food – Page 7 – dangermouse.net

Sunday in brief

It felt like a busy Sunday. I went for a run in the morning, but the weather was much warmer than yesterday, around 23°C instead of 18°C. I found it a bit tough but managed 5k before stopping.

I spent time writing new Darths & Droids comics, building up the buffer for my trip in a couple of weeks. And had three ethics classes tonight.

Also tonight I cooked linguini for dinner, with roasted cauliflower and pesto (from a jar). I discovered that cauliflower leaves were also edible, so I roasted some of those with the florets and they added a nice green element to the dish. The pasta was fresh hand-made pasta from the farmers’ market that my wife visited yesterday. It was really good!

New content today:

More marking; and Success and Failure

I finished off my marking for the image processing course today. As in previous semesters, this was followed by a tedious hour or so of pasting all the marks and comments into the university online interface – 10 separate entries for each of the 54 students I’d been assigned. I was very glad once I got that finished!

This evening I had the first three classes on my new ethics topic: Success and Failure. I think they went pretty well. This topic has less of me talking and more questions for the students to answer than the previous one I did on Dinosaurs, so it feels a lot more interactive, which is good.

This afternoon I read an article on the ABC News site about pears falling out of favour with Australian consumers relative to other fruits, with the result that a lot of pear farmers are finding the crop to be no longer commercially viable, and are removing pear orchards. This prompted two things:

Firstly, a conversation on with my friends on Discord in which two of them revealed that they never realised that pears are sold in supermarkets in an unripe state and that they ripen and soften over several days in the home. Both of them said they never thought much of pears, as they were too hard, crunchy, and bland compared to apples. I was amazed that they’d apparently never experienced the fact that pears soften considerably as they ripen, nor had the pleasure of eating a nicely ripe pear.

Secondly, I resolved to go out and buy some pears! When I went out with Scully for a walk after lunch I popped into the local grocery store and grabbed four nice Packham pears. Which are very firm now, but will ripen and soften nicely in the next few days. And one of my pear-incredulous friends also went out and bought himself some pears today as well, to experiment and try to experience this phenomenon of ripe pears himself.

I don’t know if it’ll be enough to convince the farmers to keep growing pears, but I certainly hope they don’t end up disappearing from our supermarket fruit sections.

New content today:

Fancy floral food

This morning I picked up the groceries and then did a 5k run. Today was cold again, with spring back into winter mode.

I printed out a copy of the board/card game that I’ve been working on designing with my class of three kids in my Creative Thinking class (which I mentioned a few days ago). I cut out the cards and Fame counters, and played a couple of games with my wife. The game plays very quickly, in 5-10 minutes. I actually at one stage grabbed a pen and scribbled new rules on one of the cards in my hand – which caused my wife to object about me changing the rules in the middle of the game! But of course this is just good playtesting practice!

Anyway, we came up with a few potential improvements, which I can use as discussion points in the next lesson on Monday night. Apart from those, the game seems to play pretty well! I think with a few simple tweaks we can make it a decent little game.

My wife went to the local farmer’s market this morning and came home with a bag of interesting vegetables, including a small container of edible flowers. So I decided to get fancy with dinner. I made risotto with asparagus and baby zucchinis, and used the zucchini flowers and edible flowers to decorate.

Looks amazing, and tasted pretty good too. There are plenty of the flowers left, so it looks like we’re going to be having fancy dinners all week.

Oh, and here’s a bonus photo of Scully at the park yesterday.

New content today:

A new patisserie

With 5 classes today I don’t have a lot of time to do other things. But I did take Scully for a short drive over to Neutral Bay for lunch. The day was cool and very, very windy, so I didn’t fancy taking her on a long walk. Instead I found a French bakery that I haven’t visited before and decided to go there and get something for lunch.

La Bonne Bakery had a selection of bread and baguettes, and an array of pastries:

But they didn’t have much else apart from these. A man entered the shop just before me and asked for a pie, but the staff said they didn’t make pies any more. They did have some croque monsieurs made and ready to be reheated for lunch, so I grabbed one of those, as well as a pain au chocolat, and a slice of pecan tart to take home for dessert later tonight. I took them with Scully to a small park nearby to sit and eat while she ran around on the grass. The croque monsieur and pain au chocolat were both really good. I haven’t tried the pecan tart yet, but it looks amazing.

I’ll have to go back here again and take my wife some day to try it out. It’s also convenient with that park nearby where Scully can be off-lead, with a fence around it.

