angharad_gam: (Default)
A few weeks ago Erin decided she was going to become a vegetarian. A peculiar choice for a person whose staple food is toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, but there you go. 

And yesterday Andy was diagnosed with coeliac disease. This seems a little peculiar to us, as his only symptom was iron deficiency, and he probably wouldn't have noticed that except he kept being told he couldn't give blood. Since chronic iron deficiency is pretty unusual in men I prodded him into going to the doctor, they did a heap of tests, and lo and behold: coeliac disease. I suppose he might have other nutrient deficiencies that we haven't noticed because he has never been tested for them, but I was under the impression that coeliac patients had lots of gastro-intestinal symptoms, and he's had nothing like that. Anyway, Andy is currently in mourning for pies and beer. 

It's going to be interesting reworking our household diet to deal with these developments. The rest of us might actually get a lot healthier...
angharad_gam: (Default)
 Do you?

I made tiramisu tonight, for the first time in ages. (I made it for lunch tomorrow). There are lots of ways to make tiramisu, but I find the following generally gives pretty awesome results:

Tiramisu
500 gms mascarpone cheese 
250 mls whipping cream 
2 egg yolks
4 tblsps caster sugar
400 gm packet of savoiardi or sponge finger biscuits
2 large teacups of espresso coffee (two long blacks, basically)
6-8 tblsps of coffee liqueur (eg Tia Maria)
Cocoa or grated chocolate

Make the espresso, pour into a shallow bowl, and leave to cool. Whip the cream into stiff peaks.
In a large bowl whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale and thick, and the sugar is mostly dissolved. Beat in the mascarpone until smooth and well-combined. Carefully fold in the whipped cream. 

Stir the liqueur into the espresso.

Take a large baking dish or flat-bottomed bowl. Dip sponge fingers lightly into the coffee mixture and lay in the bottom of the dish until they form a complete layer (you may need to  reak a couple into pieces to fill in gaps). Spread half the cheese mixture carefully over the top. Make another layer of coffee dipped sponge fingers,  and then spread the remaining cheese over this. Dust with cocoa, or sprinkle with grated chocolate. Cover the dish with cling wrap and refrigerate until serving.

These quantities make a pretty large tiramisu for occasions when you're feeding a horde. For just a handful of people half will probably be plenty.

Tiramisu is one of those things where the flavours improve if it sits for a bit. Make it the night before for a lunch, or first thing in the morning for a dinner. However, given this has raw egg in it, you cannot keep it very long (though lasting too long is usually not too much of a problem).

Some variations: whisk a tablespoon of cocoa powder into the espresso for a mocha touch. Use roughly broken amaretti instead of sponge fingers (maybe only if you're making a small tiramisu or you will bankrupt yourself on amaretti). Melt 200 gms of dark chocolate and stir in a couple of tablespoons of butter. Spread this out to form 10-12 cm diameter circles on pieces of baking paper. While the chocolate is still molten drape each piece of paper over the end of a narrow-bottomed glass. Let the chocolate set then carefully peel off the paper. Put a couple of large spoonfuls of tiramisu in each chocolate 'bowl'.

angharad_gam: (Default)
 So, after my last post my foot got worse and worse, to the point where I hobbled off to the doctor. The doctor promptly sent me off to have an x-ray and ultrasound,  but this being the Friday before a long weekend, I couldn't get an appointment until the following Wednesday. Cue a lot of sitting around with my foot on a cushion. 

Wednesday came and I limped off to the radiologist. I spent about an hour there all up, between both scans and various waitings around. But at the end of it, they found no obvious problems with my foot. That was good news in some respects - it's not broken, and there is no major soft tissue injury. But it didn't shed a lot of light on why my foot hurt. It could be a soft tissue injury too minor to show up on a scan, but I am pretty talented at inflammation, so that seems fairly unlikely. Another option is inflammation of a nerve (which doesn't require much inflammation before you start to notice it). Regardless, treatment is the same - basically more sitting around with my foot on a cushion. The good news is that it does seem to be settling down in the last few days.

What's up?

