Playing with food words

Meatloaf - but I won't do that.

Family GP had a bit of a riot around the table the other night.

I'd managed to pull off one of those meals that was both made up on the spot (along general guidelines provided by Mrs G) and evoked actual "wow"s from the minions. I don't like to brag, but I like telling you how impressed they were. OK, I'm bragging.

I'd made individual meatloaves in silicon muffin forms. In the mix was your standard onion, beef mince, salt and pepper to taste, but I added a very finely grated carrot, some finely minced mushroom, and left out the egg and breadcrumbs, which are really just stand-ins for reasonable food. I also added a good dollop of hoisin sauce to the mix, and another sneaky one at the bottom of each form, so that it bubbled up through the stuff as it baked.

I don't think this is exactly restaurant-grade anything, but the result impressed.

Conversation moved to how it could possibly be improved. The first suggestion was for a little blob of fetta in the middle. Then the fetta had to be poked inside a potato gem (a tater tot, for any Yanks reading) before the meatloaf mix was formed around it. Then the fetta-stuffed potato gem needed a bacon blanket before disappearing inside the meatloaf.

About then we got sidetracked by how it should be described. Following the example of the "turducken" (a turkey stuffed with a duck, itself stuffed with a chicken), and after much hilarious experimentation, we settled on "me-baco-tater-fetta-loaf" to describe this entirely fanciful concoction.

Nobody at any point actually thought we would ever make such a thing, it was just a silly conversation where everybody got to throw in a ridiculous idea and see where it led.

Do other people have dinner table conversations like this? I remember well the terrible punning conversations I and my brothers (and Dad) would have when we were young, while our Mother groaned and sighed. When I married Mrs G, Mum advised her to ignore us when we started to try to out-do one another with ever more terrible puns. Anything else just encourages us. We still do it, because the only encouragement we need is each other.

There's a harmless, silly kind of fun in creative wordplay. I'd much rather be collaborating in the naming of a "me-baco-tater-fetta-loaf" with my minions than talking about the weather, or what they might have seen on television.

There's also laughter.

It's so good to laugh with your minions. The healing power of laughter should not be underestimated.

For all the trials we've faced this year, getting around the table and being silly quickly restores a bit of perspective.

Mrs G and I are blessed to have families which are only mildly dysfunctional. For those of you less fortunate, yet who are obliged at this time of year to share meals with the odd people you're related to, I hope you're able to spot some absurdity and run with it.

You never know who'll try to keep up.

Strange victories

Tomorrow I'll be eating leftover crumbed fish and potato gems, and this is a victory.

Those with even a passing familiarity with the kitchen will realise that leftover crumbed fish fillets and potato gems don't react well to microwaving at lunchtime the next day. They might resemble the cheap tastiness of last night but they by no means resemble the exciting crunchy texture that makes it worth taking things out of the freezer and treating them to heat in a way that makes them acceptable on the plate.

And yet I will be thankful, and here's why.

Computer slugfest

It's time to bite the bullet.  Sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to have to replace this computer.

It's a Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop, and it's getting sluggish, poor thing.  Whenever you ask too much of the processor it just throws its metaphorical hands in the air and says "This job's too hard!", and switches off.  To be honest it's always had cooling problems - and for the last six months I've been using a cake cooling tray under it, to ensure it doesn't just shut down when I least expect it.

For example, I just tried to Google the model number for this laptop, to find out how old it really is, and the thing shut down.  (And yes, why would I dig out the documentation when I can Google the result?)  

Enough is enough.

Minion in a million

Happiness in the Good Plates household tonight, with the news our eldest minion has call-backs for four (count them!) parts in her school's production of Annie Jr!

The school puts on a show every December which involves almost all pupils.  It's a K-10 campus, so the lead roles are nominally reserved to Years 9 and 10.  Our Year 8 minion walked into her audition yesterday, Hard Knock Life'd her little socks off, and appears to have made an impression, with call-backs for the parts of Annie, Lily St Regis, Grace and a Boylan Sister!

We're so very proud!  Call backs are tomorrow, so wish her luck!

Make no mistake, hens are vicious: UPDATED

"Daddy, something's wrong with Penny."

It was more the way the words were delivered than the words themselves that filled me with dread and made me put down the wet thing I was about to hang on the clothes line and head for the chook run.

Penny is one of our chickens.  As it happens, she's at the bottom of the pecking order.  When the big, tough chooks want that scrap on the ground, she gets out of the way.  From time to time she cops a peck on the way out.  So, there being something wrong with Penny will almost always have more to do with being bullied than anything else.

Making time for what you want

You know that feeling, when you're frustrated because you want to do something but there’s a bunch of other stuff you need to do first?  And there’s that other feeling, of satisfaction, when you actually get through the “need” stuff and create the opportunity to start the “want” stuff?

I love that second feeling.

Stop and smell the masonry

Bendigo's Capitol Theatre portico

Bendigo is full of old stuff.

Okay, that seems a bit obvious.  So obvious that I hadn't really paused to think about it very hard until one night last week when I found myself sitting in what must once have been the manager's office in the 1876 Union Bank in View Street, drinking fine French red with an old theatre friend and her fellow cast members.

When Mrs G and I were selling the idea of moving to Bendigo to the minions we contrasted the relative lack of buildings more than a few decades old in Canberra with the profusion of century-plus old buildings in Bendigo.  The city dates from the 1850's gold rush, so there's a lot of period architecture; from the follies of mining barons to the facades of old pubs on almost every corner.  "Look, minions, surely you'd be thrilled to live amongst all this history!"  They weren't too sure.

Admittedly, it is kind of easy to overlook all this built heritage around you while you're trying to go about your life.  Getting to work, doing the shopping, paying the bills.  And yet there's a statue of Queen Victoria, unveiled only two years after her death, on the corner of one of the main intersections in town.  We're on the other side of the planet from where she lived and reigned, and there's a bloody statue of her here!  Mind you, the state is named after her, so I probably shouldn't be that surprised.

Anyway, as I was sitting there the other night, gazing about this 130+ year old building, eating fabulous prawns and lapping up the company, my conscience prodded me to appreciate the fact that the profusion of white-haired motorists with hats on their parcel racks aren't the only old things here that should drive you to distraction.

Photo credit: David Stephenson, via Flickr

Ups and downs

A vast improvement.  Or, "Avast!  Improvement!"

It's been a roller-coaster few days in the Good Plates house-hold.  A birthday dinner with my Dad for the first time in a very long time, some housework and a pretty cruisy Mothers' Day.  But the highlights were watching our youngest minion make a breakthrough at karate and building a better wardrobe.  The lowlight was definitely responding to the realisation that one of our dogs had eaten a lot of rat poison.

Not playing for sheep stations

Created at atom.smasher.org/wof/

There are quizzes and there are quizzes. Some are really challenging and some are walks in the park but, regardless of their difficulty, they present the only legitimate opportunity for me to use the large block of information in my head which would otherwise lie idle (probably around a pool, sipping cocktails through a long straw).

When it comes to difficulty, the annual quiz I used to co-write for Canberra Rep was never as impossible as QI, but certainly more challenging than your average breakfast radio quiz. Be that as it may, the radio quizzes are a good source of occasional free stuff if you can get through to be the contestant, and if you give enough correct answers.

Knowing my audience is pretty cluey, you should have no difficulty with this lot (answers at the bottom):

1. What television cooking show returns to the screen this Sunday night?
2. Where in your body would you find a cornea?
3. Where would you find a ‘hospital corner”?
4. Which team is currently at the bottom of the AFL ladder?
5. (Music cue: excerpt of “Killer Queen”) Who recorded this song?
6. Which city is hosting this year’s Olympic Games?
7. How many carats are there in pure gold?
8. What is the collective noun for a group of insects?
9. Strawberries are the only fruit with its seeds on the outside: true or false?
10. Who played “Bridget Jones” on the big screen?

There should be an "i" in "parent"

Okay, so I've been at this parenting malarkey for slightly over 13 years and, while there are most certainly longer treatises on the subject than I'm going to offer here, I reckon I've seen and learned a thing or two.  I'm not even going to try to impart a fraction of what I would class as the advice at my disposal.  I'm simply going to make two choice observations today.

These observations are not just based on my personal experience as a parent.  I'm also tapping my observation of other parents and the way they manage their lives around the minions they've produced. In a lot of cases I knew them before they were parents, and there are as many reactions to becoming parents as there are people.  Further, I don't think there is any "right" or "wrong" way to parent.  I will certainly think to myself "well, I wouldn't do it that way",  but I won't tell those parents that they should do things the way I do.  There's superior and there's different.  A lot of the time stuff is just different, and you should leave well enough alone.  Lots of different parenting skills work, sometimes unexpectedly.

There are a couple of matters, though, that I think are universally applicable.  Here are two of them.

In praise of Lego

Lego meets mini-golf!

It is 50 years since Lego was introduced to Australia.

I'm not certain there was always Lego in my life, but certainly from the age of about 5 my brothers and I had a big box of the stuff to build things out of.  Many was the afternoon that we'd be raking our fingers through that box, with conversations along the following lines: "I need a white single two-by-two ..."; "Oh, I need a red single one-by-two ...".  Rake, rake, rake "Here it is!"

The perennial beauty of Lego is that your construction is only limited by your imagination.  As Lego has introduced ever more specialised components, the ability to build what you see in your mind's eye has improved.  For example, I was building 8-bit spaceships compared to what my son is able to invent now:

Just about everyone I know has a similar story about Lego.  How it was the go-to toy for rainy days; how, if you were inspired by something you'd seen on TV, you'd recreate it in Lego; the pain of kneeling on Lego (a phrase immortalised in a collection of "songs from our childhood" compiled by my brother-in-law); the frustration of not being able to find the right piece when you needed it.  These are the common experiences of several generations of kids and, when Mrs G and I started making minions, we agreed they would also have that experience.  True to our word, they too have access to a big box of the stuff.

Somehow Lego has managed to retain the interest of many people beyond childhood, and their diversification and licensing deals have largely been good moves.  The Lego Star Wars range is the clear leader here, and the fact that I can play through the Star Wars saga as a Lego character on my TV is like all sorts of Christmases come at once.  Having a minion around who has accidentally wiped your save, from time to time, enables me to have to play through it all again ... !  Neat-o!

There is possibly only one down-side to Lego - the historical inability to integrate it with other building systems such as Meccano, K'nex or MegaBloks.  However, even that's no longer a problem.  The Free Universal Construction Kit enables interoperability of all of these systems and more.  What's more, you make the pieces yourself, with a Makerbot or similar 3D printer (h/t Steve).  The possibilities now really are endless.

So, if you have a soft spot for Lego and something suitable in the cupboard or fridge, I invite you to pour some in a glass, raise it and say after me: "Here's to Lego!"

Our minion is all grow’d up

It’s amazing how years of operating under a particular set of circumstances makes you forget certain options when you’re problem-solving.  After 13 years of arranging the constant care of one’s minions, from birth, it feels unnatural to incorporate “no supervision” into the repertoire.  Yet it shouldn’t be, and it’s a prompt to start thinking outside the “minor” box in a range of different minion-related matters. 

Mrs G and I have been preparing for the coming school holidays, and since we both work full-time, we have to arrange care for the minions.  Grandparents have never been a reliable option, as they’re variously not local, fully occupied with running businesses or still teaching.  A series of school changes means that we don’t know any of the minions’ friends’ parents well enough yet to consider them as holiday carers. 

So, we got the local YMCA vacation care program details, and that all looked OK, and we started filling out the enrolment forms.  At that point I noticed that the program is “for primary school aged children only”, and we have a secondary aged minion.  Uh-oh, spaghettios!