chilli, but there're no hot peppers spicing it up. Instead, we help ourselves to the Tabasco sauce on the condiment shelf and drip to taste.

Pebbles, the yob

Turns out Pebbles is quite the soccer fan. The small, fast movements on screen during the long-shots held his attention much better than the close-ups; but other programmes on TV hold no fascination for him. If he is a soccer fan, though, he's more like a United yob, a.k.a. soccer hooligan. We hesitate to introduce him to other potential adopters because he's begun to show his true colours as a violent, attack-anything-that-moves psychopath. All claws and teeth, maybe he needs yet another name change -- how about "Sabertooth"? We're trying to train him out of his volatile tendencies: that is, make a loud noise (other than "ouch!") to startle him whenever he takes a chomp at our exposed extremities. Hope that will work, or else we'll spray him with a faceful of atomized water if things escalate. As a kitten, he's not causing us too much damage, but he needs to be better behaved before he gets any bigger. Bad boy!