ma's big red birthday

sadly at no time during the day did this kind of gift present itselfOkay, so I don't know how "red" or "big" Ma's pre-birthday birthdayness was (although I did write in her card "The word of the day is: Red" since the gift wrapping was all red)... but we had a nice day.

We started off, as we always do no matter what other special things may be happening for the rest of the day, with the usual Supermarket Safari... nothing out of the ordinary there, although I did buy Ma a Balfours Custard Tart since she's saying that if it's not homemade or Balfours then she's not interested.

When we got back here, I unpacked the groceries while she unpacked all her presents... interestingly she'd put on the new pearl shell pendant she bought last week at the Expo, which matched up very nicely with the pearl earrings I bought her yesterday...

Completely in character for us, we had no idea at all what the hell we were going to do for the rest of the day... I'd floated the idea of going to a place down the road for yum cha for lunch, which was only half of a plan, since we had a bunch of time before the place even opened.

In the end we decided on Ikea... for no particular reason other than they seemed to be having a sale (and oddly it turned out to be Sweden Day or something)... as always when we go to Ikea we bought some stuff that neither of us necessarily needed, but was on sale, and thus was something we had to buy. Go figure!

I also drooled over the chair I keep drooling over every time we go there (and honestly, it's not really very droolworthy, but it's possibly the closest thing to what I want... or would be if I knew what I wanted... it is comfortable though). I also spotted another bed frame that seems like it might work in the space I have... good rails for handcuffing people to (these things are important), and it would get the bed up off the floor and away from the wall. We took down the dimensions and figured we might go looking at matresses next week and if we can find one that fits properly, we'd go back down to Ikea so I can buy the bed. If I do do that I think I'm going to buy the chair at the same time... kill two birds with one stone.

As we were on our way out of Ikea, they had some little food tasting trays in the food section... some unidentifiable pinky grey stuff on one of those balsawood cracker biscuits... turns out it was herring marinated in blackberry something-or-other... not totally unpleasant, but as I said to Ma afterwards... "It's going to take something like a small-scale tactical nuclear strike to get this taste out of my mouth!"... although it wasn't a fishy taste, which is kinda weird.

After a couple of quick stops on the way back to North Adelaide, we headed to Maple House in the North Adelaide Village for yum cha... now I've had dumplings and yum cha type stuff at different places, but usually you get a menu that tells you things... like how much stuff costs, and how many pieces there are to a serve. Not at Maple House... we got a very, very long list and a pencil. And, to be honest, I still have NO idea how much most of the stuff cost, but what it all totalled up to...

What we ended up getting was:
  • Steamed Prawn & Pea Shoot Dumplings (VERY yum)
  • Steamed Mince Beef Ball (a weird colour, but fairly tasty)
  • Deep Fried Savoury Dumpling (which turned out to be seafood... we should have gone with the pork version)
  • Steamed BBQ Pork Bun (I LOVE the filling in these, even if the outside is like eating a cushion)
  • Steamed Golden Mushroom Chicken Rice Roll (very slippery, but tasty)
  • Egg Custard Tart (for dessert... and they were SO yummy that we ended up getting two more serves to take away with us... I think they'd cooked too many and were trying to make sure they went)
You always know that any restaurant with food from a specific region is good when the place is full of people from that region... while we weren't the only "white" faces in the room, there was only one other table that was totally non-Asian.

We definitely have to go back... I think we might skip over things like Snow White Chicken Feet and Tripe with Ginger Sauce though...

So, very full and very happy, we stumbled on back to my place to watch this week's episode of Heroes before Ma tootled on home...

Happy Birthday Mama-san!

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