Cake blisters

Spent a few days in London doing very little work indeed. But 'twas fun, I re-read two Pratchett books in four days -- a sorely needed break from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I am wading through oh so slowly, I really can't deal with more than four continuous pages about Hell and Stephen's rather annoying internal battles with his sin, his heinous sin, blahblahblah. And also spent over five continuous hours doing absolutely nothing but cooking.

I haven't the photos but we made my second sister a going away feast as she is moving to the Big Apple. It consisted of all the most labour intensive recipes we could find, by accident rather than any sort of masochistic urge. We made:
1. Lamb and turnip stew (an Indian one). This spent about 3 hours on the stove. :)
2. Okra stuffed with spiced finely chopped onions. These did turn out nice, but I'm really not convinced they're worth the effort. I spent literally hours sitting there stuffing these damn things and started having all sorts of thoughts about stuffing, viz. is somebody employed to stuff fishball mixture into all those stuffed okras and chillis we get for yong tau foo, and are there machines that stuff those rambutans you get with cubes of pineapple in them? (When I was very very little I once asked an unsuspecting family how they got rambutans to grow with pineapple cubes in them... what, it was a valid question okay.)
3. Lentils and spinach. A scant hour to make!
4. Kulfi (Indian ice cream). Made from first principles, meaning hours of the milk reducing on the stove. Seriously yummy stuff, and quite healthy -- no cream in Indian ice cream! With almonds and pistachios. And some melon balls. I didn't know there were such devices as 'melon ballers', but you learn something new everyday.
4. Choc'lit cake! Yummy, yummy choc'lit cake with only about 12 oz sugar and quarter of a kilo of butter and 200 g chocolate and we're only talking cake here, nevermind the chocolate butter ganache and the mounds of icing that went piled on top of it. I got shortlived cake blisters on my right hand from all the attempts to get a whole bowl of coarse sugar and butter 'light and fluffy', but it was all worth it! We put white royal icing around it and piped on little green dots and a good luck clover (which was hilariously wonky). It turned out to be huge, and my other sister is also off on holiday, so I had to bring the remains back to Cambridge. I have been feeding chunks of it to friends to prevent myself from eating it all.

I think I think about food too much. ;)

Oh yes, I've decided to stay on in Cambridge. This news is a little stale now but I think I did tell all the most important people immediately so I didn't bother to write about it. This dear little town has grown on me, but most importantly, I wanted to stay so that I could work on my beloved fish back home in Malaysia (my supervisor did his own PhD on the same system and has a lot of contacts). It's something I know I would love to do, and I thought why take a gamble on the unknown when I can have what I want now. Maybe it's playing it safe, but I'm happy with my decision ultimately -- there is a lot of personal peace in it.

Meanwhile it's back to the work. I am now trying to write an essay plan about why females often copulate with more than one male. Doing behavioural ecology does funny things to your view of the world. Did you know that in reed buntings which appear on the surface to be monogamous, 86% of a male's reproductive success comes from extra marital affairs? And that in dunnocks (a little brown bird), females do this wonderful balancing act where they shag two males just enough so that both males help to look after their chicks, but they make sure to shag the alpha male more so that the chicks are of better genetic quality -- the beta male often ends up helping to raise offspring which just aren't his. Ah, the joy of internal fertilization... (beats spewing eggs into the sea any day, surely). Ahem.