One thing I like about cook­ing is the free­dom it gives you to be cre­ative and adventurous.

Last Wednes­day I offered to cook a din­ner for Ange, some­thing I don’t usu­ally do. I’d orig­i­nally planned to cook a Honey Soy Lamb Roast with gar­lic roast potaotes, veg­ies and gravy, but at the last minute Ange told me that she’d pre­fer her pota­toes mashed. take from that what you will.

Given that the potaoes were already on the boil (and I was run­ning a bit behind sched­ule) it wasn’t a hard deci­sion to make.
To spice (ha ha!) things up a bit I stirred through a cou­ple of table­spoons of a spice mix called za’atar. I can’t recall what actu­ally went into this mix, but it’s got a great tex­ture and really com­pli­mented the smooth­ness of the potato.

Epi­logue: Din­ner was received very well. Escpe­cially con­sid­er­ing she’s never had a “Aussie” roast before.

OK, so maybe I was a bit too opti­mistic.
I’ve cracked open the back­end of the site to see row after row of PHP code. Not being par­tic­u­larly skilled in PHP cod­ing it’s going to take me a bit longer than I thought to craft a redesign for the site. Given that the actual blog part of the site works. I’ll con­tinue to use it to post of the redesign and any major life event that I feel is text-worthy.

While I’m on life events, last night was my sec­ond foray into the world of semi-professional pho­tog­ra­phy. Ear­lier this week I was asked to take pho­tos for a Gov­ern­ment pol­icy launch. I glady agreed. I culled the 50 or so pho­tos I took down to about 13. Three of those I put up on my Flickr account.

Now that I’m inspired enough to get back into edit­ing this site I’ll see if I can put the Flickr cod­ing up under the right side menu.

I’ve had to think about what I want for this site. Did I reg­is­ter the domain just because I thought it was cool? Partially.

What I really need is a place where I can jot down ideas/notions and spin them into far greater things. A place to note impor­tant events in life — with­out get­ting to LiveJournal-y. A place for pho­tos and a place for sto­ries. Be they fic­tional and non-fictional (the sto­ries that is).

Also I need to start think­ing about a design for the site.
There’s a great sign at Flinders Street Sta­tion for Mr Donut. I like the colour­ing and style so I must remem­ber to take a photo next time i’m there.

Cat­e­gories will need to be set up. Ini­tial ideas are: ‘life’, ‘cook­ing’, ‘geek’, ‘gam­ing’ and ‘fic­tion’. That should cover every­thing that I want to type about.

Ah yes, one more thing. I want to have a link dump, but I’m not sure if I should make it a sep­a­rate part of the blog (with it’s own feed) or just make it a weekly thing. More think­ing and plan­ning to come I guess.