Scallion pancakes

Finally, a food post! A two ingredient lunch. Scallions + flour; way too easy peasy. Well water and some oil too, but hey, minimal!
A half used bunch of scallions had been languishing in the frdge for a week. Scallion gulit had become a problem. Thankfully the light bulb went on. Problem solved. Family Styles scallion panckaes. They also have a good series of pics if you cant understand my instructions. My hands were so flour coated I only took a few pics of the process.
These pancakes are quick, tasty , crispy, flaky and best of all easy and low fat. We scoffed them for lunch, even the bean loved them (sans spicy sauce).

makes 4 frypan size pancakes

:: 2 cups plain flour
:: 1 cup boiling water
:: 1/2 cup of chopped scallions
:: sesame oil

mix flour and water with spoon (its hot) and then knead with hands into a smooth, soft ball. Divide into 4 balls.

Roll a ball of dough into a thin flat circle to fit your frypan. Drizzle sesame oil to taste over surface then scatter 1/4 of the scallions over complete surface. Then take an edge and roll the circle into a 'cigar' shape. Make a coil from the 'cigar' and then roll the coil back into a thin flat circle. Fry in a sesame oiled pan , turning until cooked. Nest time I will use more oil and cook for less time. Im too used to dry frying tortilla and indian bread.

Sauce
:: soy sauce
:: smashed clove/s of garlic
:: chopped scallions
:: chilli flakes/sauce
:: sugar
:: rice wine vinegar

Mix together vinegar and sugar to dissolve the sugar. Add other ingredients to taste.

Serve with the pancakes! (the leftover sauce I used to season the okonomiyaki we had for dinner)

I squeezed these in for lunch around finishing the dill pickles (after fermentation comes canning!) and limoncello bottling before I braved the 'Monster Mall' with three kids in tow. It was actually much less traumatic than usual. Either we've all grown up or the planets were aligned. No tantrums, no tears, just endless searching for the 'perfect' summer apparrel. I thought I handled myself well not to mention the picture perfect small-child-handed-down-from-heaven who happily sat in his wheel chair watching all that an afternoon at 'Fountain Lakes' offerred his innocent self without complaint. He was pretty enamoured with all the sparkly christmas baubly bits. Four hours of shopping centre tramping took its toll on both my feet and my 'stumulus tolerance' level, driving me to fall into a deeply soothing alcoholic beverage after the unpacking, re-feeding, fashion parading and bathing frenzy subsided. Ive now fallen into a second snifter of limoncello. Good thing I made somewhere near six litres of the stuff! Might get me through till Christmas...

wild boar salami update - we're still alive!

To follow up my salami post from a few weeks back, heres an update on its progress. The salami has lost about 30% of its weight (mositure loss) and that's the recommended minimum wait time for eating, that and 3-4 weeks as an alternative criteria. Heres what it looked like the day it was made. My date for sampling filled both criteria. Problem solved. Time to try!

As you can see from the pic below and a little in the pic above, the mould is blooming; the white chalky, dry looking 'good' mould. The jury seems out in general on the topic of mould in the salumi blogsphere: some say all fuzzy mould is bad and some say greeny-blue mould and some brown and black mould is just fine and its the red mould to look out for and avoid. Its very confusing. Im thinking mouldy salami is bit like homebirth- lots of fear around it based on the notion of 'sterile' and 'safety' and when you do the research its actually a different story... So Im not going to do what alot of the online and American sausage writers do, chuck it out! (yes, theres a whole sausage community out there) I will do some more research and decide. The European sausage makers who blog all seems rather enamoured with the flavour enancing qualities of a good bloom like this one and check this green salami out, it'sfor sale!. I figure Im in good company with a couple of thousand years of tradition...

So, Im just watching those few sausages which are happily growing the fuzzier stuff and will check for mould 'roots' which spread from the surface to the interior and decide from there.
We cracked the first salami and the duck proscuitto at our wine making afternoon with The Gnomes. Post on that to come. We all actually woke up the next day, alive and its a good thing too coz the salami and duck 'proscuitto' (eaten with last seasons pickled figs) were delicious and I'd hate to waste it. So im feeling pretty chuffed so far with my first foray into charcuterie and extra happy when i saw wild boar salami selling for $60 a stick!

and so we struggle

just like all normal people, we bumble along, tentatively, honestly, with our hearts on our sleeve and our head in our hands. We are dancing our way through a patch; a patch of uncertainty, of newness, of unchartered waters. Yes we had a great holiday, a wonderful relaxing holiday, but reality bites as soon as we returned. It had been there before we departed; a sore, an itch, an unresolved nip. How does a 53 year old (retired since he was 38 year old) man reconcile his past freedoms as a well-off entrepreneur and property owner with time to himself and money to burn, with his current reality as a stay home dad, homemaker to five and 'ships cook and concubine' to a working academic.
Well, apparently he doesnt. Well he does and he doesnt, and he does and he doesnt. As a life long feminist with feminist/marxist parents, grandparents and great grand parents and parents before them, I use all the empathy i have to manouver us through the ultimately feminist/patriarchial issues i now see my male beloved struggling with.

Issues he never thought he would face ( how could he as a priviledged male of the upper middle classes?) but issues i knew he ultimately would face through the sheer nature of the job, but thought it best he reconcile them for himself when the time came. Our time has come. We had a very beautiful conversation this evening where he opened himself right up, confronted his weaknesess, his foibles, his limitaions, his maleness. He struggled, cried, mourned and asked for comfort. He confronted for himself all the feminist issues of drudgery, boredom, repetition amd emotional exhaustion that women have traditionally faced. I cannot tell you how pleasurable it was (after a day or so of pissed-offness), exquisitely beautiful in all the right ways, to use all my knowledge and experience as a mother and a woman to comfort the man i love in dealing with his feelings of inadequacy, distress and insecurity about being the primary care giver to our beautiful boy. I do understand. To reassure him that he was doing a fine job despite his perceptions about being ill equipped to do it. To have him appreciate and need my warmth, reflection, humility and empathy was priceless. Its a struggle sometimes, we went through days of uncertainty, but the other side is glorious.

Happy Anniversary 17.02.07

We've been married two years today. It was, i have to say, the best wedding I've ever been too! LOL. Warm weather, friends and family, great food, great fizz, great music and great lighting; our garden looked like magic. It was a really wonderful night. By all accounts it was a 'responsible' wedding; electronic invites, loca vore catering, no waste, no flowers, homemade clothing or at least reusable, charitable donations for a well in Africa, wedding rings from recycled jewellery (and teeth- eek! weird)but the best part was the love and the fun on the night. Yesterday when we were preparing dinner and talking about the time that had passed, Simon said "its been a fun couple of years" and i had to agree, its been bloody wonderful. It was interesting though as my first reaction was to balk and says to the ever present guilt monkey on my back "hey, you're not supposed to think life is fun like that, you're a mum, you're a professional, you're your mothers daughter, fun doesnt enter into it". But i have learnt in the last few years that IT BLOODY WELL DOES! and here's cheers to a lifetime more of it.
Thanks for always reminding me Si that life may be full of necessary things but there is always room for fun. So yesterday i made a gift for my lovely man, a declaration of love filled with symbols from our past together. It was so enjoyable to spend part of the day being creative; getting out of my head and into my heart and fishing around the house for bits and pieces to use. I hope he loves it. Happy Anniversary Moo.

Holy Shit!

Another Award invitation! I made the finals of the Prime Ministers Awards for Excellence in Public Sector Management. Ceremony in Canberra, December 6. I'll be in Hawaiiii!!!!! Bummer. Im pretty high at the moment. If Obama wins today, i might express and have a few glasses of fizz tonight and pass out in an elated stupor!

All about 'The Thing'

ive thought about doing a post about 'the thing' off and on for a while and always thought the better of it. i mean does anyone really want to know? well, apparently some of ya do! Writing up a precis is a good chance for me to conslidate, as i still have my thesis abstract to write. You're it, my guinea pigs, so if its all gobbledygook, let me know. Its pretty hard to spice up mathematical modelling and public health, but i'll give it my best shot and try and explain why its recieved the attention it has. Its also pretty hard to stand back and not be too scientific and dogmatic about how i tell the story. Im so used to systematic and technically correct (scientific) writing!

Umm, background. My field is oral epidemiology; epidemiology is the science of looking at the determinants and distribution of diseases (who gets what and why). By its nature, epidemiology concerns itself not with the biology of disease but the public health context of illness/wellness.

The research question i set out to answer was ' can we develop an index by which the relative urgency of an individuals need for dental care can be determined?'. The reason i was interested in doing this research is that in the public sector, receptionists were making decisions about who got to see a dentist and who didnt and it appearred that in a lot of cases they were giving emergency priority to people who were not really urgent. Also, by tradition, people were given appointments on a first come first served basis, not urgency of need.

This work has been about 10 years in the making and it started with a very long series of questions asked to a large random selection of persons presenting to public dental clinics in two states of australia for both emergency and general dental care. These questions covered just about everything to do with an individuals oral health; hygiene practices, sugar consumption, dental visiting behaviours, medications taken, pain perceptions, sociodemographic characteristics, past dental treatments, etc. We asked pretty much everything about everything. These persons were then tracked through the dental system and all treatment provided to these people was recorded. Two dentists also provided independent opinion about the urgency of each patients dental problem.

Then i used statistics to match up question responses with dentists urgency categories to see if any questions were highly associated with urgency. This analysis resulted in 10 very predictive questions.

You still with me?

These questions were then tested on the computer on a pretend set of patients to see if the same questions would still be useful in predicting urgency and it wasnt just chance that led us to these 10 questions. They were. This is about 4 years of work so far. Research is like that. it takes ages when you deal with human populations. Give me a test tube! Ok!.. the questions work well in predicting urgency when i use a fake set of people. what about real people?

So then i took these 10 questions and had receptionists use them on the phone on real patients. I had dentists again rate the patients urgency. This was the first test of the questions on a new set of real people. After more analysis, the questions still matched up well with dentists ratings. What really 'Wowed' us was that the 10 questions worked better than receptionists at figuring out who needed most urgent care and was more like the dentists rating of urgency. Im getting excited now. It looks like i have found a systematic way to determine urgency for dental treatment.

Soo, then the public dental service gets all excited about my results and decides to let me do a full trial using my predictive model. They give me 4 clinics to run the trial and we actually say 'yes' or 'no' to people using responses to my series of questions. New computer interfaces for the dental clinic databases were made and installed and my special algorithm runs quietly in the background and calculates scores to peoples responses. It then tells receptionists the urgency category of each person calling and how long until an appontment should be made.

I do even more analysis and the questions still identify people with the most urgent need. It gets even better. Gasp, 'how can that possibly be'? i hear you all crying! This new way of determining need also lets the system better manage its bookings and over a year of using my system, these 4 clinics manage to change their service around from being mostly an emergency system;extracting rotten teeth which hurt, and start giving people check ups as well; looking after teeth, providing fillings and helping people keep their teeth healthy.

Before i have finished my dissertation, the system is rolled out in every clinic in the state and now all clinics are able to provide routine check ups for public dental patients, not just emergency dental services. It was a very thorough and scientifically rigourous piece of health services research using 'gold standard' design, process and analysis AND its had a great public health result. Hence its award nomination. Wheeeeee!

Award Finalist

My Prof just called. Whoohoo. Its official. My PhD research has made it to the final of the Premiers Awards for innovation and excellence in Health Services. Award night is on the 22 November. Fancy pants required. Next stop...Canberra!