Day 105: First Ride

On Australia Day I took delivery of my new race bike, some 80 days later I finally got to ride my new toy. I had intended to try and do a couple of track days before entering a race, somehow I just never got around to it so a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and signed up for today's race meet at Wakefield.

I was a little nervous initially and my first qualifying session was really hard work. It seemed to take a long time to get comfortable on the bike but I still managed to qualify 7th outright which had me on the second row of the grid.

As the day progressed my times improved along with my comfort levels on the new bike. I even improved my previous best lap time for Wakefield by 2 seconds, not bad for my first outing on the 675.

So the somewhat delayed verdict: I like my new bike.

Day 101: Post Dinner Snack

Belinda cooked some delicious pork chops for dinner tonight with fried sage leaves and an abundance of her home made apple chutney. Normally two decent sized pork chops would be enough for dinner, but today Belinda had put me to work in the front garden and I'd worked up a bit of an appetite.

The gardening involved shoveling 3 cubic meters of pine chip onto the front garden where Belinda had carefully laid layers of newspaper to keep the weeds at bay. It took most of the day but left enough time for me to load the new Daytona into the freshly swept out trailer and start getting things organised for the racing this Saturday at Wakefield. It will be my first ride of the bike and I'm feeling a little nervous about jumping straight into a race situation on a bike I've never ridden before, but I digress.

Back to the explanation of today's photo: After dinner I was still feeling peckish so I opted for my favourite old snack of curried chicken 2-minute noodles. It's pretty simple really, I just cook up the 2 minute noodles without adding the flavour sachet then drain all the water. I add half of the sachet, about half a teaspoon of Keen's Curry powder and enough milk to mix it all in and make a bit of a curry/chicken sauce. For the photo today I tried to dress it up a little with some parsley... after the photo I removed the parsley and scoffed the noodles.

My little recipe is certainly not going to get me on to Master Chef... and it would probably have me kicked off My Kitchen Rules faster than you can say "Manu's accent is as bad as George's technique with cutlery". Still, despite the lack of culinary skill and knowledge required to put this little dish together, it remains one of my favourite quick & easy snacks.