Zagadka's Site

Meatballs with tomato sauce. They taste amazing. Half beef mince, half sausage mince. The sauce is a simple one - soften some onions in a pan, pour in some canned tomato soup. Sounds dumb right? Try it... trust me. Bake the meatballs (which also have some shredded cheese in them). Once they are browned, pop them in the sauce for a little bit then serve.

Slowly improving my Osu! game. I borrowed a graphics tablet from a mate to try out - hopefully it will improve my game rather than using a mouse. It is a Wacom Intuos.

That's not your BBQ! Dropped into a mates house for tea, put on some steaks with mushrooms and onion.

Creamy pumpkin soup from scratch. Roasted some seasoned pumpkins slowly until the tips of the pieces were jut browned. Browned some onions in the pot and added some stock, water and the roasted pumpkins. Turned out super good.

Had a bit of a BBQ today. 2Kg of proper butcher's snags. Half are beef. The other half are pork and apple. They were amazing. Miles ahead of anything you get in the big supermarkets.

I bought a pack of 4 10W Kogan RGBW lamps on special. They work out to about $12.50 AUD each, at that price I decided I'd sacrifice one to see  what the controller was and how hackable they were. Turns out they are actually an OEM Tuya globe. Even better news is they use a TYWE3L wifi module which is actually an ESP8266. This means I can flash them with custom firmware.

Ham hock soup from scratch with herb and garlic chibata bread. Turned out spectacularly. Started from scratch with mirepoix (carrots, onions, celery diced) and some stock. Ham came off the bone nicely.

Left over schnitzel and burger buns? I threw this together for brunch. Light toast on the buns (buttered). Spread some caramelized onion and hot english mustard on the bun. Added bacon and baby spinach leaves. So good.

This is my shortcut chicken katsu curry. It uses some pre-made chicken schnitzels, but the curry was from scratch (including the roux). Delicious.

Steak with creamy garlic and onion sauce. This steak came out awesome. Also: this gallery has progress pictures of the process.

More work on the BIAB brew stand burner. Cutouts and reinforcing on the side as well as a bar to hold up the burner.

A special treat. Crumbed cutlets. Served with mashed potatoes and a capsicum / cucumber salad.

The kids planter box gardens are taking off like crazy. Nearly all the beetroot has sprouted.

I've been trying to get a bunch of old games like Powerslide and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 running on Windows 10. I have this old Guillemot / Thrustmaster racing wheel with pedals which is also a pain to make work with modern Windows. Once I did finally get it working, there was an issue where the thrustmapper software was not able to reverse axis as it could previously. So I modified the pedals with a switch that allows me to reverse the gas pedal axis.

Today I fabricated some rails to mount the gas burner on the BIAB (brew in a bag) brewing stand.

I've set up the Juniper SRX210H as a gateway now that the NBN has been provisoined. It should be solid and reliable.

Scored a Nashua Disc Pack today for the collection. This is a 4473 which has 12 x 14" platters and stores a whopping 300MB

I was asked to look at this DVD player. The ribbon going to the optical head in this DVD player was mangled. There is no fixing this, so it's off to eBay to try and find a flat flex ribbon that matches.

Next time you make meatballs, I highly recommend throwing in some tasty cheese. It tastes  fantastic. These meatballs are 50/50 pork/beef.

Fried up some haloumi to have with brunch. This stuff is amazing.