Cooking tips

I'm a big fan of efficiency. My boss calls it "laziness", a virtue that he respects enormously - the ability to get results with the minimum possible investment.

Nowhere is this skill more important than in the kitchen. Despite the addition of our lovely Danske Møbler sideboard, space is still at a premium and we only have two saucepans. And when Susan starts to get hungry, her normally sunny disposition starts to cloud over, and getting calories into her becomes a time-critical exercise. I dread to think what she'd do if she were dining in Hell's Kitchen.

Thus it came about that last night, when I'd put the rice on and realised I hadn't hard-boiled the eggs as I'd intended, I came up with the bright idea of popping the eggs in with the rice. After all, I reasoned, it's all boiling water, isn't it? And rice requires ten minutes of simmering plus five to ten minutes of standing - that's surely enough time to get a nice hard-boiled result, yes?

For the record, it is. The eggs were perfect. There were only two drawbacks.

The first became apparent when the time came to hook the eggs out of the bed of quietly steaming rice. A spoon did that job nicely, but it also hooked a non-trivial amount of rice out with them, which immediately stuck like glue to the shell. I don't know why rice (Basmati, in case it makes a difference) is so adhesive to eggshell, but take it from me, there is an affinity there.

The second struck me when I contemplated the smooth, shiny whiteness of the freshly peeled eggs. Each egg showed a distinct patch of yellow to one side. Deprived of the tossing motion of the more conventional rapid boiling, the yolks had settled to one side. Not a disaster, merely a minor suboptimality.

I offer this finding in the spirit of furthering human understanding. My training as a process engineer tells me that your less brilliant ideas are just as worthy to be recorded as the best of them; that way, you (and others) will know, next time, without having to do the experiment again.

You're welcome.

Responsibilities

It's challenging, being a householder. We don't even complete the deal for another two months, and already I'm dropping behind in my commitments.

Local by-laws, at my place of employment, dictate that someone who makes such a major commitment as buying a house (or getting married, giving birth etc.) is required to bring in a celebratory cake for the rest of the team. Local by-laws in my own household stipulate that any such cake must be home-made, not shop-bought.

But what kind of cake? The laws are silent on that.

Anything with chocolate and/or cream is too much like hard work. Ditto anything that requires obscure or specialised ingredients, such as - well, anything I don't have in the apartment at the moment. I've never got the hang of meringue.

For my last birthday, I made Westmorland pepper cake, which went OK but not favourite. I'm thinking something sweeter, perhaps something quite unlike what you can get in any corner bakery. After dredging my childhood memory, I hit on: cardamom cake, with lemon glaze.

Hey, I never claimed to be a great cook, it doesn't have to be imaginative. But on the web, even simple recipes can become complicated...

Most cardamom cake recipes I can find involve random other ingredients - orange, pear, apple, pecan, you name it, all of which would I'm sure be delicious but they're not what I'm looking for. The closest I can find is this one, which stipulates when to use a food mixer (quite unnecessary), and actually forgets to put the cardamom in at all, and then smothers the whole thing in a thick lemon icing, rather than a thin transparent glaze. Not confidence-inspiring, but let's give it a try.

So I settle down to it, inserting spice where it seems to make most sense, doing the beating by hand Just Like Mother Taught Me, making the glaze with just lemon and sugar. The result isn't bad, but needs more cardamom.

Trying again, I suffer 'second-attempt syndrome'. This is what happens when you don't follow the recipe closely enough any more because you think you can remember it, only you can't, not in the right order anyway. We're eating through the results of that now.

I'll get it right later this week.

I'd rather be listening to Mahler

The worst thing about house hunting is how it takes away one's weekends. Not that we spend that much time actually out and about looking at the damn' things; but there's time researching online, drawing up a shortlist, scheduling, travelling and looking; then there's time discussing afterwards, trying to decide which ones deserve any sort of followup.

This (Monday) morning my phone has been ringing with agents wanting to know what I thought of their property, which to tell the truth I can barely remember. So here, for my own convenience, is my take on this weekend's crop of no-hopers:

• 3/57 Mariri Road - nice little place, good neighbourhood, but criminally overpriced. The agent was talking loudly (to a roomful of viewers) about a price possibly "in the high $500s".
  Yeah right.
  If she's been fool enough to talk like that to the vendors, they're not going to sell. Not this year, anyway.


• 11 Esperance Road: very nice - in summer. But I can't rid myself of the thought that, come winter, the huge, all-glass, single-glazed walls are going to be something of a liability.


• 31 Duke Street: ancient phone kiosk and collection of stolen roadsigns in the front garden. Two bathrooms, no bath. Ensuite with underfloor heating, but no heating in the rest of the house. In short: built by and for a man, with no noticeable input from his wife. Sorry, but sometimes stereotypes just work.


• 64 Parau St: this one I think the agent put us off by playing obnoxious music on the outside speakers. All Kiwi estate agents are obsessed with "outdoor living". Me, I like to spend time indoors. Guess I'm just a foreigner.


• 38a Symonds St: this is a lovely house. Good condition, great rooms, excellent storage, a downstairs. It suffers only from two things: too much sun in the kitchen, and greedy developer syndrome (some wanker built three houses on a lot that would've accommodated two just nicely). Taken together, these things are enough to spoil it.

Two other places we saw that we haven't completely ruled out yet - and that's even more of an intrusion on my time. But I'm not very hopeful for either of them.

Design flaws, part 2

(Part 1 here. For now.)

I think the bin in the kitchen knows my name.

We've been in this brand-new, purpose-built office eight months now. Although I hesitate to use the word "purgatorial", it doesn't feel like a place where sane people would come by choice. Maybe "prison" would be a fair comparison.

What bothers me is that this isn't so because it's cheap. (It is cheap, but it could be both much nicer and much cheaper.) Someone actually went out of their way and spent good money to furnish this crap. And nothing sums the issue up better than the aforementioned kitchen bin.

See, where any sane person, outfitting an office for up to 20 people, would have bought a decent-sized pedal bin... John, my boss, is a gadget freak. "There is no household object so humble", he firmly believes, "that it cannot be improved by adding batteries."

I wonder if he's got one of those electric sofas that gradually creeps across the floor of his living room. I feel sure that every light, blind and curtain in his house can be controlled while sitting on said sofa. He'd consider it a personal failing if he had to stand up and go outside to batten down his house against a hypothetical hurricane.

So what we have, in the office, is an electronic bin.

When you wave your hand over it, it flips open with an electric whir. About three seconds later, whether your hand is still above it or not, it snaps shut. It's a bit like a robotic version of a baby crocodile.

For the first few weeks, it was a top talking point in the office. We'd grumble at how awkward it was to put anything more complicated than a fruit peel in it -- the lid would snap shut while you were still brushing stuff off your plate. We'd complain at how it popped open at inopportune times whenever someone stood too close to it (which you had to do to get at the sink). We'd discuss, in smugly ironic tones, the day when -- as countless movies have taught us is inevitable -- it would rise up to throw off the shackles of scullery servitude and make a bid for freedom. Probably, I thought, John would try to enlist it as a new programmer.

But now the smugness has faded. Now, we discuss the bin with -- not fear, exactly, certainly not respect -- let's say circumspection.

At first, we thought it was just malfunctioning. It would sometimes fail to open, or having opened, refuse to shut. Not a major problem -- there are buttons you can press to override the automatic function, make it open or close. Of course that rather nullifies the advantage of not having to touch the bin with one's hands, but still it's a solution of sorts.

A couple of weeks ago there was an unmissable aroma of over-kept kitchen waste in the office. Of course it's summer now, stuff starts to go off quite quickly in our balmy climate, but even in the worst case the bin is supposed to contain such odours until it's emptied. But, we discovered, the bin's lid was open.

And it wanted to stay open. No matter how many times it was closed, whenever we went back to it, it had opened again.

Last week, sitting at my desk, I became aware of a monotonous banging noise from the kitchen, like an impatient three-year-old demanding supper. Nobody was in there; no prizes for guessing what was causing it. The only solution seemed to be to switch the bin off entirely, which I did, although that leaves no way of opening the lid.

Now, I swear, it remembers me.

It's taken to opening for some people and not for others. It will open to accept an eggshell, but not a banana peel. It will snap at my elbow while I'm washing up.

The day I look down and see it's turned to face me, I'm out of here.