cooking – Page 7 – dangermouse.net

No work Tuesday

Tuesdays are the days when I don’t have any classes on Outschool to teach, so they’re good days for me to go do other things. My golf friend suggested we go play at the pitch and putt course this morning. I got up early (6:30) and went straight out for my run, to get it out of the way before heading off to play golf. It was nice and cool that early, but my muscles obviously hadn’t warmed up after a night asleep and I didn’t do a very good time.

After breakfast, I headed out to the golf course. It was an overcast day, and rained a little as I drove there, but the rain held off for the rest of the day.

I scored 75, which was okay, but not as good as my best 71 on this course last time. Afterwards I went to the driving range next door to hit a bucket of balls. I started with a 9 iron and I was hitting the ball to the 100 metre marker, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m still finding my strength with full swings. I don’t think I’ve ever hit a 9 iron that far on an actual course. Then I switched to the driver and practised that for a while. It was a bit more erratic, but more consistent than I’ve been before, and I hit a few into the netting which is at 180 metres, but most didn’t quite reach that far.

After that I drove over to the pie shop at Collaroy for lunch. I sat and ate on a bench looking out over the beach. It’s usually a nice view, but was a bit grey with the overcast, and the surf was a bit brown with all the recent rain.

Later in the afternoon I relaxed a bit at home. For dinner I made pizza with mixed mushrooms. I decided to try hand stretching the dough to make the base instead of rolling it out, to see what difference that would make. And it turned out amazing! The rolled bases are very even, but hand stretching it made it thinner in the middle and puffier around the crust. So the centre cooked thin and crispy, and bubbled up like a proper pizzeria pizza. The difference was amazing, and my wife agreed it was much better than the rolled versions we’ve been having. So I guess from now on I’ll be hand stretching our pizza bases.

New content today:

Houseworky Saturday

After putting it off for a bit too long, I decided the house really needed a clean today. I vacuumed the floors and cleaned the bathroom and shower, and tidied up a few things generally.

My wife went for a walk to the fortnightly local growers’ market and brought home some zucchini flowers. So I planned a dinner to use them while they’re fresh from the grower. I made pasta with a sort of carbonara-inspired sauce, but using the zucchini flowers and no meat. It turned out very nice, but could have used some explosive hits of salt from something like bacon/pancetta. I think next time I’ll try adding some capers.

I worked a bit on Outschool stuff, liaising with parents to schedule new classes and to reschedule existing ones to fit new constraints. I also scheduled two new instances of my course on creative thinking and game design, to start in the week of 6 February. If anyone reading this has kids aged 11-14, check it out!

This afternoon I watched England turn the fifth Ashes Test into yet another debacle in Hobart. Dear oh dear… I hope they can rebuild the team and be a bit more competitive next time.

New content today:

Clearing a memory backlog

Two things that happened in the past few days, but which I forgot about when writing here:

1. Yesterday when I was out with my wife walking Scully in the early evening, we were enjoying the quite strong breeze that was cooling down the heat of the day. I didn’t realise quite how strong the wind had become until we happened across a scene on the street: Two young men were examining where a large tree branch had fallen onto the street, blocking it. It was a eucalyptus branch, and pretty substantial – maybe 4 metres long and the diameter of a dinner plate at the base end where it had splintered off the tree above. It was fortunate that nobody had been under it when it fell, as it could have been very dangerous.

But unfortunately the car belonging to one of the men was under it at the time. The branch had caught it at a glancing angle on the side, smashing the tail light and causing some significant dents and scrapes in the bodywork. The guys were maybe teenagers, and one of them looked at us as we approached. They didn’t seem to know what to do, and one asked me who would be liable for the damage to his car – would it be the local council? I answered that I didn’t think anyone would be liable, and the damage would need to be covered by his insurance.

We left then trying to pull the branch away from the car, but they weren’t having much luck as it was pretty heavy. This morning when I walked past the same spot, I saw that the State Emergency Service had come to chop the branch into firewood sized chunks and has piled it up by the side of the street, with emergency tape around it.

2. A few nights ago, I think it was the night of 30 December, I took Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet. As I always do, I gaze up at the stars (assuming a cloud-free night). Orion is prominent in the northern sky at the moment, with red Betelgeuse at the bottom, and the bright blue of Sirius in Canis Major trailing it to the right. (This is upside down compared to what people in the northern hemisphere see, of course.)

Anyway, I was looking up at Orion, when I saw a very bright streak of light flash rapidly from east to west, just below the constellation. It was a meteor. I see them occasionally when taking Scully out, but this was one of the brightest I’ve seen. So that was pretty cool.

Today, I spent time assembling and writing annotations for Irregular Webcomic! strips for the coming week. I got stuck into some mathematics for one of them, so it took some time. I even had to break out Matlab to do some calculations.

For dinner I made quiche, with home made shortcrust pastry. Previously I’d been rolling the pastry cold from the fridge, and wondering why it always cracked around the edges. Searching the net turned up some advice to let it warm up a bit before rolling, and that seemed to help a fair bit, so I’ll do that from now on.

New content today:

A busy Christmas Eve

Okay, let’s see. 2.5k run followed by stretching exercises. Picking up weekly groceries from the supermarket. The COVID QR code check-ins are back, after having being removed just a couple of weeks ago.

I had to get carrots and mushrooms for the Christmas cooking we had to do today. I made a lentil and nut loaf – kind of like a vegetarian meatloaf. To go with it I also made some tomato relish. We’ll take this to Christmas lunch tomorrow at my wife’s mother’s place – assuming I get my negative COVID test back in time.

We took a drive to drop off presents there, just dropping them at the door, so we don’t have to carry too much stuff tomorrow.

And tonight is virtual board games night with friends. I’m currently no doubt losing a game of Splendor.

Hmm, maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but that was a lot of cooking effort today.

New content today:

Last day of work

For my wife that is! She had her last day in the office before a Christmas break, and doesn’t go back until January. Scully went into work with her as usual, and I picked her up at lunch time. It was another warm day and after walking home and letting Scully chase a ball in the park for a bit we relaxed inside out of the heat.

I spent much of today working on Darths & Droids comics, trying to get a Christmas/New Year buffer populated.

For dinner I tried a new recipe. Baked ricotta gnocchi, using roughly this recipe, except I used spinach instead of kale. Here they are before baking:

And after:

It was delicious!

New content today:

Double bread and cooking Sunday

Late this morning we had a morning tea with my wife’s brother and mother, at a cafe a few suburbs away. The traffic was awful, in both directions. It seems that Sydney traffic is back to its usual levels after the COVID lockdown, at least on weekends. I think the weekday traffic is still down a bit due to many people now working from home.

On the way home I dropped my wife and Scully at a local market so they could browse around and do a bit of Christmas shopping. Back home I worked on Irregular Webcomic! strips for the upcoming week.

I also did a lot of cooking. My wife wanted a fruit and nut loaf with the sourdough starter that I refreshed this morning, for baking tomorrow morning. But we need some normal bread too, so I threw together a loaf using yeast. It rises a lot faster, so I could bake it this afternoon. We had some of it with dinner, which was corn fritters with tomato relish. I spotted that on the cafe menu this morning and decided I felt like it for dinner. So I found some relish recipes, but most of them called for doing stuff overnight! I eventually found a recipe that was done within about half an hour, and made that. I adapted it a bit, using some ingredients from another recipe, including capers, which I had in the fridge. It turned out really good!

I don’t know if I’ve ever made corn fritters before either so I found a recipe and fiddled with it a bit, and they also turned out nicely. It would have been good to have these with a salad, but I didn’t happen to have salad ingredients ready to go, so we just had them with some of the freshly baked bread.

New content today:

Calzones for dinner

Tonight for dinner I wanted to use up a big batch of mushrooms that I’d bought in the last grocery shop. I asked my wife and she suggested calzones….

So I made them. I sautéed the mushrooms with onions and garlic, added some tomato paste – and no water because I didn’t want the filling to be too liquid. I added some shredded mozzarella cheese before sealing up the dough and baking. They turned out really good – I think better than the ones I did a while back with ricotta.

What else did I do…? I did a 2.5k run, despite the warmer weather and humidity. I went out with my wife and had fish & chips for lunch. Did some comics stuff… not much really!

New content today:

Slicing sourdough

I’ve got a couple of new kitchen gadgets. Firstly, I’ve been making sourdough bread since December last year, when one of my friends gave me some starter. I’ve kept that starter going and been baking a couple of loaves every week since.

One of the things you need to do is slash the dough just before putting it into the oven. This breaks the skin that has formed while the dough is rising, and allows the bread to expand as it bakes, making the texture lighter and airier. Up to now, I’ve been slashing the dough with a sharp kitchen knife, but that doesn’t work perfectly because the blade has some thickness to it, and it drags through the dough, squashing it down a bit as you cut.

True bread artisans use a tool known as a lame (not pronounced the way you think). It’s basically a razor blade on a handle, so you can slash the bread without slashing your hand. My friend has been using one for ages and told me about it, but I hadn’t got around to getting one until just recently. I used it today for the first time… and it is indeed much better than using a knife. Check this out:

I may also be able to do some interesting new patterns in the loaf. The other thing I got was some muslin cheesecloth, which I’m going to use to try making labneh, after seeing it done on a cooking show recently.

Other things I did today: Wrote some Darths & Droids strips. Went on a long walk with my wife and Scully, to get some things from the Italian bakery. 2.5k run.

New content today:

An expedition for cotton

It was a lot colder today than yesterday. After the 33°C of yesterday, a cold front came through overnight, and today’s maximum was only 20°C, which felt really nice and cool after that heat.

My wife wanted to get some more cotton thread for her sewing, so we took a drive over to Birkenhead Point, where there is a large shopping centre with a branch of the fabric crafts store that she likes to go to. I dropped her off there and took Scully with me to a nearby bakery to get some lunch. We walked down to a park to sit while I ate, and she got to explore a new neighbourhood.

This afternoon I prepared the last lesson of my Creative Thinking and game design class for the students. It was really going over any comments and ideas they had on the second iteration of the Ruin the Wedding game that we’ve developed, giving them another creative thinking technique, and wrapping up with tips on how to use everything they’ve learnt in the future. The class went really well, and I think they really enjoyed the whole course.

This evening for dinner I made shakshuka. I searched for some recipes and just figured out the common ingredients and threw it together, adding some spinach for greenery. Rather than bake it, I just let it sit in the frying pan on the stove top with a metal backing sheet over the top to keep the heat in and cook the eggs on top. It turned out pretty good!

New content today:

Storms and banana bread

The morning here was fine. I walked with Scully up to the local shops to get some sushi for lunch. There’s a small square with some grass which is a nice place to sit and eat lunch, so I went there. It’s good having Scully with me, because this is the turf of some very aggressive magpies who hang out and try to steal people’s lunches. At first they gave me a wide berth because of Scully, but they got bolder and bolder…

They didn’t quite get close enough to steal any of my sushi, but I’m sure they would have tried if not for Scully.

Back home I made some banana bread. This time I decided to add some choc chips, and leave out the yoghurt. And I made extra certain to bake it long enough, after the one I made a couple of weeks ago turned out a little soggy in the middle.

Normally to test cakes, I use a metal skewer to probe the middle and see if it comes out clean. I’ve done it that way for as long as I can remember. But I read recently that you should use a wooden skewer, because metal is too smooth and the texture of the wood holds the undercooked batter better, so it’s a better indicator. Curious, I did a bit of Internet searching… and I was astonished to find the most common question asked about testing cakes was:

How can I test if a cake is done if I don’t have a toothpick?

Toothpick??? Who tests cakes with toothpicks??

Apparently everyone according to the Internet. But I’d honestly never heard of using a toothpick for this before. It’s weird the stuff you discover sometimes. Anyway, the banana bread turned out brilliantly this time.

As I type, there was just a huge flash of lightning and a loud peal of thunder. It’s been storming on and off all afternoon, with really heavy and violent storm cells sweeping across Sydney. Early this afternoon the weather bureau even issued a tornado warning:

THIS INCLUDES A TORNADO WARNING. […] Tornadoes, destructive winds, large, possibly giant hailstones and heavy rainfall that may lead to flash flooding are likely.

I’ve never seen one of these before. Tornadoes have historically been extremely rare to non-existent in Australia – we just don’t have the geography for them. But they’ve been becoming increasingly common in recent years. There was a very destructive one reported a couple hundred kilometres west of Sydney a week or two ago, which destroyed some properties. But this is the first time I’ve seen a specific tornado warning for the Sydney area. I strongly suspect that with climate change this is going to become more common in this region.

There was destructive hail and wind and flash flooding in parts of Sydney, but mostly west and south of where I live. We got some heavy rain and spectacular lightning here, but nothing destructive.

New content today: