cooking – Page 4 – dangermouse.net

Busy week, Wednesday

Today was the installation of our new induction cooktop, replacing the old gas cooker. The tradesman appeared about 10am and got to work. It was quite a job.

He had to: pull out and disconnect the electric oven; disconnect the gas cooktop; cut the gas pipe close to the wall; cap the gas pipe and test it for leaks; cut the granite benchtop to fit the slightly larger induction cooktop into the hole where the gas one used to be; drill a hole through the wall near the fusebox; thread electrical cable through the hole to a power point in the kitchen wall; disconnect that power point and replace it with a new heavy duty one; thread cable through from that power point to another power point inside the kitchen cabinet next to the stove area (this used to be the power point for the kitchen sink garbage disposal, which was no longer in use after we removed the garbage disposal a while back – it was lucky we did this because it meant the now spare point could be repurposed for the induction cooker); lay new cable from there inside a protective duct to the induction cooktop; remove the entire fusebox; replace all the circuit breakers with new ones to bring the fusebox up to current safety standards; actually install the induction cooktop; wire it in; reconnect and replace the oven; then switch everything back on and test it all works.

Here’s the area in the middle of the job:

The two ends of yellow cable are the same cable, passing through the wall, and that’s the fusebox visible in the upper cupboard. From that wall socket another cable goes down into the lower cupboard and through the hole visible in the back corner of the cooktop area.

And here’s the new cooktop, fully installed!

Shiny! I’ve tested it out boiling a little water in some of our pots, and it’s amazingly fast. But although I’m keen to give it a go cooking a meal, tonight was not the night for it. I had ethics classes from 5-8pm, and my wife wanted her dinner about 6:30, so she ended up just making grilled cheese sandwiches in the sandwich press. And after my last class I made myself a falafel roll in the same sandwich press.

Tomorrow I’ll try cooking something on the new cooktop. I need to test out cooking rice – to see what setting to leave it to simmer so that it comes out right. I’m hoping it works first time, but perhaps I’ll need to try a few settings to tune it.

It took the guy until a bit after 2pm to finish the installation, so my day was a bit disrupted, with the noise and having the power turned off. But I managed to write my lesson plans for both ethics age groups: “Psychic Powers” for the younger and “Philosophy of Ethics” for the older. And I spent some time scribbling notes on paper for the haunted house board game that I need to put together by Friday for my game design course.

New content today:

Caramel slice photos

Here are some photos of that caramel slice I made last night.

First, the base has been baked in the left, and I’m making the caramel filling.

I think the base is meant to be a bit more uniform in colour. I could have mixed the flour, coconut, brown sugar, and butter more thoroughly. But it didn’t affect the texture. Second, here’s the caramel filling after baking:

And then here are the final cut pieces of the slice, with the chocolate top layer:

And it tastes delicious! Overall I’m really happy with how it went.

Today I spent much of the day writing up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Japan, for Standards Australia. I have a meeting next week to fill in the Australian experts committee on all of the events from that Japan meeting.

And finally today, I know that much of the northern hemisphere is currently in the middle of record-breaking heatwaves. The stories have been shown here about heat in southern Europe, east Asia, and North America. But here in the south it’s winter at the moment, so we’re not especially hot, but we are also experiencing highly unusual warmth for this time of the year. It actually really feels like spring already, and it’s confusing many of the plants, with potentially devastating consequences for our crops. There was a story about it in the news today.

New content today:

Cooking a caramel slice

I decided this afternoon I had a craving for caramel slice, so I decided to get some ingredients and make some. I used this recipe.

I started making it after dinner, about 7:30pm. Now it’s almost 10pm and it’s finally in the fridge for the final 1-hour cool before slicing it. Gah… that took way longer than I expected. I thought I’d be eating it by now.

It rained again this morning, but cleared up by the afternoon. I think tomorrow is supposed to be warm again. The other main thing I did today was write my lesson for the next week’s ethics class starting tomorrow, on the topic of “Fear”.

New content today:

And a reasonable first day of winter

It was supposed to be warm today, 23°C forecast, but the temperature barely reached 19°C, and it was overcast until the late afternoon. It didn’t feel too bad though.

Today marks 5 years since Scully joined our household!

Here she is this afternoon. I remember the day we picked her up from the breeder. It was a really really cold day, out in the countryside. We stopped on the way back to eat at a cafe, having to sit outside because of Scully, and wrapping ourselves in blankets to avoid freezing. I think it was like 4°C or something.

For dinner tonight I made a fancy meal: roast pumpkin with home-made labne, a sage and burnt butter sauce with home-grown lime, pomegranate, and toasted pepitas.

I’ve been wanting to try making labne for ages. I bought some cheesecloth a while back, but this is the first time I’ve tried using it. I put a large tub (900 g) of plain yoghurt, mixed with about a quarter teaspoon of salt, into the cheesecloth yesterday, in a large sieve, and let it drain over a bowl in the fridge overnight.

Today I ended up with almost 300 mL of whey drained off the yoghurt (leavig I assume about 600 g of labne), which I used instead of water to make a loaf of sourdough (which is still rising, and I’ll bake soon). So I’ll be interested to see how that turns out too.

New content today:

Last day of Data Engineering class

The university Data Engineering course ends this week. The students have until Friday night to submit their final reports and presentation videos, but today was the last tutorial session. I went in after my three morning ethics classes.

When I got into the city, I noticed everything was wet from rain, with puddles everywhere as though it had been very recent, although I hadn’t noticed any rain all morning, and the sky was mostly clear. There were a few dark clouds around the horizon, so they must have blown over and dumped rain on the city quickly.

The class went generally well, except for one annoying thing which I probably shouldn’t go into further here. Suffice to say I needed to call the professor to deal with queries from some of the students.

At home tonight I made satay sauce to go with steamed broccoli, green beans, and rice. And I threw a few cashews in for good measure. I use this recipe for satay sauce, tweaking the amounts slightly to taste – well, I never measure them exactly to start with, so I end up adjusting things a bit after tasting. I’ve found it’s the best of a few that I’ve tried. Oh, I also add a bit of turmeric as well.

Monday has been my busy day since the Data Engineering class started, but now I get a bit of a reprieve, before Image Processing starts on Thursday nights on second semester.

New content today:

Quitting before the end

This morning I had a new student in one of my ethics classes. I was halfway through teaching the class when I got an email notification, and I could see part of my mail client in another window behind the Zoom window, and saw enough of the subject to know that it was a student unenrolling notice from Outschool. Curious to know who it was, I clicked it and saw that it was the new student I was in the middle of talking to, and the reason given for unenrolling was “don’t like the class”. With over 200 students so far going through my classes, I’ve seen reasons mostly like “parent has a schedule conflict” or “student has a schedule conflict” or “taking a break” or whatever – this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone say they didn’t like the class.

And I still had to teach this kid for another 20 minutes! I thought it had been going well, with the kid answering questions and giving good explanations. I wonder if it was more the subject matter this week (“getting even”), and they would have liked it more in a different week.

We reached the end of the class, still with no sign from the kid that they hadn’t enjoyed it. I decided to just do my regular end of lesson summary for new students, in which I suggest they can discuss the class with their parents and use it to start a family discussion on the topic. And at that point in the Zoom video I saw this kid shake their head quite vigorously, clearly indicating they were not going to do that.

I’m guessing the kid didn’t make the call. Often on first lessons a parent sits next to them out of the Zoom video, to supervise, and I’m thinking the parent decided and made the cancellation. Oh well. I have hundreds of happy kids and parents. I suppose it had to happen eventually that one just didn’t like it!

For lunch I took Scully for a drive to the Allambie Pie Shop. I tried their pumpkin and feta pie today, which was really nice. Im glad I found this place – they make really good pies, and it’s closer than the Collaroy pie shop for a mid-week lunch drive. And there’s a soccer field a short walk away, where I can let Scully run around and chase a ball for a while to get some energy out.

This afternoon I worked on writing more Darths & Droids strips. I was over a week ahead a few weeks back, but the buffer has been burnt away with the fact that I’ve been busy on other stuff recently. I need to build it back up again before our trip to Japan next month.

For dinner tonight I had Brussels sprouts which I’d bought last grocery shop, and I wondered what to make with them. For the evening walk, I took Scully past the nearest supermarket, and popped in quickly to grab a couple of potatoes. I made chilli-miso sprouts, accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes.

New content today:

A survey of data engineering projects

Monday morning, 8am ethics class is the new schedule for winter. So I need to get up a little early and grab breakfast and get ready. We finished off the cloning topic, ready for Tuesday to start a new topic for the next week. Tomorrow morning I’ll need to write that lesson.

