Good Eats

One thing I have learnt since starting my studies & living abroad is how to cook with the least washing & cleaning up and with cheapest ingredients possible but still healthy(ish...). I try to reduce my processed food - the 'bad' ones, at least - intake and one way that helps with that is by cooking my meals from scratch.
I learnt how to pick ingredients and dishes that can be mixed and match with other ingredient/dishes - roast chicken that can be eaten with rice and turned into a sandwich, stews & curries that you can have with rice, noodles, bread, roti canai, frozen peas that can be added to instant noodles, fried rice or made into soup etc..
Yesterday I found a recipe from the internet that was quite easy and relatively cheap, too. I  have diced lamb neck in the freezer; halal lamb is cheaper and easier to find here as compared to beef. I have a can of plum tomatoes (also cheap here - 38p!) and most of the other ingredients are the usual cupboard stock. I guess the recipe is a Northern Indian one - it is called Adhraki Gosht. A friend's aunt taught me to cook a similar dish using chicken and it tasted nice, so I thought this should not be bad, either.
I didn't follow the recipe strictly; to be honest at first I thought of making Lamb Kurma. I have been eating quite a lot so I thought I could do without the extra calories from the coconut milk in the kurma. I had about 300-400g of diced lamb neck (with bone). So I chopped 2 small onions and 2 cloves of garlic and about an inch of ginger and fry them in a bit of oil. I added a cardamom, a bit of cloves and a small cinnamon stick (still thinking of making kurma at this point). And then I changed my mind and decided to try the adhraki gosht recipe instead. I did it differently; I added the garam masala and let the fried things go brown and fragrant before adding the lamb. The lamb was browned for a bit before I added a can of plum tomatoes (I guess u can use canned chopped tomatoes or even fresh tomatoes) and a bit of tomato puree. I didn't have any proper chilli powder so I substituted that with pimiento powder left by a Spanish former flatmate. Added a chopped carrot (because it has started to go bad in the fridge), about a cup of water, let the pan go to boil, lowered the heat, and left it for the lamb to become tender.
I like the tomato sauce as it doesn't make the lamb taste too oily. Had it for the first time with roti canai. There's enough leftovers to last me two meals :).

1976 was a great year...

...because I was born in that year :D.

It was a great year for audiology, too. Southampton Uni presented electrocochleography, multifrequency tympanometry was studied, and so was hearing aid fitting by prescription. There were even two papers discussing hearing loss caused by diving and flight. And all of these in just one journal! It must have been a very exciting year.

Now, if only I can access the fulltexts....

How old are you?

Tak perlu kusut kira umur dengan calculator lagi! :D

How to calculate age in Excel (provided you have the birth date, of course)

This is probably trivial to some, but i just looooove this function at the moment. Thanks google!

3rd Annual Review coming soon

...and I am still struggling with ranges. Seven months being away from doing any writing slows my (academic?) brain. Words don't flow easy. Mind easily distracted (hence this post). Being in a new place does not help, either. I want this to end so bad.

Anyway, back to ranges. Does 2 SD as 95% range apply in my case?