The main part of why this is such a good idea is that it can be DIYed at home, unlike the ice cream version which just turns into sludge unless you have an actual cold rock (or a frozen chopping board).

I need to get some Violet Crumble and chocolate sauce!

Anyway, I am on holiday. I am having a nice holiday. (Perhaps especially because) this is the first time in a long time that I have been on a holiday with a job on both sides of it! I just finished up a term’s contract at a very lovely school with very lovely students who I was sad to leave. I am afraid that I have been a bit spoilt by it! Next week, I am starting at another school where I’ve got a contract for the rest of the year. If it is as nice as my last school, I will be a very happy girl! But either way, it’s a load off my mind to have work lined up.

Josh and I are off to Clare tomorrow for a minibreak. We are going to start off exploring historic mines and gaols, and will finish up sipping wine by an open fire, and it will be cosy and nice :)

I agree wholeheartedly with this New Republic article about the US government’s Let’s Move campaign. Maybe there are fat kids out there who have rock-hard self-esteem and can hear, “You’re getting fat, we need to change your lifestyle,” and respond “Oh, that is good advice. Thank you for wanting to help, please tell me more!”. The majority of fat kids, and even not-particularly-fat kids, will hear that and translate it to, “I am fat, being fat is bad, therefore I am bad.” I don’t really know what the right way is to deal with kids in this context. I do know that I was firmly convinced that I was disgustingly fat by the time I was 7 or 8 years old, and still convinced at 11, and still convinced at 15. And I was… quite indoorsy, and hated sports, but neither was I at any health risk, and certainly never close to obese at that time. For me, being encouraged to lose weight as a child did little more than to seal “fat” into my identity – it was something I was not able to change, because it was something I had always been. While it’s good for kids to avoid getting overweight, it’s important to bear in mind that culturally, this is not a physical problem to overcome with some healthy food and sport, but a judgement on that child’s success and value as a person.

I see Fat Acceptance as a really good thing. We tell people constantly that they are bad for being fat. If you’ve had the message drummed into you for years that you’re lazy, ineffective, helpless, unmotivated, dumb, worthless etc – if you can hardly bear to own up to your body or even think too hard about it – then feeling empowered to change anything about yourself is a huge challenge! I got to be properly obese in my early 20s (probably for various reasons, but it’s telling that I already felt as fat at seventy kilos as I did at ninety – i.e. I had already written myself off so why not get KFC), and (although there was most certainly constant overlap) it wasn’t a case of “I lost weight and felt better about myself”, it was a case of realising that I was able to lose weight, and worth it, before I could make that move.

So perhaps talking to kids and teenagers about their weight as a problem is inherently damaging. I have a feeling the (rather small?) Health at Every Size movement is a good thing. On the Let’s Move website, quotes like “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up to a healthy weight” could be modified fairly easily to “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up healthily”. Perhaps it really isn’t too hard to focus on nutrition and fitness and leave weight and fat out of it. Certainly I think it’s quite immoral to view being fat as somehow “worse” than being slender. This is not a humanistic viewpoint!

Which is where my internal conflict really lies, because I chose to lose a lot of weight, and I would never choose to put it back on. It seems like wanting to lose it in the first place must be an admission that there was something wrong with being overweight. And, I have gained a few kilos over the last year and despite all my rhetoric, it still does feel like almost a moral failure. While, on the other hand, I am not a better person after losing weight and I was not a bad person for being fat. I am yet to figure out how I can have it both ways. All that really changed was what I looked like, and therefore how other people viewed me. So maybe it is all about image, and conforming in order to be liked. Yet for about a year, people would congratulate me whenever they saw me. I don’t know how to reconcile it.

But I do think that it’d be nice if, when people saw a fat person, they said, “Oh, her calorie intake has exceeded her calorie output!” instead of, “Oh, she looks quite slothful and slovenly, let us scorn her!”.

My first home-grown strawberry! It was SWEET.

Ingredients
Lasagna pasta sheets
500g Italian turkey sausages
3 cloves garlic
1 carrot (large)
1 eggplant (small)
1 zucchini
1/2 pumpkin
1/2 broccoli
180g (one tin) of champignons
1.5 cups of red wine
800g (two tins) of finely chopped or diced tomatoes
400g (one tin) of tomato puree
Salt, pepper and parsley to taste
500g ricotta
100g fetta
1 cup grated parmesan

Feeds Claire for a week.

1. Use scissors to remove the casings from the turkey sausages. You can use turkey mince instead, but the sausages have some interesting herbs/spices added. Break up the sausage innards with a spoon, and fry them in a pan until they are cooked.

2. Chop up the carrot and pumpkin into small pieces. Add the garlic and some olive oil to a saucepan, then add the carrot and pumpkin and cook them until they are no longer crunchy.

3. While the carrot and pumpkin are cooking, chop up the eggplant, broccoli and zucchini into small pieces. Add them to the saucepan.

Realise that your small saucepan can no longer contain the fury of your vegetables.

Switch to a stockpot.

4. Add the finely chopped tomatoes and the tomato puree to the stockpot. Do not do to your puree tin what I did to my puree tin.

5. Add the red wine.

6. Add the champignons (if you are me, you will add them later than this because you forgot whoops).

7. Add the salt, pepper and parsley.

8. Add the turkey and simmer for about 30 minutes, or until your lasagna sauce looks like a happy lasagna sauce.

9. While your sauce is simmering, combine your ricotta and parmesan in a bowl. Crumble the fetta over them.

10. Mix your cheeses until they look like ICECREAM.

11. When your sauce has finished simmering, you are ready to assemble your lasagna! From the bottom up, your layers should go: sauce, cheese mixture, pasta, sauce, cheese mixture, pasta, sauce, cheese mixture. I haven’t figured out a way to spread the cheese well, so I kind of do it in clumps like this. It turns out fine.

12. On top of your last layer, sprinkle some more grated parmesan.

13. Bake it in the oven until the pasta sheets are soft and the top looks gold and yum (photo pending, I have to go to the gym first!)

14. Enjoy your delicious turkey lasagna!

15. Clean up the bomb site that was once your kitchen.

I was skeptical that the flowers would ever happen, because those little plastic cards promise all kinds of wacky hijinks. So I told him, no, I am not waiting for my cactus, you must buy me real flowers! (N.B. he did good.)

Then on Sunday night, I came home a bit crankily after the beach to this:

!! Surprise!

So pretty!! Thank you, hot weather and Josh!

Tomorrow is a day of promise. Not only is my cactus pretty, but also I get to do the (relatively fun task of) doctors’-letters-typing at work, my internet is supposedly getting connected at last, it’s late night shopping so I get to go and buy some flowers to plant in my flowerpots, there are turkey burgers for dinner and Beauty and the Geek is on TV!

Anyway. If I can pass a typing test this week, I have a job interview! Not in DECS, but elsewhere in the government. Yay!

Currently debating whether to wait for my sister to get home at some indefinite time between now and 8:30 before I have dinner. When it is too cold to go out and get takeaway is when you know you have real troubles :(

When I wasn’t being intellectually stimulated by my shoes, today I learned the lesson of “don’t buy stuff online if you don’t have to”. I ordered one of the brand new iMacs on Tuesday from the Apple online store. 24-hour shipping blah blah. The reason I did it online was that I also wanted something cheapish from Apple that I couldn’t find in real shops, and if I bought it at the same time as an iMac I could save $9 shipping. I am tight!

Anyway I am very excited for my computer. Patience is a virtue I lack. I was so tempted to stay home from uni on Thursday in case it came, although guilt won out, and quite luckily because it didn’t come until today anyway. BUT TRAGICALLY, I had to be at work all day today and even though there were only about two hours when there was no one home, that was when it came :( DAMN YOUR POOR TIMING, TNT!! So now, I cannot get my iMac until Monday because it is locked up in a storeroom at Adelaide airport :’( And even then they don’t do deliveries until Tuesday so I have to drive over and get it myself. Sigh?

The moral of the story is: parking in town may be hard, but just go to freaking NextByte, Claire, geez.

Also today, I had a fairly solid panic attack over what to cook for dinner. I… think I have too many assignments :(

Cannot sit up straight.

For tonight, I took matters into my own hands and made some pizza from scratch. This was how:

1. 7g dry yeast + 1/4 teaspoon castor sugar + 3 tablespoons warm water: mixed in a bowl and left to sit at room temperature until it’s frothy.
2. 1 3/4 cups of plain flour + 1/2 cup warm milk: stirred into mixture.
3. KNEAD!!
4. KNEAD SOME MORE!! We’re talking… 10 mins of kneading.
5. Leave dough to sit at room temperature (or a bit warmer) for 40 mins.
6. Roll the dough out into a big flat circle on an oven tray.
7. Put stuff on it, then cook it!

It was so much better than supermarket pizza crust omg. I think my next mission is to get a hold of some fresh mozzarella, instead of using the low-fat cheddar out of the freezer, pre-grated for your laziness.

Did you know that in Italy, as part of dinner, people are known to eat an entire block of mozzarella (the size of a fist) with a knife and fork? That was one aspect of Italian cuisine I did not embrace. Because it’s insane.

The Wikipedia article on pizza, incidentally, just gets visually grosser and grosser the further you scroll down :( Why? :(

Anyway. Not everything about Japan is awesome. But some things about Japan are awesome! For example, bento! Bento is basically a way for really boring people (like me) with really boring lives (like mine) to make their day a tiny bit more interesting without actually having to, I don’t know, take any risks or try anything new. It is a packed lunch! But an aesthetically pleasing packed lunch. For me, the rationale is that if I am too poor to buy food in town, and am going to eat my lunch staring at the off-white wall of the office kitchen, then damnit my lunch is going to look pretty.

The other part, I think, is that I eat fairly carefully at the moment so I think it’s important to eke every possible bit of pleasure out of the food I do get.

So here is a picture of my first bento!

I think that traditionally it is meant to be rice, fish and vegetables? But I’m not the biggest fan of rice unless it’s fried or in sushi, and even then I balk at the carby-ness. So, so far, I have gone for salad and fish or a meat substitute. Here, we see tofu, salad, and also chocolate cake. Which didn’t taste very good at home, but like magic tasted freaking awesome at uni.

And this is my second bento!

Still pretty salad heavy, but with salmon! Definitely needed more chocolate cake.

Speaking of chocolate cake-like things! Maybe nothing is as good as Krispy Kreme, except for the Byron Bay Organic Donuts at Womad, but I had a chocolate cream bavarian donut at Gourmet Glaze in town last week and it was heavenly. The world needs to know!!