Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Sunday night I had a small assortment of people over for a two-course fondue dinner. As I'd managed to sleep until 1pm (don't ask), most of the day was taken up with preparations. K made almond macaroons; I soaked lentils for a lentil, basil and tomato salad side dish. Then a tedious process of grating cheeses, slicing breads and chopping chocolate.

The end products were thus:

Roast Pumpkin with cheese fondue. Which was a-fucking-mazing. The pumpkin turned a glorious bronze colour and smelled fantastic, and infused the fondue with a delightful sweet tang. I'd used gluten-free countrygrain bread for the bread layers, which worked remarkably well. And in the absence of anything identifying itself as gruyere, this was made on a mix of emmental and generic made-in-germany "swiss style cheese".

Slightly less heavy, Swiss Cheese Fondue, which caused me to buy brandy for the first time in my life. Again, not made with the recommended cheese, because although the extra food miles involved pain me a little, the extra cost in the Tasmanian-made version was alarming.

We served these with an assortment of sides: salami, very popular; potatoes, likewise; broccoli, mostly consumed by K; proscuitto, popular but i think it was overwhelmed; and pickles, not so popular. Obviously pumpkin could be scraped out of the former dish.

Then for dessert:

Choc-orange fondue, made on cointreu instead of brandy. Candied orange rinds were also provided, but not the macaroons from the recipe (K made Campion and Curtis' easier version).

And a variation on the Family Circle "Fudge Sauce for Ice-Cream", which I don't think I've ever chronicled here:

( Instructions! )

I made the above on white chocolate, since we had a few blocks to use up. It was sickeningly sweet and amazing. Strawberries and marshmallows rounded off the dessert portion. We, that is I and Peta and Kiera, also drank two and a bit bottles of wine, including the "Shook me all night long Moscato" I've been saving for a suitably hideous occasion. It was in fact hideous, and Peta dubbed it 'Angus piss'.

This was all well and good, although I was sad to throw out the pumpkin at the end of the night. I suppose I could've turned the remaining fondue and pumpkin flesh into cheesy pumpkin mash, but we had ZERO FRIDGE SPACE left after storing the small side dish of cheese-and-GF-bread fondue and the leftover white wine fondue. And the chocolate ones, of course.

Just as well we did save the savoury ones, though, because K and I just had a most fantastic leftovers experience. You know those moments when you suddenly feel like you're living in someone's unrealistic fantasy of what young professional people do in their child-free evenings? Yeah. We fried mushrooms and chorizo and made toast and broccoli and reheated some roast veggies and a dish of fondue and stood around in the kitchen spearing small food on forks and laughing at what ridiculous foodies we are even when eating leftovers.

( Photographic proof )

I think the chorizo and mushroom were better fondue sides than anything we came up with on Sunday, actually.

"It is only fitting. I'm having green biscuits and blue cheese"

Partly for tree_and_leaf, who likes to see where her flisties live, and partly Just Because:

( Marrickville )

( Also, plants! )

K, just now: Mark Willacy just tweeted that South Korea are going to start using 1.5m tall robot guards to patrol prisons. They'll use sensors to detect suicidal behaviours and violence.

... Somewhere, Michel Foucault is jerking off.

Today we went to a picnic. Not just any picnic, but a *feminist* picnic.

We talked to Actual Humans. And I think I may have got sunburnt and I do seem to have become overheated, which is weird, for me. We thought about going to buy food, because we have very little of it, but that sort of ended after a grumpy encounter with Harris Farm.

Now I have to prep class for tomorrow and also learn Latin words.

Also I feel quite shitty. Don't know why. It's K's job to get overheated and mine to ruin baked goods, but clearly this week we have swapped.

DEAR ADULTS ON MY FLIST:

Yesterday, I cleaned the oven. It smelt gross. I let it air out for a while after wiping it down.

Today, K turned the oven on. The kitchen proceeded to smell of hellmouth. She turned the oven off and wiped it down with water and vinegar.

Now our kitchen smells like Satan 'N' Vinegar, flavour of the month.

Our mothers have decided that tonight is the night for both of them to be on the phone for hours (hopefully not to one another. If our parents are ganging up on us, we really *are* married).

DEAR ADULTS AND SKILLED ADULT-IMPERSONATORS: WHAT DO WE DO?

ETA: got hold of my mother. Apparently this is not a spectacular Highly-and-K disaster, it's Perfectly Normal, Dear. We started by putting the door ajar and turning the oven on; then, on a whim, we started cooking potatoes. So hopefully we'll end up with potatoes that smell like Satan, and an oven that smells of potatoes. If that fails, maybe we'll try garlic! It works on vampires, it's got to work on Satan 'N' Vinegar Oven.

ETA2: News just in! Oven Cleaner + Vinegar + potatoes = SATAN AND VINEGAR CHIPS.

It's getting better. Sort of. Marginally. And in the meantime, we have invented medium-sized evil.

So I undertook to make my mother's lemon chicken recipe, which, holy glod, is the best food in the universe. IT TOOK BLOODY WELL FOREVER, and also trashed the kitchen in the process. And that was with K doing the fried-rice side of things.

I had forgotten the part where chinese food turns your kitchen into a COMPLETE WRECK. There's a *reason* mum rarely cooks this particular dish - she considers it unfair to make dad clean up after it.

But it was delicious.

I ate it too fast and am now full of noms and indigestion at once.

It has a bath. Which mostly collects dirt and dust and crap, since none of us habitually take baths.*

But today I wanted a bath! (It was a vain attempt to make my knee stop hurting.) I managed to manufacture bubbles to boot, by tipping large globs of mysterious green-tea body wash into the tub.

And then I sailed sjazzmreow 's tug boats around for a while. They come in the same colour scheme as iDaleks.If iDaleks ever need tugboats they will use these tugboats.
~

* We SHOWER, ok? Why're you looking at us funny? Do you think we smell?

K: Highly, I have an article. "Reigning Queens in Medieval Europe: Where, when and how"
Highly: ... *breaks into song* It's reigning queens!
Sjazz: InmedievalEurope-
Highly: -it's reigning queens!
K: I hate you.

I am not doing very much study.

My mother rescued a whole pile of cookbooks from my grandmother's infestation house (they used to belong to my cousin). I have acquired a steak cookbook and a microwave cookbook and a bundle of recipe cards for all sorts of things including "what's wrong with my baking?". Also at some point she is going to rescue (and then sterilise) a whole range of really good quality food storing jars and parcel them out between Joel and I. YAY JARS.

My mother is giving me tomato plants, and pots to re-pot them in. We should be able to grow them up the balcony railings. She is also giving me a pot suitable for kayloulee's parsely-growing ambitions. And I have plans to grow CARROTS. And maybe petunias, mum has petunias and they're really scarily bright. I could get a rectangular pot and grow a petunia rainbow?

Mum also has a possibly-capsicum and a probably-some-kind-of-melon which she thought of giving to me, but they'd be too hard to carry on the train. We also came up with an exciting gardening plan which involved just grabbing some compost and watering it and seeing what happened (that's how come she has possibly-capsicum in her petunia bed), but compost would be kind of weird to carry on the train.

Why yes, I do intend to carry tomato plants on the train. I shall carry them with dignity and aplomb and all the ceremony they deserve. Tomato/Train FTW.

It is a bad sign for my gardening ambitions that I forgot to water the nom nom plant before I left. (Known to Lucy as Chronos and to K as Godiva, and to me as The Nom Nom Plant, it is carnivorous, and has a delicate constitution.)