“HOW MUCH?”

Quick tip: if you ever want to shock a bunch of British people into silence followed by twenty-thirty minutes of raging, telling them how much you had to pay for your MRI scan is a great way of doing it.

So, my first MRI! Lots of whomp, whomp. No results yet, so no idea what’s wrong with the foot, only that it’s very sore and I would like some idea what I need to do to fix that. If possible.

Also, I hardly slept last night at all, so today’s blog is going to suffer from that. Though it probably won’t end up being much different than usual.

Anyway, it’s been an odd week; I’ve been at home most days as I was having serious pain walking, meaning that I missed the arrival of two new people over at Mammoth Data, though they’ll still be there tomorrow, I guess (well, one will, the other will be back on his boat). I continue working on preparation for the demo we’re going to be giving in a couple of weeks time.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, I spent the days making vegan marshmallows, mixing a steel-aged cocktail (I’ll let you know how it is come the end of July!), and also, after coming across the EZTemper earlier in the week, I attempted to replicate its functionality using a water bath instead of another ~$1,000 piece of equipment. And it does work - seeding the chocolate with melted cocoa butter tempers it almost instantly (at the slight expense of changing the chocolate characteristics a little, but not so much that you’d notice). I rolled out a sheet of orange flavoured 55% chocolate mixed with feuillantine which tempered quickly and tasted pretty good. It’s not going to replace my industrial temperer for large runs, but I can see using the cocoa butter method for smaller batches (one drawback is that you still need to plan in advance, as the butter needs to sit in the water bath for a fair few hours before you can use it).

I have a rant building about TFI Friday and how I’m not ready for I Love The 1990s. But maybe that’ll keep for a few days. From what I heard about the show, though, it summed up TFI Friday almost perfectly: fun to begin with, then it petered out and got lost in Evans’ obsessions. And then you question whether the first bit was any good to begin with either…