Hello, the Internets.

It seems that my Year Abroad is finally coming to an end. It's gone by terrifyingly fast. I arrived in Auckland exhausted and bewildered and excited almost a year ago, and in about a month I will be coming home. wow.

I guess there's not much else to say. I've spent this entire winter cooking noodles and snowabording.  my life is pretty clean and simple, hence the lack of LJ posts, but I'm loving every moment of it.  When my work visa expires in mid-september, I wil no longer be allowed to work.  I will stay in town as a snow bum for a week or so, then I shall drive around the south island exploring and meandering my way back up north, eventually to arrive in Auckland in time for my flight to LAX on the 15th of October.

What will I do then, you may ask? Well, initially, I will go home ot Atlanta to say hello to my parent, do an Epic load of laundry, and proably sleep on the couch for a few days. Then I will proceed to catch up with as many Atl area people as I can find.  

AND THEN I will fly to Bozeman, Montana, in November to work at Big Sky Resort. yes, I have officially been offered and have acceped a postion to work for the winter season at Big Sky. Woo!!

If anyone fancies coming to visit, by all measn let me know, as I will have a limited number of discounted passes to offer to anyone willing to make the trip =) want to learn how to snowboard? I will do my best to teach you!



so anyway, yeah. that's my update. Home to the US in October, more snow in Montana in November.

-b

Hello, Internet!

I am still alive! I am still in New Zealand!

So, I have been dead silent (on lj) for ages. I feel bad, in a way, but my excuse is that i have been too busy to have time to sit down properly and write something, as well as too busy to get up to anything fun and interesting.  My Blenheim days are over, and with them passed my days of free fancy beer.  I left that job a little over a month ago in late May, and I do miss working there, to be sure.  I have every plan to take up hobby brewing when I get settled, or possibly working at a brewery in the near future (Piece? Goose Island? Rogue???) The company is doing well and sales have increased respectably. I was replaced by one of my former housemates, a Canadian chick who finished up her time at the vineyards just around the time i finished up at the brewery.

Speaking of when I finished up at the brewery, I bet you are all vaguely curious to know what I've done with myself since then. Well, in the last week of May, I got an official email from one of the ski resorts i'd aplied for. Upon calling them to ask if they would honor their cheaper early-bird season ticket prices for someone who had been denied a position (and informed two days after the prices went up), they pulled my CV and decided that the food and beverage division would be keen to give me a second look.  Well, I moved to Wanaka, the town from which the Cardrona Alpine Resort is based, and found a home to live in and a job to occupy myself for the three or so weeks before the snow season started.  (I've been making sushi for the past three weeks and living in a house with three other people, all local types.)  A few days after my arrival in town, I interviewed with the manager of the Food and Beverage dept of Cardies (the local familiarized name for Cardrona.)  As it turns out, they Loved me (based on my previous chefing experience, combiined wih my exhaustive familiarity with asian cooking) and decided that I would be well-suited for working at the so-called 'noodle bar' as a wok chef, and offered me the job with the added duty of being the stock manager who reported to the head chef to keep on top of the stock ordering.

Last monday was our first day of training, and when all the new staffers were introduced, I was anounced as the Head Chef and Supervisor for the entire Noodle Bar -- one of five food venues on the entire hill. Needless to say, this was as much a surprise to me as it was news to everyone else in the room. But the work has been fun and definitely an eye-openning experience. I have a staff of 8 full-timers -- three barristas, three kitchen grunts, and two chefs. I also get a fancy jacket that says I'm the head chef.  Yay!


So, basically, I am going to work here at Cardies through the 12th of Sept, which is the last day that my work visa is valid, and thus the last day I am legally entitled to work in NZ. (I can stay up to three months more on a standard tourist visa) The season continues through the end of October, but by mid-sept, the crowds will have subsided and they will be looking to this the ranks and reduce operating costs on the hill. I still get to take full advantages of staff discounts and my season pass. AWESOME.
This means that I am not coming home in time for Dragoncon. I will probably be coming home in late-october. I have to drive to Dunedin to go to the nearest STA agency to change my flight tickets, so I don't have an official date yet.

well, that's about it for my news. My CV is gonna look pretty cool after all this is over. I hope everyone back home is having fun adventures!

-b

The following culinary experimentation was undertaken as an exploration of the artistic medium of pasta and sauce.  My primary subjects for investigation were Barilla 'bevette no 13' (normally marketed as 'linguine') and Bertolli ''five brothers' roasted garlic and red wine pasta sauce'.

I am recording my laboratory cooking notes here for future reference, and collaboration with other research groups on this project is welcome and encouraged. Pending third party confirmation of these results, I aim to publish my findings in Nature, Popular Science, or Southern Living.

As I am soon to be moving out of my current flat, I have been diligently working to reduce my food supplies in the kitchen without purchasing new food ingredients. I have thus far reduced my holdings to a bit of rice, some onions, some pasta, one jar of sauce, and sundry spices and condiments.  Thus, one dinner, I turned to the pasta and sauce with little else but hunger driving my actions. I cooked my pasta and microwaved the sauce in the jar. When the pasta was cooked, I placed it in a bowl, poured about on third of the sauce on it and consumed. Thus was formed the baseline measurement and hypothesis of my experiment: 

Baseline data: [pasta] + [sauce v1.0] = crap
Where ‘crap’= thin and runny red pasta dish with little flavour.

Experimental hypothesis: adding ‘stuff’ to my pasta sauce will reduce the ‘crappiness’ of the end product, and ‘crappiness’ inversely proportional to ‘goodness’

The following evening, dinner time occurred with more preparation and a better plan of action, but with all the culinary laziness of the previous evening. I put the pasta on to cook and retrieved the remaining two-thirds jar of sauce from the fridge.  To the remainder of the sauce I added hot curry powder, chilli powder, cumin, salt, and pepper. Quantities were not precisely measured, but on retrospective estimation: for spices roughly 1.5-2 teaspoons, and about 0.5 tsp for salt and pepper.  I vigorously inverted the modified contents of the jar (my bench-top vortexer is temporarily broken or non-existent) and incubated at room temperature until the pasta was just short of al dente.  After draining the pasta I returned it to the original pot and added about ½ of the remaining pasta sauce [(1/3 * original jar contents) + (1/2 * added seasonings volume)] and stirred until the pasta was well coated.  Under medium-low heat, I reduced the sauce until it seemed thick enough to not be as crappy as it was the previous night.

Datapoint 1: [pasta] + [sauce v 2.0] = flavourful but too spicy
[sauce v 2.0] = [sauce v 1.0] + [curry powder + chilli powder + cumin + salt + pepper]
‘too spicy’ = not unbearably spicy and certainly edible, but too spicy to be able to enjoy the other flavours in the sauce.

This morning, I woke up and read xkcd for about 5 hours. I had nothing better to do, and well, it's a funny web comic.  At about 1pm, I realised just how hungry I had become since I woke up, and once again ventured into the kitchen to assess the situation.  Continuing my experiment, I put (the last of) the pasta on and once again retrieved the remaining sauce from the fridge.  To the last third of the original (though now highly modified) sauce I added one large fork-scoop of wholegrain mustard and 2 ‘glugs’ of olive oil. I once again vigorously inverted the contents of the jar (my vortexer is still experiencing an existential crisis) and set it aside to incubate at room temperature until the pasta was done. Repeating yesterday’s procedure, I drained the pasta and returned it to the pot and added the remainder of the sauce, then added a bit of water to the jar, shook it to rinse the jar and force the adherent sauce particles into suspension. The sauce/water suspension was added to the pot as well.  The sauce was reduced until non-crappy viscosity was achieved. The sauce reduction time seems to have been reduced greatly by the addition of olive oil.

Datapoint 2: [pasta] + [sauce v 3.0] = quite tasty!
[sauce v 3.0] = [sauce v 2.0] + [wholegrain mustard + olive oil + water]
‘tasty’ = I would totally eat this again, though honestly, the curry flavours were not very prominent.

Concluding remarks:

This is a poor way to develop recipes, but it worked. Cooking the pasta with the sauce is a critical step for improving the texture and presentation of a pasta dish. Tumeric in pasta sauce behaves selectively: the sauce stayed as red as before, but the pasta turned bright yellow.  Overly spicy pasta sauces mask the tomato flavours and kind of just overwhelm the palate.  Mustard is a superb addition to pasta dishes. 'Crappiness' and 'goodness' are indeed inversely proportional, and addition of 'stuff' to a 'crappy' sauce can affect this ratio.