Today was my last real work day. Tomorrow is my last official day but we're having our end-of-project day, which means going to the National Gallery then boozy lunch and more drinks. Nice that work are paying for my farewell!
That means no more work until, well, next year really! We're off travelling on 10th April, and won't be back in Oz until December. Can't wait!
Holly has recently discovered she likes smoked mackerel. I've been eating it for years because it has many advantages: cheap, not endangered, tasty and being an oily fish it's got lots of the good stuff in it. So anyway, she's been getting me to cook it a lot recently.
Here's a really quick and easy meal I whipped up last Friday night. Dead easy, tasty and interesting both for flavours and textures.
The sweet potato is a bit of new ingredient for the Brits, and I've had people confused about what they are. Our local market sells two very different varieties interchangeably, often in the same basket. What you want are the yellow/orange-fleshed "kumara" type (though nobody here will know it by that name) not the white-fleshed yam type. Externally they look identical, but pick one up and scrape a tiny section of skin off with your thumbnail. If it's white, put it back. You want a deep orange/yellow colour. This picture shows you what you're looking for.
The sweet potato in this recipe works very well with the fish, adding a little sweetness and bulk to the dish. I also felt it was a bit lacking in starch, so I added a couple of sliced of oven roasted toast to bulk it up and soak up the garlic butter. By toasting it inthe oven you get a nice crunchiness, kind of like fried bread but without all that extra oil.
Ingredients:
Pre-heat the oven to about 180°C.
Peel the sweet potato and slice it along its length in about 1cm slices. Then slice those into long, 1cm by 1cm chips.
Put a tiny amount of oil on a baking sheet and spread it around. Put the sweet potato on, with plenty of space around each. Cook for 20 minutes, then turn and cook another 20 minutes. You want them to start going golden brown.
While this is cooking, finely dice the garlic and heat it up with the butter. Throw in ashort shake of dried thyme, which adds a little warmth to the garlic butter.
When the sweet potato is cooked, leaving it in but bunching it up on the baking tray a bit, place the mackerel fillets on the tray, skin-side-down.
Arrange the slices of bread somewhere in the oven where they get heat from all sides. You want it to get nice and crispy, but not completely desiccated. You could do it in the toaster but you probably want it a bit dryer than you can get from that.
After ten minutes, the mackerel will be hot enough and the toast
done. Take it all out
of the oven and arrange like this:
Toast, sweet potato chips, mackerel, garlic butter.
Serve with some lightly steamed curly kale, which also benefits from a little garlic butter. Delicious!
So all the council workers are out on strike today. Their union, Unison, has put excellent information about why they're striking on their web site. Compare and contrast with the fatcat train drivers on £30k when they go on strike, where the only source of information is the right-wing Evening Standard. Then again, maybe they realise their strikes are indefensible?
This is a fantastic visualisation of US government spending. Would be great for comparison purposes to do something similar for other governments.
Bought some CDs recently. Remember them? Maybe ask your grandparents what those were.
The Spinto Band - Nice and Nicely Done is by a band we caught after going tothe Barfly in Camden to see Melbourne band The Morning After Girls (who were crap: too many guitar heroes for one band). If you like Bright Eyes and the like, you'll love these young lads from Delaware. Highlight of their set was the silly medley they did at the end including Was (Not Was)'s Walk the Dinosaur, with all the moves!
controller.controller - History is a Canadian band I heard on GPC and I'm hoping to catch them at the Barfly in a few weeks. Kind of somewhere around Life Without Buildings, PIL, Joy Division sound. There's some full-length tracks on the web site.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Tepid PeppermintWonderland is an anthology from these guys who are doing their best with the laudable goal of keeping music evil. Turns out they're playing in Germany around the time we'll be there, so hope to see them. Maybe they'll end up playing Roskilde, since they're in the area around the same time.
So I'm on the tube this morning and realise I need to tell Holly something. I send her atext message on my phone. Now this is pretty damn advanced phone, you'd think it could handle that. There is, of course, no mobile reception on the tube, but it should be trivial for the phone to wait until there is reception and then send the message. Don't fucking expect it!
So when can we expect store-and-forward to work for SMS? We're not talking rocket science here.
I don't normally remember my dreams but this morning I had a very vivid one, which seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie. It was all about an evil Russian scientist who drugged me and implanted a mind control device in my brain. Not sure what exactly he was making me do, but the mind control thing and the implant were very vivid. Strange.
Wonder what the dream interpreters would think of that?
There's one good thing about election season: I get to tell Tories quite how much they disgust me in the comfort of my own doorstep. And they have to be polite! Hours of entertainment. This is more fun than god-botherers, and less likely to be on a Sunday morning.
Last night I went to the launch of Ryan Heath's book Please Just Fuck Off, It's Our Turn Now (Holding Baby Boomers to Account) at Australia House. Quite a fun evening, and the debate was quite entertaining and thought provoking.
While there, I discovered that Greatest Working Australian Tim Flannery is in town promoting his latest book, The Weather Makers, which is all about climate change.
The event is on at The Menzies Centre at 18:00. Not sure I'll be able to make it as I'm getting a vaccine in Victoria at 17:30, but I'm gonna try.
This interweb thing is great! I've been translating a bunch of strings in our software at work from English into French. We used a translation company for most of it, but these are the little bits that got left out. Not sure my translations will be perfect, but they'll get what they get. Anyway, I've been relying heavily on a few fantastic web sites.
WordReference.com is your standard dictionarytool, but it's quite comprehensive and fast.
The government of Quebec provides the fantastic Grand dictionnaire terminologique which has an exhaustive range of technical term translations in just about every technical field you could imagine from aeronautics to zoology. You have to be careful though, because Quebec French isn't always the same as French French. For example, the standard translation of email in French French is "courriel" while in Quebec they say "courrier electronique".
Finally, and probably more useful for someone who's a bit rusty in French these days, is Verbix which conjugates verbs into the 15 main tenses. Incredibly handy, particularly when you don't have your red book to hand.
