Fan Art
Choices That Matter is a serial story hub app by Tin Man Games. KG Tan is the project head and editor. The stories are:
And The Sun Went Out written by KG Tan, Alyce Potter, and myself.
And Their Souls Were Eaten written by yours truly (edited by KG Tan and Phill Berrie).
And Their Heroes Were Lost written by Phill Berrie (edited by KG Tan and yours truly), which is still getting periodically updated at the moment (the ‘serial’ part of the app).
All of which is to say that there is a bunch of awesome fan art out there, and it’s high time I collected some here!
This is Etienne Sole, one of the love interests in And The Sun Went Out. The artist is Frey. His website is here and his twitter is here.
There’s more gorgeous And The Sun Went Out art here (but I can’t figure out how to contact the artist).
And here (same artist as the above link).
If you know of more fan art out there please let me know. I’ll share anything G-rated (and I love knowing about it all, OF COURSE).
The beginning of the end
Well, it’s still not 100% certain, but things aren’t looking good for Princess Ana. There are probably some hard decisions ahead.
So here she is, looking perfect as usual:
Update: The decision to put her to sleep has been made. We’ll tell the kids in the morning.
Update: Ana died peacefully at the vet last Saturday.
The Banana Bread of Destiny
The only good thing about banana bread is that is uses up bananas.*
Ingredients
1 and a half c buckwheat flour
1 c coconut sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 c mashed banana
1 egg
1/2 c yogurt
1/4 c grapeseed oil
1/3 c maple syrup
2 tsp vanilla bean paste
Method
1. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon.
2. Add banana, egg, yogurt, oil, maple syrup, and vanilla. Mix.
3. Pour into a lightly greased 21cm x 10cm loaf tin lined with baking paper.
4. Bake for 1 hour at 160 degrees or until cooked when tested with a skewer.
Obviously, the kids loved this. Even Louisette.
Yum Factor: 0
Health: 2
Easy: 4
Will make again? Nope. Bananas are evil.
*Apologies to the 6 year-old child who lovingly contributed this recipe to her Year 1 class.
Aaaand we’re done!
While in the waiting room today I looked over my last three months of blood sugar readings. It turns out I spoke too soon when I blamed that delicious baklava for my record-breaking blood sugar reading the following morning.
As is utterly obvious to anyone who glances at me in passing, I eat a lot of chocolate. Like, every day. (I’m gonna go analyse that habit sometime soon.)
Despite this, my blood sugar has been remarkably good ever since my stomach operation last year. (Pause for cheering!)
Except these school holidays.
Was it all these not-usually-healthy recipes?
Actually, nope.
I looked back over the past three months of daily blood sugar readings, and guess what?
There were a total of 10 high blood sugar readings.
1 was due to getting up at stupid o’clock to drive to Sydney.
1 was just random.
2 were due to medical appointments. (Often deeply stressful.)
The other 6—that is, 60%—were ALL on the one day a week that I look after the kids for the full day (that is, from 8am until 6pm, while Chris is at work and there’s no day care or grandparents).
So that’s informative. Unfortunately for everyone, I associate the kids with an increase in physical pain and panic, which of course is a self-fulfilling thing.
So school’s about to start again, which is going to help with my sanity a bunch, but I clearly need to think about this some more. For one thing, I’ll make sure Chris takes more time off work next holidays.
Sushi Bowl Recipe
Okay, this one made me nervous. It was invented by one of the kids “inspired by the giant packet of seaweed paper he asked his mum to buy at Costco”.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ingredients
Rice
Smoked salmon
Avocado
Seaweed paper
Soy sauce
Method
1. Cook rice.
2. Put rice in a bowl.
3. Scrunch up the seaweed.
4. Put salmon, avocado, and seaweed in the bowl.
5. Drizzle on soy sauce.
6. Soy sauce.
Obviously, after taking the picture, I shovelled on a whole lot more salmon and avocado and tucked in. It was delicious.
I let the children choose their own toppings, encouraging them to make beautiful designs. Louisette’s is on the left, and TJ’s is on the right.
*long sigh*
Great job kids.
Yum Factor: 4
Health: 4
Easy: 4
Will make again? Maybe. It was pretty great—except for the seaweed 😛
I had my diabetes checkup today. It’s over now, which is good. There was a lot of crying (just from me, but with several different medical professionals because why stop at just one?), and then I went and bought a fast food lunch and $20 worth of lollies.
So, today went pretty much as expected.
Now there’s just one more job to do: wait for the vet to call and tell me my cat has cancer.
What a fabulous day.
It is pretty nice, actually. I’m watching “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (terrible title, brilliant show) and stuffing my face. My major decision of the day is whether to lie down while watching TV, stay sitting while watching TV, lie down and read a book, or take a nap.
Who am I kidding? The only decision is which order to do all of the above.
More More Pancakes
Ingredients
2 eggs
1 and 3/4c milk
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 c self-raising flour
1/3 c caster sugar
Method
- In a bowl, sift self raising flour and mix in the caster sugar.
- In a separate bowl, mix eggs, milk, and vanilla essence.
- Add egg mixture to dry ingredients and mix until there are no lumps (a blender, hand mixer, or shaking bottle is helpful).
- Heat and grease frypan.
- Spoon mixture into frypan and cook until bubbles form and pop.
- Flip and cook other side.
- Enjoy with your favourite toppings.
The kids were thrilled, naturally.
Surprisingly, this recipe had a lot of similar elements to the other one (I guess not that surprisingly, since they’re both pancake recipes).
Tomorrow is technically the last day of school holidays, and the kids will both be at the grandparents all day. So we made it? I guess? We HAVE done all the recipes, and I’ll blog about the last two shortly.
Today I spent two hours with an endometriosis nurse. This is one of the steps along the road towards likely surgery (given how much the last surgery helped, and how much hormone treatments have destroyed my brain, this is good news—and since it’s through the public system, I won’t need to run another GoFundMe campaign).
As I drove to the appointment at the Canberra Hospital, I listened to the radio.
So it turns out that, last night, a man under police guard wrestled a GUN off a POLICE OFFICER and fired at least two shots. In Canberra Hospital. (He’s now being charged with two counts of attempted murder, so. . . yay?)
Well, I didn’t get shot and I didn’t quite start full-on bawling while discussing my mental and physical health, or being earnestly told that diet and exercise is strongly recommended (WHAT!?!?! I’m an enormously fat female with depression so that idea has never once occurred to me or any of the dozens of medical professionals I meet every week or so).
So. . . yay.
Tomorrow I have a “diabetes checkup” which is medical speak for having another, unrelated nurse tell me to diet and exercise. She’ll continue suggesting exercises I can’t do and foods I can’t eat until I start sobbing, then she’ll tell me off for giving her attitude, and then I’ll say, “Thank you very much. I’m going now” and walk out while she’s still talking.
Or at least, that’s what the last one was like.
Oops cookies
I forgot this one: Choc Chip Cookies
Ingredients
125g butter, cubed
3/4c brown sugar
1/4c caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 c self raising flour
1 c plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 c choc chips
Method
1. Melt butter.
2. Add the sugars to the butter and mix well.
3. In a separate bowl whisk an egg, then whisk in the butter and sugar mixture. Add vanilla essence and mix well, until it looks like caramel.
4. Add flour and baking powder. Stir to combine and fold in chocolate chips.
5. Roll into balls and place on a lined tray.
6. Bake at 180 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until lightly golden. Cool on a wire rack.
Okay, so confession time: It was ever so slightly difficult to stir, so I added more melted butter. Don’t blame the recipe. (Also, I was two lazy to use two types of sugar, so I only used brown. So the biscuits are brown.)
In the world’s least startling news, the kids loved every crumb, and so did I.
Yum Factor: 5
Health: lol
Easy: 5
Will make again? Yup. I might even follow the recipe next time.
Three recipes to go people!
Also, Ana (aka the cat aka Fuzzybutt aka SHADDUP) just had a checkup and she now needs Rather Ominous follow-up tests. We’ll most likely find out on Friday if she’s okay or not. (Although usually when medical types say that, it ends up taking much longer.)
Here she is, looking (as usual) annoyed that I’m taking a picture.
Sushi
I went through a sushi phase long ago so I was pretty confident going into this. I was also pretty confident the kids would be determined not to give this beautiful-looking food a chance. So… how did it go?
Ingredients
Rice
Seaweed sheet
Cucumber
Japanese mayonnaise
Soy sauce
[I added a small tin of tuna & sun-dried tomato, which was delicious.]
Method
1. Wash and cook rice.
2. Cut cucumber into matchsticks.
3. Put the seaweed sheet on a large chopping board and spread rice on the seaweed sheet.
4. Put the cucumber over the rice.
5. Squeeze the mayonnaise on the cucumber.
6. Roll it up and cut into pieces.
7. Dip into soy sauce and enjoy!
TJ liked it, but even Louisette’s enthusiastic friend wasn’t enough to win her over.
So much for peer pressure.
You can clearly tell that some slices worked better than others (always!) but I was pretty happy with how most of them looked. (I should admit, you need a good sharp knife for slicing so it’s not generally a good task for kids—but they both loved the rest of the process.)
Yum Factor: 4 (I actually REALLY liked these!)
Health: 5 (low fat, and has 2.5 vegies if you count the words “sun-dried tomato” from the tuna tin. I’m assuming anything as aggressively green as the seaweed must be good for me.)
Easy: 3 (easier than it looks, but also easy to screw up)
Will make again? I think it might be time for another sushi phase! Especially since we have the rest of the pack of seaweed sheets.
I know these are really California rolls, but you get the idea.
I like using almost any small flavoured meat tins for this.
Chicken 65
I’d never heard of Chicken 65 (a popular South Indian dish) but a quick google shows I’ve been missing out.
Ingredients
500 gm chicken
1 tsp lemon juice/plain yogurt
1 tsp corn flour
1 tsp chickpea flour/plain flour
1/2 tsp ginger garlic paste
1 egg
1 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp mixed spice powder
Pinch tumeric
Pinch pepper
Salt to taste
Oil for deep frying
Method
1. Clean and cut chicken into bite size pieces.
2. Add lemon juice/yogurt to chicken and set aside.
3. Mix the rest of the ingredients (except the oil) into a smooth paste.
4. Add the chicken to the paste, mix well until combined, and allow it to rest for half-1 hour.
5. Deep fry in medium flame until golden.
Due to my usual habit of altering various ingredients, the ‘paste’ wasn’t very paste-y in consistency. Chris and I heartily enjoyed our fried chicken all the same.
You can see above that there are two distinct colours of fried chicken, varying due to the heat of the oil. The lighter-coloured chicken was cooked at medium (instead of high) heat, and tasted nicer.
Louisette. . . well. .
Yum Factor: 4
Health: 3 (points for protein; points off for deep frying!)
Easy: 3 (I’ve deep fried a few times in my life, and only set the kitchen on fire once… but this is certainly not something the kids will be cooking solo anytime soon)
Will make again? Probably not. I may not be the poster child for low-fat eating, but I usually steer clear of actually deep frying my food.
Going Bananas
Louisette was deliriously excited about these. I’m mildly intolerant of bananas, especially the smell of bananas.
When I gathered the courage to breach the banana, I realised that the recipe didn’t include proportions. I googled, and adjusted this recipe.
Ingredients
130g butter (melted)
70g caster sugar
1 egg
1 banana, mashed
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla essence
250g self raising flour
160g milk
Another 50g melted butter
60g cinnamon sugar
Method
1. Beat butter and sugar until smooth.
2. Add egg and mix.
3. Mix in baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla, and banana.
4. Sift flour and add flour and milk a little at a time until it’s all combined.
5. Spoon out onto baking tray in round shapes. (I put the mixture into a clear vegie bag, cut off the corner, and used it like a piping bag—it was very easy to use and would have been tidy if I’d used two trays instead of squeezing it all out here.)
6. Bake for 6-8 minutes at 200 degrees. Flip with a fork after 5-6 minutes. Also, lick the bowl.
7. Cool on tray for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a cooling rack.
8. Drizzle melted butter over the top and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
Okay, so…. remember I had a huge pile of syrup leftover from the baklava? I used that instead of milk. So this is what happened:
The back row is flipped and the front row isn’t (yet). I didn’t help my case by being too lazy to use two trays (and therefore making six monster donuts instead of 12 small, neat donuts).
They tasted amazing, though!
I used an apple corer to make the holes in the middle.
Yum Factor: 4.5 (actually, these were REALLY nice. And even crispy on the edges, which I really liked)
Health: 1 (contains a single hard-working banana)
Easy: 4
Will make again? Actually… Yes, I think I will. Strange but true.
Felicity Banks 