Cheap Dessert and a general update

Hey.

Uni season has begun again, and things move from one end of the fun spectrum to the other as this week has gone by. But of most of the things that have happened this week, I think I would start with Saturday's activities.

On Sunday I travelled back to the big smoke. So, with Saturday being my last full day to go and do fun things, the Old Guard from my home church headed out to a waterhole that us and a handful of other people in the local area know about. It's a spot you need a four-wheel-drive car to get to, and judging by the small jungle that we had to push through to get to the parking area, it would seem that the last time the track was used was when we last went down there.

It's also been raining quite a bit since the start of the holidays, so our trek down was something of a giant mad-toboggan ride. We got out okay, but there was a lot of mud stuck to the back of the car at the end of it.

I have a couple photos from this outing. I've gone with the group twice before and both times forgot to grab clothes for swimming in. Which was an error. This time that fact got fixed, so I was spending more time in the water than taking photos of everyone jumping around and chasing a butterfly.

So, Documentational footage.

Podiatry-based puns aside, I think also half the reason why the photos were less this time was because I spent more time being dunked in freezing cold water and generally having fun; looking at the tiny details in the moss and rotting wood chilling up on the top of the waterfall with us, poking weird stuff, and laughing when the lads fed one of the tiny ponds of tadpoles sunkist.

It's the little things in life.

The little, glorious things. I really like this waterhole, freezingness aside.



The other, slightly important (well, it's important now) thing that happened when we were out there was that I fell over. It sounds short and concise and that's really what it is. Some of those bits of rock were really slippery. I walked on one of those slippery bits without traction control engaged and the hardest rock in the world hi-fived my body.



I was a bit busy trying not to let it hi-five my head on the way down, so I didn't have any idea on what happened to my big toe. Still don't have any idea at the moment, but I've got roughly the same stride length as my grandfather, and he only has one knee.

At the moment? Visited the doctor yesterday. She thinks it might be fractured. My toe, that is. Not Grandpa's knee. I have to go somewhere and let them do science to my foot to find out. I'll show you the results when I get back from it. Anyway, it hurts, and I tend to whinge a lot when I bust something. So there you are. My whinging. Moving on.

We spent the rest of the arvo chilling out, watching Zombieland, until finally darkness fell and the last bits of the plan were put into place. Steel Wool, it turns out, you can set on fire if you rub it with a battery. By putting together a simple rig, we made sparks and took photos of them.

Also, I'll probably include details for that in a pyro-related post. I've still got to tell you all about fireball. It will be fun, and also disclaimer-riddled. Comes with the job description.

Does it? hrm.


Okay. Fast-forward to at the moment. Uni is about to start, there is food in the fridge and I'm going to try and write a doujinshi this year. (A doujinshi is a fanfiction in manga format. Last time I checked.)
It's as much an exercise in drawing as it is in storytelling. And as a writer, I'm so hyper-aware of Mary Sue that staying away from them is something that happens all the time. I hope.

(Although, I did plan to write a send-up for the concept a while back. One day...)


So, the present. It's a bit scary, but I'm not too worried. Everything happens according to Someone Else's plan, and that Someone Else has my best interests at heart. Yours too.


What else should I yammer on about for ages?

Oh yeah. The other part of the title.

I've got a few more friends from home moving down to Newie this year. They're already here, and I've caught glimpses of one or two about campus.


That said, I kind-of decided to start posting recipes to cheaply-made, good unifood. So, the first one is:


Caramelised Apples.
(Stuff you, American Spellcheck! I'm going to spell it with an 'S' whether you like it or not!)

This is possibly the simplest dessert I've ever made, aside from Jelly. It got rolled into the food-book when part of the Old Guard went to Queensland to visit more of the Old Guard mid last year. You need.

~1 Apple per person. (Juicy is best, but whatever is in season is pretty good)
Sugar
Water
Something to fry in/with. A saucepan will do the trick, but a frying pan has more surface area. Bec and I don't have a cooktop, so we'd use a skillet instead.
Ice-cream. Uni Students tend to prefer Homebrand for some reason.

So. Slice the apples into six-eight pieces. Take the seeds and funk in the middle out.
Heat up the pan to a low-medium temperature.
Throw le apples in. Throw le sugar on top. Don't actually le throw literally otherwise you'll have a buttload of stuff to clean up later.
Add a little bit of water too.

Thing is, when you heat up the apples, the juice begins to heat up. Caramelises them, with the help of the sugar. So, if everything goes alright, the apples turn a slightly-mushy golden brown, and sit in their own juices and the melted sugar and water. Reduce the liquid in the pan.

Apply Ice-cream to bowls, then apply apples and caramelly goodness to the ice-cream. Get as much of the juice out of the pan as possible before it cools.

Side-effects:
Makes Kitchen smell like apple-themed awesome.
Melted Sugar requires really hot water to clean up once it hardens. So try and wash out the pan before it cools.

Also, sugar can be easy to burn if you use a temperature too hot. The water acts as a buffer, so it's a little bit harder to mess up, but if you begin to smell burning, get that food off the heat immediately. Hot sugar redefines what you understand as 'hot'. But it's good. Be liberal with your sugar application.

Cost:

I put this together for my Bible study group last year. It fed twelve people and cost me about eight bucks.

It's really rich and sugar laden. I was astonished when Babs went back for seconds.

Gone Aerial.

It seems that none of my ideas with which to begin blogging are sticking. I was so excited to give it a shot, not having attempted a blog since the livejournal years. But everyone knows that when you're fifteen and you have a livejournal, all one can expect from the individual is possibly whinging and whining. Maybe some lyrics or a poem or two about angst and depression.

Don't get me wrong. Because I did all that. It felt nice to have something to rant on. And there are some pretty funny entries in it.

But I need a fresh start.

Hey everyone. My name is Brooke and I know the likelihood of picking up readers straight away is, um, not much. But I'm keen to give it a burl.

Now, I just need to know how to progress from the angsty writings of the nether years to something that people want to read. How do I do that?

Um. Um. Um. Okay.

As a kid, I used to play outdoors sports a lot more. One of my favourites was soccer.
Back in the days when it was called soccer, all the kids from my Sunday School would congregate in the grassed yard after church. There was usually a soccer ball nearby, and all the tact of under 10's soccer, en masse. That is, there would be roughly thirty kids ranging in ages from about seven to twelve, all running after the soccer ball. Forget positioning - the only guy that held his post was the goalie, standing between the goals marked by shoes of a willing donor. There was no half-time, start or finish. Or distinguished teams for that matter. I'd run up to someone and say "who needs more teammates?"

As with all these things, they usually seem more glamorous than they really were. But churchyard soccer was awesome. There was just one factor that played into my eventual denial of the sport.

Any game you played as a child, usually involved projectiles, because that was the only way it could be fun. This had the occasional casualty - a ball to the arm, butt, leg, gut, head.
I was that kid.

Sure, soccer can be awesome, but there was always an element of fear in it, as though any minute I would receive a ball to the eye, usually from an unperceived angle.

This is where my blog name comes from, since the stage when the ball was the most dangerous was when it had 'Gone Aerial'. For those brief seconds, I would cower, certain that I would receive the brunt force of the soccer ball, and along with it the mob that follows unstructured soccer.

I don't play soccer nowadays, but my fear of airborne projectiles of any size remains pretty steadfast.

So yeah.

How do you write a blog, anyway?