An awesome salad

With A down in Melbourne on weekdays (a fact I may have neglected to report here) I'm left alone to fend for myself. My solution to this last week was to catch up with friends for dinner every night, an endeavour that left me well socialed, but tired, poorer and lardier than before.

Thanks to the Melbourne Cup this week, I'm only "home alone" for 3 days. Tomorrow afternoon I'm heading down to Melbourne myself - and hopefully escaping the deluge that has engulfed Sydney for the last week!!

What I have decided is that these 3 days are going to be the start of Operation "Me Time".

I'm going to take advantage of this time to make healthier meals than I might if I was feeding both A and me, and to cook all the things I love, but that he finds less agreeable. Namely a lot of salads and soups - lucky its soup weather at the moment!! A is gradually being converted to soups and salads, but is not the biggest fan. There's also other things he doesn't eat - like tofu, eggs and spinach - that I'm bursting to cook.

As part of this, I want to use up some of the random ingredients cluttering up our fridge, freezer and kitchen cupboards. I've got tapioca that I bought 4 years ago sitting in the pantry, 2 falafels left over from a Lebanese meal in the freezer, and more dried porcini mushrooms than I can poke a stick at. It's all gotta go!!

Apart from food, other things I want to do with this "Me Time" is continue to clean up the mess that is our kitchen cupboards, second bedroom and the verandah. These feel like never-ending tasks, but I hope I can make a dint in them.

Doing some more study, and working on my honours project wouldn't go astray either!!

Before I go, here's the salad I made tonight:

Yummy chicken, sweet potato and haloumi salad

• Lettuce and rocket leaves
  
• 60g chicken
• 90g baked sweet potato
• 15g grilled haloumi
• 1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts
• 4 cherry tomatoes
• sliced red onion
• dressing: 1 teaspoon olive oil, 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar, juice 1/2 lemon, cracked pepper
  

Very tasty, and very filling - in fact next time I might cut down the portions - especially if I'm eating late.

And right now, I need to finish packing!!

Washing Betty - long overdue!

A washed, and I polished. Was way easier than I thought it was going to be, despite the shockingly dirty state she was in.

Can you believe I have owned her for nearly 3 years without ever having washed her before? The shame!!!

But now, ain’t she beautiful!!

This needs to happen a lot more often!!

Mmmmmmmmmilkshakes!

I'm not normally one for guzzling down too much milk. Sure I have it in coffee, and I have the occasional glass of Milo, but I can easily go a week without consuming more than 500mL of the stuff. Likewise, I'm never really tempted to order a milkshake when out. Unless the magic word "spearmint" appears in the title.

After that, the chances of me *not* ordering it are slim to none.

Ok I must come clean, I'm just generally a mint hussy. And normally the mintier something is, the better^*. But somehow spearmint - the milder cousin of peppermint - works best in these shakes. It gives it a light and sweet taste, that combined with soft bubbles of milk is just pure delight to imbibe.

Unfortunately a spearmint milkshake is not that easy to come by. After more than half a decade's searching, I can still count on one hand the number of establishments I know that serve them. And now that Poppies of Stanmore has closed down, the number within a 20km radius of my house is now zero.

I was once so desperate to obtain some spearmint milk that I cajoled my mother into visiting a wholesale confectioner in her city, and allowing them to sell her a 2L bottle of the mint-flavoured syrup. She succeeded, and that bottle kept us in good supply of milkshakes for well over a year. After that bottle though, our source literally dried up.

When I visited Broken Hill at the end of last year I was delighted to visit Bells Milk Bar; a 50s style milk bar serving a massive variety of flavoured milkshakes.


Image from www.bellsmilkbar.com.au.

I was even more delighted to discover that spearmint was one of those flavours.



I was even more delighted to discover that they sold bottles of their homemade syrups, which I promptly bought. I am ashamed to say that for nearly a year this bottle sat atop my desk, unopened.



But today something cracked, and I decided a spearmint milkshake was in order.

Perhaps it was my anticipation in going to Melbourne next weekend to visit A, and knowing that one of the few reliable spearmint sources resides at the Queen Vic markets there. Perhaps it was just time I cleaned up my desk. Either way, it tasted great. And made me keen to seek out another source for when this 250mL bottle runs out.

If you know of one, please do let me know!!

---

^* The only occasion this has even been shown not to be true is when I accidentally bought mint flavoured water in China. It tasted like I was drinking toothpaste backwash.

attack!!

Thanks to not realising it was daylight savings, and turning up to my yoga class just as it was finishing, I was a little more awake (and in a slightly worse mood) than usual when I got home and watered my plants this morning.

Perhaps that’s why I noticed that they had been attacked by evil caterpillars!!

Image thanks to flickr.

It was the mint that I first noticed. Mint is nothing if not hardy, so I was immediately suspicious when I saw that a few of it’s leaves looked a little moth eaten. Evil plans don’t just make themselves, you know.

Closer inspection revealed a couple of dark grey looking caterpillars. Ugh. After having lost a battle with caterpillars on my rocket earlier this year, I wasn’t relishing the though of having to repeat the experience.

Observation of my other plants revealed a similar invasion. My basil had been all but demolished by a number of the green suckers.

Despite the copious foliage, my tomato was also under similar attack by a mixture of green and brown suckers.

This particularly disturbed me, because the first of the plant’s fruit had just started to appear. I’m desperately hoping I get some to eat before I got to Vietnam!!

The only herbs that are (so far) immune to the caterpillar’s attack are the lettuce, chilli and parsley. Fingers crossed they stay that way!

1. Lettuce, 2. Chilli, 3. Flat-leaved parsley

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to take this lying down. When my rocket suffered a similar fate earlier this year, I lost the battle despite using slug and snail pellets, and a combination of soap, garlic and chilli (a method I devised, but must have read about it somewhere though surely?).

I was aware this wasn’t going to be easy, so I pulled out the big guns – Google – where I stumbled across this recipe for an organic bug spray. Deciding it looked suitably caterpillar-toxic, but person-friendly, I thought I’d give it a go. After all, should it survive, I do want to eat this stuff!!

Spraying it onto the plants certainly had some effect. At least 10 caterpillars dropped off and died. The tabasco also went right up my nose, and a few hours later my hands and lips are still tingling.

The question is, how many caterpillars remain?

See more progress on: grow an herb garden

Me not dead

Whew, it's been a while. A lot has happened in the 17 days since I posted.

I'm now nearly halfway through my Obstetrics & Gynaecology rotation, and am enjoying it thoroughly. I've yet to witness a vaginal birth, but I've seen about 7 Caesarean sections. The first one blew my mind.

I was scrubbed in, and after the initial abdominal incision it was my job to hold instruments that help keep the tummy open, giving the surgeon a clear view of what he's doing. All of a sudden, instead of looking at fat or muscle, I was looking at hair. From then, it was my job to push the bulging mother's belly towards her feet - in other words, to move the baby so that its head popped through the hole. And it did! All of sudden I'm staring at this tiny face, still inside the mother. At the same time amniotic fluid is gushing everywhere, over the side of the table, and down my front.

I couldn't remember anything that happened after that, so dumbstruck was I by what I had witnessed. The next 6 Caesareans weren't as mind blowing as the first, but they were all pretty damn amazing. I'm not tired of them yet, unlike how I felt after watching 7 colonoscopies or 7 laparoscopic cholecystectomies earlier in the year!

I've also enjoyed the ante-natal clinics I've sat in on. It's fascinating seeing the range of different issues that pop up in pregnancy, and how different each pregnancy can be for each mother. Every mother is different too - from the 14 year old who didn't want her baby, not realising she was pregnant until she was 28 weeks along, to 40 year olds who'd undergone IVF treatment and were cherishing their pregnancy.

It's also made me acutely aware that the proverbial biological clock on my own eggs are ticking away. I'll soon be 32. That'll make me a mere 3 years from being considered "Advanced Maternal Age". That's a slightly daunting prospect.

An even more daunting prospect would be having a baby whilst studying, or doing internship. But is there ever an "easy" time to have a baby. Or is it just something that happens, and you fit whatever else is going on in your life around it as best you can?

The thought of having kids scares me. But so does the thought of not having them, and regretting it once its too late to do anything about it.

Wow this has become a rather meandering post hasn't it? Certainly ended out in a different direction that I'd thought it would when I started this brain dump. Still, better out than in hey!!

Bay run!

I finished at hospital early today, so decided that despite not having run any distance for a while, I’d give the Bay run a go. It’s perfect running weather at the moment – not too hot, but still nice and sunny. What better track to run and admire the slowly setting sun?

It wasn’t all peaches and cream though. 15 minutes in I got a stitch that lasted a good 20 mins. It wasn’t too bad that I had to stop and walk though, so I just pushed through it. With 15 mins to go I also noticed my knees were hurting – I hope that is something that will go away rather than continue if I try to do this more often.

All up I did the 7km in 45-50min (I forgot to look at my watch until after I had finished stretching). I was pleasantly surprised that I made the whole thing without having to stop and walk.

A few hours later and I can feel my calves are tightening. It feels good knowing that I pushed myself today.

Let’s see how tomorrow feels though eh?

Catching up

It's been a busy time since I checked in here last. I don't have the energy to write a long, detailed post describing it all, but here are the highlights of the last week or so of my life, in roughly chronological order.

1. Eating dumplings, drinking much wine and singing lots of Guns 'n Roses at Karaoke.
   
   
2. Waking up still drunk the next morning and having to pack my bags for a morning flight to Cairns.
3. Making it to Cairns in one piece and enjoying a cruisy day wandering the streets, sussing out what had changed in the 5 years since I'd been there.
   
4. Spending 3 days on a boat staring at a view like this non-stop. Note the lack of blue sky.
   
5. Doing 10 dives in 3 days, including 2 night dives. Never done a night dive before and was expecting it to be very scary - it wasn't! Best dive was the last morning - there were 9 sharks right underneath our boat as we descended. Then we saw 7 turtles in the one dive!
   
6. Making it back on dry land and discovering that blue sky still exists.
   
7. Getting home and unpacking. Such fun - not!!!
8. Finding out I passed 3rd year and am now officially in 4th year - woohoo!
9. Realising this now officially means I have 9 weeks before I head to Vietnam for 3 months. Buying a Lonely Planet (still not opened it though)
   
10. Picking out a new pair of glasses. They'll be ready to collect soon.
11. Visiting my Babushka and getting to eat prawn dumplings at the same time. Yum.
    
12. Starting my first 4th year rotation - Obstetrics and Gynaecology. It's going to be an interesting 8 weeks, and I am loving being able to walk to hospital in the mornings.

So I think that pretty much brings us up to date. I need a rest from all this excitement!!