I've finally found the Tak
OnChow Mein noodles
that I've been looking for for some time. In the past I have cooked them individually, but
nowadays I freeze them in 180 g portions.
First, “cook” them (really pour boiling water over them) for 45 seconds and drain. Put in
bags. Straightforward enough, except that this time the total increased from a somewhat
generous 1025 g (nominally 1000) to only 1338 g, an increase of 30%. In my cooking page I
had 44%. Is that due to the fact that I didn't boil them this time? I won't find out until
I actually cook with them.
Prices seem to have increased generally over the last few years. Since we cook all our own
food, we're less concerned, but it's good to keep an eye on the prices. And they're
thoroughly confusing. I've already noted some of the confusion, but there's more. Over the last couple of
months we have bought:
Ingredient
Weight
Price
kg price
Date
Chicken thigh fillet
888 g
$2.56
$2.88
10 May 2015
Chicken thigh fillet
1 kg
$13.90
$13.90
not purchased
Chicken thighs, with bone
2 kg
$6.89
$3.45
21 May 2015
Chicken breast
1 kg
$10.99
$10.99
not purchased
Chicken breast (special)
1 kg
$8.99
$8.99
not purchased
Chicken breast “schnitzel”
500 g
$7.99
$15.98
special, not purchased
(Bomba) Rice
1 kg
$13.50
$13.50
8 May 2015
Lard
500 ml
$22.95
$49.60
23 April 2025
These are from two different suppliers (ALDI and Woolworths), and
clearly some of them are specials, but why the amazing price differences? And somehow the
ridiculous prices for Bomba rice and lard make things even more confusing. I've left out the price for saffron (starting round $5,000 per
kilogram) because it wouldn't have made sense.
Somehow my web server load has recovered. Only round midnight UTC (10:00 local time here) did the load
on both servers go over 1:
load averages: 1.31, 0.82, 0.71 up 440+04:26:09 00:04:44
load averages: 1.15, 1.00, 4.85 up 13+20:21:13 00:04:56
That's lax.lemis.com and fra.lemis.com respectively. Since they have 2 CPUs
each, they weren't even fully loaded. And then I saw what was using the CPU time:
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
92255 grog 1 133 0 14M 1952K CPU0 0 3:52 99.16% egrep
92220 www 1 26 0 35M 9288K lockf 1 0:08 13.55% httpd
Part of the overnight cron jobs. Nothing to worry about, and sure enough, the load dropped.
That's still interesting, though. I removed the robots.txt on laxyesterday, and nothing has changed much as a result. Has my redirection trick
helped? It seems so:
That's actually more than the record that I had last week. And again it seems that diary-dec2006.php is the favourite, this time with 843,490 hits in the top 20, only
marginally fewer than on Friday. I wonder what the fascination is with that month.
The interesting thing is that they name one of the bots: ClaudeBot. Is it attacking me? Of
course. Here on fra, which still has the restrictive robots.txt:
That's much less! Clearly I need to look at things, including how my stats job counts
things. But the bottom line seems to be that I'm weathering the storm relatively well.
Linda Swift along this afternoon in a considerable state of agitation. Their dog Denzel had
some problem, so Graeme had taken him to the vet in Linda's car—without the key! So when he
got there, he was stuck. I lent her my car to take the key to him, and she managed to get
my car to refuse her too. It seems that there's an alarm, something that I didn't know. My
best bet is that she opened it in a manner to which it wasn't accustomed and locked up for a
while. But after that she got it started again.
I've made a couple of attempts at pad see ew,
most recently two weeks ago. But the recipes all call for wide rice noodles, like those used for
Kway Teow. And finally I have
found some:
How do I separate them? The recipes I have read recommend heating them in a microwave oven.
I had thought of doing it in water, but first I tried just pulling them apart as they were.
And how about that, it worked!
I found this recipe to be
hard to read, and it is. But it is complemented by an equally hard to find video tutorial that contains some
interesting information, including how to fry the noodles to get the desired wok hei. So today I tried following
that:
The thermometers that I bought from Aliexpressearlier this month had one significant disadvantage: no batteries. I had enough for
two of them, but I needed more for the third. Off fighting the Aliexpress web site and
found 10 for $5.02. That seemed reasonable. But they wanted $1.61 postage, and when I went
to checkout they put another 10% GST on top. Total price $7.29, 45% more than what it seemed to be.
And looking on eBay, I discovered that I
could get them more cheaply there. Doubtless Aliexpress has its advantages, but it's not a
silver bullet, and the difficulty navigating the site is a great disadvantage.
What is there to say? We've clearly had watering problems, partially due to the drought and
partially due to unclear issues with the sprinkler system. The roses all looked unhappy
last month:
Other casualties include the Persicaria odorata (“Vietnamese mint”), which is the brown in the first image, and
the herb garden, which I think is too moist for the thyme and sage. To make up for it, the
parsley has self-seeded and is everywhere:
I had thought it exotic, but it seems that there are two species, Urtica dioica, which I know from
Europe, and Urtica incisa,
which is native to Australia. They look very similar. I'll have to look more carefully to
see which this one is.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
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