cooking – Page 12 – dangermouse.net

Lightning and vet

Today was busy and exhausting. Workwise, I found a cool new Proof that the Earth is a Globe, that I didn’t even have on my list already, thanks to a reader. It was so cool, I wrote it up today!

In other news, I was preoccupied with Scully, who hasn’t been able to keep any food down since Monday night. She’s been sleepy, and refusing almost all food, and vomiting a few times. My wife took her to the vet today, and they did a blood test and x-ray, which both turned up all clear, so they suspect probably a stomach bug of some sort, which should hopefully resolve in a day or two. She’s got some anti-nausea medication to help keep her food down, and she’s eaten dinner with some gusto, so hopefully she’s okay.

Also, I baked some scones today, since my wife expressed a desire for some, and I thought it was a good idea to spoil her today.

New content today:

Virtual games Friday

I’m trying to go grocery shopping less often, so we’ve run out of bread at home… the perfect opportunity to bake some home made bread! General flour has been sold out at the supermarket the past few times I’ve gone (and I’ve heard from my friends that yeast is impossible to find too), but last time they had a boxed kit for making sourdough light rye, with all the ingredients included, including yeast. So I bought that. And today was the day to try it out!

Kneading bread dough is hard work! All I had to do was open a pre-mixed flour sachet and add a couple of spoons of yeast from another sachet, add water, and start mixing. Then you have to knead the dough for “at least 10 minutes”. The pack says the more you knead it the better the bread will be. So I did it for a little longer, but honestly I was tired of kneading so I stopped and let the dough rise.

It said to put the dough in a “warm place”. The weather was cool and I was wondering how to do this, so I searched online and found lots of advice, such as “on top of the fridge” (impossible as there’s only a few centimetres of clearance above mine). But one that worked was “in the oven”. It turns out my oven thermostat goes as low as 30°C, so I put it on for a minute to warm up and then turned it off and put the dough in, with a cup of hot water to provide moisture. It rose nicely.

After rising once for 40 minutes, you knead the dough again, shape it into your loaf, and then it rise again. This is after the second rising, and the dough has increased massively in size. It’s now ready to go into the oven for baking.

The baking time is surprisingly short (at least it was to me). 25 minutes and it looks like this. I was a bit concerned if it was baked all the way through.

But yep! It slices nicely and tastes delicious! And the first slice while it was still warm out of the oven, with melted butter… mmmm…

Well, it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought to make fresh bread! I think I’ll be doing this a bit from now on.

Besides making bread, I worked a bit on writing new Darths & Droids comics. And in the evening was fortnightly board games night, held virtually for the second time due to COVID restrictions. Last time we used Board Game Arena, but this time we had planned to do a Magic: the Gathering draft tournament, as mentioned the past couple of days. We drafted our decks asynchronously using a tool my friend wrote, and then built decks in Tabletop Simulator, which is an amazing virtual gaming tool that I only recently learnt about.

This is a screenshot from Tabletop Simulator showing my deck laid out. I actually drafted really badly. I played 5 games of the tournament during the virtual games night, and lost every single game. I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming dead last in this tournament. Ah well, at least it’s fun!

New content today:

Chilli and potatoes

My chilli plant has been growing really well, and had heaps of chillis on it. Way more than I could use for cooking. So today I decided to pick all the extras and make some home made chilli sauce. A friend of mine got me on to this, since he also has a chilli plant that produces way more than he can use.

My wife picked the chillis for me. I was only going to grab the ripe red ones, but my friend showed me a photo of his latest batch and he included a lot of the unripe green ones too, so I did likewise.

I chopped them up carefully, trying not to touch them with my fingers.

Put them into a jar with some salt and sliced garlic.

And topped it up with water. The jar gets sealed and stored in a dark place at room temperature for two weeks. The idea is that the naturally occurring lactobacillus that is everywhere ferments it, while the salt inhibits any undesirable bacterial/fungal growth. After two weeks, the whole lot gets blended and vinegar added. And that’s pretty much it, as I understand it, although you can add other flavours as well for variety. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Besides this, I spent some time this afternoon making potato salad, to have with dinner. Similar to last time I made it, but this time I remembered to add chopped capers! I completely forgot about those last time.

Work-wise, I intended to start writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! today… but ended up so distracted and busy that I didn’t even manage to write a single comic. Yeesh! I better get stuck into it tomorrow.

New content today:

Baking damper: attempt 2

We were out of bread today after eating all the damper I made three days ago. Restricting our grocery shopping outings to once a week, I didn’t want to buy bread today, so I made another damper. This time I used soda water instead of beer, and the recipe I looked up pointed out that you don’t want to knead the dough, because that drives the air out of it. Last time the beer damper recipe said to knead the dough lightly.