Mar. 4th, 2018 06:56 pm
angharad_gam: (Default)
 Life has been pretty quiet lately, divided mostly between work and video games, which is not entirely unusual in summer, when I tend to bunker down against the heat. Now that Autumn is officially here I am going to try and tear myself away from the screen a bit more. The last week or so has not been a good start, delivering in approximate order - three new staff at work, a cold, and a foot injury. I don't know what I have done to  my foot, only that it hurts when I walk on it. There's no causal event I can remember , there's no bruising or other surface sign of a problem, the pain feels different from a soft tissue injury, and it's not located at any obvious joint, and I seem to have exacerbated it doing the grocery shopping yesterday. Maybe this is like the time my knee swelled up for no reason. 

The other news is that I have signed up to run the kitchen at a weekend long rapier event in September. Still very much in the planning stages at the moment.
angharad_gam: (Default)
 Usually a long string of very hot days is followed by the famous Adelaide cool change, where the wind switches suddenly from blowing down from the desert to blowing in from the sea.  The temperature  can drop ten degrees in an hour. I love those cool changes. But all this summer we have been seeing a different pattern: a string of hot days followed by rain, which makes everything super sticky and humid for a day, and then cooler weather after. Given that it's not unusual to go three or four weeks without any rain at all here in summer, this is deeply wrong and needs to stop.


angharad_gam: (Default)
 This morning the three clocks in my kitchen read 8:04, 8:17 and 8:25 in the same moment. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey....
angharad_gam: (Default)
 I am generally pretty happy about the public transport in Adelaide,  especially since there's  bus route about 500m from  my house that goes direct into the city (and back again) every 15 mins during rush hour. However, if I have one complaint it's that the bus that supposedly leaves the city at 5:25pm frequently either doesn't show, or arrives so late it might as well be the 5:40 bus anyway. You would think I would have learned by now to not bother showing up until 5:40, but I  tend to leave work when I have run out of either brain or things to do for the day, rather than at a specific time, so it's not unusual for me to turn up in the vain hope that the bus will also do so. After all, 15 minutes is not really that long to wait if it doesn't  (unless it's 42C out of course). They have recently installed those 'real-time' electronic signs at my bus stop in the city and it has only further highlighted the liminal nature of the 5:25 bus. This is what happened the other day:

Angharad arrives at bus stop a bit early for the 5:25. Sign states it is 8 minutes away.
Wait 7 minutes. Sign states bus is 1 minute away.
Wait 5 minutes, during which time the two buses listed as arriving after my bus come and go. Sign still states bus is one minute away.
Bus dissappears from sign.
Next bus appears at bottom of sign. Sign states this bus is 11 minutes away.
Wait 5 minutes. Sign now states 5:40 bus is 6 minutes away.
5:25 bus appears at top of sign. Sign states it is two minutes away. 
Wait 1 minute. Sign now states one bus is 1 minute away and another bus is 5 minutes away.
Wait 1 minute. Bus listed as arriving after my bus shows up. Sign states one bus is 1 minute away and another bus is 4 minutes away.
Bus actually shows up!


angharad_gam: (Default)
Back to work tomorrow, for the first time in three weeks, although I am having trouble coming to grips with the idea. I think I could happily have another couple of weeks off, although I am getting to the point of feeling like my brain is starting to moulder, so maybe it's not such a terrible thing. What have I done with those three weeks? Not a great deal. We had my parents and nephew visiting last week, so that kept us a little bit busy, but most of the rest of the time has been lazing around and playing Mass Effect (I have gotten about 2/3rds of the way through a second play through of the original trilogy and 1/3rd of the way through a new game of Mass Effect:Andromeda). I guess I did want something to take my mind off Dragon Age.

Read more... )
angharad_gam: (Default)
 I finished Mass Effect 3 yesterday. Bawled like a baby through the whole 15 minute end game sequence. I am just going to be over here in this corner having feelings for the rest of the week...
angharad_gam: (Default)
 I actually started writing this post earlier in the week, but I wrote half of it on the bus on the way to work one morning, and then discovered Dreamwidth had failed to save the draft *grumble* 

I thought I might write about Christmas dinner instead of complaining about coughing, or rambling on about Mass Effect (getting close to the end of it now, but it is going on hold while I spend the next few days cooking and feeding people). For mains we are having roast pork loin and turkey stuffed with figs and pecans (which stuffing I made this morning), alongside salads (lentil and beetroot, fancy coleslaw and a plain green salad), roast potatoes, asparagus and butter beans. For dessert I am making a Christmas bombe and a summer pudding. If we don't all end up in a food coma after that it will not be my fault.

I wrote up the recipe for Christmas bombe a few years ago here: https://angharad-gam.dreamwidth.org/109948.html, so I will give you the recipe for summer pudding. Summer pudding is quite an old-fashioned dessert, but it is a favourite of Andy's and relatively simple, so I often roll it out at Christmas alongside something more virtuosic. It's also largely fruit, so you can pretend it's healthy if you like (the same way I pretend parkin - a traditional northern English ginger cake - is healthy because it has oatmeal in it). The ingredients are quite simple. Assembling the pudding requires a little bit of care and creativity. 

Summer Pudding 

1kg mixed berries, fresh or frozen (cherries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, all good)
1 double package of plain, unfilled sponge cake
Handful of sugar

Put the fruit in a saucepan, add a small amount of water and some sugar to taste,. Note, even if you think the fruit does not need sugar you should probably add a couple of tablespoons as it will help draw out the juices. If you have frozen fruit you will not need as much water as if you are using fresh. Cut up any bits of fruit that are larger than a big raspberry. Put the pan on the stove and bring to a gentle simmer, stirring until any sugar is dissolved. Cook until the fruit is juicy and soft, but still has recognisable pieces (don't boil it to a homogeneous pulp, in other words). Set aside to cool.

Take a 1.5 or 2l pudding bowl. Open your sponge cake and cut a round piece to fit the bottom of the pudding bowl. Now cut some wedge shaped pieces to fit the sides of the bowl. Squeeze them in quite snugly as you want the cake to be fairly compressed. Now cut a large circular piece for the top. The idea is that you are making a shell of cake to fit the pudding basin. 

Separate the fruit from its juices and retain both. Take each piece of cut cake, beginning with the bottom circle, and dip into the fruit juices so the 'outside' (the face that will be sitting against the bowl) soaks up some juice. Don't allow it to become completely saturated - you want the juice to penetrate 1/3rd to half way into the cake. Now place each piece in place in the bowl, juice side outwards until you now have a juicy pink cake shell for the bowl. It is a good idea to have a few spare bits of cake in case you need to plug any gaps. Before you do the top, place the fruit into the hollow inthe middle of the cake shell. Now dip the top and place it. Cover the whole thing in cling wrap, pressing the wrap over the cake (don't just stretch it over the top of the bowl). Press down firmly, giving the whole pudding a good squeeze (there's nothing like a pudding that needs a good squeeze). Now put the bowl in the fridge. If you have something that can apply a nice even pressure over the top of the pudding, like a heavy plate, put this on top. Leave for at least a couple of hours before serving, but ideally, overnight. 

Before serving, turn out onto a plate (basically, turn the pudding bowl upside down,  hold your breath, and hope). Serve with whipped cream or cold custard. Try not to let Andy eat it all.

A few notes: summer pudding is traditionally made with bread not cake, but I think the texture is better this way. If you use bread you will have to cut it from an unsliced, stale loaf so the pieces are thick enough. If you are completely mad you could make your own sponge cake, but whatever you do, don't use the sponge fingers sold for making tiramisu or trifle. You can use fresh or frozen fruit, but given you are cooking it, it doesn't matter too much if you use frozen, and it is much cheaper (unless your garden is overrun with blackberries). 

Now I am off to actually do this (I already made the bombe this morning), and to roast some turkey. I doubt I will have the time or energy to do another post later,  but I hope you all have a lovely Christmas with much excellent food, and the company of people you care about. 
angharad_gam: (Default)
Pun very much intended (I am taking my pleasures where I can get them atm). I am ill again (or still ill). I think this is a new cold, swooping in take advantage of the lingering remnants of the old one. Regardless, I am back to coughing up my lungs again (after a few days of a head full of mucous). I don't know if this is just bad luck, or down to another deficiency my body has decided to throw into the mix (I was low on B12 last time I went to the doctor). Either way it is seriously interfering with my ability to get stuff done before Christmas, on both a work and personal front. 
angharad_gam: (Default)
 This cold has been taking ages to get over.  It has been about three weeks now and I am still not quite 100%. The 'doing my job and my boss's at the same time' thing ends in a few days, so that might help. I have got most of my Christmas shopping and mailing things done, just food to worry about now. I am looking forward to taking a long break after Christmas. 

Still playing through the Mass Effect Trilogy. I finished the second game yesterday and started the third today. The first game was good enough, but not amazing. The second really puts you through the emotional wringer. The third - I can already tell it is going to rip my heart out, chop it into little pieces and stamp all over them. I have been a lot more successful about not spoilering these games than I was with Dragon Age, but I have still picked up enough to know some of my choices in the earlier games are leading to some serious pain. And that's without the whole 'the galaxy is doomed and I don't know if we can save it' plotline. The game does a really good job of making the odds of success seem extremely low...



angharad_gam: (Default)
I can see I may be falling into a pattern of only posting here when I am sick or bored or both. But life has been fairly quiet recently. Work has been keeping me moderately busy, with a trip to Canberra and sporadic filling in for my boss. Otherwise we are on the run down to the end of the year, and starting to think seriously about what we are doing for Christmas (which will be at our place this year - definitely no last minute rushings off *crosses fingers*). Maybe I will try and get in a food post about our plans between now and then. 

But, yes, I am sick. Liam had a bit of a cough at the end of last week, and I started feeling a bit tickly in the chest on Sunday. By Sunday evening I  had a raging sore throat and had almost completely lost my voice, which persisted through most of Monday. Ashwyn was highly delighted to discover that I couldn't speak when it came time to try and tell him he needed to go to bed. 'You sound terrible, Mum,' he said. 'Maybe you shouldn't try and talk.' Getting laryngitis when I have a cold is not terribly unusual for me, but having it persist for more than a few hours is. Anyway, fortunately that has mostly settled down, but I am back to coughing quite a lot, and poor Andy is sleeping on the couch so I don't keep him awake at night. 

Aside from this, I finished my completionist, imported world-state playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which ended up being about 125 hours long (I had skipped some of the DLC on my first play through, and skimmed over some parts of the game). I am still completely wrapped up in this game, and I am hanging out for the next one now. That there will even be a next one is still an unconfirmed rumour, and it is unlikely to appear before the end of next year, if then. I am glad I didn't get into this series in 2014 when DA:I originally came out!  Andy has convinced me to give the original Mass Effect trilogy another go. You may recall I had trouble getting into this when it was first released, but I found it a lot easier this time round and finished the first game yesterday (it wasn't a huge game). 

Stuff I have been reading lately: Provenance by Ann Leckie (set in the same universe as her Raadch books, but not about them - I liked this a lot), The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandemeer (I only just started the second book of this - it is very weird and somewhat unsettling. Andy liked it a lot, but I am still waiting for it to grab me by the throat). Also, I thought I would try the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, as I have been on a bit of detective fiction kick for a little while now. I have to say that as far as 1920's detectives go, I prefer Phryne Fisher, but then she has the benefit of being written by a modern author for modern readers, while the Lord Peter books are nearly 100 years old now.

The Spring glories of the garden have passed on, and it's starting to get into the kind of weather where it is too hot for gardening, but that matters less because it is also too hot for weeds to grow. 

Erin is in the middle of exams. This is the first major exam period of her schooling (they seem less keen on them than when I was in high school), and she is stressing out a bit. After that she will be done with school for the year, and then she only has one year left (I swear five minutes ago she was a baby). Liam has now just slightly edged me out in height, and given that Ashwyn is already up to my nose I am still betting on my proposition that I will be the shortest in the house by the time he is 12. I am already the person with the smallest feet. 
angharad_gam: (Default)
 ...and it was moderately amusing, and since I am currently sitting in an airport departure lounge,  trying not to spend all my travel allowance on books I thought I would have a go.

The idea is that you type the starting phrase into your phone's message software and then see what the predictive text throws up. You can keep going withe predictive text as long as you like I guess. I've done short and slightly longer versions of each...

Phrase 1: "I am the god of"
Short result: I am the god of the morning
Long result: I am the god of the morning by the sound of torrential rain 

Phrase 2: "I woke up worried"
Short result: I woke up worried about the warden 
Long result: I woke up worried about the warden the power of the morning 

Which suggests that a) I text about mornings a lot b) I have been playing too much Dragon Age (the warden is the player character in one of those games) and c) I may be slightly concerned about my new role as god of the morning.

Actually, I just now noticed that I tend to select the right most of the two initial suggestions my predictive text makes. If I choose the other one, I woke up worried about the vomiting, which makes a lot more sense. Still the god of the morning though...



angharad_gam: (Default)
 I do not have whooping cough...
angharad_gam: (Default)
I woke up on Friday morning feeling moderately unwell, eight days since Mum got sick (incubation period for whooping cough is 7-10days). So off I went to the doctor to stick a couple of swizzle sticks up my nose (this is how you test for whooping cough), and get a prescription for antibiotics. I find out on Monday if the test is positive, but in the meantime the antibiotics seem to be keeping me from feeling too horrible.
angharad_gam: (Default)
A brief timeline first to hopefully clarify things. Today is the last day of the South Australian school holidays, which are two weeks long. Preceding these two weeks (with no overlap) were the Queensland school holidays, also two weeks long. As I believe I mentioned last time I posted, my parents were intending to spend the last week of our school holidays visiting us  (as indeed they did and went home yesterday). Now to the drama....

Last Sunday, aka the day before they were due to fly down here, mum and dad rang up and told us my nephew had just been diagnosed with whooping cough. He was not terribly ill (he was vaccinated), but he had spent the entirety of the Qld school holidays staying with mum and dad. He had been ill while he was there (in the second week of his visit). They took him to the doctor just before he went home and it takes a week for the whooping cough test to come back, so they had only just discovered that he had it. 

We spent half the day going around on whether or not mum and dad should cancel their trip. Whooping cough is most contagious in the first few days you are ill, which meant that it was almost two weeks since mum and dad had been most exposed. Whooping cough has an incubation period of 7-10 days, although it can be longer. Neither of them were sick (although my sister, who had visited them during the relevant period, was). It seemed like if they were going to get sick, they would have by this point. In the end, we decided that they should come.

All went swimmingly for the first couple of days. Then Andy and I went off on the overnight trip we had planned to celebrate our anniversary (and which, to be honest, was a big motivator for deciding in favour of them coming - his family are much much more reluctant to kid watch, especially if it involves more than sitting around for a couple of hours). When we came back on Thursday,  mum was sick. The next day she was still sick, if not worse. On Saturday she went to the doctor to get some antibiotics. They don't help much with the illness, by all accounts,  but they do help to make you less contagious, which is probably important when you have to get on a plane. We won't know if it's actually whooping cough for another week. 

If it is, and I have caught it (and I have not been vaccinated against it - something my mother did not see the need to tell me until now) it might be two weeks before I get sick. But at least if I do get sick in the next couple of weeks I will know it is likely more than just a cold and not go randomly spreading it around. There is nothing to do now, but play the waiting game, and as Homer Simpson so sagely said "The waiting game sucks..."



angharad_gam: (Default)
 ...when a combination of hayfever and the increased light in the mornings means I reliably wake up around 5:30am, regardless of when I actually went to sleep the night before. You would think that I would compensate by going to bed earlier, but that would be too much like common sense. So, sleep deprivation is the order of the day. On the plus side, the garden is awesome at the moment. Also, daylight savings came in this morning, which may help with at least one part of the problem. 

I have also been rather busy lately, but I am hoping that the period of busyness will more or less wrap up after I give my cooking class tomorrow, and to help that along  I am taking some time off work in the second week of the school holidays. 

I spent half last week at a Women in Maths conference. I was a bit nervous going into it, for some reason, but it turned out really well. There was a surprisingly large number of people there, the talks were interesting, and I met some really interesting people. Normally I only get to go to statistics conferences, so it was good to see what people are doing in other fields of maths and maths related subjects. I even went to a physics (well, technically astronomy) talk and was pleased I hadn't completely forgotten everything. 

I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda. That game has gotten a lot of flak and negative criticism, but on the whole I thought it was a perfectly fine and enjoyable game. I can see how it compares unfavourably to some of the other Bioware games - it didn't grab me anywhere near as much as the Dragon Age games have (then again I have always preferred fantasy to sci-fi) - but taken on its own merits it was ok (if not amazing). It kept me engaged through a fairly thorough and complete playthrough,  but I am in no hurry to play it again. So I am back playing Dragon Age: Inquisition again. Since I have now played the first two games I have been wanting to do a run through with the characters and choices I made in those games, rather than the defaults. It's weirdly satisfying being able to do this. 

I am really rather looking forward to having some time off. In the same week we shall be having my parents visit, celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary, and heading to the biannual plant fair with [personal profile] dirtygreatknife . It's going to be a good week.

angharad_gam: (Default)
 Experimenting with getting images in here. The process is a trifle cumbersome. I need to move the picture from my SD card to my phone memory, then upload to DW, then copy URL in here. All a bit tedious on a touch screen.

Hopefully, here is some proof that the garden, at least, thinks it is Spring:
Read more... )Hmm... That was distinctly painful.
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 06:48 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios