I wanted to make a variety of flavours, and to leave them unsugared and dry.  The sugar can be added at a latter stage as gomme if they’re too sharp or a liqeur is desired, but yuo rarely get dry full strength fruit flavouered spirits.  Luckily we’ve got a load of blackcurrents, redcurrents and raspberries, so all I needed was spirits and glass.

I managed to pick up 2 litre Kilner jars for a super cheap £1.75 each at a sale in a local hardware shop (I should have bought an arm full thinking about it), and Aldi vodka is a very reasonable £7.99 a bottle (and far better than all the generic supermarket’s own brands).  Actually their Cronwell Gin is the same price and very good too, but I wanted to use a neutral spirit to let the flavours of the fruit come through.

Put a bottle of vodka (70cl) into each Kilner jar, the aim is to fillt he jar full and I’m betting you’ve gotmore fruit than vodka.  Pick over the fruit, remove any manky ones, give them a gentle rinse under the cold tap and then add to each jar.  Seal the lids, and once a month give the jar a swirl to mix it up (don’t break the fruit with shaking or stirring).  In six months time, strain and bottle, just in time for Christmas (ish).

Of and the names, well a Russian theme was too good to miss, so I present Raspberry Rasputin, Revolutionary Redcurrent and  Russian Ribena.

Raspberry, redcurrent and blackcurrent

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Things I discovered:

1. Swimming with a tshirt on is like being sandpapered whilst doused in salt water – just go bare.
2. Wearing swim booties that are slightly too big is like swimming in wellies.
3. You will swallow sea water, so just admit it and get good at breathing
4. Even the slightest current makes things much harder (I probably actually swam closer to three quarters of a mile)
5. Standing up when you hit land is hard

The funniest bit was when some tourist in a little motor boat came out to me (swimming beside a man in a canoe, towing my canoe) and asked if I was ok.  I was dyeing to say ” No – this bugger nicked my canoe and is now waiting for me to drown so he can have my pants!”

Actually, lesson 7: Don’t laugh at sea, inhaling sea water is horrific.

If you can spare a few quid, pop over and sponsor me, because I’ve got to get up at 6am tomorrow and do it all over again.  Here’s a picture of a red squirrel I took out of the office window which justifies getting up at this time.

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Take a 1kg ham, or gammon joint.  I used an unsmoked one, wanting to bring the spice flavour through, but a smoked one might be really good.

Pop it in a big pan, and run the cold tap on it for a good couple of minutes to remove remove the salt.

I stood mine end on in the slow cooker (a 3 litre job) and added 2 bottles of “rustic” cider (Old Rosie would be good, this was a Lidl bargin job in a glass bottle), totally 1.5 litres.  Add a large clove of garlic, peeled and thumped to break it up a touch.  I used a fat clove of smoked garlic because that’s what I had in after the Jerk Chicken experiment.

I ground a heaped teaspoon of black pepper corns and one “arm” of a star anise up in the pestle until all cracked through.  I was tempted to add more star anise, but the liquouricy flavour was enough.  Stick that all in the slow cooker too.

The liquid nearly covered the ham, but instead of adding extra liquid, I turned the ham ever couple of hours.  I cooked on High for 3 hours, and low for 4 hours, then turned off and the meat left to cook in the liquor.

You could slice it finely once cold (lift it out of the cooking liquor once cold), but I flashed it in a hot oven without a lid for 20 minutes to warm the meat through and crisp the outside fat.  You don’t want to crisp it too much, the velvet soft liquid-laden fat is one of the great delight.  If you’re hot slicing it cold, cut with the grain to break of big chunks, and pretend to be a medieval king!

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However, time is my master at the moment, and being able to wake up to a fresh loaf (and a house full the smell of baked bread) is worth the trade off.  The weekend is kept for making real bread.

I can’t recommnd my Panasonic SD255 breadmaker enough.  There were a couple of things that set it apart from the others I’d looked at, namely the dispenser (for dropping fruit/nuts/seeds etc into the dough part way through) and the timer.  If you’re going to get a breadmaker then buy one with a timer or you won’t use it.  I set it up before I go to bed, pouring all the ingredients in including the ater and oil, dial up when I want my bread, and toddle of to sleep.  A perfect loaf awaits me once I get out of my pit.

One of the things I’ve noticed though is that the recipes that come with it don’t really make the greatest loaves.  Often they were a bit too dense, with a tight fine crumb.  Fine it you like it, but I prefer my bread to have a far more open texture.

I tend to add a bit too much sugar, at least atable spoonful, which is 3 times what is normally added, which kicks the yeast into being really gassy, opening up the bread texture hugely.

I also add a really good slug of olive oil, which results in a really crisp and flaky finish.  It does make the outside of the bread a little greasy sometime (a bit like a focaccia) but it makes the bread much easier to slice when fresh ans I love the chewy flaky crust.

Of late I’ve also been adding a good handfull of mixed seeds into the mix, not using he hopper but just slinging them in with the flour.  Flax, linseed, sunflower and punkin seeds have all gone in, and all been great.  A big handful fo cheap green olives makes for a lovely Saturday lunch loaf too.

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The idea was simple…

1. Take a mushroom growing kit from gourmetmushrooms.co.uk
2. Use it to turn a fairly racist and crap novel (which upset me because it’s written in Robert Ludlum‘s name, and not half as good) into mushrooms
3. Eat them in a meal where I’d grown or made everything
4. Film the whole process and release the film and the scripts that built it.

The Mushrooms

The instructions that came with the kit are pretty good.  You soak the book in warm water, wring it out so it’s not sodden, scatter spore impregnated wheat through the book and then rubber band it up nice and tight.  It sits somewhere for a couple of days (about a week) until the mushrooms root system has developed and once the whole book has gone white you pop it in the fridge for a couple of days.  This shocks the mushroom system into growing, a bit like a cold patch of weather.