After lunch I walked Scully over to my wife’s work where she could mind her while I went in to the university for the first week of project work for the Data Engineering students. They have two weeks to write a project planning report, outlining what they intend to study and how, and then two further weeks to do the project and write a final report on the outcomes, as well as recording presentation videos. (All of which I have to mark…)

Today I walked around all the tables and asked each group what they planned to work on. It was a diverse range of project ideas. Some samples:

Looking at food prices in developing countries to see if they are affected/correlated with climate, economy, and other factors.
Examining agricultural output versus weather.
Checking for any effects on the consumer price index and other economic indicators of the COVID pandemic.
Collecting data on person and car movements at various times of the day and week in the vicinity of the university to determine any patterns.
Examining and comparing the image quality of difference phone cameras.
Studying the extent of glaciers over many years compared to weather records.
Determining if electricity consumption is affected by factors such as wind speed, temperatures, and building parameters such as height of building.
Characterising the popularity of video games on Steam versus time, looking at factors such as genre.
Modelling diabetes risk factor as a function of various demographic and health measurements.
Determining if the investment returns of US members of Congress outperforms stock market indices.
And the moon phase correlations one I mentioned last week.

So a really interesting range of projects!

For dinner tonight I made pizza. We got a new bag of bread flour in the groceries on Friday. Normally I get one brand, but it was out, so the supermarket replaced it in the online order with a different brand. It feels really different – finer and denser. And I think the pizza dough turned out a bit different, maybe a touch lighter, chewier, and crustier. I’m also making a new sourdough loaf tonight, so tomorrow morning when I bake it we’ll see if that is any different too.

New content today:

Brew 2

This morning I had lesson 2 of my current iteration of Creative Thinking/Board Game Design, with the two kids from last week, and the third enrolled student also showed up. So it got very interactive and was a lot of fun. We came up with a big list of ideas for possible game themes, and the kids have homework to rate them and also write down any new ideas, so next week we can pick a theme to work on.

My wife and I played another game of Brew, and it went faster and we had a better idea of what we were doing than yesterday. It was extremely close, and she ended up beating me 79 points to 78. After this we took Scully for a walk. We thought it would be cold and cloudy, possibly rainy, so we rugged up and took umbrellas. By the time we got home, it was bright and sunny and we were peeling off jackets to avoid overheating.

Three more classes tonight, and in a one hour gap between them I made fried rice for dinner. I think my wok is finally getting a decent non-stick seasoning layer on it. I’ve been too lazy to take the time to season it specifically. I heated it up clean with some oil a few times, but not enough to season it effectively. But using it for cooking is slowly building up a layer and tonight the fried rice was sticking noticeably less than last time I made it, so I guess that’s a good thing.

New content today:

Games night and cake day

Friday was fortnightly games night with my friends. My wife took the car to visit her mother with Scully, so I caught the train to the venue at one of my friends’ place. I stopped off on the way to grab some Thai food from the place near where we used to work.

We played Viticulture first. This is a game where to win you need to be the first to score 20 points. To score points, you (1) acquire grape cards, (2) plant grapes in your fields, (3) harvest grapes and put them in your mash barrels, (4) create wines from the grape mash, (5) optional, mature your wines a bit, (6) fulfil orders by selling wines to buyers. It’s only when you reach step 6 and sell your wines that you gain victory points.

There are a handful of other ways to earn points. You can get a consolation point for choosing to go last or second last in a given round (during the phase where everyone chooses their ordering – going earlier gives you smaller consolation rewards). You can get a point by being the first in a given round to choose to sell some mashed grapes, before they get turned into wine. If you build the windmill, you get a point whenever you plant some grapes. And there are “visitor” cards which represent various people visiting your winery, and they have various effects, allowing you to do bonus actions (such as harvesting extra grapes, or making more wines, or whatever). A few of the visitors let you do things like sacrifice money or grapes for a point or two.

Anyway, the game start is partly randomised by each player being dealt a Mama and a Papa who own the winery together, and they each grant different initial resources. My Papa gave me an option of taking an extra 3 coins, or starting with the Cottage building (which normally costs 4 coins to build during the game). I elected to start with the Cottage, which gives you an extra visitor card draw each round. So I thought I’d go for a visitor-heavy strategy, and my first few turns were spent doing actions to collect more money, since I started with less than anyone else, while everyone else started planting grapes. The first two visitors I got were a great combo: A wedding party, where I got to give up to 3 players 2 coins each, and collect a victory point for each player I gave money to. Since I had a lot of money, I gave 6 coins away and collected 3 points. Then the other visitor I played on the same turn immediately after allowed me to ask for 2 coins from each player. For each player who chose not to give me coins, I would gain a victory point. Since they were all short of cash, they elected to keep the coins, and I gained another 4 points! I was now 7 points clear of everyone, and I still hadn’t even planted a grape!

I continued to play by collecting extra visitor cards and using visitors to gain points where possible, and choosing some of the actions that granted me points. I built the windmill and planted some grapes (gaining points). After I harvested the grapes, I chose the action to sell the mash and gain points, rather than turn them into wine. As the game progressed, it reached this stage:

I was green, and you can see on the scoring track at the bottom of the board, I was way ahead on 17 points, with the next nearest player on 10, and the others behind. But… by now they were all selling wines and gaining points quickly, while I had not produced a single wine in my winery! I wondered if my strategy would run out of steam and they would overtake me before I reached 20. But I drew into some more visitors who gave me points and managed to win the game, although it turned out to be closer in the end than shown in the photo. My nearest rival ended on 17 points, and he said he would have been able to reach 20 if he’d had just one more action on his last turn. So, I won with the unusual strategy of not bothering to make any wines!

Next we played Through the Desert, which is an older game we played many years ago. The simplest way to describe this is as a kind of multi-player version of Go. You play camels to create connected caravans and try to enclose areas to score points.

This game I came second in, which felt like a good effort, because it’s a fairly intense game where it always feels like you don’t have enough camels to do what you want. These two games were long enough that we called it a night after that, and I got a lift home from a friend.

Today I tried my new running shoes which I bought last weekend. They feel good, and I ran my fastest 2.5k since the first half of last year, breaking the 12-minute barrier at 11:54. I’ve been trying to get below 12:00 again for months. I wonder if the new shoes really helped.

I did a big round of housecleaning: vacuuming, draining and refilling the damp absorbers, cleaning the bathroom and shower. Workshopped some new Darths & Droids strips with a co-writer. And this afternoon I baked a cake!

It’s an orange and almond cake, made with this recipe. Only 5 ingredients (and one is just a teaspoon of baking powder), and dead simple. It looks like it turned out beautifully, and I’m looking forward to trying a slice tonight for dessert.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

New pizza tray

It was a pretty bog-standard Monday. Three ethics classes, to wrap up the topic of Games with the younger students. One particular question that I asked was very interesting. It needs a bit of introduction to set up, and there were other questions I asked along the way, but I’ll condense it down to the essentials for the pertinent question:

Tegan, Josh, and Adele are playing a board game together. They roll dice and play cards and move pieces on the board, chatting and laughing while they play. At one point in the game, Tegan makes a really good move which forces Josh to lose a bunch of points.

Later, as the game nears the end, an interesting situation develops. All those points that Josh lost put him in last place, and he only has one turn left. He knows he can’t score enough points to win. Tegan is currently in the lead, and she will win the game… unless Josh uses his turn to steal points off her. If Josh does this, Adele will win the game. Or he can just try to score as many points as he can, in which case he’ll still come last and Tegan will win.

While Josh is thinking about what move to make, Adele sees that he can steal Tegan’s points. She says, “Josh, if you take her points and make me win, I’ll give you a chocolate bar!”

If you were Josh, how would you respond to Adele in this situation?

Most of the kids throughout the week said they’d accept the chocolate and steal Tegan’s points, letting Adele win the game. (One of the earlier questions asked if it was okay for Josh to steal Tegan’s points, and most said yes, because it’s within the rules of the game.) A few kids said that accepting the chocolate would be bad, because it’s bribery outside the game – there are no in-game rules for chocolate bars, so it shouldn’t be allowed, and Adele was bad for trying it.

But in all the classes I did this week, one kid said:

I’d turn to Tegan and say, “If you give me two chocolate bars, I won’t steal the points from you.”

Honestly I burst out laughing at that point. I thought it was a brutally honest and clever answer. One of the other kids in the same class said, “Ooh, start a bidding war!” It was a great moment.

The rest of my day was pretty standard. Took Scully for a couple of walks, got fish and chips for lunch, made a sourdough loaf, and also made pizza for dinner tonight. I tried using the brand new pizza baking tray I bought last week, so we have a second one, to enable me cooking multiple pizzas on Friday night when the guys come over for Dungeons & Dragons. Our first pizza tray has holes in the bottom, which allows heat to bake the crust from beneath, making it crisp. But I didn’t find any with holes, so this new one is a solid aluminium pan, and the pizza turned out with the base a lot less crisp. I considered a pizza stone, but they’re expensive and I didn’t want to start messing around with that. I’m wondering now how difficult it would be to drill some holes in the aluminium pan.

New content today: