food – Page 20 – dangermouse.net

Friday evening games night report

My Friday evening was busy with gaming night with my friends – still meeting online, though we may do a live gathering soon now that COVID restrictions have been lifted. We played games of So Clover, Azul, Coloretto, Incan Gold, and Sketchful.

Earlier in the day I did another 2.5k run, trying to keep up this strange idea of exercising not just once a week but more frequently. And I worked more on the course outlining for the university data engineering course. And ran a couple more Outschool classes on the topic of online product reviews for kids. I think I’ve found a better groove with this topic, and it’s working out better than the first day on Wednesday. The kids are generally pretty savvy about online stuff, and they have a sense of when to be suspicious. Several of them have mentioned that people could fake reviews, and there may be bots posting fake reviews. Most have said that they feel that deliberately posting false reviews is serious enough to be considered a crime.

Oh, and I wrote up a new review for Snot Block & Roll! I haven’t been travelling far enough in recent months to visit any new bakeries, but I spotted a new one opened within walking distance last week, and tried it out this week.

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:

A long walk and a lie in the grass

This morning I took the opportunity to go for a run. I haven’t done any for a while, so I started easy and went at a slower pace. I started thinking I’d do 2.5 km, but I decided to extend it a bit further, and ended up doing 3.2 km. It felt okay but I was starting to wane near the end. I want to build back up to 5k again if I can.

I did some comics stuff in the morning, then went for a long walk over to the new bakery I discovered yesterday, to try it out for lunch. On the way I took a photo of St Leonard’s Catholic Church, which is a landmark visible across much of the surrounding area with its tall copper spire.

When I got there and went inside, it was very weird – they had several of exactly the same things as the Grumpy Baker over at Waverton. The pie selection was identical, and they had Nutella babka – the only place I’ve ever seen that before is at Grumpy Baker. If I didn’t know better, I’d believe that they were going over to Grumpy Baker first thing in the morning and buying a bunch of stuff to resell under the guise of a different bakery. Anyway, I tried a pie and a sausage roll. And they did have some things that Grumpy Baker doesn’t make, including vanilla slices, so I had one of those too. I’ll add the review to Snot Block & Roll in a day or two when I get time.

On the way home I picked up Scully from my wife’s work, and took her home via the slopey park where she does ball chasing and fetching. We had a bit of a play with the ball before she got tired and decided to have a rest. I joined her for a lie down in the grass too, and we both just laid there for a while. Nice and peaceful.

But on the way there we passed the brand new pedestrian island in the middle of the road. It’s not a main road, but it does get a lot of traffic. The council recently widened the pedestrian refuge in the middle and installed safety barriers. But today…

Someone had ploughed right through the “Keep Left” sign, the first pedestrian safety barrier, and half-removed the second barrier on the far side. I really hope nobody was standing there when it happened, or they would have been severely injured, if not killed. I think it might have happened while I was out getting lunch too, because I didn’t see it messed up like this when I passed it on my way out, and neither did my wife on her way to work this morning, though she did see it on the way home.

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Back to the office!

My wife that is, not me. Her office is opening up again after the long COVID lockdown here in Sydney, and she went in to work this morning for a full day (she did a single afternoon last week in preparation). And she took Scully back into the office for the first time in months. So I had the entire morning to myself!

I had the last class of the week on the ethics topic of Democracy. It was a bit tough because three of the students in this class are a bit slow to collect their thoughts and express them, while one of the kids is a fast thinker, so he gets a bit impatient. Fortunately though, the USA goes off daylight saving in a couple of weeks, which will split this class into two, with the US students moving an hour later, while the ones in Asia stay at the same time.

At lunch time I went to my wife’s office (a short walk away, which is good because she doesn’t need to use public transport while COVID is still going around) to pick up Scully and take her home for the afternoon. Scully likes being in the office with my wife, but she gets a bit stir crazy being in there all day, so I took her for a long walk before heading home.

We walked past Naremburn, a suburb about 2.5 km away that I walk to sometimes. There used to be a small bakery here, which made some okay meat pies and some good sweet treats, but it closed down maybe a year or so ago, leaving nothing much of interest in the small cluster of shops for me. (There’s a couple of cafes, but I don’t drink coffee. There’s a brewpub, but it’s not exactly the sort of place you can grab a bite to eat while walking home – though it is nice to sit in for a long lunch. And there’s a hairdresser and a dog groomer and a clothing shop.) Well, I was pleasantly surprised to discover today that a brand new bakery has opened in the same place as the old bakery! I peeked through the door and it looks like they have some nice things, so maybe later this week I’ll walk over here again before I eat lunch and I’ll have the chance to try some things.

This afternoon I tried to write some comics, but had a bad case of writer’s block, so didn’t get much done. And tonight was the second last tutorial session for the UTS image processing course. I had to help a few groups of students with their project work – several of them are discovering that the grand ambitions they had with their project specification reports are not so easy to turn into practice. I reassured them that the important thing was to adapt and learn, and report on the fact that they had to try something else because their initial plans didn’t work out. I think all the students I’m working with are pretty competent and doing decent work, so I hope that’s reflected in their final reports.

New content today:

Last pizza pickup?

Today I worked on lesson 3 of my Creative Thinking game design course. I also took Scully for a short walk in the morning, and then with my wife for a longer walk at lunch.

For dinner we ordered pizza from our favourite local pizza place, and I went up to the restaurant to pick them up. This might be the last time we pick up pizza for a while, as restaurants will be back open next week after the COVID lockdown restrictions ease. The owner of the pizza place said he was looking forward to having customers dining in again, and said they were doing a few renovations to change the place around a bit.

Tonight is online games night with my friends again. I’m losing all the games as usual…

New content today:

Splendid meals

Today I made the slides for the second lesson in my creative thinking course, based on the lesson plan I wrote up yesterday.

This evening I had two more ethics classes, on animal hunting. I’ve been ending the classes with a question for the kids to think about, without answering it: Experts say one of the biggest dangers facing the world is overpopulation of humans. What if an advanced alien species came by Earth and saw our population problems. Would it be okay for them to hunt humans?

In the second class today we’d previously discussed whether it’s okay to hunt overpopulated animals, and all the kids had been very affirmative that not only was it okay, but it was necessary to protect the greater environment. So… I got to the end of the class and left them with the above question to ponder, and one of the girls who I could see on the Zoom video silently did The Scream pose, and then slid her hands up to cover the top of her head as she continued the look of horror. It was really amusing to see!

This evening for dinner my wife and I ordered a special treat from a local Greek restaurant that we like to visit now and then. It’s a nice change from ordering pizzas. I went up to pick up the meal and we had spanakopita and roasted lamb shanks, with Greek salad. And there’s sticky date pudding for afters.

Tonight is online games night with my friends. We started with the game Splendor, which I haven’t played for a long time, and have always been really bad at. I thought I was winning, but then all of a sudden someone else took a huge lead and won the game, and I ended up third.

New content today:

Start me up

This morning I decided to kickstart some exercise routines again, and I went out for a jog around the streets. I didn’t want to start with a full 5k run, so I cut a large loop off my normal circuit, and also took the pace a little easier than when I was running regularly earlier this year. I did 2.25 km, and was feeling good at the end, like I could have kept going at least a bit longer. It probably helped that I skipped the hilliest parts of my normal route. Afterwards I did a stretching routine that I haven’t done for ages as well… my flexibility has decayed quite a bit.

I spent most of today working on new Darths & Droids strips. I also took Scully out to the dog park for the first time in weeks, now that the COVID lockdown restrictions have been eased back to allow you to meet with a friend or two in an outdoor setting, so long as everyone is vaccinated.

For dinner tonight, I made a pesto, pumpkin, and pistachio pizza. It also had chunks of fried haloumi on it, which added a nice saltiness.

A friend pointed out that the haiku I wrote a few days ago had an error, with “frangipani summer” being 6 syllables. I completely missed that at the time! And there isn’t an easy fix either. Oh well. I claim the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi on that one!

But inspired by another prompt: “The Secret Lives of Vegetables”:

Soft dewy morning
Refreshingly crisp and green
Cucumber dreaming

Flowers of passion
Fecund seeds swell in their beds
Conceiving pumpkins

Furtive green hairdos
Possessors shyly hiding
Carrot introverts

New content today:

More experimental baking

I had more leftover sourdough starter today, so I decided to try making some sourdough focaccia using it, plus a bit of yeast to get it to rise. (Sourdough rises when the starter is fresh, but not if the starter has been left over and sitting for a few days.)

It turned out pretty well!

I think I baked it a little too long, and next time I won’t use the base heat setting in the oven, as it made the base very crisp and close to burnt. But otherwise it was really good. For dinner I made a simple tomato and chilli sauce with pasta, and we have that with the focaccia and some extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip it in. A very simple and rustic Italian meal, but delicious.

In other news, Scully had her groom today, and now she’s all fuzzy and velvety with short hair again. I didn’t get a photo to compare with yesterday, but maybe I will tomorrow.

I spent the afternoon working through the exercises for Monday’s next lecture in the image processing course I’m tutoring. We’ve finished the basic image processing stuff and are moving on to machine learning for pattern recognition. I have a very high level knowledge of machine learning, but have never dealt with the nitty gritty aspects of it in detail before, so this part of the course will be more challenging for me. This first lecture is really an introduction to machine learning, and most of the actual work is on probability distributions, which I have more familiarity with. So the work wasn’t too difficult, although I had to struggle with Matlab’s weird syntax issues for a while before getting something to work.

I’ve also started work on a new course for Outschool, to complement the ongoing classes on critical and ethical thinking. This new one will be a fixed length course of about 6 weeks, on creative thinking and problem solving. I plan to teach the kids how to think about problems and come up with creative solutions to them. And as an example context, I thought that over the six-week course we could work on a specific creative problem: designing a simple board game! The goal would be to have a completed, playable game at the end, invented by the kids, with my guidance. I think this should work well as a course, and I have ideas for all the stages. Just need to write it up and then submit the course for approval.

New content today:

Comics and Standards reporting

I did two main things today: Finished writing that batch of new Irregular Webcomic! strips, and wrote a report on the ISO Standards meeting I attended a few weeks ago. There’s not too much to say about the first, except that finished the batch, so I’m ready to do the photography first thing tomorrow.

The second: I have to write a report on each international standards meeting I attend, to deliver to Standards Australia, and then go through with Australian experts during a follow-up meeting. We have that meeting next week, so it was time I wrote up the report. It’s a little tricky because the template I have to use is a Microsoft Word template, but I don’t have Word on my Mac. Apple’s Pages will open the document, but it gets the formatting badly wrong – so badly that it’s impossible for me to edit the document in Pages. So I have to edit it in Word. My wife has Word on her laptop since she needed it for work purposes – so I’m not about to pay for another license to put it on my desktop. So… I have to set up file sharing between the two machines, transfer my docs to the laptop, edit in Word there, then export to PDF and then transfer the lot back to my desktop. Which is why I tend to put off the task until I can’t any longer.

Anyway, it’s done now, so I can breathe easy again for a while.

For dinner tonight I tried a new recipe, from a TV show I saw a few weeks ago. They have the recipe online, so I can just link to it for you: Forever-roasted pumpkin with lemon pepper butter. I tried to find curry leaves in my supermarket, but they didn’t have them, so I settled for sage instead. It turned out delicious, although an entire half butternut pumpkin was very filling as a meal for me and my wife. Next time I’ll do half as much, and serve it with a light side dish.

We both separately tried taking Scully out in her new doggie-carry backpack today. She’s a little tricky to get in, being a bit squirmy, but once tucked into the pack she settles down nicely and really seems to enjoy the ride. We want to keep using the backpack regularly so she gets used to it and sees it as something totally normal.

New content today:

Organising recipes

First the COVID news: 112 new cases in New South Wales in the last 24-hour reporting period. The Government expects the numbers to keep going up for a few more days until the effects of the lockdown start being felt and, hopefully, bring them back down towards zero.

And in personal health news, my throat is feeling a lot better after the tonsillectomy. There’s just a little residual pain when I yawn widely, or move my tongue around to extreme positions in my mouth. But it’s still improving day by day and feels pretty close to back to normal. I think the coughing and phlegminess is reducing each day as well.

I worked on writing Irregular Webcomic! strips today, hoping to have a batch done in time to photograph tomorrow morning, but I don’t think I’m going to make it. It’ll probably have to be photography on Wednesday.

Something else I did was look into recipe organiser apps for my desktop machine. I’ve been collecting recipes using OneNote, which I use as a general note-keeping app for many types of information. It’s been okay so far, but it’s getting to the point where it’s difficult to find recipes, and I’m wishing for features such as search by ingredient and better categorisation using tags. So I’ve looked around and am currently trying the free version of Recipe Keeper.

I’m impressed with it so far. It’s not overly complicated or feature-bloated, but it has just the right set of features for organising recipes. There are three different groups of customisable tag sets. It imports recipes automatically from URLs from many popular recipe sites – and worked flawlessly for one I use a bit, the Australian site SBS Food. And it does automatic unit conversions from American units! No longer will I have to wonder what an “oz.” is. It also has a meal planner and automatic shopping list generator, although at this stage I’m not sure how much I’ll be using those features. I’m going to give it a few days, but I’m already thinking I’ll pay for the “pro” version, which gives you unlimited recipe storage and ability to synch to phones and iPads.

Oh, I was out walking Scully this afternoon when we met Billy, a 14-week-old toy poodle, black like her! He reminded me exactly what Scully looked like when she was a puppy!

New content today: