Gloria in Excelsis Deo

A quick plug:

Traditional Kings' College Style Xmas carols and lessons at St Phil's, O'Connor, Sunday 7.30pm. Plenty of old favourite singalong carols, and some very interesting and fun choral pieces. Supper in the courtyard (weather permitting). I will be singing. Come along! All welcome, and it's free!


Note that - also in wonderfully traditional style - our local government has decided that NOW is the perfect time to resurface the driveway leading to the church parking area! I mean, who would be wanting to use a parking lot at Christmas? So, it's street parking only, and in O'Connor at that. Bicycles and feet are highly recommended as transport.

PS to those unfamiliar with church vocab: "lessons" means readings from the Bible, not actual lessons in, say, Latin grammar, or how to do long division. I must admit that there is a *little* bit of Latin, but I promise there is no quiz.


(No actual "read more" content, it's buggy. I'll fix this one day. Next year when the moon is blue.)

Things I've learned

Recently I was looking at cracked.com, that scary site of internet crack; it's second only to tvtropes.org in addictiveness. Just ONE more funny list. I'll just follow that ONE more link. No, OK just ONE more. Oh, I wonder what that next one is like. Hang on, how did it get to be 3am? So with due warning given, look at just this ONE list of the 10 most important things they didn't teach you in school. It's hilariously and totally true, all of it.

In the spirit of that, but on a very much lesser scale, here are some things I've learned recently.

1) You know when you cut yourself while chopping up food, and put on a bandaid really tightly, because you remember from first aid that compression stops bleeding? Always remember to loosen it within the hour. Ow.

2) You really shouldn't pot roast one of those heart-tick extra lean cuts of meat. It will come out much too dry.

3) An overly dry piece of meat can be turned into a rather good cottage pie, by chopping it very finely and adding tomato paste, herbs, stock, wine, carrots, onions, peas etc, then simmering together for an hour or so to meld. Then add a good topping of mash and bake until hot.

4) You don't have to peel your spuds under cold running water. Dunking them in a bowl of warmish water will do nicely, once to peel, once to rinse clean. It feels much better in midwinter, and it saves water.

5) Don't use a serrated knife to chop up cold (dry) meat. Use a chef's knife or carving knife. (See point one.)

We Have Kittens

Kittens! Two of them! We're still thinking of names, though the dapper chap with white shirt and spats is probably Archie. The other one isn't Misty or Smoky or Hazy or anything so trite, but we're not sure what he is called. For a placeholder, he's Silver.

Plummet isn't happy about it, but we expect he'll adjust. There's been a bit of hissing and sulking. It's going to be a bit complicated for a while, especially since we have houseguests arriving in a few days for the folk festival, and the kittens are bivouacked in the main bathroom. Perhaps we can move them to the bar.

I was thinking of making a key lime pie for our annual co-operative dinner, since I have a bag of limes, but I seem to have got it mixed up. I thought key limes were the small West Indian ones, but now that I read more, they seem to be more closely related to the Tahitian kind, except smaller. Oh well, I can make some sort of lime tart anyway. And I can buy some Maggie Beer Lemon curd icecream, since I will be working Mon-Thurs and not have much time to do anything fancy.

Tomorrow, by the way, is the Handmade Market. Always worth checking out, this time it's at the Kamberra Wine Company just up the road from me.

O hai, I can has weekend?

I haven't had many at-home weekends recently. I've been madly gadding about like a mad gadding thing. I've been to the Goulburn Blues Festival; Corinbank; a friend's birthday (staying away the night); visiting a friend in Sydney; and last weekend I was off to the global atheist convention in Melbourne. It's been fun, but exhausting - this sort of schedule doesn't mix well with full-time work. But yes! I have finally had a weekend at home! And I even have another whole free weekend before we have our Easter houseguests.

For a while I was feeling a bit guilty about not blogging, but I got over it. It's supposed to be some fun for me, not an obligation. I do keep thinking about it, so I don't think I'm over the whole blogging thing yet. Plummet decided to wake me up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm feeling a bit ordinary. But nevertheless I've had a good go in the kitchen, and am feeling quite proud of my production, and feel like telling the world.

Hello, world! Today I made roast tomatoes, stewed rhubarb with mixed berries, Thai red curry pork with veggies, and a spinach and cheese potato bake. The spinach and spring onions in the potato bake, as well as the rhubarb were from the garden, so that's extra gratifying. And yesterday I took a cake baked in the octopus shaped tin along to Skeptics in the Pub, where PZ Myers was speaking.

The curry was just from a paste, Mae Ploy brand. I used some lean pork, and added eggplant, green beans, red capiscum and bamboo shoots. And I used light coconut milk, not the proper rich coconut cream kind, so it's a bit thin. It's OK for an easy dinner, though it's a bit hotter than I intended! My previous tub of Thai red curry paste was Maesri brand, which I now know is milder.

The spinach bake is a trifecta of virtue: home grown veggies, using up some things that were on their last legs, and preparing for the work week in advance. Can you actually see my halo? *ting*

There's no recipe per se, but this is what I did.

* I mixed together a tub of low fat cottage cheese, some leftover fetta marinaded in olive oil & sumac, and 7 eggs. All of these were very close to their use-by dates.
* I ground in some pepper and chucked in some extra sumac, pine nuts, a handful of grated parmesan, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and three chopped spring onions from the garden.
* I picked lots of spinach from the garden, washed it and chopped it roughly. Microwaved it to wilt it, then wrung it out and chopped it up.
* I decided there wasn't enough spinach for me, so I defrosted about 250g of frozen spinach and added it in.
* Oiled a cake tin that seemed about the right size. (It's silicon, but I'm getting less trusting about the non-stick qualities of that where eggs are concerned.)
* Washed, peeled and finely sliced up four large potatoes (Dutch cream, they really are quite yellow).
* Layered it the cake pan - potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato.
* Took a picture part way through the layering.
* Baked it at 150C for half an hour, then added a bit more parmesan on top and baked it for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it - I made it up as I went along. I don't know yet exactly what it tastes like, since I haven't cut it open, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's hard to go wrong with spinach and cheese. And it will come in very handy this week. It can be reheated in wedges in the microwave, as cafes often do with their frittatas, or in a slow oven.

Reasons for not blogging

* Too tired, because I'm not getting enough sleep, because Plummet wants to show off his mice at 2am and 4am.
* Getting used to 5 day weeks again.
* Out of town for the Blues Festival.
* Out of town for a friend's birthday.
* Moving all my stuff from one computer to another, so I could give my old one to B1, who is stuck in Sydney for the long term.
* Manually rebuilding all my photo libraries, contacts, bookmarks etc since Migration Assistant didn't do it right.
* Trying to get ahead with my Canberra Times stuff, so the editor can have a break.
* A new Mystery Case Files game.

I haven't actually given up. I have a few plans and partial posts waiting in the wings. Now that I've got my phone resynched and my camera connection reset, I can upload the photos to go with them. But now I have to go shopping. It's time to get the weekend food prep underway, and I need to buy some cream to fatten the cat.

Internet Salmagundi, Special Xmas edition

This is not exactly how I did my turkey, though mine did also involve a bacon wrap. But it sounds even more awesome. Though there isn't any stuffing and I'm not sure if you'd get good pan juices for gravy. Perhaps it could be modified.

A while back, some people were discussing raw milk - here's a good article on the subject.

And some funnies:

Atheist Holiday Traditions

The War on Xmas

And look.. it's Santa Cephalopod!

Notching up the achievements

Done massive supermarket shopping trip
Done smaller market trip for pudding and salmon
Put salmon on to cure
Made bottom half of trifle
Decorated cake
Made panforte
Made brandy butter
Took cat to vet to be put to sleep
Made breadcrumbs for stuffing
Collected first batch of relatives from the airport
Cleaned out part of the fridge (more to do there)
Written lists for final market and supermarket trips

Still to go before the day:
Wrap all the presents
Do final market and supermarket trips (twilight EPIC market tonight)
Organise relatives to get the turkey & ham & bacon while I'm at at work Xmas eve
Make rest of stuffing
Finish trifle

One of these things is not like the others. It's not so easy to be festive at the moment.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Ask a Question

I keep seeing people asking questions on really old posts. I don't have an alert for that, and anyway they're often not relevant to the post. So here is one you can use for general questions, that I will check more often. I'll link it up the top right with the indices and spam reporting things.

A New Start, A New Cafe

The first week back in full time work, after all this time off, has been a bit of a shock to the system. I'm lucky in that I have flextime, and my supervisor is quite happy if I start work at 9.30am. Also, I never got into terrible late night habits during my time off - a lot of the time builders were arriving at 7am. But I'm out of the habits of planning meals and doing some dinner prep in the morning.

So last week we had simple dinners. One leftover curry; one mixed grill with steak, sausages and oven chips; one quicky pasta with a pre-made tomato sauce and some cauliflower, capsicum and sausage pieces chucked in; one pide from the Dickson TurkOz - the best pide in town, IMO!

And I bought lunch three times, all from Cafe Momo. This little cafe is right next to my new job, less than five minutes walk away. It caters to a range of tastes, with a hot box of chips and pies and such; a sandwich bar; and a sit down cafe with some full meals and a short wine & beer list. There's inside tables, a pleasant little deck out the back, and a small room that can be closed for a private group of maybe a dozen. There are some pictures on their website; I snaffled one showing the approach that I take, walking in from the back. Pretty!

The prices are very reasonable compared to town. Once I had a chicken and avocado salad sandwich ($5.50 I think) which was nicely fresh and well filled. Another day I took in some fruit, and supplemented it with a pepper steak pie ($4). It was a good pie, made in house, with big chunks of lean meat and a lovely golden pastry top. The pastry bottom was a bit soggy, though.

And I had a sit down lunch with my friend F, who works across the road. She had a Thai beef salad ($16), and an iced chocolate heaped high with cream. I had zucchini fritters ($14.50), which you can have with smoked salmon or roast capsicum. I chose salmon this time, and the serve was generous. The fritters are those standard blobby shaped ones, Turkish restaurant style, drizzled with yoghurt and served with mixed leaves. They were cooked well - no soggy insides. F's salad looked good, too: plenty of beef and beansprouts, and made a bit substantial with noodles. I'll try that one sometime soon.

I also bought a muffin one day when I missed breakfast. That was due to chasing down our wandering sick cat, and then making him take pills and coaxing him to eat. But I wasn't rapt with it - too cakey for my taste. I don't like muffins to be too much like cupcakes, I prefer less sugar and a more solid style, given some guts with bran or wholemeal flour. Cake for breakfast is just wrong. Next time that happens, I'll just get a vegemite sandwich on wholegrain.

I'm pretty pleased with Cafe Momo, despite its minor flaws, and I'll certainly be a regular there. The coffee is decent, too. It's not the greatest, but it's not too bad. A little on the weak side, it's overly light and sweet in flavour. But hey, at least it's not burned or cold or obviously stale. Canberra is not strong on great coffee, unfortunately. I count myself lucky to find a drinkable one out here in Bruce.

Cafe Momo is at 14 Thynne Street, Fern Hill Park, Bruce. They are open Mon-Fri 7.30am to 4.30pm, and Sat 8am-2pm.

Well, I'm back.

Happy December, everyone!

We're on for the count down to Xmas, and all the foodie stuff that goes along with that. I've ordered a free-range turkey and half a ham from Eco meats; the cake has been soaking up its weekly dose of brandy for almost two months now; and the Farmers' market special Xmas times have been scheduled. I'm annoyed that I forgot to pick up a leaflet, since they haven't posted hours on their website. I'm pretty sure there's an evening market on 23rd Dec.

In the market, it's cherry season. You pay from $6 to $12 a kilo, depending on the variety and quality. So I simply have to go to the market every week for a couple of kilos. I have sweet black rons and sharper bright red merchants in the fridge right now. So good! Blueberries are also pretty good, though not as cheap - I got 500g for $12. I've been eating them straight, and I made some blueberry muffins on Sunday.

The garden's doing alright. A few things got crisped in the week of 30-38 degree heat, so I've replanted a bit. I've been picking rhubarb and herbs, and the apricot, tomatoes and boysenberries are setting fruit. A few redcurrants are nearly ripe, though there won't be enough of those to do anything with except maybe adding to the breakfast cereal. Or perhaps to the rhubarb.

In personal news, I'm starting a new job next week. The Public Service has got me at last! It's actually my first preference out of all the public service jobs I applied for, so I feel pretty lucky. I got the job offer officially on 19 Nov, and we went off and bought a new car the same day. I'll be working in Bruce, near Cafe Momo and Ellacure, neither of which I've managed to get to yet.

So hey, I'm not DOOOOOOMED to useless unemployment and depression (well, duh). I have recovered some cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Recently I've been thinking of blog posts that I should write. I'm planning to get back to this more regularly, maybe twice weekly or so.

