cooking – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Patatas bravas

I tried making something new for dinner tonight: patatas bravas!

Excuse the messy presentation. I mixed the potatoes and sauce in the bowl and didn’t tidy it up afterwards. I basically used this recipe from the BBC. It turned out pretty good! But potatoes really do take a long time to crisp up in the oven, gosh. I got a bit impatient, and could probably have left them for another 10-15 minutes.

I took Scully for a long walk this morning, since I had time and the weather was cloudy and cool.

At home I spent time writing a new class for this week’s online ethics lessons. The topic for this week is “Minor Laws”. Some example discussion points for the kids:

One important difference between serious laws and minor laws is that a lot more people break minor laws. People who commit murder are quite rare, but there are many thousands or millions of people who drive too fast, or litter.

• Why do so many people break such laws?

One thing about minor laws like these is that most of the people who break them never get caught or punished in any way. They get away with it.

• If it’s safe to cross the road when the light is red, and you’re not going to get punished for it, does that make it okay?
• Is it okay to break a law that lots of people break and never get punished for?

(some stuff about enforcement and why minor laws are poorly enforced here, which I’ve cut for brevity)

Unenforced minor laws are sometimes used as a way to punish people for something else. For example, in a city where nobody usually gets punished for jaywalking, the police could set up an operation where they monitor street corners and give jaywalking fines to people they don’t like the look of: immigrants, or homeless people, or people of certain skin colours.

• Could this be a serious problem if we start enforcing minor laws more?
• Is there any way we can ensure that the enforcement of minor laws is fair and unbiased?

This evening I had free so I went for a 5k run after my wife got home from work. It wasn’t hot, but it was very humid (97% according to the Bureau of Meteorology) and that meant a slowish time, although better than the runs I did on the weekend, which were similar humidity but hotter.

Last night I watched The Running Man (1987), which was new on Netflix here recently. I thought I might have seen it before, since I watched many of Arnie’s films in the ’80s, but I found to my delight that it was unfamiliar. I had to laugh at the fact that it was set in the dystopian future of 2017, and that 2017 apparently still had a very ’80s aesthetic, with dancing women in high-cut aerobics leotards and big hairdos, and computers that were no smaller or more advanced than what could be found in the 1980s. It wasn’t especially profound, being an Arnie action flick, but it was a lot of fun. Bonus points for featuring Mick Fleetwood as a freedom fighter. I was really not expecting that!

New content today:

New Year’s Day relaxation

There wasn’t much on today. I slept in again and then just did some comic writing, worked on a lesson plan for my next ethics class for the older kids on the topic of “Learning”, and took Scully for a couple of walks. In the afternoon I played a few more games of Kingdomino with my wife.

For dinner tonight I tried another new recipe: beetroot curry (from this site), and I made home made flatbread to go with it.

It was good, but I think I chopped the beetroot a bit coarsely and it was a little on the firm side. Next time I’ll cut it more finely and hopefully it will cook a bit softer.

New content today:

Cyclone Jasper

The main news today in Australia is the approach of Tropical Cyclone Jasper to the north Queensland coast. This is a long way from me so there’s no direct concern. But the forecast track looks like making an almost direct hit on the town of Port Douglas tomorrow around lunch time, with the much bigger city of Cairns also within the zone of destructive winds. Hopefully people in the region will be prepared and nobody will be hurt.

Here it was warm again, but felt a bit less humid. I assembled comics in the morning and then took Scully for a drive over to the Italian bakery for lunch. I had a slice of mushroom pizza, and the special pastry today was a panettone snail. It was a scroll of flaky pastry filled with candied fruit and almonds and was delicious. This bakery is always creative and coming up with new things. I just wish they’d do the banoffee croissant again!

This afternoon I wrote my next ethics lesson for this week, on the topic of Restarting Civilisation. We’re going to start by imagining that some disaster such as an asteroid strike kills a few billion people, and then consider what life would be like for the survivors. How would people get food and water? Would they be likely to cooperate for survival, or become hostile? Do survivors have an ethical responsibility to help other survivors, or to maximise their own chances of survival? Once groups of people have stable food supplies, what aspects of modern civilisation should they prioritise in rebuilding first? (laws, education, electricity, transport, etc.?) Should we take some effort (and expense!) now to provide usable information and resources to future survivors in the event of a global disaster?

Tonight for dinner I tried a new thing. I like fennel whenever I go to a restaurant and have a dish that includes it, but I think I’ve only ever tried cooking with it once, doing it as a roast vegetable with other vegetables. On a whim last grocery day I grabbed a fennel bulb, determined to try something else with it. This afternoon I decided to make caramelised fennel and eggplant calzones with a tomato sauce. I caramelised the finely sliced fennel with some balsamic vinegar, then let it cook slowly with diced eggplant. I made pizza dough, and stuffed it with the fennel and eggplant, plus some mozzarella cheese and baked it. And made a separate sauce with onions, garlic, chopped tomatoes, and oregano, to spoon over the top of the baked calzones. It turned out really good!

