Primrose vs Harrier - Troll Challenges

Could You Pass?

So I will have to take the theoretical exam next Sunday to determine whether this challenge will be passed or failed. Luckily, practice tests with the same pool of questions and under the same conditions as in the real exam are available online. The questions are in German, of course, but if you happen to speak that language, would you like to give it a shot yourself?

The test can be found under this link, and you would have to select "Deutsches Rettungsschwimmabzeichen Bronze" to get to the test that I am going to take next Sunday... but feel free to check out any of the other tests too, of course. There will be 30 multiple choice questions, and you are allowed to make up to six mistakes in order to pass.

Those of you who don't speak German will have a steep language barrier to overcome, especially because online translation services won't be much help because you can't copy/paste the text from the buttons without immediately selecting an answer. But who knows, it's just for fun anyway, and we actually do have a fair number of German speakers here, I believe.

So yeah... feel free to give it a shot, if you like. I will practice a few more times as well next week, though I should be pretty well prepared already.

Troll Trivia of the Week

During one of Harrier's soccer matches in 2009, a referee caused a bit of a stir with his unique interpretation of the following rule:

1) Off-side
2) Advantage
3) Back-pass

I didn't even plan this stop, but... remember the nasi goreng from last week? It gave me an idea. Off to Indonesia!

Did you know that nasi goreng means "fried rice"? Well, let's see how well it will work without the rice part. We get our chicken patties ready...

...and then season them on both sides with about a tablespoon in total of our prepared nasi goreng seasoning (tumeric, cardamom, coriander, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, ground mustard, nutmeg and allspice). I made sure to move the seasoned patties around in the oil to make it a little more marinade-like.

After maybe 6-8 minutes, I lowered the heat and added onions, garlic and red bell peppers, and cooked them along with the chicken.

I then also added some shrimps, and a small bit of additional seasoning for the newly added ingredients.

Meanwhile, I prepared a scrambled egg.

All right, so let's start building. First the patty...

Then the onions, garlic, bell peppers and shrimps...

...and finally the scrambled egg. I put the egg below the patty instead for the second burger.

Our Indonesia-inspired burger is ready.

This is where Primrose would shout "but not in a burger!" once again... if she wasn't utterly grossed out by the entire combo already. I think this one has earned a spot near the top in her "banhauser" list. Shrimps on a burger were always a problem for her (I believe this is the third version so far that features shrimps), and I don't think the other ingredients helped a lot either.

As far as I am concerned, those burgers were quite good. I felt like I didn't even really notice the bun all that much, this burger is absolutely packed with flavor, so the bun essentially just becomes the thing that simply holds everything together. This is not necessarily ideal, as the bread matters too, but yes, this one was very tasty. Basically a nasi goreng sandwich - who would have thought that it would work? Well, Primrose didn't, and still doesn't...

Top half for sure. Where exactly? Hmmm... maybe between Germany and Russia, in 13th place.

1st Switzerland
2nd Cyprus
3rd Israel
4th Senegal
5th Greece
6th Japan
7th Mongolia
8th China
9th Denmark
10th Korea
11th Spain
12th Germany
13th Indonesia
14th Russia
15th Madagascar
16th Alsace
17th Italy
18th Texas
19th California
20th Mexico
21st Morocco
22nd Brazil
23rd Namibia
24th Arabia
25th Turkey
26th Australia
27th England
28th France
29th Colombia
30th Cuba
31st Canada
32nd Hungary
33rd The Netherlands
34th Thailand
35th South Africa

Originally posted by Harrier88
Troll Trivia of the Week

During one of Harrier's soccer matches in 2009, a referee caused a bit of a stir with his unique interpretation of the following rule:

1) Off-side
2) Advantage
3) Back-pass

I guess it's number 2, but I could be wrong

I'm guessing #1 on this one.

So we rolled Italian again... and can you believe that I was actually struggling to come up with something, despite this huge array of widely popular dishes in the Italian cuisine to choose from? Well, the problem was that I was not all that well-prepared this week, and a little pressed for time. Many of the dishes I thought of or looked up required too much preparation before cooking, or they simply took too long. I should plan ahead more carefully next time.

What I ended up settling for is a bit of a cheat: I made a Chicken Caesar Ciabatta sandwich, after discovering the linked recipe while desperately searching through lists of quick and easy Italian dishes. This one may be Italo-American at best... but I decided to let it slide. You may know already that Caesar salad is not directly named after the Roman statesman, but after Caesar Cardini, who created this dish, supposedly on the spur of the moment after getting short on supplies on a particularly busy day in the restaurant.

I will be using the Caesar dressing from this recipe too, even though the original probably went more like this - at least that is one of the versions I had saved up before. Here is another possibly easier one that I have saved, but honestly... I really like how the version I made turned out. This may be my new go-to version from now on.

6 tablespoons mayonnaise, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, 8 chopped up anchovies, 2 cloves pressed and chopped garlic, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, and salt and pepper to taste.

Toss it with about a cup of romaine lettuce.

I had some ready-made frozen chicken - perfect for the occasion. I cooked it in olive oil.

The ciabatta rolls were store-bought too, to be baked in the oven. They were a little bigger than I expected.

All right, then. Salad...

chicken...

some additional dressing, as well as some shredded parmesan...

...and our Italy-inspired burger... no, wait, we had that one already. Our Caesar Chicken Ciabatta sandwich is ready.

It was quite good, and as I pointed out before, I was very pleased with the dressing. I especially like that it requires less ingredients that I typically don't use at home, like the other recipe I linked, which contained mustard.

Honestly, though... could it be that ciabatta bread was invented with the sole purpose of ripping up gums and palates? It certainly didn't feel as nice as it tasted. Well, I'm sure I can come up with some other nice dishes involving Caesar dressing in the future, and in the meantime... bring on the antiseptic mouthwash.

Originally posted by Harrier88
Troll Trivia of the Week

During one of Harrier's soccer matches in 2009, a referee caused a bit of a stir with his unique interpretation of the following rule:

1) Off-side
2) Advantage
3) Back-pass

Solution:

I see. I had 1 time a same kind of situation as goal keeper. The free kick was taken outside the penalty box and was taken directly on the goal and ended on the post and the player shoots the rebound in the goal.

Originally posted by SDK1987
I see. I had 1 time a same kind of situation as goal keeper. The free kick was taken outside the penalty box and was taken directly on the goal and ended on the post and the player shoots the rebound in the goal.

An indirect free kick? If this was a deliberate shot at goal, I am not even 100% sure if it should be allowed... but I think it still counts, all that matters is that a player other than the kick taker was the one who scored the goal. In this case, they got pretty lucky to get such a rebound.

.

Yes, tomorrow is my final exam. Thank you very much, I think I should be well prepared. I rarely make mistakes in that online test, and if it happens, it's just because I wasn't paying enough attention. In the actual exam, I can make up to six mistakes in my 30 questions as well, so everything should be fine.

Other than that, I will have to perform some CPR, which I already had to do for several first aids courses in the past, so it shouldn't be a problem either. The hardest thing will probably be the escape moves from those grappling holds, but I don't expect to fail those either. I think I will write more about them later.

What bothers me a little is that I will have to bring my laptop. They expect us to take our theory exams on some kind of app, and since I don't have any smartphones or tablets, my computer will have to do. What on earth is wrong with pen and paper all of a sudden? The DLRG has been around since 1913, I'm sure they were able to train lifeguards before people were messing around with apps.

Either way, I'm eager to put all of this behind me and finally get my Sunday afternoons back. It's fine to sacrifice time on a weekend or two to get some extra stuff done, but having an appointment almost every Sunday for over two months straight will eventually leave its toll on you.

Tomorrow it will be over, win or lose. Let's get that badge...

Wrapping Things Up... And Escaping People Who Wrap Around You

Okay, so one of the few things left to do in the lifeguard exam tomorrow will be to escape those "chokeholds", or whatever I have called them here in the past. The things that we have been practicing ever since our first lesson. It's tough to explain those well, I guess.

Let's just put it this way: Imagine you are out there by a lake, a person is drowning and can't swim, and you make the heroic effort to jump in there to rescue them. You have made your swimming approach and you have reached that person just in time - what will they do? They are still panicking, in fear of their life, and desperately looking for something to hold on to, and without any swimming aids around, YOU would be the only thing to hold. So that's what they would do, they would tightly embrace you, attempt to push you under water in an effort to stay above the surface themselves... and if you don't do anything about it, it won't end well for either of you.

Luckily, there are techniques to prevent this, allowing you to escape their embrace and put them into a position where you can safely carry them ashore. As I said before, explaining them is not too easy, so let's just take a look:

Those are the five situations that we have learned too, and while the escape moves that we have been taught differ in some slight details, it should give you a good idea of what to do here. You would also dive down during most of them, while still holding on to the other person's arms, which makes the escape a little easier. I wish I would have found an underwater video of this, but this is the best one I could find right now.

This is pretty much the main thing of my practical exam that is still left to do tomorrow, and probably the most challenging part. The rest is mostly theory.

Just great... I have been informed by email today, on short notice, that my lifeguard exam will have to be postponed due to the sickness of the examiner.

I was anxious to finally get this one behind me, I even have a mini vacation scheduled for the end of next week, as well as a meetup with Primrose, and I thought I could approach those things with a clear mind, knowing that all those major challenges are now behind me and that I can take things easier until the end of the year... but it wasn't meant to be. All this tension yesterday for nothing.

Nothing I can change about it, though. Bad beat, I guess. I will be informed about the date of the re-scheduled exam soon... I hope. I also hope that I will be able to enjoy my short vacation next week all the same, despite knowing that the big exam will still be around the corner.

If I am going to take any similar courses next year, however, I don't think I will go for those long ones with short appointments across several weeks anymore. Maybe it's better to do those courses that last all day long instead, to be wrapped up on one or two weekends, which seems to be the more common format anyway.

Classic!

Italian? Of course. I decided to go classic: pasta bolognese, the bolognese sauce had been prepared during summer: with own-grown tomatoes, carrots, as well as own grown mediterranean herbs.

I always try to prepare a surprise menu with something own-grown from the garden.

Classic indeed! But supplying your own home-grown ingredients instantly makes any classic great.

We are ready for next week's menu, and it will be...

Troll Trivia of the Week

Too bad about Harrier's lifeguard exam having to be postponed, but it could have been worse. In the past, young Harrier already had to take a much more important test twice due to matters beyond his control. It was...

1) his math graduation exam
2) his driving test
3) his B.A. thesis

I don´t know this one, so: I guess 3)

I'll go with 2
In Canada people rarely pass their driver's exam on the first try, and I'm guessing it is an even more rigorous exam in Germany

Wow, there are now a lot of things to post here that have been piling up within the last few days... let's start with the first one, I made some new burgers on Monday.

I've been meaning to make a Pakistani version for a while, because I felt that there are several good meat dishes in that cuisine that could be nicely adapted as a burger version. Shami kebab and chapli kebab came to mind. The problem was that many recipes always included this or that ingredient that was either hard to get, wouldn't be easily used for anything else, or both.

After spending some time looking around, I found a simpler version to recreate at home, so... off to Pakistan!

This video gave me a nice and simple idea for the Shami kebab-inspired patties. Just 400 grams of beef, half a finely chopped up onion, a teaspoon each of salt, pepper and turmeric, and a tablespoon of sumac, to make two patties.

The sauce and the other toppings are based on a combination of recipes I found at several other places. For the sauce, I used four tablespoons of yogurt, a tablespoon of dried coriander, half a teaspoons each of mint and chili, and a bit of sea salt, for which I used the one Prim once got for me from one of her North Sea vacations, that one also came with a bit of extra chili mixed in later.

Building the burgers was then relatively simple. Just a seasoned patty on one bun, and half of the sauce on the other...

Then some iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and onions on top of the sauce... maybe I should have put them on the patty right away instead.

And then we just carefully put the top bun above the rest. Maybe I should have been a little more careful than I was, so I would have had less onions to pick up on the floor, and less messy looking sauce. Either way, our Pakistan-inspired burger is ready.

Those hit the middle stump, as cricket fans in Pakistan may put it. A very solid combo, I liked the seasoning and the sauce, and while the other toppings were pretty standard, they didn't take anything away from this burger. A quite good version.

Primrose wasn't sold. What exactly was it again, Prim? The sauce, or just the overall combo? Well, it's a banhauser rating from her once again, probably another case of "but not as a burger!".

Maybe we will put it just above last week's version?

1st Switzerland
2nd Cyprus
3rd Israel
4th Senegal
5th Greece
6th Japan
7th Mongolia
8th China
9th Denmark
10th Korea
11th Spain
12th Germany
13th Pakistan
14th Indonesia
15th Russia
16th Madagascar
17th Alsace
18th Italy
19th Texas
20th California
21st Mexico
22nd Morocco
23rd Brazil
24th Namibia
25th Arabia
26th Turkey
27th Australia
28th England
29th France
30th Colombia
31st Cuba
32nd Canada
33rd Hungary
34th The Netherlands
35th Thailand
36th South Africa

We rolled Middle Eastern for this week's cooking theme. As I said before, I could have cheated, because I prepared some chicken shawarma a while ago, of which I didn't post any pictures that I took. I'm not going to use those, but I will make the same dish again - except this time, I will serve it with rice, instead of making a tortilla wrap with it, as I did last time.

Shawarma is a popular Middle Eastern street food, where marinated meat - usually beef - is skewered and then shaved off before serving, like in the case of gyro or döner kebab. While I had those other two dishes, I never had the chance to get some shawarma before. In fact, the first time I heard about this dish was when I started taking some Arabic lessons on Duolingo and it was mentioned in the introduction.

While gyro is among my favorite takeout dishes (if only it didn't get so expensive these days...), I always found it really hard to recreate any decent version at home. I guess at the end of the day, there is no way around getting one of those skewers if you want to get it right. We may face the same problem with shawarma, but I found a few recipes for a chicken version, so I wanted to try it out. I can't compare it to the real deal anyway, so this can only give me a vague idea at best.

It all starts the night before. We prepare a marinade consisting of a tablespoon of lemon juice, 1.5 tablespoons of olive oil, half a tablespoon of coriander powder, a minced garlic clove, a teaspoon each of salt, pepper, cumin and paprika, and half a teaspoon each of ground cardamom and cayenne pepper.

We will marinate 400 grams of chicken overnight with it.

The next day, we preheat the oven to 200°C and bake the chicken for about 20 minutes, until it is nice and brown.

For the rice... I was just throwing some things together. Onions, harissa, cumin, and a spice mix called ras el hanout. I also added some chickpeas towards the end, and I cooked the rice in vegetable stock instead of water.

We are now ready to serve. I also added a yogurt dip with cumin, lemon juice and a bit of garlic, the recipe for which is also included in the linked chicken shawarma recipe.

It was quite tasty, good stuff. I would love to try some "real" takeout shawarma some day. Well, I can keep practicing with those Arabic letters until then.

For reference, here is a picture of the chicken shawarma I made a few weeks ago, served as a wrap. This one was also good, though Middle Eastern flatbread would have been a much better choice than the more conveniently available tortillas, I expect.

Over here, "doner" is spelled "donair" and there are many places specializing in it.
https://www.yelp.ca/search?cflt=donairs&find_loc=Langley+Township%2C+BC+V4W

"gyro" is sold as a type of sandwich. See: https://www.onelook.com/?w=gyro&ls=a&loc=home_ac_gyro

I'm not a donair fan, and places that sell it also sell other stuff, but I've never encountered shawarma