cooking – dangermouse.net

Booking Tokyo

Today was very warm, 31°C in the city, 39°C in some suburbs. I did a 5k run in the morning, reluctantly, as it was already almost 25°C at 9am.

Back home, I had two main tasks for the day. First I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, based on the scripts I’ve been writing the past few days. This is really getting near the end. I wound up a few of the story themes and there’s not much left to do with the remaining ones. I expect I might be able to finish completely with one more batch of comics, probably made late January or early February.

The second task was to book several of the things we’d planned out for Tokyo at my sister-in-law’s place yesterday. We booked a tea ceremony, in Ginza. And a day trip tour to Hakone to see Mount Fuji. These things will be done by the others while I am working in ISO Photography standards meetings. I also want to book tickets to the Shibuya Sky observation deck, but they only open for booking four weeks in advance, so that has to wait until the end of January.

While booking those, I also booked a car rental for Auckland for our short trip to New Zealand in March. This is only a 3-day trip over the weekend to visit my wife’s nephew and his partner there for their combined 30th birthdays. My wife’s sister and mother are going too, but they are arriving several days earlier and spending a week there. We’re going to collect the car from the airport on Friday and go pick them up at their hotel to drive up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend, before coming back to Auckland for departure on Monday.

I assembled some of the IWC comics. And then spent a bit of time in the afternoon pondering story details for Episode IX in Darths & Droids, discussing with co-authors, and making notes. It’s quite a shift in mode from normal strip writing in the middle of a movie. I have to switch mental gears and get refamiliarised with the new movie. I’ve spent the past two years viewing scenes from Episode VIII over and over again, and now I have to discard all of that and start on the new movie. I’ve rewatched it twice in the past few weeks, including one time through in slow motion, rewinding and pausing every minute or so to catch details and make notes.

For dinner I made pizza, topped simply with potato and rosemary. I used a couple of tips I saw on a cooking show last week. Because I’m using a domestic oven rather than a pizza oven, the temperature is lower and the pizza cooks more slowly (though still pretty quickly as I use the maximum temperature). So one tip is to add more water to the dough, since it has longer to dry out in the oven. I increased the water from a strict 1:2 ratio with the flour, adding an extra 5 mL to make 130 mL of water to 250 g of flour. And I hand-stretched the dough by first using my fingers to delineate a fatter crust around the rim before flattening and stretching the central area. Overall both changes worked well!

New content today:

Christmas cooking and Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve dawned clear and cold. The temperature dropped down to 16.5°C overnight, and it was still chilly when we got up and I took Scully out for her morning toilet. My wife then took her for a walk, while I did a 5k run. The cooler temperature meant an easier run, and I managed to record my second best 5k time, at 26:24.

After a shower it was time to cook some mini quiches to take to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering in the afternoon. My wife had made the pastry an hour earlier, and I rolled it out into a dozen small circles, which she put into muffin tins to blind bake. Then we chopped spinach and mixed the eggs and some milk to make the filling, which she poured into the pastry shells, then baked another 25 minutes.

We took care of some other last minute prep and then drove out to the western suburbs of Sydney for my family’s gathering. It’s become a new tradition to gather in a park by the shore of the Nepean River.

I’m really surprised that nobody else uses it for Christmas Eve. We basically have the whole place to ourselves every year. This time there were a few other people there, but only very small gatherings, like four people eating lunch, and a couple on a picnic blanket. Our group was a total of 21 people once everyone had arrived, plus Scully. We had finger food and snacks, and fresh fruit, plus one of my cousins’ wife had made some caramel slice for sweets – all together it was plenty for a lunch.

Some of the people played a lawn game involving throwing chunks of wood at wooden pins, while the rest of us caught up on family news and gossip. I see things about horror family gatherings, but everyone in my family genuinely gets along very well, so these events are always good fun.

My uncle does wood turning and gave us a hand-made vase:

There’s a hole in the top with a glass tube in it to hold the water and flowers.

We left after a few hours to drive back home – the trip each way took an hour so it was a substantial chunk of time. Back home I made dinner. I got an idea off the Italian home shopping network cooking videos that I’ve been watching for language practice. They made a pizza dough and then made small parcels stuffed with ricotta and something else (pancetta I think). And then pan-fried them! So I decided to make spinach and ricotta ones.

I made a Napolitana sauce with tomato, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, and a hint of chilli to go on top.

Then after eating my wife made a zucchini loaf to serve as a vegetarian main course at Christmas lunch with her family tomorrow. It has zucchini, carrots, onions, cheese, and a bit of flour to bind it together. Phew!! And tomorrow morning before heading out to the lunch I need to glaze and bake the ham.

New content today:

Christmas prep: treat cooking

My wife, having this week off work, spent much of today in the kitchen, making various Christmas treats. More of the chocolate date balls she made yesterday, and some rocky road.

On the other hand, my day was full of online classes. My normal topic week goes from Tuesday to Monday, so I wanted to have the Monday classes before finishing for the year. Four during the day, and two late in the evening.

We also had to go out driving for a couple of chores. Altogether, this pretty much filled up the day. There wasn’t really a spare moment to do much else.

New content today:

Busy Baking Bits

I made sourdough bread today, and I made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had mushroom pizza, which is a topping we don’t have too often.

Again, it was a pretty standard day. I had a bunch of classes to teach. And in between I worked on next week’s new topic, which is Time Passing. I’ll be asking the kids questions about what things change over time, how fast, why, and what’s good and bad about how things change. We’ll also look at aspects of nostalgia, and looking forward to the future.

The reason I did it today instead of waiting until Tuesday like I normally do is that tomorrow I’m planning to go out in the morning and spend the time doing some stuff I wouldn’t normally get to do. This is because my wife is going to take Scully to work, so I won’t have to look after her at all, and I can go places that I wouldn’t be able to take a dog. I’m thinking I might do the Bondi to Coogee walk.

New content today:

Pancakes for dinner

I’ve been trying to feed my sourdough starter a bit more frequently to get it in a healthier condition, so I’ve been generating some starter discard. And so I’ve been looking for ways to use it. Tonight my wife went to a painting class, so I made diner for myself, and decided to use the discard as the basis of a pancake batter. I just added an egg, a splash of milk, and some baking powder, and it came to the right consistency. I had the pancakes with ricotta, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

They turned out really nice! It’s a little strange having a sweet dinner, but it can be fun every now and then.

Today was the fourth lecture of the image processing course, with the professor back after I filled i for last week’s lecture. he reminded me that it wasn’t actually my first official coursework lecture – I did lecture 4 (today’s topic) last year when he was away! I wrote about it back then. He read my blog and pointed out how I was now Wrong On The Internet, so I feel duty bound to correct it. 😀

I decided after the lecture to head home on the normal train rather than the new Metro, since the best walking route home fro the Metro stop is still messed up by work on the pedestrian crossing lights, necessitating a significant detour. I think the old train is quicker overall at the moment.

I also went ot the post office this morning to mail some more Magic cards to a buyer. And while there I hopped over to Moon Phase (the croissant place) and tried one of the char siu buns. I’ve wanted one for a while, but they’ve been sold out the last couple of times. But today I got one. And wow, it’s amazing. It’s a next level steamed pork bun (char siu bao). Instead of the steamed doughy bun, it’s light flaky croissant pastry with a super crispy top. It was so good.

New content today:

Sourdough pizza experiment

Monday is always very busy with online classes. It’s the last day of the “Sayings” topic, which has been a bit different and interesting, but I think I’ll be happy to move on. It took a bit of extra encouragement to get some of the kids talking about possible meanings of some more obscure sayings.

For dinner I experimented and used some sourdough starter discard in my pizza dough. I measured out about 120 grams of discard and adjusted the amounts of water and flour to compensate. The dough was a bit crumbly at first but after kneading it turned out fairly normal. It baked well and tasted pretty good, so that’s good!

Weather continues to be warm and spring-like. We have 28°C and 29°C days to look forward to later in the week, and it’s still winter! I wonder if this forebodes a hot summer.

New content today:

My first second university coursework lecture!

Today I gave my ~~first~~ second lecture of regular coursework for a university course, as I’ve mentioned preparing for over the last few days. The professor had an important meeting and asked me to give the lecture for him. I’ve done “guest lectures” before for this image processing course, during the project work period, on topics that weren’t strictly covered by the course, but this is the ~~first~~ second lecture I’ve done that was actual course material. (Edited after the professor reminded me I in fact did one last year!)

In the morning I did a couple of critical thinking classes. Then I had to get ready for the trip to the university. I would normally leave at 12:30 and walk Scully down to my wife’s work to drop off there and then catch a train in. But I ran out of some ingredients for my usual home lunch fixings (falafels and tortilla wraps), so I decided to walk up to the shops and get some sushi. I didn’t really have time to walk back home again so we went straight from there to my wife’s work and arrived a little early.

After dropping Scully off, I rode on the new Metro train from there in to the university. This train line only opened on Monday, and it’s a significant change from the style of train lines Sydney has always had. Our old train network is heavily interlinked, with many lines diverging and converging, so the train traffic has to be carefully regulated to avoid collisions between trains on different lines merging into one. The Metro is designed on the principle of a single line with no branches or merges, so the trains can run more frequently and faster while still being safe. From my place to Central Station (the closest station to the university) takes 16 minutes on the old line, but only 12 on the new Metro line.

Being a brand new rail line, the stations are gorgeous and clean, with impressive architecture. Here are some photos: Victoria Cross Station.

I arrived in good time for my lecture. It was about image processing operations like binary morphology, cross-correlation, segmentation, and so on. It’s material I know pretty well and the lecture went smoothly. I made sure to try and give context and motivation for every algorithm that I covered, and explain it in simple terms. Afterwards, a couple of students came up and told me they enjoyed the lecture and thought I explained things well. So that was good!

And another Metro photo: Central Station, on the way back home:

Tonight for dinner I made lemon pasta with broccolini, garlic, black pepper, and Parmigiano Reggiano. I used a fresh lemon that I picked up for free from a crate of lemons out the front of someone’s place. Presumably they have a lemon tree out the back and had ridiculous numbers of lemons so wanted to give them away. It was super juicy and the pasta turned out delicious.

I’d use fresh lemons more, but I always feel like paying $1 or whatever for a lemon from a supermarket is bad. It just fells like lemons are a thing that should be free.

New content today:

We have cookies!

In between the last classes of the Fishing topic today, i had to run up to the post office to get a packing box, and then pack the five Dungeons & Dragons adventure books that I eBayed on Saturday. Then it was back up to the post office to mail the package.

I also made a sourdough loaf. And pizza for dinner. And tonight I’ve just pulled a batch of choc-chip cookies out of the oven. The oven’s been going all evening! And I’ve used about a kilogram of flour just today!

Not much else to ay about today, except that it was again very cold and a bit windy, but not as bad as the weekend. Central New South Wales is expected to get record low temperatures overnight and tomorrow, down as low as -7°C in places! Thankfully that doesn’t extend to the coast. But this week looks like continuing the cold spell.

New content today:

Spring already?

Today I did some comics stuff, and worked on my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes, on the topic of Fishing.

For lunch I took Scully on a big walk to get her some exercise. She didn’t get much yesterday and was a bit restless and cheeky, so today I really wanted to tire her out. We stopped at St Thomas Rest Park where Scully could run around a bit off her lead. I practised some recalls with her, getting her to sit and stay while I walked away, and then calling her to come to me. We also said hello to some other dogs (and their owners).

Then we went to Maggio’s Italian Bakery for lunch. I got a pizza slice and a sour cherry danish, and grabbed a couple of Napoli biscuits for snacks tonight.

Near the bakery is a cafe called The Laneway Cafe. They serve a coffee brand called The Cat’s Pyjamas, and have signs for it on the barriers around their tables. Seen here with Scully:

Now… I’m disturbed by the fact that the cats on the sign are wearing clothes that are not pyjamas.

Yesterday I assembled the Lego Dungeons & Dragons tower with the tavern and the other castle-like bit, and this afternoon I took photos of the whole lot so far.

So this is all stages 1-24 put together. It’s huge! I managed to put it into my display cabinet, where it just fit, thanks to me having moved the shelf a while back specifically to accommodate it. Hopefully it’ll still fit when the dragon is constructed and added.

And finally, I’ve stared noticing signs of spring flowers and foliage already. There are several magnolia trees starting to flower, and even a few azaleas, and I’ve seen new green shoots on some plants too. I’m a bit surprised, as the weather is still really cold. Although we are forecast to get up to a pleasant 23°C on Thursday. So maybe that really is the first sign of spring…

New content today:

Satay pizza for dinner

Monday morning was busy with ethics classes. I had three new students across a couple of classes today. It takes up a couple of minutes doing an introduction to the class for new students, but I’ve done this so many times now that I can pretty much recite it without thinking.

At lunchtime I took Scully to the post office to mail off some more Magic cards. The weather wasn’t too cold and it looks like warming up to 20-21°C later in the week, which is much more bearable than temperatures in the teens.

This afternoon I photographed the second half of that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I started last week. That gives me a total of six weeks of new strips, although the first week has already been published last week.

For dinner tonight I made pizza. We had some leftover fried puffy tofu from a str fry on Saturday, so i wanted to use that, and we had broccoli. So rather than make the pizza with tomato sauce, I made a spicy satay sauce with peanut butter and chilli and some other ingredients. It goes really well with broccoli and tofu, but I wasn’t entirely convinced about tofu on a pizza. But it turned out pretty good and was delicious.

New content today: