tl;dr

Distance travelled by various modes of transport during my two-week holiday in the USA:

• Planes: 11,952 miles (LHR-ORD; ORD-IND; IND-ORD; ORD-SFO; SFO-ORD; ORD-LHR)
• Trains: 75 miles (Woodstock, IL to Chicago; LHR to Paddington)
• Automobiles: 1127 miles (Wales-Hackney (and return journey); Hackney-LHR; Indianapolis-Chicago (bus, return); Chicago-Woodstock; SFO airport connections; San Francisco-Carmel (return), San Francisco-Yountville (return))

This is disregarding some short cab and bus rides, so the “automobile” figure is an underestimate.

Personal

It was all Matt’s fault. Skittles and vodka, together at last. Toby and I decided we had to try this for ourselves. At 4:55pm the suggestion was made; by 5:15pm we were back from Asda.

(tucked away behind a clickthrough because of copious pictures)

Read more…

Food

Well, that didn’t quite go as planned.

What is supposed to happen is the chilli paste sinks down into the jar and a layer of clear vinegar forms on top, which you skim off. This vinegar will contain a good chunk of the capsaicin from the chillis in it (this is the chemical which gives chillis their hot flavour), which calms the sauce down. Except I have no vinegar layer, for whatever reason. So I have an entire jar of very potent, rather sour sauce.

Not that it’s unpleasant — it’s rather tasty, in fact, I just ate a teaspoon of it — but it’s probably not all that useful as a table sauce. I might freeze most of it in ice cube trays and use it as an additive to curries and suchlike. The original recipe says this will keep for months in the fridge but even so I’m not sure I’d get through it all.

Food

I’ve just caught a few of the new Currys advertising spots on Sky One — they sponsor The Simpsons and Futurama now after Domino’s dropped out last year (details).

I’ve seen three of these spots:

• A guy bolts a very large, glossy flatscreen TV to the wall over his mantlepiece. Channel surfing, he finds an exercise program and starts to jump around. Presumably dislodged by his antics, it falls from the wall and shatters to the floor, taking a vase with it for good measure. Cut to a Currys delivery van with two guys who proceed to bolt a new TV to the wall for him.
• An elderly gent is struggling to put his new TV into the back of his car in a car park. Balancing it with one hand while he opens the tailgate, it crashes to the floor. Warily, he shakes the box, accompanied by the sound of broken glass. Cut to “need a hand putting your TV in the car? We can help!”
• A lady is walking through a car park with a large TV in a box. She trips and the box crashes to the concrete. Cut to the same catchphrase.

All three of these ads have really well captured foley; really prominent crunchy shattering glass and plastic.

Now, I understand that they are trying to pitch Currys as a place with value-add services, like carrying things to your car and installing TVs for you. But the strongest mental link they’ve made in my brain is between “Currys” and “very expensive, very broken broken TVs”. Is it me, or is that somewhat wonky marketing?

Professional

Well, not quite, but it did feel that way.

Started on Saturday afternoon when my friend Scott came around. As we were making a curry for tea, I followed his advice and made up a batch of his curry base sauce. He’s taken and modified a number of recipes from a currymaking forum (I can’t remember the name, unfortunately); they are aimed at reproducing, not authentic Indian cuisine, but rather “authentic” takeaway curry. As such, most of the recipes start with a generic base sauce you make in large quantity in advance and typically freeze in small portions. The recipe for this:

700g cooking onions, chopped into 8 pieces
4 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
15g of fresh ginger root, roughly sliced
1 red (or green) pepper, cut into 16 pieces
120g salad potatoes, peeled and halved
120g carrot, sliced (2-3 carrots)
1 large tomato, quartered
20g coriander stems, finely chopped
200ml vegetable oil
1500ml water
1 tbsp salt

2 tsp cumin powder
1.5 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp Kashmiri mirch (MDH) (or paprika as an alternative)
1 tsp Madras powder (Rajah)
0.5 tsp fenugreek powder

1. Boil all ingredients in a pan, covered, for 45 minutes.
2. Add one (400g) tin of chopped tomatoes and a further 500ml of water.
3. Liquidise thoroughly.
4. Simmer rapidly for a further 30 minutes to reduce volume to around half; you are aiming for 2.65 litres in volume (a depth of 7cm in a 22cm soup pan; go go pi-r-squared).

It looks like this before reduction:

Note the use of vegetable oil, rather than the more traditional ghee. I’m going to try a smaller batch with ghee; Scott thinks it would be too rich. He could well be right.

Then we got drunk and played the drums:

Growing hungry, we decided to make a curry we could actually eat, rather than a vat of generic sauce which, whilst tasty, wasn’t particularly satisfying on its own. For this we followed a pathia recipe of Scott’s own devising:

600g of lamb steaks, diced and pre-fried in one ladle of base sauce and some oil

3 ladles of base sauce
1 onion, finely diced
2 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tbs brown sugar
½ a lemon, cut into wedges
2 plum tomatoes, cut into wedges
Fresh coriander (to taste, as much or as little as you like)
3 tbs vegetable oil
1 tsp mustard seeds

Make a paste of the following ingredients in a blender:
3 fresh or 4 dried red chillies
4 garlic cloves
2 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp turmeric
½ tsp chilli powder

1. Warm base sauce through.
2. Heat oil and fry onion until golden.
3. Add the mustard seeds to the pan and wait for them to pop, then add the paste,  fry for a few minutes. Add red wine vinegar (and stand back from fumes!)
4. Turn up the heat and add 1 ladle of base sauce to the pan and allow it to boil.
5. Add the brown sugar and lemon and a second ladle of base sauce to the pan, keeping the heat up and the contents of the pan moving. Bring back to the boil.
6. Add the pre-cooked lamb. Add a ladle of water if needed to stop the sauce sticking, but make sure it’s hot before moving on.
7. Add the third ladle of base sauce to the pan along with the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.
8. Keep the pan on the hob, cooking through until you get your preferred consistency.
9. Just before removing from the heat, stir through the chopped coriander.

We served this with this pilau rice recipe — which requires timing just a fraction too precise to tackle after half a bottle of Rioja and a few rum’n'cokes. Sorry, guys who ate my overcooked rice.

Here’s the final dish:

The curry there has too much lemon in; being of a “chuck it in” mentality by this point we put the entire lemon in, but it came out just a little too sour. Temperature was just right though, the perfect pathia being (in my opinion) slightly too hot to eat comfortably but so tasty you can’t stop either.

Then we played more drums:

Sunday, following a cooked breakfast, Scott went home and I made a roast dinner with Toby. Whilst waiting for the chicken to roast we thought we’d make some chilli sauce to this recipe:

1. Place chillis in blender
2. Add enough vinegar (the colourless stuff, distilled malt vinegar)
3. Add handful of salt
4. (Optional) add tomato puree, garlic, sugar, and/or anything else
5. Blend, transfer to saucepan
6. Bring to boil for 10 minutes
7. Transfer to a jar and leave covered with a cloth (but with the lid off) for a week
8. Skim the vinegar from the top of the mix and refrigerate

This is what it looked like before blending:

The stuff is… whatever you call it. Not fermenting. Resting perhaps? Anyway, it’s resting now, but I can confirm it’s pretty damned hot (there were a number of bird’s eye chillis in there, so that’s unsurprising).

Food

Sadly, I have a broken dishwasher. It runs, but the water is cold. I’d assumed the element was broken but after speaking to a repair engineer today he told me that if that was the case, he wouldn’t expect it to run at all — he’d expect to see an error code reported. He guessed it would be the logic board, and that it’d be beyond economical repair, and that he’d want £25 to come and check it out and confirm this.

Damn, I thought to myself, and went searching for someone who’d do me a free estimate before I throw it out and buy a new one. I came across RepairCare. I entered my type of appliance (dishwasher), my make (Siemens), and my postcode and voila — I have a fixed-price any-repair quotation of £104 and a form asking for my contact and credit card details. Now apart from my friend Matt’s suggestion that I remove everything but the cutlery basket and say to the engineer “there it is, please supply all the parts you need”, I thought this sounded too good to be true. A quote I’d had earlier for the element being changed (which I understand is a fairly routine job) was a little under £100, so I had almost nothing to lose by using RepairCare for even a routine repair — and they had almost nothing to gain and a lot to lose for a complex repair. Suspicious, I checked the Terms & Conditions:

11. We reserve the right to cancel a repair if on inspection or during the repair of the product it is deemed beyond economical repair, or when parts are ordered from a supplier and they are unable to fulfil the order. In such instances we will refund (to your credit card) any monies you have paid less a callout charge of £40.00 (inc VAT).

I emailed them to clarify how they decide what constitutes “beyond economical repair” on a nearly five-year-old dishwasher but they did not reply.

I think this borders on false advertising and an excuse to charge a lot of people a £40 callout charge when they have been sold, according to their FAQ:

Q. What’s included in the quote?

A. We use fixed pricing; this means that the amount you are quoted for the repair includes all of the following:

• Call out
• Evaluation by a qualified engineer
• Labour
• All required parts
• Professional safety check
• 3 month guarantee on all work

The FAQ page makes no notice of this beyond economical repair clause. I feel this is deceitful and would advise others to deal with this company cautiously. I understand that RepairCare need this clause to protect themselves from (potentially) completely rebuilding appliances, but I feel it should be much more prominent on the site.

Personal

Via Charlie Stross, Jim MacDonald, and msia comes a list of items it would be a good idea to have stockpiled at home in case you get influenza. Bottom line is, despite your tendency to roll your eyes at the media hysteria about bird ‘flu, there genuinely is an enhanced risk of it and you don’t want to have to try and get hold of this stuff after getting sick. But don’t panic, says Bruce Sterling.

1. pain and fever reducer of your choice — ibuprofen is generally well-tolerated, while aspirin is more likely to cause stomach upset
2. decongestant (pseudoephedrine-based)
3. antihistamine (like Bendadryl — in case you get some whacked-out allergic reaction while your immune system is in a tizzy)
4. cough suppressant
5. cough expectorant
6. long-keeping juices, clear soups/consommes – easily-digestible, easily-prepared, long-keeping staple foods (you’d be surprised how good Cream of Rice can taste)
7. bottled water
8. a basic clean-up kit for infectious spills/vomit, etc.: bleach, a few sponges, some small plastic bin liners, a roll or two of paper towels, and a small bucket (in fact, everything may fit inside the bucket, how convenient!)
9. table salt (to mix with water to help keep your electrolytes up) and table sugar (ditto). Mix 5cc of salt and 40cc of sugar into 1 litre of water.
10. vitamin C in some readily-available form — a jar of chewable vitamins is fine (see above)
11. some extra boxes of tissues
12. some extra rolls of toilet paper / loo paper / bog roll
13. a thermometer that you know how to use and read — one that you can’t is not going to be so useful to you. (Wee digital thermometers are easy to find, btw., and no mercury and glass waiting to break and so on.)
14. a ballpoint pen and a small notebook, for keeping track of vital signs and symptoms in case you need the reference
15. backup/reserve supplies of any medications you take on a regular basis, on the theory that you may be too ill to get to a pharmacy to get a refill when you need one; a great many disaster preparedness folks generally recommend that people keep a one-month backup supply of meds around anyway Just In Case
16. stomach-settlers of your choice: if you like Rolaids or Pepto-Bismol, great, but you might also think about things like dried peppermint (peppermint tea), candied or dried ginger, and dried catnip (catnip tea)
17. rubbing alcohol and gauze pads or cotton balls/cotton wool — can be useful in reducing fevers
18. a copy of the Merck Manual of Medical Information (Home Edition) — one of the single most useful books any household can own, can help you know the difference between, say, “just a cough” and pneumonia
19. a copy of Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook — an unbelievably useful basic diagnosis, treatment, and prevention handbook for common health care issues

Also worth reading is How To Wash Your Hands. Spoiler: antibacterial soap does more harm than good.

Personal

I feel sorry for whatever poor fool buys it and mistakes this for a table sauce. Sloshing it liberally over a plateful of food is a good way to render that plateful inedible.

(photo taken in Asda Cwmbran)

Personal

I’ve struggled with this in the past, usually getting the quantity of water/stock/time/heat just right. Last night I tried this recipe from Delia Smith and it worked flawlessly. Here’s exactly what I did:

1. soak 275ml of Basmati rice for 1/2 hr in a few changes of water (Delia says this is not necessary)
2. grind 2 cardamon pods, 3/4 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2tsp coriander seeds
3. using a large frying pan with a lid, toast the spices for 1 min over a high heat
4. reduce heat, add 1tbsp groundnut oil and one small finely chopped onion, fry for 3 min
5. add rice to pan and toss to cover the rice in the oil
6. add one pint of boiling water with one chicken stock cube dissolved in it (supposed to make 3/4 of a pint, so it’s weak stock)
7. add one bay leaf and a 1 inch piece of cinnamon stick
8. stir the rice just once, gently
9. put the lid on (I wrapped it in a teatowel for a tight fit) and put on your smallest hob on the lowest heat
10. after 15 min, all the liquid was absorbed (40min for brown rice says Delia)
11. it’ll keep with the lid on like that for a while
12. before serving, fluff the grains with a fork

Delia says this serves “four to six”. I say it serves three, maybe four, because I am fat. It could probably use some saffron or yellow food colouring for cosmetic purposes, but it tasted very nice. Compared to what I did in the past, using a broad frying pan and not stirring it were probably the reasons this came out better.

Food, Games

Steve has sent me word of another horrible/ingenious bacon related recipe: bacon caramel.

Essentially: make caramel, fry bacon until crisp, mix into liquid caramel with some roasted almonds, and leave to set. The question of “why would you do this” I leave to a higher power.

Bacon, Food