super generic girl

the awesomely average life of a girl like all others

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Bread

Here it is – my first fully successful loaf of high fibre bread. I used a friend’s recipe that I had tried before (but a slight problem with the water temperature made my first attempt look and taste a bit more like a cake). This time, I got it right. The crust was crispy and the crumb was nice and soft.

I don’t have a bread maker nor a mixer capable of kneading the dough so the whole process was a real workout. It’s incredibly simple to make and only requires flour, water, olive oil, yeast, sugar and salt (pretty much all stuff that you probably have in your kitchen at any given time). The only thing that puts me off is the 15 minute workout. On the bright side, I’m going to get arms of steel if I make this more often!

It was still hot when we had the first few pieces with butter for afternoon tea.

The boy gave it its stamp of approval and had several pieces, included some toasted ones. Shame that he had to ruin the bread by spreading marmite all over it. Yuck.


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setting up a running playlist

I can’t run by myself without music. It takes my mind away from the whole running process and the right songs help me find my pace and run more comfortably.

When I started running and realised this, I had a bit of trouble finding the right songs to run to. In fact, my running playlist is still (and probably will always be) a working in progress. I realised then that most of the songs in my itunes library were way too slow to set a comfortable running pace and so I spent some time looking for some new stuff to listen to.

I tried running podcasts (there is quite a selection out there) but I just can’t relate to any of those techno beats they usually play in those. I tried audiobooks, thinking that maybe I’d be able to distract myself from the run to the point of focusing only on the audiobook and running longer as a consequence. It didn’t happen. I tried other podcasts but then found myself running on the street and getting weird looks from people as I ran along laughing out loud because of Karl Pilkington‘s theories. Laughing out loud when you’re out by yourself is not only embarrassing but, if you’re running, also screws up your breathing. Lesson learnt.

In the end, I gave in and, one day, spent a good couple of hours googling half-marathon playlists and any recommendations for good songs to run to. There is a lot of stuff out there and I learnt a couple of things in the process:

  1. the songs that help you run aren’t necessarily songs you would describe as being your usually style of music but they still help you clear your head and run at a comfortable pace so you just embrace that.
  2. there is a surprisingly high number of runners out there running to the beat of Celine Dion songs. I’m not sure I understand this.

Anyway, I thought I’d add some of my current running songs to the already large number of such lists on the internet. Because I can.

  • florence + the machine – dog days are over
  • florence  + the machine – kiss with a fist
  • regina spektor – fidelity
  • postal service – such great heights
  • the killers – mr brightside
  • amy winehouse – valerie
  • anika moa – running through the fire
  • gin wigmore – oh my
  • iron maiden – run to the hills
  • arctic monkeys – when the sun goes down
  • cee lo green – forget you
  • mgmt – kids
  • anything by franz ferdinand
  • most songs by vampire weekend
Got any suggestions of good songs to run to? Let me know!


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a half-arsed commitment

One of the 1,458 reasons why running is awesome is the way it makes me want to improve other aspects of my life. Like what/how I eat, for example.

When S. and I started this running malarkey, the idea was that, well, if we were going to get together for a curry anyway, we met as well run first and then gobble down the curry. Our sense of entitlement lasted a few months, admittedly. We often felt like we had the right to reward ourselves with the tastiest thing we could think of, just because we had made the effort to go out and run.

That has, however, begun to change. Rather than having my brain tell me that I ran, therefore I deserve a curry, I now try to follow the logic that, if I ran, I shouldn’t ruin the effort with something unhealthy.

(You’d think I would have gotten to this stage a bit quicker, wouldn’t you? I’m not that smart.)

S. got there a few months ago but the change for me has been a bit slower. The minute I finished the half-marathon in August (yep, I’m mentioning it again), I got in the car and devoured a bag of jelly beans, which was followed by a large combo from Burger King (a triple whopper, chips and full-fat coke, of course, because, you guys!, I’d just finished a half-marathon!). I then had peach crumble and ice cream which I followed with more peach crumble and ice cream, after a nap. So yeah, a fountain of health.

Going back to training after that, however, has put my mind in a different place. My fitness level right now is not as good as it was back in August and I know I have to do more than just cross my fingers and hope it’ll all improve soon so I get back to how I was. I have another half-marathon to run in 6 weeks and curries aren’t going to get me across the finish line.

So I’m sort of maybe kind of going to try to give this no-sugar thing a go. Mostly. With the exception of the Wednesday cinnamon roll (a tradition is a tradition) and the odd mistake here and there (not my fault that Whittakers has just launched a Berries and Biscuit chocolate bar!). Brace yourselves for some angry blog posts but, hopefully, writing this here will mean I will hold myself accountable for this decision.


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a random photo and five random facts

here's a photo that has nothing to do with the rest of the post.

 

Since I took up the challenge of blogging every day in October (as training for writing every day for NaNoWriMo next month), this is the first day when there was actually a chance it wasn’t going to happen. Mainly because of how busy/tired I am. I’m lacking time but I’m mostly lacking inspiration – two things I’m going to have to deal with a lot during NaNoWriMo.

Anyway, for lack of something else to talk about but to avoid ruining the challenge on my first week into it, here’s a post about nothing in particular and a few things in general.

  • Today, at work, I had to write about Steve Jobs’ death. I didn’t think I would care much about this sort of news but, a bunch of photo slideshows, videos and written biographies later, it’s a real shame for the world that he’s left because, at only 56, I’m sure he could still create a lot more innovative things.
  • Yesterday, I went for a 6km run by myself. It sucked. And not (just) because I was by myself but also because I was wearing old Nike shoes (since my proper running shoes were still drying) and the stupid old things gave me a giant blister 3km in. Running the rest of the way back home was really not my idea of a good time.
  • My running buddy and I met up to do something other than run, something that has been quite rare lately. This time, I was her +1 at the opening night of the “show me shorts” film festival. It was at Capitol Cinema on Dominion Road, in Auckland, and it was my first time there. Such a pretty place!
  • Also, in today’s chapter of “where have you been all my life?”: dried cranberries. How did it take me 27 years to try them? What other amazing stuff have I been missing out on?
  • Oh, I found out that The Inbetweeners Movie is going to be released in NZ at the end of the month and that made me happy.
See you tomorrow!


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crouch, touch, pause, engage!

Thanks to the Rugby World Cup, I’ve opened another chapter of my kiwi education, one that, up until now, I was more than happy to keep closed: rugby. It was pretty much unavoidable.

I was visiting Portugal when the RWC started and so missed all the excitement of the first few days but felt strangely connected to it. When I woke up in Lisbon, just as the opening ceremony was ending in New Zealand, I rushed online to check out all the videos of that NZ evening (PT morning). I saw the fireworks display and the Maori chants and 45,503 haka flashmobs and that even got me missing NZ a little bit.

So when I returned, about three weeks ago, I got straight into the action and watched rugby games to stay awake and get through jet lag. And, little by little, I  started understanding the game. Sort of.

Last weekend, I got a triple dose of rugby and added another level of confusion to the whole thing by watching a rugby league game (the NRL final) in between two rugby union games (RWC ones). See, I didn’t even know there was more than what type of rugby up until fairly recently. That was my second time watching a rugby league game, after attempting to follow one with C.’s dad a few months ago and have him count how many questions I asked about it (lets just say there were quite a few).

We’re down to the quarter finals of the RWC now and, if part of me wants it all to go back to normal (no “lets not go into town today because there’s a game on and it’ll be chaotic”), another part of me is wearing a metaphoric all blacks jersey and all excited about the upcoming matches.

I even know how much you score for a try, a conversion or a penalty. I know what a scrum is and I shout “forward pass! that was a forward pass!” before the ref even has time to blow the whistle. As much as I wish New Zealand would embrace soccer, I’ll go ahead and admit that being in a rugby nation isn’t *too* bad, now that I know what the heck they’re throwing themselves on top of each other for.


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a photo tour of new plymouth, new zealand

New Plymouth is definitely my favourite town in the North Island. Mt Taranaki dominates the landscape no matter where you are in town and it is always a beautiful sight. Because of its similarity to Mt Fuji, Mt Taranaki (also called Mt Egmont) is where the film Last Samurai was shot.

It feels like a sleepy little town, far away from the noise of the big cities, but there is actually quite a lot of action going on in New Plymouth, pretty much all year round.

It is well worth a day stop on a tour of the North Island. Or maybe even a couple of days if you really want to make the most out of all the sights – I could spend a good few hours just inside Pukekura Park, for example.

While you’re in the Taranaki region, a visit to the Three Sisters is mandatory.

and if you stop there at the end of the afternoon, you might very well be rewarded with this:

If you are planning a New Zealand road trip, or even just a road trip around the North Island, this town should definitely be one of the pit stops.


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vanilla cupcakes with passionfruit icing

It really must be true what people say about how running leaves you full of energy because, following the run of death, I ended up having a fairly productive weekend.

On sunday morning, I was out of bed by 9am and, since my legs were too sore to go for a run in the morning, I stayed home and got a bunch of stuff done. And then I made cupcakes. These only took me like 10 minutes to make, plus the 15min to bake and the time to let the cupcakes cool down before icing them (if you look at my icing job up there, you can tell I didn’t wait long enough for them to cool down). Anyway, I’m a big fan of anything delicious that only requires about 10 minutes of work so I thought I’d share the recipe here.

For the vanilla cupcakes: mix 125g of melted butter with 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence and half a cup of sugar. add two eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. fold 1 cup of self-raising flour into the mixture and then add 1/4 litre of milk and mix well. bake for 15min at 180 degrees celsius.

For the passionfruit icing, I just used 5 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar (which turned out to be enough to ice 12 cupcakes) and some delmaine’s passionfruit dessert topping that I had already bought for another dessert (that I’ve since forgotten to make). I’m not entirely sure how much passionfruit topping I used but it was quite a bit, maybe one third of the bottle. It was quite passionfruity (what a terrible made-up adjective for a journalist to use, I know) so I think next time I’ll add some butter to it.

Enjoy!


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distance means nothing

Before we started, when our shoes were still nice and clean

Judging by the title of this post alone, you could assume this is going to be about how much my friends and family in Portugal and other parts of the world rock (hello, all!). Could be but no, it’s yet another post about running.

In case mentioning it every chance I can isn’t mentioning it often enough, I ran my first ever half-marathon in August and was damn proud of myself for it. Up until then, and after entering a few runs, the half-marathon had been the hardest run I’d ever had.

That was until I signed up for my first trail run, thinking it would be, you know, sort of like on road running. Yeah, there’s a lot into that “sort of”. It is *nothing* like running on the road.

S. and I had initially signed up for the long 15km course but, after taking a long break from proper training, we thought we’d be better off emailing the organisers and enter in the 9km category instead. Best. Decision. Ever.

Yesterday morning, we got to the place where the run was taking place and our first reaction, as soon as we arrived, was “oh shit, look at those hills!”. The scenery was amazing but there was no enjoying the views on that racing course. Running on steep terrain is tiring enough in itself but running through paddocks, forest and 4wd tracks is even more exhausting, not just because of the extra physical effort required but also because we have to pay attention to each step we take, to avoid putting our foot down wrong. I rolled my right ankle three times and my left ankle once. Fun, right? Luckily, it was never serious enough to make me give up halfway. What was making me want to give up halfway was seeing the steep hills in front of us, climbing up for what seemed like a million years and reaching the top only to find the track turned and kept on going up.

We both wanted to give up a few times during it. It was cold, our legs were giving up on us, our feet hurt from so many little mistakes… but we were both glad to cross the finish line and celebrate with the fattiest greasiest food we could find (not pictured: the chocolate brownie I devoured after the sausage).

post-run sausage on bread and hash brown

That said, there were a couple of good moments. Like the “Baywatch – farming edition” moment when the glorious S. took off her running shoes and jumped into a creek to save a scared lamb that had fallen in it and was desperately trying to climb up. She had to run the rest of the course with cold and wet feet but it wasn’t too bad because she was soon going to have her shoes filled with mud anyway.

S. saves a life while running because that's just how cool she is

Some people are really passionate about trail running but I really can’t see myself getting into it. If the hard terrain wasn’t bad enough, the kilos of mud I brought home in my shoes (and socks!) would be enough to put me off. But it was a good experiencing, in retrospect. The whole way, I kept thinking about how hard the whole thing and how much easier the 21.1km of the half-marathon had been, even with the wind and hail, compared to these 9km. Distance really is just one of many factors when you go out for a run. And it’s not even the most important one.

Post-run shoes and some manure, for good measure

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have half a forest to go scrape off my shoes.


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Pre-challenge challenge

 

WordPress reckons that I should write a post every day in October. It’s a sort of pre-challenge challenge, in anticipation of NaNoWriMo, which starts on 1 November and which I decided to do again this year, because I’m clearly a big freaking idiot. I’ve got a lot coming up in November, such as, oh I don’t know, another half marathon for which I haven’t even started training (crap!), the whole full time job thing which, as the description suggests, takes up quite a bit of time, concerts (portishead coming to auckland – yes!) and other activities that I stupidly signed up for while at the same time deciding to try to write 1,667 words a day during the 30 days of November.

I’m not taking this whole one post a day in October thing very seriously but I also don’t think it’s a terrible idea, to get me into the right mood for the November madness (hello, big fat giant bags under my eyes!). So yes, I hear ya WordPress, I’ll give this one post a day thing a go, if it helps getting my ass into gear for November.

I’ll probably cheat though, just so you know. Just a bit. You know, here and there. If I struggle to come up with something to write about because life has been sort of uneventful, I might just make it a “photo a day challenge” for that day. Or I might just slap you with a random You Tube link. Or even pre-schedule posts if I don’t think I’ll be able to blog on a particular day.

Or, if I wanted to be a real cheater, I could write a post about writing a post a day for a month and have it count towards that final goal.

1 October = done!


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postcards from ericeira

Heading to Ericeira for a seafood lunch has always kind of been a favourite activity for my parents and something we tend to do pretty much every year, without even planning or thinking about it. Even when I visited Portugal in Christmas in previous years and the weather outside was cold and uninviting, we always made the yearly pilgrimage and sat at the same waterfront restaurant.

This year, I finally got to return there on a summer day (and what a glorious summer day it was!). With me still uber jet lagged, only a couple of days after getting off the plane (well, planes) from the opposite side of the world, we sat at the usual restaurant and then spent the afternoon wandering around the streets and admiring the surfers out in the water.

There isn’t one particular reason as to why we end up going to this place and not somewhere else but rather a mix of little things that add to Ericeira’s coolness factor. It’s a relatively short drive from Lisbon, it gives us the chance to stop in Sobreiro (Mafra) for some amazing pão com chouriço (which we didn’t this time, since we’d just gotten churros and farturas!) and it is one of those nice little fishing villages that has everything going for it: it’s got that small town character, the amazing sea views and amazing food.

And here’s some bonus trivia, which I’ve just learnt, courtesy of the always trustworthy wikipedia: “In 2011 Ericeira was chosen by the WSR to one of the four World Surfing Reserves together with Malibu and Santa Cruz in California and Manly Beach in Australia”.