I want to return to Brisbane

Holidays are great. Holidays somewhere environmentally comfortable and holidays full of comforting food are greater!

 

[maxbutton id=”10″ ]

 

Even though it was just a week away and it was a week spent staying with my parents, returning to Canberra was hard. Really hard.

The good thing is I love my job and I work with terrific people. If I hated my job it would have been more awful coming back to live in Canberra.

Work-wise, the week has been great. I got to meet some new people on Monday at a stakeholder meeting and enjoyed some meeting food 😃

Book writing

I’ve started thinking more seriously about a recipe e-book. The first half of 2018 saw quite a few sous vide recipes on Yummy Lummy.

I’m thinking of taking the recipe cards I use and paste them onto even-numbered pages and on the following odd-numbered pages add photographs and some explanatory text.

The idea is to keep it small and tight with say half a dozen recipes, and an appendix on sous vide cooking with good references including my favourite sous vide cooking YouTube channels as well as the equipment and apps that I use.

I’ll offer it in exchange for a free subscription to Yummy Lummy, so basically what I’ll ask for is an e-mail address. Obviously, people will be able to use dummy e-mail addresses or immediate unsubscribe, but you know, that’s life 😂

Because I’m an excellent procrastinator, that’s about as much as I’m going to do for now. There’s heaps of time to do this. I’m just grateful I don’t blog for money. The stress of writing good copy would really get me down.

Master Chef

As much as I enjoy this TV program, I’ve found it’s a bit of a time-sink. I find myself each night that it’s on TV (Sunday to Thursday), live tweeting my thoughts and feelings about the contestants. The interaction with other tweeps has been great and remarkably, it’s been friendly, even when I’ve tweeted things some people may disagree with. For example, this week (on TV, but much earlier in the year for the recording of the program), the contestants found themselves in Darwin on Stokes Hill Wharf. They were cooking for Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. I was tweeting my love of Darwin and the sub-equatorial weather. While some tweeps contested my view that Darwin is heaven on earth, there was no nastiness.

The best part of this episode is Darwin. Heaven on earth people, heaven on earth #warmandmoist #MasterChefAU

— Yummy Lummy (aka Gary) (@Yummy_Lummy) July 4, 2018

I’m almost grateful the show will soon be over. It means I can start going to bed at 8.30 again.

Trolleys and plastic bags

Australia has been in the spotlight again after the introduction of new shopping bag changes by the two largest supermarkets here, viz., Coles and Woolworths. I’ve seen some stuff online from friends living across the big pond which has highlighted this matter. It’s mostly been about the strong reaction from some shoppers to the changes.

Over the last few years, some state and territory governments have passed legislation forcing supermarkets to stop issuing free biodegradable thin plastic bags. These were bags with integrated handles which were available free at the check out for packing groceries. Many people would keep them and then use them for liners of rubbish bins and to temporarily store dog faeces when they took their dogs for walks. Rather than the ‘free’ bags (because nothing is ever really free), the major supermarkets introduced reusable plastic bags with a price of $AUD0.15. These bags are thicker and while there is a claim these bags are reusable, I find they are easily pierced and the handles break. The charge for them is meant to deter shoppers from ‘buying’ them and steer shoppers to use sturdier fabric bags which usually cost $AUD1 or more, or to bring a cardboard box for packing and transporting their groceries.

While this has been legislated in some places, in other jurisdictions, Coles and Woolworths have voluntarily introduced the change and some shoppers are angry. While Coles and Woolworths are citing environmental protection as the reason for the change, some shoppers have speculated that the big two companies will now save money on not having to purchase, and issue for ‘free’ the smaller, thinner, biodegradable bags which shoppers repurposed, and these companies will make money selling the slightly larger, thicker and I’m guessing non-biodegradable plastic bags. According to these shoppers, Coles and Woolworths stand to profit from this arrangement.

In the Australian Capital Territory, the ACT Government (Australian Greens and Australian Labor Party coalition) introduced legislation to stop the use of the smaller and thinner biodegradable plastic bags a couple of years ago. I bought a few of the fabric bags and now also buy rubbish bin liners. The fabric bags are washable and I find them useful for carrying many other things, and because I don’t particularly care what people think of me, I’ve even used them on aeroplanes as a carry on bag for gifts and things when visiting Brisbane. The rubbish bin liners I use are plastic and I assume they pose the same environmental dangers as the smaller, thinner biodegradable plastic bags but I see no easy alternative in my living situation.

I think it’s important to wash the fabric bags given they can easily be contaminated with biological material which can act as a culture medium for harmful germs.

Another local government initiative here in the ACT has been the application of locks and chains on shopping trolleys. I’ve always returned shopping trolleys to the storage bays but it seems more and more Canberrans were taking the trolleys beyond the limits of the shopping centres and leaving the trolleys on footpaths, in the artificial lakes, in front yards, and dumping them in the bush to rust away.

Aldi has had a lock and chain arrangements from the beginning and it seemed to work for Aldi. When the local government passed legislation forcing all the commercial providers of shopping trolleys to install locks and chains, it seemed to be too much for some Canberrans. I still find shopping trolleys on footpaths, in the artificial lakes, in front yards, and dumped in the bush. The annoying aspect of this less than stellar plan is that people who would ordinarily return the trolley now get frustrated by people who share the less than brilliant intellectual status of local government authorities by manifesting ‘trolley-art’. Rather than an orderly conjugation of like trolleys by inserting the front-end into the rear-end, we see attempts at interspecies interaction. There are more than half a dozen species of trolleys in service and they are not compatible with one another. In the end, I see clusters of rear-end to rear-end bondage and sometimes clusters of trolleys in configurations I never initially imagined was possible. This all leads to some fine ‘trolley-art’ but all I’m interested in is getting my one dollar coin back. To me, one dollar buys a 375 mL can of Coke Zero at work from the charity refrigerator. I don’t want to donate my hard earned money to the people who collect trolleys. All I want is to find an open rear-end of a standard Coles shopping trolley, so I can insert the front-end of the trolley I’ve been using and then release my one dollar coin so I can engage the lock and chain.

We live in the twenty-first century. Surely there are brighter people in local government who can develop a less frustrating way to keep shopping trolleys in a centre’s perimeter. The lock and chain method has not successfully stopped shopping trolleys being left on footpaths, in the artificial lakes, in front yards, and being dumped in the bush.

What I’ve been eating this week

This is a gallery of photographs. Click on a thumbnail and then scroll through the images.

I ate well this week despite not eating out much at all.

[maxbutton id=”11″ ][maxbutton id=”12″ ][maxbutton id=”13″ ]

 

Final thoughts

How do you feel about plastic shopping bags?
Do you have a better idea for returning shopping trolleys?
I hope you have a good week and eat well.

What is the collective noun for shopping trolleys?

Google forms feedback