Charles's Bits and Bobs

The Tudge Rum Rocket Cocktail

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 09:04:00 +0000

For a cocktail with a difference, take one champagne glass

Add 4 ice cubes
One two caps of dark rum
One cap of Bottle Green Lemon and Gingergrass Cordial
Fill to the top with soda water
Add one slice of lemon

Cava or Processco makes an interesting replacement for the soda water

Walking Up Kilimanjaro

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:02:00 +0000

On May 10th, I'm attempting to walk to the top of Kilimanjaro.

I'm raising money for Practical Action, so please consider sponsoring me via my JustGiving page

If you'd like to know a little more about the trip, I've setup a microsite at www.charlesvskili.me.uk

Mozzarella, Parmesan and Goats Cheese Macaroni

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:33:00 +0000

Mac & Cheese by Dalboz17,
on Flickr

The cheeses listed here are the ones that I like to use, but you can use an combination of hard and soft cheeses with different melting points. The goats cheese won't melt, so you end up with little pocket of goats cheese

With the ingredients, you can vary them as you see fit - this normally feeds 2 hungry adults and kids

250g of macaroni
2oz (56g) of butter
2oz (56g) of flour
1 pint of full of milk
1 pack of pancetta cubes (or bacon)
250g of grated mozzarella or cheddar cheese
50g of parmesan
50g of goats cheese - cubed
1 teaspoon of corn flour

Cook the macaroni in a large saucepan of boiling salted water for 8-10 minutes; drain well and set aside in an ovenproof dish

Melt the butter in a microwave (or pan) and then stir the flour in until you have smooth paste

Put the milk into a pan and place on the hob. Scrape all the paste into the pan and start whisking as it gets warm. After around 5-10 minutes you'll have a thickened and smooth sauce

Gently fry the pancetta cubes until nicely browned and then mix into the macaroni so that they well distributed

Scatter the corn flour into the mozzarella or cheddar and mix with your hands. This stops the fat and proteins separating and gives you a nice shiny sauce

Pour the mozzarella or cheddar into the sauce and whisk quickly until all the cheese is melted

Add the parmesan and whisk

Finally add the goats cheese and whisk

Pour the cheese sauce over the macaroni and add some more mozzarella or cheddar over the top followed by some parmesan

Place under a hot grill until bubbling.

The corn flour trick came from the excellent How to Cook Like Heston

Made in Mumbles Website goes live

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:46:00 +0000

Another quick post, this time to announce that my wifes website has finally gone live.

Her business Made in Mumbles, offers a wide range of fresh flower arrangements for any occasion delivered to anywhere in Swansea.

She is also running a series of Christmas flower arranging courses, throughout November

How to stop people tagging you in Facebook Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:11:00 +0000

If you'd prefer all of your friends on Facebook not to be informed when someone else tags you, follow these simple instructions.

Unfortunately there is no way to stop people from tagging you apart from leaving Facebook

1) Goto Account > Privacy Settings

2) Select the Customise Options at the bottom

3) Select Photos and videos you're tagged in option halfway down the page

4) Select the Customise Option

5) Select Only Me

6) Select Save Settings

It's good to be blogging again

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:46:00 +0000

Not much has been happening on this blog recently as I've been devoting my attention to my new company blog Always Be Testing which contains lot of useful hints and tips about internet marketing

Got 12 posts under my belt so far and determined to keep up the momentum

Helping Small Business

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:09:00 +0000

In these tough times, it's even harder for small businesses to find the money to either build or maintain a website.

We've been testing out a new framework for the Wordpress platform called Thesis to create a website that can be quickly and easily updated by our clients.

We're pleased to announce the launch of our first one. Built for John Roberts who runs wine tasting courses and events in swansea, it allow him to quickly edit the pages and he'll be writing a blog shortly

Brined & Roasted Pork Belly

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:01:00 +0000

This recipe is adapted from the one out of the excellent Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson. I've reduced the amount of brine and cut the brining time down to 1 day.

