food – Page 13 – dangermouse.net

Pre-Japan trip day

It’s our last full day at home before we fly out to Japan tomorrow evening. I was busy with four ethics classes, starting at 9am, followed by three in a row from 2pm.

After the first one I worked a bit on completing Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! strips for the buffer so that they can continue updating while I’m overseas. I managed to get all this done, so both comics will be uninterrupted by my trip. (Hopefully… if nothing goes wrong with the auto-updating scripts.)

Between the classes, I had an errand to run, heading out in the car first to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and then taking her on a drive across town to a friend’s place. He was the one who gave me my sourdough starter a couple of years back. He said recently that he thinks his starter had died and he wanted to get a bit of mine back to start again. The timing was fortunate and I asked if I could just drop off the whole starter and he could feed it while I’m overseas, taking some for himself, and then I could pick it up when I get home. So I was going over to drop it off.

We made it a contactless exchange, since his wife had COVID in the past few days, and he didn’t want to expose me to it. He’s been busying himself making fermented chilli sauces recently, and left a bottle of a sauce he made from Carolina Reaper chillis for me. I’m actually a bit afraid to try it. I do like a hot sauce, but middling heat is more my style. I won’t try it before I leave for Japan tomorrow, but when I get back I’m going to start by adding just a single drop to a whole meal and stirring it through, to gauge how hot it is.

In travel prep, I recharged the batteries for my DSLR camera. And I looked into overseas roaming for my phone. I’ve never used this before, because it was expensive and I was okay just connecting to WiFi when necessary. But prices have dropped and I think I might just take the plunge this trip, and see how it works It’ll be handy having net access and things like Google Maps just working everywhere. There are a few other housekeeping and packing things to be done tomorrow, but our flight is in the evening, so we have time after we drop Scully off at a friend’s place for dogsitting while we’re away.

New content today:

Lunch at Two Chaps

Remember two days ago I talked about transferring our physical Japanese Suica transit cards onto our phones, in preparation for travelling to Japan? Once the transfers were done, the phone said that the physical cards would no longer work and we could discard them.

Lucky I didn’t! One of them is a standard issue Suica card, but the other one, which we got for my wife when we travelled to Japan together last time, turned out to be a limited issue commemorative card. To be precise, one of these ones, which is currently selling on eBay for about A$130. These limited edition cards are quite the collectors’ item apparently. I did find some others for sale online for prices ranging from about A$20 and upwards, mostly on Asian sites. I might just hold onto it for a bit and see if it’s worth anything decent in several years.

Today my wife suggested we go over to Marrickville for lunch. She was keen to explore the suburb since it has a reputation as a place with a good variety of cafes and restaurants, and we’ve only ever been there a handful of times many years ago. One of my friends lives nearby and recommended a cafe called Two Chaps to us.

We drove over – about 30 minutes – and took Scully with us and managed to grab a table right on the transition from street to indoors, where staff told us we could sit with a dog. The menu is 100% vegetarian. I couldn’t go past the “Corned Beet” Reuben sandwich, which the menu suggested would be good with a side of crispy potato skins. So I had that.

Wow. This was amazingly good. Really delicious, and generously filling. There were other very tempting goodies as well, including mushroom pies and potato and cheddar pies, and a range of amazing looking sweets and pastries. But I was so full after the Reuben that we just had to leave and go for a long walk to walk it off. We walked a loop around several blocks, passing many other interesting cafes and bakeries and things.

Back home this evening I had three more ethics classes on Natural Resources. And worked on another Darths & Droids strip, which now safely brings me to the other side of my trip to Japan. So I have enough buffer to last through the trip, phew!

New content today:

Getting creative with pizza

In good news, my cough seems to have almost resolved, meaning for the first time in about a month or more I feel almost back to full health.

I had 4 ethics classes today, and in between went to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, who spent the morning in the office with her. I thought I’d take Scully for a bt of a drive over to the Italian bakery and get some delicious goodies, but I realised I didn’t have all that much time before my afternoon classes began, so decided to just go home.

This evening I made pizza, with broccolini and a pseudo-satay sauce on top, essentially just peanut butter and chilli flakes. I’ve done this once before, and it worked fairly well.

And tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’re currently playing The Castles of Burgundy. I’ve played it before, but a while ago, and I can’t remember much about it.

Not much else to report – it was a pretty busy day, with nothing out of the ordinary.

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Crossing the harbour for lunch

A dream I had last night: Someone gave me as a gift a guided climb to the top of Mt Everest. So I went, and eventually found myself at the summit with a bunch of mountain climbers and Sherpas. They’re all sitting there at the top enjoying the view, while I’m saying, “Whoa, no, this is way too high… I can feel the mountain swaying… I want to get down…”

Today my wife and I dropped Scully off at the dog groomer, and then we indulged ourselves by heading down to the ferry wharf:

A little pied cormorant was sitting there, but this was as close as I could get before it flew off. We caught a ferry:

Across the harbour to Balmain, just two stops away:

We walked up the hill to the shopping strip and The Cottage restaurant:

Where we sat inside and had a lovely lunch. I had chicken schnitzel, with mash, fennel, and radicchio:

And a sticky date pudding with pistachios and rose water for afters:

After lunch we walked down streets full of historic houses:

To Birchgrove Wharf, where we caught a ferry back home:

Just in time to pick up Scully from the groomer!

New content today:

Chicken burger day

Today was fairly routine I had three ethics classes this morning to wrap up the Curiosity topic. After that I took Scully for a walk up to the shops and grabbed a barbecue chicken burger for lunch at a fried chicken place. I normally like this place, and I had a hankering for it today, but today something was lacklustre about both the burger and the side of sweet potato chips that I ordered with it. Or maybe the dregs of this mystery virus are slightly affecting my sense of taste. I don’t really notice any significant loss of taste, but it could be slightly affected I suppose, like when you have a cold.

I worked on making comics this afternoon, trying to get my buffers for both Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids up before my trip to Japan. I took Scully for another walk around 5pm. And that was about it.

So here are some photos! This was the foggy morning on Saturday:

And here’s a shot this evening while I was out walking Scully.

This area near where I live is undergoing a big wave of urban renewal at the moment. All of those apartment towers you see in this photo, except for the one at far left half obscured by the tree, were built in the last 3 years. The tallest one in the middle was only competed and opened for residents a few weeks ago. And the dirt area in the foreground with the excavator on it is land that just a few weeks ago was occupied by 19 fully detached houses, now all demolished to make way for more apartment towers. It’s certainly going to be an interesting time as all these new apartments come online.

New content today:

A nice mid-week lunch

My wife is busy at work as we approach the end of financial year, but she had today off, so I treated her to a nice lunch out. We drove several suburbs away, about half an hour, and tried a wine bar which was open for lunch and has outdoor seating so we could take Scully. The weather was a bit chilly, but the forecast of showers didn’t eventuate and it was reasonably nice.

The food was very good! We had burrata with fennel jam for a starter, and then I had some fried barramundi fillet with an Asian style sauce and vegetables. And I had to try the sticky date pudding for dessert.

It was okay being so full afterwards, since I had three ethics classes tonight and didn’t get to dinner until after 8pm, which was just some minestrone made from yesterday’s leftover vegetable soup. But being out for much of the day I had to finish writing my new lesson for the older children, on this week’s topic of “The End of The World”. This should be a fun one to start tomorrow morning!

New content today:

A new Italian place for dinner

It’s Friday online board games night, and I’m writing this in between games while waiting for players. I just got home from a lovely dinner at a restaurant we’ve never tried before, although only for lack of motivation. It’s a cafe by day, and I walk past it frequently on walks with Scully, and have known about it for years before we got Scully even. My wife and I have frequently said “We have to try dinner here one day”, but we’ve never managed to actually do it. It’s a good 25 minutes walk from our place, and in a different direction to our usual restaurant locations, with nothing else near it, so it’s a bit off the radar.

So today I thought I definitely have to book that place for dinner. I considered tomorrow night, but then checked the weather forecast and tomorrow is supposed to be cold and rainy, and since we have to sit outdoors with Scully it wouldn’t have been pleasant. But today was warm and fine, so I made the call to just do it and surprise my wife when she came home from work.

We walked over in the cool evening air. The place is called Waterview Cafe, and it has a very slight view of Sydney Harbour, through nearby residential areas. We could see the lights of boats moving across the water, which was pleasant. I had a pork and veal ragu pasta, while my wife had spinach and ricotta ravioloni. I couldn’t go past the dessert, which was pavlova with fresh berries. It was more berries than pavlova, and delicious. Overall, a good meal and we definitely want to go back again.

Apart from that, not much else to report today, as I had 4 ethics classes to teach, which didn’t leave much time in between for other things after adding in lunch and taking Scully for a couple of walks.

New content today:

An overdue chicken schnitzel

This morning I got stuck into photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I took Scully for an early walk, and it was really chilly today. Then I got the Lego stuff out and spent the rest of the morning building and arranging the sets and taking photos. I finished the batch around 11am, then relaxed a bit before deciding what to do for lunch.

I decided to walk Scully up to the local shops and have lunch at one of the outside tables at one of the pubs. They have delicious chicken schnitzel, and it’s been a long while since Ive had one, so that’s what I ordered. Scully wanted to sit on my lap because it was still a bit chilly and windy, and she gave the schnitzel a good stare. But she’s pretty good and doesn’t try to grab food off plates. And it was as delicious as I remembered, so that was good!

This afternoon I finished up class notes for this week’s new ethics topic: Getting Even. This is a topic I did a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of good questions from then, so it wasn’t much work revising it. I had three classes this evening.

For one question I asked what the kids would do if another kid deliberately stepped on their foot, causing some pain. One girl said she’d feel angry an give them her “angry look”. She said she wouldn’t do it now (over the Zoom video) because it would scare me too much. I laughed and said I really wanted to see it now. So she did it, and yes it looked pretty angry, but in the current context it was really quite funny. I love it when the kids do interesting things and we can have a fun class.

New content today:

A nice lunch in a new place

Today I worked on my class plan for the older students, who are discussing Fashion this week. I know this is a topic which some kids might think will be uninteresting at first, but I think there’s some though-provoking questions for them to ponder. The most basic ones at the beginning ask the kids to think about what fashion really is, and how important it is. I get them to imagine a world without fashion… there are no choices you can make in clothing, or hairstyle, or shoes, or accessories. Everyone wears the same thing all the time, like a uniform. And then ask if the self-expression that we all exercise whenever we choose to wear this shirt rather than that shirt is an important part of human existence and culture.

Anyway, it should be interesting!

Scully had her regular groom today, clipping her hair down from unruly to neat. My wife dropped her off and then we went out for lunch to a nice restaurant that I’d found yesterday by searching for a good lunch spot. We could sit inside, without Scully! It was a delicious meal. I had Murray River cod with dashi broth, spinach, and pickled mushrooms. I saw it on the menu, but was still surprised when I tried the mushrooms and found them vinegary – it’s not a flavour you expect from mushrooms! It was good though, balancing the savoury aspect of the broth.

I also had a dessert, which was a crema catalana with burnt fig. Again I was surprised by the flavour. I expected the sauce to be sweet caramel, but it was a complex fruity flavour of the fig, with some citrusy sourness. It was surprising, but contrasted nicely with the sweetness of the cream, balancing it out.

Overall the meal was really good!

Back home I made a leek and potato soup for dinner – just something light as we were both so full from the lunch. Then three classes in the evening on the animal communication topic.

New content today:

Big lunch and little dinner

This morning I did a 2.5k run, for the first time since last Wednesday. Last weekend I felt more like just resting and trying to get over this lingering COVID cough, but I thought this morning that I should get some exercise. I took it a little easy, but wanted to go a bit faster than last time, which I managed okay.

It was my wife’s day off work and we took a long walk with Scully, stopping at a cafe to have a nice lunch. I ordered a chicken schnitzel burger, which turned out to be enormous, bigger than I’d expected. And it was really delicious too! But very filling. My wife’s haloumi and avocado toasted sandwich was similarly generous.

Even though that was around midday, we decided a light dinner would suffice. I made some salad with falafels and a tahini dressing.

This afternoon I made more of that recent batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed last week. Apart from that I kind of didn’t achieve very much. Oh, I did some overdue website updates – boring technical stuff mostly. I had to change the links from Irregular Webcomic! to the Fantasy and Cliffhangers books sold by TopatoCo, because they’re no longer available there. I had them send me some of the leftover stock and recycle the rest, so now the only way to get any of the few remaining books is to contact me directly.

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