Posts by Alice Ronald
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One light meal I like is to do a Thai-style salad. I usually make enough for two salads, which means tomorrow's lunch is sorted too.
Or scrambled eggs on toast. I've been making my scrambled eggs in a frypan recently, rather than microwaving, with crushed garlic in the egg. So good.
Cooking for yourself occasionally is quite different to doing it every day, I've found. At my last flat, I did a lot of things that would do 2-3 meals and chill or freeze the extras. Now I'm sharing cooking with others again & just need to fend for myself a couple of nights a week, so I tend to do simple one-offs.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I did Bursary in '00, which I think made my year one of the last to do the whole "old system". When I changed degrees in '04, I joined a bunch of first-years who had gone all the way through NCEA. They were most surprised to discover that the final exams would cover stuff from the earlier sections - "But we've already been tested on that!" came up in one review session. Oh boy, the lecturer's reaction to that was scathing.
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I've read several comments from people who do actually live at/below the line, permanently. Most of them are actually pretty disgusted by the "poverty tourism" and grandstanding that seems to accompany these awareness raising stunts, especially when it's a celebrity or someone pretty well off staging it.
Their point is that living like this for a finite period doesn't replicate the stress of actually living a life with minimal income. The people taking on this challenge don't face the challenges of living in a food desert, being at the mercy of landlords who hike rent, constantly hoping that your car/fridge won't die. When you know that everything's going to back to normal next week, you can cope much better with deprivation.
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Russell Brown,
I transitted through LAX in 1999, the most vivid memory for me was the floor to ceiling plate glass window in the transit lounge. We could look out into the 'real world', seeing people go by, with food & drink. We were stuck in this tiny lounge with a 2 hour wait for the toilet and telenovelas with the sound off on a TV behind a locked cage. And since we were going to Germany, none of us had US dollars to buy drinks, so we kept staring at the vending machines and swearing.
Singapore was lovely. I got a foot massage and a shower, found a charging station for my phone & checked up on FB etc with the free wifi while watching the planes, then visited the 4 different garden areas to see the orchids, butterflies and koi fish.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Ben McNicoll,
Or there's the duct tape trick - wrap the circumference of a jar lid with tape (don't get tape on the jar itself) and leave about 6 inches free on the end, in the direction of the thread. Pull on the free end to open the jar. Works for both plastic & metal lids.
I tend to buy JarKeys as "just in case" gifts - forgotten birthdays, random thank-yous, secret santa.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Russell Brown,
In that case, Gregor Ronald's tried & true lifehack for cooking a Sunday Roast dinner: prep veges for roasting & toss in oil in a plastic bag (separate veges according to roasting times), then twist top of bag & place in roasting tray on the bench. Place meat in its roasting tray, cover with foil & leave on bench.
Write down cooking schedule on kitchen notepad, leave for wife & daughter to follow when they come back from Sunday arvo swim. Go to pub.
Return home at 6:30pm, steam a green vege in the microwave, make gravy, carve meat & serve dinner.
Note that writing down the cooking schedule is important, because said wife and daughter will have a couple of wines during this process & likely forget where they're up to, so they need instructions.
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Device: a JarKey. You can get them at King of Knives and Stevens for $12-$15. They're an acrylic lever that looks like an oversized beer bottle opener - you put them on the edge of a metal jar lid, lever up to pop the seal, and the jar opens easy as pie. Great if someone has weak hands or (like me) tends to try & open jars with wet/greasy hands in the middle of cooking.
Technique: free-flow freeze your bacon (this is actually Gregor's). Lay out the rashers on sheets of baking paper or clingfilm on top of a baking sheet & pop in the freezer for a few hours, then store the frozen sheets in a ziploc baggie. Much easier to chop up a frozen rasher or two. Also, those squeezy tubes of crushed ginger, garlic, spice mixes from the produce section? You can freeze those as well - they don't go completely solid and they last much longer than in the fridge.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Lilith __,
Little bumpy, but not any more than riding on Chch roads these days ;)
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Moz,
I'm happy with them. I do generally use a second set of lights, simply because I'm a bit paranoid and the low mounting of the Reellights is a bit disconcerting to me. I put some detachables higher up. But I've ridden home after dark a few times without the extras & felt like I was plenty visible.
I had one situation where the Reellights semi-failed. A bike shop tech remounted a wheel slightly off-centre and the capacitor wasn't charging. The lights still worked, but they stopped when I did (at lights etc) instead of running off the charge that had built up. Squaring the wheel fixed it.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to BenWilson,
They are good - I don't mind that they run in the daytime & I wouldn't want to have to realign the magnets on a frequent basis, they can be a bit fiddly. If it's bright, you can't see them, and if it's slightly dim then it's good to know they're on. The funniest bit is when my workmates come & tell me that I've left my lights on when I parked my bike, because the capacitor is still running down.
From what I can tell, they don't get brighter - because the induction charges the capacitor & which then powers the LEDs, they're just on (flashing). But then, I never go very fast on that bike :)