New content today:

It’s hard thinking of a title…

… when I didn’t do anything particularly noteworthy today. Two ethics classes this morning, three tonight, and in between I worked on some comics, and had lunch and took Scully for a walk. And that’s pretty much the whole day.

I didn’t even cook dinner – my wife did that tonight because I was busy teaching my classes. She’s getting used to the new induction cooker as well, and says she really likes it compared to the old gas one. The heat setting 1 is low enough that you can just leave a pot of soup on at that setting for an hour and it stays at a nice edible temperature without simmering. She made minestrone, which I ate after my classes.

Exciting day, yeah?

New content today:

Busy week, Saturday

Well, not as busy as during the work-week, but I still did a few things. After breakfast I did a 5k run. First run in 8 days.

After showering and also cleaning the bathroom, I went on a walk with my wife to a kitchen supplies shop to get a new saucepan and a couple of frying pans to replace old ones that didn’t work with our new induction cooker. I took some time going through the store to choose ones, because they have quite a range. We had a small frying pan, 16cm, diameter, the right size for making just a couple of fried eggs which we used a lot – but it was aluminium. So I wanted one that size that would work on our new cooker. They didn’t have one exactly that size, but there was a slightly smaller one at 14cm, so I got that.

When we got home we tested all the new cookware to make sure it worked… and the small frying pan didn’t, despite the labelling saying that it was suitable for induction cookers. It was quite a walk there and back, so I decided to drive over again to exchange the pan for another one. But that was the only small pan they had – the next size up was 20cm. But I got one of those instead, and it worked fine when I got home. I guess the fried eggs will spread out a bit more, but it should be fine.

This afternoon I finally got to finishing off that Darths & Droids strip that I really wanted to do on Thursday. I’ll need to do another one tomorrow to catch up a bit.

And this evening I went up to the science toy shop where they do Dungeons & Dragons events on Saturday nights, to meet up with the organiser and have a chat about the possibility of me hosting a game there some time. It was a youngish woman and she was setting up a table with a battle map when I arrived. I was a little worried that she would want to run strictly 5th Edition rules, which is not really what I want to do, so I mentioned early on that I preferred to run a more rules-light style of game, with more roleplaying and less dice rolling. She said she agreed that 5e was too rules-heavy, and sounded happy for me to run something a lot lighter. I said if I was running a game for new kids, I’d just hand them a character sheet each, say they’re at the entrance of a cave dungeon, and say, “What do you do?” – and she said that sounded great! So that was cool. She said they basically attracted enough people, mostly kids, to run one table, and it would be good if I could take over once every few weeks to give her a week off.

So it all sounds pretty good! I won’t have time to do it next Saturday, but maybe in two weeks.

Tonight I used the new large saucepan to cook pasta on the induction cooker, and made a tomato mushroom sauce in a smaller pot. It took a bit of juggling with the heat settings, but I found the right ones with a little trial and error, and overall it was pretty fun and easy. So yeah, it’s good so far!

New content today:

Busy week, Thursday

Today I got to play with our new induction cooker. The first thing I wanted to do was test cooking rice, to work out what heat setting to use while leaving the rice to absorb. I knew it had to be fairly low, so I started with setting 1 of the 1-14 power range.

Half an hour later I had… raw rice in tepid water, no hotter than a warm bath. Okay, so setting 1 is not really for cooking as such, but it will be a handy setting for keeping food warm before serving. Next I tried going up a couple of settings to 3. And this turned out to be perfect – the rice was perfectly cooked.

So tonight I made our first meal using the new cooktop.

This is rice in the right pot, cooking on level 3 as you can see on the LED display. On the left is Thai red curry, made with pumpkin, snow peas, and mushrooms, as well as a bit of celery and spring onions and lemongrass. When it was nearly done I added coconut milk, and it turned out really good.

I’m impressed with the control and the rapid response of the cooker. And the heat range is wider than the old gas cooker, on both ends. The top setting of 14 is significantly hotter and faster to heat up than the gas at maximum flame. And the setting of 1 is something I couldn’t possibly reproduce using the gas flame, even at the lowest possible setting and with a heat diffuser. So overall I’m very happy with it!

My other main thing today was 5 ethics classes, which I’ve just finished at 9pm. And taking Scully for a couple of walks. Phew, what a day!

New content today:

Busy week, Wednesday

Today was the installation of our new induction cooktop, replacing the old gas cooker. The tradesman appeared about 10am and got to work. It was quite a job.

He had to: pull out and disconnect the electric oven; disconnect the gas cooktop; cut the gas pipe close to the wall; cap the gas pipe and test it for leaks; cut the granite benchtop to fit the slightly larger induction cooktop into the hole where the gas one used to be; drill a hole through the wall near the fusebox; thread electrical cable through the hole to a power point in the kitchen wall; disconnect that power point and replace it with a new heavy duty one; thread cable through from that power point to another power point inside the kitchen cabinet next to the stove area (this used to be the power point for the kitchen sink garbage disposal, which was no longer in use after we removed the garbage disposal a while back – it was lucky we did this because it meant the now spare point could be repurposed for the induction cooker); lay new cable from there inside a protective duct to the induction cooktop; remove the entire fusebox; replace all the circuit breakers with new ones to bring the fusebox up to current safety standards; actually install the induction cooktop; wire it in; reconnect and replace the oven; then switch everything back on and test it all works.

Here’s the area in the middle of the job:

The two ends of yellow cable are the same cable, passing through the wall, and that’s the fusebox visible in the upper cupboard. From that wall socket another cable goes down into the lower cupboard and through the hole visible in the back corner of the cooktop area.

And here’s the new cooktop, fully installed!

Shiny! I’ve tested it out boiling a little water in some of our pots, and it’s amazingly fast. But although I’m keen to give it a go cooking a meal, tonight was not the night for it. I had ethics classes from 5-8pm, and my wife wanted her dinner about 6:30, so she ended up just making grilled cheese sandwiches in the sandwich press. And after my last class I made myself a falafel roll in the same sandwich press.

Tomorrow I’ll try cooking something on the new cooktop. I need to test out cooking rice – to see what setting to leave it to simmer so that it comes out right. I’m hoping it works first time, but perhaps I’ll need to try a few settings to tune it.

It took the guy until a bit after 2pm to finish the installation, so my day was a bit disrupted, with the noise and having the power turned off. But I managed to write my lesson plans for both ethics age groups: “Psychic Powers” for the younger and “Philosophy of Ethics” for the older. And I spent some time scribbling notes on paper for the haunted house board game that I need to put together by Friday for my game design course.

New content today:

Caramel slice photos

Here are some photos of that caramel slice I made last night.

First, the base has been baked in the left, and I’m making the caramel filling.

I think the base is meant to be a bit more uniform in colour. I could have mixed the flour, coconut, brown sugar, and butter more thoroughly. But it didn’t affect the texture. Second, here’s the caramel filling after baking:

And then here are the final cut pieces of the slice, with the chocolate top layer:

And it tastes delicious! Overall I’m really happy with how it went.

Today I spent much of the day writing up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Japan, for Standards Australia. I have a meeting next week to fill in the Australian experts committee on all of the events from that Japan meeting.

And finally today, I know that much of the northern hemisphere is currently in the middle of record-breaking heatwaves. The stories have been shown here about heat in southern Europe, east Asia, and North America. But here in the south it’s winter at the moment, so we’re not especially hot, but we are also experiencing highly unusual warmth for this time of the year. It actually really feels like spring already, and it’s confusing many of the plants, with potentially devastating consequences for our crops. There was a story about it in the news today.

New content today:

Cooking a caramel slice

I decided this afternoon I had a craving for caramel slice, so I decided to get some ingredients and make some. I used this recipe.

I started making it after dinner, about 7:30pm. Now it’s almost 10pm and it’s finally in the fridge for the final 1-hour cool before slicing it. Gah… that took way longer than I expected. I thought I’d be eating it by now.

It rained again this morning, but cleared up by the afternoon. I think tomorrow is supposed to be warm again. The other main thing I did today was write my lesson for the next week’s ethics class starting tomorrow, on the topic of “Fear”.

New content today:

And a reasonable first day of winter

It was supposed to be warm today, 23°C forecast, but the temperature barely reached 19°C, and it was overcast until the late afternoon. It didn’t feel too bad though.

Today marks 5 years since Scully joined our household!

Here she is this afternoon. I remember the day we picked her up from the breeder. It was a really really cold day, out in the countryside. We stopped on the way back to eat at a cafe, having to sit outside because of Scully, and wrapping ourselves in blankets to avoid freezing. I think it was like 4°C or something.

For dinner tonight I made a fancy meal: roast pumpkin with home-made labne, a sage and burnt butter sauce with home-grown lime, pomegranate, and toasted pepitas.

I’ve been wanting to try making labne for ages. I bought some cheesecloth a while back, but this is the first time I’ve tried using it. I put a large tub (900 g) of plain yoghurt, mixed with about a quarter teaspoon of salt, into the cheesecloth yesterday, in a large sieve, and let it drain over a bowl in the fridge overnight.

Today I ended up with almost 300 mL of whey drained off the yoghurt (leavig I assume about 600 g of labne), which I used instead of water to make a loaf of sourdough (which is still rising, and I’ll bake soon). So I’ll be interested to see how that turns out too.

New content today: