Miraz Jordan

Excited: I’ve booked on the West Coast Wilderness bike tour for April 2022.

We bike through unbelievable scenery, from wild coastlines to lush rainforests … beautiful sweeping downhill trails … historic waterways, … past waterfalls and … on stunning backcountry tracks.

🚲

Hmmm, downloaded free samples of two Kindle books: The Odyssey by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (translator) and The Iliad by Homer (Author), Caroline Alexander (Translator). It might be interesting to read these again, some 50 years later, and translated by a woman.

I was a teen when I read the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ‘teeth’ of this quote have always remained with me. Today I found the source (my bold):

Son of Atreus, what manner of speech has escaped the barrier of your teeth?

Homer, The Iliad bk. 4, l. 350

// @hollyhoneychurch

OK, you’ve bought ingredients, rewritten the recipe and you’re ready.

You’ve set up your workspace, got the pots out, found the knives, measurers and stirrers and whatnot. Now on with the cooking.

Tip: follow the recipe exactly, at least the first time. Measure ingredients, set timers.

This is where you’ll discover the parts of the recipe you hadn’t noticed before: it fails to tell you what temperature to set the oven or the stovetop element to. It mentions adding in an item that never appeared in the list of ingredients. Or it uses some cooking term that you just don’t really understand. You may need to do some quick web searching…

Ultimately though you come up with a finished dish. Maybe take a photo before you tuck in. I hope it was delicious.

But here’s an important step: make some notes on your recipe. I’ll often add a Delicious! to remind myself for next time. Or it might be a longer note about some problem with the cooking process or a thought on how it could be improved — too spicy — use less chilli.

If you detected a problem, like adding an ingredient that wasn’t mentioned, or steps that should have been in a different sequence, then edit the recipe ready for next time.

If the recipe worked out for me then I’m likely to cook it again, perhaps with some variations — different veges are in season or I couldn’t get a particular ingredient and either left it out or found a substitute. I note that down.

We live in a rural area and buy ingredients from our local small town. The chance we won’t be able to get hold of some slightly ‘exotic’ ingredient is very high.

Also: cook the recipe again in a few days or weeks if you enjoyed the food. The next time through should be a bit easier because now you have some clues about what you’re doing.

I’m adding a few screenshots that show some of my comments.

Next time: links to a few recipes I really like because they’re simple and delicious.

Kiwis: if you’d like to make a donation to Afghan refugees arriving soon in Aotearoa New Zealand this GiveALittle page might be of interest.

Hey @help I’ve seen an interesting bug in the web interface — see screenshot. The Reply box multiplies. It’s the morning. I reply to someone and get one box. I reply to another and get 2 boxes. By this screenshot I was on my 5th or 6th reply. Safari Mac, latest release software.

As A Reluctant Cook I’d regularly get really stressed while cooking. That still happens sometimes, but a bit of prep goes a long way to making the whole process smoother.

First rewrite the recipe.

I find most recipes are written for people who know how to cook or enjoy cooking. They lump a whole lot of steps in together and even get things out of order. They also seem to assume that you’ll have all the ingredients measured out and prepared beforehand in a dozen little bowls.

That may be how things work on cooking shows, but in real life I reach for a packet and measure out the spice or whatever straight into what I’m cooking.

The first thing I do is to go through the recipe I’ve saved in Drafts app and break it down into tiny, single actions. I’ll often also set up a separate Preparation section for things like making stock (from boiling water and a cube), or chopping up veges.

For that recipe for Mexican-style Mince (from the first post in this series) my Preparation section has this: Make 1 cup beef stock, cook rice, drain can of beans.

I also expand abbreviations: when I’m cooking I can easily mistake 1 tbs for 1 tsp. I’ve made TextExpander abbreviations so I can easily go through and write tablespoon or teaspoon where it’s needed.

Then I work through the steps and add in amounts of things. A recipe may say something like:

In a large bowl combine the beef mince, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, paprika and chilli powder.

I rewrite that with quantities, so now it says:

In a large bowl combine 500 grams mince; 1 carrot, finely chopped; 1 stick celery, finely chopped; 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon paprika; 1/2 teaspoon chilli powder (or more to taste).

Note: I don’t eat onion, so I remove it from my copy of the recipe.

OK, recipe rewritten, I’m now ready to cook, so I get out the pans and dishes I’ll need, spoons and measuring jugs and so on, plus the ingredients.

I also grab my iPad, call up my rewritten recipe, make sure the text is large, and put the iPad on a stand so it’s easy to read.

Note: Drafts has a Shopping Mode that I only recently learned about. It stops the iPad from going to sleep and also stops you from accidentally editing a recipe you’re simply trying to scroll.

It’s time to cook!

It rained a lot the last couple of days, but was relatively warm. Those conditions probably created this very white low cloud in the valleys of the Tararuas, with the peaks standing clear above.

I was pondering how Delta won’t be the last variant we deal with… What next? 🦠 For those who don’t know their Greek alphabet:

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega.

Watched and loved CODA. 🎬

coming-of-age comedy-drama film that follows a hearing teenage girl who is a child of deaf adults (CODA for short).

This shocked me: a mere 9 months! She looked expert:

Jones took voice lessons and learned ASL for nine months before filming started.

Following on from A Reluctant Cook, I started my exploration of cooking by searching the Internet for a recipe I thought I might like.

I’m happy to eat good quality mince (Americans seem to call this ground beef) so that was a good starting point.

Step 1: find some recipes (a key search term was easy or simple and skim them to see if they have ingredients you like and can buy, not too many steps, and don’t need pots and pans etc you don’t already have.

As a reluctant cook anything with a load of steps or that needed special equipment was an instant No.

Step 2: choose a recipe.

Simplicity was the key here, and I turned up Mexican-Style Mince.

For this dish you mix up a bunch of ingredients, cook them a bit in a saucepan, and then leave it all to simmer for a while. Easy peasy!

I used copy and paste to get the whole recipe into Drafts, including the URL it came from. It doesn’t have to be the Drafts app, but I use my Mac to record the recipe and then open it on my iPad to refer to while cooking. The Drafts app works well for me.

Step 3: read the recipe carefully and make a shopping list.

Beware: some badly written recipes fail to mention ingredients and you only discover at Step 5 or whatever that you need something they never mentioned. Other recipes don’t tell you what quantity you need of an ingredient.

Also beware of language differences, in both ingredients and quantities. A search engine is your friend. If you need to look something up, make a note of what you find in your copy of the recipe. For example, something I cooked recently needed granulated sugar. Turns out that’s what I call caster sugar, so I edited my recipe accordingly.

Step 4: go shopping.

Tip: I used to buy fresh garlic and ginger, carefully peel and chop what was needed and then often ended up throwing away unused parts a week or so later. Now I buy a jar each of crushed garlic and ginger and keep them in the fridge. It’s so much easier, and less wasteful. I like both so tend to add a liberal teaspoonful where a recipe mentions a couple of cloves of garlic.

Decide when you intend to cook and eat your selected recipe and buy the ingredients. The fresher the ingredients, the tastier and more nourishing the food.

Another thing to watch out for: some recipes are for only one part of a meal. The mince recipe I found is best paired with tacos or rice etc. Do you need to add rice or veges or anything else to your shopping list?

Next time: get ready to cook.

Although I’ve always enjoyed eating delicious food I’ve also always disliked cooking. I never learned how to cook, though I could muster up often acceptable dishes like scrambled eggs or some kind of meat and vegies.

Something happened a couple of years ago — I don’t know what — and things have changed.

My first big realisation was around shopping and cooking. I always used to buy food — the kind of stuff one should buy, like vegies, and also meat — and then try to figure out how to make meals. What a chore!

💡 My lightbulb moment was to first find a recipe and then to buy ingredients.

It’s so obvious in retrospect. How come it had never occurred to me before? Perhaps because I didn’t like to cook so why would I look for a recipe…?

Anyway, that’s part one of my reluctant cook’s story.

Cool! And 75!!!

Two dogs … among the first to go to a new refuge for animals affected by domestic violence, have been reunited with their owners.

The purpose-built Pet Refuge … is able take up to 75 animals at a time.

Source: RNZ News

Very nice!

My advice (for what it’s worth) for success and happiness: Compete with yourself and root for everybody else.

Source: Candice Millard

Our community Facebook group is OK, useful; the moderators great. A member, whose avatar shows a middle-aged white guy, posted an appalling anti-woman ‘joke’ about his wife not doing chores so he’d chain her to the gate for someone to take away. I challenged. He hit back. Yuk! 🤬

We want the dogs to get used to their new soft crate so we just put it up in the lounge, added a few treats and dog blankets and ignored it. Oshi ate the treats; Sasha was anxious. Now it’s become a good place to have a nap, though only one at a time. Whew! That’s progress. 🐶

The MB web timeline jams photos together unpleasantly (Before screenshot). I wanted them spaced (After). I use Safari on Mac so I made a stylesheet and pointed Safari to it. CSS:

.post_text img {margin-top: 1.5em;
background-color: #ffffff;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px gray; }