food – Page 7 – dangermouse.net

Special calzones with caramelised fennel

Today was cold. I took Scully for a morning walk and it was pretty chilly.

This morning I sold some more old Magic cards online. I had to make a couple of packages and take them to the post office after lunch. I spent some time working on Darths & Droids comics, scripts and producing the actual strips.

And I started cooing early for a special dinner. I chopped up a whole fennel bulb and fried it up to caramelise it and make it soft, adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to deglaze the saucepan and add flavour. I let that sit for the afternoon. Then this evening I made pizza dough, chopped up some spinach leaves and blanched them quickly. I assembled them into calzones, with ricotta cheese, and baked them in the oven. I’d also made a tomato sauce with chopped onions, garlic, basil, and oregano, to spoon over the top of the baked calzones.

I’ve made calzones before, with either just spinach and ricotta, or mushrooms inside. This was the first time I tried fennel and it was delicious, adding another dimension to the flavours.

I’m also starting to organise our next Dungeons & Dragons session, which is planned for 28 June. I thought we could use another payer, and remembered an old friend who I haven’t seen for a while. She used to play with me and one of the other current players in different games many years ago. If you read Irregular Webcomic!, you’ll know her as the player of Alvissa the elf in the Fantasy theme and Paris in the Space theme. So I sent her an email to invite her to join our current game.

New content today:

Okonomiyaki day

I had my usual four classes this morning, taking me right up until 1pm. I had the leftover rice and vegetables from last night for lunch, fried up with an egg.

Then I took Scully for a walk. It was cloudy and cold, but not rainy. Winter feels really cold this year. I think it must be me getting older and disliking the cold more. I considered going for a run in the afternoon after my wife got home from work, but it was so cold and I felt too lazy, so gave that a miss.

During the afternoon I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, then made the new strips for this week and uploaded them for queuing in the buffer.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki, with the spring onions and cabbage, also grating a carrot into the batter before frying it up in thick pancakes. We ran out of okonomi sauce, so I’ve added that to my shopping list for next time I got to an Asian grocery store.

More classes tonight, not ending until 10pm…

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A brief meeting with visiting relatives

This morning we all slept in. It rained a lot overnight, and we had almost 150 mm in 24 hours, but it had cleared by this morning and it was sunny but cold.

My wife’s nephew and his partner are visiting Sydney from their new home in Auckland, having recently moved there from Oslo. So they’re now a lot closer to home, but still in another country. It was the first chance we had to see them for over a year. There was a morning tea at a cafe with some of the rest of the family. Because it was so cold, they wanted to sit inside, rather than at an outdoor table, so after saying hello I had to look after Scully.

I drove with her to Collaroy where I got pies for an early lunch. We walked over to the beach and sat on the bench looking out over the murky ocean and grey sky. The swell was large and a lot of surfers were out there braving the freezing conditions. After that I drove back to pick up my wife.

We got home at lunch time. I spent the afternoon writing up a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts, which I’ll photograph tomorrow.

And then some evening ethics classes to round out the day. For dinner I made a stir fry with 5 green vegetables: cabbage, broccolini, spring onions, celery, and fennel, flavoured with garlic, ginger, chilli, miso, mirin, and soy sauce, served over brown rice. It turned out pretty good.

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Finished marking, oh my

I had a full day today, five ethics classes. And in between during the afternoon I finished marking all of my university Data Engineering student project reports and presentations.

It was a bit of a slog, because most of the reports were not particularly high quality, with some fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings of how to apply statistical tests and present graphical data. The last report I had to mark was a final breath of fresh air though, as they had actually done the statistics correctly and achieved a decent result for their experiment.

They wanted to determine if brand awareness had an influence on people’s judgement of photo quality. They got a series of photos of the same scenes taken by an Apple and a Samsung phone camera, and made surveys where they showed them side by side and asked people to pick which photo they preferred. In one survey they showed the photos labelled simply as “option 1” and “option 2”. In a second survey with different people they labelled the photos as “Apple” or “Samsung” respectively. And then in a third survey they switched the labels so that the Apple photos were labelled “Samsung” and vice versa. I thought this was a really clever bit of experiment design.

The results showed that out of 200 responses to survey 1 (20 people judging 10 photo pairs each), 96 favoured the Apple photos, and 104 favoured the Samsung. This established a baseline for comparison, which was pretty even. In the second survey, they found 111 favoured the “Apple” labelled photos (which actually were Apple), while 89 chose “Samsung”. And in survey 3, 112 favoured “Apple” labelled photos (which were actually Samsung), while 88 chose “Samsung” (actually Apple). This is a pretty cool result! It really suggests that some people are swayed towards photos that they think were taken with an Apple phone, even if they weren’t. They did a chi-squared test on the numbers, but the p-value was 0.12, meaning there was a 12% chance of this discrepancy happening by random chance. We usually expect a value of 5% or less before we say that it was likely not random, but 12% is pretty close. The problem for this analysis is they didn’t quite have enough data – if they’d received the same proportions with more data it would have been more significant. Anyway, it was a really nice experiment and project and write-up.

The other thing I did today was take Scully for a long walk to Botanica Cafe for lunch. I started working my way down their all-day breakfast menu, from the first item, a “breakfast bowl” of tapioca and chia seeds with preserved mangoes, coconut, and fresh figs and berries. It’s delicious and cinnamony, but a large sweet meal for lunch really filled me up for the afternoon and I was craving something savoury afterwards. I waited for the minestrone that my wife made for dinner, using yesterday’s leftover vegetable soup.

New content today:

A potato-ey lunch treat

My Monday morning was full of ethics classes. I squeezed in an early lunch of a falafel wrap because I was getting hungry after an early breakfast. Then after my last class finished at 1pm I took Scully for a walk and we went past the fish & chip shop, and I felt like a bit of a treat. So I went in and ordered just three potato scallops – New South Wales terminology for slices of potato, battered and deep fried. Delicious and hot and oily and salty, just what I felt like to spoil myself.

We’re getting some nice days at the moment. Sunny, not too cold. If winter is more of this, I’ll be happy.

Last night I started watching World War Z, which I’ve never seen before. It really kicks off with a bang! I’m half way through and will finish it off tonight.

Tomorrow I visit Loreto at Kiribilli again to mentor my Year 9 students. The teacher has collected some questions from them and sent them to me. Very interesting! Two of them are asking specific questions about details of the atomic theory stuff I was going over two weeks ago, and the third asked a question about observing objects at cosmological distances. I’ve been thinking about how to approach discussing these and think I have a good plan for tomorrow.

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What did I even do this Sunday?

I’m having trouble remembering… it was really just a day of mostly staying at home and working on comics stuff. I did a 5k run in the morning, and then looked after Scully while my wife went into the city for a lunch with some old work colleagues.

Although I slept in a bit this morning, I’ve been feeling a bit tired for much of the day. Oh, I did make a sourdough loaf for my wife to use for lunches this week.

For dinner I made vegetable fajtas, which was a suggestion to make use of a lime that has been growing on our small lime tree on the balcony. I was hoping it would grow larger, but it fell off the tree overnight, so I wanted to try and use it quickly. It was tiny and not very juicy, but did taste really good squeezed on the spicy vegetables.

New content today:

Heading south for lunch out

Today I caught up with my old schoolfriend Lisa again. We last met for lunch back in February, near my place. It was a hot day, and we said we should get together again in a few months when it’s cooler. Well, unfortunately the 5 nice days in April passed too quickly and now it’s chilly! But she arranged lunch at Blackfish Cafe in Como, in Sydney’s southern suburbs. This was near her place (in fact she walked there), and her husband wanted to meet me so he came along as well and the three of us had a very nice lunch.

Four of us… Scully was there too!

She’s got her eyes on my fried flathead & chips. She did get a small piece of fish once I’d finished.

Anyway, I’ve seen Lisa’s husband many times in her Instagram feed, but I was surprised when he spoke with an English/Welsh accent. They’d met over in London while Lisa was spending a few years living over there. We all had a good chat over a nice lunch, but it really was a bit too chilly when the wind blew across the river. Otherwise it was a nice day, sunny with scattered clouds, and a nice setting on the water for lunch.

The drive there took close to an hour. On the way home I stopped in at Bunnings to buy a new kitchen mixer tap to replace our dodgy one, and also a light bulb to replace a burnt out one in the bathroom. I suspect there might be something wrong with the light fitting in there, as it’s burnt through two LED bulbs in the past year or so. I got a nice mixer tap, and I’ll have a look to see if I can possibly replace the old one myself without having to pay a plumber to do it. Assuming I have the right tools, I suspect I probably can.

At home I made sourdough, and pizza for dinner, and worked on some comics. And going to relax a bit tonight!

New content today:

Late night trip to the vet

After I posted last night’s blog post, I was planning to relax, watch some TV, and go to bed. But Scully was behaving oddly, refusing to eat dinner, and her hind legs were shaking. Normally she starts sleeping soon after dinner, but she was lying down with her head up, alert and awake. And she looked very wobbly on her legs whenever she moved, and struggling to stand or sit.

We were worried enough that we decided to take her to the vet, which has a 24-hour emergency service. We were there until almost midnight while the vet examined her, manipulated her legs and torso, took her temperature, and did a blood test. The vet said that she reacted when he manipulated her lower spine and that maybe she had a muscle strain or sprain. He asked of Scully had done any unusual jumping or other activity that could have caused it, but there was nothing as far as we knew. Scully never jumps up or down on anything – we trained her from a puppy never to jump. The vet also noticed her anal glands were quite full, and he expressed them to relieve pressure. He said it might be possible that the two things combined were causing more pain so that might relieve things. He gave us a painkiller tablet for Scully so she could sleep. But after her glands had been expressed, she was already a lot more sprightly and walking around easier. Her legs had stopped shaking. We took her home and gave her the tablet and she had a good sleep.

Today Scully seems to be almost back to normal. So it seems it wasn’t anything serious. The blood test was all normal. So I think we basically just have to monitor her over the next day or so and make sure she’s back to normal.

This meant I didn’t get a lot of sleep as I had to be up for Zoom classes starting from 8am today. So I’ve been a bit tired today.

After four classes in the morning, I too Scully for a walk to Botanica Cafe for lunch. I tried the last thing on the lunch menu that I hadn’t tried before (except the chicken and avocado sandwich which I’ll never have because of the avocado), the roast beef and onion sandwich. It was pretty good, though there are other things on the menu that I prefer. Starting next time I go there I’m going to work my way through everything on the all-day breakfast menu!

I went there because I had a meeting arranged with someone who wanted to meet up to buy a Magic: the Gathering card from me. It was a valuable card (several hundred dollars), and the guy is in Sydney so decided a meeting would be better than sending it through the post. He arrived after I’d finished eating, inspected the card, and was happy with the condition, so transferred the cash to me electronically and could take the card immediately.

We got back home as grey clouds rolled in and threatened rain, and it became very cold again with the southerly wind. I don’t think it actually rained, but there might still be showers later tonight.

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… And wintry weather has arrived

Tuesday, time to write my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes. This week the topic is “Taking Advantage”. As in people who do things like cut in to queues, or park in disabled spots (when they’re not disabled), or generally otherwise take advantage of other people by bending rules, ignoring social conventions, or generally being insufferable. I said yesterday this week’s topic would be “Mysterious Beasts”, but I was getting ahead of myself – that’s for next week.

The weather turned cold and dismal today. A cold rainy front came in mid morning and cooled things down from a top of 19°C, so that by lunchtime it was just 16°C. There was also intermittent rain all day. The forecast is pretty dismal too: cold and rainy like this for at least the next ten days. We are expecting heavy falls on the weekend, close to 100 mm.

I took Scully for a walk in a brief non-rainy period. And this evening I cooked a recipe that we call “cauliflower bomb”. The recipe is online here, although with a less evocative name. It’s one of the more complex recipes I make, with several steps of preparation, cooking, and lots of pots and dishes and utensils to wash up afterwards. I also roasted the cut off cauliflower leaves, which are delicious when roasted with oil, salt, and garlic until crispy. We had those as an appetiser before the main cauliflower itself. I mentioned this recipe back in 2020 when I discovered it, and that blog post has a photo from then.

I also did some comic stuff today, both Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! I’m cutting really close to publication time on both at the moment, and in fact missed the update time for the latter by an hour or so. Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend.

New content today:

The last perfect day of autumn…

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth… then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

Carl Sagan said this in his TV series “Cosmos”. I’m reminded of it on a day like today, when it’s absolutely gorgeous autumn weather – warm, with a light breeze, and just a pleasure to be outside. Not too hot like summer, and not yet descending into the chill of winter. And with the forecast for tomorrow being rainy and much colder, it will probably feel like the start of winter.

So today felt like the last perfect day of autumn. I had four ethics classes before lunch, but then took the chance to take Scully on a nice long walk in the sunshine, filtered through high cirrus clouds so it wasn’t stinging. We stopped at The Grumpy Baker and I got a spicy vegetable roll for lunch – like a sausage roll but filled with a kind of Moroccan spiced vegetable mix. It’s really good.

Then Scully got to run around and chase a ball on the grass by the harbour for a bit before we walked back home. She rolled in the grass a bit, enjoying the scents, but it was okay because we had planned to give her a bath this evening. We meant to do it on the weekend but time got away from us.

I spent some time making stage 8 of the Lego D&D set. This adds a door and arches around the dungeon level, and adds a roof which looks like a floor of the storey above.

I made pizza for dinner, but didn’t realise until the dough was ready that we’d run out of pizza cheese (a blend of mostly mozzarella with a little cheddar and parmesan for flavour)! So I had to make it with just cheddar and feta cheese. Cheddar’s not the best by itself as it gets oily when it melts, but spreading it sparely on the pizza works okay.

Then two more classes tonight to finish off the week’s topic on “Why don’t we?” questions. Tomorrow I write up the lesson plan for the next week, which will be on “Mysterious Beasts” – like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and so on. That should be fun!

New content today: