PeterMBall.com

On Friday I sat in the middle of messy apartment, contemplating the messy state of affairs, thinking a series of messy thoughts. And after a while I thought, well, enough of that then, it’s kind of a drag, and instituted a plan to cut through the chaos and get stuff done. I spent Saturday and today cleaning rooms, ordering bookshelves, and taking care of long-neglected tasks. Not enough that I’ve instituted order across the flat, but enough to give me a foothold. That was phase one.

Phase two requires me to finish the rewrites on Cold Cases*. I have twelve days. That’s a chapter’s worth of rewrites per day, about two-and-half to three thousand words. If I succeed, I will allow myself to have a guilt-free weekend of not-writing in May**. I’ve prepared for this task by making a weeks worth of meals in advance, stocking up on coffee, and dancing around the house to Goldfrapp***.

To aid me in this task****, I also baked a cake. Specifically, a chilli-carrot cake. It looks something like this:

Not an elegant looking cake, I’ll grant you that, but tasty. Tasty wins out over elegance in my world, especially since I’m the one who’ll be eating it. It also brings the sum total of cakes I know how to cook up to two (the other being a variant on Sri-Lankan Love Cake served with ginger cream, which I can no longer make because I no longer own a food processor and refuse to crush cashews by hand).

Since I twittered about it’s making and some people asked about it, I give you the recipe for the snack du-jour of this twelve-day rewriting death march.

Chili Carrot Cake

Stage One Ingredients
3/4 cup of vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 cups finely grated carrot (or something close to it; I generally use two largish carrots and figure that’ll be close enough)

Stage Two Ingredients
2 cups of flour (probably should be sifted, but I can rarely be arsed)
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
2 or 3 teaspoons of minced chili (this makes for a mildly spiced carrot cake; I’m tempted to go a little stronger next time)
1 or 2 teaspoons of minced ginger

Method
- Bung all the stage one ingredients in a bowl and beat them like they owe you money.
- Add all the stage two ingredients. Mix until the whole thing looks like cake batter.
- Pour into a cake tin
- Put the cake tin in an oven pre-heated to 180 c for about an hour

I tend to cut bread-sized slices off mine and butter them before serving, but I suppose you could dust it with caster sugar or something if you were so inclined (which is what was recommended for the recipe I adapted this from, but that cake used cinnamon and nutmeg where the chili goes, so your mileage may vary). My only real note to all that is this: if you’re going to hand-grate carrot, remembering that it’s a pain to clean off the grater afterwards.

* Also known as the project that’s causing me the most guilt because it’s not yet done.
**Well, probably not since I never allow myself a guilt-free weekend of not-writing, but I’ll try.
*** Dancing badly, but dancing.
**** Finishing Cold Cases, not dancing to Goldfrapp

Being a single bloke who lives alone, I have a certain blindspot when it comes to shopping. Actually, I have several, but the one I speak of here primarily kicks in when browsing through the area marked “fruit and vegetables.”  I have my staples – there’s usually a spanish onion or two in the house, plus some potato and sweet potato if I’m splashing out- but I generally stick with a few vegetables and rarely touch the fruit at all. If ever there were a guy who steps forth to challenge the statement that “man cannot live on curry and pizza alone,” it’d probably be me.

I’ve mostly arrived at this situation through habit, laziness, and the tendency towards belt-tightening when one lives alone and doesn’t get to share around the general costs of living. I’m also aware that it’s not a good state of affairs, especially since I’m taking the easy route of take-away food far more often than I used too (which, yes, contradicts the belt-tightening logic above, but the other part of living alone is *keeping yourself sane* so it pays not to examine my logic too deeply). So last week I contacted one of those organic famer-direct delivery services the internet has on offer, and this afternoon a nice chap has delivered the first box of randomly-assorted in-season fruit and veg to my door.

It’s a veritable cornacopia of tastiness. I know, because I’ve already devoured the first of the nectarines. This is not the bit where the future is awesome.

No, the bit where the future is awesome came after about thirty minutes of searching for the doobie-do that connects my digital camera to my computer and failing. “Woe,” said I, “for now there will be no visuals to accompany the blog post.”

“Hey dumbarse,” said the spokesbear, “you dear realise that your new computer came with a SDHC drive that’ll fit the data thingy from your camera, right?”

And lo, he was correct, and the future corrected my problem before I even realised such things were possible. Freaking awesome. *This* is why it’s good to be a luddite sometimes.

Also, I finished rebuilding a story that’s been sitting around in parts for the last three months, waiting for me to revise it and fix it and sent it out in the world. Productivity FTW!

Also, I have peaches. They are delicious. The fruit half of that box is so not lasting the weekend.

And since today is Friday, and I’m certain of this because I’ve double-checked this time, I’ll be heading off to celebrate the launch of the Tangled Bank anthology where a bunch of fine authors (including Chris Green and Ben Francisco) have been rocking Darwinian Evolution, SF-Short-Story Style.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 1
Days without chocolate: 9
Today the Spokesbear is: OM-NOM-NOM-NOM.

1) Eat a pie floater. Maybe two, if I survive the first one.
2) Eat a frog cake. Oddly, the pie floater does not fill me with fear, but this little sugared treat does. Insidious looking things, I tell’s ya. Insidious.
3) Launch Horn on Sunday (5pm)
4) Pick up a bunch of Horn pre-orders for family & friends who aren’t attending the con.
5) Remember the names for the beer sizes in SA (you have pints, right guys? right?). Find a pub that has Cooper’s Stout on tap.
6) Slap Jason with a big steel gauntlet of iron resolve until he starts working on his novel.
7) Take part in the Urban Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Magic Realism panel on Saturday morning.

If you’re trying to track me down at any point during the con, that’s your rough guide for finding me. All offers to help me go find pies and black beer will be gratefully accepted

Try and describe the taste of coke (regular or diet). Then go and drink a mouthful, to see how accurate your recollection of the taste is. Bonus points if you can do it without falling back on either the fizz or the use of cola as a flavour descriptor.

I’ve been trying to do this – and failing – for most of the day.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting here listening to Chibo Matto and Regina Spektor, trying not to regret last night’s culinary adventure. This is what I ate:

Actually before I start, it’s probably worth pointing out that I have this obsession with bad fast-food from places that do their best to try and replicate the fast-food experience of a McDonalds but just don’t quite get it. Show me someone’s random idea to try and revolutionise the franchise fast-food industry or a local take-away doing something odd and I’m there with a couple of bucks in my pocket and a desire to see their worst. It’s a sickness, I know, but it’s mine and I’ve come to grips with it. It’s like those people you know who are obsessed with bad movies and love them for their flaws – I’m obsessed with bad fast-food and love it despite the stomach pains and added kilograms that result. Call it a desire to savour the culinarily camp. 

Which brings us, then, to Snitzl - a fast-food restaurant I discovered while driving home yesterday built around the theme of doing very bad things to the chicken schnitzel. How bad, you ask? Well, alongside such traditional meals as the schnitzel with gravy and cheese or the schnitzel with salsa, they also offer such delicacies as the Thai Schnitzel (Schnitzel with coconut curry sauce, Thai vegetables, cheese and sweet chilli sauce), the Swag Schnitzel (BBW sauce, bacon, fried onions, cheese), and the Chine-eze (mixed vegetables with sweet & sour sauce, plus pineapple and the inevitable cheese). I’ll leave it to your imagination as to which I was eating above (suffice to say, it bore only a vague resemblance to what I was expecting).

There’s more, of course – pick a nationality and they’re adopting their cuisine to schnitzel form, plus the inevitable variants on the meal deal, happy meal, and seniors meal. The best part was, of course, discovering that they home-delivered – you could get schnitzel abominations delivered to *to your door* if you were sufficiently interested. As dodgy fast-food places go, it was a veritable cornucopia of awesomeness; they had the flashy logo on the outside, all polished up and well-lit to suggest their legitimacy; they had the weird and wonderful mix of gimmick foods; and they had the lingo down as you walked in. Someone had put thought into the appearance and marketing of this. Sadly, however, it ended there – once you actually got inside it looked much like your local fish-and-chippery and thus the temptations of their exotic schnitzel variations was something to be met with suspicion rather than joy.

I’d like to say this ended well, but that goes against the spirit of trying such places out. Mostly you go to them to revel in the complete cognitive dissonance of seeing the basics of marketing and the capitalist impulse go awry, and in that respect Snitz doesn’t disappoint. I mean, I can now have a schnitzel covered in satay sauce, carrot, onion, coriander and cheese delivered to my house (dubbed the Indo D’Lite, though I’ll lay even money on the fact that it’s neither) and that’s worth more than little things like taste. In fact, wereit not for the Styrofoam containers used away, I could almost come to like the place. Compared with previous experiences, it’s actually okay. I’ve definitely had worse – South East Queenslanders who were out late on a Saturday night a lot in the 90′s may remember the short-lived 24-hour Brodies chain, which remains the lower echelon of such places I’ve experienced (and in recent years I delighted to discover that one still existed out in Warwick, and I immediately ate there upon discovering its existence).

Tonight, though, is devoted to recovering to yesterdays experience - I’ll steam myself a chicken breast with ginger and a handful of vegetables and eat like a sensible person. And I’ll dream of the upcoming trip to Adelaide in June, upon which I will be convincing Jason to take me in search of a Pea Floater.