The brine

200g caster sugar
300g sea salt
6 cloves
6 black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
2 litres water

Bring all the brine ingredients together in a pot and bring to the boil so the sugar and salt melt. Pour into a container and allow to cool.

The Recipe

2kg piece of pork belly, with skin on
2 onions,
splash of olive oil
a pinch of coarse sea salt

Get your butcher to score the rind of a 1.5kg to 2kg pork belly or do it yourself with a sharp stanley knife
Place the pork belly into a large piece of tupperware (Lakeland Plastics 6 Litre containers are great for this)
Cover with the brine and leave in the fridge for 24 hours
Chop the onions and pace on the base of a roasting tray.
Lay the belly on top. Rub the skin with a little oil and then the salt.
Place in a medium to hot oven for approximately 1.5-2 hours.
When cooked you should have crispy skin on top of soft and giving fatty flesh.
Lift off the onions and serve.

Flatbreads Cooked On A Barbecue / BBQ

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:43:00 +0000

The basic recipe comes from the second Moro cookbook - Casa Moro and while they talk about cooking it in your oven, I think its even better cooked over a charcoal BBQ

Ingredients

450g strong white bread flour
3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 teaspoon dried yeast ( Hovis Fast Action Yeast is the best I have found so far)
300ml warm water
2 tablespoons olive oil

Place the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl.
Mix one tablespoon of oil in
Dissolve the yeast in the water and pour into the flour a bit at a time while mixing. You can do this by hand, or in a food processor with a dough hook
Around halfway through, add the second tablespoon of olive oil
Now transfer the dough to a floured surface and continue to knead well for about 5 minutes until the dough is no longer tacky, but soft, elastic and smooth.Add more flour a little at a time if it is too sticky.
Oil a large bowl and place the dough inside it and cover with a cloth to rest for an hour in a warm place.
Divide the dough into four and, on a very well floured surface, roll out each piece into a rough circle 3mm thick.

If you don't have a airing cupboard, boil some water and pour into a large mug. Place this into a microwave with the bowl and close the door. The steam will keep the microwave warm and help the bread rise

If cooking on a BBQ

Get your charcoal really hot - you need a good red glow from them and you shouldn't be able to hold your hand over them for more than a second
Put your circles onto the griddle and watch like a hawk - after a couple of minutes the bottoms will start to crisp up and you'll need to flip them over to avoid them getting too burnt

If cooking in the oven

Transfer to two large baking sheets that have been lightly floured.
Put in the oven immediately and bake for 5-10 minutes until the bread is cooked.
Each bread should partially bubble up and colour slightly, yet not be totally crisp.

If cooking in a frying pan

Take a solid frying pan (not a flimsy cheap non-stick pan) and place it on your hob for 5 or 10 minutes to get really hot
Lightly oil it with some sunflower oil on piece of kitchen roll
Place the bread in the pan and cook for a couple of minutes each side

America... Wake Up and Listen to Warren

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:02:00 +0000

It seems if you want to polarise America, get people talking about reforming the healthcare system.

Now one of the richest and most succesful men in America, Warren Buffet has waded in.

He has compared the runaway cost of heathcare to an economic tapeworm and pointed out that America spends 17% of its GDP on healthcare wheras other countries with more centralised healthcare systems only spend 9%

Tricky one for the Republicans / Right wingers / Tea party folk who've been using term socalised medicine to imply its socalism via the backdoor.

When someone such as Warren Buffet who is:

1) Very successful investor and businessman

2) Clearly not a socialist

Says something needs to be done, it'll be interesting to see how the right counters this

RIP Michael Foot

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:25:00 +0000

Growing up in the 1980's in one of the most conservative parts of the country made me a bit of a Tory boy, luckily a stage I quickly grew out of it.

Back in the early 80's Michael Foot was seen as a bit of a dangerous leftie who would leave us at the mercy of the Soviet Red Army tanks ready to invade.

