cooking – Page 6 – dangermouse.net

Experimental pizza with peanut butter

You heard right, folks.

A few weeks ago I had the satay chicken pizza from the menu at our local pizza place. Tonight when thinking about what to cook, I realised we had no pumpkin, my usual go-to pizza topping. But we had broccoli, and what better to go with broccoli than satay sauce? But I didn’t have any satay sauce… so peanut butter and chilli flakes to the rescue! I added some pistachios and almonds as well for crunch I would have used cashews, but we ran out of those on the weekend and I have to buy some more.

Anyway, it turned out really good! There’s not a lot of peanut butter on there – just enough to give it a peanutty taste. The sauce under the cheese is traditional tomato paste, although I spread it a bit more thinly today.

The weather continues to be rainy. Today marked the 14th day in a row of rain. We can barely remember what it’s like to have a day where it doesn’t rain.

And in what I hope is not a consequence of the war in Ukraine, Outschool did its weekly credit card payment processing of class fees, and informed me by e-mail that a payment for one of my students could not be processed. A student who lives in Russia. Occasionally I’ve received these processing error notifications, but there’s no follow-up and the kid shows up in class as usual, so presumably the parent did something and the payment went through. But this time, a few hours later I received a second e-mail saying that the payment had failed to be processed again. I’ve never received a second message like this before. It makes me wonder if the parent tried to pay again, and was denied again. I’m hoping this is not being caused by the financial sanctions being taken against Russia, and that this student won’t have to miss my classes because of this war.

New content today:

Engineering data…

On my day off from doing anything ethics related*, I worked on making exercises for the university data engineering course. I completed a couple of exercises, and wrote Matlab code to be an example solution, and then uploaded them and passed them on to the lecturer so he can integrate them into the lecture for the relevant week. These are fairly simple exercises on calculating summary statistics from a bunch of data, and making conclusions about the data based on them.

Then I started work on exercises for the next week’s lecture on data presentation. I’m partway through that, and hope to finish it off later this week.

Tonight I tried a new thing: sourdough pizza dough. It didn’t rise nearly as much as dough made with yeast – it would have been good if I could have let it rise for longer, but the timing is tricky with sourdough starter. I fed the starter this morning and then made the dough about an hour before dinner. I probably should have fed the starter last night, made the pizza dough in the morning, and let it rise in the fridge most of the day and taken it out for a final hour or so at room temperature.

But despite that it turned out pretty well! The pizza crust was nicely different and it didn’t really matter that it hadn’t risen much.

* That sounds wrong… I mean, I didn’t specifically do anything unethical today.

New content today:

Home made pasta

After getting into making bread, and pizza dough, I tried something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now for the first time. I made pasta from scratch.

I used semolina, and aded eggs, rolled it into a dough, and then cut small pieces and tried to shape them into orecchie. I’d seen a show on TV recently where an old Italian woman made pasta like this.

They were a bit uneven – obviously my technique needs a lot of work. I boiled them up and just used some pesto from a jar, with toasted pine nuts and some pecorino romano cheese.

The pasta puffed up a little bit, and they were really a bit more like tiny dumplings than pasta. And they were still a bit firm after 10 or so minutes of cooking, and I wasn’t sure if they’d soften further or not, so I took them out and we ate. They tasted fine, just a bit too firm. I think next time I might try rolling the pasta thin and cutting it into tagliatelle or something, to see if that improves the final hardness.

The rest of the day I spent teaching ethics classes – four on a Thursday, so it’s my busiest day of the week – and doing my exercise routine, and baking some sourdough, and going out with Scully for a walk at lunch to get some fish & chips and sit overlooking the harbour. The day was cool, cloudy, and windy today, a very pleasant change from the warm and extremely humid weather we’ve been having for the past few weeks. And tonight we had a brief thunderous downpour. It looks like the forecast is for cooler and wetter weather for the next week or so.

