Mork & Mindy

A cold Saturday night called for something warm and hearty for dinner.  Although Mark and I had already decided on making this curry, the weather was just perfect for it!  After a short hike to the supermarket to gather ingredients, and a miserable walk back to the apartment in the rain, cooking began.

First came the garlic and onions, which were fried in oil to goldeny perfection by Mark.  I usually do all the chopping and preparation, while Mark does the actual cooking!

Next, the spices were added.  Chilli powder, cummin, turmeric, garlic, mustard, paprika and a few teaspoons of vinegar were combined to form a paste, then chucked into the pot.

Next comes the beef!  We put in about 700g of beef blade steak.  Neither of us know which cut of meat makes a good curry, but this one turned out well.

Dinner ready to be eaten – steamed rice, curry and microwaved papadums! We had a bit of drama with them, microwaving them turned out to be the easiest manner in which to prepare a tasty papadum!

Yum! The curry was very good, and made for a good meal to fill us up before going out. I love making curries because they are so easy – just chuck everything into a pot and its ready to go! They also really warm you up during cold wintery nights.

Camp food always tastes better. Maybe it is because you are very hungry from the journey there, or from putting up the tent. But maybe it is because with a little bit of effort, really delicious food can be made without fancy technology or a wide variety of cooking tools.

Dinner:
A dutch oven. Some beef cut into chunks. Potatoes too. A tin of diced tomatoes. Salt, pepper, chilli flakes, basil and oil for seasoning. Water added to fill, and the whole thing placed in the fire for a little more than 30 minutes.

Desert:
This was dumplings cooked in syrup, with cream on top. Making them was very easy, but I forgot that dumplings expand, we we had a little overflow. They were also very sweet, so we couldn’t eat them all.

Ingredients (dumplings)
• 1 cup self raising flour
• pinch of salt
• 20g butter
• 1 egg
• 50ml milk

Ingredients (syrup)
• 1 1/2 cups of golden syrup
• 1/2 cup of water
• 60g butter

Method
1. mix self raising flour with a pinch of salt into a bowl
2. rub in the butter then add the whisked egg and stir to combine
3. add the milk slowly till the dough resembles a scone mix, set aside
4. combine all sauce ingredients into a large frypan with a fitted lid
5. bring to the boil to amalgamate and turn down to a simmer
6. roll the dough into balls the size of a 20 cent piece
7. slip the balls into the syrup
8. cover with the lid and cook for about 10 minutes
9. remove balls, serve with the sauce and cream

Brunch:
Was meant to be breakfast, but became more like lunch, considering that we ate it around noon. Baked beans and scrambled eggs, with toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches to top it off. They were made by buttering a sandwich toaster, placing bread in, a slice or two of tomato and filling it up with tasty shredded cheese, then throwing the apparatus in the fire until it was ready. In some ways this was the most difficult meal to make, not due to any weakness in culinary skill, but due to the wasps that were swarming around the food.

The most convenient way to go camping is to drive. And drive I did.

Getting to Mount Cole is one of the easiest drives I have made. Across the West Gate Freeway, to the Western Ring Road, to the Western Freeway, which becomes the Western Highway in parts (notice a theme? We are heading out west from Melbourne.) There are no traffic lights, no stop signs, and besides dropping down to 60 km/h in Beaufort or for construction work, your speed is almost always above 80, frequently above 100.

The high speeds ensure that distance is covered in a short amount of time (by definition isn’t it :P.) But breaks are still necessary to prevent discomfort and cramping.

On the journey up, we stopped off at Ballarat to go shopping for food. Of particular note was a souped up Falcon pumping out Right Round to our amusement. The next stop was the town of Beaufort. We were fortunate to arrive during the Saturday market, but there wasn’t much there that interested us.

On the journey back, since Beaufort and Ballarat weren’t far enough away, we had visited them (and we wanted to try out another B town), I decided to stop off in Bacchus Marsh instead. Got $4 worth of chips from George’s Fish and Chip Shop (which has been open for more than 50 years), which was a very generous serve, almost enough for two meals for both of us.

We went camping at Mount Cole State Forest. It was not where we intended on going. We planned to go to Mount Buangor State Park instead, but sadly upon arrival there were no vacant camp-sites for us.

It eventuated that this was actually fortuitous for us. We drove back along the corrugated roads, I turned where I thought I should, and we found ourselves on the Mt. Cole Road. This lead us around to the Mugwamp camping area, which too was occupied. But at the top of the hill nearby, there was a clear area with fire places (just a bunch of rocks surrounding burnt remains of vegetative matter.) This is where we chose to setup our temporary abode.

Within a short while, we had collected up wood in assorted sizes for the purpose of building a fire, which I successfully did (though there were a few times when it almost died.) Then it was simply a matter of putting up the tent (most easy, since it is very well designed.) Difficulties arose in pegging the tent down, due to the fact that the ground was rock with a thick (but not thick enough) layer of moss on it. With occupants, the tent had no trouble standing, but when the wind picked up the next day, the tent almost became a kite! Thankfully the wind was not wild, or a disaster could have been on hand.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of Mork and Mindy go…

Love you, baby!

Content taken from: Biological Science: the web of life; third edition; Australian Academy of Science, Canberra A.C.T.

Slime moulds are also had to classify into a particular ‘kingdom’. As you may have discovered in the laboratory, a slime mould is a strange and truly remarkable organism. Its structure and behaviour have raised many questions, some of which are still unanswered.

For much of its life a typical slime mould is a creeping mass of living substance with the consistency of raw egg white. It may be orange, yellow, white or colourless. Some are microscopic; others are quite large. The movement of this living thing brings to mind a giant amoeba, for it sends out ‘arms’ which engulf and digest bacteria from rotting logs or leaves. This stage of the slime mould is called a plasmodium.

Most slime moulds live in moist places – in decaying logs, leaves, or other organic matter. A plasmodium can move over grass, creep up the sides of trees or go almost anywhere there is food or moisture.

If you look at a plasmodium through a microscope you will see that it contains many nuclei in a mass of living substance, the cytoplasm. It is not divided up into separate cells. If you watch an active plasmodium you will see the most spectacular exhibition of streaming you can find anywhere. As you watch, the cytoplasm flows rapidly in one direction. After about fifty seconds the flow slows down, stops, then reveres its direction. What causes this rhythmic back-and-forth flow of cytoplasm remains a mystery, despite considerable research.

When a plasmodium is fully grown and well fed, it crawls to a drier and more exposed position (on a dead log in the sunlight, for example) and slowly changes into one of several fruiting bodies, containing spores…

…Looking back at the description of a slime mould, you can see that they are most unusual organisms. Certainly they are not on the border of the living and non-living, like viruses. But they do not have a cellular structure. Nor is there a cell wall around the cytoplasm of a plasmodium, as there is in a bacterium. When it is feeding it looks rather like an animal, but it reproduces by spores like a fungus.