I have spent today making my first ever batch of Kimchi. I have been documenting it in photos as I go, but thought I'd write up what I did so that if anyone else fancies having a go too, we can compare results. For a start, this recipe is nowhere near "traditional" because I don't have access to certain ingredients such as glutinous rice flour. I'm sure if I searched in many of the asian supermarkets around the city centre I could find it, but I'm lazy so I didn't even try. I am not writing this up as a traditional recipe because I'm kinda making it up as I go along, with hints from various sources including the great and wonderful Maangchi whose YouTube channel I follow. Observant readers or followers of Maangchi will recognise the recipe as being close to her Easy Kimchi recipe, however since I'm useless, it won't be exact. If this batch turns out okay then I'll write it up as a proper recipe for you to follow. I started off with three Chinese Leaf cabbages which seemed to be about 1.5kg or so once I'd stripped the less nice outer leaves, cored and chopped them. I then soaked and drained the cabbage in cold water... ...before sprinkling a total of one third of a cup of salt over the cabbage and mixing it to distribute the salt. Then I returned to the cabbage every 30 minutes to re-mix it a total of three times. After the cabbage had been salted for perhaps 1h45m or so, I rinsed it out. Maangchi recommends washing the cabbage three times so that's what I did before setting it out to drain in a colander. Maangchi then calls for the creation of a porridge made from sweet rice flour which it turns out is very glutinous. Since I lack the ability to get that flour easily I substituted cornflour which I hope will be okay and then continued as before. One cup of water, one third of a cup of cornflour was heated until it started to bubble and then one sixth of a cup of sugar was added. Stirred throughout, once it went translucent I turned the heat off and proceeded. One half of a red onion, a good thumb (once peeled) of ginger, half a bulb of garlic and one third of a cup of fish sauce went into a mini-zizzer. I then diagonal-chopped about five spring onions, and one leek, before cutting a fair sized carrot into inch long pieces before halving and then thinly slicing it. Maangchi calls for julienned carrots but I am not that patient. Into the cooled porridge I put two thirds of a cup of korean hot pepper flakes (I have the coarse, but a mix of coarse and fine would possibly be better), the zizzed onion/garlic/ginger/fish mix and the vegetables... ...before mixing that thoroughly with a spatula. Next came the messy bit (I put latex gloves on, and thoroughly washed my gloved hands for this). Into my largest mixing bowl I put a handful of the drained cabbage into the bowl and a handful of the pepper mix. Thoroughly mixing this before adding another handful of cabbage and pepper mix I repeated until all the cabbage and hot pepper mixed vegetables are well combined. I really got your arms into it, squishing it around, separating the leek somewhat, etc. As a final task, I scooped the kimchi into a clicklok type box, pressing it down firmly to try and remove all the air bubbles, before sealing it in for a jolly good fermenting effort. I will have to remove a little tonight for our dinner (beef strips marinated in onion, ginger and garlic, with kimchi on rice) but the rest will then sit to ferment for a bit. Expect a part-2 with the report from tonight's dinner and a part-3 with the results after fermentation.

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As an aside, I got my hot pepper flakes from Sous Chef who, it turns out, also stock glutinous rice flour -- I may have to get some more from them in the future. (#notsponsored)

(This is my first race of the 2014 season.)

I had entered this race in 2013 and found it was effective for focusing winter training. As triathlons do not typically start until May in the UK, scheduling earlier races can be motivating in the colder winter months. I didn't have any clear goals for the race except to blow out the cobwebs and improve on my 2013 time. I couldn't set reasonable or reliable target times after considerable "long & slow" training in the off-season but I did want to test some new equipment and stategies, especially race pacing with a power meter, but also a new wheelset, crankset and helmet. Preparation was both accidentally and deliberately compromised: I did very little race-specific training as my season is based around an entirely different intensity of race, but compounding this I was confined to bed the weekend before. Sleep was acceptable in the preceding days and I felt moderately fresh on race morning. Nutrition-wise, I had porridge and bread with jam for breakfast, a PowerGel before the race, 750ml of PowerBar Perform on the bike along with a "Hydro" PowerGel with caffeine at approximately 30km.

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Zoe slept really well last night, and had a good breakfast of porridge this morning. We biked to Kindergarten for the first time in ages, as it wasn't raining. Drop off went nice and smoothly. I can't believe this is the last week of term 1 already. Today was an exceptional day, because Sarah had the day off, and picked up Zoe from Kindergarten instead of me. As tonight Zoe is with her, I got about 3 extra hours up my sleeve. The house was a bit of a mess, I decided to switch today with my Wednesday "clean the house day" and use the extra time to do a more thorough clean. Part way through that, an acquaintance, who recently separated from his wife, dropped by for a chat. We ended up chatting for about 3 hours, so I dialed back my cleaning to something more standard. My business debit card arrived in the mail today. It was exciting to see something with my name and my company name on it. I've scheduled a bank transfer to fund my business with the first loan I'll be making to it, so it'll have some cash as of the start of second quarter. All I need now is the cheque book to arrive, and I can go pay the patent lawyer a visit. I had contemplated going for a run tonight before my yoga class, but I ended up faffing around with trying to fix the song order on the USB stick that has all of Zoe's music on it. The new head unit isn't playing one album in the right order, and it's phenomenally annoying. To this end, I discovered fatsort, which is a godsend. Yoga was in the new studio tonight for the first time. I'm really happy that my teacher is growing her business. The new studio is even closer to home than the old one, which is lovely.

I woke up at 2am, and then spent over an hour trying to get back to sleep. That was phenomenally annoying. Then at 5am, Zoe's white noise app on her Nexus 7 decided to go a bit wonky (as it does from time to time), which caused her to wake up. I couldn't convince her tablet to behave, so I just let her get in bed with me, but neither of us went back to sleep. I think at about 6am I told her she could turn on the TV so I could try and squeeze in a bit more rest. I managed to forget to put the oats in the Thermomix when I made porridge this morning. It took me a while to figure out why the consistency and colour didn't look quite right when I dished it up. Yep, it was one of those mornings. Zoe had her trial ballet class this morning, at 9:45am in Coorparoo. I managed to get Zoe organised a bit early, so we were the first ones there. It's in a church hall, and has a nice floor, with a mirrored wall and barres on each long wall. Eventually the other girls arrived, there were 5 regulars in total. A good sized class. I had mixed feelings when I discovered that parents weren't normally able to be present in the dance studio to watch the classes. I was today, because it was a trial, but once Zoe starts regular classes, I'll have to wait outside. I'm disappointed I won't be able to watch, but it'll be nice to have 45 minutes to myself. Zoe did really well in the class today. She picked everything up very quickly, and I don't think she'll be negatively impacted by having entered in Term 2. She seemed very comfortable and looked like she enjoyed herself. Not long after we arrived, the heavens opened in a massive downpour, which continued when we had to leave. It was a fair dash back to the car. I'd had plans of a picnic lunch in New Farm Park, but scrapped them on account of the weather. We got home, and had a late morning tea, and then Zoe wanted to play with her Marble Run. After that, we gave Smudge a good brushing and then Zoe wanted to do some craft and painting. I let Zoe set herself up, and it was fun to see what bits and pieces she chose to dig out of the arts and craft bins. She wanted to make another crown for Mummy's boss, but we don't have any crown making stuff at home (yet), so she ended up starting to decorate a wand and gluing a pom pom on a shoe box, before moving on to painting her cardboard box cubby house and rocket. She wanted to start doing some hand painting right around lunch time, but I managed to convince her to do that after lunch. We had some lunch, and then she did a little bit more painting and stickering before her nap. She passed out for her nap very quickly. After her nap, I asked her if she wanted to paint or do science, and without hesitation, she chose science! I delved into the "Weather" chapter of 365 Science Experiments and we did a couple with ice cubes and salt and then she saw one where you stick a balloon over the neck of a glass bottle and put it in hot water and the balloon "inflates", so we did that one as well. We also popped a balloon to simulate thunder. It was all nice and easy, without a lot of preparation required. After that, we did a bit of a clean up and then Zoe watched some of her DVDs from the library while she waited for Sarah to arrive to pick her up. It was a good day today. No meltdowns.

Despite having a good, unbroken night's sleep, Zoe seemed a bit out of sorts this morning. She didn't have a particularly good breakfast. I'm not sure if that was because I made the porridge with cow's milk instead of almond milk (because I had some leftover cow's milk), or she was just having a bad day. Zoe has a trial dance class booked for tomorrow, which clashes with her normal Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, so we skipped Playgroup and did a BJJ class this morning. It was a good class, because there were 3 other kids there, a regular boy and girl, and a girl who was taking a trial class, so it was nice to have a bit more happening, but the two other regular kids were younger and a little less focused, and I think that distracted Zoe a bit. I think the lack of a decent breakfast also kicked in, and she went on strike a couple of times. Overall, it was a pretty good class though. The one downside was when I accidentally closed her fingers in the door on the way out. I didn't realise she was holding onto the door frame when I let go of the door I was holding open for her. Luckily it wasn't a heavy door or it could have ended more badly. Zoe had chosen to go to BJJ class by car today. I wondered if it was because of the improved music selection with the new radio. Her library books were due back soon, and since I don't have her this weekend, I thought we could just go to the library after BJJ class. I gave her a muesli bar to keep her going after BJJ class, but I think the lack of a good breakfast was really starting to show after we left the library. I was feeling like lunch out, and hadn't been to Grill'd for a while, nor sampled their kids menu, so I asked Zoe if she wanted a burger for lunch, and she said she did. We got to Grill'd, and I eventually managed to extract an order out of Zoe. She went for the mini chicken burger. The kid's menu items were pretty good. They came in a little box, with the burger, some chips, a popper (a.k.a. "juice box") and a colouring sheet with a set of colouring pencils. Unfortunately Zoe had a massive meltdown because she couldn't get the angle of her straw to her liking, and wasn't doing very well expressing how she wanted it ("down and then up" didn't make a whole lot of sense without it having bendy bits in places it didn't have bendy bits). Eventually I got her to eat. I'd say that food was definitely the issue, because after lunch she perked up significantly, and we had a nice little play in Bulimba Memorial Park, where I'd parked the car, and then we went home. We read a few of the new library books, and then she passed out for a late nap without much complaint. After her nap, she was still a little bit out of sorts, but we managed a walk down to the Hawthorne Garage to grab some lamb cutlets for dinner, and then she watched some TV and ate quite a good amount of fruit while I organised dinner. After a handwashing-related meltdown and dinner, we went back to the Hawthorne Garage for a babyccino. She'd perked up somewhat by this stage, and it was a nice outing. Many dogs were patted while there and on the way home. Bath time and bedtime went pretty well. It's another warm night, so I hope she sleeps well.

Zoe wound up in my bed at some ungodly hour, but then we both slept in until 7am, which was nice. Mum and Dad were coming around at 8:30am to come watch Zoe's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, so we got up, made some porridge in the Thermomix and got ready. Zoe decided she didn't feel like going to BJJ class by bike, so we all piled into our car and drove over. Zoe had a good class, and Mum took her uniform home afterwards to take up the legs a bit, which will be good. They stayed for lunch, and we reviewed photos from our Coochie and Melbourne trips, and I made some fresh guacamole in Thermomix to go with the chicken quesadillas I made for lunch. After lunch they went home, and Zoe declined to take a nap, so we read some stories in the hammock, and then we did our Science Friday experiment, one that was suggested to me by a friend on Facebook. It was nice and easy, just put some milk in a tray, drop in a few drops of food colouring and then touch them with a cotton bud soaked in detergent. The detergent breaks up the fat in the milk and the colour drops go flying all over the place. Zoe really enjoyed swirling all the colours around with the cotton buds and we repeated the experiment a few times. She then wanted to see what would happen if we put some glue in, so wanting to encourage her scientific curiosity, we tried it, and nothing interesting happened. Zoe had a play date at her friend Mackensie's house, which was just down the road in Balmoral. We biked over to her place and the girls had a lovely afternoon playing. Sarah came and picked up Zoe from there. I dropped in on some former neighbours who happened to move two doors down from Mackensie, and had just had a second child, and then headed home to prepare for a dinner and board game night with my girlfriend and some of my neighbours.

Today was Playgroup. We had a pretty early start to the day, and Zoe wanted porridge for breakfast, so we made that together in the Thermomix, and she got dressed while it cooked. After a bit of TV, we biked over. I got to witness semi-firsthand my first mother-to-mother altercation. I said hi to a mother I'd met a previous week, and asked her how she was, and got "Pissed off" as the response. Apparently a reasonably large boy (I'd put him at about the 4 mark) had been in the face of her daughter, and distressed her daughter a bit, so she'd apparently politely told the boy to back off, and then been revved by the mother of the boy for talking to her son. The boy continued hanging around her daughter, and she left Playgroup not long after telling me all about it. I worked out later on that the mother of the boy was one of the women who helped run the Playgroup. Fun times. He was a bit out of control. He full on screamed at me at the end of Playgroup for no reason. His mother did make him apologise to me for that, without me requesting it. There were some dress ups (mostly skirts) today, so Zoe had a fabulous time cavorting around on the stage in a big pink lacy skirt, doing "ballet". She dragged me up on stage with her, and we danced around for a bit. It was quite fun. She was very helpful at pack up time, and was bringing a lot of equipment back to the storage room at the back of the hall. I was helping load stuff into the large crate in the storage room. After parachute time, I lost sight of her briefly, and after a quick search, deduced that she must have gotten herself locked in the storage room. Sure enough, that's where she was. She was only missing for as long as it took me to notice and search in all the other possible places, so she wasn't particularly distressed. Poor thing. After Playgroup, we biked back home, and I had another photo I wanted to print out, so we drove over to Officeworks and had a sausage sizzle after we got the photo printed out, and then drove back home. Zoe had a pretty good bedtime last night, so I decided to try skipping her nap today. I wanted to get the 5-8 player extension pack for Settlers of Catan, which Mind Games in the Myer Centre had, so we hopped on a bus to the city. When we've been on longer public transport rides, Zoe's asked me if she can play games on my phone. This of course keeps her amused, but leaves me with nothing to amuse myself (I need to remember to bring a book). I have this cupboard full of old Android phones, so I decided to blow the dust off my old Nexus S and make it a dedicated games phone for her when we're on public transport. This worked pretty well today. She also decided to bring her handbag, which was convenient. I think she was pretty excited at the idea of her "own phone", even if it lacked a SIM card. After we'd bought the extension pack, I thought we could do something slightly more fun than just traipse into the city and traipse back out again. I've been meaning to introduce her to bubble tea for a while, so took this opportunity to track some down in the Myer Centre. We settled on some honeydew milk tea. She liked the honeydew, but after a couple of mouth fulls, was over the tapioca balls. She was a good sport and gave them a good college try though. It was fun watching her play around with the phone on the way home, and just fumbling her way around the user interface. She found the alarm setting UI, and was having a great old time creating alarms. (I'm glad I cleared them all out when we got home, there was at least one set for 4am). She had fun exploring all the ring tones. Towards the end of the journey home she figured out the camera, and was having a fabulous time taking snaps out the bus window. She still needs to work on keeping her hands and fingers away from the lens. She watched some TV while I made dinner and then I joined her on the couch for a cuddle while I flicked through my copy of 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) and 365 Science Experiments. My cousin Renata came around for dinner with us tonight. Zoe didn't have a particularly great dinner, but she did go to bed nice and easily. I'm not sure how she'll sleep tonight. I've gone back to having a light-weight doona on her, as it's possible last night's wake up was temperature-related.

Today was yet another busy day. Zoe seems to have taken to waking up at around 5:30am instead of her normal 6:00am (or a bit later when I'm really lucky). Not sure what that's all about. I did get her to go back to bed until about 6:55am, and then she was happy to just come and snuggle in bed with me for a bit instead of play games on her Nexus 7. After that we had a leisurely start to day, making porridge with strawberries in the Thermomix, and then biked to Kindergarten. Somehow it still managed to be 8:45am by the time we got there. I was expecting it would be closer to 8:30am. Drop off looked like it was going to be clingy, but then she just waved me off, so that was nice. I had an appointment at the podiatrist at 11:40am, and that was back near Kindergarten, but further away from home, so I had this grand plan of cycling over there, and then twiddling my thumbs for a bit before Kindergarten pickup. That left me with only a couple of hours at home to work on my taxes before I had to leave again. I managed to make those couple of hours productive though, so that was good. I biked to the podiatrist, had my appointment, and then it was 1pm and I still needed lunch, so I decided to grab some at a cafe near the Kindergarten. I chilled out there for a while catching up on social media on my phone, and then headed over to the Kindergarten, but was still quite early, so I just hung out on one of the couches they have out by the front door, out of sight of the kids. The Kindergarten has an A-frame whiteboard out the front that they use to broadcast messages to parents at drop off and pick up time. One of the teachers came out to write something on it while I was sitting out there, and another parent reacted rather negatively to it as it was being written, so I had to go see it for myself. Apparently a child had a suspected gastro bug (he'd thrown up a couple of times). It was interesting observing the reactions of a few mothers as they trickled in for pick up. It's been a while since a gastro bug has gone through the household, so I guess the news didn't evoke a particularly powerful reaction in me. I'm going with the "suspected" and that hopefully Zoe didn't come into contact with patient zero. I guess time will tell. I certainly hope she doesn't come down with anything between now and Sunday, with all the travel we're doing. I had an accident report to sign today. Apparently a large wooden block hit Zoe in the head while they were packing up a tower they'd made. She had a bit of a lump on her head, but otherwise seemed fine. Zoe had a nap today, of unknown length, but woke up naturally as I entered the room. She took a fair while to get going though, and was grumpy and uncooperative getting on the bike. I ended up having to do it the "hard way" and we had a fabulous ride back with her doing a tired cry all the way. All the way until we passed a playground, when she snapped out of it and declared she wanted to have a play. I'd booked myself in for a haircut at 3pm, and a make up swim class at 4:45pm (to cover our absence this Saturday due to our Melbourne trip) so playing in the playground seemed like the perfect way to fill the gap. It was even on the way to swim class. So after I had my haircut, we popped home, grabbed her swim gear, and biked back to the playground for a bit. Then we went to swim class. This was her third one at her new level, and her progress continues to go very well. It's really exciting watching her. Zoe took her time leaving the pool, so we didn't get home until after 5:30pm and I hadn't started dinner yet. I whipped it up while Zoe watched some TV, and I managed to recoup all of the lost time after dinner and still get Zoe to bed at a reasonable hour. Bedtime itself went nice and smoothly. I used the canned goodnight video I asked Sarah to make for the first time tonight, and it was well received and I think defused any potential issues. I'm hoping she'll sleep well tonight, as her mosquito bites don't seem to be actively giving her trouble any more.

Today was a pretty good day. I've found that I quite enjoyed it. Zoe woke up a bit early, around 5:30am. She decided that despite the ridiculous heat, she wanted porridge for breakfast, with cherries in it, so we pitted the cherries and threw it all into the Thermomix to cook while she got dressed. After breakfast and the obligatory bit of TV, we biked over to Playgroup. Zoe's got a few toys that she's taken a liking to, and immediately sought them out. She also seems to really enjoy just running the length of the hall after Playgroup is all done and everything has been packed away and most of the kids are gone. Today the craft activity was making paper crowns, and she wanted to that immediately upon arrival. After we got home, while I was preparing lunch, she blinged it up a bit more with some stuff from home. She took a 2 hour nap after lunch, and I did some more work on my taxes, and then, because it was still stupidly hot, we biked over to Colmslie pool for a swim. Zoe's swimming progress continues in leaps and bounds. She's had one lesson at her new level, and she's started with a kickboard and is doing strokes, so I borrowed a kickboard from the pool, and she did really well with it. We also just fooled around with the kickboard a bit. I took it to the bottom of the pool and launched it out of the water with its own buoyancy, and Zoe tried standing on it under water like a skateboard. The sinkies were also popular again. We grabbed a few things for dinner from the Hawthorne Garage on the way home, and I managed to get Zoe to bed a little bit early. I thought I was going to have a smooth bedtime, but unfortunately, as is a common occurrence at the moment, after lights out, she started crying for her mother. It took about 15 minutes to get her from near-hysterical to calm and drowsy. I'm starting to think I might need to either shorten or eliminate the afternoon naps. One of her complaints recently has been that she's had trouble sleeping at bedtime. That said, she still seems to get to sleep relatively quickly once she gets into the right frame of mind.

On Friday night I followed up on Matthew’s ITP and attended his and Daf’s party. This was the first time I had seen the OLPC prototypes and woah, they’re pretty small . Daf and I decided to make flapjack which went down really well. On Sunday^WSaturday Daniel, Rob (Kendrick) and Lesley came over to Cambridge and we went to the Free Press for lunch with Rob (McQueen) and Daf and two of my friends from college. That was followed by more flapjack and very tasty coffee at the Collabora office. At popular request (ONE!) the recipe for my flapjack is: Melt 125g of butter with 150g of dark brown sugar and two tablespoons of oozy golden syrup over a low heat. Stir it. When melted add two teaspoons of ground ginger and remove from the heat. Add 200g of porridge oats (for a more crumbly less toffee flapjack use 250g). Stir in a handful raisins (or sultanas, or both). Dollop into a greased baking tin (use the wrapper from the butter) and bake for around 20 minutes at 180 C. Score whilst still warm to ensure that it can be broken.

Serves 2

ca. 1 L	bouillon
500 g	frozen precooked vegetables (a mixture of e.g. peas, beans, carrot, cauliflower)
ca. 2 cl	oil
1 dl	rice
1 dl	oat bran
100 g	meat in small pieces (usually pork or beef)
2 dl	red wine
	seasonings to taste

Start these “background processes” at the beginning: Heat the bouillon close to boiling point and try to keep it there while preparing this dish (try not to let it boil). Thaw and cook the vegetables by steaming. Mix rice, bran and meat in an oiled frying pan. Toast these in the pan until the meat is brown at least in the surface. Add the red wine and stir it well. When the liquid has properly soaked in the bran and/or boiled off, add just enough bouillon to make the mixture resembles thin gruel. Let the mixture boil, adding bouillon as required to keep the thin-gruel likeness. Continue this long enough that the rice has cooked properly (the time required depends on the rice variety used). Then stop adding bouillon and boil the mixture down into a thin porridge. Add the vegetables and season to taste. Serve immediately. Rough nutrient breakdown Computed from recipe (assuming pork as the meat) and individual ingredient nutrient content.

	recipe	E%
Energy	4600 kJ (1100 kcal)
Carbohydrates	127 g	55 %
Protein	48 g	21 %
Fat	24 g	24 %
Dietary fiber	24 g

Notes Meat can be replaced with TSP. The wine can be replaced with (possibly thinned) grape juice.