Kelis, I choose you!

My Pokemon brings all the nerds to the yard And they're like "you wanna trade cards?" Damn right, I wanna trade cards And I'll beat you with my Charizard

Adrian's cooking disasters

Episode 2: Return of the red wine

Yes folks, the red wine returns in tonight's episode. Not because I wanted to give it another dig. No, it's because nobody wanted to drink wine with cork in it. Oh well, we'll see what we can stir up (pardon the pun). Today, we are cooking some beef spare ribs stir fry with red wine and other stuff. Now before you start... yes, I am a big fan of beef spare ribs. It also happened to be one of the only things that was defrosted. The fridge is getting kind of full. It's also pretty different to the previous dish, as it is boiled first, and includes different ingredients. Anyway, on to the meal...

Stir fry beef spare ribs with random stuff

Ingredients:

• Beef spare ribs
• Water
• Salt
• Red wine
• Tomato sauce
• Mixed herbs

Take a pot and boil some water in it. Chop up the spare ribs to desired sizes. Then, when the water starts boiling, add the beef spare ribs. Cook this for about an hour to an hour and a half on medium (this softens up the beef, making it really nice to munch on).

After that hour is up, prepare to take out the beef and add the ingredients to it. Then realise that your brother had started to cook dinner already, and a fried one at that. Think to yourself "damn, that looks really good" and decide to eat that instead. Decide to postpone your cooking to breakfast.

Wake up and have a nice big TV delivered to your house. Whilst your testing out the TV, ask your brother for breakfast. When breakfast is served, promptly say to yourself "oh crap, I was meant to cook that beef for breakfast." Delay the cooking till dinner.

Boil, baby, boil

When it's dinner time you can finally continue the cooking. Heat the beef up (again, since it's gone cold), adding water if necessary. When it's nice and hot, turn off the heat then prepare to take out the beef. Realise that the ladle (or as I'd like to call it "the big spoon") has been used for other cooking, and quickly wash the thing. While washing the ladle, look at the mess in the sink and exclaim to yourself "sigh." Now you can take out the beef spare ribs. However, don't take out all of them, because you put too much in there. At this point you would have noticed how hot the beef is, and start regretting not wearing gloves to hold the bowl where you're putting the beef.

After a reasonable amount of beef is placed in a bowl, wait till the beef cools. Then add some corky wine (filtered with a drainer, like last time). Pour yourself some wine too, since nobody seems to want to drink it. Add some tomato sauce, salt, and mixed herbs, then mix it all around.

That mix is looking wonderful

Place the beef on a lightly oiled frying pan and fry on medium. Wait until you burn a fair portion of the beef before you decide to stop. Say to yourself "geez, doesn't smell very good, does it?" then serve.

Cooking up a storm

The finished product

The result? The beef was nice and soft, but the taste was pretty bland. Just the opposite of last time. Fancy that. In the upcoming episode, a cooking disaster first: I'll be using some prepared sauces! Can I manage to stuff up even that? Tune in next time to find out.

Don't You (Forget About Me)

Trade fair day (aka final day of uni)

This was it. After 3 dodgey years of uni, this was the final day of the final week of classes (provided I pass every course this sem). I was pumped. Although that may have been partially due to the amount of V I had drank in the past day. Anyway, today was also trade fair day. It was the day in which major projects from various engineering and IT degrees were shown off.

How YOU doin'?

It was a pretty interesting day in terms of the projects that were on show. The IT people didn't really impress in the most part (especially us, even though we probably had the most original idea). There were some very interesting engineering projects, but the team that most deserved it got absolutely robbed in the awards.

Steve does the Buddy Christ pose

All in all, it was a very boring day. I was always looking forward to it ending. A few of us ducked into the UniBar halfway through cause we were just getting sick of all the crap going on. Kudos to Bradshaw and his team for getting the people's choice award for best stand.

Bradshaw looks to the future

No more uni. Totally sweet. Reminds me of the end of the Breakfast Club for some reason, when Don't You by Simple Minds is playing. Ahh, good times.

Australia versus the World

Went to see the cricket on the weekend. It was days 2 and 3 of Australia vs the ICC World XI. Needless to say, Australia ended up winning by quite a margin.

Saturday (Aus v World XI, Day 2)

I bought tickets to some nosebleed seats in the Walters stand a few months prior. They turned out to be pretty damn good seats. The crowd in that section was fairly lively too. This was an important point - after all, it's half the reason you go to the cricket. If you just want to watch the game, stay at home and watch it on TV.

Ben	Trav, Nick, Josh and Dom

In front of us were a fairly large group of mates, probably close to middle-aged, most of whom were wearing coloured sombreros. Behind us were a bunch of Scotsmen. Beer is a beautiful thing, it is the source of much entertainment in terms of crowd behaviour. As you may have guessed, the crowd behaviour deteriorated throughout the day. The Scots behind us kept yelling out amusing anti-Australian comments and chants. One that stuck in my mind was "GO URUGUAY!" - a reference that most Soccer fans would get. One of the guys in front of us got taken away by security (not exactly sure why), and his friends followed him out. As they were on their way out I noticed that they didn't take their sombreros. I said to one of them "are you going to take your sombreros?" and they replied "nah, you can have them." So I ended up with I'd say 11 sombreros nicely stacked on top of each other on my head.

Gotta love the beer snake

Oh, and then there was the game. Ahh, twas a good day's play, in terms of value for money. At the start of the day I had jokingly predicted that 14 wickets would fall... so what happens? 15 fall. Yep, 15 wickets in an entire day. That's the SCG for ya. No particularly great batting performances as the spinners pretty much dominated. Warne was great as usual, and MacGill was absolutely brilliant. Anyway, seeing 15 wickets in a single day is good stuff, especially when a majority of them are the opposition's. The weather was fairly good too. Not too hot, which was good since we were in an unshaded area.

A World XI appeal

Simon Jones makes an appearance

After the game I started to notice how heavy those damn sombreros were. There were 11 giant straw hats on my head after all. Josh and some random took one whilst leaving the ground. Afterwards, Nick, Trav and I walked back to Central while the others went an alternate route to their destination. On the way to grabbing some dinner, some tall buff guy walked up to us and asked us how much the sombreros were. I said they were free and gave him one. I think Nick was just glad that the guy didn't beat us up. We met up with Matt and caught the train to Chatswood. A chick on the train took a picture of Matt and Nick with the sombreros. She seemed quite amused.

We parted ways with Nick after some obscenely priced drinks at the Chelsea and headed off to the Great Northern where we gave away some sombreros, played some pool, ate some bloody good wedges, and watched Australia lose to New Zealand in the rugby league. We proceeded to walk back to Matt's, having a phone call with Kellie on the way back. I'm not sure if she actually said anything, just laughed a whole lot. We got back to Matt's with only 4 sombreros remaining. I'd say I did a good job in offloading those. All in all a good day was had.

Sunday (Aus v World XI, Day 3)

We ended up getting seats in the same section but a bit further back - ultra nose bleed. It was still good though, and this time nobody was directly in front of us. The crowd was a lot more rowdy this time too - probably restless from the lack of play. The main entertainment today was the small football being thrown around - and at "the Germans" in particular. I think they were actually English, but got the name because they were all in German outfits. There were also two other main groups, the "Lunatiks" with orange shirts with that name on it, and the pink hats (pretty self-explanatory), who clapped at every girl who walked by. Towards the end of the day, a majority of the Lunatiks got taken away.

Heavy cloud cover meant play was reduced for the day. It also meant I got a sunburn on my forehead because I wasn't wearing my hat (since sunscreen + forehead = eye burn). The first over from Murali was amusing, after every delivery a section of the crowd yelled "NO BALL!" In the end, the rest of the Australian wickets and the two World XI openers fell. We left early because of the bad light, and ended up missing a few overs, which we caught on the TV at Liz's. Dinner was had at a nice little Indonesian noddle bar. Afterwards, we hung out at the Regent on Anzac Parade for a while, then we started to drive back to Stanwell Park. As we got near we realised that we could catch the 7:45 from Stanwell Park station to Wollongong, so Dave's dad hit the gas. We got there just in time (literally), and Ashton and I headed home. That was some good driving.

In summation, it was quite a good weekend. I was very tired by the end of it, but it was well worth the money and the travel.

Addendum: What the hell was with that lady that tried to put her arm around me at Central station on Saturday morning? That was some weird crap.

Adrian's cooking disasters

Episode 1: Beef spare ribs

Welcome to the premiere of Adrian's cooking disasters. In this program you will witness, literally, the thrills and spills of my cooking experiments. Just to give a bit of a background, I have very little experience cooking. What usually happens with meals is one of the following:

a) My brother cooks food;
b) My mother cooks food;
c) My father cooks food (see a pattern start to emerge?);
d) I order something;
e) I heat some pre-cooked meal; or
f) My family eats out

Very rarely do I cook... and when I do, it's usually beef soup, which my mother taught me to cook. (And I must say it's quite good.)

Anyway, enough of the sappy backstory. Let's get to the cooking. Today, there was some really exciting looking beef at the bottom of the fridge. I remembered what it was... it was the remaining beef spare ribs from Sunday that wasn't cooked because there wasn't enough room left in the soup that I was cooking. Anyway, I decided I better cook that before it goes really bad (and hoped that it wasn't already bad). After much deliberation, I also figured that I wouldn't want it just plain... I'd add a little flavour. Red wine.

Stir fry beef spare ribs with onions and red wine

Ingredients:

• Beef spare ribs
• Salt
• Red wine
• Onions

Here's how it's done:

Firstly, chop up beef spare ribs and place them in a bowl. Add a reasonable amount of salt to the beef, whatever you feel comfortable with without making it too salty.

The lovely beef spare ribs

Now for the wine. Take a bottle of red and a corkscrew. Mess up the corking, and run around like a headless chicken trying to figure out how the hell to open it. Start pulling apart the cork, making pieces fly everywhere, and chip the lip of the red wine bottle. Eventually decide to just push the damn cork in. Now you have wine with half a cork and lots of cork fragments in it. Pour a bit of wine into a glass with the use of a drainer to get rid of the bigger cork pieces.

Notice the cork pieces everywhere?

On with the cooking. Take a frying pan, put it above a lit stove, and pour some oil on it. Olive oil should do. After pouring the oil in, start freaking out, repeatedly saying, "oh crap, I think I put too much oil!" Pour the oil out somewhere. Proceed to realise that the flame has gone out, and promptly relight the fire. Start cooking the beef lightly, even though the fire is on medium (switch it to low). When it seems cooked enough, add some chopped onions (you'll probably have to chop them yourself... I was fortunate enough to find some pre-chopped ones in the fridge), then add some red wine. Add too much red wine. Then add some more. Then realise that you've added too much wine, and start repeatedly saying "oh crap, I think I put too much wine in!" Cook until all the wine evaporates, then serve.

Wow, the pan looks relatively okay!


The finished product

The result? Well, the beef itself turned out pretty hard... but surprisingly, the flavour (which was strangely lacking corky goodness) was quite decent. Overall, quite a disastrous cooking experience, fitting for a first entry, but an edible meal. Till next, time... safe cooking.

Cyberspace... the final frontier...

...and I'm sure that's not the first time somebody has said that. I just couldn't be arsed saying anything else.

Anyway, this is the headless blog. It'll probably stay pretty empty till I go on my trip to Europe early next year. Just getting it set up early and get used to it so I won't have trouble posting stuff whilst there.