My Right Hand Needs a Holiday

It's nearly exam week - the biggest exams of the year, where we're tested on the whole year of stuff. I better be writing more notes than what I will be writing in the exam, or my hand will die...

Time of high stress is when you mostly want to go on holidays, so in the time that isn't really spare but I procrastinate in anyway, I've been doing a bit of reading and thinking about health. Ok, obviously, but more so in the aspect that maybe diet isn't the most important aspect as to how you develop, age and die. I especially loved the NY Times 'The Island where People Forget to Die'. Google it if you want. I'm going to Ikaria one day.

I was watching some sbs show while packing up slices of banana bread to sell and a cook was up in some mountains in a traditional tribe area in Thailand and made some meat thing that was put in a bamboo tube, topped with a banana leaf, and put in a fire to cook. And as I watched him lovingly and rustically creating this age old dish, I realised that the reason why we love recipes is the fact that they're passed down through generations, like a story. And it has a story of instruction to keep you alive, but there's a side that comes from that tribe, or from that family, or from the heart of the one showing you how to make it.

Recipes aren't instructions for making something to keep you alive.

Recipes are special stories that provide you with love in your heart to make you thrive, physically (the food) and emotionally (the love).

Arterycloggingsaturatedfat

To put it simply: this is a rant about the GOODNESS of sat fats, not that they'll give you a heart attack when you're in the middle of your stroke. Stupid media.

Today I made some tallow from some suet I got from the butcher and 700g of suet turned out to be more than I thought it would. I filled 900g of jam jars with just the fat, and I got a heap of deep fried meaty 'croutons' from straining it out. It was really quick (I'm a little anxious I didn't render it for long enough) and the 300g jam jar solidified in an hour. I wonder what the more white bit is at the top of the jar. Isn't it all just fat?

Then I went to woolies to get cream and milky stuff for my food tech assessment, where we have to make caramels.

I also wanted to make some ice cream (method - not recipe - will be up IF it works), so I needed some heavy cream and some light cream. But in the cream section, I didn't know what to get! The closest to 'light cream' I got was 'thickened lite cream', 'lite thickened cream' and 'thickened light cream'. What does one do with such options? We ended up buying plain cream, but what the hell is light cream anyway? I thought cream, by nature, was meant to be heavy. It's just really fatty milk, so if you take the fat out of really fatty milk, you've pretty much just got skin milk (read: heart disease).

One more thing. I was waiting in the shops and looked at a packet of chips. 

Their new ad campaign has been '75% les saturated fat' and so I looked at back of the packet. Yep, same old story.

'POTATOES, VEGETABLE OILS (SUNFLOWER AND/OR CANOLA), yadda yaddah flavouring preservatives gunk'

Just quickly: why is it sunflower and/or canola? Why can't they just use one? What is the point of not adding both if they could potentially add both oils?

But the annoying thing about them was this:

The 75% less sat fat claim is when the chips are cooked in palm oil, which they haven't been for a loooong long time (in Australia at least). What a stupid but cunning ad campaign! 'Yes, we have 75% less saturated fat than any potatoes cooked in a saturated fat'.

Anyway, that was my nothing rant about fat that's collected up throughout today. At the butcher, he asked if I was making soap (and later, if I had done a French cooking course) because I wanted suet, so I'll be looking that one up. Sounds familiar, but I'd love to lather myself in some beef fat. :)

Bio Excursion

I've come to realise that being a senior means that you have to be in more places more often, learn heaps more in these more places, and you need to have a responsibility about getting there, leaving there, and anything that may happen in between (eg your bus overheats two minutes down the road from your school and you have to wait 45 minutes for a new bus).

Today we had our biology excursion and, although I learnt so much from the park ranger woman who... collected fat in a pretty strange way... I also got to contemplate a lot. I was very contemplative today. I came up with a million and one interesting ideas for food experimentation, some of them including:
- Using that machine that normal people lay with bread and fill with baked beans, press together and cook (not gonna do THAT ever again), I thought you could either use thin chicken breast slabs, or parcooked (steamed and patted dry), massive spinach or kale leaves in a few layers, and fill the inside with pumpkin/starchy veggie mash with either meat or leaves, depending on what you didn't put on the outside, and lay more chicken/leaves on top, press and cook away. Little parcels of fun!
- bacon for paleos, or slices of cheese for primals, laid on the underside of a cupcake tin and baked/roasted (with another cupcake tin pressed on top if needed) until cooked, for little savoury yum cups. Sorta like those cookie cups you may have seen, but BETTER (obviously - I mean, it's bacon, guys).
- do the same thing with tomatoes, but take their insides out and make sure they're nice and squished.
No one steal my ideas please! These are now copyright because I've put a © here. Don't even think about being too lazy to think for ideas. They are mine.

My Rant about Dairy

Ok, I knew this day was coming where I wouldn't be able to keep to my posting promise. Oops! This'll probably happen more often when there's more Christmas parties...

The other day, I was about to have a rant about how you shouldn't eat/drink dairy when I didn't exactly have the words to actually say anything. I knew it's not good for you because of the hormones and that the dairy industry is absolutely foul in terms of animal rights and safety, but I didn't know the exact facts. So I did a little more research on it and found the stuff I had on the tip of my tongue, and I also found out a bit more that I didn't know.

Basically, cavemen didn't drink milk, so neither should we - to an extent. I'll get to the topic of cavemen at some point here.

Gnocchi with Fried Cauli-Broccoli Rice

Hey guys! More of a ranty post than a recipe post, but I wanted to put tonight's dinner up :)

So today I finally decided to change my subjects for year 11 and 12, so I strolled into the guy-who's-responsible-for-that-sort-of-stuff's office and asked for the form. But when he asked me what subject I wanted to change to, I told him I wanted to go from chemistry to pdhpe but he was like 'oh you can't do that they're not in the same line so you have to pick from this this or this' so I was like KJRBEIUH BUT I DON'T WANT TO DO MODERN HISTORY OR LEGAL OR THINKING SUBJECTS!! So I calmly accepted the fact that I wasn't going to get my perfect subjects as he wrote down my suggestions. And so I left the room and rushed to my exam I didn't know about... for pdhpe...

I was soo scared that I was going to get a 0 for missing the class I was hoping to swap into (how bad would that look??) but thankfully my pe teacher is a gem and let me do the exam. I wasn't even that late... like 2 minutes...

Anyway, all day I've been looking at my suggestions and asking all my friends what I should do. But there is no way I'm dropping either biology or food tech for pe so my final choice was...

DRAMA!

And yet I'm one of the shyest people on the planet. You know what? Who cares! I'm just going to stroll in there and pretend that I'm slightly more confident than I actually am and if people ask me what the hell my body is doing flinging itself across the front of the room, I'm gonna say that SCHOOL IS FOR LEARNING and I need to learn how to fling my body around the room so I don't look like the epitome of tragedy.

Plus I want to be a part time commercial model (yes, models don't all have to be tall and skinny! They can be short and... not skinny like me ;) ) so doing drama would help I guess.

Now time for the recipe, what you've been waiting for!