Several times in the past weeks I’ve sat down to write my daily blog entry and thought, “There was a thing I wanted to write about today, but what was it?” And I’ve been unable to remember what it was. So I’ve started writing down brief notes to remind myself. Let’s see how we go today…
I’m overdue for a haircut. I’ve avoided going for the past few weeks because of the current COVID outbreak here in Sydney, but now it’s getting long enough that I think I really need to get a haircut soon. The NSW Government has ordered mandatory wearing of masks in places specifically including hairdressers and beauty salons. At first I thought okay, I can just go to the barber and wear a mask… but then today I realised that there’s no way they can cut my hair normally with a mask on, as the barber trims sideburns and around the ears and stuff where the mask straps are. So I don’t know how that works. (Some searching now reveals on the NSW Government site that “You may also remove your mask for the proper provision of goods or services, for example, if you are having a facial or beard trim.” So I suppose that applies.)
Secondly, I had my first ever peanut butter and jelly sandwich today. In the USA food package that I received the other day was a jar of Smucker’s Goober Grape PB&J. Peanut butter and jelly is a very American food. We don’t really have “jelly” like in the US here in Australia, so it’s actually not easy to replicate the effect, except by using jam, which usually has at least small chunks of fruit in it. Indeed, to most Australians, the very idea of mixing peanut butter with jam/jelly sounds disgusting, so it’s not something that most of us would try to experiment with, either. So yeah, I’ve never had it before. I do enjoy making a sandwich with peanut butter, honey, and cinnamon, so I’m not averse to mixing PB with something sweet. And I like jam. But I still approached this PB&J with a bit of trepidation.
I took some photos of the preparation. I’m guessing that traditionally in the US PB&J is probably made with plain white bread, but I never buy plain white bread – I always get wholemeal or something with lots of seeds in it. But today the only bread I had was my home-made sourdough. So I spread the PB&J on a slice of sourdough.
The verdict: Well, it was mostly PB since the top of the jar seems to have a lower proportion of jelly in it than further down. It tasted fine, PB with a bit of sweetness mixed in, not disgusting at all. I’m interested to see how it goes when I get further down the jar, where the jelly ratio looks higher. I expect it’ll be perfectly fine, even yummy.
In market news today, I received an email from Kirribilli Markets, where I’m supposed to have a stall this Sunday. I thought it might be notice of cancellation due to COVID, but no. It said that they’d been informed that the current railway sleeper replacement work being done on the Harbour Bridge was behind schedule, so instead of finishing this Friday, it would extend over the weekend. Which means no trains running to the station where the markets are located. They figured this would reduce shopper turnout enough that they felt the need to postpone the market for a week, moving it to Sunday 17 January. At first I thought this would conflict with my other market, which is on the third Sunday of each month, but then I realised that that market had already cancelled for January. So there’s no conflict – it just means this weekend’s market is moved to a week later.
Workwise today I had planned to complete all of the Irregular Webcomic! annotation writing by lunchtime, and then move on to writing new Darths & Droids strips. As it turns out, I had so many distractions that I still haven’t completed the IWC annotations, and probably won’t until tomorrow. I try to schedule a certain amount of “worklike” stuff each day, but it’s often amazing how long it ends up taking.
And I reached a milestone in my Italian practice today. I’ve been using Duolingo every day for a practice session for 183 days, more than half a year as of today. I’ve had longer streaks before, but I was interrupted by travel towards the end of 2019 and took a while to get restarted. But I’m pleased to have made it six full months of practice again.
Oh, and finally I got a photo of some rainbow lorikeets while taking Scully for a walk today.
New content today:
As an American who truly enjoys a good PB&J sandwich (jelly or jam), I can tell you I tried Goober years ago and thought it was pretty gross. I don’t remember if it was because of poor quality peanut butter, overly sweet jelly, or incorrect proportions of each ingredient, but I distinctly remember being disappointed and vowing not to buy it again.
As another American, I’ve had some PB&J in my time, but I’ve never purchased one of the “pre-mixed” PB&J products. Probably mainly because we don’t eat them often enough to make it worth buying.
Yes, the average American would eat their PB&J on white bread. We typically buy whole wheat. I can imagine eating it on some breads other than those, but sourdough would certainly not be my first choice.
I’m intrigued by this Australian aversion to mixing peanut butter with sweet things. Reese’s has an entire line of candy based on PB and chocolate! I think my Australian mother-in-law says she thought it sounded quite odd when she first heard of it, but has since been won over. (I hope I’m recalling that correctly.) Of course, American companies put sugar in much of their pre-made peanut butter as well, so I guess we’re actually starting out with differences in what “peanut butter” is in the first place.
Yeah, peanut butter and chocolate is also seen as very weird here. We don’t have anything like that as candy products. But, you know… cultural differences.
And yet you have chocolate bars that contain peanuts. (Mmmm. I miss Picnic bars.) How is that different other than the consistency? Okay, I know Picnic bars have plenty of other things in them. Is there an Australian candy bar that’s just peanuts and chocolate?
I actually never thought about that. Whole peanuts is just… different to peanut butter. Yeah, it’s consistency, but that is a real difference.