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Saturday, 15 August 2026 Dereel Images for 15 August 2026
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Very experimental breakfast
Topic: food and drink Link here

After yesterday's research into Thai breakfasts, I really wanted to try something with kale and yellow Thai soya bean paste. But I had the left over from Tuesday. That wasn't enough, so I faked a dish with small quantities of pork and kale:

quantity       ingredient       step
40 g       Pork “sizzle” steak
40 g       Kale      
      Dried chili      
10 g       Garlic      
11 g       Dark soya sauce      
14 g       Yellow soya paste      

The result? Very salty, as warned. This stuff can only be used sparingly. And I still can't see that kale is a good substitute for gai lan, though I'll reserve my judgement until I try a real recipe.

Also tried to spice up the alu patta gobhi ki sabzi. Added 2 g of garam masala and 1 g of ground coriander. I forgot the salt, but the result was probably better. The dish still needs improvement.


Eye problems?
Topic: health Link here

Strange occurrence in my vision early this morning. When I shut my left eye, there was a slight disturbance to the left and below the focus (about 225°). It went away after a while, but is it indicative of some developing issue?


More anti-spam issues
Topic: technology, opinion Link here

So mail from lax.lemis.com is being rejected, maybe based on IP address. I can't send from eureka.lemis.com because I can't find a way to enable reverse lookup. But how about Aussie Broadband? Part of my subscription includes mail relaying via mail.aussiebroadband.com.au. Set that. The results were immediate:

Aug 15 09:31:03 eureka postfix/smtp[84759]: A70202635A9: to=<groggyhimself@freebsd.org>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, delay=2.2, delays=0.01/0/0.52/1.7, dsn=4.3.3, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.3.3 <groggyhimself@lemis.com>: Sender address rejected: Mail rate limit Policy rejection - Contact Aussie Broadband on 1300 880 905 (in reply to RCPT TO command))

What's that nonsense? I haven't sent any mail via that relay in the last year. And they want me to call them up! Sorry, Aussie, you'll get a fault report: mail server misconfiguration. I suppose it's typical that to enter any kind of fault report, it first needs to spend an inordinate amount of time checking my link, when that's completely irrelevant.


Another dead kangaroo
Topic: animals, general Link here

There's another dead kangaroo down Stones Road towards Bliss Road, quite a young one. Yvonne wanted to get rid of it, but nobody on Facebook wanted to help. In the end she called Sandra Thompson, phone 0413 624 205, who was here last year. She came along and took a look, and decided that it was one for the wedgies.


Roast pork, yet again
Topic: food and drink, opinion Link here

Pork roast was in special at ALDI recently, only $7.99 per kg and thus cheaper than the kale with which I had been experimenting recently. As I have noted before, the real issue is the crackling. This one was extreme: the fat layer went 270° round the roast, so heating from above wasn't an option. On the spit? That would require the “hair dryer” “air fryer”, and I've already established that that's not the way to go. In addition, it would have made it difficult to use a temperature probe. So put it in a pot and roasted at 230° with setting 5 on our oven:


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After 10 minutes things looked relatively crackled:


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So I tried the other side, which I left in for longer, maybe too long:


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Then I put it on the pan and grilled further:


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Maybe too much. Here after another 8 minutes:


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So I turned down to 200°, basted with cooking oil and continued. Maybe at this point I should have turned the grill off (setting 2 on our oven), but in fact it didn't get that much darker. The result:


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And apart from the slight charring on the crackling, it was better than before. But it took longer than I expected, 69 minutes per kilogram to reach 75° meat temperature. Was that because of the repeated removal from the oven? On the positive side, it produced less smoke than on previous occasions.

It also produced an amazing amount of fat, over 200 g:


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Given the price of rendered pork fat nowadays (round 6 times the price of the roast), that's an advantage.


Sunday, 16 August 2026 Dereel Images for 16 August 2026
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Hey, what happened?
Topic: general, food and drink Link here

Today seemed just as active as any other day. But it wasn't memorable: even the next day I can't recall doing anything of interest. About the only thing was researching Thai recipes. I must start doing other things.


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.     Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.


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