A Glimpse into the Life of a Rebelbunny

Key Lime Cheesecake

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:33:13 GMT

Key Lime Cheesecake

The crust:
200 grams (or one package) plain sweet crackers (Arnott's has several options)
150 grams unsalted butter, melted

The filling:
Two blocks Philadelphia cream cheese, softened (500 grams)
1/2 cup plain yogurt (or sour cream)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla (optional)
key lime zest (optional)
3 large eggs
Juice from two small key limes or one big one (about 1/3rd cup)
2 tablespoons cornstarch

To make crust, turn the crackers into crumbs, then add melted butter. Mix together until it looks like wet sand. Pour into a pie plate. Using a measuring cup with a flat bottom and round sides, stamp the crumbs down flat across the bottom of the pie plate and up the sides.

To make filling, first mix the cream cheese, yogurt, and sugar together.
Then mix in one egg at a time, trying not to add too much air into the batter.
Mix the key lime juice with the cornstarch, then pour into the rest of the batter.

Pour the batter into the crust.
Bake at 160 degC for about an hour.

Let it cool in the oven with the door ajar to minimise cracks, then in the fridge for at least 4 hours.

It'll have a cornstarchy texture for the first two days but you only notice it for a couple seconds before the key lime flavour kicks in.

The basic cheesecake recipe I use for every type of cheesecake I make is based on Recipe Tin Eats's Easy Classic Baked Cheesecake. There's a followup recipe for strawberry cheesecake, and it turns out to be the same thing just with strawberries mixed in. So I figured, if we can mix in strawberries, why not everything else?

I've successfully done quince cheesecake several times with the recipe as-written by just mixing in some quince jam.

For key lime pie however, the key lime juice is too watery to work as-is, so I switched out the flour from the original recipe for cornstarch, and then mix the cornstarch and lime juice together. It's still not a perfect solution because it has the cornstarch texture, but the key lime is mixed in with the batter and not sunk to the bottom or causing the whole thing to not set ("it's a umm key lime custard pie").

Other options would be to make a key lime curd across the top of plain cheesecake, or tinker with this salted caramel cheesecake recipe that underwent the same trials and tribulations as my attempts to make key lime pie.

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Winter Health Soup

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:05:13 GMT

One large daikon
One leek
2-3 carrots
Green leafy vegetable such as bok choy, spinach, etc
Tofu
A mild soup broth such as chicken, veggie, or fried onion paste
Soy sauce
A bundle of dried bean thread noodles (optional)

Cut veggies and tofu into bite-sized pieces. Put everything non-leafy into a large soup pot. Simmer for 30 minutes. Stir in the leafy bits right before turning off the heat.

Serve with sesame oil and/or hot chili oil.

Pretty much I just made all that up in the last few weeks, though it's very loosely based on a soup recipe I saw on a Korean recipe blog.

The reason I went looking for daikon soup recipes was because, when I was in Brisbane a couple months ago, we went to a Korean BBQ restaurant that had all-you-can-eat side dishes, and one of them was a super simple soup that was basically just daikon slices in a clear broth with a tiny bit of meat. It was astoundingly delicious, and reminded me of the daikon soup that my mother used to make, and I think my body was trying to tell me that I desperately needed the health benefits of eating more daikon.

There are leeks in the recipe because right before I started making daikon soup, I made Welsh cawl and discovered that I really like leeks. It's kind of like a more delicate version of a cross between onion and spring onion. So, probably a good substitute for scallions.

The carrots, I originally put in to add some colour, since otherwise it's a very white soup.

As for the green leafy vegetable, something Asian seems appropriate. My first two batches had cabbage from the garden. The "cabbage" from my garden is some sort of southeast Asian Brassica, which I'm pretty sure is one of the four varieties of mustard where one of the other varieties is used to make Szechuan spicy pickled radish/mustard. Which is yet another comfort food from my childhood that is quite hard to find in New Zealand, so I was disappointed to find out that the version I have isn't the right one.

Anyway, there's a ton of it growing in the garden. The landlords say that they were originally being grown here two tenants ago, and that said tenants ate them daily. I guess the outside conditions are just right for it to be a super weed. (Said tenants also apparently introduced cilantro, but we don't have as much of that as the cabbage.)

The third batch of this soup had bok choy because those were suddenly in season and plentiful while I was buying more daikon. It works pretty well, but since the green leafy part cooks much faster than the stem, I separated them and put the stems in with the roots, and the leaves in at the end.

Then there's tofu because I figure there should be some protein in it, and I didn't feel like messing with raw meat. Tofu only comes in two firmnesses here - "soft" or "firm." The "firm" is what I usually use for everything, though it's more of a soft-medium kind of firm (it falls apart easily when stir-fried).

For the broth, I happened to have a jar of "fried onion" flavoured paste, which I found in the soup paste aisle of the local Asian grocery. It turns out to work really well in this soup. But it should also work fine with chicken broth or vegetable broth.

The soy sauce is in there because there was soy sauce in the Korean recipe I based this on. There's a note in the Korean version to use a Korean-specific soup soy sauce because regular soy sauce is too sweet. I'm not sure what kind of soy sauce she means; my Chinese all purpose soy sauce isn't sweet at all, and is what I'm using. (Pearl River Bridge is a good brand if you have access to it, otherwise anything that is Chinese and not Japanese (or Korean?) would probably be fine. My current soy sauce is Lee Kum Kee.)

Dried bean thread noodles (they're thin and translucent) also go well in this soup. They do add a bunch of long stringy bits that make it harder to ladle out of the pot, and Brett doesn't like noodles (!) so I stopped putting them in after the second batch.

And finally, it's called "winter health soup" because somewhere on the Internet I read that it's eaten daily in the winter in east Asian places for good health.

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Welsh Cawl

Sun, 11 May 2025 06:35:21 GMT

Lamb shoulders
Topside beef steak
Lamb or beef broth
Swedes (rutabaga)
Parsnips
Carrots
Turnips
Leeks
Potatoes
Marjoram
Thyme
Black pepper

Cut all the veggies into cubes of about the same size.

Pan-sear the beef in oil (in the bottom of the soup pot).
Remove the beef and cut it into cubes of the same size as the veggies.
Put the beef back into the pot.
Add swedes, parsnips, carrots, lamb shoulders, and broth.
Simmer for at least an hour.
Stir in potatoes, leeks, marjoram, thyme, and black pepper.
Simmer for twenty more minutes.
Remove the lamb shoulders. Cut the meat from the bones and put the meat back in, or alternately, feed them to people who don't mind bone-in meat.

I first read about this soup on Facebook, but as is Facebook's wont, the post disappeared before I could record the details, but I remember mention of parsnips and swedes. The recipes I then found on the Internet all had swedes and leeks. And the recipe I eventually settled on emphasized lamb neck as the meat base for the soup, which would add gelatin and flavour.

Mostly I was interested in learning how to make yet another root veggies soup (in addition to borscht and maafe). This one has several that I've not worked with before. My first attempt used beef instead of lamb (because Brett doesn't like anything other than beef, especially if there are bones or gristle involved), and beef broth to compensate for the lack of bones. Top round seared in oil and then cut apart works out pretty well. It also didn't have turnips because I didn't find any.

Next time around, I'm figuring to do it with lamb shoulders as described in the above recipe, and depending how that goes, I might omit the broth on the third try. There were lamb shoulders at the supermarket so I assume those are easily available, while lamb neck might not be.

Other reference of note: I found out how to prep leeks via Recipe Tin Eats and swedes via this video from Utah State University.

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NZ Royal Commission Covid Inquiry Phase Two

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:19:49 GMT

Below pasted my submission to Covid Inquiry Phase Two:

( Read more... )

Submissions were collected at https://haveyoursay.covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz/
Submissions closed April 27 2025.

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New Zealand Regulatory Standards Bill - 2025 Edition

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 08:35:02 GMT

The bill in question: https://www.regulation.govt.nz/our-work/regulatory-standards-bill/
Submission due date: 13 Jan 2025
What I submitted:
( Read more... )

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Maranga Ake

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 03:50:49 GMT

The entire speech that I prepared for Nelson's #FightBackTogether #MarangaAke. I didn't end up voicing all of this, but it's what I would've said if I'd had twice the time.

( Speech Ahoy )

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Saving a link to myself

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 07:43:43 GMT

The NOAA NCEI ISO 19115-2 metadata wiki is called an ISO Explorer. Its current location is: https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/wiki/index.php/MI_Metadata

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My Covid Experience

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 00:32:36 GMT

The fish factory where I work part-time makes us do daily Covid saliva tests as part of routine monitoring. On a Thursday morning, I tested positive for Covid. On Thursday evening, the fish factory got around to telling me about it. At the time, I figured I felt fine. I'd gone on in to work, then gone to a graduate student meeting, then gone out to dinner with Brett. We were settled in front of the Playstation for the evening when I got the text message from my supervisor.

On Friday morning when I didn't have to go to work, I started paying much closer attention to how I physically felt. Well, actually I was more tired than usual. I'd assumed that this was because I'd done quite a bit of heavyish lifting at work that wasn't supposed to be part of my job, but it wasn't getting done and someone had to do it. I also felt colder than usual. I'd assumed that this was because it *was* colder than it had been, what with winter finally arriving, and also the fish factory must've turned down their temperature to keep the fish fresher while we worked on them. My nose was extra drippy (I wouldn't quite call it "runny"). But that was obviously because I'd walked to and from work in cold, wet rain all week long, and it does that when I do stuff like that. I was extra sleepy. Maybe not enough caffeine then, I should drink more coffee. I had mild muscle soreness all over my entire body including my toes. Surely also due to that heavy lifting.

Oh, but then there was also the insane, ravenous hunger on Wednesday afternoon after I got back from work. So much so that I ate part of Thursday's lunch and boiled a bunch of eggs - one to eat immediately and two more to take to work on Thursday and Friday since I obviously wasn't taking enough food with me in to work. And also, maybe hormonal things going on since I'm in the middle of switching out some medication.

And then the extreme itching at the back of my nose. This was probably on Wednesday, which I mostly noticed while at work. The area below my sinuses and above my throat always gets itchy when I've started coming down with a cold or other respiratory virus. Sometimes it goes on to become a sore throat, though it didn't this time. So I figured, oh hey, maybe I'm coming down with something. It somehow never occurred to me that it could be Covid that I was coming down with.

Also, upon paying much closer attention to how cold I felt, it wasn't the normal kind of feeling cold, which happens from the outside. It was the kind of cold like the core of my body is sucking up all warmth around it, the kind that happens during a menstrual period when my uterus does that and there's a supercold ring around my lower torso, which is why hot water bottles are so popular to put there during that time for a lot of women... Except this time it was my entire body.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I felt fine when I got up, then there were a few hours of being extra tired, sleepy, and cold, and I took naps on Friday and Saturday afternoon. (I could've napped on Sunday as well, but I was less tired and sleepy.) Then I felt fine after getting up from the nap, until mid-evening or so. I took it extra easy, did as little moving as possible, rested at the first sign of needing rest, stayed warm, etc. By Monday, I was pretty much fine (actually fine). We spent the rest of our mandatory isolation week playing Stardew Valley.

It has been a couple of weeks since then. I've gone back to work. I've even done more of the heavy lifting that isn't supposed to be part of my job, without ending up extra tired or sore. I'm a "packer" which means I'm supposed to be taking fish off the conveyor belt and putting them into boxes. There are supposed to be support staff that make sure there are enough empty boxes, which come in two parts - a thin paperboard liner fitted into a heavy metal frame. The metal frames weigh a bit more than 5 kg each, and if I have to fetch them myself I can usually move two at a time (about 23 pounds). Any more than that, and I'm not going to move too many sets before I'm too tired to continue, and also my wrists get very strained.

Brett never got sick as far as we can tell, but there was one evening (a few days to a week or so before I tested positive) when it was first getting cold for the winter, when I had an extra blanket and he didn't, that he was actively shivering in bed. This never happens. So I suspect he might've had it at that point. He tested negative as a household contact while we were in isolation, both times, and felt fine.

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Maafe (West African peanut stew)

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 03:26:15 GMT

1 pound chuck roast in small chunks*
1 small onion, diced
3-5 cloves garlic, minced
half inch piece of fresh ginger, minced
2 carrots
1 large orange kumara (sweet potato)
1 large red kumara
3 yams
[for the two above, maybe just add more sweet potato if no yams or kumara]
1 can diced tomatoes
1-2 quarts beef or chicken broth (depending whether you want to end up with a soup or stew)
half a small jar of peanut butter (maybe two large spoonfuls)
chopped roasted peanuts if the peanut butter isn't already chunky
black pepper
cayenne pepper (or diced fresh hot pepper of some other sort, scotch bonnet is authentic)

Brown the meat in the bottom of the soup pot with black pepper and cayenne pepper. Add onions. Stir. Add garlic and ginger. Stir. Add tomatoes. Stir. Add broth. Simmer for about an hour (the beef takes a while to cook). Add carrots, peanut butter, and peanuts. Simmer for another half hour. Add the kumara, yams, hot pepper (or cayenne). Simmer for another half hour or until the kumara is soft.

The authentic Senegalese version includes cabbage (according to Google). Various online recipes suggest kale or other leafy greens. I think collards would go really well in this (we sadly don't have collards in NZ). The recipe I originally saw from Whittier included spinach (stir it in in the last few minutes, let it wilt, turn off heat). I've also recently learned that black nightshade leaves are a valid vegetable in Africa, and we have tons of it as weeds during the summer, so I might try that at some point.

*For the meat, it's either beef, lamb, or dark meat chicken, ideally bone-in, or you can leave it out to be vegetarian. Not pork, the people who eat this stew regularly are mostly Muslim. (For similar reasons I never use beef in Indian curries.)

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Clam Chowder

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 01:59:15 GMT

2 quarts chicken broth
1 pint half-n-half (half heavy cream, half milk)
4 cans chopped clams, rinsed well to get rid of sand
1 can clam juice, filtered through a coffee filter to get rid of sand
10 strips good-quality bacon, diced
1 white onion, diced
5-6 celery stalks, diced
3 waxy potatoes (yukon gold, white, red, etc), diced
1/2 cup flour
1 cup good white wine (optional)
dash worcestershire sauce (required)
dash white pepper
salt to taste

Bring chicken broth to a boil. Put in potatoes. Cook until potatoes are not quite soft yet. Turn off heat.

Cook the bacon. Remove from pan but leave the grease. Cook the celery and onions in the grease until softened. Turn heat as low as it'll go and add flour. Stir everything together. Cook on low, stirring every few minutes, until the "raw flour" smell goes away. (If flour burns, start over with new celery, onions, and bacon grease.)

Put chicken broth/potatoes back on low heat. Put the veggies/flour mix into the chicken broth. Stir with a whisk until all of the flour dissolves. Slowly add half-n-half while stirring rapidly to keep it from curdling.

Add clams, clam juice, bacon, wine if any, salt, and pepper. Cook half an hour on low (not quite a simmer), stirring occasionally, until potatoes are all the way done.

Add worcestershire sauce.

Serve with a bit of shredded cheddar, bacon bits, and fresh chopped parsley on top. Goes well with hot sourdough bread.

This was adapted from Jim Wright's recipe and originally posted at Recipes for Roleplayers on LJ. I had a hankering to make clam chowder and went looking for it, and voila, it's still there...

In New Zealand, canned clams are uncommon. They have shelf after shelf of canned tuna in a wide variety of flavors, and also some canned salmon, but not much other canned seafood. Luckily for me, the local Asian grocery store sells them frozen in an amount that looks a lot like four cans.

They also don't sell half-n-half, but that's an easy fix (just mix milk and cream).

New England style chowder is an unknown concept here. The few times I've ordered "chowder" in a restaurant, I've gotten seafood soup that is usually heavy on green lipped mussels still in the shell. So, one of these days, if I really do start a soup truck featuring authentic American recipes, I'm going to have to get good at making this clam chowder.

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Banana Bread

Sat, 01 May 2021 01:17:34 GMT

2 eggs
3 overripe bananas
1/2 cup melted butter (or 150 grams)
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
Chopped nuts (optional)

Beat the eggs. Mash in the bananas and melted butter. Mix in sugar, flour, baking soda, and (if using) nuts. Put it in a baking pan of some sort (loaf pan? muffin tin? pie plate? any will work). Bake at 175 C for an hour.

We buy bananas fairly often to use in smoothies (smoothie recipe: one ripe banana, three dollops plain yogurt, 1-2 cups frozen berries, 1ish cup orange juice). Unfortunately, sometimes there are more bananas than we manage to turn into smoothies before they are too ripe. So I've been making banana bread a lot more often than I would be on purpose. I got tired of looking up the recipe online each time and thus I wrote it down here.

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End of year reflections

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:33:30 GMT

I had a pretty good 2020 overall.

It's something I'm afraid to say too loudly in front of more public spaces, because everyone else had a really crappy 2020, and I don't want to make them all feel bad. But over here with a readership in the single digits (if that), and since this IS supposed to be my space to talk about myself, I'm going to talk about my 2020 honestly and thoroughly.

First, I must say, I made an excellent choice back in late 2017 when I decided I wanted to move to New Zealand. We had six weeks of hardcore lockdown from late March to mid-May or so. During that time, not only did all the work-at-home people stay home, so did all the restaurant/retail/hospitality staff, and the people behind delivering things that get ordered online. We had no such thing as ordering anything online. We could not buy anything that did not get sold in a supermarket or pharmacy. So when I see other people sing their own virtues about staying home, washing hands, using masks, etc. - and then mention ordering from Amazon or getting takeaways ... that's not a lockdown. It won't work that way because all the people who cause things to "magically" appear on your doorstep are still mixing with each other.

Overall I was impressed with how well informed and rational the people here are, along with how organized and clear the government was to inform the people on not just what they were going to do and what they wanted everyone to do, but also why and how and wherefore.

We did have conservative people here whining about how the lockdown would tank the economy, and of course it was massively inconvenient to a great many small business owners. But the government made sure there was lots of aid money to go around. I didn't receive any since I was getting paid the scholarship money anyway, and Brett didn't receive any because he was an "essential worker" in a supermarket and continued getting paid as normal, so I don't know how well it went. But I haven't heard any major complaints about it not being enough, so it was probably fine.

So, that's pretty much all there is to say about the pandemic experience in New Zealand. Things were inconvenient for a couple months, and then everything pretty much went back to normal. Next year everyone will get vaccinated for free, and I assume it will be efficient and organized.

Meanwhile, right before lockdown started, Brett and I moved into a very nice house together. It's an old house with quirks, but it has really big rooms including one with built in bookshelves, and lots of built in storage. In summary: plenty of places to put all of Brett's board games and books. I also really like sitting around in the main lounge with all the board games. The front yard is full of trees that make it seem like we live in the middle of a jungle. The backyard has a big patio, a small patch of lawn, and places to plant veggies. And it's right next to the middle of town - I can walk to my gym in about 8 minutes. But at the same time generally quiet and feels secluded (most of the time).

We also got a flatmate a few weeks into lockdown. We don't charge him much to live in a side room off the garage that isn't supposed to be a bedroom. He's been an excellent flatmate - quiet, tidy, considerate, does a great job helping with household cleaning and yardwork, and he also waters my veggies.

So overall my housing situation has greatly improved. Brett started out somewhat skittish and paranoid that somehow things would go wrong and we'd lose the house, but settled in after a while.

The PhD situation is somewhat less good. I'm not working as fast as I really ought to be, and it's not clear I'll manage to get everything done in the remaining time. The general plan at the moment is to write three papers, and then turn that into the dissertation. We basically didn't get anywhere near completing all of the original goals, as it's going to take the entire time just to make the model in the first place, never mind try to use it for anything.

On the other hand, since I'm with Brett and we've been living together, at the one year mark (next April) I'll be able to apply for a residency visa and then (hopefully) stay in New Zealand permanently after that. This is a step up from the original plan of getting a work visa (and a job) first. So, in theory anyway, even if the PhD situation crashes and burns (which I'm certainly going to work hard to make sure it doesn't), I'll (probably) still be able to stay here.

So I guess as 2020 winds down and 2021 shows up, I mostly need to get cracking on the PhD papers, and figure out how to stop eating carbs. Everything else about life is pretty good.

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I think I'm fat now

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 03:28:00 GMT

So, up until I hit 40, I was a stick figure. Then I started having a better padded butt. Also a belly. This was concerning, but I didn't really do anything about it, especially since doctors seemed to think it was a good thing.

Fast forward to this year (8 years later). At the beginning, on the tail end of last year's housing drama, I was living at a place on top of a very tall hill 20 minutes from work by bike, or an hour by walking. I was tired all the time, but definitely not fat.

Then three things happened: I moved into a place that's only 9 minutes away from work by bike, or about 20 minutes to walk. We then had six weeks of hardcore lockdown during which I barely left the house. During that time, I got very elaborate and creative about cooking and meal planning, since suddenly I was cooking for two instead of just me.

Well, it wasn't long before I noticed that my thighs rub together. And it's REALLY annoying. I don't understand how fat people can stand this sensation. I started walking with my legs farther apart. There were also other unpleasant changes in the lower half of my torso due to having a whole bunch of extra flesh in the way of things, but most of it is TMI so I'll not go into detail.

So, suddenly, I'm a lot more interested in diet and weight loss. o.O These are topics that I pretty much ignored for the first 40 years of my life. Well, not so much the diet part - I've always tried to eat healthily (and we still do). But the weight loss part! How do I get rid of all this extra flesh! I'm still convinced that the vast majority of weight loss schemes are marketing traps, but surely someone has figured out some way to do it. If it's so easy to gain the weight, why shouldn't it also be easy to lose it back off again?

So far the only strategies I have in mind are: try to move more and eat less, eat less carbs, intermittent fasting.

With intermittent fasting, the way it's supposed to work is, you eat for 8 hours and then don't eat for 16. Most people seem to focus on only eating during their eating windows (during the 8 hours). In my case, I try to note when I stopped eating things the day before, and then count up 16 hours until I eat anything else. This mostly works in line with the way my body seems to view eating these days, which is: once I start eating, I don't want to stop. (According to doctors, I'm on a medication that stimulates appetite, which is probably where this is coming from.) So if I just don't start eating until really late, I end up eating less. In theory.

Then there's avoiding carbs. Right before I noticed all the extra fleshiness, I was eating croissants for breakfast. So I stopped doing that, and went back to avoiding sweets as much as possible. But now I ought to also cut down on things like rice, potatoes, pasta, chips, etc. I'm not into the keto concept which is about zero carbs - I don't think I could do that. But not eating all the things that are mostly carbs should help. Well, except chips. I don't think I could stop eating chips. Also, we eat ice cream after dinner every night, and I'm probably not going to stop doing that either, though I can definitely eat less.

And finally: move more, eat less. I read an article recently that exercising helps, but only if you do a lot of it. If I only exercise a little, I also want to eat more. So the trick is to pass the threshold where the eating more balances out the exercise, by exercising twice as much. That part, I have no idea how that would work. Exercise takes up a lot of time and also makes me achy and tired if I do too much.

I guess 2021 is going to be the first year where I have a resolution of losing weight. Or at least not gaining more weight. Egads.

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My standard frittata

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:35:04 GMT

a splash of veg oil
3-5 mushrooms, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
5-8 slices ham, diced
1-2 handfuls spinach
3-5 eggs, beaten
a splash of milk (2 tablespoons?)
1 tablespoon flour (optional)
1-2 slices cheese: cheddar is optimal
salsa (optional)
sour cream (optional)

Beat the eggs. Add milk, mix in. Add flour, mix in.
Cook the mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, ham, and spinach - adding to pan in that order. Put into small casserole dish.
Pour eggs into casserole dish over the veggies.
Put cheese slices on top.
Bake at 150 C for 15-20 min, until eggs are cooked and cheese is toasty.
Serve with salsa and/or sour cream.

It also works without the milk, the eggs are just less creamy. Flour makes it hold together better.

It all started when I was trying to make omelets, but wasn't coordinated enough to flip the egg pancake, and also it seemed unnecessarily complex to have to cook the veggies separately and then move them out of the pan to put the eggs in and then put the veggies back. So I would just pour the eggs directly on top of the veggies, which I learned was called a frittata. I was still rarely able to get the eggs right - usually they'd be brown on the bottom and undercooked at the top, even if I tried to cut it up halfway through and flip things over. Then one day someone mentioned that frittatas are often baked. Suddenly my egg cooking troubles were over...

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Fancied Up Cottage Pie

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 22:13:11 GMT

2 pounds ground beef (or lamb, if this'll be shepherd's pie)
1 very large carrot, diced
1 medium onion, diced
some garlic, minced
1 can diced tomatoes
quarter cup red wine
a few dashes worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoon flour

half package frozen corn

Enough whole mealy potatoes to fill half the roasting pan at one layer deep
50 grams butter
1 pint milk

Boil the potatoes until they're about to fall apart (20 minutes or so). Drain. Add butter. Mash. Add milk. Mash some more. Keep mashing until it turns into mashed potatoes.

Brown the ground beef, drain. Cook the onion and carrot in the same pan. Put the ground beef back in. Add garlic, diced tomatoes. Cook some more. Add red wine, worcestershire sauce, flour. Mix it all together.

Put ground beef mixture in the bottom of the roasting pan. Make the top surface flat. Cover with a layer of corn. Put mashed potatoes on top. Flatten the top surface again.

Bake at ~170 C for 20 minutes. (Everything is already cooked, so this is mostly just to brown the top of the mashed potatoes.)

Let it cool for 20 minutes before cutting into it to eat.

The ingredient measurements don't need to be exact.

It's still called shepherd's pie here even when made with beef. The comfort food version doesn't have veggies in it, but all the online recipes I found included some, so I did too. I also added red wine, which makes it really taste fancy.

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On Daily Meals

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 21:47:29 GMT

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend Andie Becker asked:

I’m so tired of cooking. Hard to find healthy take out or delivery - and it is super expensive to make that a regular habit for a family of five.

What are you doing for easy peasy meals with lots of nutrients and not a lot of hassle?

And my response was:

By far the best thing ever is having someone else do all of the dishes. ALL of the dishes. Pots, pans, prep bowls, the giant cutting board, everything eaten off of and with. Bonus: for the entire day, including meals that I made only for myself. And all with no complaints and only compliments for how great my food has become.

Then early this morning on Twitter, my friend Shawn Powers asked:

I know, my YouTube channel is supposed to be tech stuff. But my brain doesn’t do “one thing” well. ANYWAY, today I was thinking about meal planning. What does YOUR family do?

And I thought... surely this is a good excuse to write something longwinded and tedious about food and cooking and meal planning, which to me is a fairly fascinating subject! It won't fit on Twitter so I'll do it here.

I should start by mentioning that I'm only cooking for two of us. I know in advance how many I'll cook for (two), we don't have random family and friends wandering in and out on a daily basis on short notice, and when we do have friends over for a meal, we usually all get our own takeaways. So, that probably simplifies my life quite a bit. I think that if I did have a large adult/near-adult family with independent schedules, probably I'd just make large volumes of whatever I'm making and then enjoy leftovers if there are any. (This sounds like what Shawn does too, so I guess it must work fairly well).

What has been working great for the two of us, and I'll extoll its virtues at any opportunity: I do all of the cooking and meal planning, and Brett does all of the dishes. And I do mean ALL of them, plus he does a great job at getting things actually clean and ready for the next time I want to use them. It has been amazing for how much more motivated and creative I've been about cooking, to not have to think at all about cleaning up after myself.

Meanwhile, Brett eats everything I make and likes almost all of it. I can tell how much he likes it by whether he goes back for seconds and how much he gets when he does. On the topic of whether it's a bad idea to eat something good too often: I don't personally think so. Especially if you're rotating a lot of different good dishes, so you still get the variety. How it works out for us is, we'll eat a good thing a lot for several weeks until we start getting burnt out on it, and then drop it for a while. A good example is kale. I make a very simple kale edamame salad that takes 10-15 minutes, most of it kale chopping. The first time I did this, it turned out that Brett thinks it's the best thing ever. So for the last couple months, I would buy and cook a new bunch of kale every week. The last batch I made was two weeks ago, the kale was yellowing, and it didn't taste as good as usual, plus I was starting to get tired of doing it, so last week I didn't buy any. I might buy another bunch this week or next. But I suspect that kale season is ending anyhow and we might not do it again until next year.

I should probably also mention that we grocery shop together every week, usually on Saturdays. I figure out what I want to make in the week ahead and get all the ingredients. He buys snacks. >.> Well, a lot of his choices are fruit so I can't complain. In general, I plan to make one big batch of something that will have lots of leftovers, plus odds and ends for one-off meals.

In the regular rotation of big batches of something: beef barley soup, seafood gumbo (there's a recipe two posts down), lasagna, fancied up cottage pie, lentil chili. Probably other things I can't remember. Which one I do depends what I feel like eating and how much effort I feel like putting into it (e.g., beef barley soup contains eight veggies and most of them require chopping), also how much money I feel like spending (big masses of mostly ground beef are expensive here). Occasionally I'll make chicken noodle soup, but Brett doesn't like chicken or noodles so it doesn't feature much in our home meals. Clam chowder occasionally also happens. Pasta and cheese with veggies and a pork-based meat thrown in (Brett is horrified that mac-n-cheese should have anything other than mac and cheese in it though). In general, these dishes are good for at least two or three dinners and several lunches, reducing the total amount of cooking I have to do. I'll make them on a Sunday and then bring it back out again on Tuesday and Friday for example.

In the regular rotation of one-off meals with little to no leftovers:

curries. I rotate between Indian, Japanese, and Thai, all of them as store-bought sauces or pastes. All of them contain onion, potato, carrot, and peas. The protein is usually tofu or frozen shrimp. Usually there's only enough left over for one lunch.

pan-fried white flaky fish in olive oil with garlic, orzo, and some sort of veggie that can be mixed into the orzo such as spinach or frozen mixed veggies.

broiled salmon or sausages, plus kale edamame salad or Random Michelle's risotto, and/or some other carb like mashed potatoes or rice or orzo.

frozen dumplings with podded edamame. They don't really go together other than both are steamed in the same pot (not at the same time).

Pasta, mostly these days with a tomato-based sauce, but occasionally with a cheese-based sauce (out of a jar). Whenever I can find it (and I'm planning to grow some this summer), I use spaghetti squash.

lentils and rice. It usually includes onion, celery, and corn. Seasonings vary, though if I'm lazy it doesn't have anything other than broth, and I like adding hot sauce to it after. This one usually does have lots of leftovers because Brett doesn't like it that much, so I end up eating it for multiple lunches.

I may have lost track of the original question by this point... meal planning! Right, so I usually work out what I want to make for the entire week in advance, and grocery shop accordingly. I try to alternate between rice dishes and not-rice dishes, what kind of protein we're eating (beef or not beef, generally), and vary the veggies. It's easy to get the same eight veggies that are in my beef barley soup and use subsets of those in everything else, but possibly not exciting or nutritionally varied enough.

How do others do it that I know of? There was a family I stayed with when I first moved to New Zealand - as far as I could tell, she did all of the grocery shopping and he did all of the cooking, and he would make stuff up on the spot based on what he found in the fridge. Dinners were two things, a salad and a main dish. (Most of my food can be described as "everything in a single pot.") They are older with grown children who don't live at home anymore though, so probably have established subtleties in that system to make it work well for them (it sure wouldn't for me and Brett).

My parents owned a restaurant. We had our own family fridge spaces and didn't eat the restaurant food most of the time, however. It was usually my mother who cooked for the family, and we had a variety of stir-fried meats and veggies served in the middle of the table, with rice for each person. Brett's mother does all the cooking for his family, and she'll go around asking people to specify whether they'll be present for dinner by X hours beforehand so she knows how much to make. Dinners are generally half a dozen different veggies boiled separately very well, plus a few slices of a roast with gravy. They have fish n chips from a shop on Saturdays.

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Lebanese-Style Dolmas

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 07:26:24 GMT

One pound ground beef
One cup uncooked white rice (washed, soaked, etc.)
One medium onion, finely diced
A few cloves garlic, minced (optional)
One tablespoon cinnamon
One tablespoon cumin

80-100 fresh grape leaves

One medium waxy potato, sliced into thin circles
One lemon, sliced into circles
Olive oil
Garlic salt

To make filling:
Brown the ground beef. Drain if necessary. Try to break it up into tiny crumbles (rice sized ideally).
Stir in the onions and garlic.
Stir in the uncooked rice.
Stir in the cinnamon and cumin.

To prep the grape leaves, for each leaf individually:
Harvest healthy, medium-sized leaves, preferably not too deeply lobed. Cut from the vine as close to the base (where it connects to the vine) as possible. Aim for light green leaves that are still tender, with no blemishes, damage, etc.
Cut the stem off.
(Can pause here.)
Wash to get off all the tiny insects hiding on the underside.
Blanch in boiling hot water until it loses most of the green (20-30 seconds).

To fill the leaves, for each leaf individually:

Lay out leaf flat on a flat surface. Add a teaspoon of filling near the bottom, where the stem was. Shape it into a horizontal line.
Fold the lower lobes of the leaf up over the filling, then the side lobes in. Loosely roll upward so that the top tip of the leaf is on top.

Cooking:
Layer the potato slices to cover the bottom of the pot. Drizzle with olive oil and garlic salt. Stack the dolmas, seam side down. When done, drizzle with more olive oil and garlic salt, then put lemon slices on top. Find a plate that is almost the same width as the inside width of the pot. Put it upside down on top of the lemons. Fill the pot with water up to the level of the dolmas. Cover, simmer for 45 minutes.

The house I currently live in came with a grapevine, and although I'm not that big a fan of grapes, I do like dolmas. My main sources for how to make them came from a Lebanese recipe and a page about how to prep the leaves. The best time to harvest is late spring to early summer (Nov-Dec in the southern hemisphere) when the vine is putting out lots and lots of leaves.

It turns out that blanching the leaves individually is a good idea, even though it seems unnecessary since they're going to get cooked anyway. What it does is make the leaves go limp so that they're easier to roll. The recipes I saw said to plunge them in cold water after blanching, but that doesn't seem to matter as long as you don't leave them in the hot water too long.

The main purpose of the potatoes is to provide insulation from the bottom of the pot for the dolmas. They taste good too afterward, and any remaining liquid in the bottom of the pot is also delicious.

Most restaurant dolmas I've run across seem to be vegetarian and include mint and parsley and other flavors I'm not that fond of. I like that by making my own, I can put in whatever I want.

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Pies

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:27:31 GMT

One Pie Crust
(lots of useful crust info here)

50 grams cold butter, cut into small cubes
1 cup flour
very cold water

In a large bowl, mash butter cubes into flour with a fork until it looks like yellow flour with a few small butter chunks here and there. This can take a while (half hour to an hour depending on how many pie crusts you're making at the same time). Try to keep everything as cold as possible.

Sprinkle cold water into the butter-flour mixture while stirring with fork. You're aiming for a consistency where if you press some of the bits together, it'll stick. Try to avoid having too many of those big slugs of overwatered dough.

Press the mixture together into a ball. If you've added enough water, it should stick together - if not, add more water. Pour everything out of the bowl onto a large flat surface to mold it all together. You're aiming to have a ball of dough that sticks together well enough to stay a ball when you let go of it.

Wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for at least half an hour.

A while later, probably after you've finished making pie filling, bring out the dough ball and let it warm up for a few minutes.

Roll it out into a flat round shape. You can fold over any jagged overthinned edges and roll them back into the main crust area. Sprinkle flour on everything everywhere all of the time, to keep it from sticking. If it gets stuck you get holes and if the holes are really big you have to start over.

Maple Nut Pie
(more or less this)

One pie crust, rolled out and plated and in the freezer for at least 30 minutes

2-3 cups chopped walnuts and pecans
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup maple syrup, preferably B grade
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons butter
1/8th teaspoon cinnamon
1/8th teaspoon nutmeg

1 egg, beaten (egg wash)

Mix the eggs, flour, maple syrup, butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg together, more or less in that order.
Bring out the frozen pie crust.
Put nuts into pie crust. Pour mixture over the top.
Brush pie crust edges with egg wash.
Bake at 190 C for 40-45 minutes. Probably put foil on pie crust edges after 20 minutes to keep it from getting burnt.

Apple Pie
(basically this)

Two pie crusts

6-8 apples of various sorts, such as granny smith, fuji, jazz, etc.
1 lemon for the juice
1/2 cup sugar
2 or 3 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 egg, beaten (egg wash)

Peel and thick-slice the apples into a large bowl. Sprinkle in some lemon juice after doing each apple to keep the slices from browning.
Add sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Mix it all together until the apple slices are well-coated.
Put in fridge to keep chilled while working on rolling out bottom crust.

Roll out and plate bottom crust. Fill with filling. Roll out and cover with top crust.
Brush top crust with egg wash.
Bake at 190 C for 20 minutes, then 175 C for another 45 minutes.

My go-to recipe website for pies is Simply Recipes. Not only does it have lots of great pies (and other food), it has some great articles about pie crusts. The top parts of the recipe pages are usually about the food item (for example, the apple pie recipe talks about using different kinds of apples besides granny smiths) and are very informative for pie novices like me.

Anyhoo... so the fun part of pie making is converting all the units. "A stick of butter" isn't very useful in New Zealand, because that's not how butter is sold here. I can buy blocks of butter that have 50-gram measurements on the outside wrapping. It took a bit of googling to work out how many grams a stick is, and therefore how much flour to use. It works out to something weird like 116 grams per 2.25 cups flour, so I simplified it down to 50 grams butter per 1 cup flour equals 1 crust, which works out just fine.

Then the other fun part is baking temperature. American recipes are all in Fahrenheit. Neither of my ovens (a big main one and a toaster) have the Celsius degrees marked out at high resolution, so I have to guess where to set it.

I've also simplified down the spices to just cinnamon and nutmeg for both pies, just to cut down on how many little jars of stuff I have to keep around. They both still taste great.

Pie making in general is an all-day endeavour. I've taken to making two pies at the same time, since it's faster to make three crusts in one go than do them individually. Dividing it into thirds is a bit tricky, so in future I might start making four crusts at a time and freezing one, then two crusts the next time plus the frozen, or something.

Anyhoo, so the way it usually goes is:
make pie crust dough, put it all in the fridge as individual dough balls
make apple pie filling, put that into the fridge
roll out one dough ball for the maple nut pie, put it in the freezer
roll out second dough ball for the bottom of the apple pie, add the apple pie filling
roll out third dough ball for the top of the apple pie, complete the apple pie
preheat the oven to 190 C
make maple nut pie filling, pull out and fill the frozen crust
brush both pies with egg wash (one egg is plenty to do two pies)
bake maple nut pie at 190 C for 25 minutes
put in apple pie, put foil on pie crust of maple nut pie, bake for another 20 minutes
pull out maple nut pie
turn down heat to 175 C, bake apple pie for another 45 minutes

I haven't figured out a good use for the trimmed edges of the various pie crusts. Sometimes there's a lot left over, like I could use them to make another mini-pie. So far they're just getting composted.

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Seafood Gumbo in New Zealand

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 06:58:33 GMT

1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup canola oil

1 bell pepper
1 onion
2 stalks celery
10ish okra

1 can diced tomatoes
1 can water
1-2 pints chicken or fish broth

peeled and deveined shrimp, tail off
1 big fillet Hoki or red cod (local fish)

1 tablespoon Cajun Seasoning (commercial mix)
1-2 bay leaves
cayenne pepper to taste

***

To make roux, combine flour and canola oil in an oven-safe dish where it can spread out. Bake in oven at 150 C for 30-60 min. Stir occasionally.

Meanwhile, chop up all the fresh/frozen veggies.

Put roux in soup pot. Cook the chopped veggies in it, medium heat.

Add broth when the roux starts to burn at the bottom of the pot. Stir to combine.

Add tomatoes, then refill can with water to rinse out tomato juice from can into pot.

Let simmer for 20 minutes.

If the shrimp is raw, add it early. If the shrimp is cooked, add it when adding the fish.

Meanwhile, cook the fish in some more canola oil. Hoki falls apart when pan-fried. It should be a bunch of small chunks and shreds when done.

Add fish to soup pot along with seasonings.

Let cool overnight and eat the next day, served with Carolina long grain rice.

And on that note... my introduction to what will hopefully be a series of posts. In most online recipes (especially American ones), you're stuck scrolling through a whole song and dance about someone's childhood before you get to the actual recipe. So in my case, I'll put the recipe on top and then tell my life story in relation to the recipe at the end.

So, gumbo is from the American Deep South. It's not possible to make a 100% authentic version of it in New Zealand, because New Zealand doesn't know how to do sausages. The basic barbecue sausage here is more like a very fat, very bland hot dog - has the texture of highly processed hot dog meat, twice as wide as an actual hot dog, and none of the taste (or really any other taste). There are local markets around where you can buy other kinds of sausages, but in general they seem to prefer bland and textureless. All of the spicy sausages are called "chorizo" but I've yet to run across any that resembles actual chorizo from American Hispanic marketplaces.

Anyhow, so there's no Andouille sausage here that I'm aware of, or anything even resembling it, and in my opinion the gumbo is more authentic to just leave the sausage out.

On the other hand, the costs for bell peppers is reversed. Green peppers tend to be more expensive for some reason, while red, orange, and yellow cost less. Since the red, orange, and yellow ones taste better in my opinion, I tend to go for those. Not sure if it matters from an authenticity standpoint even though it's usually green pepper in the U.S.

I'm not sure whether or how often okra is available in the supermarkets here, but I found a big bag of frozen at the Asian grocery. There's enough for 4-5 pots of gumbo.

And finally, hoki is a great fish for putting into soups and stews and works great in gumbo. It completely falls apart if you touch it while it cooks, so the fish bits get spread out and make the soup thicker. (Edit to add: red cod also does this. Great for when hoki isn't available.)

The roux idea is from Alton Brown, who introduced it with his seafood gumbo recipe (which involves making shrimp broth but also includes sausage). Instead of standing over a stove for 30-60 minutes constantly whisking, just stick it in the oven. It works great with vegetable oil. I've also tried it with butter, but the butter solids can burn and affect the taste and lumpiness of the roux. It does stain and get baked on to whatever dish it's being baked in. I use a toaster oven to save having to heat up the big main oven.

There are lots of recipes around for what herbs and spices to use. A lot of them mention file powder, which is made from a tree leaf that isn't available in New Zealand, but the okra slime and fish bits make up for the lack of thickening, I think.

Also, I'm inclined to not end up with dozens of different tiny jars of herbs and spices again, so I'm being lazy and using a mix. It's just called Cajun seasoning and the brand is common, and tastes great.

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My last decade

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 02:28:56 GMT

Anyway, so the real reason I wandered over here was to write a lengthier answer to this tweet than a tweet response would've allowed: https://twitter.com/stfutony/status/1193954501620690944

tony asks: there’s only ONE MONTH left in the decade. what have you accomplished?

My answer:

Well let's see... 2010 was the tail end of my time in Savannah. I'd gotten laid off and was collecting unemployment up until May, when I moved back to Indiana, then went on a two month trip to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and San Francisco due to my grandfather's funeral. In the fall I got a job going out on boats to collect samples related to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. I only went out twice though. I think I was overqualified and not exactly shy about keeping my mouth shut when I saw things being done wrong, so they stopped asking me to go along.

Then from 2011 to 2018, I was in Mobile. I made a whole bunch of friends, mostly related to gaming (roleplaying and board games), and also lost some of them along the way. I was a lot more socially active offline while in Mobile than I ever was in the previous decade in Savannah. I also did a lot more academically impressive things due to getting involved in the EarthCube project.

Then I moved to New Zealand to start working on a PhD, met Brett, and (aside from the housing drama that's been going on since late July) I'm generally having a pretty good life. A lot of my daily life looks the same as before from an outside perspective, but I feel like everything is completely different and generally better.

Meanwhile, one of the other responses on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThatsPrettyLouw/status/1194232180937023488

cthulouw replies: You feel crippling inadequacy when you try to list your own accomplishments and have now fallen into the deep hole that is an existential crisis, questioning what you're doing with your life and why were put here in the first place

No? Just me then?

K.

My answer: (https://twitter.com/Kayar/status/1194792399702069250)

Well if this question had appeared a decade ago, this would've been where I was. Now I think of that decade as a decade of rest and regroup before I sprang into action to do bigger and better things.

To go into more detail from there:

From 2000 to 2010, I didn't do a whole lot. I earned my MS at the tail end of 2000, was in Atlanta for 6 months while looking for a "real" job, then was in Savannah from 2001-2010. I didn't do a whole lot. I had virtually no offline life. I wrote a lot of Nanowrimo and did a lot of online roleplaying, and that was about it really. I did start doing yoga in 2008, which eventually changed my life for the better in all sorts of ways.

But it was definitely a time of rest and regroup. I was burnt out on school and barely made it out with the actual degree. My marriage had just ended, and the bounceback relationship ended shortly after I moved to Savannah. My grasp on reality had recently shattered and it took a while to sort things out and build a new (stronger and better) paradigm. I think being laid off in 2009 was good timing overall, to push me out of the rut that I didn't need to be in anymore by that point, and go off to do something else.

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I guess first a quick update on my housing situation

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 02:01:40 GMT

So where last I left off, I posted all the gory details of the situation with the problem flatmate, as of a month ago. It's friendlocked but I can still see it so I'm just going to write an update for myself now. To summarize:

All the ads for flatmates and rentals specify that they're looking for "quiet, tidy, considerate, respectful." Rob the Problem Flatmate was none of those. It was impossible to sleep an entire night through during weeknights because of all the noise he made, especially when his girlfriend was also there (on weekends I'm usually at Brett's place). He did turn out to be the psychopath kind of food thief - by the time he moved out a week ago, I'd worked out that his total tab on stolen food was about $45. He had trouble remembering that he didn't live in the house by himself, and that everything in it was not magically there for his sole use. He got evicted by the property manager for extreme untidyness. He currently owes me almost $500 for electric/internet, and by the time the next bill comes around it'll be closer to $600.

Meanwhile, the sale of the house is proceeding along. This week was all about getting everything cleaned up after Rob's messy departure. This weekend will be the first showing. The real estate people all think that the house will sell quickly. I'm looking for other places to live, figuring on moving in early December. Hopefully not too expensive, that has veggie garden space and a dishwasher. Unfortunately, all of the good places would require at least one flatmate, and I'm kind of done with flatmates (...again. I mean, I managed to not have one for pretty much my entire adult life up until I moved here).

I guess that's all I really want to say about that, at least in public.

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Been a while, figure I ought to post something

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 01:23:10 GMT

questionoftheday asks: Are you a cat person or a dog person? How about a bird person or a reptile person? A fish person? Why?

My answer:

Definitely more of a cat person than dog person, but at this point I'm pretty severely allergic to both, and probably mammals in general (I did have a mild reaction to a friend's horses and donkeys). I've noticed that I don't have as much trouble with indoor-outdoor cats than indoor-only animals though.

The only pets I've ever had in practice have been freshwater fish. Although, now that I finally live somewhere cool enough for it, I might get a chinchilla at some point. I've always liked those.

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On Religion

Wed, 01 May 2019 09:10:30 GMT

questionoftheday asks: Did religion ever play an important part in your life? Was it a positive or negative experience?

My answer:

Yes ish... mostly positive.

I've been a modern pagan for most of my adult life, but spent most of that time being the loner type. I wasn't really like other pagans or Wiccans, and they were kind of scary. I always wished I had someone to share my beliefs with, but never found anyone to whom I would've been fully comfortable trying to explain, and also never found anyone who cared enough to ask. I have short answers available for the polite level of questions, and that was as far as it got most of the time.

The one exception was a pair of church ladies who came to my door one evening to invite me to join their bible study. The younger of the two was extremely intrigued by what I believed and I think she would've happily stood there all night asking me questions, and I was happy to answer. But the other one apparently decided that I was the devil quoting scripture or somesuch, and ended the visit. And that was it for interest in my religious beliefs, over the span of my entire lifetime.

Even after I joined a pagan community group, no one really cared. The basic tenet was that everyone was free to believe something different and worship the god(s) and/or goddess(es) that most spoke to them. No one asked about mine. So I was mostly there for the social aspects - and pagan religious ceremonies are certainly more up my alley than any of the Christian or Buddhist ones I've been involved in. They're less formal and more communal. We don't sit in rows in a building facing a speaker at the front, we stand in a circle outside with the priest/priestess in the middle.

That was back in Mobile. I haven't found any new pagans (that I know of), and haven't gone looking either. Religion hasn't come up as a serious topic of conversation with Brett (he's not very religious). Which is odd, considering that we've gone to church functions several times at the invite of my first landlady - but then neither of us are Christian, and we're just there to be social.

Actually now that I'm thinking of it, there was also the old and young Buddhist monks that stayed at my mother's house for a couple nights. The younger one was extremely intrigued by paganism in general, and expressed some interest in sticking around in the western world to learn more about it. But that wasn't really about my personal beliefs, so much as "what's paganism."

So I still haven't found anyone to share my religious beliefs with. But at some point it stopped mattering so much. A lot of things that used to be important to me have become less important as I go along, while other things have become more important. I guess that's just how life goes.

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Sometimes cheating is the appropriate solution

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 01:17:46 GMT

questionoftheday asks: Have you ever cheated to win?

My answer:
Yes. Battle Pirates.

The reason I did it was because I loved my people. Cheating at the game (via glitch repair mostly) was the only way to stay on top of the game without being ridiculously wealthy. It became a question of what counted as more important to me: my people, or good faith toward the game and its developers.

I generally didn't cheat when I was hitting other players in the game. But there were once-a-month epic events where all the high-dollar equipment came from, that were timed, and if you couldn't get hold of those you became obsolete very quickly. Glitching repair was the only effective way to do those events, especially if you wanted to have anything resembling a life outside of the game during the same timeframe.

All the cheating I had to do was a large part of why I eventually stopped playing. I stopped liking the game years before I stopped playing it, because it took me a long time to finally walk away from the community.

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First questionable employer that sprung to mind

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 09:17:16 GMT

questionoftheday asks: What is the most questionable decision an employer of yours has ever made, and how badly did it make you want to scream?

My answer:

Chinese takeout I worked at changed ownership. I was asked to stay on to provide some continuity for the new owners. A regular customer from before ordered some food, arrived to pick up, and tried to pay with a voucher that was hand-written by the previous owners, I assume due to some kind of mixup from the last time he was there.

I was ready to go along with it, figuring the new owner could pass the voucher along to the old owner (they were distant relatives of each other) and get the money back. New owner decided he didn't want to honor it. Customer left really pissed off, and I assume never returned. We spent the rest of the evening arguing about whether a one-time temporary loss of $20 was worth the loss of that customer's repeat business.

I've come up with all sorts of things I could've done in the situation since then, such as donate my pay for that night, and then get it back from the original owners later. At that point I still cared about the success of the takeout, because I cared about the original owners. But the new owners had many questionable short-sighted decisions like that, that lost them most of the takeout's original business (and eventually I got tired of working for them).

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