Mork & Mindy

I used the recipes from  “Cookery The Australian Way”, a fantastic cookbook that was a birthday present from John and Ros.  It has recipes for just about everything, including how to make jams and chutneys!  Also gives great advice as how to pick a good piece of meat, fruit or vegetable.

The lemon slice turned out too tangy for me, I would reduce the lemon juice and sugar next time.  Brownies – perfect!  Love walnuts in my brownies.

Slowly wading through all my Uni work from this semester.  Have completed revision of physiology for this half-semester, and lower limb anatomy.  Have a lot more to do, but I feel as though I’ve completed the bulk of my work!  Read some embryology today, starting on epidemiology tonight.

What my grandparents cooked for dinner today:

• Steamed rice – typical
• Stewed lettuce leaves
• Sour vegetables in a broth with boiled leftover roast pork (imagine roast pork… crispy crackling… then imagine it being thrown into water.  The crackling becomes soggy and quite disgusting.)

For reasons I hope are painfully clear to you, reader, I decided to make my own meal.

And so the egg and cheese sandwich was born.  Toasted multigrain slices smeared (literally, I wasn’t very gentle with it) with tomato sauce and dijon mustard, then an egg (with runny yolk, just the way I like it!), cheese, and sliced tomato.

Yum.

In other news, where is Mark?

I’ve decided to share some of my baking adventures.  I usually don’t care much for cake decoration, but decided to try it out for my friend Chi Hau’s birthday cake.  It actually didn’t take as long as expected, and the piped chocolate solidified fast in the cold weather.

I was happy with the way it turned out, although the ganache could have set more evenly.  I guess pushing in the piped words disrupted the even surface of the ganache!  The cake was hazelnut and apple, courtesy of Ros.  Everyone at Chi Hau’s party was impressed, even myself.  I think this calls for more cake adventures, especially with decorating.

It is getting progressively hotter in Melbourne.  27°C tomorrow, wow, I remember it was just 14°C about a week ago.  Time to bust out the short shorts and dresses.  Maybe the hot weather isn’t conducive to cake baking or eating, since cake tends to make people gluggy and is more a cold-weather food.  I’ll try more summery tarts, custards, maybe eclairs?  Slowly building up my dessert repertoire.  Either way, my oven will have to wait till exams are over for any action.

It seemed like this day would never come, but this week is my last week of Med Year 1! I’m highly excited and pleased and I can’t wait for the exams to be over so that I can start doing some stuff that I’ve been wanting to do for ages.

I like lists so I shall list the things I want to do:

1. Sew! I’m planning on learning how to sew dirndls. Progress will probably be slow, especially since I can only sew when my grandmother is not around (or she will hover and be annoying).
2. Practice my guitar skills. While said “skills” may be presently non-existent, I plan to acquire skills then practice them! And stretch my fingers out so that they can reach frets more than 1 space apart.
3. Frolic in the sun and do summery things. This is what I want to do the most – just lounging around and being happy that there is absolutely nothing for me to do. Except lounge and enjoy myself, obviously. And eating ice cream.
4. Maybe road trip? Might organise something with my high school friends, and with Mark.
5. Study some anatomy. An optional task, of course, but I think I will feel much better about Year 2 if I get a headstart on anatomy. My love-hate relationship with anatomy is currently in phase “like”, hopefully it won’t wane to “hate” before the exam!

And things that I have to complete before the ghastly and horrid exam/OSCEs:

1. Weeks 8-13 of this semester, plus Weeks 1-5 of this semester too. I’ve decided to forgo revising Semester 1, since that is a mammoth task in itself and there is not much benefit in study Semester 1 material since the exam will predominantly be testing Semester 2 content.
2. All my Epidemiology content. I’ve been rather slack this half-semester and I have yet to touch the textbook even once. Hopefully Judy’s teachings are sufficient for me to pass the Theme II section of the upcoming exam.
3. Anatomy. Again, it rears its ugly head.
4. Practice clinical skills. This means I have to get my hands on a stethoscope and a sphyg (blood pressure thing). Mark can be the person I practice limb examinations on, although he does get squeamish when I touch his legs.

I went to Mark’s yesterday and we made beef kofta on skewers, tabbouleh, and hummus b’tahini. The hummus was fantastic. We then watched the latest episode of Glee (on my laptop) and X-Men: The Last Stand (on television).

A bit of plastic has come loose off my car and is scraping on the ground everytime I reverse out of my driveway. Rather worrying.