Life is random sometimes.
I have new shiny cooking equipment. One KitchenAid mixer, with sundry attachments.
Owing to my inability to make appropriate portions, we have had three days worth of home-made pasta meals, including lunch portions. Very tasty pasta, mind you.
I am continuing to learn to salsa. For the first time in years, I am actually enjoying something related to exercise; admittedly I had a bit of a mental paddy with myself tonight, when the instructor tried to walk me through something I hadn't done before and I got it wrong, but hey! That's my own mental quirk which I really, really need to deal properly with, because newsflash: people are not expected to be good at things the first time ever. It has been fun every other lesson, and frankly I need to give my WAH I AM NOT PERFECT a good kick up the arse, because hey, not perfect and THAT'S OK.
In other news, I swear to god I am not lying: I got propositioned by a hooker on my way home. (The dance studio is near our red-light district and... I guess my car was parked too close tonight?)
Her: "Hey honey, you want some fun?"
Me: "er, what?" (thinking: don't you have some original lines?)
Her: "... this is K road. What do you think?"
Me: "Get bent."
Her: "I already am?"
I wasn't trying to be funny...
Also, I don't know why, but some part of me is actually quite insulted. She wasn't even very attractive.
Bizarre icecream
I splashed out and bought myself a 900ml tub of Movenpick. Caramelita, because caramel is... let's just say I'm a caramel girl not a chocolate girl. I can and have eaten myself sick on the stuff.
Anyhow.
Tub of icecream: Labelled Caramelita. It's on the top shelf of a cupboard-style freezer, I yoink it into my basket, and go.
Two days later, I decided to have some. And think "huh, that's odd, a walnut. And this doesn't actually taste much of caramel." But it's late at night and I kind of forget about it.
Two days later I decide to have some! And there is walnut again, and this time, I notice the LID has a Maple Walnut label.
The tub? Caramelita label, Caramelita ingredients list. The lid? Maple Walnut. The contents? Maple Walnut!
Actually, it's pretty tasty, I am totally eating it anyway, and I'm mostly just glad I don't have e.g. nut allergies. And as, somewhat to my surprise, I still have the receipt, I'm contacting Movenpick NZ just, you know. As a polite FYI...
Cake!
We had a party at home last night. A sort of "Hey, we got married, we're now home, come say Hi" deal - it was a fantastic evening. Just about everyone I wanted to see turned up (and I understood the absences and missed the people - life happens!) - there was good food, good company, and it was a good night.
Also, I made cake.
Kitchen toys
I'm not generally one for big expensive appliances. I generally find that for every HUGE NAME BRAND product, there is probably a cheaper no-name that will do just as effective a job for half the price.
There are exceptions. I adore my Le Creuset casserole and frypans, although I do find the frypan a bit heavy to handle at times. But pancakes are just utterly amazing from it.
And I have decided I really, really want a Kitchenaid mixer. One of the ones that you can strap attachments to, like the pasta maker, meat grinder, sausage stuffer... It would be nice to have sausages that Tobermory could eat without fear. I love making my own pasta.
But as they go for a pricetag of a grand or more... I am not getting one any time soon.
Still, I can dream, right?
Food intolerances suck.
We've drawn the conclusion that Tobermory is allergic, or at best intolerant, to garlic. Some cautious experimentation (and some accidental ingestion) have led us to that, and it really sucks.
Food CANNOT be cooked with garlic in it, on it, near it - that includes garlic, garlic oil, dried garlic, roasted garlic, "mysterious unknown spice mix" which subsequently ends up containing garlic as one of it's ingredients, etc etc.
We've slowly been discovering and removing all the things that contain garlic, and Tobermory's stomach has been much better as a result. Things we can no longer buy at stores: worcestorshire sauce* , barbecue sauce, in fact insert sauce in general there - hoisin, teriyaki, anything along those lines is out, many ketchups, any canned or jarred sauce for pasta ever, 99.99% of spice mixes or flavourings ever, pre made soups and soup packets, potato wedges (a lot of them have garlic in the coating!), sausages, meat patties, some hash browns, a lot of dips ...
Takeaways (or in fact eating out) is severely limited - Burger Fuel, which I love, apparently cooks with garlic oil on the grill, which rules them out even when you leave aioli off the burger, a lot of pizza places have garlic in the sauce, Italian food inevitably contains garlic (of course!), Indian food has garlic... It's immensely frustrating for my beloved and frankly it's a good thing I already enjoyed cooking.
Rant inspired by a discussion with my MotherInLawToBe regarding food for the wedding next... no wait, later THIS year (argh when did that get so close argh argh). Hopefully the caterer they're lining up will understand the concept of an allergy, and honour the request to LEAVE GARLIC OUT.
* Unless we buy really cheap worcestorshire sauce. For some reason that doesn't have garlic in it.