Serious advertising for NZ Masterchef 2011 has now kicked in…hopefully I’ll be able to schedule myself to follow it again this year – due to work commitments, I missed almost all of the last Aussie Masterchef except the final…

Meanwhile, here in the heartland, we continue to investigate buying a local cafe so that Carmen can live at home again and also do what she is so good at for a living…

In Colour Me Scared last year, I mentioned my foray into the scary world of combining chili and sardines – pretty safe really as chili, like tomato sauce, is a great ‘coverall’ for culinary not-quites…I hadn’t actually tried it again since then but late last night after a crap afternoon wresting with connectivity issues and losing the better part of a day’s productivity – and thus forgetting to take something out of the freezer to thaw – I gave it another shot… definitely a great but very simple and fast (longest thing is waiting for the rice to cook) meal for when you really don’t want to put yourself out…what’s left will be combined into a fried rice tonight…so is one less thing to worry about while I’m doing the home alone thing…

The big difference between home along last year and this year is that this year I actually have work to do and don’t quite so much have the luxury of time to spend in the kitchen experimenting…the absence of any fast foods in easy distance means that I still have to look after myself and plan ahead…my major culinary issue at the moment is what to do with so many damn eggs …

Secret Stash

Since we keep stealing, them the chickens have taken to concealing their eggs around their run…this one was buried beneath layer of blackberry and is a good week and a half to two weeks work for them…24+ eggs recovered here! Carmen took a bunch back up the road but, combined with what we had already, I’m really scratching for good simple egg recipes…had a great omelette on Friday night after I got back from a meeting with Hawkeye in Palmerston North that afternoon (and resisted the temptation to treat myself in Mr Models) that meet two key objectives: a. it took five eggs and b. it very neatly wiped out most of the leftover vegetables and venison left in the fridge…I can see scrambled eggs coming back onto the breakfast menu which will go nicely on a slab of freshly-made bread, followed up with muesli and homemade yoghurt (well out of the packet but just as good, if not, better than the prepackaged stuff)…just so long as I don’t become a creature of habit…

As you probably guessed, I having a  bit of a no news day today – I’ve spent most of the day doing ASIC administration, psyching myself up to complete the draft doctrine review I had planned for yesterday…we’ve taken to using the NATO doctrine review template, which, although, involves more typing, promotes a far deeper review of a publication and which also provides the author feedback in a standard format that can be combined with similarly-formatted feedback from other reviewers…one of these days, I WILL complete that touch-typing programme…

Not quite

I mentioned in My Fellow Americans that I had first met Martyn Dunne while working on a number of Army clothing and personal equipment projects; one of these was reviewing the camouflage pattern then in use, especially the colours (of which there had been 17 distinct variations since it was first introduced)…needless to say, our testing and evaluation wasn’t as dedicated as this…talk about taking your work home with you…

Still…I guess if you’re looking at optimising for urban combat…