It rained on Tuesday. That’s something of an understatement, as I have been told that four inches of rain came down in less than an hour. And, as it turned out, most of that seemed to end up on my roof. Coming home to a leaking roof is not a pleasant experience.

One year on, I’ve started turning my eye to what work the house is going to need in the near and medium term. I had already planned on fixing and extending the guttering (when the roof was repaired on Thursday, the contractor said it was likely due to all the pitched shingled roofs sending rushing water down onto one spot, where the concentrated force caused a crack in the flat metal roof below. I didn’t even know I had a part-metal roof, to be honest!), but it’s now a higher priority.

I’d also like to get the rotting and exposed windows in the back room replaced, though over the weekend, this has bloomed into an idea of adding doors that open out onto a hypothetical deck. I can get a little ahead of myself with my plans, so probably best to start out with just getting the broken windows fixed.

And then there’s the crawlspace. When we bought the house, the inspection report said that we should get a vapour barrier installed. So we hired somebody to do that (as well as some other tasks). Unfortunately, he did a terrible job and then disappeared when we tried to get him to correct the problems. A year later and I thought it might be time to find somebody to do the job properly. My first quote involved an eye-popping figure of $17,000. As you might imagine…I’m open to trying to find other, somewhat less terrifying offers.

Also, I guess as the clawfoot tub is not going anywhere, I should try and get the shower attachment fixed at some point…so much to do!

Okay, so there’s times where I might go a little overboard. The idea was that I was having some people over on Saturday night (including a visiting Tammy, complete with her two GIANT DOGS on a road trip), and I was going to try and replicate a favourite from Kokyu: their Korean BBQ spare rib slides with fried tater tots. And along the way, I thought it was also time to experiment with the vacuum sealer. So in the vacuum sealer, we made:

• Asian slaw
• Pickled cucumber
• Compressed watermelon
• Compressed watermelon infused with tequila
• Compressed watermelon infused with vodka
• Compressed pineapple
• Compressed pineapple infused with rum
• Compressed mango with spicy ginger beer
• Maraschino cherries (Whole Foods ran a sale on Friday: $2 for a pound of cherries. My fridge now has 2kg of cherries inside)

COMPRESS ALL THE THINGS!

Oh, and I also used the sealer to help make ice-cream. Time for a recipe break!

Everybody loves speculoos biscuits. And a lot of people love biscoff, where those biscuits are ground down, mixed with fat and soy lecithin and turned into a glorious spread of deliciousness. In the further interests of science, I wondered what would happen if I changed their state once again: from biscuit, to spread, to ice-cream.

The recipe was adapted from Eddie Shepherd’s chocolate ice cream recipe:

• 210g cream
• 125g biscoff spread
• 75g caster sugar
• 20g butter
• 115g whole milk
• 55g egg yolks
• pinch of salt

It’s a fairly easy recipe, providing you have a chamber vacuum sealer and a sous-vide set up (though probably manageable through traditional means too!). Melt the cream, butter, and biscoff together on a very low heat until mixed together. Blend together with all the other ingredients, pour into a vacuum seal bag, seal to a 40% vacuum and then cook for 20 minutes in a water bath at 82˚C. Chill in an ice bath, massaging the bag a few times as it cools. Store in the fridge overnight, and then churn for fifteen minutes or so in your standard home ice-cream maker. Leave it to set for a few hours in the fridge for serving.

BONUS RECIPE!

Speculoos Inception: Spoon out a table spoon of the ice-cream and sandwich it between two speculoos biscuits. YESSSSSS

(if you do have the equipment, it’s worth doing it this way - there’s very little active work involved, you never have to worry about over-cooking the custard, and the ice-cream was favourably received by all, including those that normally abstain from sugar).

And then came a question: what would happen if you put pound cake in a vacuum sealer? We made a sacrifice. FOR SCIENCE.

It’s…odd. It almost ends up looking like slices of cheese. Surprisingly tasty…and as Stacie pointed out, you could potentially toast it afterwards to make cake crostini. Which make happen in the near future.

Although the dinner went well, one occupant of the house was not happy. Oscar took one look at Max and spent the day hiding, either outside, or jammed tight under a bed. He never even saw Rory, which is probably just as well, seeing as how he’s almost twice the size of Max. As I write, he’s making rounds around the house, just making sure that the scary monsters have gone.

Anyway, I also had to go to Chapel Hill this weekend. Chapel Hill Comics has been my comic shop haunt going all the way back to 2002. They even held both series of Phonogram on a pull list for me when I was coming to NC twice a year, which was pretty amazing seeing as how I wouldn’t pick them up for about six months. The owner, Andrew Neal, has decided to sell the shop on after eleven years of running the business, and today was his last day of ownership (he’ll still be around over the next few months to advise the new owner). So I had to go and say goodbye to the owner of the first comic shop I’ve regularly visited that has lasted longer than six months (I…had a very bad record in the 90s to the point where I felt bad visiting any).

Also, lunch at IP3. It is never a disappointment, but today, at 12 noon, it was already full of Argentina fans with drums, dancing, and singing. Plus four Germans in the corner looking a bit sheepish. I’m guessing that a few hours later, the Germans had a little more to smile about…

This is heavy. 45kg of heaviness, actually. It took about an hour to move from the front porch to the back room and unbox (moving it wasn’t too much of a problem. Lifting it out of the box, on the other hand, was a bit more involved). This is a chamber vacuum sealer - imagine a FoodSaver but so much more powerful, able to pickle things in thirty seconds flat.

(cucumbers pickled in a vinegar brine for thirty seconds)

However, if you’ve seen Heston Blumenthal work with chocolate for any length of time, you’ll know he’s fond of making Aero chocolate. Back long ago during In Search of Perfection, he used a household hoover and a space-saving bag. These days, at The Fat Duck, he uses…a chamber vacuum sealer. The process is fairly simple: you melt (and optionally temper) chocolate, add a small amount of oil, and then you add bubbles, normally by pouring the chocolate into a whipper and charging it with several canisters of nitrous oxide. You then expel the chocolate into a container or molds…and then place it in the vacuum sealer. A vacuum is pulled and the chocolate is left to set.

My sealer has a limit on how long it can pull a vacuum - ninety seconds maximum. Once the air rushes back in, it’ll cause the still-liquid chocolate to explode everywhere. But, if you turn the sealer off mid-cycle, it’ll retain the vacuum. So Aero can still happen! Unfortunately, whilst I got the chocolate to initially rise about three times in volume, I didn’t leave enough time for it to set properly, so after thirty minutes, I released the vacuum and got this:

Which looks like what happens anybody tries to make a soufflé on MasterChef. Sadness. Still, next time, I’ll leave it in there for an hour or so, and hopefully then the chocolate will have enough structure to hold steady as the air rushes back into the chamber. In the meantime, next week there will be pickling and alcohol fruits aplenty!

Another week down in Boston. I now get smiley faces drawn in my key card sleeve and everybody at the hotel knows me. And recognized a lot at the restaurant across the road. At least I haven’t been spotted in Target yet. Though I haven’t yet been to a Target in the Boston metropolitan area, so it may just be a matter of time.

Nothing that much to talk about this week, aside from mentioning that it seems you can get good deals on Scotch at SF liquor stores. Next weekend though…well…a package is going to be arriving later this week that may need to be talked about…

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much from England in this tournament, but they managed to impress with how poor they were this time around. There’s still a chance that they’ll pull off a face-saving but ultimately pointless victory over Costa Rica, but yes, another four years, another crushing disappointment, coupled with the shock that in Euro 2016, ‘fifty years of hurt’ will fit the lyrics just fine.

And I’m not even a fan of football, really.

Otherwise, it’s been a mostly quiet week. Repairs to the hail damage on my car are estimated at just below $5,000, which is an impressive third of the cost of the car itself. Hailstorms are fun, children! I’d like to say that the reason it’s so quiet is that there will be exciting news on the horizon, but I don’t think there’s anything coming up on that front. I watched fifteen year-old episodes of Law & Order and Homicide: Life on The Streets last night. Just so you know the excitement levels going on.

(which I guess is slightly unfair, since I had a great time in Charleston last week. And after this coming week, July 4th falls on a Friday, so yay - long weekend!)

Currently, I’m in RDU airport, about twenty minutes away from boarding for my monthly working visit to Boston. I’m planning on finally getting back into Boston one night during the week (probably either Tuesday or Thursday), though that depends on how successful work goes. Any and all ideas on where to eat that evening in Boston will be appreciated. As long as it’s not seafood.