all things me

This weekend I cooked some Italian meatball soup — a recipe I found in “the Essential Soup Cookbook” (an Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook I bought from Australia, where else).

First you should make the meatballs because they need to sit for 30 minutes in the fridge. I realised this after I’d got everything ready and was already starting to make the soup. I blame the layout of the recipe… (the meatball recipe was at the end of the whole soup recipe)

You get 500 grams (a little over a pound) of minced beef. I used 10% minced beef which turned out to be a little too lean. (Or, maybe I cooked it for too long because the pasta water was so slow to boil.) You mix it with 2 teaspoons of fresh oregano. I used dried; I don’t want to buy a whole oregano plant for just 2 teaspoons! Next time I’m going to season the meat better because it was a bit too bland. I’ll add salt at least and probably some pepper. The recipe said to make meatballs the size of a level tablespoon. I used our tablespoon size which is 15ml (resulted in 31 meatballs) but afterwards I read the Australian one is 20ml so maybe I made them too small. Need to correct that one the next time, too. You put the meatballs on a tray, cover, and put in the fridge for half an hour.

While you wait, you should get the soup ready. Chop 2 brown onions (300g/0.7lb) and 2kg (4.4lb) tomatoes. I cut the tomatoes in 8 pieces and it turned out to be a good size (not too big, which I was a little afraid of). The recipe called for 3 garlic cloves quartered but the garlic I had was so small I couldn’t imagine it quartered so I cut it in half — and used about 5 cloves. Four red Thai chillies (whatever they are), seeded and chopped finely, was also on the ingredients list but I left them out because I don’t have any experience with chillies and didn’t know what kind we had at the store. I used some sort of chilli spice mix instead.

To make the soup, you heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan and cook the onion and garlic until onion softens. Then you add the tomato pieces, 3 cups of vegetable stock (I made it with cubes), chilli (although I didn’t add the spice mix just yet), and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. Let it simmer for about 15 minutes (uncovered, stirring occasionally). The soup got frothy and the tomato a bit mushy.

Then you blend it. I used a stick mixer (love it) and decided to skip the step where you push the soup through a sieve or a food mill. Too messy and I don’t need my soup to be “velvety smooth.” The mixer made it smooth enough (what an amazing gadget it is!).

At this point I threw some of the chilli mix in and also some sugar since tomatoes are supposed to love sugar. I kept tasting the soup and it kept being quite bland so I added more chilli until I could taste it, and the sugar did make the tomatoes a little tastier (they weren’t as ripe as I would’ve liked). Have I ever mentioned I’m bad at seasoning? Well, I am.

Next you put the pan back on the stove, bring the soup to a boil, and add the meatballs. Let it simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes. I know meatballs can be cooked in water but still it looked a bit like magic when they actually turned brown and cooked through in the bubbling soup.

While the meatballs are cooking, you boil the pasta. I should’ve put the pasta to boil before the meatballs because it took ages for the water to start boiling — and it was a 9-minute pasta. In any case, you cook 250g (0.6lb) of some sort of short pasta (fusilli was mentioned in the recipe with farfalle and penne as alternatives; I used cute curly tube pasta. Wikipedia lets me know it was “cellentani”). I put salt in the water even though it wasn’t mentioned in the recipe.

When the meatballs are cooked, you stir in the cooked pasta (drain it first) and some basil. Again, the recipe called for fresh stuff: 8 basil leaves shredded. My basil plant was looking sad on the countertop and I hadn’t bought more so I used dried stuff again. My cupboards are full of dried herbs and spices so I might as well use them…

Once it’s all nicely mixed, the soup’s ready to eat!

Soup-boop-be-doop

In my opinion the soup definitely needs more seasoning than what was listed in the recipe. Or maybe the vegetable stock they used is so flavourful that it’s enough — my stock from cubes surely wasn’t. Also, the meatballs need more spice than just the oregano (again, maybe the fresh stuff would make a difference) and as I mentioned, next time I’m going to try some less lean meat (17% instead of 10%). Nevertheless, it’s was a nice soup (pasta and meatballs, how novel!) and I’ll be eating it again. Not just because I have 4 litres of it in the freezer.

Ingredients

Meatballs

• 500g minced beef
• 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh oregano (I used dried)

The meatballs could probably use some salt and pepper unless the fresh oregano is the magic ingredient that makes all the difference…

Soup

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 medium brown onions (300g), chopped coarsely
• 3 cloves garlic (or more, in my case), quartered
• 2 kg tomatoes, chopped coarsely
• 3 cups (750 ml) vegetable stock
• 4 red Thai chillies, seeded, chopped finely (I used a chilli spice mix)
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 8 fresh basil leaves, shredded finely (I used dried)

I would season it more, though, unless the stock is crazy good and strong. (Using the right chilli and fresh basil could help, too. I don’t know.)

• 250g short pasta (fusilli, penne, farfalle…)

Basil is sad

I have this recurring dream or nightmare or hallucination — whatever I should call it.

I think it happens right when I’m about to fall asleep: I “wake up” and see an enormous spider, a black tarantula-looking thing, walking on the bed next to my pillow. At the time, still half-asleep/awake, I’m actually aware that this happens to me a lot and I know it’s never been anything, but I think this time the thing just looks so real (and huge, and moving!) that I have to turn on the light — which I in reality do because I’m not sleeping properly yet — and make sure.

Unsurprisingly, there’s never been anything. Not even a big crinkle in the bedsheets.

I think it’s strange that this happens to me so often, because I’m not particularly afraid of spiders. I don’t like them but I don’t have a phobia either.

There’s also the dream of a mouth full of loose teeth (I hear it’s quite common). Ugh, I really hate that one. Luckily I haven’t seen it in a while. Maybe chewing gum helps…

Every time I go around the flat with a vacuum cleaner, I wonder if I would look good with a bald head.

Back in 1997 I popped my knee really badly in April and had to use crutches for quite some time: first till I got in a surgery that summer and then finally to heal.

It was horrible having to ask help for anything and everything when both my hands were occupied by the crutches. In school I felt such a burden to my friend — just getting to class was a challenge. (And boy, the confirmation camp that summer was such a hoot.)

At a time when I’d got rid of one crutch I went to McDonald’s with my friend. I was left at the counter to carry the tray to our table. Yes, the one-armed me. The tray was quite heavy — with two drinks, two burgers and two sets of fries — and pretty soon after I’d started walking to the table, I dropped it.

I was sooo embarrassed. My friend had to go ask for refills for the drinks and someone had to come and wipe the Cokes off the floor. And I had to sit there and eat that meal.

Just now, after all these years of still being embarrassed, as something made me think about the crutches again (not that I haven’t thought about them before…) I surprised myself by realising something: why should I be embarrassed about what happened? No one offered to help me (a 15-year-old girl). Not my friend, not the person at the counter, no one. They should’ve been embarrassed.

Pull up a chair, or a recliner, this is going to be a long story. In a nutshell: new theme! In case you didn’t notice.

At last, a new theme for the blog! How I’ve missed the CSS and HTML tweaking! I haven’t worked on a layout in ages.

“Ages” also meant that I needed to brush up my knowledge and the code needed to be updated (HTML, CSS, as well as WP functions). And so started the process which I was determined to finish this time — from scratch: 1) created empty text files style.css, index.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, and functions.php. 2) typed <html><head></head><body> in the header.php and </body></html> in the footer.php.

Then I started digging through the WordPress Codex because I couldn’t remember the template tags — and, naturally, a lot had changed: functions were deprecated and nice new features were available, such as threaded comments and fancier image handling.

I also updated some of the code to HTML5 since the HTML validator noticed deprecated elements. I like using W3Schools as my HTML/CSS reference. For instance, <acronym> tag is now deprecated in favour of abbr and I wanted to clear all those out. Why did I use acronym, which needs more typing than abbr, to begin with, I have no idea…

As you may notice from my earlier post, I ended up using the nice (in my opinion) photo of my shirt collar and smiley pin that I had as a header in one of the unfinished themes. Even though I’m really bad at graphic design (or anything resembling it), I wanted some pictures in the layout.

The theme is by no means finished. I still have some tweaking and prettifying to do, but I wanted to publish this at last. It’s going to look weird for a while as I set up the widgets and things. I’m also going to browse my old posts to check which elements I’ve forgotten to style but hopefully everything looks more or less ok. I noticed I need to do some markup streamlining especially on my pages. (The headers are not logically tagged.)

While I was looking for some inspiration from my unfinished themes, I stumbled across files from my old layouts as well as pictures of some really old ones. I thought I’d put up a little Hall of Shame in honour of this historical day.

I got acquainted with HTML in an optional computer course (some pupils did crafts or PE; I was one of the few girls who chose computers) in junior high where we were taught to indent paragraphs with <li> tags. No, no <ul> or <ol> around it because that would’ve made an ugly bullet. Just the <li> with text. (I’m banging my forehead to the desk now.)

I would be curious to see how my HTML pages looked back then as I have no recollection. (Maybe I have something stored on a 3.5″ somewhere.) I do remember that I realised our teacher was bad, which led me to pick up a Microsoft Frontpage guidebook from a bargain bin. I didn’t buy it because of Frontpage which I did happen to have installed on a computer at some point and I actually used it sometimes, but because it was a basic guide to HTML (must’ve been HTML 3) with clear illustrations. And it knew about <blockquote>.

I don’t remember what I did (HTML- or otherwise) between junior high (~1998) and the first “blog” (~2004) but I do have a vague memory of a very simple homepage that I had in the small website space that came with the Internet connection. I believe the X-Files site was my first proper site. I don’t have it up at the moment because it got stuck in the middle of a re-design that I managed to destroy by uninstalling XAMPP. (Oh, the hours I had spent on making it!) The X-Files has been off the air for 8 years so maybe I won’t put the site up anymore. Not that I don’t love the show as much as I did; the collection part of that hobby of mine could easily be made into a new sub site.

My “blog” started as a launchpad for my different sites (about the X-Files, Stephen King, my alien and font collections etc.). I wasn’t even blogging, as such, only wrote a little about the updates and maybe about music I was listening to and things like that as a side note. Because it wasn’t blogging, I have no log of the status updates and asides; they could’ve been interesting to read (just for myself, that is).

I really liked iframes back then — and I still have them in Little Grey Men which I haven’t updated for a long time because I haven’t found any new alien items anywhere! I also liked image maps which I used in the first two menus seen below. Since I didn’t have much to say on my front page, this first one was probably just a simple table (gasp!) layout. I don’t think I knew any other way to align the content both horizontally and vertically in the browser window than put a table inside a table (contents of table cells could be aligned vertically). I did this in all of the first three layouts (even though you can’t see it in the pictures); the layout part of the site was small to accommodate 600×480 screens :D. I could say divs hadn’t been invented yet back then but I would be lying. I do honestly believe that I hadn’t discovered div’s yet and I didn’t know much about CSS — although just now I noticed that I was using style sheets already with this first layout. I’m quite surprised. (Then again, the very first layout(s) of which I have no record were most likely plain HTML with e.g. font styling in <font> tags, remember those? So, I had had practise.)

October '03 to January '04

Next came a brown theme with colours picked directly from HTML’s named colours (tan, steel blue, and antique white). I called this “Cafe Latte”.

January '04 to March '04

I had fewer elements to style then and therefore creating new layouts was faster (and I had more time and energy!), so this layout stayed up for only 3 months.

For some strange reason I kept using blue in my layouts even though I’ve never liked blue! (The “steel blue” is pretty nice, though.) The next one was based on a photo I’d taken at our summer cottage and now it did have an iframe plus a transparent scrollbar (available on IE only). This one survived for only 3 months, too… Here’s “From Dusk till Dawn”:

March '04 to May '04

At this point, around March ’04 I’d started writing longer entries instead of just update notices and so I started looking into different blogging platforms. My website was hosted in someone else’s (then known as Shirasade) domain for free and I think I couldn’t use MySQL for instance. I figured I wouldn’t be writing so much anyway and kept on “blogging” with plain ol’ Notepad and an FTP client. Or as I called it, “powered by coffee and noodles.”

I really like this next one, called “Scribble”. It featured some fancy underlining (whilst making a new design for my King site I’d discovered a way to do underlines with graphics) and an animated UFO in the header!

May '04 to June '04

Finally something pushed me over the edge and I decided to start using a blogging platform. I began with Greymatter and created a new layout, “Swirly”, for it (I’m shocked by the colour scheme, I didn’t remember this one!):

June '04 to September '04

(The screenshot is from the WordPress version because I didn’t have a picture of this layout. Luckily I had backups of the files so I installed WP1.2 on XAMPP and took a picture.)

Greymatter was soon replaced by WordPress because I started getting tired of the constant rebuilding of static pages.

I modified this to WordPress’s layout system when I started using WP in July 2004 (at a time just before templates and themes); WP was in version 1.2 back then. I kept the layout for a whole 4 months in total. I had used a drop shadow in most images, so they had the green background colour for a cleaner look. It was such fun to modify them to the next layout which had bright purple background instead:

September '04 to August '10

And now. Finally, after nearly 6 years I can present a new layout. To my defense, I haven’t been on a complete coding hiatus all this time because I’ve created several layouts for my “sub sites” (X-Files, Stephen King, alien collection, Ami (the dog), fonts…). And I also have been close to releasing new themes before. Apparently I had been nearly done with a design in 2005, only 7 months after releasing the purple one. I’d actually planned on finishing it in 2007 but never did. It must’ve been the design I’d created for my course work because I can remember fighting with some silly pixels — I just couldn’t get the building blocks looking the same (or at least similar enough) across browsers. It probably was structurally too complicated. Now that I look back at the design, I’m glad I didn’t finish it. The colours are… sheesh. Way too bright.

Without further ado (especially since there’s been plenty already), I present: “Not So Serious” (no reference to Batman intended). Dedicated to my late socks.

(Funnily, the colour scheme matches those boots… At the beginning of my vacation, I took a backup of the site to use as a sandbox on a local installation of WordPress and the boot post was the newest one then.)

Hope you like it! I think I do. At least it’s a change from the purple.

Ugh, sometimes I hate cooking from fresh produce.

I was making a vegetable soup today with potatoes, carrots, peas… and I was planning on including a cauliflower, too. Once I started peeling it, I noticed several bright green caterpillars wriggling around. There were also a couple in cocoons. I thought, “alright, I’ll rinse them off and see how it looks.” Then I started noticing tiny little caterpillar toilet areas all around the nice white cauliflower… The whole thing flew quickly to the trash. Brrr.

Cabbages and those sorts are probably the worst: there are so many little nooks and crannies for bugs to hide in.

When my godson was younger, I used to look after my aunt’s kids (i.e. my godson and his sister) every summer. I’d also cook for them. One summer they had a little patch of vegetables in the yard so I was asked to make a salad with some home-grown lettuce and carrots. I tried to pick out the cleanest-looking lettuce but peeling away the layers uncovered a nice surprise: two or three slugs. (The thought still gives me shivers.) Slugs are even worse than caterpillars which are kinda cute (as long as they’re not cooked, seasoned, and on my plate).

Luckily I happened to have some frozen broccoli so I used that instead of the cauliflower. I know there can be all sorts of things hidden in packaged foods (mice, crickets, beetles, lizards… just to name but a few from recent news; I also once found a feather in a nut mix) but at least I didn’t see anything!

This must be at least the fourth time I’m starting to code a new blog theme. I’m not sure how long I’ve had this layout — +3 years in any case. (Can it be 6 years? An internet archive site showed this layout in a stored page from 2004… Whoooboy, high time then.)

First I started making a theme based on the blogging application I did for a University course.

Then I wanted to do something red…

Next I started creating something around a nice photo of mine…

(The pin is from my sister and I often wear it on my winter coat.)

Now I’m creating a theme around this colour palette I created at Colourlovers.com when I was planning the colour scheme for my apartment (back in 2007, sheesh).

I’m feeling this time I’m actually going to finish it. Thankfully, I have 2 more weeks of vacation left! The creation process is always very difficult for me because I can’t doodle, draw, or design the graphics, AT ALL.

I’m on my summer vacation, and after one week at the summer cottage and one — this — week spent pretty much lazing around (and assassinating people), I decided to do something useful for a change. I started organizing my closets. I went through (actually started to go through, I’m not finished yet) the clothes — especially my overflowing sock drawer; I love silly socks — and checked if there was anything to throw out or recycle.

I came across my favourite socks.

Worn out, faded, and I haven’t worn them for ages. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to throw them out. Hopefully they’ll bring warmth to someone when they’re burned at a power plant.

I bought new boots

They’re US army jungle boots. They’re so nice… built-in air conditioning* and everything!

I have a problem with pretty much all new shoes: they scrape the back of my ankle raw. In addition to these new summer boots, I have really nice leather “combat boots” that I haven’t worn much because I can’t walk for long distances.

But, I was determined to wear my new jungle boots (after destroying my heel once and realising that yeah, these shoes have the same problem) and I googled for tips. Some people had told they always broke boots in by wearing woolly socks for a while. So that’s what I did.

That does the trick! Too bad it’s summertime because it gets pretty warm in there… I’m looking forward to autumn and winter for once! (Now I’ll also get to break in my “old” leather boots when it’s cold and wet and I don’t want to wear shoes with holes in them.)

* Little ventilation/draining holes right above the sole. Now I realised you can actually see them in the photo: they show quite clearly in the bottom photo, the shoe on the right.

Must. Find. All. Flags.

In Assassin’s Creed you find different flags all around the world and cities.

There are

• 100 King Richard flags
• 100 Saracen flags
• 100 Jerusalem flags
• 34 Templar flags
• 33 Hospitaler flags
• 33 Teutonic flags
• 20 Assassins flags

That’s 420. That’s a lot of flags.

And of course, I have a huuuge temptation to try and find them all. Because, I just like collectables.

There are also 60 Templars to (find and) kill…