pedanther | Entries tagged with cooking

. By way of procrastination, I spent this morning making a master list of all the games I have on various game platforms. Between Steam, Epic, and Origin, I have 230 games, of which I've actually played maybe a quarter. (I keep picking things up on sales, in bundles, or from Epic's weekly free game offer, that I might want to play at some point. The thing about these game platforms is that until you actually play the game it's not taking up any space on your computer or on your shelves, so you never think about running out.) Only four overlaps in the end, which is not bad; all of them cases where I picked up a game in one of Epic's free game offers that I already had somewhere else.

Invisible, Inc. and Star Realms are still my two most-played games, as they were last time I mentioned it. The number three spot is currently occupied by ShellShock Live, a side-view tank-fighting game that reminds me a lot of Scorched Earth, the side-view tank-fighting game that we all spent so much time playing when I was in high school.

. The Christmas Show has come and gone. I've heard people from both the audience and the cast-and-crew say that it was the most fun they've had at a Rep Club show in a long time. I'm a bit worried because the fact that it went so smoothly on the cast-and-crew side was down to a confluence of various factors that are unlikely to be repeated in quite the same combination, and I hope that doesn't mean I'm going to be holding whatever we do next to an unfairly high standard.

. Game Maker's Tool Kit has released its annual video looking at how this year's video games did well or poorly when it came to accessibility.

. The brass band's end-of-year party is this afternoon. We did end up getting in a few play-outs this year, playing Christmas carols at various events. We've ended up with one more engagement tomorrow, after the official end-of-year: the local monthly market day is facing an uncertain future due to a shortage of volunteers, and this month's will be the last until further notice; we used to play the markets every month, and they asked us particularly to come and play again for what might be the last one ever.

. Since I made the toad-in-the-hole for the family gathering, I've had a couple more goes at baking: another toad-in-the-hole, and a batch of muffins. The toad-in-the-hole was okay, but the muffins were a definite success. One of the difficulties with attempting baking at the "occasional experiment" level is that nobody around here sells eggs in quantities of less than six or milk in quantities of less than a litre, so after the toad-in-the-hole and the muffins I was still left with a couple of eggs and half a bottle of milk; when I didn't immediately have another baking project to use them in, they sat in the fridge looking reproachful and eventually had to be carefully disposed of, an experience which didn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm for another attempt.

. The Rep Club has begun rehearsals for our annual Christmas show, which this year will be a version of Sleeping Beauty. (The coronavirus is pretty much under control in this part of the world, and theatres are allowed to have audiences although there are still requirements in place for socially distanced seating.) I'm playing the butler/chamberlain/dogsbody, who I would describe as the comic relief except that this is the kind of show where everybody is the comic relief at some point. It's more that most of the other characters are also necessary to the plot in some way, while my character is only there for comic relief and the occasional bit of exposition. I'm enjoying it immensely.

. Our roleplaying campaign has brought us to a town where there's currently an election campaign going on. One of the candidates is a big-spending jerk who's whipping up prejudice against non-humans. (I haven't asked, but I'm pretty sure all of this was actually in the campaign sourcebook.) Despite this, he's been friendly to our adventuring team the couple of times we've encountered him, and even offered us work, even though none of us are human: the cleric is a tabaxi (cat-person), the ranger is a verdan (a goblinoid race specific to this campaign setting), the rogue is a halfling (like a hobbit, but less trademarked), and the fighter is a warforged (a kind of magic-powered robot). During our second conversation with this guy, we figured out why: he's apparently never heard of warforged, and is under the impression that our team is led by a human warrior in an unusually elaborate set of armor.

. I've given up on the discipline of wearing work clothes on work days: I decided to make an exception one time because I was behind on the laundry and didn't have any work clothes to wear, and my everyday clothes were so much more comfortable that I extended the exception indefinitely.

. One of the things I've been doing to pass time this month has been working through back episodes of the Youtube channel Marie Clare's World, where a fan of 21st-century Doctor Who is watching and posting reaction videos to the original series. Part of what makes it interesting to me is that she's managed to go into it not knowing anything except what she's picked up from references in newWho, so she knows roughly how many Doctors and what they look like, but not when or how they enter and leave the series, and that the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master and Sarah Jane are in there somewhere, but again not exactly when, and basically nothing else. So she's going in knowing that this is the kind of thing she likes, but as unprepared for the plot twists and such as the original audience would have been (or even less, in some cases where the original audience would have seen it splashed over the papers beforehand). She's enjoying it a lot, too; she's appreciating the old special effects on their own merits and finding something good to say about nearly every story, even the ones at which Received Fan Wisdom tends to turn up its nose. And she's been devastated by some of the companion and Doctor departures.

. A little while ago I made toad-in-the-hole for a family gathering, using the old recipe we used to make it all the time when we were children. I think this is the first time I've baked something from scratch basically on my own; the sibling whose house we were gathering in kept an eye on me but didn't intervene except to tell me which cupboard things were in, and the one time when the batter went weird. The trouble was that the recipe starts "For batter, use the pancake recipe with half the milk and twice the eggs", and then the pancake recipe requires the milk to be added in two stages, half before beating and half after -- and then on top of that we were doubling all the quantities to make enough for the whole family -- and I lost track of how many halves that made and ended up with too much milk in the mixture so we had to improvise to get the proportions vaguely right again. In turned out pretty good, and I'm open to the idea of trying this baking thing again at some point.

. It's been that kind of day. I got up, got dressed, started the washing machine, poured milk on my breakfast, and fell down a task fixation rabbit hole until I had to go to a lunch meeting, at which point I remembered I hadn't eaten the breakfast yet. The washing machine I didn't remember until nearly dinner time. (Fortunately it's good drying weather.) On the plus side, I've definitely done my bit for crowd-sourced internet reference works today.

. In my first year living in this house, I'd never been able to figure out how to get the oven going, which was a pity because it seems like a much nicer oven than the ones in the last two houses I've lived in. (To be fair to the oven, I wasn't trying very hard; each time I failed, I took a few months to get around to trying again.) I knew it wasn't the gas, because I sorted that out on an earlier attempt, which got the stove and the griller working but not the oven. It turns out that there's a safety feature where the oven won't ignite unless you're pushing in on the temperature dial at the same time.

To celebrate, last night I revised the subject of "preheating an oven" and then cooked one of a popular brand of frozen pizzas. It's fairly filling and you get from frozen to plated in less than half an hour, but that's about all that can be said for it. Some of the other things I've obtained to try out look more promising.

. On Friday night, I went to the out-of-town tryout for an improv comedy show one of my friends is working on. The premise is that it's a memorial service for [insert name here]; at the beginning, one of the actors in the role of a funeral director asks the audience to "remind" him the name of the deceased and what one thing everyone remembers them for, and then the improv troupe takes over and invents the rest of the dear departed's biography as they go along, with eulogies, flashbacks, a tribute song, and a dramatic emotional confession that casts everything in a whole new light. On this occasion, we heard the life story of Wezz Roberts, who put aside his own needs to fulfill his father's dream of a son who was a star trombonist, despite only having one lung and also, it developed, lacking several other significant body parts. It was a lot of fun, and weirdly heartwarming in places, and I would absolutely go and see another rendition of the show if it makes it into full production.

. The current New York revival of Fiddler on the Roof is notable for several things, among them that it's directed by Broadway legend Joel Grey, but most importantly that it's performed entirely in Yiddish. There are subtitles, apparently, which is good because I want to see this and I only know as much Yiddish as you pick up by osmosis from listening to New York comedians. An Australian transfer is opening later this year; I think it's unlikely to be one of the few musicals that makes it over to this side of the continent, so I'm seriously contemplating making the pilgrimage east to see it.

Here is the New York cast, and Broadway legend Joel Grey, performing at last year's Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Easter Bonnet fundraiser (they got judged "Best Presentation", according to the video blurb).

. Baen recently published a collection of Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric novellas, set in the same world as The Curse of Chalion. If I have this right, this marks their first appearance in a hardcover dead-tree edition, and also their first appearance in a DRM-free ebook edition.

Achievement Unlocked: Preheated the Oven
Achievement Unlocked: Heated the Frozen Dinner
Achievement Unlocked: Lesson Learned - the Picture On the Packet Means Nothing

In the past fortnight I have twice cooked dinner for myself in the frying pan I bought months ago for the purpose and then never got around to using. The results of the first attempt were... not encouraging, but I figured the principle of getting back on the horse you fell off applied, and the second attempt was much more successful. I believe I have increased the number of cooking-related things I don't believe myself to be incapable of.

The first attempt came about because I'd received medical advice that I should be eating more fish (and less deep-fried food, which meant that my standing method of obtaining fish in the form of -and-chips wasn't going to cut it). I figured that pan-frying fish ought to be fairly easy, especially once I discovered that the supermarket sold fish ready-to-go with instructions on the wrapper and everything.

The result of the first attempt was charred, unpleasantly textured, and accompanied by remarkable amounts of smoke. Consultation of cooking authorities, on the internet and in the form of my parents, led to the conclusion that I'd used too much heat and not enough oil. (I also realised, when I went back for the second attempt, that I'd neglected to remove the barcode label from the underside of the pan. I haven't decided yet whether to tell my parents about this discovery.)

The second attempt went without a hitch, and produced a nice meal and a complete absence of unpleasant smokey haze. There may be something to this cooking lark after all...

I have boiled an egg. It came out quite well.

(And I don't just mean that, unlike the last cooking milestone I posted about, this time the saucepan survived.)

Sitting here eating what is, to the best of my recollection, the first meal I ever cooked all by myself, not counting simple stuff like toasted sandwiches. (Whether it's a true first or not, it's significant that I had to postpone the attempt for a couple of days when I realised that I didn't own half the equipment called for in the instructions. Including a proper-sized saucepan.) Like so many things one puts off doing for a long time, it was much more easy and painless than I had vaguely expected.

...

Honesty requires me to admit that the meal came out of one of those packets where most of the work has been done for you already. But I still think it counts - if only because I spent too long re-reading Step Two, and it caught on the bottom of the pan. Burnt bits automatically make a meal more authentic, right?