New content today:

No work Tuesday

Tuesdays are the days when I don’t have any classes on Outschool to teach, so they’re good days for me to go do other things. My golf friend suggested we go play at the pitch and putt course this morning. I got up early (6:30) and went straight out for my run, to get it out of the way before heading off to play golf. It was nice and cool that early, but my muscles obviously hadn’t warmed up after a night asleep and I didn’t do a very good time.

After breakfast, I headed out to the golf course. It was an overcast day, and rained a little as I drove there, but the rain held off for the rest of the day.

I scored 75, which was okay, but not as good as my best 71 on this course last time. Afterwards I went to the driving range next door to hit a bucket of balls. I started with a 9 iron and I was hitting the ball to the 100 metre marker, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m still finding my strength with full swings. I don’t think I’ve ever hit a 9 iron that far on an actual course. Then I switched to the driver and practised that for a while. It was a bit more erratic, but more consistent than I’ve been before, and I hit a few into the netting which is at 180 metres, but most didn’t quite reach that far.

After that I drove over to the pie shop at Collaroy for lunch. I sat and ate on a bench looking out over the beach. It’s usually a nice view, but was a bit grey with the overcast, and the surf was a bit brown with all the recent rain.

Later in the afternoon I relaxed a bit at home. For dinner I made pizza with mixed mushrooms. I decided to try hand stretching the dough to make the base instead of rolling it out, to see what difference that would make. And it turned out amazing! The rolled bases are very even, but hand stretching it made it thinner in the middle and puffier around the crust. So the centre cooked thin and crispy, and bubbled up like a proper pizzeria pizza. The difference was amazing, and my wife agreed it was much better than the rolled versions we’ve been having. So I guess from now on I’ll be hand stretching our pizza bases.

New content today:

Houseworky Saturday

After putting it off for a bit too long, I decided the house really needed a clean today. I vacuumed the floors and cleaned the bathroom and shower, and tidied up a few things generally.

My wife went for a walk to the fortnightly local growers’ market and brought home some zucchini flowers. So I planned a dinner to use them while they’re fresh from the grower. I made pasta with a sort of carbonara-inspired sauce, but using the zucchini flowers and no meat. It turned out very nice, but could have used some explosive hits of salt from something like bacon/pancetta. I think next time I’ll try adding some capers.

I worked a bit on Outschool stuff, liaising with parents to schedule new classes and to reschedule existing ones to fit new constraints. I also scheduled two new instances of my course on creative thinking and game design, to start in the week of 6 February. If anyone reading this has kids aged 11-14, check it out!

This afternoon I watched England turn the fifth Ashes Test into yet another debacle in Hobart. Dear oh dear… I hope they can rebuild the team and be a bit more competitive next time.

New content today:

Clearing a memory backlog

Two things that happened in the past few days, but which I forgot about when writing here:

1. Yesterday when I was out with my wife walking Scully in the early evening, we were enjoying the quite strong breeze that was cooling down the heat of the day. I didn’t realise quite how strong the wind had become until we happened across a scene on the street: Two young men were examining where a large tree branch had fallen onto the street, blocking it. It was a eucalyptus branch, and pretty substantial – maybe 4 metres long and the diameter of a dinner plate at the base end where it had splintered off the tree above. It was fortunate that nobody had been under it when it fell, as it could have been very dangerous.

But unfortunately the car belonging to one of the men was under it at the time. The branch had caught it at a glancing angle on the side, smashing the tail light and causing some significant dents and scrapes in the bodywork. The guys were maybe teenagers, and one of them looked at us as we approached. They didn’t seem to know what to do, and one asked me who would be liable for the damage to his car – would it be the local council? I answered that I didn’t think anyone would be liable, and the damage would need to be covered by his insurance.

We left then trying to pull the branch away from the car, but they weren’t having much luck as it was pretty heavy. This morning when I walked past the same spot, I saw that the State Emergency Service had come to chop the branch into firewood sized chunks and has piled it up by the side of the street, with emergency tape around it.

2. A few nights ago, I think it was the night of 30 December, I took Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet. As I always do, I gaze up at the stars (assuming a cloud-free night). Orion is prominent in the northern sky at the moment, with red Betelgeuse at the bottom, and the bright blue of Sirius in Canis Major trailing it to the right. (This is upside down compared to what people in the northern hemisphere see, of course.)

