Kitchen Fails: Read the $&%@)& Instructions Right

Kitchen Fails: When you should really pay more attention to the cooking instructions

I like making muffins. It is one of my favourite things to make. So when my friend made these great Bran Muffins, and I discovered it was actually from the instructions ON THE BRAN BOX, I was in heaven. It had molasses! I love molasses. It had raisins. I love raisins! It did not and should never have chocolate chips, which I learned from experience by trying it, but that was an honest mistake and not the point of this post and really who would have expected chocolate chips to go poorly in a muffin? Not me!

So I mixed up the muffin batter, remembering what my mother told me to not overwork it and popped it in the oven. The box said 200 degrees C (390 F), so I put the oven at 200 and carried merrily on. And the muffins did not rise. They looked... sad. And not fluffy. And at 18 minutes I realized that my oven was in F and that I had put them on at 200 degrees F and that I had THOUGHT that seemed low but had just reasoned that bran muffins were weird and not bothered to read the instructions properly because come on, how hard was it to get the heat right on the oven?

Too hard for me that evening.

Luckily when I casually left the muffins in the oven at a higher heat for a bit longer they rallied and were totally tolerable. And the next batch was awesome (or possibly a little bit burnt, muffins are tricky. But also pretty hardy, thank goodness. They are like the aloe plants of the baking world).

Kitchen Fails: Yeast is a living organism

I love to bake bread. My dad's been making homemade bread for as long as I can remember, and one of my favourite things in the world is to happily feast on think trenchers of fluffy white bread covered in butter. Fresh bread doesn't last very long near me.

I have a healthy scorn of bread machines, but the prospect of only bought bread, no matter how lovely, was too tragic to face. So I was pleasantly surprised when I moved out on my own and realized that I'd watched my dad make bread enough times that I could do it too. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, loads of time, some therapeutic kneading and voila, fantastic bread. 

True, there was the time that I made it entirely out of wheat flour and it turned out like bricks. Or the time that I left in the middle of the rising period because I hadn't left enough time and it ... actually, wait, that may have been the same wheat bread brick fiasco. Anyway, needless to say there were problems, but that's what happens when you don't stop baking bread after your first success. 

But guys, Australia has been a DISASTER in terms of my bread making adventures. 

One of the reasons is simply because I've started making DIFFERENT bread. I have a sweetie to try it out on and enough time to experiment, but I am still the person that would just delete a half-cup of cocoa from a cookie recipe and things can go ....wrong.

I decided to try making the bread in the cook book. My dad always told me that my bread recipe was based off the white bread in the Joy of Cooking, with maybe a cup of bran or wheat flour thrown in for health and texture. Guys, this is not true. The Joy of Cooking asks you to do all sorts of things that I never bother doing, and sometimes it doesn't even want an egg. Madness!

But it is the ancestor, no matter how distant, of my recipe, so I decided to try it. I scalded the milk. I dissolved the butter and lard and then I ... poured the hot mixture directly into the bowl with my yeast. 

The bread did not rise. The moment I noticed it wasn't rising like normal, I knew that I had killed it with my stupid scalded milk. I had killed all my beautiful little yeast monsters with milk that was too hot. I felt like a monster. So I promptly primed some more yeast and added it in. Because of course adding more yeast most of the way through the first rising would fix it. >.<

The bread still not rise particularly well, and was dense like a block of bread dough which does not rise. Literally. I may have stormed resignedly out of the kitchen, muttering darkly. The happy ending is that it made the Most Amazing bread pizza base ever, but it was not exactly a triumph (actually, it kind of was, those bread pizzas were DELICIOUS). 

I decided to go back to my original recipe. Similar, but not quite as drastic, rising bread problems. I did it AGAIN, but primed my yeast for longer (this is where you dissolve the yeast in water with a bit of sugar first). This time it turned out almost right. 

By this point I had begun to suspect that my yeast was perhaps not the one I was used to, and that the package didn't tell me to prime it because Maybe I Wasn't Supposed To. Priming yeast is one of my favourite steps, and I had figured that even if Dried Yeast wasn't the same as Active yeast, or some such that it would still benefit from a bit of activating time with water and sugar, but after the failed batch of pizza dough (it should still be fine, if maybe a bit denser once again) of tonight, I think I will try not priming it at all. 

Australian ingredients being Almost but Not Quite what I am used to keeps tripping me up. I shudder to think what is going to happen when I make pie crust from baking lard as opposed to Tenderflake. Everyone wish me luck! 

(Also, to those Canadians moving to Australia [Americans, I have not checked for your Crisco, you crazy people, that stuff is gross], they totally have baking lard, but keep it in the chilled area with the butter instead of near the baking stuff. There, two hours in the grocery store saved!)

WOA: Book Adventures

As a side quest in my World of Australia adventuring, I've started a book blog with a friend.

www.bookswehaveread.wordpress.com

Yes, that is a different blogging platform, but that is what happens when you don't want to be the one setting it up and your friend does wordpress. We'll all survive somehow.

So if you want to know what I'm reading, and more importantly, what I thought of it, and follow some interesting adventures in SciFi reading (which is what my partner in crime is up to), feel free to wander on over there. Or click the link thing to the right. I've included it so that you can wander over WHENEVER YOU LIKE and not just when I mention it. Because I care.

And seriously, it is just whatever the hell we're reading and what we think. Which means I'm even going to talk about the more embarrassing young adult stuff I read. Which is Awesome.

WOA: Dialing Internationally

WOA: Dialing Internationally (or just because you can jump in real life doesn't mean you can get across a tiny stream in game)

Things I have learnt about Internatinonal Calling while in Australia
(where I not only have to do it myself, but need to coach other people on how to call me. When I can't call myself. It is tricky.)

First off, making international phone calls from/to countries that have completely different number systems is totally hard. Usually, when travelling, you try to use your phone as little as possible. When you've moved, that's not what's happening. Here's what six months living in Australia has taught me.

"1" is the North American country code, not a magic number that lets you call long distance.

You need to dial an exit code when calling beyond North America, which we Canadians have trouble remembering because we can dial internationally to the US like normal long distance whenever we want.

In Australia, that exit code is 0011, which means that when I dial N.A. I actually have to put in 00111 (area) (7digitnumber) which looks ridiculous, what with the three 1s all in a row, but is correct. Having one as an area code seems all fine and dandy until you have to actually use it.

Sending a text message to an international mobile number will bizarrely not follow these rules and numbers you can call will not be textable.

Various permutations of these rules will not work.

Scouring the internet will reveal that most people give up and just reply to the Canadian number and save it.

It actually turns out that if you put a  (+) sign in front of the normal 1 + (area code) + (7digitnumber) in your phone, the mobile recognizes that symbol and will just automatically apply the correct exit code when you dial/text.

Seriously? How did I not know this? We use phones all the flipping time and this is the first mention I've seen tha the little plus sign actually does something useful and isn't shorthand for something. My iphone would save numbers with it All The Time and I just thought it was being pretentious.

So yes, dialing a phone, yet another thing you have to relearn when you move to another country. Pretty sure I just figured out the international texting thing today. >.<

WOA: Blue Mountains

World Of Australia
New Location Discovered: THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

The Blue Mountains are just outside of Sydney and glorious. They are especially lovely for a beloved's birthday weekend when they are also hosting IRONFEST, where steampunkers, blacksmiths and military re-enactors run amok for a weekend. It reminded me of the Norman, Oklahoma Medieval Festivals much more than the SCA events I've been to recently, and I had a glorious time.

The theme of the event was Apocalypse and of course I made sure to have an outfit.

One of the things I love about Steampunk is that people wander up to, and ask you about it because it turns out it is exactly the type of thing they've always loved but that they never knew had a name or a following. Since that's how I felt about Steampunk when I first discovered it, I think these people are Awesome.

The Battle of Lithgow and the Napoleonic re-enactment camp were just great. The Battle is a fictional re-enactment of what might have happened if the French had fought Britain for control of the colony, and it had cannons. I enjoyed the cannons, and also, by that point in the afternoon, the sitting down.

They also had a bunker with circus acts, and a damn good contact juggler. The fallout theme actually made my partner-in-crime sad, as we'd left his Fallout costume in Ottawa to follow us later, under the evidently mistaken assumption that we wouldn't need it for at least six months. Silly us.

The circus reminded me of another quest.

Quest: Learn Aerial Dance -ONGOING
     Turns out it is called silks/tissue
     Pole dancing studies often do it (huh. Didn't see that one coming)
     Circus Avalon in Newcastle MAY teach workshops
     Pole dancing studios MIGHT be getting some courses in soon (no e-mail reply yet, the bastards)

We also saw The Three Sisters rock formation, which was FILLED with tourists, and the equally beautiful and much calmer look-out by the Leura Falls (note, the trickle you see is the falls. There is evidently not a lot of inland water in the Oz land. I may have made an unimpressed noise, but since it was following the very impressed noises I was making at the mountain views no one seemed to notice).

Plus I got to see more of my favourite Australia tree, The Bone Trees. (hmm, can't seem to find my photo of them. You shall have to wait.)

Kitchen Fails: Cocoa is a Dry Ingredient

You know how there are a billion gazillion food blogs on the internet? And how most of them seem to say things like "ohmygosh, it is so easy to make your own prosciutto/tea biscuits/glazed fizzywigs/whatever" and then there is a really simple looking list of instructions and some very lovely photographs of some very attractive food and then the comments all say things like "Wow! This was so easy! I can't believe I've been buying this all these years, and also my children/husband/greataunt'sghost all really love it!"?

Yes, of course you know, because the internet is FILLED with these things. And they drive me a little nuts, because I tend to screwup in the kitchen pretty regularly. This is because I am impatient. And often trying to cook while hungry. Which makes me EVEN MORE IMPATIENT. That, and I only vaguely know what I am doing, so there aren't many super useful cooking instincts for me to fall back on. So, because I am an oversharer and because I think we all feel better when the internet isn't insistently telling us that everyone else is super perfect and interesting and confident while we are trying to not burst into tears about losing our toothbrushes AGAIN (please note, this is just a random example. I actually know where my toothbrush is at the moment), I give you

KITCHEN FAILS: Cocoa is a dry ingredient

I wanted cookies. My old roommate used to make the most awesome cookie explosions, so I tried a recipe at her suggestion: Dark Chocolate Chip Comfort Cookies. 

The problem here is that I didn't have a half-cup of cocoa. I didn't even really want the double chocolate, so I said, hey, no worries, I have all the other ingredients, including awesome peanut butter, and carried merrily along.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, a tiny red flag went up about the fact that just deleting a random ingredient probably wasn't going to end well, but I. Wanted. Cookies., and just kept going.

Well, the batter tasted great, and I plunked them in the oven. Where they started to spread. And spread. And SPREAD. Please note that my cookie tray also doesn't fit in our apartment oven, a fact I discovered while trying to bake these, so I had them on an improvised tin foil sheet over the oven rack (I say this like I have since then replaced the cookie sheet, but I have not.). And these cookies were still spreading.

Now, the moment they had started spreading, my brain finally acknowledged the little red flag which finally got a chance to say "you know, a half cup of cocoa is actually a lot of dry ingredient" and "maybe you should substitute that with something, and not just delete it?" and "Don't do this. It never works when you muck with backing recipes" but by then it was too late. It was also too late to put them in a baking dish and make cookie bars. It was basically Just Too Late.

So they came out in sort of a strange film of mostly cooked cookie dough, and were delicious, but also a total fucking disaster. Which I then compounded by just sort of throwing the whole, not quite cooled, cookiesque mass into a bowl where they promptly adhered to each other into a big blob.  Which I sort of carved pieces off occasionally and ate in a rebelliously desultory way. Stupid cocoa.

WOA: Stromblo Steampunk Telescope

While reading about Canberra, I stumbled upon a charming sidequest:
Canberra Steampunk Telescope

Steampunk continues to be one of my Grand Passions, and I'm in the midst of being an Admin for the Newcastle Steampunk Enthusiasts group, and constantly on the look-out for Australian Steampunk Adventures. Going to go see a telescope which just happened to be in the city I was in was perfect. Go Steampunk!

The Stromblo Observatory went through a brutal bushfire in 2003, and this was a commissioned telescope to replace the one that was lost. I couldn't find much information on it, and my guidebook was from 2004, which means that the Observatory basically got a Tragic Story box which was less than useful. But Adventure! Determination! Misty morning walks!

So off we go, up the mountain. The drive was easy enough, and so was finding the husk of the burnt out observatory, as well as a lovely restaurant, but there was no sign of anything resembling a telescope, steampunk or otherwise.

By this point, I had become stubborn. There is no guarantee I would ever be in Canberra again (there's also no guarantee I won't be there every year, but big moves make you very aware of change), and we'd come up this mountain SPECIFICALLY to find this thing. Trying to prod my phone's internet into providing some type of useful location/information was spectacularly unsuccessful, and the staff at the restaurant just shrugged at our question in confusion and told us that it didn't exist (I knew they were wrong. Maybe it was a conspiracy?). So we wandered into the university compound nearby, which does the actual observatory work now, and forlornly tried doors and peered in windows.

There were a couple of displays we could see through some big glass doors, but I wasn't really sure we were supposed to be wandering around, nothing was open and it was getting a little chilly, so we sadly gave up and then cheerfully continued our drive.

Once I got home, I began to prod the internet much more efficiently than on my maddeningly rubbish little phone (I miss my Canadian iphone so much. I seriously need to get around to finding a way to get it unlocked). And imagine my surprise when I realized that my partner and I had, in actuality, stared RIGHT AT the damn thing and not realized it was steampunk.

It turned out that the telescope was the exact thing we had peered at through the glass doors at the academic observatory and then unanimously and categorically dismissed. And that's because we had been expecting to find something like this:

and had found instead this:

I think you can see how we got confused. Interestingly, those two pieces are done by the same sculptor, and you can read about their creation here.

So yes, maybe it is more impressive when you can get closer to it? Anyone been?