My real name

I hesitate to call this a system since most of it is in my head and I don’t have any spreadsheets or even folders of recipe bookmarks and I’m pretty sure that’s essential to calling yourself a meal planner. There’s about 20 recipes that we iterate over as the core of our diet. We try new things when the spirit is on us and if it’s a winner I add it to my list. I keep a list in a Field Notes notebook and copy it out clean again into a new notebook every now and then. It’s not a definitive list but it helps jog my memory on what sort of things to cook.

I said it wasn’t much of a system.

I start by picking six meals to make from our regular rotation. I try to include a couple vegetarian or meat light and at least two that make good leftovers for my lunches. I don’t cook from recipes for our favourites because they’re muscle memory now but for the sake of showing my thought process here’s this week:

Spaghetti: (+1 serving of leftovers)

2 sausages, casing removed

1 can tomato chunks

1 large zucchini

Ceres Quinoa Spaghetti

Olive oil

Salt/pepper/parmesan

Fried Rice: (+ 2 servings of leftovers)

3 rice-cooker cups of rice

4 rashers bacon, cooked and chopped

½ cup or so of frozen shrimp

generous handful green beans

one large capsicum

one large carrot

¼ cup frozen corn

soy sauce, crushed chilli, lemon juice

sickening amounts of sweet chilli sauce to server

Fancy Beans on Toast:

One can English recipe beans

One small / half large zucchini

½ capsicum

4 slices gluten-free toast

grated cheese

fresh tomato (garnish)

chives (garnish)

cumin, turmeric, paprika, mild chilli powder

Kebabs:

$7 packet of lamb pieces

2 large Gerry’s go-no-gluten wraps

Handful of parsley

Two large handfuls salad greens

Half a tomato, diced

Half a capsicum, sliced

Diced cucumber

2 tablespoons tahini

¼ cup plain yoghurt

2 tablespoons garlic oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice

chives

cumin, turmeric, mild chilli powder, paprika

Veggie Tacos:

4 corn tortilla – taco sized

1 large capsicum

1 large zucchini

¼ cup frozen corn

1/3 box of tofu

cumin, turmeric, paprika

hot sauce

grated cheese

Salmon & Salad:

Two fillets beautiful Salmon

Potato wedges

Salad greens

Tomato

Cucumber

Capsicum slices

Once I have my meals, I write my list. Many of the things we like to make share ingredients so I just put a star or a plus next to something I’ve already written down if I need more than one. I usually do this off the top of my head by writing the meals at the top of the page then listing what goes in them underneath. If I know we already have something I don’t write it down on the list. We already have rice and a huge block of cheese, for example, so we don’t need to buy any.

 Then there’s things we always need – milk, bread, chocolate, tea, toothpaste, toilet paper, etc. It usually only takes me 15 minutes with a pen and a notebook to quickly jot down the shopping list. If in doubt, I just add it to the list. An extra packet of spaghetti or tin of tomatoes won’t blow the budget and they’ll get used eventually. This does rely on me having a fairly good memory for what is in the fridge/pantry. If you don’t, you might need to put more structure around this.

The meals above might not be to your taste. We eat gluten-free, relatively low meat, and I limit some FODMAPs because they make my tummy unhappy. I’m lucky my husband has a small appetite and doesn’t insist on a lot of protein – he’s happy to throw back veggie tacos then go to the gym. I take leftovers for lunch and have fruit provided at work so on the days I don’t have leftovers I can instead bring something like tomato and cheese to have on crackers and top up with fruit.

 Places we shop.

 Because I am what my client calls a ‘fussy person’ with dietary requirements there’s some places I find better and some I find worse to shop at. My favourite places:

Farro

 Farro is excellent for the quality of it’s fresh produce, meats and cheeses. The produce in particularly is higher quality and cheaper than the supermarket. It also has some specialty gluten-free products, like really nice gluten-free gnocchi. Beware though, anything in a packet is likely to be horrendously expensive. We have managed a weekly shop for the two of us under $100 before and had enough food for the whole week.

 Countdown Quay Street

 This is my favourite general supermarket in Auckland. It’s enormous so it has basically everything and they have a good track record for always having gluten-free brands on the shelf. They’re reasonably priced for most things although more expensive than Farro on the produce.

Victoria Park New World ($$$)

 I heard somewhere this was the most expensive supermarket in New Zealand and I believe it. Really nice quality food and shelves and shelves of packaged gluten-free products but I find it hard to get out of here for under $150.

Common Sense Organics Dominion Road ($$$)

 We have one now! It’s not quite as big as the Wellington one but it’s good for those specialty products that can otherwise be hard to find.

So there you have it. It’s not so much a system as ‘plan what you are going to eat and only buy those things’ but hey. It works for us.

Recipe stolen and modified from taste.com.au. I used Edmond’s plain gluten-free flour for this recipe and substituted honey for the golden syrup as I had none on hand. I also reduced the cooking time as I know my oven runs quite hot.

They came out chewy and delicious and the whole house smells of honey and butter. Yum.

Ingredients

• 125gm butter cubed at room temperature
  
• ½ cup caster sugar
  
• 1 tablespoon honey
  
• 1 tablespoon milk
  
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  
• 1 ½ cup gluten-free plain flour 
  
• Brown sugar to sprinkle

Method

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees celsius.

Cream together the butter and caster sugar using a hand mixer until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Mix together the tablespoon of honey and the tablespoon of milk in a mug and microwave for thirty seconds to heat the mixture. Add the teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda to the milk and honey mixture and stir through. The mixture will thicken and foam slightly.

Add the mixture to the creamed butter and sugar and stir through. Then add the 1 ½ cups of plain flour and ‘slice’ the flour in with a spatula. When it is as combined as you can get with a spatula start mixing it with your hands to form a smooth dough.

Pinch off approximately 2tsp of mixture and roll into a ball. Line the balls up on a greased or lined biscuit tray. Press them down with a fork and sprinkle brown sugar on top. Let them rest for 10 minutes before baking to help them rise. Bake in the oven for 10 - 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Let cool on the tray for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Makes approximately 24 biscuits.

I had to pop over to Sydney for 24 hours for a business trip last week. Completely by coincidence, that meant I was there for the iPhone 6 launch. I reserved an iPhone 6 for pick up with my manager’s blessing to disappear for an hour. When I arrived at 10am, the lines were… impressive. There was a separate line for reservations, which was relatively fast moving. We were asked to sign model release forms so they could film us and use it for an internal company video on the iPhone launch.

It took about half an hour to get from queuing on the street to standing at the Genius Bar to get my iPhone 6. My Apple Genius was I think more excited than I was.

First Impressions

It’s thin, light, and beautifully made. It fits well in the hand. The screen curving down to meet the sides gives the effect of content almost floating on the surface. It’s exactly as beautiful as the renders.

It’s big. When I brought it back to the office and showed it around, some people thought it was the Plus at first. It is a little awkward for one-handed use and I have large hands that can easily swallow up a 5" or less Android phone. The phone is very tall compared to a similar specced Android, to accommodate the large home button. This makes reaching up to the top left-hand corner difficult without changing grip. Firing off a text message can be done with one hand, reaching up to back out of the conversation requires two.

For me, the trade-off is worth it. SMS messaging and calls are now only a small percentage of the tasks I use my phone for. Web browsing, eBook reading and social networking all benefit from the increased real estate. Even the humble SMS message is more pleasant when you can see more of the conversation at a glance.

The screen is magnificent. Blacks are very black, colours are rich. I can’t say that I can tell the difference in resolution between the iPhone 6 1334x750 and the 1920x1080 of the Galaxy S5 I upgraded from. To my less-than-perfect eyesight they are both perfect displays.

Battery life seems improved over the iPhone 5s, which I carried for a few months this year as my personal phone. I can get through a day of heavy use but I need to charge every night so far.

Operating System

The iPhone 6 was my first experience with iOS 8 as I didn’t have a chance to update my iPad before heading overseas. Most of the differences are subtle. The new keyboard is excellent and I have tried out a couple of third party ones only to go back to the integrated keyboard. It’s just that good.

Reachability sounded really odd but in practice it’s very usable. A light double touch (not press) of the home button will bring the top of the screen down to make it easier to interact with notification or press buttons at the top of the screen. Once you press a button it springs back up again.

There are some issues with application scaling on the iPhone 6 and 6 plus. Apple built-in applications and some third party apps like the official Twitter client look great but many apps are scaled up - poorly. Text looks every so slightly blurry and the status bar and keyboard are ridiculously huge. A side-by side view shows the problem.

To see the unscaled version, click through to flickr, then select ‘Download All Sizes’ and choose 'Original’

When I upgraded from the iPhone 3g to the iPhone 4 it was a few months before all the applications I used upgraded to the higher resolution resources. Developers need time - but I hope it won’t take too long. These scaled apps look terrible.

For the most part, iOS8 feels rather like iOS7. In the last three days I haven’t noticed any major differences with the exception of Photos.

Camera

iPhoto is gone and Photos now incorporates a reasonable proportion of iPhoto’s editing tools. Photos, however, strips the EXIF data from photographs on edit. I will need to find another tool to be able to continue using my iPad for photography unless I can figure out how to turn that 'feature’ off. Photos now no longer distinguishes between iCloud photos and those local to the device which confused me momentarily.

I can’t give an in-depth review of the camera yet, not having had much opportunity to go out and shoot with it since being home from Sydney. All my tourist shots were taken with an iPhone 4s before purchasing the 6. Clearly an excuse to go back. I am hoping to really put the camera through it’s paces over the next week and upload some more samples.

Focus is fast and accurate, colours are great, and distortion is astonishingly well controlled. Looking at the photograph of the statue below at 100% we can see very good performance in capturing foliage - usually a torture test for showing up noise reduction in-camera - and this performance can be observed edge to edge. It’s really very easy to get a finger in the frame with the lens so close to the edge of the camera.

My apologies for the blur in the top left. That was my finger.

Conclusion

It’s gorgeous. Go out and get one. But get a good look at the size first.

Sometimes, I think DSLRs are the worst thing that ever happened to my photography.

Not long after I moved here from Australia, I travelled all over the south island of New Zealand with a 3.2MP digital camera. It was the first camera I’d owned and I discovered a new passion in photography. 

Over time I decided to upgrade my camera to further develop my skills. I needed manual controls and the ability to shoot in RAW to really stretch the bounds of my photography. I started with a Canon 400D DSLR, body only, and started building up a lens collection. We all know how this story ends. It ended with me no longer taking photographs because my kit was too heavy and too professionally oriented. I spent more time reading about photography gear than I did taking photographs.

I’ve now moved away from reading photography blogs and following what the professionals use. I’m not one - neither are you, probably - and there are very good reasons why it doesn’t suit me to use what they use for casual photography. There were four particular areas where I needed to change my attitudes as they were holding me back.

1) Use a crappier camera.

It’s the drive for image quality that led us all to DSLRs in the first place. Do we really need the best though? If I followed that logic to the ultimate conclusion I’d drive a Porsche too. I shoot a Fuji X100s, which is about the size of a decent compact film camera. I’m cheating a little here, as it can go toe to toe with a DSLR for image quality and win. It is however fixed lens, so I am limited to a 35mm equivalent field of view. I can’t add a macro or a telephoto or a portrait lens to get the absolutely perfect shot. I have to make 35mm work - and most of the time it does.

This means I only carry one bit of photography kit and that’s my camera on a strap over my shoulder. It’s very light to carry and there’s no choice paralysis about what to take. It’s really rather freeing.

2) Shoot in JPEG.

I have read a lot of articles about shooting in RAW. It’s true that RAW files have greater latitude in post. I have seen some examples of images that were overexposed half a dozen stops where detail was still retrievable from RAW.

Mostly, I just try not to overexpose my images half a dozen stops. The Fuji JPEG engine is a thing of beauty and images come out of the camera exactly how I like them. Shooting in JPEG allows me to use fewer and smaller memory cards and consumes less battery. Even more compelling, shooting in JPEG allows me to use iPhoto on an iPad to process my photos. I don’t need to worry about how to store my photography library at home. It all fits on the tiny internal HDD on my laptop, with the last year or so of recent photos on my iPad.

3) Don’t fix it in post.

I touched on this with the previous point. I slow down and get the image as perfect as I can at shutter time. This eliminates the need to fix the image in post. It eliminates the need to take dozens of images in drive mode so ‘at least one will turn out’. It also focuses you on photography as the art of composition. 

When I load the photos up on the iPad I don’t import them unless they look great in the preview. I don’t have the tools or the skills to fix disasters so I don’t. The benefit is my image editing workhorse weighs 500g and I don’t need external storage to handle the data. I can then upload to Flickr or Facebook from my iPad anywhere I have cellular reception.

4) Let go of the shot.

I’m not a professional and so I don’t have that pressure to get every shot. If my little 35mm camera can’t do it then I let it go. I will have plenty of other shots to remember my holiday with and my memories of the ones that got away.

Taking fewer and more considered shots improves the quality of the ones I do take, and again consumes less battery and fewer memory cards. I don’t want to imply that I think all of my shots are perfect. Many of the shots I like are pretty flawed when you look at the histogram. I’ve also let go of perfection.

This is my photography setup - a Fuji X100s with an 8GB SD card and an iPad Air. For long trips I bring a second battery and the charger for the iPad.  I tend to take fewer than 50 shots a day when on a trip so even the notoriously weak battery of the Fuji X100s lasts up to a week. It is still nice to have a spare in case the battery drains inside the camera.

This kit is definitely too weak for a professional. There’s a lot of shots you just can’t get without specialised lenses and external light sources. I no longer feel the need to act like a professional though. It’s enough for me to come back able to share with you the beauty of where I’ve been.