food – Page 16 – dangermouse.net

Scully’s first puppuccino

We decided to go out today and try to find a god place to have some scones or lunch or whatever. The forecast was again gloomy, so I nixed my wife’s idea to walk into the city across the Harbour Bridge, as that’s over an hour’s walk each way and I didn’t feel like doing that in the rain.

I did some searching and found a place at a plant nursery further north, in more outer suburbs. It had a cafe which advertised as dog-friendly, and even had a doggie menu, with things like sausages, scrambled eggs, bacon, and puppuccinos. So we booked a table for an early lunch and drove out there.

We arrived early, so spent some time looking around at the plants and garden accessories, and the homewares stuff that was inside the building. We got a nice sheltered table. It was pretty much indoors, but the roof had open ventilation and the floor was exterior paving tiles, so I guess they could legally claim it was an outdoor space so they could have dogs present. There were a few other people with dogs there too, finishing up late Saturday breakfasts as we arrived at the turnover to lunch service.

I got a spicy burger with jalapeños and mustard, which was pretty decent, and a chocolate milkshake. Scully got a puppuccino – her first one ever! I guess she’s a grown-up dog now. It was basically some sort of frothed lactose-free milk, with some coloured sprinkles on top.

She really liked it! But being a little dog she could only finish about half of it.

This afternoon I spent more time working on slides for my photography engineering presentation. I had to wrestle with Matlab to produce a whole bunch of diagrams, which took some time to code and debug, but I’m pleased with the results. I think I’m more than halfway done now – at least I hope so, since I’ll have too many slides otherwise!

New content today:

Spanish lunch and a long walk

This morning I did another 2.5k run. After that I was ready for a nice lunch, and my wife (who is off work this week) suggested we go for a long walk down to Blues Point to get a nice lunch at a Spanish restaurant there. We took Scully with us and enjoyed the fine sunshine.

It was sunny despite a forecast of rain, basically all day. I checked the hourly forecast, and it said rain at every hour of the day. But as I type this, it’s almost 9pm, and we still haven’t had any more than a few scant drops which we felt on the walk home. There are some storms hovering around Sydney on the weather radar, and severe storm and hail warnings in place, but where we are it’s basically been fine all day. Maybe we’ll get some overnight? It’s supposed to rain more tomorrow, but I’m a bit sceptical by this point.

Anyway, at lunch we had some tapas dishes: patatas bravas, grilled halloumi, empanadas, and fried gnocchi in a blue cheese sauce. The gnocchi were a bit weird – it looked like they were mashed potatoes put through the churros making machine and cut into small lengths, then deep fried. The servings were generous and we were very full afterwards. I haven’t had dinner yet – all I’ve eaten so far tonight is a few strawberries.

I also had three more online classes tonight about the scientific method. One was a bit of a struggle, with one kid’s connection constantly dropping in and out and me having to repeat a lot of questions. It’s always a pain when that happens.

New content today:

Random Sunday events

I did a longer run today. I am in a small online group where we share running updates. The group purpose is described as: “For those who enjoy running. And for those who don’t enjoy it but do it anyway.” I’m definitely in the latter set!

Anyway, someone yesterday posted that they’d completed their 5k for September. Which reminded me that I’ve been thinking of doing another 5k for a while, and getting one done before the end of the month seemed like a good goal, so I got out and did it today. That’s twice my normal distance. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I at least feel familiar and somewhat comfortable running 2.5k, but 5k feels like a serious effort. I managed it in 27:00 flat, which is my third best time over the distance. And Strava also told me that my 2-mile split was my fastest 2 miles, at 16:49. So I’m feeling pretty good about that.

So good that I probably ruined the health gains by having two sweets at lunch. My wife and I walked with Scully to the Italian bakery (which is nearly 3km away, so almost 6km return walking trip). I got a chicken and leek pie, but (1) they didn’t have my favourite banoffee croissant, (2) the pies there are on the smallish side, (3) a pie and a banoffee croissant are filling enough, but the croissant is quite large, (4) I was tempted instead by a chocolate/pistachio scroll, (5) which is notably smaller in size, (6) I was really hungry after my run, (7) they had a tray full of bomboloni, which I’ve wanted to try before but they’ve always been sold out when I’ve looked for them. So I got the chocolate/pistachio scroll and a Nutella bombolone.

At last I asked for a Nutella one. The woman behind the counter confirmed, “A custard one?” I repeated, No, a Nutella one.” She gave me a box, and I walked out with my other purchases to find a seat to sit on with My wife and eat our lunches. After eating the pie, I opened the box. It was a custard bombolone. My wife took the hint that I was mildly incensed and took it back to the bakery for me and exchanged it for a Nutella one.

It was pretty nice, although I missed my favourite banoffee croissant.

This afternoon I tried to estimate my ELO chess rating. One of my friends is into chess, and has been relaying to our group news about the current feud between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann (yes, it has its own Wikipedia article), which we’re all metaphorically munching popcorn over it as new developments occur. We saw the report of the tweet by Grandmaster Maurice Ashley:

This is shocking and disturbing. No one can be happy that this is happening in the chess world. Unbelievable!

One of my friends pointed out that we’re all currently much more excited and happy about chess news than normal.

Anyway, I’ve never played chess seriously in any sense, but I was curious if there was some quick online test I could do to estimate my rating. I Googled and found a few quizzes, but they involved analysing some 80 boards and submitting moves, and they said don’t spend more than 5 minutes on each board… And there’s no way I was going to invest that much time into this. But I managed to find a ten board quiz, and spent a total of maybe 5 minutes with it. It estimated my rating at 1335, which I originally thought sounded ridiculously high, given my amateurish experience with the game. But a bit of research shows this is the realm of the “hobby player”, one step below the level of anyone who plays in a local chess club. Which sounds more reasonable than what I thought it meant. A few of my friends tried the same quiz and got 1400, 1435, and 1590.

Okay, so remind me never to play chess with them. 😀

New content today:

Double naughty lunch

In a terrible confluence of events:

The last two times I walked to our favourite bakery for lunch, I actually got my meal from the fish & chip shop next door (rather than get a meat pie from the bakery like I have normally done in the past). The fish & chip meals are big, so by the time I finished, I was too full to consider a cake or other sweet treat from the bakery. (Normally when I have a pie, I can have a treat for dessert.)
I went for my 2.5k run early this morning.
So by the time we got to the bakery for lunch I was super hungry.
I said, “Sod it, I’m getting two cakes for lunch.”

This was sheer decadence and probably inadvisable, but I really wanted to do it. I got an apple crumble pie, and a slice of carrot cake. Yep, that was my lunch today.

While eating them, I asked my wife, “Is it okay that I have two cakes for lunch?”

She replied, “Sure! You should do whatever you feel like!” Then a second later she added, “You’re really asking the wrong person, you know.”

I said, “No, actually, I’m asking exactly the right person.” I love that my wife supports me in doing crazy, inadvisable things.

In other news, I spent some time today using all my DALL-E credits before they expired. I decided to use them to make some illustrations for some D&D writing that I have on the back burner, in case I ever find the time to publish it. I gave DALL-E the following prompt:

digital art illustration of a narrow causeway with medieval car traffic, leading to a small island with a castle on it to the coast, like Saint Michael’s Mount, daylight

Now, you may notice the typo: “car” instead of “cart”. I wanted medieval carts. What I got was this:

DALL-E image of cars on a causeway

🙄 That wasted one of my credits. Oh well.

New content today:

An expedition for pies

Today mostly I worked on assembling the remainder of that last batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed a couple of weeks back. Other than that I had two ethics classes online; I went for another 2.5k run; and for lunch I went out for a drive with my wife and Scully to Newtown (a suburb over on the south side of the harbour.

We want to The Pie Tin, one of my favourite pie shops. I had a Nepali curry lamb pie, and a Mexican chicken pie. Both really good. We took the food and walked a few blocks to a nearby park to sit and eat in the late winter sunshine. It had rained overnight, but was a lovely warm day today. It really feels like winter has ended and we’re moving into spring.

After eating, I ran around with Scully a bit to get her some exercise. And then headed home to pick up the rest of the stuff I had to do. Gosh the days fly past quickly sometimes…

New content today:

Spanish food

Today I had one online class in the morning.

I spent time during the day preparing for the roleplaying game adventure I am going to run on Friday next week. I drew up a character sheet design, and I did some searching for character artwork to provide a selection of pictures for the players to choose from. I’ve assembled them into a gallery and let them start choosing which character look they want. Once they’ve done that I’ll define pre-generated characters based on the artwork, so we’ll be ready to play as soon as we assemble for the game. (I can’t show the artwork here, because I grabbed it randomly from lots of sites and most of it is probably copyright. I’m just using it for personal use.)

After work this evening my wife decided she wanted to go out for dinner tonight, rather than tomorrow or Saturday as we usually do. We decided to try a Spanish place a couple of suburbs away that we’d noticed last time we were there. There’s a nice Spanish place near us, but we only went there once before we got Scully, and haven’t been back, because they don’t have any outdoor seating. But this new place does, so we could sit outside with Scully.

We had some patatas bravas, mushroom croquettes, and split a serve of vegetarian paella. And then had some churros for dessert which came with both molten chocolate and dulce de leche. It was pretty good, and we’ll definitely be going back there another time.

Bonus Scully photo from our lunchtime walk today:

New content today:

Busy day quick update

Mondays are my busy days. I did three ethics classes this morning, then took Scully on a long walk for lunch. We did some ball throwing/chasing down at the grassy area near the harbour, which is always fun. We met another puppy down there.

This afternoon I added text to the science slides I prepared for the previous science lesson I did for the girl on Sunday, so I could send her a file with the material. I still need to do the cloning topic that we did on Sunday as well. I’d forgotten about the previous topic until then. So I need to catch up on that.

And then this evening I had tutoring at the university for the image processing course. I went in to have dinner in Chinatown beforehand, at Chinese Noodle Restaurant, which is on the same block as the different establishments named Chinese Noodle House, and Chinatown Noodle Restaurant. I didn’t actually have noddles – I did last time I was there. This time I tried the special braised eggplant, which was really good.

New content today:

Trying a burger

I think the most exciting thing I did today was try a hamburger at a place I haven’t eaten before. My wife wanted to take a long walk with me and Scully on her day off and suggested the same bakery I went to yesterday. It’s a nice walk, but I didn’t want to eat from there again. There are a few other shops adjacent, including a place that specialises in hamburgers. So I tried one of those.

Yeah… I don’t think I’ll have a burger from there again. It was okay, but decidedly average. If I don’t want to have anything from the bakery again, I think I’ll try the fish & chips shop instead. Or maybe the Thai place.

Other achievements: Grocery shopping. Broccoli is still insanely expensive due to the floods, so I’m cycling through all the other green vegetables instead of buying broccoli. Today I got string beans.

And I did a 2.5k run. In the cold. The maximum temperature today was only 15°C – very cold, although it was bright and sunny.

New content today:

Eggs and pizza

I had three ethics classes this morning, which basically eats up the whole morning. I took Scully for a walk while I got some lunch, and on the way home I bought eggs, since we were low at home. For dinner I made pizza. Um… oh, I went for a 2.5k run. I did a better time than yesterday, when I took it a bit easier.

New content today:

A nice seafood lunch

My wife was home from work today so we took the opportunity to go and have a nice lunch out. There’s a place near us that does oven grilled salmon and other things. She felt like that salmon so suggested we go there. I chose a “seafood stew” which looks suspiciously like cioppino – a dish I had once in the San Francisco Bay area and which was delicious. So when I saw it on the menu I decided I’d try it. It came with flame grilled rye sourdough slices and was indeed good.

Speaking of rye, I tried making rye sourdough myself today for the first time. I’ve been looking for rye flour for a while, but the supermarket doesn’t stock it. I found some in a health food shop the other day and bought a small amount to try it. I made a loaf with about 1/3 rye flour and the rest white bread flour. It turned out really nice!

Oh, and an interesting observation from my ethics/critical thinking classes so far on the topic of Food. Most of the kids think it would be a good idea if there were rules or regulations to restrict how unhealthy restaurant food can be. Like a maximum proportion of butter or salt in dishes. Very few of them have said that restaurant chefs should be free to make food with any amount of unhealthy ingredients they want.

New content today: