Been too damn busy to think of very much intelligent to blog about.

I did post a long meandering review of my new mobile phone over at geekrant though.

Oh, and I can tell you about this fabulous email I got the other week:

Subject: Your Food Pyramid/Trapezoid presented at food and nutrition seminar

Hello Daniel,

I was at the food industry seminar mentioned in this news story, along with many other academics and professionals from food manufacturing and nutritional health industries: Good in the snack (Herald-Sun, 27 June 2006)

The main theme of the seminar was nutritional trends and eating habits of Australian consumers, now and in the future.

You might be interested to hear that in his presentation, Dr Keast (mentioned in the news story) illustrated actual eating habits vs desired nutritional habits, by showing your Food Pyramid/Trapezoid from the toxiccustard site!

Best Regards,
Kirsten

It’s just about dinner time. I’ve been attempting (for the first time) to cook a beef stew, a meal designed and built around the half-a-bottle of red wine I had left over from Friday. It’s been slowly cooking for about six hours or so, and I’m getting very hungry.

Here’s what my (ancient) stove looks like:

Update 9:30pm. Oh man, that was de-smeggin’-licious. The mushrooms in particular… superb. Perhaps not quite enough meat, and too much carrot in it. But a great cold winter’s night meal.

Hope the leftovers are as good when re-heated. Given how easy it was to cook, I can scarcely believe I’ve never done it before.

I had to have a fix. It had been weeks. I have found a source, a legal source, but it’s expensive.

Amid stories of black market bananas, I can reveal that I had three bananas in my house this week. Don’t bother trying to break-in now to steal them; they’ve been eaten.

These were decently-sized bananas (not the tiny weedy ones you see in some of the few shops that have them), but they ain’t cheap. At $12.99 per kilo, the three I had set me back $9.

But sometimes you’ve just got to treat the family.

My favourite cold-night dining-alone dinner is soup with toast. Perhaps one of those nice Heinz spicy lentil soups; perhaps pumpkin; perhaps tomato. Heat it up in the saucepan, chuck a slice of bread in the toaster, and eat. Exceptionally low effort, quick, yummy, warming, and healthyish.

Bananas at the moment are…

small

green

$8.99+ per Kg

and pretty much off the menu at the moment.

My kids love tomato sauce, so we often have it on the table during meals. There’s several brands available, the main ones being Masterfoods and Heinz (Big Red). They both taste the same to me.

But the Masterfoods one comes in a bottle with recycle code 4, which is not recyclable in my area. Heinz comes in a bottle with recycle code 1, or in glass, both of which are recyclable.

So I buy the Heinz.

Amidst the awfulness of the impact of Topical Tropical Cyclone Larry, one of the side effects will be the impact on bananas. Apparently about 80% of the crop has been wiped out, perhaps causing prices to double, and a dire shortage expected for the next 9-12 months.

In my family we chomp our way through an enormous number of bananas every week. On a typical weekday, the three of us take one each to work/school, and they often get distributed liberally in the breakfast cereal, on icecream for dessert, and in the evening serve of fruit (generally accompanied by apple and sultanas).

Any that go mushy before being eaten end up being made into banana shakes. By my calculations the typical banana consumption could well be 20 or more per week. It might be time to diversify.

Given the seriousness of the storm, we should be grateful, of course, that the only impact is a rise in the price of fruit.

Every couple of weeks, often on a Friday, I have a hankering for a burger and chips. I know it’s not good for me, but sometimes, just sometimes, you need to indulge your tastebuds.

So I go along to the local Hungry Jacks, incorrectly choose the queue which looks like it’s going to move the fastest, but which in fact has at its head the little old lady who has never been to Hungry Jacks before and is asking the counter staff what each item on the menu is. Eventually I get to the head of the queue and order a Bacon Deluxe Value Meal, but with an OJ instead of a Coke. (Occasionally it’s something else, but that’s the usual one. Yes, they have allegedly healthy salad-oriented meals now. Would I order one of those? Hell no. If I want a salad, I don’t go to Hungry Jacks.)

The counter person will ask me if I want to upsize, and I will say no. They’ll ask if I wish to eat in, and I’ll say yes. With attention and skill they prepare and bring my meal, and I go and get a strawer. Then I’ll try and grab a napkin.

Is it just me that has trouble grabbing the napkins out of the napkin dispensers at Hungry Jacks? It’s like they’ve been specially set up to resist giving you anything. They’re wired up so tightly that if you try and grasp just one napkin, all you get is a tiny bit of torn paper. Thus you have to try and get a grip on three or four napkins, and you end up with too many.

I find a seat, eat my meal, ponder why fast food is so often just a little bit disappointing in terms of taste and general satisfaction, ponder the napkin dispensers, and try and calculate how many K’s walking I should do to work off the burger. I use one napkin to wipe my mouth and hands, and take the rest back to work with me to use on another occasion.