food – dangermouse.net

Cool relief, Christmas ham

Today was thankfully much cooler than yesterday. We had a stiff breeze blowing and the temperature only reached around 24°C. Rather than having the air conditioning on all day, I had the windows all wide open. It rained a bit in the morning, including when I went out for a 5k run. I managed a much faster time than any other recent run, in the cooler air.

Then I drove over to the nearest Aldi supermarket that has parking – there’s one a bit closer but it’s in a business area with lots of office buildings and impossible to park anywhere nearby. So I almost never go into Aldi. But I wanted to today to pick up a Christmas ham. I also grabbed a few other things while there: a Christmas stollen, a panettone, and some brie and sliced turkey for making lunch sandwiches.

After eating a lunch of turkey and brie sandwiches on my home made sourdough bread, I walked up to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. And when we got home I worked on some more Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up a buffer.

I made some pesto pasta with broccoli for dinner, before my three ethics classes in a row, which took up the evening.

New content today:

Shipping cards, codes of honour, fajitas

My first task this morning was supposed to be letting in a tradesman to install our new window blinds, which I’d ordered a few weeks ago to replace our ageing ones. He was supposed to arrive at 8 am, but I got a text message about 6 o’clock, saying that he’d had a family emergency and would call some time tomorrow to arrange a new date. Hopefully it’s nothing too serious, although it sounds pretty bad.

Next, I had to ship off a batch of Magic: the Gathering cards to a buyer, about 200 of them. After packing them carefully I walked with Scully up to the post office to send them. I’m slowly making a dent in this huge collection I have! (Which I’m trying to liquidate, since I rarely play any more. As previously mentioned on this blog.)

Next I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes. This week’s topic is “Codes of Honour”. I start with the chivalry of medieval knights, and go through an example of a pirate code, and then start the kids thinking about the relevance of codes of honour in the modern world. I ran the first class tonight and it went okay, though maybe some of the questions are a bit too open-ended for the kids.

This afternoon I made a lot more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took on Sunday. I’ve done most of them now, but still have half a dozen to go. Hopefully I’ll finish those off tomorrow.

For dinner I was feeling uninspired and didn’t have any cooking ideas until my wife came home from work. We decided to make vegetable fajitas, which required walking Scully up to the neighbourhood supermarket to get a zucchini, but we had everything else we needed. Including a fresh lime from our miniature lime tree, which added a nice zesty zing.

I also did a full write up and review of the green curry pork sausage roll for my food blog, that I promised on Sunday.

Oh, and my wife told me that she’d got a call from Scully’s vet today, saying that Scully was overdue for vaccinations. When my wife said that no, she’d had them in July with her annual checkup, the vet denied having any record of that. She finally determined that the two different branches of the vet business that we go to have at some point this year split into two separate businesses and no longer share records with each other. Which is inconvenient, because we switch between branch locations often based on convenience at the time – one is closer, but the other has longer hours. So I’m not sure what we’ll do now. I wonder if we can continue to go to both, and keep informing the other one of any events so we can keep the now-separate records in synch. 🤷🏻‍♂️

New content today:

Hazelnut surprise

My wife started at the new gym this morning which is taking over from the old one that closed down two weeks ago. They had some sort of arrangement with a new gym opening up, to transfer memberships. It’s in a slightly different location and she took a different walking route home… which went right past Moon Phase, the bakery! So she brought me home a surprise treat, one of their choc-hazelnut pastries. Mmmm. I had it late in the morning, just before starting two online classes in a row before lunch.

After making myself some sandwiches for lunch, I took Scully for a walk around the railway station. The weather was cloudy and cooler than the past few days, which was nice, but we didn’t have time for a long walk as I had to be back for two more classes from 1pm.

Tonight I made a mushroom pizza for dinner. I have some leftover sour cream which I need to use up quickly before it goes off, so I dolloped some on top of the hot slices and added a bit of chilli oil, making it kind of like a stroganoff pizza. Well, maybe not, but it tasted good enough.

Not much else to report today. Oh, I made another new Darths & Droids strip. Tomorrow I’ll need to spend some time assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips using the photos I took on Sunday.

New content today:

Exotic food and a childhood memory

This morning I did my 5k run. The weather was sunny and not as humid as yesterday. I thought I was going faster, and was confident I’d record a better time, but it turned out to be about 20 seconds slower! I think sometimes I really have no idea how fast I’m actually running.

After a shower, my wife and I drove over to Annandale, a suburb across the harbour. She wanted to visit a small market where they had pottery goods. We found the address and a nice shady parking spot nearby. The place was a small building with pottery works inside, spilling out into a couple of stalls on the footpath outside. Also outside they had a coffee stall, a place selling cakes, and another selling focaccias and hot snacks.

I had a close look at the hot food and found they had some really interesting Asian fusion pies and sausage rolls!

Wow! Beef rendang pie, green curry pork roll, and prawn and chicken roll! I had to try one, and chose the green curry pork roll. It was absolutely delicious. I’m going to write up a full review for my sausage roll blog, but not tonight.

My wife bought a couple of hand made pottery plates, for us to use at home. We walked up the street a bit to the nearby shops on the next corner. While doing this, I mentioned to my wife that my grandparents used to have a warehouse in Annandale for their Paddy’s Market stall goods (they sold crockery and silverware and similar stuff). I remembered what the warehouse was like, a two-storey building down a long and very narrow driveway. I’d been there many times as a young child in the late 1970s and I reckoned I could recognise it if we happened across it and it hadn’t been redeveloped. However I thought the odds of that were minimal.

We stopped at a cafe called Clover for a cold drink and a snack, sharing a grilled halloumi sandwich.

Then we walked back to the car. It was literally just one short block, back the way we’d come, but we happened to be on the other side of the street as the cafe had been across the street. And just two doors down… I spotted a long, narrow driveway. Looking down it, I saw the unmistakeable two-storey old warehouse that my grandparents had used! It looked like it had been converted into a house, but it was clearly the same building I remembered.

The driveway was still dirt and grass, exactly as I recalled! Wow, firstly what an amazing coincidence, and secondly how incredible that this old place had not been redeveloped since the last time I’d been here, which must have been around 1980.

I don’t have anything else today that can top that.

New content today:

Cool dinner for a hot day

The start of summer continues to be unusually warm and humid. I decided to make a cool dinner tonight, a couscous salad. I had to message my wife to pick up some cucumbers on the way home from work, but I had everything else I needed. I made the couscous and added the chopped cucumber, a diced tomato, some feta cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and also a little bit of mango to provide sweetness. Normally one might put raisins or dried cranberries or something in, but I had a fresh mango and decided that would work. It did, the resulting salad was pretty good.

I did another new Darths & Droids comic today. I also spent some time tidying up language notes for Italian. I’ve been keeping notes on grammar and usage in OneNote, but I’ve slowly been transferring all of them to Obsidian. All my Japanese notes are there as I started Japanese more recently, but I had a lot of older Italian notes. I have to copy them across and reformat them, and I added some improvements while I was doing it.

And I also processed and uploaded more photos from last year’s Japan trip. This time going through my iPhone photos from the same day, adding shots of things like food and stuff which I didn’t use my SLR for. I also added several photos to that day of my travel diary, which you can now see here.

Here’s a food photo which didn’t make the cut into the diary.

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Some long overdue photography processing

First thing this morning I had my dental hygiene appointment. As I mentioned a while back, my dentist retired just a few days ago, so I didn’t get to see him again. The new dentist is a young guy and seems very nice. During the check-up he looked at a couple of old fillings and said they were showing wear and erosion and should be replaced. So I’m booked in for that next Wednesday.

I expected to see the regular hygienist, but they had bad news – she had a family emergency and had taken extended leave. The replacement hygienist said she should be back in a few weeks. But when I went out to reception to pay for today’s visit the receptionist said that the old hygienist might not be returning at all, and if so the temporary replacement would be staying on. The old hygienist was really good, but the temp who did my teeth today was also very good, so it’s a toss-up in terms of preference, but of course I hope the family emergency isn’t something that will drag on.

I hadn’t had time for breakfast before going to the dentist, so I decided to walk home via Moon Phase and try that last regular pastry on the menu that I haven’t tried yet (second last item described here). The last item was a kouign-amann, a type of pastry I’d never heard of before, and had no idea how to pronounce. I kind of assumed it was a Korean name, as the bakery is run by Koreans, but turns out it’s Breton. Anyway, it was basically a cylinder of delicious laminated dough, glazed all over with a super thin layer of caramelised sugar. Like all their products, really good.

I came home and worked on this week’s ethics class lesson plan, on the topic of Alien Invasion. This should be a fun one, as it’s speculative and about a popular fictional theme. The first class was tonight and it was pretty good.

In the afternoon I sorted and counted some more Magic: the Gathering cards, doing an inventory of another set in preparation to selling them.

And I spent some time going back to old photos I took on my trip to Japan in June last year and starting to process them and upload them to Flickr. I have hundreds of dSLR photos which I haven’t touched since the trip, plus hundreds of iPhone photos, and I want to go through them and make an album of the best shots before I go to Japan again in February! I did photos of Okayama Castle today.

I have a bit of work to do to go through the whole trip. And then I have my trip to Italy and Finland from November 2023 to do as well!

New content today:

Sauna weather

Not weather to take a sauna. Weather that is like a sauna. It was really steamy today. The minimum temperature overnight was 24°C, and really humid. I took Scully for a walk first thing in the morning, before breakfast, to avoid the hotter middle of the day, and it was already warm and steamy. When I got home I had to take my sweaty shirt off and let it dry in the bathroom while I changed into a fresh one.

Around midday we had a brief burst of thunder and heavy rain, but it didn’t last very long. It cooled things down briefly, but the temperature began climbing again afterwards, and the wet roads emitted steam into the air. I took Scully out for a short walk and toilet and the air was thick, like breathing in hot soup. I was very glad to return to the air conditioned comfort inside.

I tried to find some cicada shells to photograph and show here, but despite looking around on dozens of trees while out with Scully I didn’t spot any. Just the other day I saw three one on small tree!

I had more ethics classes on “Points of View” and I think I’m getting a handle on how to present questions to the kids on this topic. We’ve been having some very interesting discussions about it.

Oh, it’s also the start of mango season! We had a couple of Calypso mangoes last week, and this week I bought an R2-E2 mango, which I just shared with my wife. It’s good trying all of the different varieties, as they’re quite different once you compare them and get a familiarity for the different flavours and textures.

New content today:

Cicada summer

One very noticeable thing about this summer we’re rapidly steaming into: cicadas. The past few years there’s been a distinct lack of cicadas, but this year there’s clearly been a huge hatching. The buzzing of the trees with cicadas is loud and obvious, especially in the early evening. Last night we had to turn the TV up louder than usual to hear it – even with the windows closed.

I’ve also seen a lot more cicada shells left behind in tree trunks as the moulting insects leave them. They’re all over the place. The common Australian species Cyclochila australasiae (“green grocers”) and Thopha saccata (“double drummers”) are different to the North American cicadas, and don’t have the famous periodical breeding patterns. They seem to be a lot less predictable, maybe related to the climate or predators or something. The Australian species are also known for being the loudest insects in the world. Which I can testify to.

It was another hot and humid day today, perfect for the cicadas. Overnight the temperature didn’t drop below 20°C, which is a bit too warm for comfortable sleeping. Tomorrow should be hot too, but with late rain moving in to cool things down for the next few days.

First thing this morning I had to go see my doctor for a routine checkup and blood test results> Rather than brave the heat and walk like I normally would, I took the train there, and then the Metro back, stopping off on the way home to pick up a pastry from Moon Phase (right next door to the Metro station). I think there were only two things on their regular menu that I haven’t tried yet (apart from a tiramisu and an Earl Grey tea thing, which I won’t ever have because of the caffeine). So today I tried the pistachio and rose concoction. It’s a squat cylinder of pastry topped with flowery pink icing and, as I discovered, filled with a substantial pistachio cream filling and raspberries. It was much denser and more filling than I’d assumed.

In the afternoon I did some Darths & Droids comics stuff and made a sourdough loaf. And then had three ethics classes in the evening. I revamped some of the questions and think the lesson plan runs better than last night’s one.

New content today:

A bit of a goof-off day

This morning I had two more ethics classes on the Robots topic. I was done before lunch and then had a falafel wrap. Normally I have a large tortilla, spread with some tahini, then cheddar cheese, tomato wedges, heated up falafels, and some chilli sauce. I’ll also add cos lettuce if I’ve remembered to buy any recently. But sometimes my wife buys a jar of sweet zucchini pickles from the local farmers’ market – she got them one time on a whim and they turned out to be really delicious, so she keeps restocking when we run out. Anyway, we got a new jar recently and today I added some to my wrap to add a bit of zing. Very nice.

I took Scully for a walk over to Naremburn. We haven’t been there for a while. I sat at the bakery there and had a lamington as a sweet treat. The day was a bit warm, but not too hot. Nice weather.

When we got back home, I had a few things I could have done, but I was feeling like a lazy afternoon after yesterday’s long walk, and the past couple of weeks when I’ve been busy marking assignments. So I just cued up some fun YouTube videos and watched those for a while. Sometimes it’s good to just be lazy for a bit! Well, before three more classes in the evening!

New content today:

Anniversary dinner and Arcs

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, so my wife and I had a special dinner out at one of our favourite (albeit expensive) places, The Bathers’ Pavilion at Balmoral Beach. Firstly, the view from the dinning room is wonderful.

We were there before sunset and so got to watch the beach and water as night fell. We started with some potato scallops, battered, sprinkled with wakame and topped with a vinegar mayo.

My appetiser was kingfish with rhubarb and pink peppercorns.

My wife had a vegetarian appetiser of wood ear mushrooms with witlof, blackberries, and black garlic. I tried a small bite and this was truly delicious.

My main was duck cooked two ways, a sliced breast fillet and duck sausages.

My wife had roasted cauliflower and kale, with…. I’m not sure what the orange bits or the sauce are.

For dessert we shared this chocolate, passionfruit, and caramel construction.

It was an indulgent and delicious dinner. We drove home and picked up Scully from our neighbours who had minded her while we were out.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning, followed by housecleaning: vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and shower, emptying (water) and refilling (crystals) the damp absorbers.

Then after lunch we went out to a fabric showroom to choose new fabric for the upholstery on our dining chairs. These chairs are 25 years old and the seats are getting worn and the foam padding is squashed and flat, so we decided to get them reupholstered. I got a quote from a company during the week, and they said we should go to this showroom to choose a fabric, and let them know what it is so they can order it wholesale for us.

The showroom was in Glebe, so after picking a fabric we walked over to Glebe Point Road to get coffee (for my wife) and snacks from a cafe. Then we headed back home.

This afternoon we tried a 2-player game of Arcs. It’s only the second time I’ve payed, after the 4-player one we did at games night a few weeks ago, and I was teaching my wife to play. So it was fairly instructional and strategy-free. (My wife won, but it was only a learning game!)

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