Tag: cooking

Prep for Science Club

Today I did final preparations for Science Club at the school tomorrow. I checked all the lasers, got spare batteries, and copied the dimensions of the slits in the slides to a sheet of paper so I can read them easily during the experiment, rather than having to squint at tiny print. The blue laser is cool, but it’s difficult to see the diffraction patterns after passing through the slits – I suspect because our eyes aren’t nearly as sensitive to blue as they are to green and red. Hopefully it’ll work better in the dark library at the school.

This morning I did some grocery shopping. I do almost all the cooking at home and I like browsing around the vegetables looking for interesting things to cook with. Corn cobs were on special today, so I bought a couple. Not sure what I’ll make with them yet. Probably just boil them up and eat them on the cob, with something else on the side to fill out the meal. I also bought a chicken breast, but that’s for Scully. We don’t really cook meat at home, except on very rare occasions. (I don’t cook it very rare…)

My wife had her Rock School end-of-term concert this afternoon. Normally I attend in person, but today they were live streaming the concert and she was only singing lead on three songs, so I stayed home to get some other things done while watching the stream. I had to clean up a few messy piles of stuff that I’ve had eating up space on the dining table for a while.

For dinner tonight I made pasta with pumpkin, feta, walnuts, and chilli in burnt butter. It’s one of our favourite ways to have pasta – the nuts add a nice crunch which creates the range of textures with the soft pumpkin chunks, creamy feta, and al dente pasta. (Last night I made a frittata with potatoes, broccolini, caramelised leeks with balsamic vinegar and garlic, and of course eggs. It turned out pretty good, I thought. Taking a solid half hour to caramelise the leeks before doing anything else was worth it.)

The other thing I did today was process and upload a few more photos from my trip to Portugal back in May. Going through travel photos always takes a while, since I take a lot of photos! I started going through photos after our arrival in Porto. Porto is built on very hilly terrain:

Porto is on a hill

Here’s the Igreja de Santo Ildefonso, a spectacular church with azulejo tiles on the front edifice.

Igreja de Santo Ildefonso

New content today:

Olive oil flavour

This morning I had a blood test, and had to go to the pathology place while fasting, so couldn’t eat breakfast beforehand. I like breakfast. I don’t really understand those people who skip breakfast or who don’t feel any urge to have food until lunchtime. I wake up ravenous every morning and am hoeing into a bowl of cereal within about 5 minutes of getting out of bed every day. So having to wait until I walk up the street and wait for half an hour at the pathology centre is torture. Immediately after I left I raced to the nearest bakery to get something to eat.

Back home, I worked on writing annotations for the batch of Irregular Webcomic!s that I’d made over the past few days. This is the final step before publication, and can take most of a day, depending how much research I do and how much I write for each comic. But it’s a good feeling having the batch completed. And now it’s time to start thinking about writing the next batch…

I stayed in for lunch today and made myself bruschetta. I’m trying to use up a bottle of extra virgin olive oil that I got as a gift, before it passes its “best before” date. And also some caramelised balsamic vinegar.

It got me thinking about olive oil. We have extra virgin olive oil, for stuff like bruschetta and salads and those things that everyone says you should use extra virgin olive oil for, because it has a strong “fruity” flavour. And we have the “light tasting” olive oil that everyone says you should use for cooking, because it has a less strong flavour that won’t dominate a dish.

Now, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t taste any difference whatsoever between “extra virgin” olive oil and “light tasting” olive oil. Not just the current brands we have either – I’ve never noticed any difference between any of the brands of either we’ve had over the years. I’m honestly beginning to think this whole “fruity” and “light” olive oil flavours are really just the Emperor’s New Clothes, and a way to make us all buy more olive oil because we “need” to have two different types. They all just taste equally bland and oily to me – none of them have anything that could remotely be called a “strong” flavour that might dominate anything else. Can anyone actually taste a difference between these olive oils?? Or even taste them at all??

And on another note, I took some photos of flowers. This winter in Sydney has been ridiculously warm. Besides flowers everywhere, there are new green shoots and leaves on many of the trees already as well. This is all at least a month early, possibly more. Take a look: magnolias, irises, lavender, azaleas.

Spring flowers in winter