A great knife for that teen chef

We love good design at the Spirit House and the you know design is good if some love it and others hate it – so when it comes to knives we think this is pretty neat:

Give one of these to a teenager and you’re going to get some help in the kitchen. The blood stain is permanently set on to the blade and the evidence tag is a nice touch. And at $20Aus or so, it’s quite a bargain. You can buy it online at Neatorama’s shop.

Nail Houses

What happens when a developer moves in to a neighbourhood and buys up the houses for a new shopping centre or apartment complex and one person doesn’t want to sell? You get a nail house.

I used to think that we had one in West End near the Three Monkeys coffee shop but someone told me the developer owns it – still, it’s an old Queenslander surrounded by an appartment complex so I guess it’s a nail house. With all that in mind, deputydog.com has some great stories of nail houses from around the world.

Spirit House Soups – now available

Hitting the shelves in time for winter are our new range of delicious frozen soups – Chicken and Galangal (Tom Kha Gai) and Spicy Thai Pumpkin. Each soup packet serves two people and serving is as easy as thawing and heating the contents in a saucepan or microwave.

To turn our soups into a hearty meal, simply add some cooked prawns or chicken – Easy! Available now at a stockist near you.

Inland sea disappears

Thanks to NASA you can see the effect that man has on the environment. Below is a photo of the Aral sea – the word’s 4th largest inland sea.

Rivers were diverted, dams were added to irrigate cotton farms etc. As a result, towns that lined the shores of the sea and derived their economy from fishing are now abandoned. Sometimes it takes a view from space to see just how fragile our planet is and what impact we are having on this planet.

Can’t decide where to eat?

Urbanspoon is one of the largest restaurant review sites in the USA. It’s a site that allows customers to review restaurants and you can see menus etc. They have a great app for the iPhone that finds your location and let’s you spin a ’slot machine’ restaurant picker to find restaurants close to you. You can demo it below – I’ve locked in the Brisbane area for the app and you can click the LOCK icons to lock in a suburb or food style or price – or any combination of the three.

Here’s what others say about us:

and restaurant reviews:

Monky and Froggy visit Spirit House

My google alert came through this morning with a great review of our new menu. It seems that Monky and Froggy from bellygood.net had paid us a visit. I’m glad that the Spirit House lived up to their expectations. Bellygood.net is run by two avid food lovers, monky and piggy, who have some great reviews of other restaurants – worth checking out.

And if only they had some contact details we’d love to send them a little something for their kind words.

Luminescent Mushrooms

Wandering around the restaurant last night I noticed some glowing dots coming from a log in the garden. Upon closer examination they were coming from tiny mushrooms. The light is bright enough to catch your eye but still took nearly 20 seconds of exposure to bring you this photo:

The largest mushroom cap is about the size of your finger nail.

They seem to spring up after heavy pro-longed rain and apparently as they grow, a chemical reaction involving luciferin (a light-emitting pigment contained within the mushrooms) occurs, causes them to glow a ghostly green.

Gordon Ramsay’s best scrambled egg recipe

I know what I’m cooking this Saturday morning:

Sticky Rice in a rice cooker

I’m not sure about this one – but according to About.com in the Thai food section, someone has posted a technique for cooking sticky rice in your rice cooker. And no, apparently you don’t have to soak it over night. I haven’t tried this technique yet but if you want to be the first let us know how it turns out.

Ingredients:

• SERVES 4
• 2 cups  “sticky” or “glutinous” rice
• 2 1/2 cups water
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Preparation:

1. Place 2 cups sweet rice in your rice cooker. Add 2+ 1/2 cups water and stir.
2. Let the sweet rice stand for 30 minutes (or longer if you want – up to 4 hours).
3. Add the salt and stir once more. Turn on your rice cooker.
4. When your rice cooker switches off (after 15-20 minutes), let the rice sit at least five minutes extra.
5. Enjoy your sticky rice!

Sticky Rice Tip: Sticky rice will become sticker the longer it sits.

Jupiter slipping behind the sun

There’s a reason you should never look at the sun – that’s because NASA does it for you and when they do they see cool stuff like Jupiter and its moons travelling behind the sun – if you were to do it you’d see your retinas fried:

That mild green glow on the left side of the sun is billions of tons of plasma blasting off the surface into outerspace.