Domestic Goddess

I made fried rice! I made fried rice! All by myself! (except for Leonie telling me what to do.) Mum would be so proud. I'm so pleased. It looks like mum's fried rice. I took photos to prove to show mum when she comes back.

Look mum! No recipes!

*wide grin*

Joan's recipe for fried rice

• Leftover rice (up to one week old)
  
• Leftover bolognese sauce
  
• Leftover sausage
  
• Frozen peas
  
• Frozen corn
  
• Egg, beaten
  
• Leftover dumpling sauce (soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, chilli, sesame oil)

1. Fry sausage in a spoonful of oil.
   
2. Add peas and corn. Take mixture out of pan.
   
3. Fry beaten egg. Add to previous mixture.
   
4. Fry bolognese sauce.
   
5. Add rice.
   
6. Add egg/corn/peas/sausage mixture.
   
7. Taste. If too bland, add dumpling sauce to taste

How to get a boyfriend -- slow version

1. Meet people through an extracurricular or extraworkular activity. Choose something you enjoy or are inspired by.
   
2. Join the committee.
   
3. Find the target boy.
   
4. Work on a project with him. Is he still interesting? Is he friend material too? If yes...
   
5. Slip in a social comment into official business emails or phone calls. If he responds in like, then the odds are looking better.
   
6. Make ambiguous comments that can be interpreted either way (ie. I'm flirting / I'm a friendly person).
   
7. Go on a group social outing. Maybe go out to celebrate the success of a committee project.
   
8. Find an excuse to invite him on a one-on-one outing. Maybe establish that you are a fan of (some cuisine / an obscure artist or film director / rock climbing / macrame) and pretend you happen to have voucher for a meal at (a restaurant that serves said cuisine / the Melbourne International Film Festival / a rock-climb-a-thon / a macrame short course). Whatever the excuse, make your sentiments ambiguous. It's still too early to risk anything too much.
   
9. Go on "date". Be yourself but at your best.
   
10. If he's responded receptively but not declared his like for you, then repeat "dates". Don't try to define anything yet.
    
11. I'm not sure what happens now. Maybe up the ante by leaning into him or initiating casual physical closeness. If he doesn't step back...
    
12. Ask him out on a Date. If he agrees, you are now going out.

Hooray! Now that you have obtained your boyfriend, you need to do some work to keep him. Keep an eye out for Joan's tips on how to lay the foundations of a good relationship.

See you next time!

Goodbye for now

Now I'm going to the airport to say goodbye to Damjan.

Light lunchtime reading

"Wiki wiki wiki...!"
(spins the platters like a DJ)

So not ready

My parents have gone on a holiday.

They've done this before, so irresponsible *grumble* *grumble*

The last time they did this, they left me two weeks worth of food, carefully packaged, labelled and frozen. This time, because now I've "grown up", they've only left me one week of food.

They've been gone for four days. I've forgot to put the rubbish out yesterday. The house is getting messier and messier. I ate instant noodles for lunch instead of my usual gourmet lunchbox of home cooking (it was planned, I swear!). The laundry is waiting to be folded. There is a pile of unopened letters on the coffee table (at least I brought them in!). I left my umbrella at work. I left my keys at work. I had a field day disaster. I haven't finished my homework. My head hurted.

Mummy!

*sob sob whimper*

Need chocolate. Lonely...

There, there, Joan. Don't cry. Here, have some Panadol. Okay, now make a list of all the things you need to do.

1. Open letters.
   
2. Send letters.
   
3. Collect rubbish.
   
4. Bring in laundry.
   
5. Make lunch.
   
6. Tidy room.
   
7. Tidy house.
   
8. Plan meals, go shopping, cook.
   
9. Do homework.
   
10. Rig timesheet to hide the time wasted on field day diasaster.

See? Not so hard after all.

Smashing Bollywood taboos

Since Kate started going out with Avi (of Indian Mauritius background), she's become a fan of Bollywood. Bollywood films are fairy tale musical extravaganzas. They are epic (read: long), full of spontaneous singing and dancing. They are always love stories with happy endings -- all without the audience ever seeing the lovebirds kiss, let alone "get it on".

However, the new Bollywood film Salaam Namaste shows (or at least suggests) the main characters going all the way. The blatantcy is unprecedented.

Unsuspecting, Kate and Avi went to the Thursday night showing of Salaam Namaste. Kate described it to me. "The movie is set in Australia. The main characters are like, kissing, which was shocking enough. But then they go into a white gauzy tent on top of a hill. You can't see anything but you can see the shadows! You could see what was going on. CONTROVERSY! I hissed to Avi, 'Close your eyes! Close your eyes! ...Otherwise, take notes.' It was so romantic..."

The Trouble with Trooble

Damjan and I made up a word about a year ago.

trooble n. pl. troobles: a word having the same sequence of numbers as another word when typed on a telephone keypad. eg. Good is a trooble of home. Joan is a trooble of loan.

Why trooble? Because a carelessly used trooble can result in trouble.

It's a handy word. I've decided to immortalise it on my blog because if 'trooble' starts appearing in the English language, the etymologists can unequivocally assert its origins.

That's right, folks. You heard it here first.

Go with the flowchart

Imagine a large major hazard facility with lots of pipes. Now imagine you have to do a environmental and health risk assessment on the site. Think of all the ways chemicals can enter the environment -- groundwater, air, soil, marine, freshwater. Think of all the different effects it can have on ecosystems, people's health, irrigation, animal drinking water, industrial water use.

Okay. Now draw a picture of these pathways and impacts.

This is what I've been doing for the past week. I've been doing conceptual modelling of one of the biggest chemical processing plants in the southern hemisphere. These flowcharts have taken up maybe 20 A3 pieces of paper.

The logic and breadth of the task has hurt my brain but finally I have settled on seven exposure pathways.

Now I have to translate my pencil scribblings into something pretty for a report. I called the IT department to ask if the company had any flowcharting software. "Well, some people use Microsoft Visio," they told me, "but we've run out of licences for it."

Oh.

I hopped on the internet to look for open source or freeware flowcharting programs. If someone had programmed The Gimp (graphics editor), Inkscape (vector drawing program) and Freemind (mind mapping software) -- all of which are installed on my computer at work -- surely someone had put together something that lets me connect boxes together, right?

Well, no. I spent two hours looking for something, anything that would help me avoid the hell of creating diagrams in Microsoft Word. It turns out any satisfactory software out requires purchase (the trials create advertising watermarks on the flowcharts). There is the open source Dia for Windows, which I was excited to discover. However, the program resizes text in unpredictable ways. The errors in the latest version was far more trouble that it was worth.

In the end, I bashed my way through Microsoft Word. It's not the most efficient way to create flowcharts but at least I know how it behaves.

Sigh.

The irony is that because I'm charged out to clients at almost $100 an hour, the two hours I spent looking for efficient software was $200 that could have been spent on buying a Visio licence or other software, which I could have used in future risk assessments.

Apologies for the dull post.

Just desserts for consultants

Our company arranged for us an eight hour training session with RMIT's School of Geological Engineering. We environmental specialists were to learn how to classify soil consistently. We would get hands-on experience reading geological maps and differentiating between silty clay with sand inclusions, and sandy silt with gravel inclusions.

Our lecturer, Paulino, greeted us with abrupt enthusiasm. Seventeen of us sat in the soils laboratory, our legs dangling from high chairs. Paulino introduced himself and turned on his Powerpoint presentation.

"Look! I have new gadget!" he announced in his occasionally incomprehensible (Italian? Portuguese?) accent. With a flourish, he waved in front of us a stubby metallic wand. "See? It's laser pointer and... Ah ha! Changes slides too." The presentation jumped ahead. He clicked backwards then forwards.

We were suitably impressed.

"I only got it yesterday," he said. He looked at us all slyly. "I charged it to you guys, you know."

There was silence as we absorbed this news.

"Don't look at me like that!" he cried in glee. "I know your type! Always charging things to jobs. Consultants! That's what you do. Well -- now I charge you!"

It was true and we knew it. We all began laughing.

"Of course, Paulino," Sherri affirmed. Sherri is the team leader for contaminated land in the Environment Group. "Of course you should charge your new gadget to the company. In fact, you should have bought an even more expensive one!"

Lightbulb moment

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

Multi-multi-tasking

I've always been a computer multitasker. Back when we were running unstable comupters at home (ie. Windows 95), my computer nerd brother Jason used to get so frustrated with me because he'd see eight programs sitting on my taskbar. At work, when Miriam briefly sat at my computer to open a file, she was boggled by the fifteen programs I had open. I alt-tab and control-T in my sleep.

I'm like an insatiable energy gorging monster alien. Every time humanity thinks it has defeated me by inventing more and more powerful computer processors, I just expand into the gap and add more programs to the taskbar. MUAHAHAHA!

However, now I have truly outdone myself. I'm at work running twelve, count 'em, twelve computers in parallel. I'm modelling all the little air particles sitting above Tasmania. All the computers are connected to one monitor, one keyboard and one mouse. I use a fancy black box to switch between computers. It's awesome. It's more than I can handle. I find myself trying to alt-tab between computers. I can barely remember what each computer is doing. It doesn't help that I'm blogging :)

The fundamental nature of rice cookers

On the cooking theme, yesterday at a bar, there was a brief yet vigorous discussion about whether or not rice cookers were the most pointless of inventions.

On one side of the ring, Tony, an Australian who had survived the trials of independent overseas living with no more than a saucepan, a stove and presumably some sort of rice-measuring device.

On the other side, six bewildered Asians who took some time to grasp the meaning of Tony's challenge. (The point of a rice cooker? Huh? Whaddya mean... It cooks rice. What? Cook rice without a rice cooker? But that's...that's crazy talk.)

I went skiing last year with fifteen friends. At least half of us were Asian. Six days without a rice cooker was inconceivable. Witness the following email excerpt from Damjan (a European) in response to five earlier (deadly serious) emails negotiating whose responsbility it would be to bring a rice cooker to Mount Buller.

*Rice Cooker*

It seems a very bulky thing to bring.  However, we've got a big group so
it might be worth bringing one for everyone to use.  Especially for
those addicted to rice.   *cough* Carlo *cough*

(Did I mention the bread has been invented??  It's cheap, easily
available, and requires no preparation!)

"Rice," Tony insisted last night, "is the easiest of foods cook. Just put a cup of it in a saucepan, add two and a half cups or whatever of water and stick it on the stove. I get perfect rice every time. Who needs a rice cooker?"

Asians need rice cookers, apparently. So maybe there are some non-Asian rice cooking masters out there like Tony but too many times, I've had to chew Westernised rice that is too soggy, dry or some disconcerting combination of soggy rice punctuated with hard uncooked grains.

Wikipedia says:

The preparation of rice has traditionally been a tricky cooking process that requires accurate timing, and errors can result in inedible undercooked or burnt rice. Rice cookers aim to avoid these problems by automatically controlling the heat and timing in the preparation of the rice, while at the same time freeing up a heating element on the range. Although the rice cooker does not necessarily speed the cooking process, the cook's involvement in cooking rice with a rice cooker is significantly reduced and simplified.

Let me conclude by asking:

• Can you cook rice on a stove, finish an hour early and keep the rice perfectly warm and fluffy until dinner time?
  
• Can you get children to cook rice on a stove?
  
• Can you prepare a dinner party for twenty by cooking ten cups of raw rice on a stove?
  
• Can you cook perfect rice every time when you are as clumsy and clueless in the kitchen as Joan is??

If you have answered "No" to any of these questions, your life would be much enriched by the purchase of a rice cooker.




Our rice cooker at home, which I plan to ask my parents for as a dowry when I am married off to a peasant farmer.

Joan's cooking adventures

"I don't know what to do for Father's Day," I lamented to Natalie during morning tea at work.

"Why don't you make him something?"

I brightened. Yeah. Yeah! I could bake dad a cake. Dad likes chocolate. I'll bake him a chocolate mud cake! With my lack of kitchen experience widely known, nothing would be more special than baking dad a cake from scratch.

On Saturday morning, I walked to the shops, clutching my internet print-out recipe. I managed to find everything except marsala. What's marsala? Some kind of cheese, I suppose. Oh wait. I need two tablespoons of it. It must be a liquid. Maybe it's a cream cheese.

I spent five minutes wandering up and down the dairy refrigerators, looking for something with the word 'marsala' in it. Nothing. Finally, I pulled out my mobile phone and called Damjan.

"Good morning, Damjan! I'm in the supermarket. I'm baking a cake for dad but I can't find something called marsala. I think it's a kind of cheese..."

"Marsala? [slight pause] It's a wine. A sweet wine. Anything fortified will do."

Wine??

I went home and read the recipe over lunch. To minimise my unco-ness, I memorised it. At 2:30 PM, I decided I was ready.

Slowly, I began chopping the chocolate. I mixed up the first stage batter. "Cook over simmering water", it said. So I filled a wok with water then floated the pot in the simmering water.

I managed to go through the recipe without any mistakes and with no help from mum, who had run away from the kitchen so that she wouldn't have to watch my clumsiness. I only had to ask her opinion once.

"Mum, I need three and a half eggs. What should I do?"

"...Just use four eggs."

What kind of recipe asks for three and a half eggs, you ask? Well, the internet recipe required 262.5 mL of cream. Yet the bottle I bought contained 300 mL. I didn't want to have 37.5 mL of cream left over. So I did the only logical thing. I increased all the quantities by 14% so that I could use all the cream. Which is why I needed 3.42 eggs.

The whole baking exercise took three hours. I went out in the evening, came back at 2:30 AM and complete the cake with frosting ("ganache") and cocoa dusting. Then I had to wash the pots and pans. What can I say, it was a late night.

The next morning, I bounced out of bed. Proudly, I served dad a slice of mud cake garnished with strawberries. "Happy Father's Day!" I said.

"That looks pretty good, Joan. Did you use all Home Brand ingredients?"

"Da-ad! Do you know I cost $99 an hour? This is an expensive cake!"

The cake turned out wonderfully. If you visit me before Tuesday, you can try a piece.

Joan's recipe for rich chocolate mud cake

• 205 g butter
  
• 228 mL thickened cream
  
• 0.38 cup castor sugar
  
• 0.285 cup brown sugar
  
• 319 g dark chocolate, chopped
  
• 2.28 tsp instant coffee
  
• 2.28 tbsp Chinese ginger cooking wine (or marsala, if you must)
  
• 3.42 eggs
  
• 1.14 cup plain flour
  
• 0.57 cup self-raising flour
  
• 0.57 cup cocoa
  
• 171 g dark choclate, extra
  
• 0.285 cup thickened cream, extra
  
• extra cocoa for dusting
  
• strawberries for garnishing

1. Combine the butter, cream, sugars, chocolate, coffee and ginger wine in a heat proof bowl.
   
2. Cook over simmering water, stirring regularly until smooth.
   
3. Allow to cool completely. Wash the cooking tools.
   
4. Beat in the eggs and fold in the sifted flours and cocoa.
   
5. Pour into a buttered and lined pan about 14% bigger than a 22 cm pan, and bake for about 46 minutes in a fan-forced oven at 152°C.
   
6. Cool. Wash the cooking tools.
   
7. Combine the extra chcolate and cream in a heat proof bowl.
   
8. Cook over simmering water, stirring until smooth.
   
9. Refrigerate until cool.
   
10. Remove cake from oven. Cool. (I thought it was, anyway.)
    
11. Go out to a party. Come back nine hours later.
    
12. Take the ganache out of the fridge. Poke it. Realise you've stuffed up because the thing's set. Put it in the microwave for 20 seconds to soften it.
    
13. Dust heavily with the cocoa in one corner. Try to spread the cocoa around the cake with a bread knife.
    
14. Wash the cooking tools.
    
15. Go to bed. I said, go to bed!

(Click here for the original recipe.)

Trouble on platforms 5 & 6

It was almost dark when I stepped out of the train at Richmond station. I hoped I didn't have to wait long for my connecting train. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something dark flying towards the train.

"THOCK!"

It rebounded off the train window. I looked down. It was a large rock, dark grey and angular. It was big. I wouldn't have been able to wrap my hand around it.

"THOCK!"

I recoiled as another rock flew by. A man staggered past me. He stopped some distance ahead. He wound up his arm again and this time I saw him hurl another rock at the departing train, throwing his entire body forward in the effort. The train passengers inside ducked back away from the window.

Alert and alarmed, I walked casually towards the downward ramp. As soon as I passed the rock-thrower, I began jogging to the ticket barriers, where I knew there would be train staff.

"Excuse me," I called to the two staff members as I approached thee exit. "There's a gentleman on platform 5 and 6 throwing rocks at trains. They're big rocks."

"Really?! What does he look like?" asked the woman.

"He's wearing a dark blue t-shirt with white writing on it. He's got dark hair, I think."

The male staff member began speaking rapidly into his radio. "There's a man throwing rocks on platforms 5 and 6..."

I waited for a short while then looked back towards the platforms. And there he was, leaning against the wall about five metres away. The rock-thrower stared balefully at me. I stepped a little bit away from the people talking into radios.

"There he is," I said in a low voice. The staff stopped talking and looked at the still man.

"That's him?"

"I think so. Yes."

The male staff member passed through the ticket barrier and walked up to the man. "Hey mate. Where are you going?"

The rock-thrower exploded into action. "I'm going home!" he shouted, stumbling away from the wall. "I wanna go home! I WANNA GO HOME!" He looked at me again then ran up the ramp.

The staff member whipped out the radio again. "He's on platforms 3 and 4 now. We'll need help..."

"Don't worry," said the woman. "We'll take it from here."

I nodded and walked backed to my train platform.