Spiced chicken stew/curry

I just made this up with what I had to hand (and can eat, most people would add chilli), and it's tasty :)

Ingredients:
finely chopped:
1/4 onion
2 cloves garlic
1cm ginger

Small pieces:
2 skinless chicken thighs
1 small potato
1 small turnip

seeds from 3 cardomon pods, crushed
big pinch tumeric
small pinch cumin and coriander
salt and lots of pepper
1 cup chopped (frozen) spinach

Method:
Put a little oil in a non stick pan. Fry the onion, garlic and ginger until it looks a bit cooked. Add the chicken and spices and fry until browned.
Add the potato and turnip and fry a little. Add water to cover and simmer, covered, for 30 mins.
Remove lid and increase heat, simmer uncovered, stirring, until roughly the right consistency.
Add the spinach and simmer for a minute or two.

Makes 1.5 servings (the problem when you make things up as you go along is you don't know what you'll get :))

I read recently that chicken thighs make for tastier stews than the breast and they totally do.

OMG Kyle XY

I'm about halfway through Kyle XY and it's great. Much better than season one. They had mid-season break so the current plot is fairly wrapped up, I'm curious to see what the second half of the season will bring.

As well as the quite interesting sf-y drama, the relationships and characterisation are quite nuanced and engaging. For example, in this season there's a River-like character Jesse, who's morally confused and mentally broken, and her minder Emily, who's morally grey and totally sane. At various points I was sympathising with poor Jesse being controlled by big mean Emily, while at other times I sympathised with Emily who was genuinely afraid of her unpredictably dangerous charge. One of the things I really like about the show is that it creates these mentally very unusual characters (not just ordinary person+ extra abilities, but genuinely thinking a bit differently) and then lets us empathise and get into their heads rather than having them being this strange Other (like River)

Also, there's an episode with the explicit moral that girls like teenage boys if and only if they're not homophobic, and one of the characters describes two male characters slashy relationship as a "bromance" and comes up with a shippy portmanteu for them (Kyle/Declan=Keklan) Oh! And pretty much every time two or more characters have Drama due to a misunderstanding? They talk about it and figure things out! BIZARRE.

On the downside the only non-white character so far is unambiguously evil :/

An idea too late

We can't do it now of course, but in four years, if the american election is the same "day" as the Melbourne Cup again I think we(*) should go around and any time an internet conversation becomes over-run with election talk insist on talking about Melbourne Cup. Talk lots about how important it is that everyone bets, have flamewars about who will win, etc :)

Of course, I actually care a lot more about the American election than the Melbourne Cup, I couldn't name you a single horse that ran today let alone who won. But that's not the point :)

(n.b. I'm not complaining about americans who post on their own ljs or whatever. I'm mainly still bitter from like 4 years ago when the Brights forums got overrun with "All REAL atheists are voting for Kerry/Bush" crap even though most people there weren't even american EDIT: Two places where this happened to me this year: Example 1, Example 2)

See also today's Irregular Webcomic annotation, which reminded me of the idea.

(*)meaning we aussies, but you foreigners are welcome to as well :D