New content today:

1 chance in 4096

This morning I had bread for breakfast. This is unusual, as I almost always have cereal – home-made muesli with fruit and yoghurt on weekdays, and Weet Bix on weekends. But I forgot to order the groceries for pickup on Friday, and we’d run out of milk, so I couldn’t have my normal Weet Bix. And I’d baked a new sourdough loaf yesterday, trying it with some rolled oats for the first time, so I decided to just have a couple of slices, one with butter and one with marmalade.

After breakfast I went for a 5k run. The morning was warm and humid and it was pretty draining. But it was good to have that done before the day got hotter.

Before lunch I played another game of Root with my wife. She wanted to try Marquise de Cat again, after attempting the Eyrie last time. Playing the Eyrie birds myself, I was attempting to gain territory by initiating battles to gain clearings and then build roosts. When you battle, you roll two dice, which are 12-sided, but numbered 0-3 three times each, so there’s an equal chance of each number form 0 to 3. Battles favour the initiator: the defender loses warriors equal to the higher number rolled on the dice, while the attacker loses warriors equal to the lower number.

What should have been about halfway into the game, I started a battle. I rolled the dice and got double 3, meaning we each removed 3 warriors. So I took heavier losses than expected, as double 3 is the only way of losing 3 attackers, a 1 in 16 chance.

In the next battle: I rolled double 3 again.

In the next battle: I rolled double 3 again.

I took so many unexpected losses, that my wife ran away with the game from there. Yes, she was losing the same number of cat warriors as I was birds, but the cats recruit forces significantly faster. I should have been inflicting a lot more casualties than I was sustaining. Anyway, it was basically a debacle from that point, and my wife won easily.

After lunch, we went to visit some friends, taking Scully so she could play with their dog. We hung out for a bit in the very slight breeze outside, in the shade at the rear of the house. It was really pretty hot out in the sun.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, forecast up to 37°C.

New content today:

A nice Italian lunch for all of us

I got up this morning and while using the bathroom I noticed a small dark lump on my neck, which looked a little like a dried scab of blood. I figured maybe I’d accidentally scratched myself somehow and not noticed it. I used a fingernail to lightly scratch the lump to probe what it was like, and it came straight off. I looked at the tiny dark blob on my fingertip and realised it was a tick!

Somehow I’d attracted a tick. I guess it was probably late last night when I took Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet, and it maybe fell on me from a tree branch overhead, and attached itself to my neck. Now I was concerned that I’d just removed the body, and the head may have detached and still be embedded in my skin. But I examined the wound carefully and had my wife check it too, and we don’t think there’s anything embedded in there. I put some iodine solution on it to prevent infection. I’ll keep an eye on it in the next day or two and if it doesn’t get better I’ll go see a doctor.

Following that drama, I did a 5k run and had a shower. By 11am my wife and I were ready to go out for lunch. We took Scully and went down to the local ferry wharf, where we caught a ferry across the harbour to Balmain. We walked up the street to the shops and restaurants and found a place to have lunch. We found a nice looking Italian place called D’Vine Ivy.

As we sat down at one of the outside tables, a woman who we presumed to be the owner came out and greeted Scully and asked if she’d like some Italian sausage. I said yes, she’d love some, not thinking that the woman was actually serious. She ran off and returned quickly with a plate of sliced sausage for Scully! Then she took our orders for lunch. My wife had a daily special vegetarian lasagne, and I had penne boscaiola. The serves were very generous and delicious. After we ate, the woman admitted that she’d run out of the vege lasagne and had tossed it together quickly after our order, which explained the somewhat free-form assembly of the dish, although honestly it looked and tasted great. I also had to try the dessert, which was hoe baked carrot cake, served hot and delicious, with fresh berries. Scully got a blueberry.

Then we walked back to the ferry wharf and caught the ferry back home. It was a very nice day out. And it’s now almost 9pm and I’m still not hungry after that lunch!

New content today:

Getting a new chilli plant

Today was forecast to be hotter than yesterday, but it didn’t quite make it there. The other big change from the past three years is how noticeably dry it’s been lately. Almost no rain in the past month or so, and the humidity has been low. Grass in the park across the street was lush and green a week or two ago, but is now already showing signs of dying off and turning brown.

On the other hand, spring flowers are out in full force. Cherry blossoms are dropping and the trees turning to foliage. There are tons of clivias blooming bright orange all over the neighbourhood. And huge bushy displays of azaleas in pink, white, and red.

Speaking of plants, I went to the hardware store today to pick up a new chilli plant. I’d bought one a few years ago and it produced an abundance of chillis, but it died at the beginning of winter. With spring blooming now, I thought it was a good time to get a new plant. Only $4, and it should produce a lot more value than that in fresh chillis for our meals.