So today I mixed the dough roughly and didn’t knead it at all. And sprinkled a bit of flour on top before baking. And here’s the result!

It turned out well – better than the last one. Really delicious, in fact. My wife actually said she didn’t want us to buy bread ever again. Of course that relies on me making bread whenever she wants it…

I did have to go out today though, to take my wife’s 4G box that her office gave her to use for connectivity and get it repaired, after the trouble she had yesterday. The guy at the mobile shop poked a tray through the door and told me to put the box on it, then locked the door behind him, with me waiting on the outside while he checked it out. Ten minutes later he came back and told me through the glass that it was working, and had me check by connecting to the WiFi with my phone. Then he unlocked the door and handed it back to me, from the tray. Getting it home, it did work again, so that’s good.

I really don’t know what happened with the rest of the day!

New content today:

Darths & Droids #1820 – yesterday actually, I forgot we’re updating three times a week again!
Irregular Webcomic! #4223
Square Root of Minus Garfield #3970
Lightning Made of Owls #863
Comments on a Postcard #4098

More walking and baking

For today’s exercise, my wife and I took Scully on a walk down to the local golf course, and then through a bushwalk along Gore Creek.

It leads to Bob Campbell Oval, a cricket/soccer field near the water.

From here you have to climb The Stairs of Cirith Ungol to get back to my place.

At home, we were out of bread. Rather than go shopping, I made some damper! This is beer damper, made with 3 cups of self raising flour, a bottle of beer, a pinch of salt… and that’s it! Mix and bake for 30 minutes at 190°C. It turned out really nice.

This afternoon I played some games with my wife. We played Azul.

And then Walking in Burano.

New content today:

Patricia Trail and banana bread

It’s Saturday, so although she’s been working from home all week, today my wife had some spare time during the day. So we took a bit of a trip, choosing something to do that wouldn’t involve encountering any people, to respect the coronavirus distancing rules.

I wanted to find somewhere where we could do a bit of walking through some bushland, with Scully. Unfortunately for this plan, dogs are forbidden from National Parks. However, I found that there are some Regional Parks which allow dogs, and there are a few within Sydney. So we set out for the Berowra Valley Regional Park, and in particular the area accessed from the northern end of the suburb of Cherrybrook. Here there is a walking track through the park where dogs are allowed.

The track led through thickly grown forest and undergrowth, but the path was easy enough to follow. Although it was a bit muddy in places from the recent rain this week, and there was also a bit of grass growing on the path.

After completing the track, we did a loop back to where we’d parked the car, walking along the quiet suburban streets. We only saw a few people out and about – it was a lot quieter than the area where we live.

Back home I decided to bake some banana bread.

We don’t do a lot of baking, but with the purchasing of a few weeks of non-perishable foodstuffs we suddenly have plenty of flour in the house, so I figured I’d make use of a couple of old bananas. I used a simple recipe found online.

It turned out fairly good. Nice flavour, maybe a little denser than commercially produced banana bread. My wife had a slice with yoghurt and honey on top.

New content today:

Salad days

I don’t really have much to report today – I was busy doing boring financial stuff. Except I made potato salad.

Boiled kipfler potatoes, with the skin on, sliced; chopped boiled eggs; diced gherkins; chopped onions and garlic, lightly fried; mild English mustard; and coleslaw dressing. I like to use coleslaw dressing instead of mayonnaise because it’s lighter and tangier.

New content today:

Salad Sunday

I spent much of today… making a salad.

Usually a salad you just chop a few things and toss them in a bowl. Done in five minutes. Not this one.

I started first thing in the morning, by putting some dried chick peas into a pot and covering them with water to soak for several hours. After lunch, I boiled them for a half hour or so, then let them cool slowly. Then I tipped them out and dried them thoroughly, then spread them on a baking tray. Into a hot oven for 20 minutes, checking and giving them a shake every few minutes. At this point several of the peas popped, like popcorn, and flew across the oven, ending up on the oven floor. After 20 minutes I took them out, put them in a bowl, added olive oil, salt, and some garam masala, gave them a stir, and then back onto the baking tray and into the oven for another 10 minutes.

Meanwhile I chopped some cauliflower into small florets, mixed them with olive oil, salt, cumin, and chilli powder in a bowl. When the chick peas came out, I poured them into a bowl to cool while I placed the cauliflower on the tray, and then into the oven to bake for half an hour, turning them occasionally.

While the cauliflower cooled after baking, I opened a pomegranate and extracted the arils – a job which takes about 20 minutes just by itself. Then I toasted some pine nuts in a frying pan. And finally, just before dinner this evening, I combined all the ingredients, with some tahini and a drizzle of caramelised balsamic vinegar, while I fried up some vegetarian sausages to go with the salad.

The salad turned out spectacular, if I do say so myself. My wife and I both loved it. The chick peas were crunchy and flavourful, the cauliflower provided tenderness, the pomegranate sweetness, the tahini nuttiness, and the vinegar a bit more sweetness as well as sourness. And there was just enough spice plus heat from the chilli to make it even more interesting. Absolutely delicious, and I’m glad I spent so long making it.

Otherwise today, I watched a bunch of cricket on the tele, and I wrote a bunch of rerun annotations for Irregular Webcomic! Oh, and I finally changed the IWC poll question, to something seasonal.

New content today:

Christmas cooking

Being two days before Christmas, it was time to get down to some preparatory cooking today. My family has a gathering on Christmas Eve, while my wife’s has the traditional Christmas Day lunch, so we manage to attend both events every year.

I began this morning with a trip to the supermarket to get some last minute supplies: celery, onions, milk, and some other stuff. Then we hit the kitchen and cooked up a big batch of spicy lentil balls using an old recipe we’ve made many times. These are good because you can make them ahead of time and keep them for a few days, they’re easy to reheat, and they’re nice bite-sized finger food. We’ll be taking half to Christmas Eve, and the rest for Christmas Day.

This afternoon we took Scully to the dog park. We know most of the regulars there, but today I saw someone I hadn’t seen there before: Trent Zimmerman, our local Member of Parliament for North Sydney. He’d brought his dog, Simba, to play in the park. The regulars said he often comes down to the park with his dog, so I must have missed him on every other occasion. One of the regulars went over and had a chat with him, and reported back that he’d asked him about the Government’s policies on climate change, given the recent bushfire emergency and the record breaking heatwave and drought we’ve been experiencing. Zimmerman is a relative moderate in the mostly conservative right-leaning Liberal Party, and he said he expects that there will be a shift towards policies that are more responsive to climate change and reducing carbon emissions. Well, we can wait and see – he’s only a backbencher.

New content today:

Final Ethics of the year

This morning was my last Ethics class of the school year. I walked to the school (3.1 km away) because the weather was cool and winds had blown yesterday’s smoke away, thankfully.

In this class we didn’t discuss ethical questions, but instead reflected on the year gone past and what the students learnt. I asked them what topics they enjoyed most, which ones made them think when other students expressed different opinions, and which, if any, changed their minds. We had a really good discussion, and the kids’ behaviour was excellent. Towards the end of the lesson I handed out completion certificates to each child. I told them I wished them well as they begin high school next year, and said I would miss them, as this would probably be the last time we ever see each other.

I genuinely will miss (most of) them, and it makes me a bit sad to think that I really won’t ever see any of them again. However when the bell went, they basically just got up, waved bye, and filed out the door. I think at their age it doesn’t really hit them when they have to say goodbye to someone forever. Come February I’ll have a brand new class with new names to learn, and no doubt I’ll grow fond of the new kids as well.

I decided to walk home through the Lane Cove Bushland Park, which is more or less an alternate “shortest” route home. The track passes through some dense bush, and it would be very difficult to go cross-country off the established walking track. I should have emerged back into a street near my place, but when I was almost there I found a fence blocking the track, with signs indicating that it was undergoing repairs and was closed for safety due to heavy equipment being used. The idea of jumping a safety fence and incurring the wrath of construction workers didn’t appeal, so I had to backtrack through much of the park and emerge an extra kilometre of so away from home, adding maybe 2 km to my journey.

On the way though, I went down some streets I’ve never walked down before, and found a lovely old estate house on a big block of land:

Back home, I didn’t have much time before picking up my wife and Scully to take them to their very first job as a Delta Dogs therapy dog team! This was an event held at Macquarie University for international students who won’t be travelling home to see family over Christmas, with the dogs there to give them some good cheer. They had a team of seven dogs there today, with Scully among them. Normally she’ll be working solely with my wife on hospital visits, but occasionally they have other sorts of events like this as well. Here’s Scully in her Delta uniform:

While I waited to pick them up I had lunch at a nearby friend’s place, and we played a game of Wingspan (the same game I played last Friday games night), which I won handily. Then I picked up Scully and my wife to head home.

I spent this afternoon and evening doing some coding work on the mezzacotta generators, adding some stuff to a new band name generator which we’ve been collaborating on.

Oh, and last night I made a batch of eggnog, using Jamie Oliver’s recipe. It had to refrigerate overnight, so I didn’t taste it until tonight. Actually, I had some commercially produced eggnog at my friend’s place at lunch today, to compare it against. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever had eggnog. The commercial stuff tasted okay, but honestly not something I’d buy.

But then I had my own home-made eggnog tonight… and it was delicious! A much nicer drink than what I’d had at lunchtime.

Yummo! I’ll definitely be making more of this some time.

New content today: