The other half of it

Before swanning around with my sister in law for four nights, I did some very cool side hustle stuff last week.

My adventures kicked off with meeting the inventors of peanut butter whiskey.

Steve and Brittany Yeng established Skrewball in 2018 and sold the company to Pernod Ricard in 2023, but still play a major role in the brand.

As to why they created peanut butter flavoured whiskey … the big question on most people’s lips, including mine … well that’s an incredible story.

Steve was born in Cambodia and contracted polio. The country’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime had killed all the doctors so his family fled to a Thai refugee camp.

They spent six terrifying years there before eventually being sponsored to migrate to the United States, where they started out living in a garage without running water. Someone gave the children a jar of peanut butter and it became the symbol of a better life for Steve.

He met Brittany in high school and the pair opened a restaurant and bar in San Diego, California. Customers couldn’t get enough of Steve’s peanut butter-flavoured whiskey shots, so they decided to bottle the idea and call it Skrewball.

Handily Brittany is an industrial chemist and headed to the lab to work out how to put peanut butter flavour in bourbon. The results have won lots of awards and millions of fans.

As Steve told me his incredible life story, a shot of peanut butter-flavoured whiskey with a smoked salt rim sat on the table in front of me. I was a little nervous to try it, especially in front of the founders, because it sounded like such a bizarre spirit.

But it was actually delicious. When my eyes widened with delight, Steve raced off to the Pernod Ricard kitchen and mixed me a cocktail with orange juice and Skrewball, which was also unexpectedly fabulous. Anyways, Skrewball is going on sale in Australia next month and gets two thumbs up from me.

A few nights later I was invited to a really special night at a gorgeous bar called Eau de Vie. It was a dinner organised by my friends at The Whisky List that matched delicious food with cocktails and rare releases of Angel’s Envy whiskies.

My place setting even featured an engraved mini bottle of Angel’s Envy, fancy!

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I sat at a table with complete strangers, but had a great time chitter chattering to someone’s dad who’d come along as a plus one. We shared a love of travel and pink wine and talked up a storm all night. That’s us in the Insta video above before you press play.

I am also very pleased with the photo I took of the waiter lighting my bombe alaska. Fancy!

The following night I was invited to a dinner at Matt Moran’s Chiswick restaurant in celebration of the National Wine Awards winners.

It was hosted by one of the wine show’s sponsors, CropLife Australia, who were a lovely team.

The dinner was next level luxe and included the opportunity to taste the Best Wine of Show. Something must be finally clicking in me when it comes to my palate, because I described the winning wine – Rocket Chardonnay – as being “savoury” and Chair of Judges Matt Harrop, who was sitting beside me, exclaimed in delight that it was exactly what made the wine so unique and wonderful!

The food at Chiswick was divine – our dinner included slow roasted lamb shoulder with chickpea garden salad and mint, along with yuuuuuummmy ‘Barra-masalata’ with vegetable chips.

The experience helped me move on from the unhappy memories of being taken there for a special occasion by my ex in the dying days of our marriage. He clearly wished he could be anywhere else – such an empty, sad evening.

This visit, however, was heaps more much fun. I took along a former work contact called Mira, who loves wildlife and snorkelling just as much as I do. We spent a few hours chatting happily before I treated myself to a cab home to belatedly welcome my sister in law to Sydney.

And I just kept powering on from there, as you may have read in yesteday’s blog post.

Fortunately this week has been much quieter … well, sort of.

I worked a 14-hour day in the office and at the Vivid Sydney control centre on Tuesday night, then walked the dogs at 11.45pm before collapsing in bed. And on Wednesday night I hosted the body corporate for a mouldy ceiling viewing and a 20-point meeting agenda that dragged on for two hours.

The head of the body corporate has lent me a ladder so I can clean the mould off my ceiling for health reasons while we wait for Fred the builder to come back with a quote to fix the cracked tiles above my apartment.

Anyhoo, this weekend will be head down, bum up finishing my book. Then DD is back on Monday!!!!!! He is pretty knackered too after travelling from Sydney to Tokyo to London to Stockholm to Iceland to London to Tokyo to South Korea to Tokyo and finally back to Sydney.

Have a great weekend and I will catch you next week.

Song of the day: Pink “Raise your glass”