Tonight I started the new ethics topic: Energy. I wrote the lesson plan during part of the image processing lecture last night (while the lecturer was speaking and I was sitting waiting for interactive time with the students), and I think I rushed it a bit. A lot of the questions are a bit too prescriptive and not the open-ended ethical dilemmas that lead to interesting discussion. So I had to improvise a bit to keep things interesting. I’ll try to revamp the outline a bit tomorrow.

New content today:

New Mexican food

Today was the hottest September day on record in Sydney, 34.6°C. Tomorrow is forecast to be even hotter. That’s not really a terrible temperature for the middle of summer, but in September it’s obviously weird. We also had a total fire ban today, the first one declared in three years, and no doubt the first of many for this coming summer.

The Bureau of Meteorology also officially declared an El Niño today. The Australian Bureau was the last major meteorological department in the world to declare that this El Niño had begun. Most others declared it several weeks ago, but the Aus Bureau has stricter criteria and were holding off until the surface trade winds showed consistent reversal lasting at least 7 days, which finally happened today.

Rather than walk Scully to my wife’s work before hopping on the train to the university for tonight’s image processing lecture, my wife left a bit early and I picked her up in the car and brought her home, before I walked the much shorter distance to the nearest station. I would have been very hot and sweaty if I’d walked all the way like usual.

Continuing my mission to try a new place for dinner every week this semester, I found a Latin American place. I tried the jalapeño peppers stuffed with goat cheese, and a couple of tacos, one with shredded chicken and one with pulled pork.

They were pretty good, but this was a bit more expensive a place than the numerous Asian eateries around this area of town.

The lecture tonight was the last of the actual lectures, on deep learning. Next week is the introduction to the student project. Many of the students have already been talking with me about their plans for project topics, which is good!

New content today:

Trying a new pizza place

Yesterday I ordered our weekly groceries for pickup from the supermarket this morning as usual. But when I got up I found a message from the supermarket saying they’d had a “major network outage” and could not fulfil any pickup orders today. And I had to phone their customer support line to organise a refund or reschedule the pickup to another day. So I had to spend time on their support line, which was busy of course because all the other customers were doing the same thing. I rescheduled the pickup for tomorrow.

So instead of getting groceries after my morning ethics class, I used the extra time to go for a 5k run. I’m getting used to this distance now, so hopefully that means I’m getting fitter!

For dinner I spoiled the gains of the run by going out to a new pizza place with my wife. It opened near us recently, but has a few other places around Sydney: Farina Pizzeria. It’s a very authentic Neapolitan style wood-fired pizza place and has won awards at the International Pizza Competition. And indeed the pizzas were excellent.

And tonight is online board games night. I’ve already run away with a huge victory in one game of Jump Drive, and then immediately lost the next one appallingly. We played a new game, Space Base, which I won comfortably. And we’re moving on to Ticket to Ride.

New content today:

5k run + brisket burger

I had a mixed bag in the health stakes today. I did a 5k run, and then I blew it all by having a barbecue beef brisket burger for lunch. This was at the Naremburn shops, where I usually get something from the bakery, but today I tried something from the fish & chip shop, though I eschewed the fish & chips and looked at their burger menu, and was attracted by the brisket burger. It was very good and I have no regrets.

While walking home, a bird pooped on my hat. Now, this probably wouldn’t have stood out enough for me to report it here, except for something which I also didn’t bother to mention yesterday: a gull pooped square on the top of my (hatless) head yesterday too! It was after I’d picked up the games from the game shop and was walking towards the university for the evening lecture. I went via Darling Harbour, which is populated by numerous gulls, and one too a dump right above me as I was walking and… yeah… it was very unpleasant. Fortunately I was very close to a public toilet and it had copious soap and paper towels, so I managed to wash my hair in the sink and dry it off adequately before eventually heading to my pad Thai dinner and the university. Today I just washed my hat when I got home.

Tonight I started the topic of “Music” with my ethics classes. I think this is a good lighter topic after last week talking about brain uploading, which weirded a few of the kids out. Everyone tonight felt excited and happy to talk about music, which was good!

This afternoon I had a bit of spare time to start looking at my photos from Amsterdam in June last year. I still haven’t fully gone through and processed the photos that I want to put into an album for this trip, and I kind of want to get that done and start work on this year’s Japan trip before my next trip to Europe in November!

Here’s the Singelgracht canal:

And the Rijksmuseum:

New content today: