Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.
Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.
If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).
Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.
I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."
Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.
I didn't hope hard enough.
The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.
I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.
(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)
I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.
Have you ever rung those toll-free phone numbers that food companies put somewhere on the packaging of their products so you can ask questions / give feedback / make complaints? Well, for the first time in my life, I actually rung one of those today: I rang Nestle/Maggi to find-out what happened to their Devilled Sausages Mix.
Devilled sausages have been a mainstay of the family dinner table for as long as I can remember: a meal enjoyed by all with its sweet sauce and soft apple slices, and a meal which I've taken to cooking for myself when I'm out of ideas yet still want to feel good about putting a little effort into preparing my own dinner. Using the sachets provided by Maggi (and yes, that specific brand after some time spent trying-out the others and not liking them so much), my family, and now I, have been able to churn-out a delicious meal within a short time and with almost minimal effort.
(OK, that last paragraph reads like something one of those advertising personalities that gives you meal ideas during the ads just before dinner time would say)
I thought I'd make devilled sausages for myself some weeks ago when I noticed some flavoured sausages at the back of my freezer that hadn't been touched for a looong time (let's just say the word 'months' is adequate to describe it; thank God for the refrigeration/freezing process!). Looking to the pantry, I couldn't find any devilled sausage mix, so added it to my shopping list and resolved to buy a few packets of the stuff the next day.
There wasn't any at the grocery either, and all I succeeded in doing was spending countless minutes standing like a statue before the section of the isle dedicated to all of those just-add-hot-water meals and sauces while I looked for something that just wasn't there. A trip to a larger grocery in the suburbs when I spent the next weekend with my family also proved fruitless, and when I relayed my story to my mum, we both started to worry that Maggi had discontinued the product.
Another pass at the local grocery gave me the same results, so I finally decided to ring-up the company and find-out what happened to one of my favourite meals:
"Unfortunately, the site we use to check stock availability is down at the moment, but I can ring-around, find-out if any stores in your area still have some." said the lady on the phone.
"OK, thanks." I replied.
"But don't worry, it hasn't been discontinued because it's one of our most popular products." she assured me.
I left my details with her and hoped for some good news.
Good news came in the form of a phone call the moment I returned to my desk after lunch.
"Hello." I said, answering the phone.
"Hi, is this Emanuel?" said the lady - the same Nestle/Maggi customer services lady who helped me earlier - on the line.
"Yup, that's me."
"Hi. I still can't check stock as the system is still down, but I checked our staff shop and we have some there which I can send to you to help you out in the meantime."
!!! I was excited! I gave her my address, thanked her at least twice, and put down the phone thinking ohmigod they're gonna send me free stuff!!!
I feel almost silly being so happy to receive a few packets of what is essentially powdered ingredients, but it's free stuff, and it's free stuff that I WANT. After all those weeks of trying to find this particular combination of powdered ingredients, and given my recent disappointments, it feels good to end on a high note for once.
I believe the sound I should be making at this very moment is *squee* :)
Pizza 1.2 (or, how I might have paid too much to make pizza)
(Taking a short break from all those zombie book posts as of late, but I promise it won't be a long break; I still have plenty to say. Also, this is a continuation of Pizza 1.1 and Pizza 1.0.)
Holy smokes Batman! I've finally done it!
After Pizza 1.1, the only improvement I wanted to make was to bring-out more of the cheese flavour in the cheese-stuffed-crust (previously it was overwhelmed by the taste of the herb-infused base which was too thick around the crust), and with Pizza 1.2, which I made over this weekend, that cheese flavour really came out to play.
The first thing I did different this time was to make the bread around the crust thinner; that was easy since all I had to do was roll-out the edges until you could almost feed it to your printer. The next thing I did was a suggestion from amazing-baking girl: add to the mozzarella that would go into the crust, a more aromatic cheese like parmesan since mozzarella by itself is typically quite plain in taste.
Now, if you've been following the evolution of this experimental pizza from Pizza 1.0 up to now, this whole thing is turning-out to be less about making pizza and more of an exercise in buying cheese! I already use cheddar as a base for the toppings since it's the jack-of-all-trades cheese that I keep in the fridge for everything from toasted sandwiches to nachos. With Pizza 1.1 I added mozzarella to my arsenal since it has that elastic texture that I normally associate with cheesey-crust pizzas. With this latest incarnation, I went and bought a block of parmesan.
So that's 3 different cheeses, each of them about the same price for an increasingly smaller amount of cheese: the cheddar I get in 500g/1kg blocks, the mozarella came in a roughly 250g 'block' (it's more of a quantum sponge though, given its uncanny ability to change shape when you pick it up), and as for the parmesan, I don't even know how little of it I got, but it's roughly the same size/weight as my mp3 player which is neither large nor heavy.
Regardless, I made the pizza with all of those little improvements.
I scaled most of the recipe down this time so I could use the smaller circular pan. I say 'most' because I made the rookie mistake of not reducing the amount of flour I use in the base to match... whoops. When I placed the base in the pan and removed the excess (which I normally use to make something resembling a snow man), I found I had enough of it to give Pizza 1.2 a little brother: a small Hawaiian pizza.
Both those pizzas went into the oven. When I checked-up on them the first time, the opening of the oven released that wonderful pizza smell that lingered in my apartment (since the initial chills indicative of the coming winter mean I keep many of my windows closed) and stuck to my clothes. They also fogged-up my glasses which I had on at the time, causing temporary blindness and swearing.
After more intermittent checking-up on the pizza and more loss of sight and shouting expletives at things I couldn't see, I finally got to sit-down and eat.
The result: everything I hoped for.
My brother was able to eat the leftovers when he came by later that night. He left the following comment to my latest pizza-related tweet / Facebook status:
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction :)
(continued from Pizza 1.0)
To recap, Pizza 1.0 was an attempt to create a pizza that contained everything I ever wanted from a pizza:
- home-made base
- herbs in the dough
- thin base
- cheese-stuffed crust
- toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)
Of those points, the cheese-stuffed crust one was going to be the challenge since I had never attempted it before creating Pizza 1.0. In my first attempt, while the rest of the pizza was absolutely delicious, the cheesy crust was very weak: I used the wrong cheese or not enough of it.
With Pizza 1.1, I aimed to improve on the cheesy crust aspect of it, which was to use the correct cheese. After several discussions about it with amazing-baking girl, I settled on mozzarella cheese (other options being pre-made cheese sticks/string) and went out to buy some.
I also planned the afternoon that I'd be making Pizza 1.1 so that I could invite others to eat the pizza with me. I asked what toppings people would like, and the list that came back pretty-much amounted to an apricot chicken pizza, so I went with that.
There was one surprise that came out of making the pizza, and that was the use of canned apricots when in the oven caused the juices to ooze out all over the pizza, adding a subtle and lovely apricot taste to the base.
As for the cheesy crust, it was MUCH better than last time: the mozzarella didn't thin out when cooked so stayed thick enough in the crust for it to be actually tasted. When I tested it while it cooked by cutting into a section of the crust, it gushed out of the resulting hole just like it does in the ads. Mmmmm...
There is still room for improvement though: the bread of the crust itself was a bit too thick in places, weakening the overall cheese taste. That's a side-effect of the way I roll-out the dough however, so for Pizza 1.2 I'll have to figure-out a way to keep the edges thin.
A taste of childhood
A couple of weekends ago, inquisitive guitar girl invited people to come along to one of her first art exhibits. It wasn't exclusively her exhibit (there'll be one, but that's not for a while); she was one of several local artists who brought their stuff to be a part of a larger Waitangi Day (New Zealand holiday) festival. The festival is quite a distance from where I am, but I was staying with family that weekend who live closer to where the festival was being held. So, I selected 'Attending' on the Facebook invite, and told her I'd show up for a bit.
The festival itself wasn't huge (neither is the city it was held in, even by New Zealand standards), but it doesn't take a huge festival to draw in the fast food stalls and carts. Even small events manage to rope them in - I'm reminded of a hot-air balloon festival I went to around Easter last year which was pretty small, but the food carts all made an appearance: hot dog stands, hot chip stands (basically anything you can add tomato sauce to), hot drink and coffee carts (or anything that's best served at high temperatures), cold drink and ice cream stalls (OK, so there are some exceptions to these rules), and lots of candy stalls. Basically, if it can be served within minutes and doesn't reside anywhere near the bottom/healthy sections of the food pyramid, you will find a cart/stall for it.
One cart at these events always catches my eye, and that's the Lil' Orbit donut cart.
In my search for decent images of these donut carts, I stumbled across their website which is, well... it's a bit shit. OK, it's quite shit. The Lil' Orbits site is very much stuck in the past with it's tiled background, animated images, and inconsistent use of several fonts. In these days of clean lines, smooth corners, and easy-on-the-eye colours, seeing the Lil' Orbits site with it's sharp edges and large red Times New Roman links of the late 90s is enough to make the web designer in me cry. Here, take a look and judge for yourself:
*shudder*
The donut cart occupies a very positive part of my memory; the section of childhood memories that is always seen through rose-tinted glasses and can't be sullied by things like time and outdated websites.
A looong time ago, when my age could still be counted on one's fingers, shopping was one of the least-exciting activities you could subject me to. It meant being taken to several places for reasons I couldn't then understand, often resulting in not coming back with anything after hours of 'just looking'.
Subjecting a child to hours of nothing leads to restlessness and whining. If one of the stores we frequented during these trips didn't have a display model Gameboy with Tetris running on it, I couldn't be held responsible for what damage I might have caused. As a deterrent to bad behaviour from either my brother or I, my mum would reward us with donuts from the Lil' Orbit donut cart that was outside Deka (a department store chain in NZ that isn't around anymore) at the end of the shopping trips.
Those donuts are probably the sweetest, fluffiest little treats I have ever had, and the taste is something that has imprinted itself on my senses since those days. Nowadays, when I see a donut cart and am feeling the need to satisfy my sweet tooth, I always end-up buying a bag of donuts for old times' sake.
When I bought a bag at the Waitangi Day festival after finding my friend's art exhibit and doing another round of wandering, I realized several things about childhood memories:
1. Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)
The same sort of phenomena as believing that your dad was really tall, or that the walk to school was really long: your sense of scale was very different then. I remember those donuts being large enough to hold in my hand. Now, they're about a quarter the size of my palm.
2. You never cared what it was that made something sweet, sweet. You just cared that it was sweet.
Looking at the bag of donuts, I could see now why those things were so sweet: the donuts were thrown into a bag filled with brown sugar that clung to the donuts like a stubborn food stain on the crotch area of your pants. I found myself shaking some of the sugar off the donuts, just so I could tip the donut:sugar ratio in the donut's favour.
So what did I learn about my childhood memories? That they lied to me? Sort of. If anything, I lied to myself, but only because at that age I didn't know any better. Regardless, I still find myself drawn to the donut cart: no matter how bad the company website is, no matter how much smaller those donuts seem to get, and no matter how much I learn about health and nutrition, I am willing to put up with crappy site design, tiny donuts, and bags full of sugar, to sample a taste of childhood.
I went to Strawberry Fare last night! :D
OK, so I guess I should explain why that is such a big deal for me. It started a long time ago, back in high school...
*cue flashback sequence harp tune*
Back then, I had a friend (still have, although I don't see her much nowadays since she moved city, although I'll be attending her wedding come April!) who often went to Strawberry Fare. Now, her family didn't go there so often as to think that Strawberry Fare was all they ate every Saturday evening, but enough times to make you think that it was one of their favourite places.
Strawberry Fare is a dessert restaurant, specializing in gigantic meal-sized desserts - yes, you can swap-out your dinner for one of their desserts and feel full. Every time my friend would come back from this place she'd regale us with tales of how decadent the dessert was, or how sweet the cakes were, etc etc ad infinitum. The stories fed-upon my curiosity and my sweet tooth, building atop each other from high school through university, and eventually my mind painted a picture of a place bathed in glowing reviews and surrounded by an aura of good times to be had.
The details of the stories faded once my friend moved away, but the feeling they left inside me stayed for a long time, and were still with me when I would finally eat at Strawberry Fare in late 2008.
(Note: I have mentioned the Strawberry Fare story before in my post: Too. Much. Food. as part of Blog Every Day April 2009. If you've already read that one, then think of the following paragraphs as filling-in the gaps of that story)
I was with a bunch of people who I knew mostly through work. We had eaten dinner at a nearby restaurant already, and were actually pretty full (we ordered and shared food expecting 1 extra person who didn't turn up until near the end). That late guy though, having not eaten as much as us, said he'd stick around for dessert. Somebody came-up with the idea of going to Strawberry Fare for dessert, and all of my senses heightened (imagine a dog's ears going up in alert) and focussed on that suggestion.
"Yes!" I said, not heeding the fullness of my stomach. It's only dessert, I thought, it can't be that much, despite what everyone else has been telling me for last almost-decade.
So the group all headed for Strawberry Fare, anticipation building inside me like a child on the eve of Christmas.
The desserts all looked pretty expensive, so at first I thought this place was overcharging. I stuck with a pretty safe bet - a cheesecake, elegantly described in a blurb that contained more words than there were actual ingredients in your average cheesecake - and when I made my order the little cynic inside me started disbelieving that a cheesecake could cost so much.
The little cynic quickly shut up when I got served THAT MUCH cheesecake.
I was full, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. I had to go on because a) I was finally at Strawberry Fare and was learning that all the legends were true, and b) I am going to have to pay for this at the till later.
So I ate. I got through half of the cheesecake before my stomach reached capacity and started calling-in favours from the nearby organs to use them to store any excess food.
*return from flashback*
So what was I doing there last night? I was there for a goodbye dinner/dessert for an overseas friend returning to their country of origin (USA); the second overseas friend I've had to say goodbye to within the span of a month...
(to be continued, because I really shouldn't be up this late when tomorrow is Monday and I gotta go to work; Monday is bad enough already without me adding sleep-deprivation to the mix)
A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.
Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.
Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.
Coping mechanisms developed:
- talking to myself
- singing out loud
- blogging more often
- watching Home and Away
- joining, using, Twitter
Hobbies developed:
- baking
- giving-up on baking
- bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
- renewing my guitar playing
- making meals, and having some pride when doing so
So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.
Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:
- home-made base
- herbs in the dough
- thin base
- cheese-stuffed crust
- toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)
Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.
(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)
The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.
A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.
*sigh*
Giving-up on 'giving-up on baking'
It wasn't too long ago that I said I'd given-up on baking. From then, I had let my baking utensils collect dust (as well as things can collect dust being stuck in a kitchen drawer anyway), and even looked a bit sadly at the silicon muffin tray of mine when I put it into a new drawer with my move back into the city; remembering through a sepia memory flashback of an era long gone.
But this week, hug nazi announced that she was going to the Carols by Candlelight this year, and unable to find anybody else to come with or bring their own baking to complement the scones she was going to bring to it, I thought I'd rise to the occasion. This meant baking...
After a trip to the supermarket for baking ingredients and a trip to a department store for mixing bowls (and a colander I found-out I didn't have when I went to drain the pasta I made last night for dinner; it was a very LOL moment), I arrived at my place with all I needed to make quite possibly the most basic baking recipe I know to do: chocolate chip cookies.
My mum has been baking chocolate chip cookies for the family since the dawn of time, and I didn't need the instructions to put it all together; my visual memory of having watched her make them a million times and my muscle memory from my baking days took over. It didn't take long, or much effort, and within minutes, before the slower thinking part of my mind had the time to catch-up to what was happening in the kitchen, I had 28 chocolate chip cookies sitting in the oven.
So I should renege on my earlier blog post: when I said that I'd given-up on baking, I should've really said that I'd no longer have myself compete against the amazing cakes/treats/gingerbread-houses that everybody else around me seems to be able to pull-off. I'll just stick to what I know and can do, which in this case means going back on silly promises I made, and accompanying a friend to an event, so that she's not all on her lonesome.
Giving-up on baking
As things like lifestyle and circumstances change, I've had to discard many of the hobbies or interests I've picked-up along the way. It's always a bit sad to throw these things by the wayside or put certain others on hold as I make room for the things I want to do or focus on, but if you want to be good at anything, you can't be good at everything.
For example, some things I've given-up:
- origami
- model planes (the glue-together kind)
- rollerblading
- biking
And some other things I've put on a long hiatus:
- piano
- sketch drawing
- and a certain game programming project
Soon, the list-of-things-I've-given-up will grow by 1, and the thing joining that list: baking.
Baking was always a talent from my mother's side: weekly she'd bake something often for her afternoon teas or something my brother and I could use for breakfast, and just as often she'd bake more delicious things, like a cake, simply for the hell of it.
It's something I've picked-up from her and have always been alright at (just alright, no more) as all I see it as is the process of following instructions with a little bit of artistic flair - things I'm both good at. But recently, I've been discouraged from the art. You know that saying "too many cooks in the kitchen"? Well, amongst the people I know, there are too many baking gods and goddesses to compete with.
---
First and foremost: amazing-baking girl, who I've mentioned a few times in this blog, is a force to be reckoned with. Her kitchen is lined with jars of truffles and, for some parties, tiny Chinese takeaway boxes full of little treats inside. Raw ingredients overflow from the kitchen counters that, despite their combined surface area, lack the necessary room to hold everything.
Remember that saying about how to never trust a skinny chef? Well, amazing-baking girl would be the dessert equivalent of that saying; she's diabetic. Talk about irony.
Next up: Melissa, aka: hug nazi, who I've also mentioned many times in previous blog posts, is the loose inspiration for one of my story e-mails, and is credited as the photographer to my McDonalds chicken burger review.
I don't know what did it, but she's decided to walk the path of the housewife/homemaker, and in doing so has had several opportunities in recent memory to show-off her new-found skills. These include, a Cookie Monster birthday cake, a Hogwarts spellbook birthday cake, and tiny hamburger cupcakes. "Hamburger what?" I hear you say? Well, I'll let the photos do the talking:
And the final nail in the coffin? A few Facebook photo albums from fellow ceroc'ers showing creativity and baking talent flourish amongst them too:
Upon seeing those last 2, I thought, Fuck it! I'm done with baking! Too many wonderful sugary treats to compete with - I'm hanging-up my piping bag. I can't do this anymore.
---
Thus ends the story of my short-lived baking career path. The most spectacular baking thing I ever did? A Black Forest Gateau. Unfortunately I don't have any pics of it (like I've said elsewhere: I have no digital camera of my own), but here's what I gleamed from the internet, which sorta looked like what I made:
Three thirtyitis
Those in the Australia / New Zealand part of the world are likely to be familiar with the words three thrityitis. It's a term used by the Continental cup-a-soup ad campaign in these countries to promote the drinking of their soup products at 3:30pm - the time of day when concentration in the work place hits a low.
It may not be the exact time of day for everyone, but it's in that mid-afternoon slot where things just seem to slow down and mistakes are often made. One time I saw it in effect was a few years ago when I was getting my degree framed.
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was at my desk when my cellphone started ringing. I answered and was greeted by the voice of a young lady ringing to let me know that my degree had been framed and I could pick it up from their shop.
Her: Oh, but we'll be closing early in the afternoon on Saturday, so don't come in tomorrow."
Me: Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Friday. You're still open on Friday right?
Her: Huh? Oh whoops, yes you can come in tomorrow. The closing stuff was meant for Saturday.
After that phone call was over, I took a look at the time: 3:38pm. Roughly 3:30-itis time.
I went to pick up my framed degree the following day. I was so excited about it I almost went to buy the person who called me some of that Continental Cup-a-soup stuff, as both a thank you and a joke.
Nowadays I face a different sort of battle at around 3:30: staving-off sleep.
We learn that eating large meals can make you sleepy. I learned this lesson during my university years, where I would eat lunch on campus. I never brought my own food, so I would eat from the places that were on campus, which weren't always serving the healthiest food options available. Most importantly (but I didn't know it then) was that it was the stuff that I was choosing to eat and the amounts of it which made me fall asleep faster.
So there I was, eating too much of the kind of food that would in lesser amounts still easily knock me unconscious. During my first year at university, I was lucky enough to not have too many classes too close to lunch time, but when I did, I was often drowsy and using all of my remaining concentration from keeping my eyelids from closing. All I needed was a 15 minute nap, and on the occasions that I did succumb to slumber, at the end of it I would feel great and refreshed. The problem lay in the lead-up to the nap where I sometimes spent 20 minutes trying to not fall asleep.
20 minutes fighting sleep + 15 minutes sleeping = most of the lecture gone.
To fight this problem in second year, I went to my friends' psychology lecture which was sandwiched between lunch and my afternoon classes. It was a big class, so 1 more person - particularly one who doesn't take psychology - wouldn't be noticed. There, I would sit with them, lay my head on the desk, and fall asleep.
This didn't always work however. I often found the psychology lectures quite interesting and at times stayed awake throughout the entire thing to learn a little. One time, they even brought in a hypnotist! That was cool. Suffice it to say, this wasn't my most successful solution to the sleepiness problem.
In my 3rd year, I tried to get a nap on the couches in this common area where my friends would often hang out. It was a bit noisy, so naps weren't always easy to come by.
In my 4th and final year, the 4th year BIT (Bachelor of Information Technology) students had their own computer lab, and there I would eat my lunch, and then take a nice nap afterwards. It was a relatively quiet environment, so sleep was easy to come by. It was the best solution I had come up with.
Unfortunately, I can't replicate this solution at my work. If I happen to make the silly mistake of eating too much for lunch and then have an afternoon with either not much to do or with a task that really isn't all that engaging, then the drowsiness starts to return, and I find it hard to fight back. Once, I had been caught-out by my team leader, and on a few occasions my work mates have jolted me awake, either by coming up to me and saying something loudly, or ringing my phone.
If I do eat too much sugars (carbohydrates and what not) I can get hypoglycaemic quite easily due to the over-abundance of insulin my body makes. I'm like an anti-diabetic according to my diabetic friend, but am still susceptible to the same problems she faces if she doesn't watch what she eats. The thing is, she's the one that takes the insulin shots; all I have to do is alter my diet - smaller meals more often, don't chow-down the carbs at lunch, etc - so I feel quite bad when I make the mistake and eat too much at lunch and then start feeling drowsy afterwards.
Now that I do know a diabetic, I feel I'm not doing the best I can with the luck I've been given, and so berate myself every time this happens. I really have to fix this and stick with it; if not for the approval of my diabetic friend, then for my own well-being.
Too. Much. Food.
Yesterday my dad and I were going to have lunch together, but we didn't know where we were gonna go. My dad suggested we try a place neither of us had been to: a place called Burger Fuel. So we met up, made our way to Burger Fuel, and having never been there before, I used my knowledge of other popular burger places to make a guess as to what might be a good lunch for me.
Big mistake.
What I ended-up doing was underestimating the size of the burgers they served, so was very surprised when I was given one of the largest burgers I had ever seen. I only just managed to eat it all, before walking ever so slowly back to work. OK, 'walking' is the wrong word for it; 'waddling' is a better description of the movement I used to get myself back to work.
Suffice it to say, I didn't feel hungry again until moments before a planned dinner with my friend... where I made the same mistake all over again.
This time the place was called Lone Star. Like Burger Fuel, I had never been here before, so it was a good day for me to try new places. And just like at Burger Fuel, I underestimated the size of the portions they served here. Despite being warned by my friend who sounded like a Lone Star veteran, I only had myself to blame when they placed in-front of me the largest plate of food I had ever seen.
This time I never finished my food, nor did my friend finish hers. It didn't seem possible for any normal human being (that is, a person with 1 stomach) to complete the meals they served here in one sitting. I must've made it only 1/3 of the way through my meal before my insides just gave up.
Enough! Enough! I could hear my stomach say. You've already had 1 huge meal that almost killed me, now you want to do it AGAIN in THE SAME 24 HOUR PERIOD!!!??
During the walk home I poured all of my concentration into not throwing up. I was probably waddling again, but I didn't care; I would have used any movement, no matter how ridiculous, that had the lowest chance of puncturing a hole in my stomach, and the highest chance of getting me home. If it's good enough for the penguins, it's good enough for me.
So that was pretty much the recurring theme for yesterday. What makes this whole ordeal even stupider is that this isn't the first time this has ever happened to me.
Rewind to almost a year ago. I was being invited out to a group dinner by someone I had recently met through the ceroc dance classes I had just started attending (I've called this person 'amazing baking girl' in a previous post, so will continue to call her so here). Amazing baking girl took us all out to place called HK BBQ which I haven't been to before (seeing a pattern here? New restaurants must be a precursor to gluttonous behaviour). But it wasn't HK BBQ that killed me. You see, everyone wanted dessert afterwards, which HK BBQ doesn't do. Down the road however, was a place called Strawberry Fare - a place that had earned almost legendary status with me after hearing so many great stories about it from so many other people - and that was where we went next.
Not only was Strawberry Fare another place I had never been to, but it had one of the best cheesecakes I had ever eaten. Yes, I ate ALL of my cheesecake against the advice of my stomach.
Stop eating! it would say, You've reached capacity! We'll have to store any further food in your throat if you don't stop!
STFU stomach!, I would tell it, After all these years of hearing about this place I am FINALLY here so I am going to enjoy it and let this magical cheesecake flow through my veins!
Well, you can guess what happened next. Waddling was involved, as was concentrating on breathing in, breathing out, and entering the PIN for my card between breaths, so that I wouldn't collapse from the shock that my body was undergoing in reaction to my new weight.
It's a story that amazing backing girl remembers well to this very day. I remember it too, yet I never let the lessons learned that night guide my choices at lunch or dinner yesterday. It's like a blindspot in my knowledge, and something I may well repeat and may well be the death of me, provided my statistically short lifespan doesn't kill me first.
So why do some lessons stick with us and alter our behaviour to prevent us making those mistakes again, while others get missed no matter how many times we repeat the mistakes?
Breakfast
Coming up with something to write about today is gonna be difficult: I wrote yesterday's item very late at night, then went to sleep, woke-up at about 10am this morning (yay for the weekend), had breakfast, watched the American Idol top 9 and the results show (yes I'm a fan, quit hating on me), and after a bit of cleaning-up around my place, have only 2 hours before I have to go to a birthday party which won't see me in-front of my computer to do any blogging for the day. So I have to come up with something now, and as you can see the number of things for me to draw upon is very slim.
Since I was talking about food in the last post, I might as well follow it up with more talk about food, which brings me to the topic I've chosen for today: breakfast.
Now in spite of hearing my friends go on about healthy food, one thing they often fail to get right, is breakfast. We've all heard the age-old saying about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. My parents drilled this fact into my head from a very young age, this country used to have an ad campaign about it in-case your own parents forgot to do the drilling, and whenever a report comes out that a statistically significant amount of children aren't eating breakfast before going to school, it makes headline news. So with all this talk about breakfast, I would've thought the advice had been heeded and is one of the things that every diet-talking person I know would follow and take to heart. But oh not so.
I most often used to hear my friends complain about crappy days because they missed breakfast during high school and university. Yet with both of those eras long behind us, the number of missing-breakfast-related complaints hasn't subsided.
Understandably, some of these people have demanding jobs with strict working hours that see them operate on the weekdays with minute amounts of sleep that have to be offset by popping back-alley pharmaceuticals. But others with the most flexible work-whenever-they-want-and-can-even-work-from-home hours still miss out. It's not as if they're being hypocritical of all the dieting advice they like to spout, but rather that they've mis-prioritized the advice and poor little breakfast has taken a back seat to sucking down omega fish oils or counting vegetables.
My own experiences with missing breakfast have always been bad, understandably, I feel CRAPPY for the entire day if I skip breakfast; I can't concentrate, my head aches, my stomach complains because it's schedule is all messed-up, and I'm much more likely to fall asleep at around the 2:30/3pm mark. Having skipped breakfast maybe once or twice during my university years was all the lessons I needed to remind me to never do that again. Nowadays, even if I'm running late for work, I will make a detour to the nearest McDonalds or Wholly Bagels and grab something from there before beginning my day. Everything else can wait; people rely on me to be focused when I do my work, and combating head and stomach pain while I'm comatose on my desk in the afternoon isn't going to help.
Healthy eating
Now if only something just as cool can be said about greater/increasing age. No, I haven't started feeling the pinch of the years on me, but some of my friends definitely have, and it's their conversations on things like nutrition and fitness that make me think it's having an effect on them.
As we creep towards (or in the case of my older friends, pass beyond) a point that is equidistant with both 20 and 30 years of age, I've noticed they have an ever-increasing need to talk about their diets or their choice of food, or the number of kilometres they can run. Not that any of these things are particularly bad - putting healthy food into your body is always a plus, as is testing the heart rate - but they never really talked about these things before. It's like a switch has gone off in their heads that, now they have to tick a different age group tick box on surveys or censuses, an extra and conscious effort has to be made to cling to youth.
Suddenly, everybody is an expert in kilojoules, carbohydrate intake, the types of vegetables to eat, and the perfect weight-to-repetitions ratio on certain gym equipment. Should they be worried? Maybe. Should I be worried? Most likely yes.
A majority of my friends are of your white western-civilization type, whose chances of reaching a very old age increase with every year and every advance in modern science. Whereas I'm from a country where the average life expectancy will see me through my 50s if I'm lucky. But either through genetics or culture, despite being almost half-way through my natural life, that switch in my head hasn't gone off.
I feel no extra compulsion to eat any more healthy than I have already been doing, nor do I feel the need to supplement my existing activity with trips to the gym. I'd like to think that I have pretty good tabs on my body; that I can understand the signs of a past weeks worth of bad food or of not getting enough sleep, than I can predict how my health will fare in the following days when I'm struck with illness, and that I know the distances I can run or the number of stairs I can climb before collapsing on myself (hint: it's not a large number).
With good weeks in terms of the above, I tend to reward myself with a trip to McDonalds or a large thickshake (if I haven't had either in a while). Today I decided to have an ice cream after lunch, but made the mistake of underestimating the size of the scoops of ice cream when I ordered a double. The result was huge and looked to topple any moment if I didn't keep a close eye on incoming people or gravity.
Once I made it back to work and to my desk, I relaxed and thought now I can enjoy my ice cream. Yet just as I started to, all I could hear were voices of my friends talking about bad desserts, or the number of calories that might be in this ice cream. One voice, that of my diabetic friend, was rather prominent. I imagined her looking at the ice cream saying "Oh my God" in that "what the hell are you thinking" manner, and shaking her head as if I hadn't learned a vital life lesson.
Since when was eating ice cream supposed to suck?
While I was re-tagging my news posts, I noticed that I've never actually posted anything about the goings-on with the Writing section. The main reason for that being that it's mostly stories I've written to friends which require some level of inside knowledge, and thus it wouldn't go down too well with others. Although recently (a couple of months ago) I did write something which I think anyone can appreciate.
After being told something strange about a McDonalds burger, I decided to run a semi-scientific investigation and review of the burger. My findings and final write-up (complete with pictures) can be found in the link below:
[EDIT]: Arg, just found out something else while checking that the recent CSS-crusade didn't break anything: many of the Writing pages look messed-up in Internet Explorer 6. Seems I still have some work to do. Or, you IE6 folk could upgrade to IE7, or go get another browser :P
[Update]: IE6 fixed-up.
