food – dangermouse.net

Board games and Japan prep

Friday was online board games night with my friends. We played Can’t Stop, Ticket to Ride, Just One, 7 Wonders, and then a game of Castles of Burgundy. I didn’t won any, but came second in Castles of Burgundy behind the guy in our group who usually wins everything, so that felt like a victory.

Before that we went up to the fish & chips shop for dinner, eating casually while we walked home with Scully. I didn’t do much else on Friday, except pick up the groceries that I’d ordered online. But I got a surprise message from the supermarket, telling they were sorry my order had been cancelled because of an error in their online system, and saying they’d refund the full amount and give me a $20 gift voucher. A bit later I did indeed get sent a $20 voucher. I’m now waiting to see if they will also refund the total order which they tell me was cancelled, but which I actually picked up.

While walking Scully at lunchtime I spotted a grey butcherbird sitting on the overhead train wires near the station. We were walking on an overpass over the rail line, so I got the photo from a higher elevation, which is unusual for most birds. Its plumage looks a bit dishevelled for some reason.

This species is moderately common around here, but usually seen high in trees where it’s difficult to get a good photo—or more often heard with their distinctive call but not seen at all—so I was excited to get such a good view of one for a change.

Today, Saturday, I went on my usual 5k run in the morning. My times have not been great lately, because of the warm weather and high humidity. I’m looking forward to autumn and cooler weather.

For lunch we went to a Thai restaurant with my wife’s family for her mother’s birthday. Not a large group, just seven of us. We shared some delicious dishes. We used to eat Thai quite a lot as there had always been very good Thai places near us, but the best one closed down some years ago, and there isn’t one we like much nearby any more. So it was good to have some today.

The other thing we’ve been doing is organising for our trip to Tokyo next weekend. I booked another couple of restaurants. Normally we don’t bother booking any eating places in advance of a trip, but Japan is tricky for vegetarians and places that offer vegetarian food are often extremely busy with tourists, because visiting vegetarians all end up going to the same few places.

I’ve also got some things to print out, like our travel insurance details, hotel booking receipt, and other miscellaneous stuff. And I have to double check I have a usable Tokyo train map on my phone. Although I suppose Google Maps will do for route planning.

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A couple of local building projects

Yesterday while walking Scully up to the main shops nearby, I took this photo:

This row of buildings has been somewhat derelict for several years, some businesses shutting down and nothing new opening, although there were still some hangers-on up until very recently. One of them, the green one, was a place called “Stuffed Beaver”, which purported to be a Canadian restaurant. I’ve never ever seen any other Canadian restaurant in my life (except in Canada I guess) and have no idea what would distinguish it as such, other than perhaps having poutine on the menu. But now they’re all empty and demolition has begun with the removal of the metal awnings that hung over each shop front. You can also see a guy surveying the area. So I expect that demolition will begin pretty soon, followed by redevelopment into new businesses and almost certainly a tower of apartments above.

Today I did some more comics stuff in the morning. I’m needing to build up a buffer to cover my trip to Tokyo in a week and a half, so I’m concentrating on that in my spare time.

At lunch I walked up to y wife’s work to pick up Scully and bring her home. I decided to take a roundabout route home, via a cafe where we stopped for lunch. I had a chicken burger, which was pretty good. It came with hot chips and they were sprinkled with super fancy sea salt crystals, which were large pyramid shapes. But the crystals were so large that they all fell off the chips and the salt ended up on the plate and there was none on the chips. I had to manually pick up the salt crystals and delicately place them on the chips before putting them in my mouth to get any salt at all. Despite this, the meal was good – the chips were nicely crispy with a fluffy centre.

On the walk home from there, I passed another piece of construction.

This is a bushwalk track that I take up from the harbour shore, through a forested reserve area to the road to walk home. The sandstone steps on the left are brand new, still under construction. Previously the path up the hill involved an awkward large step up that tree root on the right, where you can see the old wooden steps above and below. It was tricky, and also very high for Scully to jump – one time she didn’t land properly and fell off the tree root. So the new steps will be much appreciated once they’re finished.

Tonight I made pumpkin quiche for dinner, and then had three more classes on the Fantasy logic topic. I’m really enjoying this one, and it’s getting the kids to apply their critical thinking to some interesting new hypothetical situations. Although some of the kids are having some difficulty understanding the distinction between coming up with reasons why magic can’t do X from the point of view of the author, versus in-story reasons.

e.g. “What are some reasons within the story for why heroes go on a difficult quest instead of just using magic?” And a kid answers, “Because if they used magic it’d make the story boring.” I need to explain very carefully that “Yes, that’s the reason the writer writes the story that way, but what could be a reason that the writer comes up with that the hero would tell someone else in the story why they can’t just use magic?” The wording gets a bit convoluted when trying to clarify this for a kid who is having difficulty with the distinction. But I did get there in the end!

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D&D prep and a Italian treat

Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?

So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.

It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.

At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.

This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳

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Finding Paths, and a new Indian restaurant

On Friday I had a busy day. I was chairing the latest meeting of the Standards Australia (SA) committee on photography, held over videoconference. We normally have three meetings a year, but the last one (supposed to be after the New York ISO meeting in June) was delayed so long because of staff turnover at SA (resulting in us not having a project manager for several weeks) that we finally decided to leave it until the next date, after the Sydney October meeting. And then it was tough to organise it in December like I wanted, so it was pushed to January.

It was a fairly routine meeting, except for a new attendee. One of our current committee members decided it’s time to cull his numerous committee roles and went to the effort to find a replacement to take over his representation of their university. The new guy I had a Zoom meeting with on Tuesday (which, looking back, I see I didn’t mention that day) to brief him on what our committee does and what sort of work he’d be expected to do. That didn’t scare hi off, so he attended on Friday as a guest, before they go through the motions of replacing the retiring member.

Otherwise I went through the discussions and progress from both the New York and Sydney meetings. Unfortunately our member from the Art Gallery of NSW couldn’t make the meeting because I especially wanted to thank her for the behind-the-scenes tour she organised for us at the Sydney meeting.

This meeting yesterday overlapped with one of my ethics classes, so last week I rescheduled it to be a day later and told the kids. But without that rescheduled one I still had three more to teach after the standards meeting, which with a break for a late lunch took me up to 6pm.

And then from 6pm we had online games night with my friends. One of them had organised for us to do some roleplaying this time, using Pathfinder 2e rules and a virtual tabletop (VTT). And by 6pm everyone else was ready to play and all waiting for me! So I pretty much had to dive straight in.

It was nice to be a player for once instead of running the game. This was a one-shot test run of the VTT, before the GM starts a proper campaign. There were five of us in the party; I was a halfling rogue who I named Quillby Bramblefoot. We were given a mission to check out a watchtower which had lit its distress fire signal, and told to recover a magical artefact from the tower, although the guy giving us the mission was a bit cryptic about it and wouldn’t tell us what it looked like or what it did. Which in hindsight may have been a hint, because when we got there and after fighting a couple of battles against wild boars and some semi-undead things, we found a cloaked woman who led us to the item and told us a different story about it. We didn’t get much further as it got late and we finished up there.

Today I got up and did a 5k run. It was very tough going because it was 24°C and 75% humidity. I can really see it in my times when the weather is warm and humid; it can make me a minute or two slower than a good time in cool, dry weather. Back home I showered to freshen up and then it was time for the make-up class that I’d moved from yesterday. Three of the four kids showed up, which was a good turnout for moving the class to a different day.

This afternoon I looked at organising more details for our trip to Tokyo in a few weeks. It was time to think about the dinner options and book some restaurants. I went through the vegetarian-friendly restaurants that my Japanese contact recommended for us to meet for dinner. One sounded truly awesome – mid-range fully vegetarian versions of traditional Japanese cuisine, conveniently located, great reviews. I tried to book it for 27 February… but it’s booked out for the whole month! This is another issue with vegetarian places in Japan – tourists book them out well in advance, because there are so few options for all the vegetarian visitors.

