And Still No Dark Chocolate Digestives

I stood for about a minute in the aisle at Harris Teeter looking at the gap where the dark chocolate digestives were supposed to be. Milk chocolate to the left, Hobnobs to the right, but no dark chocolate digestives. What a savage country this is.

A long weekend down. Boxes opened, rooms emptied, kitchen restocked, and yes, a new bookcase (of course). It’s going to take a while to get used to living on my own, but hopefully I won’t starve or die of malnutrition (I’d like to point out that I have ate multiple green things this weekend! Rocket and peas! Yes!). I also fixed two chairs and unscrewed a door, which makes me feel like a DIY expert or something (also, my iPhone tells me my new steel bookcase is perfectly level, so go me!). I’m sure that feeling will pass when something else goes wrong in the house.

There’s probably more to write, but I’m tired now, and I still have to do the washing up. We’ll see what September brings.

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

I can’t help imagining this song to rain and concrete vistas. New Rail Standard signage, almost, but not quite Helvetica leading the way to the platforms, the faded but defiant logotypes of British Rail speeding past, regulation digestive biscuits and the death of the post-war consensus. It went a bit bleak at the end.

It’s a Saturday night that finds me defeated, annoyed, and utterly vanquished. Too old for this, but still feeling like I should feel young enough not for it to get on my last nerve. All the things I could and should be doing just sitting there glaring, mocking me for my failures. The nights spent not sleeping.

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season

Three Years

Three years. Three houses. Three jobs (well, four technically, but three employers!).

It’s been an interesting period. Lots of changes over the last 36 months, and lots more to come, some very soon. I am very happy that I live in the age of Internet and FaceTime. Home doesn’t seem too far away when I can call any time. Mostly.

Yeah! Yeah! 10th Anniversary Special Edition

Consider this a placeholder post. A post that contains all the possible variations of the post I could make on this day, this day of all days. Of the fear of being a retromancer, as Kieron Gillen would call it. But also of the feeling that rushes through the body every time I hear that firework, a shot against the Wall of Sound, fired by an almost impossibly British amalgamation of Spector, the Manics, the fanzine girls, the fanzine boys.

Of that day in June, 2006, my favourite day in London, a day spent drinking strawberry beer with Forest Pines and Masonic Boom, watching Shimera Curves, and then dancing with Kieron and Alex De Campi in the evening.

Or the day when I saw the advert for their album and they had used one of my lines in my review for their album.

”Karl Marx with a beat. Girls Aloud with C4 strapped to their chests”

I wanted to be Paul Morley so much back then. King Mob circa the end of Invisibles crossed with Morley…but in the end it wasn’t to be me.

And I just can’t help believing, though believing sees me cursed

Even now, ten years to the day of its release, the brazenness of that title, a title that races towards a city of parody before suddenly taking flight and piercing the sky - a title that mocks itself with a knowing wink, but at the same time is more serious than anything else for those three minutes, those three minutes of revolution, of dancing, of sneering, and of looking at everything around, smiling, and digging in to fight the good fight.

This placeholder post isn’t enough. The website, updated for 2014, isn’t enough. I didn’t have enough time, so Adam Curtis is all you get for the moment. It feels just enough on the right side of Sixth Form, but there needs to be more dancing. I’ll rectify that in the months to come.

I’m wondering if I’ve already heard all the songs that’ll mean something

It wasn’t my last song, like I feared at the time. There was a night, many nights in fact, in 2008, when I would listen to Hold On Now, Youngster more times than was really healthy, or that moment in Santa Monica when I came across Tallulah for the first time. And there will be more to come.

This frequency’s my universe

And it always will be.

YEAH! YEAH!

It Rained

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!

Further Adventures With MRIs

“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…

Crazy Crazy Weekend (includes recipe!)

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!

Compressed watermelon

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

speculoos inception: we heard you like speculoos

(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.

cake slices, pre-vacuum

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.

cake slices, post-vacuum

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…

VACUUM EVERYTHING.

VP215

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.

30 second vacuum

(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:

Deflated chocolate

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!

We'll Just Pop Out To The Liquor Store

Concrete!

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…

We'll Go On Getting Bad Results

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.