Cooking Stuff

So a couple of days ago, Repton and I were wandering through Moore Wilson's wondering what the difference is between a boutique grocery and a regular supermarket. Then Repton asked how you cook goat meat. I didn't know, so we went home, looked at some recipes, decided that we could do that, and next time he went past the shop he procured some.

It turns out that goat meat isn't good to fry or roast because it shrinks like billy-oh, and most of the recipes out there are for curries or casseroles. I don't have much experience with curries, but casseroles I do, so this is what we went with (adapted from here.)

- some flour (about half a cup?)
- various dried herbs (we had rosemary, thyme and oregano)
- about 500g of goat meat
- two small onions chopped into large chunks (I guess one large would do)
- two cloves of crushed garlic
- one cup chicken stock
- half a cup red wine

Season the flour with the dried herbs and coat the goat chunks in it. Fry briefly to brown it and place in a casserole dish with the onion, garlic, chicken stock and wine. Add some extra rosemary.
Cook at 150 degrees for three hours. (Every hour or so I stirred the mixture.)
Served with basmati rice and grilled capsicums.

It smelt _really_ nice, and tasted pretty good too. We also ended up asking the obvious question of: so how much does it cost to run an oven for three hours, anyway? which Repton worked out from first principles and I looked up on the internet. Turns out to be about a dollar fifty, or less than the cost of the cooking wine, but even so, we made shortbread as well.

My Body Clock is Seriously Messed.

As in, I go to bed at a reasonable hour and find myself wide awake and staring at the ceiling by midnight. Not even a 10km walk today, which should have exhausted me, has done the trick.

(Actually, was pretty wobbly when got home, but dinner and tv watching with a friend fixed that, and now I'm disturbingly wide awake again. Gah!)

I am allergic to bee stings.

Not deathly allergic - no running around with adrenalin shots for me, but still, 30 hours after the fact, I have an extremely swollen, extremely itchy foot which the wonders of modern chemistry are not doing much for. Have given up trying to be staunch about it (not much sleep last night is not helping.) Hijacked Nisha Talitha from the Larp picnic, and we went to Sherlock Holmes instead. It was fun.

Am also trying to rerun my Kapcon game and finding this a very difficult task what with all the people who are interested but can't make particular nights, and the two people who said that they could make a particular night, then changed their minds after I set that night as the date. Am grouchy and wondering if it would be easier just to cancel the thing entirely. [/grumble] Will probably feel better tomorrow morning.

EDIT: Went to the doctor and got a better grade of Better Living Through Chemistry (steroids! woo hoo!). (Haven't worked yet, though.) He laughed when I said I was there about a bee sting, I insulted his typing - it's nice when you get to have a regular doctor, it's much more informal.

EDIT2: Still itchy, but the swelling has gone down a lot. This is a Good Thing. Have spent much of the last few days with my foot ensconced in a bowl of water - would be nice to be able to put it away.

Awake Too Late At Night

Stupid blocked runny nose. Better living through pharmacy is probably helping some, but not enough for comfortable sleeping. :-(

EDIT: Also, when I did go back to bed, my Significant Other decided that I was breathing too loudly and kept poking me until I quietened down (i.e. woke up.) Spent the rest of the night on the couch. Cat happy, me feeling hungover.

The Braggity Post of Bragging

So, I'm back from Kapcon, with the news that the game I sent in to the Scenario Design Contest (with considerable input from my sister Cat) won. This means that we can now truthfully call ourselves Award Winning Writers. Hee hee hee.

OK, normal programming to meet industry guidelines for modesty will now resume. Second day was lots of fun: a restful stint helping run the admin desk in the morning, a PTA pilot where we were reality police, and Cathulu. It's like Chthulu, but you're playing cats, and I killed the main bad guy, despite being an utter coward. (Got lucky on a dice roll when I had his head in a death grip trying to rake his face. But he was a bad person with a three eyed demon cat, so it was OK really.)

Two final notes: that with the typos I'm having to correct I should really give up and go to bed, and the obsevviseness with whtich my cat is begging for attention is getting distrubing.

Good night!

EDIT: Am concluding from the green slime coming out of my nose that I'm officially sick with a virus, instead of the hayfever/dehydration combo I thought I was sporting. Feel a bit better about feeling massively hungover as I'd been trying to drink lots of water and go to sleep at a reasonable time and was annoyed that that wasn't working. Also, drugs for the win!

Huzzah!

I ran my game at Kapcon, The Book Club, and it went really well, thanks to my player group who totally brought the awesome. (I'm still somewhat boggled about how much time we spent talking about the phallic implications of carrots versus the idea of cockleshell as a symbolic Holy Grail. It worked in the game!)

St Margaret Redux

And it's now handed in. One. Two. Three ... Huzzah!!

Feeling a bit spacy right now, owing to disturbed sleep patterns this week, but coping a lot better than expected. Nice weather and getting Repton to come out to Manners Mall and have crepes with me helped a lot.

And I just want to say that the standard Margaret legend offers remissions of sins, a place in heaven, and no children born who are blind, deaf, lame or crazy to anyone who reads or writes a copy of her life. Her and me are like that. :-)

March to Ship

I'm currently staying up late trying to finish off my Margaret of Antioch essay. Eye eye eye. I've been on a Search and Destroy mission for //TODO place holders and trying to tidy up poorly written sections, and have been making progess with one section still to do and a mere handful of placeholders left to roust out. It's also massively overlength (like nearly twice as long as it ought to be.) This is not my fault - every time I pointed at a section and told my supervisor I was thinking of cutting it he said 'No, no, keep it in, I like it.' Bah humbug!

In other news, I have until tomorrow to decide if I'm going to do Masters this year. Pros and cons both ways and I'm being infernally indecisive about it.

EDIT: Finished all the writing about half past midnight, now can't sleep. Double bah humbug! Proof reading tomorrow. Just checked scholarship docs and actually have another 10 days to dither - probably best not to make decisions when I'm tired and stressed about essays. :-)

Surprising Things

So, a couple of weeks ago, Repton and I went to New Plymouth to watch the Fleetwood Mac concert (1) and, as you do, went for a walk up Mt Taranaki. We didn't make it to the top by any means, stopping at the transmitter tower just before the track gets really hard, instead of just really steep, chatted with the unicyclists coming down the path, that kind of thing. I'm not kidding about the unicyclists. One of them even had brakes.

It turns out that they were in the country for the World Unicycling Championships, one event of which, Freestyle Pairs, Repton and I went to see tonight. It was nifty, and pretty scary the amount of skill involved. There were dancer unicyclists, acrobat unicyclists, bishounen unicyclists, Swiss stripper unicylists ... pretty damn awesome. And I'm not kidding about the Swiss stripper unicyclists; there were other teams that took the opportunity to fling off a bit of costume at an artful moment, but these guys really took that idea to heart and were, moreover, wearing suspender socks (who the heck wears those anymore?). Despite my kibbitzing (and discreet leering), their performance was Awesome and they won that section. Good for them etc.

In other tramping news, my Christmas toy was a GPS so I can go geocaching. Dragged Repton out with me to find a couple of caches on Tinakori Hill which, even with getting lost for reading the map wrong at one point, was a pretty awesome walk. Also found a geocoin, which is trying to visit every cache in NZ and has a code deciphering wheel.

(1) Which was awesome by the way.

Corset Photos

Ta da!

And a closer look. I got the silk for this at a fabric sale run by the Mary Potter Hospice, where you can get bits and pieces left over from other projects. So 1m of brocade silk was suprisingly affordable.

As you can see, the lacing was quite loose for my first session. Keira Knightley's opinions in the Pirate movies aside, it was quite comfortable, although it rather encourages good posture and restricts bending over.

Look! Cleavage! (Not something I can usually brag about.) Note that Cat put some little bumble bees and 'moonstone dew drops' as decoration - this is an outer wear fashion corset rather than one that discreetly stays under my ball dress.

The chemise I'm wearing under this is way out of period (made to an Elizabethan smock pattern and quite heavy linen.) My next project is to find some nice floaty lawn or muslin and make a semi-transparent shirt that makes people even more interested in my cleavage. It's a girl thing.

Merry Christmas!

I was woken up by two extremely enthusiastic cats this morning. One of them jumped on my face, the other one brought me tea and had a loud cellphone alarm. Still, I got to try on my new personally tailored pure silk Christmas present corset...

(Pictures to follow)

Wicked Thoughts

I am writing an essay on St Margaret of Antioch.

It probably says bad things about me that I'm trying to subvert the structure of the essay so that I can have Jane Austen-ish puns in the subtitles. ("Pride and Public Exposure," "Sight and Sensibility," that sort of thing. Now, if only I can think one up for the section on the dragon and the devil...)

Adventures in Cookery, part something or other

Today's new recipe was Hungarian Goulash, which to the uninitiated is a kind of casserole/stew made with paprika, black pepper and capsicums. The recipe I used also said to put in tomatoes, but I'm not sure how authentic that's supposed to be. And, er, apparently proper goulash is more like a chunky soup. But anyway, you get the idea.

It was quite nice, but took a while to make, what with having to make a trip to get some stewing steak because we didn't have any, spending rather longer than I'd like trying to get the can of tomatoes open and opting for puree instead (stupid can opener), and generally doing the messing about prefrying the steak, as you do. And the two hour cooking time, although we shortened it a bit because I was getting hungry. On the other hand, the recipe didn't quite use the last of the cooking wine, so I felt duty bound to finish it off while I waited for dinner to cook. I really am a cheap drunk. Whee!

On being a published author

Er, kind of, so long as being a part of a Lulu collection counts.

Got some exam results back

A+s for me! La la la. (Still got a research essay to finish up, mind.)

And so it begins...

Christmas shopping has started. Granted, the first item purchased was of a utilitarian and modest nature, nonetheless - I've Started Being Organised!

Today I went to a book signing by Emma Hart and David Haywood. The former wrote a book called Not Safe For Work which Repton brought home a week or so ago, and he wanted signed since they were in town doing a joint book launch. She showed me her scar. (Read the book to find out why this is important, it's very entertaining. Not the reason why she has a scar, but the book in general.) I also picked up a copy of Haywood's My First Stabbing, which is not actually the book he's launching, but I'd heard about by means of the hilariously funny article of the same name, which someone had linked me to a while ago. Both authors were nice, friendly, and did readings of each other's books and then made each other do readings of their own books. A surprising amount of coercion was required.

Also, I got a long overdue haircut. This turned out quite short, owing to my hairdresser having a funny idea of what "Shoulder length, please" means. It still looks good, but I'm a bit sorry because Cat chopped off most of her hair recently as well, and we've been Cox and Boxing our hair cuts since forever. Eh well.

The Event

And the last of this is done: http://theeventwellington.blogspot.com/2009/11/part-five-robin.html

Bwa ha. Ha.

Cooking

Tonight's new recipe was Vegan Nut Rissoles, via a recipe in the paper. This meant an expedition to get tofu, which really doesn't taste of anything at all. Took quite a while to make - prime offenders are the precooked brown rice (which takes bloody ages to do its thing), and the imminent demise due to non-nonstickiness of our large frypan. And there were lots of rissoles. If we make it again, I'll probably halve the mixture. (And throw veganness to the winds and mix some cubes of cheese in, so there's something solid to chew on.)

Tiki Touring

Yesterday I went for a walk along the Sanctuary fenceline up to the wind turbine. It's an interesting walk, because you spend most of it going uphill through bush, trees, and a steelmesh fence, until right near the top you break out of the bush and see the panorama of south Wellington. This really is a beautiful town to live in.

Also notable is that getting up all that way left me tired (but not exhausted), only 1 hour 10 minutes (less time than I expected), and with absolutely no asthma attacks (yay!) And today, the post walk stiffness isn't in my legs, it's in the muscles stretching across my ribs. Er. Some pilates artifact, maybe?

Other things for yesterday were meandering down to Brooklyn to look at the fabric sale there and going into town to have lunch with Repton. Interestingly, since I started up at Uni again, I no longer have to go into, through, or nearby town everyday, or even every week, and it's taking on a very exotic kind of Field Trip air.

More cooking

Tonight we tried out rice risotto made from scratch. This entailed a shopping expedition to procure a bottle of wine (the first time I've been IDed in ages) and some saffron (which costs how much? Eep.)

The result was a bland looking glop that was really nice. Yum.

I went to visit Cat on the weekend and she made a point of making me deviled sausages and broccoli in cheese sauce, also made without the aid of premade assistance, in part because: "you made me such nice food last time I visited." I suspect there may be some cooking one-uppery in my near future...