So I did some research and found a nice looking izakaya with an extensive vegetarian menu, in a good location. I emailed our contacts there and suggested this. I also booked dinner for me, my wife, and her mother and sister at Sakura-tei, an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku. It’s interesting using a Japanese restaurant booking site. They want to know so much about you! There was a drop-down asking what occasion it is, with about 50 options: Birthday (self), Birthday (spouse), Birthday (friend), Birthday (family), Friends, Women’s group, Welcome, Farewell, Holiday party, Reunion, Tourism, Business meeting, Team drinks, Family celebration, Kids event, Wedding reception, Anniversary, Engagement celebration, Date, Group Date, Proposal(!), Seminar, Music recital, Exhibition, Other. Those are all in the list, and I skipped some other entries. And another asking how many times you’ve been to the restaurant before.

Speaking of restaurants, we tried a brand new Indian place tonight. It’s the new one that opened up where Turka used to be. I checked the Google reviews and… it was very mixed. A lot of 5-star reviews, and a lot of 1-star reviews. People can be very opinionated, so we decided to try it ourselves. Unfortunately our experience was more 1-star than 5-star. The samosas were cold in the middle, as though frozen and not fried enough to warm through. The dosa had a good spicy potato filling, but the pancake around it was a bit tough, not nice and crispy. The malai kofta curry had decent paneer dumplings, but the sauce was fairly bland. So, we decided not to come back. There are a few much better Indian options in the area.

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Leftovers and vegetarian Tokyo planning

Not much else to talk about today, so I thought I’d pick a food theme. Because I have ethics classes from 6-8pm, it’s difficult organising dinner for me and my wife to eat together. I need to eat around 5:30, which is too early for her. So we often end up eating individually on Thursdays (and Wednesdays). Sometimes I cook something that will withstand sitting on the stove staying warm for an hour. Last night I made a single pot of lentils ( a mix of red lentils and French lentils), with broccoli and potato. There was some left over, which I kept in the fridge until my dinner tonight, while my wife made herself some eggs later on.

The other leftover was the last few slices of sourdough from the loaf I made a few days back. I made a new loaf today, but it just came out of the oven this evening.

And the other food-related task of the day was going through options for vegetarian dining in Tokyo, to pick places to try and book for our upcoming trip. A contact on the Japanese ISO photography standards delegation sent me some recommendations, and this one looks really good: Saido. I think we’ll suggest this one for dinner with my contact and his wife (we had dinner with them last time we were in Tokyo as well).

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Lunch expedition to Bourke Street Bakery

That was about the only noteworthy thing about today. I went for a short drive over a couple of suburbs to the Bourke Street Bakery at Neutral Bay. I was feeling like a nice lunch and they have some excellent pies and sausage rolls. I wanted the beef, beer, bacon, and cheesy mash pie, but that was the only one there sold out of, so I got the beef brisket, mushroom, and red wine one instead. And a pork and fennel sausage rolls, which is the go-to item there. They were delicious as usual, although honestly I think the pork and fennel roll used to be better.

On the way home I stopped at the local shops to pick up some hamburger buns for dinner tonight. We had vegetable patty burgers. By the timer I parked, walked over to buy the buns, and stopped for a gelato because it was a hot day, it was time to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, so I drove straight over there and waited a bit until she was ready.

At home I made some Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids strips, before three ethics classes tonight. The new topic on Bio-Engineering is going well, with some very diverse opinions from the kids about the merits and dangers of the technology. One question is: If you could make a brand new life form, plant or animal, what would you make? And there was a new girl in one class who loved dragons, so of course she was enthusiastic about the idea of making one. And then I asked what we should do if they got released into the wild and caused problems…

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An easy Saturday and a closed restaurant

I was glad that I did a 5k run yesterday, because this morning’s weather was miserable. Cold and rainy and still very, very windy. But the awful weather eased up today and the sun finally came out in the afternoon, heating things up and releasing a ton of humidity into the air.

I basically took it easy, doing some comics stuff and random puttering around. I took Scully for a walk at lunch without my wife, and we got fish and chips for lunch. We planned to stay in for dinner again, but my wife got a hankering for dinner at Organica restaurant, so we walked up there with Scully early in the evening. This has become her new favourite restaurant, after the closure of some of our other favourites over the years.

But when we got there, it had closed down! The furniture and signage had all been removed! My wife checked online and sure enough, it’s listed as permanently closed. So that was a big disappointment. We walked over to Green Gourmet, the vegetarian place that last time said we were welcome to bring Scully inside. So we popped in and they confirmed Scully was welcome. I actually don’t think this is technically legal in New South Wales – dogs are allowed in commercial outdoor dining areas, but not indoors. But it’s on them, so we were happy to enjoy a nice meal there. Another couple came in with a dog too while we were there, and they looked like regulars, as the staff greeted them and knew the dog by name.

Not much else to say about today.

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Losing games and double pizza

Friday morning I did the grocery shopping. The old fashioned way, since I forgot to order online for pickup, so it took about half an hour longer than just going to the supermarket for the pickup. The day was rainy, and I had four ethics classes to teach.

Then it was heading out to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. We went to the place of the guy who recently moved into his newly built house (on the same property as his old house). He has a nice dining table and laid a felt mat on top for gaming on. We started with a game of Notre Dame, which I’ve played before but not for many years.

It’s a worker placement game, and your workers activate various powers, but you are restricted by first having to draft cards related to the placement areas, so you only have a limited choice of zones to place your workers each turn, rather than free choice. I scored a lot of points early on, but got stifled for resources in the late game and everyone else overtook me, so I ended up coming last of five players. A sixth friend arrived about halfway through the game, and we stopped to eat delivered pizzas for dinner. When we resumed we started a six-player game of Ticket to Ride: Asia, which plays as a team game with three teams of two.

In this variant of the classic game, each team has shared racks of tickets and train cards, and also a secret hand which you’re not allowed to share with your teammate. You have separate turns, but are working together to build your routes. It gave an interestingly different dynamic and was a lot of fun. My team leapt to an early lead… but you can guess what happened. We got overtaken and ended up coming last! Oh well, at least we all had fun.

Today was another partly rainy day, with unsettled weather set in here for the next few days. The sky is rapidly changing between sunny and grey clouds that threaten rain.

After a 5k run in the very humid conditions (82% humidity and 24°C) I cleaned the bathroom and then tried to write a Darths & Droids comic strip. I got stuck with writer’s block for a few hours – it was torturously slow going. I managed to finish it off in the afternoon.

For dinner we walked with Scully over the Naremburn, 2 km away, to have a simple meal at the pizzeria there. So I ended up having pizza two nights in a row. Not that I’m complaining.

Tonight we watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie on Netflix: Vengeance Most Fowl. I’ve always liked all the Wallace and Gromit films, and this one was brilliant as always.

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A nice Italian dinner, planning for Japan

Friday was online games night with my friends, so no blog post. Earlier in the evening, I went with my wife to a new Italian restaurant I’d discovered recently, named Enoteca 128. It’s a short drive from our home and has outdoor tables so we can take Scully. It’s in a relatively quiet alley off the main road, so it was a bit quieter than some of the usual places we go, and Scully could relax rather than bark at everyone walking their dogs past.

The food was delicious. We began with some zucchini flowers stuffed with sweet potato and taleggio cheese, served with a spicy dressing of softened red capsicum and almonds. We both had tagliatelle pasta, with a simple tomato and basil sauce for my wife, while I had the lamb ragu. Then for dessert I had a honey pannacotta with fresh berries and honeycomb. It was all very god and we’ll definitely keep this place in mind for future visits.

Earlier in the day we did a big walk and I worked on some comics stuff. And then after getting home from dinner I played games with friends: Ticket to Ride, Jump Drive, Just One, Azul, Can’t Stop. I won the last game, so finished on a high note, despite not doing so well in the others.

Today, Saturday, I did a 5k run first thing in the morning. The cool weather is heating up again and it was already 25°C when I did my run at 9 am. So I went a bit slowly.

After lunch we went over to my wife’s sister’s place to meet her and their mother and do some itinerary planning for our upcoming trip to Tokyo at the end of February. They want to plan and book some activities, such as a tea ceremony, and a day trip to Mount Fuji. We went through a bunch of options and found some online activities to book. So that’s more organised now. We also discussed our other trip, to Auckland in New Zealand, which is just a few weeks later. For that one we need to book a hire car, as we’ll be doing some driving, up to the Bay of Islands.

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Expedition to Rose Bay

This morning I did my first 5k run for the new year. Normally people are friendly when I run past them, some saying “good morning” or something. And as they see me approaching, they will give me room to run past them.

But this morning I was running along a footpath and two middle-aged women were approaching, walking side by side. The path was wide enough for two people to pass, but not for me to get past two of them walking abreast. I assumed that as I approached they would move slightly and go single file for a few seconds to allow me to run past. I stuck to the far left of the path to make my intended direction clear. But as I approached, they continued walking side by side, and the woman on my side of the path started staring me down, as if she was daring me to run headlong into her. She blocked the path and at the last second I had to divert into the garden on the left side – not even just grass, but an actual garden plot with a flower bed in it and coverage of clivias with their long strap-like leaves. I trampled some of the plants as I twisted sideways to get past them and avoid hitting a tree. And avoid hitting them.

I’ve never seen behaviour like this in five years of running around this neighbourhood. It was really quite shocking. I continued running past them, though I was half tempted to stop and say something.

After showering and changing, my wife and I went on a driving expedition to Rose Bay, a suburb on the south side of the harbour. I went here back in October for a day out by myself, and stumbled across the bakery Li’l Mix. I’d been telling my wife about it and saying we should go check it out together, but they only open Monday to Friday, so we’ve been unable to do it during normal working weeks. But with both of us not working this week, we took the opportunity today to go there.

But when we arrived they didn’t have anything in their shopfront for sale! There were people inside baking stuff, but no completed products at all. We asked, and they said they’d just opened another shop across the street, where all their products were being sold! So we crossed over and went there. This was a significantly bigger premises than the tiny original, and even had a table with seats outside on the footpath for customers. It was occupied, but the people left soon after and we grabbed the table. My wife got a shakshuka which was baked into a bread roll, and I got this beef brisket and mashed potato pie:

Really good! We also got a Jerusalem bagel and three of their delicious cookies to take home. From here we walked over to the main shops at Rose Bay, a couple of blocks away, and browsed around a bit. I found this beautiful little laneway full of shops, reminiscent of somewhere in Italy:

In the afternoon, back at home, we took Scully for a walk down to the Harbour. I spotted this forlorn looking yacht down there (which has never been there before, so it must have happened recently):

On the way back home, we walk past this house which is being rebuilt. It was derelict for two years, and they’re finally rebuilding it, but leaving a lot of the original walls (white) and just adding on to them (new bricks).

A friend of mine said they’re probably doing this so they can class it as a “renovation”, not a new construction, so they can get away with the fact that the house footprint is too close to the property boundaries according to current development laws. If they demolished it and built from scratch they’d have to make the area of the house smaller. Which seems likely, as it’s very close to the neighbouring property.

For dinner tonight I needed to use up some Brussels sprouts. My wife suggested pasta, so I improvised with garlic and chilli and lemon juice.

I also added some shaved Parmigiano Reggiano cheese before serving (not shown in the photo). It was delicious. The bowls seen in the photo are hand-painted ones we got in Italy last year, from Orvieto – which we now use whenever we have pasta.

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