The cats are OK. Plummet is cheerfully getting fat on his renal diet food and Shadow's leftovers. Shadow is still alive, bright eyed and bouncy, though he's taken up a few odd habits. Sleeping under the car is the most annoying. He has to be coaxed to eat, and won't touch anything but real meat and tuna. He got some fillet steak trimmings a week or so back, and I was thinking how extravagantly cat-tragic a thing that was. And then I worked out the price of the k/d tinned food that Plummet is supposed to eat. The steak was cheaper. Lucky I've got that job, now.

So, how's it going?

One does adapt to circumstances. After our initial scare that Shadow might have to be put down immediately, it was a great relief that he's responded well enough to his treatment to be able to come home. So now we merely have kittehs with a terminal disease, one very far advanced. They also have very silly haircuts. We're trying to get Plummet to accept the renal diet, which he's kind of almost OK with, except that he can smell the tuna and meat that Shadow is getting. Shadow won't eat anything else, and since he won't last long, he may as well enjoy his last few months.

That renal diet is expensive! About ten times the cost of whiskas. The vet gave me a list of recipes to make your own, which I was quite keen on until I read them. I'm pretty sure they are American. Cans of clams aren't exactly standard fare around here. Oh well. As long as he's eating moderately well, that's the main thing. They're both bouncing around the house seemingly as healthy as horses. That's kidney disease for you - all well until sudden collapse.


In other news, I'm still feeling a bit down and slightly off my food. The job situation is getting to me, even though I know that the Public Service processes are very slow. Not very much music is happening either; my singing teacher is down with a very nasty shoulder injury. Too much facebook game time is going on. Hey, wanna be my friend, and play cafe world and fellowship and that zoo game thing and farmville and treasure mania and bejeweled blitz? Hmmmm. Could be slightly excessive there...

Well, I'd better look more on the bright side. I'm still reviewing for the Canberra Times, so I get to go out for fancy dinners even while unemployed, yay! And it's springtime and the garden is doing well. I planted Kipfler potatoes and they are up and flourishing. There's spinach and rhubarb coming along and my hydroponic lettuces are growing quickly. Perhaps too quickly, they're stealing the water from the other plants in the box. The baby apricot tree is setting fruit, the fig tree and the new cherry tree are sprouting leaves. And we've had a lovely display of irises, too.

I have cooked a few things, mostly simple repeats like the pulled pork, brown bean sauce noodles, spag bog, and grilled meats and sausages. I have a half finished post on a curry dinner that I made before all this fuss. I should finish that one off, I suppose. I've also made an egg and leek and potato dish that won't be reappearing on the menu because it needs too many saucepans. I've also made the annual Xmas cake, and I used my gorgeous new birthday cake pan to make the orange cake that came on its label. This is it - photo is not ideal, and some icing would enhance it, but I think it's clear enough to work out what it is. Cool, eh?

I've also been out for a few meals. We've done pre-theatre quick dinners at several places. The Wig & Pen - great beer, tolerable pub grub - is an old standard and close to the Street Theatre. Tosolini's is pretty good food, convenient to the Canberra Theatre. Entree sized pastas are enough if you have bread and salad, too, and it's pretty quick. And we also tried out Coo, which had terrible, terrible service. We only ordered sushi, and though you'd think that would be quick, only two of our 4 items actually made it to our table in 45 minutes, and then we had to leave. It is very new, though, so I'll be giving them another chance some time. And the food we did have was delicious, and they apologised a lot.

Internet Salmagundi XV

Food
Flags made from food! The Australian one is a meat pie, of course.

Supposedly the 50 best foods on the planet, and where to eat them. No Australians, but then the selection is rather highly debatable. It has best milkshake and burger and pizza, and trendy high end items, but no best kangaroo steak. Nor anything but the most famous of non-Anglo ethnic foods.

Speaking of Anglo ethnic foods, 'tis the season for devilled kidneys. Lamb kidneys $3 for 6 in that Civic butcher whose name I can't remember. Progressive Dinner Party has a hilarious Holmesian story and recipe, which I think I must make soon.

Notes on the food revolution - an article at Salon about this new book, Cook Food by Lisa Jervis, that I WANT MUST HAVE GIMME NOW PLS!!eleventy!11! Who is Lisa Jervis, you may ask? Well, she's awesome, but not commonly known as a food writer...

Not Food
Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yarrr.

The UK government has apologised for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing. A surprisingly good statement from Gordon Brown, there.

My favourite biology/atheism blogger, PZ Myers is coming to Australia next year. I'm tempted to go, and naturally wear my octopus shirt. Also there will be Richard Dawkins and Sue-Ann Post. Fangrrl swoons.

You think your internet connection is slow? Try the pigeon test. In case you're wondering, this is not why I haven't written anything for a week - that's more due to job panic, plus a bit of can't-be-arsedness, plus no really notable cooking or eating to report. Hmm, maybe I'll do a backlog of the repeats next.

Save the Fringe!

You may have heard that the Fringe Festival is being de-funded. In the goverment spin, this is presented as funding the National Folk Festival to host Fringe, and allowing the multicultural festival to focus more on our local cultural diversity. Yah, right. As long as it's very traditional cultural diversity and not postmodern gypsy punk eastern European storytelling, I guess.

I got this letter from a couple of people who have been involved as performers and organisers, and are very concerned about this direction. Please read and take what action you can.

Dear Arts lovers,

As you may know by now the Fringe Festival in Canberra has been defunded with a small portion of the previous funding being re-allocated to the National Folk Festival to do something "fringey". The Canberra Times is taking a big interest in this so please take the time to write your opinions down in a letter to the editor.
Points to think about:

* $30,000 is a mere fraction of the amount of money required to put on the grand scale we've seen in the last few years
* The folk festival is expensive, not free like fringe was and attracts a limited demographic
* The folk festival is a music festival with very little focus on theatre and visual arts which the fringe has always promoted evenly
* Local artists have relied heavily on the fringe as an affordable way to produce art and reach the wider canberra audience that only comes out of the woodwork for large scale free events in the middle of the city
* The folk festival is not central


Letters to the editor must be 200 words or less and sent to letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au

You can also send a letter online at http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/letterstotheeditor/

I also suggest writing to Jon Stanhope, whose full contact details are at http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au/page.php?v=28. Or his email is stanhope@act.gov.au

My take on it, as a regular of both festivals, is that the Folk Festival is too big, too focussed, and too isolated to do this well. Do you host it onsite at the National? It's already overcrowded out there, what venues will they use? And how much overlap in the audience will there be anyway? Fringe fans are not going to want to pay steep entry fees to the Folkie to see their shows. It's $85 a day if you buy at the gate. We usually buy season tickets early, which will be $166 this time.

And if you put it in town, that won't work well either. Folk fans from around Australia stay onsite in camp grounds - they won't go into town to watch their shows, especially not with our appalling public holiday bus schedules. How involved can the Folkie management possibly feel, in dealing with something offsite and well outside their usual audience's interests? They run on volunteer labour already; an extra job that few of their patrons care about is not likely to be done well!

And Easter is a bad time to attract audiences anyway. We all know that locals use the last warm long weekend of the season to go out of town. It was working well, but this is a mess. Why take a successful event and nobble it?

I finally clicked that "Monetise" tab

So now we have google ads. I have no idea if this will make me any money, or if my readers will instead form a tiny lynch mob with flaming torches and drive me off. So far it seems to be producing sensibly food-related ads. And if you're using firefox & adblock, I'm pretty sure you will see nothing of it anyway.

I'm told that if anything offensive turns up, I can ban them. But I haven't fully learned to drive this thing yet, and my readers may not see the same ads that I do. Let me know if there's anything terrible, and I'll do my best to get rid of it.


Edit: This is amazing - I seem to be getting a lot more page views that I expected. I'd avoided counting before because I didn't want to feel intimidated by a large audience or disappointed by a small one. (Yes, I can be hard to please.) And you guys are clicking on the ads! I actually want to click on a couple of them, but I'm not allowed.

So I now feel, like, all responsible. I've added a link to this post to the top of the left column, as "Report a Bad Ad". Anything that looks nefarious - junk weight loss spams, quack miracle cures, mailorder slaves brides, whatever - please post the URL here as a comment, and I will put it on my ad filter list for bannination with extreme prejudice.

NOTE: Don't bother reporting it, if it appears on this specific page. Talking about dangerous weightloss spam brings it on like Beetlejuice.

Howto note:
My account -> AdSense (wait for load) -> AdSense Setup -> Competetive AdFilter.

Internet Salmagundi XIV

I haven't done one of these for ages. It's facebook's fault. I keep posting fun and interesting links to facebook and forgetting to do it here. So here's a collection for amusement.

Food Related

I can't believe I only just found epicute this week. Cute food - cakes, bento and lollies, mostly. Kind of opposite to cakewrecks, which I have mentioned before.

Speaking of cakes, here are some very wrong ideas for cakes: the tomato soup cake and the beer cheese cake with bacon icing. Words fail me.

These are supposed to be the best chocolate chip cookies ever. They contain more salt than you would expect.

And I really fancy making Alton Brown's granola. Though it is winter, and I'm more into porridge than cold cereal at this time of year.

Is it worth making your own? Well, maybe, maybe not - this article examines a few cases. It's where I found the link to the granola recipe, which is definitely something to make at home for both the author and me. Jam and marmalade, too, for me. But I'm not sure I eat enough yoghurt to justify making it, and bagels seem too time intensive to be a regular.

And in local news: Stonesoup has a book launch coming up at Gunning this weekend. I'd like to go but may be exhausted by the rounds of other events this week.

Not Food

First, I'm honoured to have been included by the Darling Sisters in their list of bloggy goodness.

This is cool musical toy to play with.

This letter from a former slave to his former master amused me no end.

If you like Buffy and hate Twilight, here is an excellent antidote. Personally I couldn't care less if some vampires sparkle, but the romanticisation of stalking and abuse is just disgusting.

And while we're on the politics of fantasy/SF, here is an thought-provoking critique of the Star Wars series.

And for happy geekery: a collection of periodic tables. Some are works of art, some are simply comedy.

Goodbye, Blue Tiles

It's on. The kitchen facelift began on Thursday, with the demolition of the dreadful booth. This morning the stove and sink have been disconnected, and some new cabinetry has arrived. We're keeping most of the old cupboards, except the most damaged. But that dreadful tile benchtop is to be covered up with shiny new manufactured stone.

Tip for any kitchen renovators: tile benchtops are a really, really bad idea. No matter how cute and funky they look. The surface is uneven. The grout becomes very dirty. They tend to lift in wet areas. Wiping it down is a chore that takes much more attention than a simple flat surface. OK, so some of those problems are from the crappy installation that characterised a lot of this house when we bought it. But the grout cleaning problem is not going to go away even with the best tiling job.

There will be a lapse in cooking for some unspecified time. We do have a toaster, kettle, coffee grinder and microwave set up in the bar, so we won't have to eat out for every meal. We also have fridge or freezer leftovers: pasta and potatoes, sauerkraut, pesto and shredded Carolina turkey. Possibly we could eat out of the microwave for a week. But the washing up would get to be a problem: the bar sink is tiny.

More experimental porridge

My diet yesterday was:
* breakfast - porridge
* lunch - tinned spaghetti
* dinner - tinned chicken soup, with extra frozen veg
* dessert - lemon yoghurt
Oh dear.

I'm not feeling any better this morning. Glands like walnuts, sore throat, earache, headache, hurts when I chew. Blecch. I've been making bad swine flu jokes on facebook. My favourite so far "I called the swine flu help line, but they are overwhelmed. All I got was crackling." (Yes, I do count myself lucky they haven't worked out that way to stab people in the face over the internet.)

Anyway, today's porridge was going to be a sachet of Wild Oats Hot Stuff. I found it in Woollies while I was stocking up on tinned spaghetti and soup on Monday. It's multigrain. Ready in 90sec in the microwave. Made in Australia. Almond and vanilla flavour, and says it's all natural - so I optimistically hope that it has actual vanilla and not vanillin.

Well, I made up the sachet and looked in my small bowl, at the little lump of porridge sitting there, and thought WTF? Who eats this little breakfast? Maybe someone who follows it up with bacon and eggs, I'm guessing. Or a small child.

I give it a taste, and it's so sweet I can't eat it. So I put on a half cup of quick oats (2/3 cup water, nuke for 2.5 minutes) and mixed half of that in. It's quite nice now. There's a reasonable amount, and the sweetness is cut to a tolerable level. Excellent - it won't be a waste, I can eat the rest in a mix with extra quick oats.

Like all sachet cereals, it's expensive compared with making your own. I do like the almonds in it, but you can easily add a few flaked almonds to regular porridge. I also like the fact that it's multigrain. It has barley and rye and linseeds. I want to find multigrain porridge again - I did have a bag of Monster Multigrain porridge, but it's almost gone and I don't remember where I got it. Woollies at Dickson doesn't have it any more, if they ever did.

It's all PZ's fault

I've been busy with guests and renovations, and then away down the coast for a bit, but I'm back now. I'm writing up the coast trip in a separate post, but here's a little to be going on with. My purchases: this is a really cool bowl, from the Mogo Pottery. It's pretty big - it would suit a bouillabaisse, should I ever get round to making one. Or a large salad for a BBQ party, which is much more likely. The potter says it's oven and dishwasher safe, too.

And what's that in the background? It's hard to see, but here's a detail. That's my new T-shirt from the folk festival. It's from the Stringybark people, who do all sorts of cool animal themed prints. The actual colour is closer to the dark one in the bowl image; I was too slack to fiddle the colour balance properly.

Octopus and squid. It's all PZ's fault, I tell you!

Internet Salmagundi XIII

It's been a while since I did one of these. I've been posting funny and peculiar links to facebook, mostly. I'll go back for a trawl.

Food related:
* Beer Meringue Pie. I have to do this one day.

* Undead themed wedding cakes: the good and the bad, as collected by cakewrecks.

* And look at this: Mexican gelatine art. This is just amazing - is it a bunch of flowers?


And moving away from the food theme:

* This collection of 1920s cartoon LOLcats has grown to over 1000. Someone has far too much time on their hands.

* I don't think I know anyone who would knit me a jumper, and I can't knit, but I love this one. Owls! So cute!

* Sita Sings the Blues is an entire animated movie, available for free under creative commons. It's a fascinating construction - multiple animation styles, interweaving the ancient story of Rama and Sita with a modern story, and modern commentary (by shadow puppets) on the old story. All this, and a track of 1920s blues/jazz songs by Annette Hanshaw.

* We saw Meow Meow recently. She's an amazing artist: see her if you ever get the chance. Some blurbs: "vamped-up kamikaze cabaret and exotica performance art", "From the psychotic to cool to kitsch cabaret, multimedia performance art and virtuosic contemporary opera". "Stranded somewhere between the Middle Ages, 1930’s Shanghai show tunes, 60’s French pop, witty wicked Weimar and post-punk thrash..."

Farewell my pantry

It was a good pantry. With a light in the top, and wide U-shaped shelves so you could still reach things at the back at the top. And now it looks like this. It's at the right, a mere empty frame where the new laundry door will slide in. There is no replacement coming up in the immediate future: I'll be living with shelves in the laundry until we re-do at least some of the kitchen.

It's not so easy to cook with all the ingredients in boxes on the floor. I managed a stirfry on the day the pantry went, and we've been eating the chilli. Tonight I've got ham steaks. I know I've said "never buy ham steaks", but these are different. Free range pork, from the wonderful Eco Meats at Belco Fresh Food market; they are all lean meat. I'm going fruity with them: panfried ham steak with fresh panfried pineapple, plus some "Ham Jam" spicy cherry relish. Add some spuds and a green salad and we're done. I'm actually cooking one steak for the two of us tonight, and a smaller thinner one for 'Ron. I'm going to brush it with Hoi Sin, and pretend it's BBQ pork, and slice it up into a laksa. I usually make laksa with a pre-made paste from the Asian grocer; but maybe one day I'll make a project of it and do my own.

I've also made the bright green pea dip "poicamole" from Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini. It's dead easy, and very nice as a dip or a sandwich spread. Note that 300g baby peas only need about 5 minutes to microwave from frozen, if you choose that over the steaming that she recommends.

Today's harvest was 2 figs, the 400g rhubarb, and two medium-small zucchini. It's not much, but at least I'm keeping up with it easily. Today I'm cooking up the rhubarb with four old pink lady apples, to make some breakfast stewed fruit.

I'm microwaving it rather than roasting. I have no tomatoes left over to roast this week, since I used them all in the chilli, and I prefer not to use the oven for a single small dish. It seems like a waste of electricity. The microwave is very energy efficient, and works well on most things that you'd usually steam or boil.

I just chucked the cleaned chopped apple & rhubarb in a glass bowl, with a scant 1/4 cup sugar and a drizzle of Bundaberg ginger beer syrup. Nuke it for 5 minutes, stir, test, keep nuking for 2 minute blocks until it's done. The hardest part was finding the box which had the sugar in it.

This is rather haphazard, and depending on the variety and freshness and fineness of chopping of the apples, you might not get both fruits cooked at once. But it's only for me and I don't care if the rhubarb turns into a sauce. Cooking is much less of a fine art than people often think - perfection is hard, but "reasonably edible" is almost guaranteed with a bit of common sense.