Daffodils!

It is spring here! Above is a very small portion of the daffodils that I have picked. I have so far filled my office and a friend's house. My own house is still lacking in floral excess so I guess this weekend I will further deplete the college gardens. There has been more sunshine than rain, though it is still cold. But you wouldn't guess it to see all the students about, dressed in short-shorts and sleeveless tops. Of course it is rag-week, so they all have nice warm beer blankets on. Rag-week is a party week, like O-week, but it is not the start of the semester. And it is also now called college week because like many of Dunedin's student activities, it has gained a very bad reputation for disorderliness. Rag stands for raise-a-grand and apparently used to be all about getting students involved in raising money for some charity or another. It doesn't seem to be all about that anymore. Instead there are loud drunk students wondering through campus at all hours of the day and past my bedroom window at all hours of the night. And we all complain about it because we have become boring old-fogeys, apparently.

So work is going, I would say poorly but I guess overall not so bad, and it's better than it not going at all. At least with the season changing people are becoming a bit more active so there is sometimes entertainment to look forward to at the end of the day. Not today though, and I was exhausted after work, so it being Thursday which is late-night shopping here, I went impulse buying. I brought a cake tin (that one wasn't on impulse, I was intending to get one). I also brought a pair of snuggly fluffy socks and a stripey green bowl. The socks because they looked warm, and I am wearing them right now (and they are purple and stripey), and the bowl because I felt like eating. So I came home and had a bowl of cereal, in my stripey green bowl. And they were both on clearance. Really I should have brought normal plates because I seem to keep breaking them. But luckily I only seem to break the plain ugly ones so I will just keep on buying random brightly coloured pretty things and very soon the kitchen will be a nice eclectic mix of colour.

Last night I made delicious peanut-butter biscuits. I took them to work and fed my friends and general consensus was that they were awesome. They had white chocolate too because I cannot make something without chocolate and if I didn't use the bloody stuff I would have ended up just eating it all, which I didn't really want to do because I don't really like it that much. And it is lucky that I baked bikkies because I really needed them, after finding out that my last two weeks of work, which was the third attempt at preparing new samples, again did not work. And now I really don't know why. Everything used to work perfectly, and now it is terrible. So that just sucks. Screw work. I will avoid the lab and do writing instead. Other than this stuff that isn't working I am mostly finished and ready to figure out my results and write them up. It is hard to begin though. Today I did very little real work in the end. And tomorrow I can forsee a similar problem.

I have decided to take the weekend off. It's not like I have been working my butt off or anything. Yet I am exhausted. I am sure I don't work as hard as everybody else, but after just a couple of hours at work, in fact before I have even begun to work for the day, I am ready to go back to sleep. So to keep myself awake and entertained I will continue to indulge in my kitchen-addiction and bake some more. A birthday is coming up this weekend so I have the excuse to make chocolate cake, yay. And there is journal club on Monday, and I have no interest in this journal article, so I will just bring cookies instead. Brownie cookies, the chocolatey-ist biscuit recipe that I have. Plus the other night I was lucky enough to sample some chocolate brownie that a friend made, and it was amazing. So now I must make my own brownie recipe plus this new one and see how they compare and which aspects I should steal in order to make my own recipe the best one. So I guess next time I have a bunch of hungry guests I should make a big batch of brownies. Plus next week it looks like there will be a sampling trip, which really means a road-trip, which means we need lots of snacks to keep us going.

While it is one thing to allow myself to cook so much and to think of food so much, I really should stop talking about it. People don't really care, which I think actually indicates that they care the appropriate amount about food and that I care much too much. In fact, when I am swimming I am often thinking of food and recipes, it keeps me from getting bored. And if in the evening I come home and do not cook, like tonight, instead of reading or watching tele or getting some work done, I look at recipes and think about food. Maybe I should get a new hobby.

But before I do that, you know what I noticed in the supermarket? Here in Galway, or maybe in Ireland (or maybe just in the supermarkets that I frequent) they do not seem to have smoked chicken. I'm sure I remember it being quite common back home, quite the in-fashion thing (in culinery circles, that is), and it is really yummy. But they don't have it here. The traditional Irish diet is very boring and not that healthy really. And while the Irish potato thing is completely exaggerated, I do actually have an Irish friend who can be a bit obsessive about his potatoes. One of the few people that will discuss food with me properly, though my obsession far out-weighs his, it is never a good idea to bring up potatoes, or the fact that I don't really eat them and when I do I buy whatever is on special - this is somehow seen as an invite to a lecture on potatoes, the best variety, the proper way to peel them, the best way to cook them, the history of potatoes in Ireland, etc. And this might then extend into the joys of traditional Irish food in general. And usually run full circle around to how terrible the variety of potatoes that I am using is (whatever that may be at the time). So I must be careful to never feed this person potatoes. In this case, I will leave such matters to the stereotype, the potato-loving Irishman. Being the kiwi that I am, I will instead introduce some of our own classics. The next one being bacon and egg pie, something that they do not have here. March the 14th is Pi day and I will celebrate the number by eating pie.

Woo sunshine!

Today it did not rain. In fact it was sunny and not even freezing cold! It's nearly t-shirt weather again, and the days are getting longer. Of course, yesterday I got soaked to the skin but you can't really expect any better from Ireland. Now that winter is over hopefully more will begin to happen and then I can write about something interesting. As it is, I guess I will just rant on a bit. See, work has been busy. And not great. Before Christmas I spent a month getting samples ready and then they turned out to be unusable, close inspection with the electron microscope showed that the fixation was not good. So I did it again. A month later, I had more samples ready. But it turns out that the reason my first samples didn't work is because my fixative had gone off. So of course the next lot of samples didn't work either. So can you perhaps see why I had a very bad week? But it's ok because in the long run it will work out, I have new samples ready. It just means a lot of work over the next couple of weeks.

So to make things worse I have gone from never being sick to always being sick. Clearly there is just something wrong with Galway. I get over tonsilitis and stupid antibiotics only to get an ear infection that feels as if there's a big plug of cotton wool in my ear. Not to mention the ringing sound and pain. And while it is great that our student doctor is free, medicine here in Ireland is really expensive. I miss my community service card and only playing three dollars for a prescription.

And you know, after all this time I am growing accustomed to the way things are here and if I were to go back down under I would probably be amazed at the vast selection we have in our supermarkets. But still, sometimes I want something and when it is not on the shelf I notice. So I wanted fruit, canned fruit. And you know at home there is so much of it, all different brands, all different sorts, in juice or syrup, and it tastes good. Here there is very little, there is not much selection at all it seems, and it doesn't really taste very good. And my fruit salad had way too much pear. But that is not really the point. The point is, fruit is good for you so they should have more of it. It is all limited. The fresh stuff, the canned stuff, and the frozen stuff too. Plus they don't have crushed pineapple here! There's all sorts of things you might want crushed pineapple for.

Still, despite what I consider to be serious faults in the selection of certain food-stuffs in this country, I am still allowing my cooking obsession to run away with itself. Firstly a friend had a birthday so I had an excuse to make chocolate mud cake. Now the thing about this cake is that while when cooked it is dense and heave and rich, the mixture is very runny. The recipe specified that a spring-form tin shouldn't be used, but I figured it'd be right. I lined it, and put tin-foil around the outside. But despite this the mixture was so runny that it began to leak out from beneath the tin, up around the tin-foil and down into the tray (because luckily I always put the cake tin in another tray just in case). At the same time though it was already cooking and congealing around the top and edges so I tried to scoop up what was leaking and put it back in the tin. That didn't work. Then somehow the tray beneath suddenly bowed somewhat in the heat! Why would a cooking tray do that? So now the leaky cake tin was on a slight angle and the excess mixture began dripping out of the tray onto the bottom of the oven! So I put another tray below to catch it. Luckily before too long the cake really began to cook and no longer leaked. The mixture that leaked into the tray was of course a much thinner layer and cooked through long before the cake. If I had left it there it would have burnt to a crisp. So I had to take it out and eat it. It was very good.

I am though trying to control my sweet tooth, it is very difficult. But I like to cook other things too so I made a big feast of Arabic foods for a bunch of friends, because I was missing my arabic food. I miss the heat and sunshine too but there's not much I can do about that. The food on the other hand I can do. So I made hummus and baba-ghanoush, I made tabouli and fatoush, we had flat-bread and I made stuffed peppers and kebabs. And it was good! In Abu Dhabi we largely live of hummus and baba-ghanoush, just dipping stuff in it. There are a load of foods that you don't even think about trying till you travel. Eggplant for instance - baba-ghanoush is a dip made of mashed up roasted egg plants with red peppers and tahini (sesame seed paste). And bulgar wheat, which is like grains of wheat and you can soak it and eat it like rice or cous-cous. You use it for tabouli (celery and mint salad basically) and you can make a risotto out of it and even make it into a dessert, like porridge or rice-pudding.

So the plan for this week is to try a new recipe that I have, biscuits of course because really that's what I do best. You know how sometimes you see chilli chocolate? They even had chilli flavoured tim-tams for awhile (I miss tim-tams). So I have this recipe for chilli chocolate chip cookies. Maybe they will be no good. But I hope that they are delicious and chocolatey. I will probably increase the amount of cocoa powder just to be sure. It shoud be interesting. And I really must try to start doing interesting things and taking photos. Just writing is surely boring.

I am told it won't stop raining for all of spring so ...

Today I brought sparkly blue gumboots.

I figure seeing as it won't stop raining I really need gumboots because I would quite like to have dry feet. And it's not so easy to get plain gumboots, there were green ones but not black and I didn't want khaki green. So I had to get glittery ones and the silver was ugly. So it had to be blue. And of course, it's not like anyone could expect any less from me. Had to live up to my reputation.

Saw the movie Black Swan. It was not bad. But not great. It was a bit weird, and dark. The music was good. But I don't appreciate an open ending and it was rather open. I like more of a finish. Then there was burgers. They were quite good but nothing near Velvet burger, I hope that place is still around when I make it back to NZ. Now I am introducing the Irish to Bro' Town. It's not a great show. They are laughing a bit, and luckily don't get all the references because some of them are really stupid.

Tomorrow I will make chocolate cake. I will take it to work for journal club, and then I will hopefully not have to say so much because I don't have so much to say about these marine biology papers. The thing about this chocolate cake recipe though, is that it features mashed sweet potato. Should be interesting. I'll let you know. The chocolate cake might be the highlight of my week. Though the glittery gumboots were pretty good.

Monday update: the chocolate cake was not the highlight of my week. In my opinion it was very average. I think it needed spice, like a pumpkin pie. But still, why bother? I will stick with normal chocolate cake. Sweet potatoes can be saved for roasting.

This one is really all completely about food

Well the most important thing to everybody I am sure is food, I think it is for me, so that's what I will talk about. Besides, I don't want to disappoint everybody's theories that I am obsessed with food. So I made pumpkin pie and it was good but not as amazingly fantastic as I remember. Not really something you want all the time, just sometimes. It was a bit watery, I think butternuts must have a higher water content. And my brownie didn't work out! I don't know why. It was not fudgy or cakey at all, it was solid and cookie-like. I was not impressed. Other people liked it but clearly I must just make another one.

On a more positive note, I made ANZAC biscuits, and you can't really go wrong with them, and they are delicious. When you bake them people will often tell you that they are the most amazing yummy biscuits ever. So I am slowly converting the world the the greatness of the ANZAC biscuit. And they are so easy to make.

And did you know that lamingtons are a down under thing? I always imagined they were English but they are not. They were actually invented in Australia in the kitchen of one Colonel Lamington by his french chef who fucked up the sponge cake and needed to save his ass. So he cut it up, rolled it in rasberry jelly, coated it in coconut and put cream on top. And there you go, they were a huge hit! So it seems Aussie gets the credit for that one but apparently the chocolate variety is all NZ so that's good because everybody likes chocolate better.

So it is Friday and work is finished for the day, I've been working my butt off and today I get to relax a bit. They are having a dodgeball tournament here, it's a postgrad thing, and I am reffing, which is good because I can't throw or catch and I probably can't dodge either so I didn't really want to play. And of course there will be work tomorrow but it should not be too bad and hopefully I will mostly take the day off on Sunday. At which point I intend to have a go and baking soda bread, and I will make soup to go with it, the weather is warming up here but in my opinion at least you can always have soup. And this next week I intend to make bikkies again, something new and interesting, but it has a secret ingredient so I can't tell you why they are so interesting. If they are good though maybe I will relent.

It's crazy, but January is all bit over. It was a rough month. Everybody says though, that a January slump is common, it is so cold and dark and dreary and going back to work sucks. Do we have this in NZ, even though January is summer? Or do we have this in June and July? Well I think it must be a real true phenomenon because January sucked, I hate working so hard, I have had very little fun, but things are looking up. The days are getting longer, it is only 5pm and it is still quite light. And it is warmer, I am wearing much less layers. I will still be insanely busy next week and the week after, and then less so but still quite busy. Yet the idea of February is quite welcome, despite a lot of work it should be good. A bit more socialising maybe, progress at work I hope, maybe I will manage to begin writing up my results. And of course lots of food to cook! I think we should have a bake sale. That way I have an excuse to bake stuff. And people's birthday's are coming, so cakes will be required! Lot's of chocolate cakes! Which is good because I have some recipes that I have not tried yet, I do not possess the perfect chocolate cake recipe so that will be what I work on for the next couple of months. My distraction from work. It's either that or get me a dog. And that's not really a feasible option at all.

Another week has gone by, so here is a really long ramble ...

So I think I ended the last post somewhere around banana cake. I gotta say, the banana cake was a hit yet personally I thought it was rather average. It was just not moist enough, I used the Edmond's recipe, but from now on I think I will use three bananas instead of two. And of course I made sure to make a really rich chocolate icing, which makes everything good. You see over here they don't seem to eat banana cake, everybody was quite interested as to what it was. They thought it was banana bread, and I said no it is cake. But, people say, if you put it in a loaf tin and make it bread shaped it would be banana bread. So I had to explain no, cake and bread are very different, the mixture is different, the texture is different. If I put this recipe in a loaf tin it would still be banana cake, just in loaf shape. I tried banana bread actually, it didn't really work and I didn't get the big deal. I would rather make cake.

So as for work, it is as life-consuming as usual only it is starting to get to me and I find myself slacking off. Sure, I work long hours, but I am not getting quite so much done. Still a lot done but it is just never ending. And I can't find the time to do research, to read and learn new stuff. There is a website, PhD comics. Today's comic really illustrates how my life is right now:

So you see this is why I have nothing to talk about. After work I am so worn out, I come home and read my book. So far this year I have gotten through a pile of books already. I read The Butcher Boy, an old Irish story. It is about a young man that is slowly driven insane by his circumstances in life. It was quite sad really, a bit awful. I also read Pompeii, I historical novel with a difference - that being that instead of being something to do with the English royal family it had an entirely different setting. Made a nice change. And it was very good. You always know that a book is really good when you are annoyed at it for ending. I also just read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I had been wanting to get my hands on it for some time now, I thought it would be a good spoof. The concept is good, it surely could have been hilarious. Sadly, it was not. It was rather poorly executed. It didn't make me laugh once. So not only was it a very poor piss-take but it ruined the real satire of the original Jane Austen novel. So now I must find another book to make my day better.

Of course, that is actually rather misleading because there is nothing wrong with my day today at all. I only spent about three hours at work, I went grocery shopping and I watched a movie. And now I am cooking. I am going to have a bunch of friends over tomorrow, really just to give me a reason to cook lots of food. Hopefully they can all entertain themselves. See what I really want to make is pumpkin pie. Only it will be butternut pie because you don't get pumpkins to eat here which is very stupid. And I want to make a proper chocolate brownie too, one so rich that it makes you sick just to think of it.

So in order to have a reason to bake yummy things I will invite friends over for dinner. I am going to make a vegetable lasagna, which I am right now making the sauce for. Then I will prepare the pie filling. Tomorrow I will only have to make soup, put together the lasagna, make a nice salad and do the chocolate brownie. It is still really cold here so it is very neccessary to have soup. Plus I really love lentil soup, it was my favourite thing to eat in Abu Dhabi, and I want to share the joy of good lentil soup. A friend will bring home-made bread. Here in Ireland they eat soda-bread, which is a non-yeast bread, it uses baking soda instead. And it is really good. It's more cake like than normal bread, a little bit sweet, you can put nuts and seeds and anything you like in it, and it's particularly good once it has gotten cold, spread with butter and honey.

After my weekend of entertaining hopefully I will feel ready to face another week of work. The really insanely hard work is sort of my own fault because I signed up to demonstrate the first-year zoology practical labs. But it's for a really good cause, I will put the money I'm getting for it on my student loan. It's not much but better than nothing. Only this last week the lab was terribly boring, they had to dissect earthworms and mussels. I think I preferred looking down the microscope. Even though I did have to go through so many microscope slides I had dreams about them.

January

So it is January, I can't even remember the last time I wrote, probably not for some time because I am not doing anything much interesting to write about. I am just working, that is all I do. And now it has started raining properly again, more and more rain, it is very dreary. Last week I managed to melt plastic in the dishwasher - it turns out that not all plastic should go in the dishwasher. I needed that stuff, but I've sorted it now so no worries. What's worse is that this week while I was quickly using the microscope I managed to knock my slide box off of the desk, and it was open, and all of my microscope slides fell out and smashed. That's not so good. But luckily today it stopped raining long enough for me to go to the aquarium, which is technically work but seems like a break.

 An anenome

 A scorpion fish

 Crayfish

 And a tunicate, which is really interesting because it is actually a chordate, so it does not look like an animal but is more closely related to us than, say, a crab, or a worm. And all of that is interesting because I am a scientist, and I like all sorts of facts.

 And since I have no interesting things to write about lately, no travels, not even much in the way of funny stories because I just am working so much, instead I will tell you that I baked delicious biscuits on wednesday, tonight I am baking banana cake. And my biscuit recipe? Well they were my classic, world famous (in my world that is) chocolate chippie biscuits, and since I am not longer there to bake them for everybody, here is my recipe:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Cream 125 grams of butter with 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup white sugar. When it is light and fluffy, beat in 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 egg.

So next sift into the mixture 1 and 3/4 cups of plain flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt and 1 teaspoon cocoa powder. Mix well and then stir in 200 grams of chopped chocolate.

Roll the mixture into balls, press lightly onto an oven tray and bake for 10 minutes.

And enjoy!

Back in Galway

So here I am in Galway again and strangely enough it is a whole new year. The snow has gone away and it is raining again. It has actually been oddly warm, but then even 0 degrees is warm after -15. I have already started work sadly. I mean, it's not all bad, today would be the first day that I was working all year! Sounds strange to say that. And it went well, but one day going well when I supposedly am supposed to finish all of what I am currently working on in only two months is not actually so much. To top it off, I seem to have a cold. That sucks.

But you know for awhile it was 2010 here for me but already 2011 in New Zealand. Isn't that the weirdest thing? Only everybody was too busy celebrating so there was nobody online for me to tell at the time. As for celebrations here - the strangest thing happened that night. People were out, as they do, partying it up in the early hours of the morning, and apparently these three clubs, all owned by the same people, have some huge tax issue and were liquidated. Only the tax people for some reason showed up at 2 am on the 1st of January, shut the bars down and took away all their stock! I guess the pub owners had been given till January the 1st and the tax people took it very literally. So many people welcomed the New Year and said goodbye to their favourite pubs all at once.

So to exemplify my resolve to at least begin the new year with hard work (and it is not so much a New Year's resolution as a general resolution because I've been saying I need to work harder for months) here is a pretty picture that I took today, I'm not going to bother explaining it because I don't really see that there is any point and then there is the whole intellectual property thing. But these things can be nice to look at without knowing what the hell you are seeing. So ...