Tag: food

Double naughty lunch

In a terrible confluence of events:

  1. 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.)
  2. I went for my 2.5k run early this morning.
  3. So by the time we got to the bakery for lunch I was super hungry.
  4. 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:

Run Scully

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.

Special braised eggplant

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!

Rye sourdough

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:

Icing my back

Despite taking it easy last night and trying not to aggravate my twinged back, it stiffened up badly overnight. I made an appointment with my physiotherapist, at midday today. The guy I see is really good and loosens up my pelvic joints and realigns things so it feels a lot better. Then it’s just a matter of getting the inflammation down, which in the past has taken a few days. But today he mentioned that if I was an athlete I’d put an ice pack on it for 15 minutes, take it off for half an hour, and repeat that all day, and by tomorrow it’d be completely fine. I never realised I could do something like that! If it helps heal faster, I’m all over it!

So I’ve been icing my back on and off for much of the afternoon. And yeah, it feels a lot better already, so it seems to be working. I’ll see how it is after another night’s sleep.

The other main thing I did today was write up my lesson plan for the new online ethics topic of Food. I included stuff on dumpster diving for discarded food, food waste, healthy and unhealthy food, and some ethical questions about the impact of raising meat on the environment, and also the impact of shipping food around the world just so we can buy peaches in the middle of winter. One kid tonight had a very interesting idea about junk food, suggesting that people should get a maximum quota of junk food per month, “maybe two chocolate bars or something.”

Oh, and the rain is back again… It was very cold today, a maximum of only 13°C in Sydney, which is the second coldest day of the year so far. It’s supposed to be rainy for the whole week. We’re definitely approaching that all-time yearly rain record.

New content today:

85% complete

The secret project is now 85% complete, after a hard day of working on it. Not long to go now!

At lunch I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully to the Italian bakery about 3 km away. They had a special today, which was a banoffee croissant. Imagine a pain au chocolat, with the addition of some sweetened mashed banana in the middle, drizzled with toffee on top, sprinkled with some of those tiny chocolate malt balls, and topped with dried banana chips. It was as delicious as it sounds! Alas I neglected to take a photo. I just hope that they have it again some time when I go back there.

New content today:

Secret project and cheesecake

I had one online class this morning.

Then I spent most of the day working on my secret project. It’s approaching completion – I actually have numbers. It’s over 80% complete as of this evening. This isn’t a vapourware project – it’s something that will see the light of day and you will all be able to see it when it’s done. I expect that to be within the next month or so – it’s a bit of a toss-up if it’ll be before or after I travel to Germany on 17 June. But I’ll say definitely by some time in July.

I took a lunch break walk with Scully, doing the longish walk to what’s become our favourite bakery. I’m amazed all over again every time we go back and their selection of cakes and sweet treats is different yet again. This time they had individual cheesecakes – plain, raspberry, and blueberry. I had a blueberry one, following the sausage roll for a savoury lunch.

Not much else to say about today, really, except perhaps that it was a nice day – sunny and not too cold.

New content today: