food – dangermouse.net

Pancakes for dinner

I’ve been trying to feed my sourdough starter a bit more frequently to get it in a healthier condition, so I’ve been generating some starter discard. And so I’ve been looking for ways to use it. Tonight my wife went to a painting class, so I made diner for myself, and decided to use the discard as the basis of a pancake batter. I just added an egg, a splash of milk, and some baking powder, and it came to the right consistency. I had the pancakes with ricotta, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

They turned out really nice! It’s a little strange having a sweet dinner, but it can be fun every now and then.

Today was the fourth lecture of the image processing course, with the professor back after I filled i for last week’s lecture. he reminded me that it wasn’t actually my first official coursework lecture – I did lecture 4 (today’s topic) last year when he was away! I wrote about it back then. He read my blog and pointed out how I was now Wrong On The Internet, so I feel duty bound to correct it. 😀

I decided after the lecture to head home on the normal train rather than the new Metro, since the best walking route home fro the Metro stop is still messed up by work on the pedestrian crossing lights, necessitating a significant detour. I think the old train is quicker overall at the moment.

I also went ot the post office this morning to mail some more Magic cards to a buyer. And while there I hopped over to Moon Phase (the croissant place) and tried one of the char siu buns. I’ve wanted one for a while, but they’ve been sold out the last couple of times. But today I got one. And wow, it’s amazing. It’s a next level steamed pork bun (char siu bao). Instead of the steamed doughy bun, it’s light flaky croissant pastry with a super crispy top. It was so good.

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Sampling the menu at Moon Phase

This morning I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic. I was over a week ahead recently, but have now let the buffer slip back to nothing, so I needed to get one made today.

I had to decide today whether to eat the last falafels in a wrap with tahini, cheese, tomato, lettuce—my usual home lunch—or leave it for tomorrow and go out to get lunch somewhere. I had one day’s lunch supply at home and two days to go until the next grocery shop on Friday morning. I decided to let the Fates decide and used a die rolling bot to choose randomly. It rolled odd, which I’d decided was eat out today. So I took Scully up to Moon Phase to try sampling some more of their menu. I’ve been there maybe 5 times now, and haven’t had the same item more than once. Today I decided to try the “hot dog” pastry—a frankfurt encased in flaky croissant-like pastry, with mustard and some other condiments—and a “kimcheese” pastry.

They warmed them up for me as I waited at one of the small tables outside with Scully. I would have preferred to be indoors because it was bitterly cold and very windy. Both of the pastries were okay. Enjoyable enough, but I think I prefer the other savouries that I’ve had on previous visits.

In the afternoon I sorted out some piles of Magic: the Gathering cards, to try to bring some order to mixtures of sorted and unsorted piles and half-deconstructed decks. I’m consolidating them all into sorted collections so I can see just how many of each card I have before I sell them off in a systematic way.

Tonight I had the first three classes on the new “Empires” topic, from 5-8pm. So I made a quiche for dinner before hand during the afternoon and had one slice before 5, and the second slice after 8. And my wife could eat whenever she was ready, though she chose to eat pretty early. I think this Empires topic is not bad. I was a bit worried about it, if I’d have enough material and if the questions would be ones the kids could relate to well enough or not. But having them pretend to be the Emperor of Rome and presenting them with some governance problems and asking how they’d respond seems to be a good tactic!

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Satay pizza for dinner

Monday morning was busy with ethics classes. I had three new students across a couple of classes today. It takes up a couple of minutes doing an introduction to the class for new students, but I’ve done this so many times now that I can pretty much recite it without thinking.

At lunchtime I took Scully to the post office to mail off some more Magic cards. The weather wasn’t too cold and it looks like warming up to 20-21°C later in the week, which is much more bearable than temperatures in the teens.

This afternoon I photographed the second half of that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I started last week. That gives me a total of six weeks of new strips, although the first week has already been published last week.

For dinner tonight I made pizza. We had some leftover fried puffy tofu from a str fry on Saturday, so i wanted to use that, and we had broccoli. So rather than make the pizza with tomato sauce, I made a spicy satay sauce with peanut butter and chilli and some other ingredients. It goes really well with broccoli and tofu, but I wasn’t entirely convinced about tofu on a pizza. But it turned out pretty good and was delicious.

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Two Chaps and Marrickville Organic Market

This morning I went for a 5k run in the cold. It was a bit tough backing up from yesterday’s 7.5k. My legs are very worn out now. Not sore, but I can definitely feel them when walking around.

To make up for this, we went on an expedition, driving over to Marrickville and Two Chaps cafe for lunch. It was very busy when we arrived just before midday, and we had to join a list of people waiting for tables. But they said that the waiting list was for indoor tables, for which half of them in an annex were okay for dogs, while the outdoor tables on the street kerbside were up for grabs as soon as we saw one free. After waiting a few minutes we saw people leaving an outside table, so we grabbed it.

Here’s Scully enjoying the cafe ambience.

We ordered our meals. I got sourdough crumpets with peri peri, fried cauliflower, capsicum salsa, and smoked almonds:

I’d never really considered crumpets for a savoury dish like this. At home I usually just toast them and have them plain with butter, or with honey. I have tried melting cheese onto them a few times, but generally I think of crumpets as more of a sweet topping carrier. But this dish was spicy and really delicious.

My wife got the quinoa porridge with warm lemon and plum compote, mixed fruit and nut granola, topped with rose petal and pistachio:

The food here is all vegetarian, and insanely delicious. We really enjoyed the lunch. They do pasta nights on Fridays and Saturdays, and we keep thinking we should try that one time.

After eating, my wife asked if there were any markets nearby. I found the Marrickville Organic Farmer’s Market, just a block or so away. We walked over there and found it was larger than I expected, with a lot of outdoor stalls selling both produce and also assorted bric-a-brac. And dozens of food stalls doing a brisk lunch trade. Plenty of people, many with dogs, walking around. It was pretty cool. My wife bought a bag of freshly made plantain chips, and a cheap bag of mandarins.

After this we drove back home. I made up a sourdough loaf to use for lunches during the week and did my early evening classes online. For dinner in between I made fried Brussels sprouts with mushrooms, garlic, chilli, and miso. And now later in the evening I’m baking the bread and will head off to watch some TV soon.

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Carbonara Sunday

Well, I end my week of food-related headings with an interesting story.

I had two ethics classes tonight from 6-8pm, which is inconvenient for dinner. I’d had a late lunch so wasn’t hungry before hand and my wife wanted to eat before 8pm, so she made herself something while I did my classes. After finishing at 8pm, I made myself some spaghetti “carbonara”, with just the egg and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, no meat. I don’t make this much and found a recipe online to follow. It suggested warming the plates before serving to maintain the warmth in the pasta while eating. And it said you can warm plates by putting them in the microwave….

Now I’m pretty sure that won’t work. But my wife had just made a cup of tea, and I had pulled out a shallow bowl to eat from, so I thought I’d warm my bowl by pouring in some boiling water.

I boiled up the spaghetti, mixed it with some molten butter, a beaten egg, the grated cheese, and a lot of black pepper in a frying pan, and made a passable carbonara-esque sauce. Then I dumped the whole lot from the frying pan into my bowl… Which was still full of hot water.

After a moment of panic I managed to salvage most of it by quickly holding back the pasta with a fork and tipping out as much runny hot water as I could into the sink. But half the sauce went with it. Oh well. It still tasted pretty good.

Around lunch I did a 5k run. It was still very cold then. We’re getting another polar blast which should make the next few days very chilly again.

I also worked on writing scripts for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! I’m approaching concluding strips for a couple of the themes and have figured out the endings for them. Just need to write them up into scripts.

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Faux Hun Friday; pastie and pizza Saturday

Friday was gaming night at a friend’s place. My lunch was just a falafel wrap that I made with supermarket ingredients. But for dinner I picked up something on the way to my friend’s place. This involves a bit of a story.

When we used to work together at Canon Research, there was a Thai restaurant just around the corner from the office, where we often used to get lunch. It was called Go Hun. And it had some of the best Thai food you could find in Sydney.

When we stopped working there, Go Hun of course remained, but I didn’t have occasion to go out that way very much, except to visit this particular friend who lived nearby for board games night. So sometimes I’d drop in on the way and grab some take-away for my dinner, which was good. But then about a year ago Go Hun closed down! But a new Thai place opened in the same premises. It’s actually named “Charmed Thai“, but we all refer to it as “Faux Hun”.

Anyway, I hadn’t tried anything from Faux Hun yet, so I stopped in on the way and picked up an order of chicken pad kee mao. It was really good!

At the games night there were just four of us. Two of our other regulars both happen to be in Europe at the moment: one on a six-week grand tour with wife and teenaged kid, and the other who popped over to Italy for a week to meet up with his partner who was taking a slightly longer trip there.

We started with Ingenious, which I won. And then played a quick hand of Uno Flip!, which I also won! My friend had found this at a discount store for just $3 and decided to buy it because it was so cheap. It normally retails in regular shops for about $10. Only when he got it home and opened the box, it became clear that it was a Chinese counterfeit version! The box said it contained printed instructions, but it didn’t, and the quality of the cards was awful. They were thin and flimsy, with a weird finish that looked like it’d start peeling off any second, and were already starting to curl. We played a game merely so that he could say he got his money’s worth out of the $3 he’d spent, before he throws it away.

We moved on to the big game for the evening: Architects of the West Kingdom. This is a worker placement game where you choose to place a piece each turn to collect money, collect various building resources, hire workers, build buildings, or round up rival workers in an attempt to (a) restrict them from gaining bonuses and (b) sell them into incarceration for profit. You can also use actions to free your own workers from other players or the prison. The goal is to amass points by building buildings, constructing parts of the cathedral, earning a virtuous reputation, or simply collecting valuables including silver, gold, and marble. The obvious routes to victory involve building a lot of buildings and working on the cathedral. But I got some workers who synergised into a way to collect lots and lots of marble cheaply, and reward me with bonus virtue for marble at the end of the game. So rather than build buildings, I decided to see if I could just collect enough marble to win.

I came last. I think the strategy could have worked if I’d just built another building or two, or found another worker who synergised with the engine and gave me more benefit from the marble that I’d amassed. I didn’t lose by a lot, so I believe the strategy could be viable.

Anyway. We ended the night with a quick game of For Sale. Which I also came dead last in. But I’d won two of the four games for the night, and the other two wins had been split between other players, so I declared myself the grand winner!

Today I cleaned the house up, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and shower, and emptying all the damp absorbers and refilling them with absorbing crystals. Our weather is still far too damp and humid and I dread getting mould growing in things. For lunch I took Scully for a walk and popped in at the pie place, which had a special beef and vegetable pasty

And for dinner tonight my wife and I went out to Organica, which we tried for the first time a few weeks ago. This time we tried the pizzas there, and they were very good. Thin crust blistered by a wood fire, with buffalo mozzarella and toppings.

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Savoury danish Thursday

Continuing our food theme this week, I went to Moon Phase for a pastry lunch, trying their savoury danishes for the first time. I selected a mushroom and asparagus one, and one with onion, truffle, and cheese.

They warmed them up for me and I sat outside at the small table with Scully as I ate. They were both really good! Also a lot more filling than I expected, probably because of all the butter in the pastry.

For dinner I made a quick meal of vegetarian “chicken” sausages with microwave “baked” potatoes, and what was left of the broccolini. I only had an hour in between groups of ethics classes, so I had to make something that didn’t take too long to cook.

Speaking of ethics, this evening I asked in one class, “What are some annoying noises?” One student immediately said, “Someone playing the recorder.” I also had two kids today in different classes who said they find the sound of rain annoying. Everyone else said rain is a sound they find relaxing, which was more what I expected. I haven’t heard of anyone thinking the sound of rain is annoying before.

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Fancy lunch Wednesday

This morning I had a food disaster. I poured out my bowl of muesli, added fresh blueberries and chopped apple and orange chunks. I was about to spoon yoghurt on top when I bumped the bowl and it fell off the kitchen bench, landing on the floor, face down. The entire lot was scattered all over the floor. I had to clean it up and then make a whole new bowl of breakfast.

For lunch I walked with Scully down to my wife’s work. She was having a half day and was free from midday. We walked from there to Rafi, a restaurant in North Sydney. We sat at an outdoor table with comfortable sofa seating and ordered a very nice lunch.

Hummus with crispy chick peas and green chilli (which we had with the home made sourdough pita bread, not pictured):

Crispy eggplant with spices, honey, and herbs:

Jerusalem artichokes with hazelnuts and Grana Padano:

King prawns with chilli miso butter (non-vegetarian, for me):

And after this fantastic meal I wanted to try one of the desserts. Roasted apples with burnt honey and Pedro Ximénez sauce (and crumble and vanilla crême anglaise):

The whole meal was amazingly good, and very filling. It’s now after 8pm and I still haven’t eaten anything else yet. Although I will make something quick and light for dinner in a minute. I just finished my three ethics classes for the evening, on the new Noise topic.

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Pub meal, schnitzel and banoffee

This morning my wife went out early for an appointment, and then I took Scully up to meet her at the dog grooming place to drop Scully off there. She got a wash and tidy, but not a cut, as her hair wasn’t really too long. But when we picked her up she was super fluffy from the blow dry and looked really big compared to normal. But the hair will flatten out agian and she should be fine until the next groom. It’s midwinter anyway, so she can use the extra insulation!

On the way home from the groomer we stopped at Moon Phase for croissants. I actually had a black sesame bun, another new item. I keep trying new things and haven’t had the same thing there twice yet. The sesame bun was really nice.

Back home I changed to go for a 5k run. I thought I was still taking it fairly easy, since I’m a little out of practice, but I clocked a time nearly a minute faster than last weekend, at 27:15, which is on the lower end of my usual times, so that was good.

In the afternoon I worked on some comics stuff.

And then for dinner we all walked up early to Naremburn and the Flat Rock Brew Cafe. We grabbed a table outside. Everyone else except other dog owners were sitting inside out of the cold! I got a chicken schnitzel and they had a chocolate milk stout on the beer specials, so I tried that with it. After the meal I pondered idly if they had any desserts, because I hadn’t seen any on the menu. My wife asked a staff member who was walking past, and he said they had a banoffee pie. Well… that’s one of my favourite desserts, and I wasn’t too full already from the meal, so I ordered a piece. It turned out to be obviously hand made, with a really thick biscuit base, slathered with sticky toffee and banana slices. It came with a scoop of ice cream on the side. The base was so thick that it was difficult to cut it with the spoon! It was really delicious and I’m very glad I decided to get it.

After that it was a walk home to walk off some of the food. And we sat down to watch the final episode of Disenchantment, which we have finally got to after a drawn-out process of working our way through the episodes after not realising for a few years that seasons 4 and 5 had been released!

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Cold AND rain

Saturday was not only bitterly cold but also very wet, with almost constant heavy rain all day. We took Scully for a walk after lunch when the rain stopped briefly, but by the time we got home we were wet enough to have to change our clothes, despite having ventured out with raincoats and umbrellas. We had to give Scully a towelling off and blow dry.

Yesterday was online games night, so I didn’t write up an entry for Friday. I did ethics classes, adding a new class at 10am, which had two students in it. For dinner we went out to a newish restaurant near us, on the ground floor of one of the new apartment towers that went up over the past few years, a place called Organica. We sat outside because Scully was with us, and it was pretty cold. I was rugged up in my warmest winter coat.

I had the crispy skinned porchetta, with maple beetroot mash, pearl couscous, and a raisin salsa. Not usually the sort of thing I go for, but it was marked as a specialty on the menu, and I thought why not? It was really delicious!

My wife had some gnocchi in a tomato sauce, which was richly spiced when I tried a bit. We were pretty happy with the meals and the venue, and plan to go back in the future. They are also a patisserie, and we got a chocolate cannoli to take home for my dessert. And that was delicious too.

There was one drawback to this dinner. Around 1am I woke up, feeling nauseated. I started feeling hot and sweaty, and waves of nausea rolled over my head. I felt close to throwing up, and had to get up and get dressed and go sit on the lounge with a bucket just in case. I’m pretty sure it was because of the fattiness of the meal, plus all the cream in the cannoli. I had my gall bladder removed many years ago, and I get spells of nausea like this a few hours after eating fatty meals as my body tries to digest it without the help of enough bile. But this one was the worst I’ve felt for a long time. I managed to avoid vomiting, but it took about half an hour for my stomach to settle enough for me to go back to bed. By this morning I felt fine.

Except for the cold weather. Yesterday was the solstice, and the end of the first three weeks of winter (by the Australian system). New reported that the first 21 days have been the coldest start to winter Sydney has experienced since 1989. And then today we had almost 60 mm of rain. Pretty miserable stuff.

I spent some time today working on new Darths & Droids comics. Also discussing story planning with my co-writers for Episode IX, which will be ramping up as we approach the end of Episode VIII.

For dinner I made a lentil dhal with rice and broccoli. I added some coconut powder to the dhal this time for a bit of a change of flavours, and it was really nice.

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