Earthworks 2014 Barossa Valley Shiraz

Today's You-app task was to "think positive" and make a note of something positive. This was actually my chosen "keep-it-up" habit-forming activity, so I had to do it twice. Fortunately, living in Australia gives you many positive things to think about, even on a rainy day like today. One of them is the wine - and one of the wines to be positive about is Earthworks 2014 Barossa Valley Shiraz, which is rich and velvety without being too in-your-face like some Aussie wines can be. (Not that I have a problem with that!)

It’s on offer at Vintage Cellars at the moment, so that’s two things to be positive about in itself!

Creamy mustardy lentils with bacon and squash

This is another repeat favourite, based on a Waitrose recipe, Rosemary-roasted squash with ham hock and lentils. Aussies are more into cow than pig products, so it’s not so easy to get decent ham/bacon etc. However, this recipe does just fine with some fried bacon chunks rather than the (cooked) ham hock in the original. The original also used frozen squash.

You can pre-roast the squash for this recipe.

Ingredients

• ~1kg Butternut Squash
• 2 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
• 250g puy Lentils
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 100ml Single Cream
• 180g pulled ham hock or cubed bacon
• 25g sunflower seeds
• 20g pack flat leaf parsley, chopped
• 100g frozen peas

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 200C, gas mark 6. Cut the butternut squash into large chunks (e.g. quarters) and spread in a single layer on an oiled baking sheet. Sprinkle with the chopped rosemary. Bake for around 45 minutes until tender and lightly browned, tossing in the oil about halfway through. Cut into something resembling even cubes. Bitesize chunks, if you will. (Don't obsess too much - there's a chance the squash will, well, squash to mush anyway.)

2. Cook the lentils in a pan of boiling water for 15–18 minutes until tender. Drain.

3. If using bacon, fry the bacon cubes in a bit of oil until cooked.

4. Heat the oil in a large non-stick frying pan and cook for 5–10 minutes until good and soft.

5. Stir in the mustard, cream and some seasoning and bring to simmering point.

6. Stir the cubed squash, drained lentils, bacon/ham hock, sunflower seeds, parsley and peas into into the cream sauce.

7. Heat through gently until everything is hot.

8. Check seasoning and serve.

Tastier than it looks (with my food photography skills, at least) and makes good leftovers too.

Humpbacks ahoy! Whale watching off Sydney

We’ve been meaning to go whale watching since we moved to Sydney and today we finally got round to it. The weather was not the best - and the sea was a bit choppier than ideal - but it was a fantastic morning, well spent. Best of all, we got to see humpback whales!

It was only a small pod - a mother and calf, plus “escort” - but we got some reasonably close up views when one of them was having a play.

As well as a couple of breaches, this included a couple of good tail slaps.

Amazing animals. We saw some birds too - and, of course, some great views of the cliffs around Sydney harbour. All in all, a recommended half day trip.

A tale of two conferences - #ABACBS2015 and #AGTA15

Two weeks ago, I attended the awesome double-header of ABACBS2015 and AGTA15. In some ways they were chalk and cheese - ABACBS was cheap and cheerful, where as AGTA was expensive and (therefore) exclusive - but both were great and highlighted some of the very best features of successful academic conferences.

As part of the ABACBS2015 organising committee, I needed to collect my thoughts for a debrief, so I thought I’d got down some thoughts here. (Thanks to grant writing, the post itself got a little delayed!) As with biology itself, most decisions are trade offs and the following comparison is not to criticise - I just find it interesting. As with the awesome ABiC14 conference last year, I mainly want to document good practice for future reference. (Some of these will no doubt be repeats of my ABiC14 thoughts!)

Size. Both conferences were, for me, the perfect size - around 180-190 people. This is enough to give the conference a good buzz and ensure that there are sufficient interesting people to listen to and posters to visit. Critically, though, it was small enough that you could find and speak to the people you wanted to. (Even if I didn’t fully get the chance at ABACBS2015 because I was busy, and managed to miss some people at AGTA15 because time ran out!)

Venue. ABACBS2015 was run on a budget and we were very fortunate to have the Garvan Institute provide a free venue for the conference. The Garvan lecture theatre is lovely, with a great AV system and comfy seats. The only negative for a conference of that size - and we got close to our 200 person limit - is that the space outside the theatre for breaks and posters does get a bit cramped. In contrast, AGTA15 was held in the Crowne Plaza at Hunter Valley, which is a pretty luxury hotel in the wine region of New South Wales. It took me a while to warm to the main conference setup, with seats around tables in a large, wide room with a screen each side of (and a long way from) the podium. However, the “trade exhibition” space where the breaks, lunch and posters were, was excellent. I am big fan of having the posters up all the time and in the same place as the breaks.

Location. ABACBS was held in the city centre at a research institute. This kept the costs down and made it easy to get to. (We did not organise accommodation.) It also made it easy to escape from, which might have affected evening social numbers. AGTA was out in the sticks, which made it harder to get to and may have put some people off attending - it essentially added another day to the length of the conference. The plus side of this was that everything was on one site and it was not so easy to disappear or go home, and so most people were around most of the time, I think. (Although there was the temptation of wine tasting on the doorstep!)

Goodie bags. I’m pleased to say that both conferences went down the reusable shopping bag route (pick above). Being budget, we got UNSW to sponsor us with some canvas bags for ABACBS. (Complete with the scary statistic that plastic bags take 15-1000 years to break down.) AGTA was (a) a bit more upmarket and (b) in wine country, so they provided wine coolbags!

Trade exhibition. We binfies are a cheap lot - and I don’t mean tacky or miserly, I mean that we don’t need a lot of money to do great things. As a result, it is hard to attract trade sponsors: we just don’t spend (or often even have!) any money! Genomics is clearly a different matter, as you literally cannot do it without lots of expensive kit. The AGTA trade exhibit was therefore pretty big and bustling. Again, putting it with the food and posters made for some great…

…Breaks. Breaks really do make or break a conference. One of the few criticisms of ABACBS2015 was that the breaks were a bit too short - we were somewhat hemmed in for time because we needed to leave people enough time to get to AGTA in the afternoon of the second day. We also tended to over-run a little, because people would be enjoying the breaks and take a bit of time to filter back into the theatre for the talks. My advice for conference planners: (1) make all breaks 5-10 minutes longer than you think they should be (e.g. 40 minutes for coffee and over an hour for lunch); (2) build in some dummy time into the program to soak up delays; (3) Make sure you have a bell or something to signal that the next session is starting! Being a more leisurely multi-day conference, AGTA had nice long breaks, including a session off for posters etc. after lunch. Lots of opportunities for mingling and looking at posters.

Invited speakers. Both conferences had outstanding invited speakers that gave really interesting talks. I know some of the binfie crowd would have enjoyed a bit more about the methodology in ABACBS2015 - and we should perhaps brief our speakers a little better in future - but personally I was blown away by the quality of the science presented. Both fields are rapidly changing as technology opens up opportunities and there is some really cool stuff going on out there! AGTA in particular seemed to have a lot of invited speakers, talking about really cool stuff - possibly part of the reason it's so expensive. (It must be said: the quality of the selected abstracts was good too!)

Gender Equality. Both conferences did pretty well on the gender front, I think. ABACBS2015 in particular nailed it, with a 50% split of invited speakers and over 50% female speakers overall! (The latter wasn’t deliberate as such - there are just loads of good female bioinformaticians in Australia who submitted interesting abstracts!)

Twitter. (And #confBingo.) I have mixed feeling about live tweeting at conferences. This year, I decided to throw myself in a bit more and, on balance, I feel that I got more out of it than I missed. It is true that sometimes I missed something a speaker was saying because of a tangential Twitter conversation (such as #JediKelpie) - but I also learnt stuff and picked up on things that I had missed thanks to the Twitter feed. The #confBingo thread was also quite entertaining a fun, and helped networking and building community spirit, which is what a lot of a good conference is ultimately about.

Coffee. Unfortunately, we were unable to attract the barista sponsor from ABiC14 to sponsor ABACBS2015. AGTA did have a sponsored barista, though. Roche (I think) gave out three tickets with registration for the trade exhibit barista. Not quite as good as unlimited but it hit the spot. My other top conference coffee tip: bring a reusable cup! It' so much easier/safer if you want to take coffee into the talks and generally cuts down on spills - and refills! (Next year, I am hoping for ABACBS Keep Cups in the goodie bags!)

Overall, I had a lot of fun helping with the conference organisation - and would recommend it - and even more fun attending. Australia has some great science going on and a really strong/vibrant bioinformatics community, and I am proud to be part of it.

Quick and easy pasta with Italian sausage and kale

Coles magazine quite often delivers the goods in terms of convenient and tasty meals that I can actually be bothered to make - and are quite forgiving to deviations from the recipe. This is my variation on Curtis Stone’s “Penne with sausage and kale” from April 2015. I’ve made this a few times now, so it’s time to post it so that I don’t have to dig out the magazine. (Yes, I really am that forgetful!)

Ingredients

• Coles finest Italian sausages. (Any tasty quality sausage will do but these have fennel in, which adds an extra dimension.)
• Bunch of kale, stalks removed and sliced. (Recipe calls for half but I go for a whole bunch - it cooks down.)
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed.
• Small/half glass of dry white wine.
• Jar of tomato pasta sauce. (The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of passata but then you are left with lots of passata.)
• 300g pasta. (Recipe says penne. I tend to use small spirals… for everything.)
• Parmesan, salt, pepper to serve.

Instructions

1. Get a large pan of salted boiling water going to cook the pasta. See below for the timing you’re aiming at. (Err on the side of too late, I think - the rest can simmer for a bit longer.)

2. Remove the sausages from their skins and fry them over a medium-high heat, breaking them up with a wooden spoon/spatula as you go.

3. Add the kale and garlic and cook until the kale is wilted. If you are using a whole bunch, like me, you may need to add it in a couple of batches - unless you have a very big pan. Don’t worry: it cooks down a lot.

4. Add the wine and the tomato sauce. This time, we used puttanseca sauce, which was quite olivey. If olives aren’t your thing, you might be happier with a simple tomato or tomato and basil sauce. (You can just use passata as in the original recipe, of course!) The sauce had a few cherry tomatoes in it, which was nice. This recipe would work well if you roasted some cherry tomatoes and chucked them in too.



5. Bring to a simmer and cook for a few minutes until at the desired consistency. Hopefully, your pasta should be done by now. Drain and toss with the sausagey tomato goodness.



6. Season to taste and serve. Sprinkle with grated parmesan and black pepper. This makes enough for four adults, or two good dinners and lunches.

And, of course, it passed the Arthur test. (No, he didn’t get any.)

A handsome beast

Today, I decided to take the day off and went to Taronga Zoo in advance of the Oceans of Plastic event. Like most people with an interest in conservation and animal welfare, I have mixed feelings about zoos. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need them; unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world and zoos are an increasingly important bastion of biodiversity.

They are also a place where you can go and marvel at nature. And what a marvellous chap this is:

How anyone can look at that and think, “I really must shoot that” (other than with a camera), is totally beyond me.

UNSW are robot soccer world champions!

Following the first the first innings performance of their cricket team at Trent Bridge, the Aussies need a sporting success story. Happily, the UNSW Australia Robocup team has been able to provide such a story.

Yesterday’s piece in The Conversation by team captain Sean Harris, How we won the world robot soccer championship, gives an interesting insight into the competition and how our team was able to overcome the Germans in the final.

It makes for strangely compelling viewing. It’s pretty awesome to consider that these are autonomous robots - this is no Robot Wars scenario where the humans are controlling from the sideline. Of course, it is rather unrealistic as soccer: when players fall over (sometimes themselves but usually following contact), they get straight back up again!

After watching the first couple of minutes for authenticity, I recommend dialling the speed up to 2x for a bit more action. Watch for the great Maradona moment by UNSW #3 (screenshot top) at about 21:30 (dribbling round everyone, not scoring with his hand!) followed shortly afterwards by a fantastic long range strike by my personal “robot of the match”, UNSW #5!

Ireland demonstrates democracy (and itself) at its finest

Well done, Ireland. I am proud of my semi-adopted nation (by residency/marriage). This is what democracy is all about. The whole of society being given a clear mandate to determine its values.

No party politics. No politicians feeling like they have a mandate to implement unpopular decisions just because they managed to get elected. The voice of the people, making a clear statement that they are pro-equality.

Rest of the World, the bar has been raised.

Slash sets the rock world on fire (again)

I’ve previously raved about Slash’s albums, Apocalyptic Love and Ain’t Life Grand. Well, he’s done it again.

Weighing in with a bargainiferous 17 tracks, World On Fire is Slash (and friends) at his very best, especially the first few songs. With 17 of them, you would expect there to be some bum tracks on there - but there aren’t. An iTunes screen capture says it all, really:

If you only buy one album this year, I recommend this one.

Easy, tasty chicken & chorizo minestrone

I like cooking that essentially consists of chopping stuff and then adding it to the pan in the right order. This recipe hits that nail firmly on the head. It also fills the kitchen with delicious smells. It got the cats interested, anyway.

If in Australia, make sure you get a continental chorizo for this recipe, not the inferior “chorizo primo” that seems to be common.

Serves: 4; Cooking: 30 mins

Ingredients

• 1 chorizo sausage, finely chopped.
• 1 brown onion, finely chopped.
• 1 carrot, peeled & finely chopped.
• 1 courgette (zucchini), ends trimmed, finely chopped.
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed/grated.
• 400g can diced tomatoes.
• 500ml chicken stock.
• 1 large chicken breast. Cut into chunks if very large.
• 110g risoni pasta.
• 40g spinach, finely shredded. (I put in a bit more, roughly torn, which seemed fine.)
• Lemon zest, to serve.
• Crusty bread, to serve.

Instructions

1. Heat a large saucepan over a high heat and cook the chorizo for about 5 mins to brown and release the tasty oil. Transfer to a plate with a slotted spoon.



2. Add all the veg (onion, carrot, courgette & garlic) and cook, stirring, for 5 mins until the onion softens.

3. Add back the chorizo, plus tomatoes, stock and chicken. Bring to boil and then simmer for 10 mins or until chicken cooked.

4. Remove the chicken and coarsely shred. Return to the pan with the pasta. Cook for 6-7 mins until pasta is tender.

5. Remove from heat. Stir in spinach and season with salt and pepper.

6. Ladle into bowls and sprinkle with lemon zest. Serve with crusty bread. Yum!

Two (very) good eggs at Two Good Eggs

I’ve blogged before about a mighty fine brunch at Two Good Eggs in Surry Hills. Yesterday, we went back for the first time since then and I am happy to report that nothing bad has happened to the place in the intervening year.

This time, I went for a special of “Chorizo Hash Brown Stack” (or something to that effect). I don’t often take photos of my food but sometimes it is so handsomely presented that it’s hard to resist. Today was one of those times (even if the resulting photos is a little blurry):

It tasted as good as it looked, with two perfectly cooked eggs. A year is too long to wait between visits, so I’m aiming to find an excuse to go back a bit sooner next time.

Best journal cover ever?

Courtesy of the Molecular Biology and Evolution Facebook page comes this awesome cover art:

According to the MBE Editor:

The author and artist info: The cover image depicts representative squamate species (lizards and snakes) playing poker, with the card and chip colors representing the sex-determining system most prevalent in each clade. The tabletop shows results from a comparative genomic analysis of squamate sex-determining mechanisms by Gamble et al in this issue. This study discovered that changes between sex-determining mechanisms in one clade, geckos, account for a half to two-thirds of the total transitions known in lizards and snakes. This remarkable frequency of transition is reflected in the illustration by the heightened activity at the gecko side of the table: the three gecko species in the foreground are cheating, implying that when it comes to sex determination, geckos do not play by the rules. The image was created by University of Minnesota biologist and artist Anna Minkina and pays homage to the Cassius M. Coolidge painting, “A Friend in Need”, part of the artist’s “Dogs Playing Poker” series.

h/t: James McInereny

Love chocolate? Love ice cream? Love coffee? You'll love a Magnum Espresso!

I do like good chocolate, ice cream and coffee. What could be better, then, than something tasty that combined all three‽ Behold! The Magnum espresso

Magnum vanilla ice cream is not spectacular but it is good - and surrounded by really good dark chocolate. (It makes me wonder whether you can just buy bars of the stuff.) Stick in some swirls of coffee syrup and you’ve got a winner. It’s chocolate with a splash of coffee, rather than coffee with a splash of chocolate - so don’t be too disappointed if you are after COFFEE!

According to their Facebook page, it’s a limited edition. I hope its not too limited!

Easy (and delicious) slow cooker beef chilli

Autumn has arrived in Sydney and with the dropping temperatures - we sometimes need two layers now! - there is an increased desire for warm, comforting food. We’ve therefore been seeking out recipes that are either made or can be adapted for the slow cooker. Today’s was an adaptation from a taste.com.au recipe for shredded chilli beef. (It was too yummy to remember to take a nice photo once dished up, so a photo of the pot will have to do!)

Ingredients

• About 1kg beef chuck steak, cut into pieces and large bits of fats removed
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 brown onions, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, grated
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1.5 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 690g jar passata (plus/minus) + water (see below)
• 1 tbsp finely chopped pickled jalapenos
• 3 dried bay leaves
• 2 tins of red kidney beans

Instructions

1. Season the beef with salt and pepper and brown in the oil. Our slow cooker has a “sear” function, so I used that. If feeling lazy, I’m sure you can skip this step.

2. Lightly fry the onions to soften. Again, I used the slow cooker “sear” function.

3. Bung everything except the kidney beans in the slow cooker. Use a bit of water (50-100 ml, maybe) to get as much of the passata out of the jar as possible.

4. Cook on low for 6-7 hours.

5. Drain and rinse the kidney beans before adding around half an hour from the end. (My slow cooker had already flicked to "keep warm" so I added them and put it back on low whilst the cornbread was baking.)

6. Serve with Firecracker cornbread and sour cream. (My wife made the cornbread, so I can’t brag about that.) It was also be good with rice, tortilla chips, or just about anything of that ilk.

Easy and delicious!

Edit: as I almost did in life, I forgot the kidney beans!

A lego HMS Beagle for Darwin Day

It’s Darwin Day again, and what better way to celebrate than to support the awesome work of LuisPG by voting for his outstanding rendering of “HMS Beagle: A Voyage of Researches”:

The eight minifigures include some all-time favourites for fans of The Voyage of the Beagle, or anyone following Darwin’s tweets/blog of his travels. (He’s around Cape Horn at the moment.)

The Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary blog features extracts from the diaries of Darwin, Fitzroy and Syms Covington, as well as artwork from Conrad Martens, so it’s good to see them all feature!

There’s more pictures and info at the “Lego ideas - HMS Beagle” page, and in the designer’s flickr album. So go, register (if you need to) and give the Beagle a vote: it’s what a 206 year old Darwin would have wanted.

Awesome Octopi

Via the Youtube channel of a friend from (but no longer in!) Dublin, Jonathan Gordon, here are some awesome videos of octopus camouflage. (Yes, I know that “octopuses” or “octopodes” is more correct for the plural but “octopi” is more fun!) I’ve seen this kind of thing on documentaries before but never realised this kind of thing could happen when just “[diving] down to look at a shell”.

The screenshots give the game away, sadly, but even when you know it’s there, the camouflage is still so amazing that the octopus is hard to spot.

And if that’s too scary for you, here is another video from Jon featuring an über-cute baby octopus “walking on the beach”:

Here be (water) dragons!

One of the great things about living in Sydney is that you do not need to venture far from the city to find little pockets of National Park and bush tracks, where you can take a stroll away from the hustle and bustle. One such pocket is the headland at Shelly Beach, in Manly.

Last Friday, I took advantage of a day off to pay Shelly Beach a visit, and stumbled across this guy (or gal) on the headland:

To be honest, I almost stumbled on him! He was good enough to hang around and pose for some close-ups. (A much larger one scared the bejaysus out of me when it bolted into the bush a little later!)

Judging from the signs up in the area, (s)he is an Eastern water dragon. I've never really noticed such prominent ear openings on lizards before.

The UK has only 6 native reptile species, so it’s always a treat to see them. (Until, I suspect, I stumble across a venomous snake!) Fantastic creatures!

A couple more photos here.

Best Christmas stocking chocolates ever!

Like many - most? - people my age who grew up in the UK (and Ireland, I think), Christmas stockings are synonymous with Cadbury’s chocolate coins. However, this year was destined to be a Christmas without them, for two good reasons:

First, there was the report earlier this year that Cadbury are no longer making them. This had a considerable public backlash, as captured on Buzzfeed. (The author made one error in his post, ending: “However, all hope is not entirely lost, you can still buy different chocolate coins at supermarkets and pound stores around the country.” Sorry, but other chocolate coins suck in comparison.)

Second, Australian Cadbury’s chocolate is rubbish. (Sorry, Aussies, but it is. We’ve done blind taste tests and everything.)

Fortunately, Santa came up with a much better idea this year: spiced chocolate almonds from Haigh’s Chocolates.

These sound pretty amazing but are even better than they sound: an almond, encased in milk chocolate, encased in white chocolate and dusted with spiced dark chocolate powder (cinnamon, cloves, cardamon and star anise.) One to look out for next year!

Sculpture by the sea is back

We moved to Sydney just over a year ago and one of the first things we discovered was Sculpture by the sea 2013, an annual free public arts event in which one hundred or so artists create sculptures on the eastern coast from Bondi Beach to Tamarama Beach.

Even without the sculptures, the Coogee to Bondi coastal walk is an impressive piece of coastline and we are lucky to have it on our doorstep. The sculptures really add another dimension, especially the ones that make use of the terrain as part of the art. I’ve not yet seen all of the 2014 offerings, but some of my favourites have this element, including a small army of giant ants and some strange tentacled beasts, draped over the rocks.

Another thing I really like is the use of materials by some of the sculptures. The giant tentacular monster, for example, is made from thousands of bottle tops (left). There may well have been an environmental statement here too, about the amount of plastic (and plastic bottles specifically) that wash up on beaches. There were also some fantastic wooden birds made from old bits of furniture etc.

Another material that always seems popular is super shiny metal, which reflects the viewer, landscape and/or bits of the art itself in interesting ways. Last year, for example, there were some invisible dogs on the beach. This year, the sculptures included some shiny metal cylinders that mirrored flat discs into surprisingly three dimensional images.

It was a glorious weekend for the most part and so the coastal walk sections were predictably crammed with people. If you have the opportunity (as we did last year) to go off-peak, it is highly recommended. I’m already looking forward to going back and seeing what I missed the first time around. More photos on Google+.