Anyway, I was looking up at Orion, when I saw a very bright streak of light flash rapidly from east to west, just below the constellation. It was a meteor. I see them occasionally when taking Scully out, but this was one of the brightest I’ve seen. So that was pretty cool.

Today, I spent time assembling and writing annotations for Irregular Webcomic! strips for the coming week. I got stuck into some mathematics for one of them, so it took some time. I even had to break out Matlab to do some calculations.

For dinner I made quiche, with home made shortcrust pastry. Previously I’d been rolling the pastry cold from the fridge, and wondering why it always cracked around the edges. Searching the net turned up some advice to let it warm up a bit before rolling, and that seemed to help a fair bit, so I’ll do that from now on.

New content today:

A busy Christmas Eve

Okay, let’s see. 2.5k run followed by stretching exercises. Picking up weekly groceries from the supermarket. The COVID QR code check-ins are back, after having being removed just a couple of weeks ago.

I had to get carrots and mushrooms for the Christmas cooking we had to do today. I made a lentil and nut loaf – kind of like a vegetarian meatloaf. To go with it I also made some tomato relish. We’ll take this to Christmas lunch tomorrow at my wife’s mother’s place – assuming I get my negative COVID test back in time.

We took a drive to drop off presents there, just dropping them at the door, so we don’t have to carry too much stuff tomorrow.

And tonight is virtual board games night with friends. I’m currently no doubt losing a game of Splendor.

Hmm, maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but that was a lot of cooking effort today.

New content today:

Last day of work

For my wife that is! She had her last day in the office before a Christmas break, and doesn’t go back until January. Scully went into work with her as usual, and I picked her up at lunch time. It was another warm day and after walking home and letting Scully chase a ball in the park for a bit we relaxed inside out of the heat.

I spent much of today working on Darths & Droids comics, trying to get a Christmas/New Year buffer populated.

For dinner I tried a new recipe. Baked ricotta gnocchi, using roughly this recipe, except I used spinach instead of kale. Here they are before baking:

And after:

It was delicious!

New content today:

Double bread and cooking Sunday

Late this morning we had a morning tea with my wife’s brother and mother, at a cafe a few suburbs away. The traffic was awful, in both directions. It seems that Sydney traffic is back to its usual levels after the COVID lockdown, at least on weekends. I think the weekday traffic is still down a bit due to many people now working from home.

On the way home I dropped my wife and Scully at a local market so they could browse around and do a bit of Christmas shopping. Back home I worked on Irregular Webcomic! strips for the upcoming week.

I also did a lot of cooking. My wife wanted a fruit and nut loaf with the sourdough starter that I refreshed this morning, for baking tomorrow morning. But we need some normal bread too, so I threw together a loaf using yeast. It rises a lot faster, so I could bake it this afternoon. We had some of it with dinner, which was corn fritters with tomato relish. I spotted that on the cafe menu this morning and decided I felt like it for dinner. So I found some relish recipes, but most of them called for doing stuff overnight! I eventually found a recipe that was done within about half an hour, and made that. I adapted it a bit, using some ingredients from another recipe, including capers, which I had in the fridge. It turned out really good!

I don’t know if I’ve ever made corn fritters before either so I found a recipe and fiddled with it a bit, and they also turned out nicely. It would have been good to have these with a salad, but I didn’t happen to have salad ingredients ready to go, so we just had them with some of the freshly baked bread.

New content today:

Calzones for dinner

Tonight for dinner I wanted to use up a big batch of mushrooms that I’d bought in the last grocery shop. I asked my wife and she suggested calzones….

So I made them. I sautéed the mushrooms with onions and garlic, added some tomato paste – and no water because I didn’t want the filling to be too liquid. I added some shredded mozzarella cheese before sealing up the dough and baking. They turned out really good – I think better than the ones I did a while back with ricotta.

What else did I do…? I did a 2.5k run, despite the warmer weather and humidity. I went out with my wife and had fish & chips for lunch. Did some comics stuff… not much really!

New content today: