Feats II.

November 9th:

• Didn't sleep because of owwie neck and shoulder. Sigh.
• Had AM dose.
• Was told I was appreciated for all the stuff I make happen around here. That made me happy. I sometimes feel the magic house fairy is invisible.
• Started thinking about and writing down my life/fitness goals for the next six week cycle.
• Worked on my ToDo list
• Started my bucket list
• Wrote more about tasks and management or lack thereof of same.
• Tried to call mum and dad on skype.
• Spent time on Facebook.
• Cleaned up my inbox a bit.
• Did my veg box order for next week.
• Had painkillers.
• Reported a website error to my veg box company.
• Filled in a survey for Ocado, in hopes of winning 100 quid grocery money.
• Found inspiration for my six week goal cycle. 
• Wrote more, nearly fell asleep sitting up.
• Ate food, had a cup of tea, and read Animal Farm.
• Told Ocado that their automail was spamming me about a non existent delivery. Got an autoresponder email back. Nice.
• Browsed Ikea's website for lighting to put near my plants.
• Got sidetracked into looking up lightbulbs on amazon.co.uk. This would be more useful if I knew what kind of lightbulbs were in the sockets in my house.
• Tried to reach a lightbulb.
• Started my Ocado shop for next week.
• Wrote meal plan for up to next Tuesday. Well, some of it.
• Re-investigated slowcookers, and definitely decided on the Cusinart PSC650U. 
• Bought the slowcooker, it should arrive Monday. Before midday.
• Looked at about a billion slowcooker recipes.
• Took my laundry in.
• Emptied out the drip catch cup for the third time today.
• Randomly found a recipe for Vegan butter for baking.
• And then I found a recipe for Gluten Free Brioche. No prizes for guessing what I want to experiment with at some point. 
• Wrote up my goals properly. Ish, anyway.
• Had some dinner.
• Had a hot bath.

Today was one of those days where I feel like I did bugger all and just moped at my desk and was generally a bit of a washout. It's a pretty active kind of bugger all now that I'm looking at it, though.

Cooking: EggThing

Yesterday, between researching parkour, grumbling about couriers, trying new tea, and stretching, I cooked an Egg Thing. It involves eggs, veges, ham, and an oven.

It's two serves, so yesterday's lunch and today's breakfast. It's much tastier than my previous stab at a similar dish, I think because I reduced the amount of non-egg things in it. Still, it does have spinach, capsicum, onion and mushrooms in it, so I did make progress on reducing the amount of veges in my fridge :)

So I fried the onion, mushrooms, capsicum and garlic together.

Then I put the veges in a baking dish, and added in 6 beaten eggs, with a bit of oat cream, mixed herbs, salt, and pepper mixed in. And threw a couple handfuls of fresh spinach on top.

Threw it in the oven at about 170C for around 40 minutes, and it came out looking pretty awesome.


And then, there was noms.

Hell, and how it happened to me in the heavens.

My flights were an experience I'd rather not ever repeat.

Begin Tuesday afternoon, with selling my car. The buyer I had fell through, so I went and saw a dealer - who wanted some paperwork from Qld Transport. This is 5.30pm - and my flight tomorrow at 2pm, dictates getting to the airport around 11am so I can say goodbye to my family and get through security and whatnot.

At this point I stress out. Just a little bit.

I get home and repack my bags so that I won't get charged the earth, have dominos for dinner, and collapse in a stupor of nervous exhaustion around 11pm. I sleep poorly, partially because of nerves, and partially because I have an epic cold leading to both noseblowing and racking, convulsive coughs at intervals.

I'm up at 6am, jittery and tense, because before getting to the airport, I have to provide myself with significant quantities of tissues, breakfast, papers from Qld Transport, and a receipt for the sale of my car. Of relevance here is that Qld Transport offices don't open until 9.30am Wednesdays, and it's school holidays, so they're packed out with tests and such.

Breakfast got skipped, because I can get something at the airport, and there's food on the plane, right?

I get my tissues and head on over to the Qld Transport office. Standing room only. Fortunately, it turns out that the papers I want were simple to get, I had the right documents on me to get them, and I was at the counter for less than 5 minutes.

10.15am, at the car dealer. The bloke I need to talk to is in a meeting. Cue stress.

11am, out of there, being driven to the airport by the wonderful @limobyjames. Stress levels lowering, slightly.

At the airport, I checked in, and as I was walking away from the checkin desk, the lights go down. The power outage takes the checkin system offline, slowing checkin for everyone after me, the poor blighters. Time for a chat and coffee with my family (not enough time) - we're interrupted by an announcement telling people on my flight to go through security now, as the power outage is making it slow. Being the good airport citizen that I am, I bid farewell to my family and head through security - which takes all of about 5 minutes. This annoys me, because while I approve of quick security processes on principle, I could have spent more time with my family. Grr. It's now about midday.

I wait for my medication to settle, and go get some lunch from noodlebox. They take their sweet time, and get my order wrong. I get my correct order at 1.25pm - and my flight is called for boarding at 1.30pm. I eat what I can of my noodlebox in the queue, chug a Coke, and board my flight.

2pm, getting ready for takeoff, I'm told that the gluten free meal option definitely contains dairy. This makes me feel ... not great. It'll be around midnight, Brisbane time, before I can get a meal at Chiangi airport in Singapore, making it about 28hrs between meals for me. My travel agent was informed by Qantas that the gluten free option was also dairy free. I struggle through the flight - the plain rice and greens are safe enough, but not really enough to stave off the tired/nauseous/headachey feeling that I get when hungry. The lemonade and coke help, but aren't food. Of course, I was also constantly blowing my nose and coughing, which I'm sure wasn't any fun for my seatmates, either. The staff tell me they've radioed ahead and that my next flight should have a vegan meal for me.

The descent into Singapore is not something I want to remember. My left ear did not pop for nearly an hour, and my right only with difficulty. I was trying all the tricks, none were working. It was incredibly painful.

12amish, brisbane time, we land in Singapore. My medication has worn off, and I'm staggering from tiredness. I've got a four hour layover here, and I wander around looking for food. I find some chips which are incredibly gross - I get through about two before I can't eat any more. I find some crisps that are better, and have some juice, but it's not enough. I can't find anything else that looks safe. Of course the staff at the fast food don't know what's in their products - when I can get them to understand what 'dairy' means. At this point, I'm not in good condition - people keep asking me if I'm okay. I catch sight of myself in a mirror, and I understand why - my face is entirely red, my eyes are swollen and red, and I generally look pretty bad. I get to my gate, and collapse to await boarding. I'm trying not to fall asleep, because I know I won't wake up - I don't want to miss my flight. I don't dare take my medication, either, because I've had a small amount of food - I don't want to make the nausea I already have worse. We take off at midnight, Singapore time.

The flight from Singapore to England I remember as a series of wakeful moments, where I would cough convulsively, blow my nose, feel guilty about waking my seatmate up, sip some water, and go back to sleep. My tissuebox is emptied when we're over Eastern Europe somewhere, so I fall back on pursepacks and reusing tissues as much as possible. Food situation much the same as the flight from Singapore - no vegan meal for me, stuck with the occasional softdrink or juice, no actual food as such. My head is incredibly painful, my face feels like it's burning, each breath rasps in my throat, and I struggle each time I cough to not retch as well.

We land 6.25am London time. My seatmate (an incredibly kind young man) gets my things from the overhead lockers, and we disembark around 7am. I stagger as fast as I can through the seemingly endless corridors to get to border control and baggage pickup. I think I probably walked nearly a kilometre. Once I get my bags, through customs, I see Steve - we meet and I can't let go. This flight was bad enough to do by myself, but if he hadn't been waiting, I would have been in significantly more dire straits. After discovering that there was nothing worth eating at Heathrow either, we go buy me an oyster card and catch the tube home. Once there, Steve heads off to work, and I grab eggs, bacon, and potato waffles from the mini-Tesco downstairs and cook myself a long-awaited meal. 40 hours without an actual meal, while ill.

Travel with a strange food intolerance sucks, and travel with a cold on top of that sucks worse.

Rediscovering the joy of cooking

It's no secret - anyone who knows me well enough knows that I love playing around in the kitchen. What many don't know is that I haven't had the energy or the will to cook for around two years now. For a hobby I loved to do daily, that's been pretty crushing.

Throw in going dairy free, and more recently gluten free, and I've been even less able to do this one of my favourite things.

When I have made food it's generally been as an obligation, or in one of the very, very rare flashes of feeling not-tired. It hasn't been a part of my daily life, and I have missed it horribly.

That's changed in the last two weeks. I have been able to think about cooking, and experiments, and carry them through. To theorise and test my theories. What can I say? I'm a geek in the kitchen, as much as I am anywhere else in life. I stand there and I think about the chemical processes going on, and how it would change if I did something else, or used a different ingredient, or a different process, or whatever.

Occasionally I get a surprise, as I did on Sunday when I made my breakfast quiches. Well, they were supposed to be quiches. They ended up being souffles instead. Apparently, mayonnaise is a very effective raising agent. I'm not quite sure why that is, but it certainly seems to be the case. Originally, it was supposed to be substituting for cream, to give them a better texture. It changed the texture, all right. Just in a bit of a different direction to what I was expecting. I've tacked the recipe on to the end of this post, suggestions for flavour combinations and tweaks would be great.

I want to start making my own mayonnaise for use in my quiches too. Anyone got a good recipe?

I still haven't debugged my mini meatloaf, which are my lunches during the week. Being dairy and gluten free, and also doing a lot of physical exercise, relying on cafes and food courts for lunch is expensive and risky. So, I DIY. I like a hot lunch, too. Thus: mini meatloaf. Anyway. They're lovely and moist and ... fall apart. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong there, really. Maybe less egg? More breadcrumbs? Oh well, I'll give it a try next time I make a batch.

Quite apart from the meds (which have had a vastly positive impact on my outlook and mood), I think that making more of my own food is making me feel healthier. I get bugger all preservatives in my diet now. Lots of fresh veg and good quality protein. Very little starts off looking like something not recognisably of plant or animal origin. On top of that, it's fun. And delicious! I say without shame that I am a very good cook. I can count the number of fail meals I've made in the last decade on one hand (I'm up to 4). I make food that is far, far better than what I can buy in a packet and is usually better than what I can buy in a cafe or restaurant. Part of that is, I think, that I have been doing it long enough - about 20 years - so that I have a good 'feel' for it. Part of it is the way my brain is twisted towards curiosity and experimentation, followed by analysis, theories, and theory testing. This is helped along by a very active sense of taste - I love food, food tastes awesome, and there is no faster way to give me an endorphin high than to feed me a wonderful meal.

In a slight change of subject, I'm considering adding to my list of hobbies doing formal reviews of gluten and dairy free products. Especially for baking, flour in particular, it is a right royal pain in the posterior to get together, mix, and keep on hand all the little bits and pieces needed. Also, packet products are a good place to start a new set of experiments - it tastes good, what's in it, can I make it better? Or simply have around as convenience foods. I guess I'd have to contact various companies to find distributors in my area, although I suspect I already know where most of them are within a 10km radius. It will improve my writing and food photography skills, as well as providing at the very least a self-reference for various products, and potentially a resource for others.

This post is probably long enough, so I'll leave it there. Please comment on anything that interests you, and let me know if there's anything I can improve in my writing or anything else.

As promised, the recipe:

Crustless Individual Quiches or Souffles.

Ingredients.
8 eggs
2-3 cups finely chopped veges (shallots, fresh asparagus, capsicum,
tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, mushrooms, caramelised onion, etc).
Saute hard veges first.
200g meat filling (bacon, salmon, chorizo, etc)
spices to taste (pepper, garlic, chilli)
herbs (basil, thyme, dill, rosemary, mixed herbs, etc)
2-3 tbspn whole egg mayonnaise (4-5 tbspn for souffle)

Method.
1. Preheat oven to ~180C.
2. Grease six-cup texas muffin tray.
3. Whisk together herbs, spices, eggs and mayonnaise in a 2L jug,
until smooth. ~30secs.
4. Mix together meat filling and veges.
5. Divide meat/vege mix into muffin tins.
6. Pour egg mix over meat/veges. Fill cups to nearly full.
7. Bake for around 30min, until golden brown on top.

Makes six texas muffin sized quiches or souffles.

Quinoa, keeenwah.

As part of my recent dairy-free kick, and wanting to expand my diet a bit so that I have more options, I picked up some quinoa recently.

A couple of things about quinoa:
- It's gluten-free
- It's a complete protein source, and very high in protein for a grain
- Well, actually, it's a seed, I think, not a grain
- Anyway, it keeps well after being cooked. A week or so in the fridge.
- It's low-GI, although I don't yet know if it's diabetic-friendly
- It comes in different colours: black, white and red; I have red
- It's as versatile as rice or couscous
- It's one of those trendy 'superfoods' which means it's a lot easier to get a hold of now than it was 2 years ago.

To cook it, it's basically the same as rice. Add 2 parts liquid to 1 part quinoa, set to gentle heat, cook for about half an hour, you're done. Easy as. Oh, except the important part: soak or rinse thoroughly (or, hell, both) before cooking. There's a coating that doesn't taste very nice that you want to get rid of. So the internet tells me, at any rate.

Anyway, so far I've done two things with it.

First thing was to make up a fairly plain 'savoury' style. 1 cup quinoa, 2 cups vege stock, a bay leaf, a shake of random spices (cumin, tumeric, chilli, pepper). I had some of this as a lunch, by itself. Man, was it filling. Tasty; the quinoa itself is very mildly flavoured, unlike, say, amaranth (ew). It is also a very textured food - chewy and interesting in the mouth, much more so than rice or couscous. About the closest would be perfectly al dente pasta, but made as it is of smaller pieces, it's not the same at all (which is not a bad thing). I'd say maybe 1/4 cup would have been enough for lunch food, easily.

Based on this experiment, flavoured appropriately, I think it would do well with just about anything that has a liquid component - thai and indian curries, italian sauces (especially tomato-based), stews, casseroles, tinned tuna, that sort of thing.

The second experiment I've conducted is using the cooked leftover quinoa to make a griddle cake, as a substrate for my bacon and eggs, instead of bread. I must say, the results are ... well, not so great. I should probably have looked up some sort of fritter or pancake recipe first, instead of just mixing with egg and spices and whacking it into the pan any old how and hoping. Don't get me wrong, here; it tastes great, the flavours mix well, but it's not holding together very well. Scooping it up with a fork wasn't what I had in mind. On the bright side, this is the perfect excuse to experiment more, and get it right. Hmm ... I wonder what it would taste like mixed in with scrambled eggs?

Other experiments on the horizon: using quinoa to give a bit more texture to meatballs and pies. Making a porridge or congee equivalent, both sweet and savoury. Some form of salad. I'm curious to see how it would work in biscuits, bread, and muffins.