Toby asked for broccoli cheese soup last night. It’s so unusual for him to voluntarily eat anything green that I went home via the vege shop for two heads of broccoli.

I winged the recipe, but it was something like this.

Chop & fry a couple hundred grams of bacon (six-eight middle rashers). In the bacon fat, fry a chopped red onion. When you get to the point where you need more grease so you can sweat the onions properly, add 75g butter.

Let that simmer for a bit, until the onion is translucent. Stir in a 1/4 cup of flour (you’re making a weird bacony roux here). Once that’s mixed, quickly pour in a bottle of beer or cider (we had cider on hand so I used that).

While this is going on, chop your broccoli heads (I had two), and nuke them to speed up cooking time.

Once you have your alcoholic roux going on, add in about 100g of grated cheddar, stir. Add three cups of milk, and the broccoli.

Add cracked pepper, 1/2tsp of paprika, some sage, celery seeds. Simmer gently for half an hour until the broccoli is squishy.

Makes five or six bowls, depending on hunger of consumers.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

Someone posted something (on facebook, natch) that got me thinking.

I don’t want to be needed. Need implies someone is dependent on me. Need implies that I am something they can’t get anywhere else. Need implies weakness, that only I can fill a gap, that they have no choice but to depend on me. Need implies that I have no choice but to be there for that person, because there is something that they require of me that I have no choice but to fulfill. Need requires things of me, whether I wish to give them or not.

I want to be wanted. I want someone to be strong, to be able to live without me, to have choices and options and freedom. I want to be chosen. Want implies strength, the power of choice. I want people in my life that have other options, who choose me anyway, because I am something that they want in their lives, because they could live without me and freely choose me. Want allows me a choice; I can choose to fill someone’s wants, or I can choose not to, knowing that I may make someone’s life richer for ceding to their wants. If I am wanted, it is because I make someone’s life better, not because I merely make their life bearable.

I don’t want to be a need. I need to be a want.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

Last night took me from “I have no idea what dinner’s going to be” to “pasta with bacon and gouda / blue brie sauce” inside of about 40 minutes.

Here’s how it went down:

Remove bacon from freezer, nuke enough it can be chopped.

Pasta spirals + water + cast iron pan + stove.

Cast iron frypan + butter + olive oil + stove.

Chop bacon, apply to pan.

Rummage fridge for further ideas. Apply onion to pan.

Decide on cheese sauce, realise no milk, add white wine to pan. Add red wine to self, from last night’s open bottle. Add parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, celery seeds. Add 50g butter and potato flakes to thicken. Add large dollop of sour cream (see: no milk). Add water to thin sauce somewhat.

Rummage cheese drawer, find end of gouda and half a blue brie wheel. Chop both (after removing white rind from brie), add to pan. Add heaping tablespoon of tomato paste.

Rummage fridge further, find tupperware with leftover misc veges. Chop finely, add to sauce as pretence that we are civilised adults that eat our veges.

Discover that by some miracle, you have cooked four servings of dinner on an evening when you are feeding four adults.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

It occurred to me this evening that I MIGHT want to review my definition of ‘easy’, where cooking is concerned.

I made devilled sausages, with spinach served over rice. I considered this a very easy dinner to make.

If I explode the process out, though…

Put rice & water in saucepan, apply heat. (This bit: actually easy by anyone’s standards.) Less straightforward: saucepan is cast iron and holds heat beautifully, making it harder to burn rice.

Heat cast iron pan with butter & olive oil. Yes, both, I like mixing my fats in the cast iron. (Have cast iron pan. Have appropriate heat source for cast iron pan. Know how to clean cast iron pan, rendering it usable in future.)

Chop onion, apply to pan. Remove sausages from freezer (buy sausages, place in freezer…), nuke briefly, chop into half rounds, apply to pan. (Have sharp knife and good chopping boards.)

Apply tomato paste, water, jar of home-made apple sauce (.. yeah, that easy thing?), home made chilli sauce (… again), stock from freezer (…).

Turn to spice rack, add celery seeds, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Previously, have spices organised enough that they actually live in that order in spice rack. Spice rack has ‘herbs’ in top layer, ‘less used herbs’ in bottom layer. Other spice rack has ‘curry’ in top rack, ‘baking’ in bottom rack. There is also a herb drawer. We will not discuss the herb drawer. You could get lost in there and go on adventures.

Simmer until sauce magically occurs. Thicken with potato flakes.

Apply spinach from freezer to pan, simmer until spinach melts.

Serve over the rice, which you have supervised and ensured cooked & not stuck to saucepan.

Dinner took me about 40 minutes in clock time. About, oh, ten minutes of that was active cooking, the rest was dishwashing, stirring, drinking wine and talking crap with Kazz…

Yes, I consider this an easy dinner. But there is a shitload of work, preparation, skill, and I don’t know, How Food And/Or Kitchen Works 101 under the hood there.

Easy for me, but that’s quite a privilege.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been trying to post this for awhile and every version wavers between stupid or ridiculously pretentious. I am giving up and sharing it anyway.

Mum used to wonder, when I was a kid, where I got my love for the sad music from. We’re very different, me and Mum – she’s a cheerful soul, through and through. Not that she’s never unhappy – her life’s had its share of grief – but she’s fundamentally an upbeat person.

I’m not unhappy, but I experience the world a different way.

I gravitated to the music in the minor keys, with the haunting refrains; the passionate, the angry, the sad, the quiet mourning. I remember discovering Bela Bartok and Debussy and being thrilled by them. And later, my piano teacher giving me Michael Nyman’s sheet music to The Piano.

Neither she nor my mother had seen the film; I suspect they’d have considered it deeply inappropriate for teenage Emma.

Music was always an outlet for me. A mental exercise, something I could work at and get right. Something that makes me happy. Something that reaches right into my heart and lets me express what I’m feeling.

When I got access to the ‘net, I started acquiring my own sheet music. I remember finding Michael Hsiao (who no longer seems to exist online), and revelling in a series of three songs – Insanity, Rage, and After. My mother always knew when I’d had a bad day at uni – I’d come home and throw myself at the piano, and she’d leave me in peace to work the angry out.

The same applies to the music I listen to. Sometimes I like the sad songs. The ones about heartbreak and loss and grieving, anger and fear and doubt and trouble. In some way, they make me happy.

We’re not encouraged to talk about the hard things. If someone asks “How are you?” they expect “Great!” as a response. Even among friends, it’s hard to say “I’m struggling”. We can’t say we’re sad, we’re upset, we’re depressed, we don’t know what to do. Or even if we do know what to do, and we just need to be allowed to be sad for awhile while we work through it.

I think I like the sad songs because, in order to write them, someone had to live them. They had to experience sadness. They had to say goodbye to a lover, to a friend, to a parent or child. They had to live with fear and stress and depression. And they chose to take that experience, to voice the sadness and make something from it.

So when I gravitate to these songs, it’s not because I want to wallow in sadness. I don’t want to remain upset, hurt, worried, stressed, sad. I gravitate to them because in times of trouble, I’m reminded that it’s possible to take the pain and build something beautiful.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

I’ve worn glasses since I was five. They’re not exactly my favourite thing.

I hated wearing glasses at school. They were ugly, they got in the way, they fell off my face, a particular little toad by the name of Natasha took delight in taking them off my face and throwing them away so I had to go looking for them and constantly got in trouble for being late back from P.E. as a result…
… You know, I was a bit of a thick child, it never occurred to me to tell the teacher why I was always late back. Anyway.

Then there was the time I was running around the playground, jumped off a piece of equipment, glasses fell as I jumped and I couldn’t change my trajectory in time not to land on them. My mum was PISSED OFF that time, as I’d just got that pair a week earlier.

I do remember the pair of glasses that had little cherries on the corners. Looking back, they must have been horrendously ugly, but I loved them.

I basically avoided wearing my glasses as much as humanly possible, until somewhere around age ten when I realised I couldn’t see anything useful, ever, and had to do something about it.

I had horrendous enormous glasses until I was about nineteen, when I got my first contacts and flatly refused to wear glasses ever again. Then Toby convinced me into a pair of remarkably fashionable frames (the year I was 23, I think?), which I’m still wearing eight years later. Plus contacts, except I work in IT, and staring at screens + aircon = easily dried-out eyes = contacts not my friend in the office.

So. Today, I had the initial “do you qualify?” appointment for iLasik surgery. Never expected to hear the line “you have lovely thick corneas”, but apparently I have lovely thick corneas. How about that.

So yes, in a couple of weeks, I am having my eyes lasered. I was amused at some of the warnings – no swimming, no makeup for a week, etc. I realise they do have to explicitly tell people these things, but … common sense really isn’t any more, is it? Like, yes, I’ve just had my eyeball CUT OPEN of course I will go sticking FOREIGN OBJECTS right up against it and risk eye infections. Durrrrr.

Laser eyes, baby! No more glasses! No more contacts! No more waking up blind going “where are the glasses, where”? No more fluffing about with contacts for dance events.

I am cheerfully excited about this. LASER EYES!!

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

I experimented with cheesecake last night. I’ve never enjoyed doing the painful crush-biscuits-with-butter exercise for a cheesecake base, especially as we don’t /buy/ biscuits so I have to make them and THEN crush them and ugh.

So, experiment.
200g butter, melted
1c flour
1c sugar
three or four? cups of fine dessicated coconut.
Mixed all of the above with a little cinnamon spice mix until it was the appropriate melted-butter-squashable texture that a cheesecake base should be. Squished into a springform tin, then baked for 20 mins in a 180c oven to brown and crisp it up some. (With less butter, this is my apple crumble topping mixture.)

While that was baking, beat together 1kg of cream cheese, 2 tins of sweetened condensed milk, about 1/4 c lemon juice, a slosh of brandy. When the base came out the oven, I added gelatine to the cheesecake mix (it’ll firm up without it, but I like the risk being removed). Poured the cheesecake over the base, allowed to set.

Once that layer set, I threw mixed berries, water, mixed berry sauce from the fridge, and more gelatine in a saucepan, turned it into sauce, and poured over the top. Obviously this layer could be anything (I considered banana nut jam as an option too, and didn’t have enough passionfruit).

Yum yum yum. (Image recycled, as I broke into the cheesecake to eat it before taking pictures.)

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

It was fifth wedding anniversary yesterday (where DID the time go?)

Toby waited till I got home from Paddington Thursday night, and it was officially past midnight, then exploded in a CAN’T WAIT ANY MORE MUST GIVE PRESENT NOW.

He’s built me a new computer (it’s been a while since I had a new one) in a mini-ITX case I’ve been lusting after. Geek love.

Fortunately his present was also well received. Fifth anniversary is ‘supposed’ to be wood, and he loves fountain pens, so…. his eyes lit up when he saw it, it was great.

Friday night we went out for a pretty low key dinner (Flying Burrito Brothers – service a bit meh but delicious). It was a lovely day.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

There’s a few people in my friend’s circle doing the 101-things-in-1001-days. It’s our fifth wedding anniversary today, so I’m starting mine now, and I’m going to fudge the 1001 days bit to “my 35th birthday”, as I’m more likely to actually remember when that end date is!

My list is in Dropbox, and has 60 things on it so far. I figure I’ll work out more life goals as I go. It’s a stupidly organised Excel spreadsheet, which at least makes me feel like I’ll pretend some accountability to myself!

Some of them are small – make gnocchi that doesn’t suck, for example. Some are large – achieve a new roof on the house (oh god, that will be expensive).

Here’s to documented achievements.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.

One of my missions in life is to find vegetarian dishes that my husband will eat, without asking where the meat in the meal is.

For whatever reason, it occurred to me on Saturday that I’d never made felafel before. As I have a bunch of chickpeas in the freezer – I soak/boil beans and chickpeas etc in bulk then freeze – why not?

Approx 600g of frozen chickpeas
1 bunch frozen parsley (or dried equiv)
~4 tbsp coriander
1c chopped onion
~3tbsp ground cumin
~3tbsp paprika
Slosh sweet chilli sauce
1/2tsp celery seeds
One or two eggs
Breadcrumbs
Wholemeal flour

Whizz chickpeas and onion through blender. Add spices. Mix until approximately meatballs consistency, adding egg / breadcrumbs / flour as required.

Leave in fridge for an hour to soak.

Add more flour now if required.

Shallow fry in 1/8 cup balls, in a mix of something+sesame oil.

They were utterly utterly delicious, served in tortillas with salsa, spinach, carrot, capsicum, and sour cream.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.