While I still disagree with some of his views, the more I read about him, the more time and respect I had for a man who clearly stood by his views and principles even if meant time in the political wilderness

While most people thought of him as a pacifist for his views on unilateral nucelar disarmament, they didn't know that he was equally vocal on the use of force when he felt it was right.

For example;

In 1940, his booklet denouncing appeasement sold over 250,000 copies
He was vocal supporter of Nato involvement to stop aggression in Yugoslavia

A few more politicans such as him who are prepared to stand up and not worry about what others think should surely raise the publics respect for politicans.

Today's obituary in the Guardian sums up his life pretty well

Would A Hung Parliament Be Such A Bad Thing?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:24:00 +0000

With a general election now only a couple of months ago, it is possible that we may end up with a hung parliament for the first time since WW2

While the joint wisdom (and I use that term very lighly) of the Daily Mail and currency traders don't seem to think so, would be be such a bad thing?

Timothy Garton Ash in todays Guardian points out a couple of very salient facts

1) World War 2 was won with a coalition parliament

2) Germany who has the strongest economy in Europe has known nothing but coalition governments

His conclusion is that it would strengthen parliament and take back powers from what has become an overstrong executive

The full article is here: Don't be afraid of a hung parliament

Laverbread and Cockle Gratin Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:37:00 +0000

I first had this at the King Arthur Hotel in the Gower and have been trying to replicate this ever since. Laverbread may be a little tricky to get hold of unless you live in Wales, but its worth getting hold of.

For this need you'll need the following ingredients

150g pot of Laverbread - Swansea market is excellent for this if nearby
200-400g of cleaned cooked cockles - you can buy these from fishmongers
4 slices of day old white bread
4 slices of good free range bacon

150g Strong Cheddar - Little Black Bomber is perfect for this

2 oz butter
2 oz of flour
1 pint of milk

To make it:

Turn your oven to 190C / 375F
If the cockles appear a little gritty, run them under the tap, otherwise leave
Melt 2 oz of the butter in the microwave in a large bowl and add 2 oz of flour
Mix together to create a paste / roux and add the milk and whisk ensuring that all the paste has been mixed in
Microwave on full power for 1 minute, take out and whisk
Repeat until the sauce is starting to thicken
While making the sauce grate your strong cheddar and put to one side
Remove any rind from the bacon, chop up and put to one side
Remove the crusts from the bread, tear up and put into a food processor
Pulse until you have fine breadcrumbs
Once you white sauce starts to thicken, add the cockles, bacon and cheese
Now add a spoonful of laverbread and taste. Laverbread is fairly strong tasting so try the sauce and see what you think. You should be able to taste it without it being overpowering
Pour the white sauce mixture into an overproof dish and sprinke the breadcrumbs over the top
Put in oven and bake for 15-20 mins
Serve with some crusty rolls which can be torn up and dipped in

The Maths behind Alice in Wonderland

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:24:00 +0000

Ever since Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was first published, people have tried to interpret exactly what it means. The Freudians had a field day trying to unravel the dark journey into the world of the subconscious.

A recent article in the New Scientist magazine suggests they may have been barking up the wrong tree. Research by Melanie Bayley suggests that the book was a biting satire on the radical new ideas in mathematics that were emerging towards the end of the 19th century.

Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Dodgeson., a mathematician at Christ Church Oxford. It appears he was rather conservative and disliked the new style of maths that detached itself from the physical world.

While some of the maths went right over my head, its a fascinating read into how someone communicated their ideas through fiction, allegory and story telling.

Read the article - Alice's secrets in Wonderland

Day of the Triffids Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:17:00 +0000

Any director who attempts to update a classic text or film is never going to please everyone. The purists will insist that you stick to every word in the book, whereas an audience who has never seen or heard of the work, will compare it to more modern material.

Herein lies the problem of trying to adapt John Wyndhams classic Day of the Triffids.

Originally written in 1951, it has been adapted several times. Anyone 35+ in the UK is most likely to have come across the BBC TV series version, which while it looks dated now, certainly felt very scary back in 1981.

Over the last two nights, the BBC has been showing its updated version of the book. While keeping the central storyline, they have added new characters and updated to include contemporary issues such as global warming.

Personally, I think they have done a pretty good job and keep the central tenant that it mankind messes with mother earth too much, its going to come back and bite (a theme running through several John Wyndham books).

Whats interesting is that while some people like it, others are critical of it for the following reasons

1) Bad special effects - for those people weaned on the Matrix, the effects are not going come on guys and girls, its always going to be tricky to make the triffids really scary

2) Plot holes - While the ending makes no sense at all, the rest of it was all pretty plausible. I'm not sure what people were expecting from a story that deals with society collapse - perhaps they had the same issues with 28 Days Later.

I'd recommend anyone who watched the film to either

Go out and buy the book

or if you don't have time, read the Wikipedia summary and make up your own mind

Getting People To Switch

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:15:00 +0000

Take a look at what you do everyday on the web and in the real world and you soon work out that you constantly go back to the same place time and time again.

Whether its

Using Google to find web sites
Buying books from Amazon
Shopping at the same supermarket

Why do we do this? Most likely is that these sites or suppliers don't let us down and do what we ask of them, so why bother taking the time to find something else that is probably only as good.

Seth Godins latest blog post Can't Top This, suggests that if you really want to someone to switch to you come up with something that the big providers didn't think was important

A Different Type of Lateral Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:44:00 +0000

I've heard a lot said about lateral, blue sky and out of the box thinking, but rarely seen it put into action.

The Economist reports on an project in High Point, North Carolina designed to make a rough neighbourhood liveable in again. By adopting a new and alternative strategy, they have been able to make a difference.

The area had been taken over by drug dealers and the police department standard reaction was to come in once in a while like an invading army, grab the dealers and leave again. While this shut down drug dealing for a couple of hours, it did poisoned communutity relations

But then they tried something different. On the advice of David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, they started talking to community leaders in West End. They found out who the street drug-dealers were. There were fewer than they had expected: only 16, of whom three were habitually violent. Patiently, they compiled dossiers on each of them. Then they arrested and prosecuted the violent ones, and invited the rest in for a chat.

The young dealers were shown the evidence against them, and given a choice. If they stopped dealing drugs and carrying guns, they would not be prosecuted. A “community co-ordinator” sat down with each of them and asked him what he needed to go straight: a job? Drug treatment? A place to stay? An alarm clock to get to work on time? The community promised to help with all these things. The dealers’ neighbours and even grandmothers stood up and told them that what they were doing was wrong, and had to stop. Then prosecutors warned them that if they did not stop that day, they would be sent to jail, possibly for the rest of their lives.

It worked. Nearly all the dealers reformed, bar the odd bit of shoplifting. You can still buy drugs behind closed doors in High Point, but the intervention was never about drugs. It was about making the neighbourhood liveable again. Fears that the open-air drug market would simply move elsewhere proved unfounded. As the same technique was tried in other neighbourhoods and for other types of crime, such as gang-related muggings, the city’s overall violent crime rate fell noticeably, from 8.7 per 1,000 people in 2003 to 7.3 in 2008.

14% Drop In People Believing Climate Change Is Man Made

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:38:00 +0000

This weeks George Monbiot column in Guardian explores the worrying trend that more and more people think that global warming is not man made.

As he says

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

Its worth reading the whole article, especially for the work by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker who suggest that the more we get confronted by bad news, the more strongly we stick to our own world view and reject ideas that suggest that we may need to change.

As he says in the final paragraph..

And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the last two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

When Comics Are A Force For Good

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:17:00 +0000

There's an interesting new exhibition taking place at Lazarides Gallery on Greek Street in Soho, London.

Entitled Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption the exhibition

"brings together an eclectic mix of comic book and graphic novel work in a bid to politicise a new generation of activists through the medium of popular comic culture. It will feature a powerful range of political stories created by some of the world’s best comic and graphic artists such as Dave McKean, Pat Mills, Peter Kuper and Dan Goldman. It will also include a collaborative piece of work by acclaimed musician and writer Dev Hynes (aka Lightspeed Champion) and Luke Pearson, the winner of the 'Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption' Competition which ran back in August.

There's also an anthology of the best of the work available from the 5th of November

Ctrl.Alt.Shift was setup last year by the international development agency Christian Aid and aims to use art – whether comics, film or music – to create a new generation of activists.

The Guardian covered this this in an article called Pow! Comic-strip heroes fight against corruption

Think You're Having a Bad Day?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:40:00 +0000

If so, try reading this sobering article about life in Katine, Uganda and how its residents put up with issues that are hundreds time worse than what most of us have to deal with with on day to day basis.

To quote from the concluding paragraph

I've learned a little of something I have seen a lot of: patience. Many of the women I have met have a capacity for endurance that is extraordinary. No doubt they know that frustration can send people mad – remember the last time you were exasperated by some incompetent service, and then multiply that a thousand times. In lives this constrained, survival requires a strict emotional economy. And yet, along with that so often comes a wonderful warmth and an irrepressible humour – so many smiles, so much laughter. It is why every time you leave, you immediately want to come back – because the immediacy and strength of human connection, often so elusive at home, is tangible there.

More Technical Support Humour

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:39:00 +0000

Another cartoon from Private Eye

Perhaps I'm emphasising a little too much with the son here, but if you're going to act as unofficial technical support, you might as well have a uniform

What Does the Financial Sector Actually Produce

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:27:00 +0000

Considering the billions that have been poured into the world financial system to stabilise and cancel out all the bad bets that the financial whizz kids made, you have to ask what does the financial sector produce.

Go back 40 years, before the Big Bang and the stock market did a good job of allowing companies to raise money via share issues. While it was a bit of all old boys club and insider trading common place, decisions made on the markets didn't reverberate as much as they do today. That money would be used to invest in more plant and machinery and ideally employ more people.

Skip forward to today and what happens to the trillions flowing around the system. While some is still used to invest in new plant, you do wonder what the money invested in credit default option and swaps was for and for whom.

Add into the fact that a lot of the investments were made by banks on their own accounts and you start to question the actual benefits of the financial services. They were too blind or stupid to see the huge risks they were taking, yet we had no choice but to bail them out as otherwise they would have taken us all down. According to the Observer today, the FSA was hours from shutting down cash machines

Their defenders will point out all the tax they have paid over the years, but surely this is no where near the money we have paid out to bail them out.

One last thing - just think of the worlds problems we could have made a start on solving, if all the brain power that went into building algorythmic trading systems went into looking at the issues of global poverty, clean water and climate change

The Secrets Behind Technical Support

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:21:00 +0000

If you're one of those people who ends up doing technical support for parents, grand parents, wives etc simply because your job has some degree of IT, I think you'll appreicate this image from the guys at the web comic xkcd

The Difference between OK and Great

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:28:00 +0000

Producing something that people will remember always requires a little more effort than doing something that is just OK.

Seth Godin uses the example of cooking an egg to perfectly illustrate the difference between the two in his blog post - Quality, scale and the regular kind

Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

noreply@blogger.com (Charles Meaden) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:19:00 +0000

Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

The local greengrocers have started stocking Gower broad beans and after last years failures to make an interesting salad out of them, I went in search of another recipe.

The following is an minor adaptation of a Nigel Slater recipe from his The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen book and I've reduced the amounts needed.

800g broad beans in their pods
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
juice of half a small lemon
Small handful of dill

1 .Pod the beans and drop into boiling water for 8 mins
2. Drain and then pulse to a coarse puree in a food processor
3. Add olive oil, lemon juice and the dill
4. Pulse until you it is almost smooth