Not the best way to light an image, given that it’s the harsh afternoon sun, and you lose some colour detail with it being too contrasty. Prepared some achar for a party tonight at my cousin’s place.

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It’s been an interesting two weeks, where we’ve been cooking lots of new things. Finally dug out the pasta machine my cousin and her husband bought for us for our housewarming gift nearly 9 months ago. We’ve been putting off making pasta and one day I was talking to a friend and he has been making fresh pasta over the last few days. I decided to just give it a go as I’ve seen many videos of it before, but just never got round to actually producing anything.

It was trial and error, pouring flour onto the bench top, making a well, pouring egg in, spilling the egg out of the well and trying hard to just mould everything back together. With pasta, you really need to spend time kneading it to get the gluten working, otherwise you’d have trouble trying to roll it out.

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Besides pasta, we have also tried making ban mien with the pasta machine. With all the leftover pork bones from my roast pig party, it was easy to prepare a soup base. Added anchovies, fried up some pork mince with dried black fungus, boiled some vegetables and a few poached eggs later, we had a meal for dinner.

I’ve been boiling sweet potatoes with ginger and pandan leaves for dessert as a sweet soup. I’ve also made some siew yuk, where I bought a slab of pork belly not too long ago. Vyanne used part of it for a dish for dinner and since it was defrosted, I decided to just give it a go. It was a frankenstein mix of recipes that i scoured through the Internet as I blanched the meat, marinated it, left it to dry overnight before roasting it in the oven. Strangely enough, it came out quite successful, with the most important crackling being crispy. Flavour wise, it was pretty similar to what you get outside, and I really need a proper cleaver to cut through bones when serving it up.

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Heh, I’ve come a long way with cooking. I still make some rudimentary mistakes at times, but these days my brain is slightly more involved in the cooking process, so even if you make some mistakes, it’s easy to fix it before finalising the dish and having it taste awful.

It’s like all the other things I’ve started trying out of late, like gardening, where you don’t have to know everything before you start, but you do learn quite a bit as you go along, and it gives you more confidence to tackle the more difficult situations later.

It’s an annual ritual, doing the 14km Run For the Kids track. Didn’t have much time to practice for the last couple of weeks but still managed to get through the whole run intact. Had more friends and relatives do the run this time around, so it was a little more fun.

I think my time was around 1 hour 38 minutes. Not that great considering I’ve run faster, but there were places where you do get stuck on occasion as you try to get pass the hordes of people. I kept my pace this time around, never ever going too fast. My knee was giving me trouble within the first 2km of the run in the underground tunnel. I pretty much prayed to God to relieve my pain and after a while, the pain subsided and I continued on my run. Had less trouble with the hills this time around and didn’t spend too much time walking. Having an iPhone helps with keeping you on track as one of the apps tells you the time that has elapsed in increments of 5 minutes. I knew how i was progressing so I didn’t try to run myself to the ground.

Was a little hungry by the 10th kilometer, and I only had a waffle this morning and a shot of espresso. The customary banana wasn’t purchased due to the recent natural disasters in Brisbane, hiking banana prices by 600%. The weather got pretty warm halfway through the run, but I somehow managed to maintain the pace.

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Not quite sure how I’d train for a 42km marathon. I like running but even doing the same activity for more than an hour can get quite boring, not to mention strenuous! Heh, it is still an aim for the future, so I really have to figure that out. A decade ago if you had asked me to run 15km, I’d have called you crazy.

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I brought the GF1 out this time, as I skipped bringing a camera out last year. Had the Canon IXUS in 2009 and there were some good photos from that run. Having the larger sensor of the GF1 gave me some pretty good pictures with shallow depth of field, however I noticed that it’s not as quick to respond as my D300 (heh, not many cameras are) and when it goes to sleep, one button press wakes it up, and another button press focuses it. Got a few out of focus shots and I realised this halfway through the run, as you need to give it time to wake up from sleep, before you half press to focus.

Still grabbed some interesting photos, especially those hip shots (not exactly from the hip, but I just tried my luck aiming in general direction and sometimes the framing was spot on). Here are some photos from the run.