Once you take the book out of the fridge and open up the plastic bag it’s just a matter of keeping it warm and nicely moist.  A plant mister is perfect.  Spray a couple of times a day and you should be about right.  I went to a wedding for 2 days, so soaked it well before leaving and it survived ok.

Once sizable mushrooms had formed it’s justa matter of breaking them off and getting cooking.  With a bit of luck the book should produce another run, if not, it’s compostable (hell, it’s half way there).

The technology

The original plan was to use an old Sony laptop running Linux, connected by USB to a digital SLR camera, taking a photo every 15 minutes and backing these up.  After talks with Ken Murphy about his History of the sky project at MakeFaire this all sounded pretty easy.  However after a lot of messing about with gphoto2-lib and my old Fuji S7000 I found them to be incompatible, one could see the other, but not take photos. Bummer.  My Nikon D40x works with gphoto2 brilliantly, and takes better photos, but you can’t power it externally easily and the batteries only last for about 24 hours taking a photo every 15 minutes.

To top it all off, the laptop I had picked out turned out to not have an ethernet port (how old was it, no idea, 10 years +) , so it was back to the drawing board all round.

So ended up with the following rig…

1. My old G4 iBook running OS X
2. A webcam from PC World for a tenner (Logitech)
3. Wacaw running to take the photos
4. DropBox* being used for remove backup and public viewing
5. Cron calling
6. A bunch of BASH scripts to hold it together electronically
7. A bunch of duct tape to physically hold it together

Wacaw was a complete find and saved my bacon.  It’s a command line utility that will ket you call multiple cameras and save the images off that it gets back.  It did on Mac what gphoto2 was going to do for me on Linux.  You run it with a -L switch to get a list of available devices, and then run it again calling the input device you wish to grab from.  Ideal if you want to do multiple angles with multiple cameras.

The scripts that make al this happen are nothing special, just a bit of date wrangling to get a unique id for each photo, and then some copying around to ship the files to DropBox. A second script runs once a day to create a daily video file.

This first script captures a new image ever 15 minutes, between the hours of 5am and 7pm. Here’s it’s crontab entry

0,15,30,45  5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 * * *  /Users/me/grabber.sh

And here’s the script…

#!/bin/bash
DTS=$(date "+%y_%m_%d_%H_%M")
HOME=/Users/me
#/Applications/wacaw -d02 /Users/${home}/Documents/grabs/one_${DTS}
/Applications/wacaw -d02 /Users/${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_${DTS}
rm ${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_current.jpeg
cp ${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_${DTS}.jpeg ${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_current.jpeg
cp ${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_${DTS}.jpeg ${home}/Dropbox/Public/mushrooms
cp ${home}/Documents/grabs/mushroom_current.jpeg${home}/Dropbox/Public/mushrooms

And here's the daily crontab entry that makes a film...

58 23 * * *  /Users/me/filmer.sh

#!/bin/bash
set -x
DTS=$(date "+%y_%m_%d")
/Applications/Mencoder\ OS\ X.app/Contents/Resources/mencoder "mf:///Users/me/Documents/grabs/mushroom_${DTS}_*.jpeg" -mf fps=10 -o /Users/me/Documents/grabs/${DTS}.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800
cp /Users/me/Documents/grabs/${DTS}.avi /Users/me/Dropbox/Public/mushrooms

And here are the results, which if you look closely, you can see that I picked them two days too late.

12 days of mushroom growing time-lapse from Oli on Vimeo.

Also, the photos (and the final destination)

*Disclosure: if you use the link for Dropbox on this page, you’ll get an extra 250mb and so will I because it’s a referral link.  I’ll not make any money through.

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Ideally jerk should be cooked on a half oil drum barbecue, but whilst I hunt down and build one of these, I use a bog standard BBQ.  This time annoyingly the rian started just as a lit up, so this chicken was cooked in the oven.

I followed this jerk chicken recipe from the from Helen Grave’s brilliant blog Food From the Rye, which I’ve been addicted to for a little while.  The only modification I have was to drop the dark sugar and molasses, and to replaced it was a big tablespoon of golden sugar, and about 50ml of dark rum.  I didn’t have dark sugar in, otherwise I’d have used it, but I would still keep the rum in.  Lots of things are soluble in alcohol that are not soluble in water, so using rum not only adds to the smoky and sweet flavour, but I believe also helps carry the flavours through the meat better.

I took a whole chicken, spatchcocked it to help fit it on the BBQ, and kept it in a tight plastic bag with the marinade for a full 24 hours before cooking.  The bag holds the marinade against the meat and excludes the air.  You need to pick up the bag and squidge it about to made sure all the chicken gets exposes, and turn it so that the top is not left out of the fun.  I also slashed the chicken deeply a few times to help get the flavours into the meat.

On the day of cooking I took the chicken out of the fridge for a few hours to come back to room temperature, and opened the bag to help lef the meat dry off a bit.  Ideally I’d have BBQ’d it indirectly over the coals (push them to one side, and put a tin tray under the meat to catch the drips).  This time however, I had to use the oven, 180 degrees for an hour covered, with 30 minutes on the end uncovered, and then resting for 20 minutes.

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Assuming you’ve installed Redis (on Ubuntu for me it was as simple as “apt-get install redis-server”, follow these steps to get Redis and CI working via Rediska.

• Download Rediska and copy the content of the library directory to your system/application/library
• With your favorite text editor replace all of the “require_once” includes in each of the Rediska files so that the path uses CodeIgniter’s path variables, for example “require_once APPPATH.’libraries/Rediska/Exception.php’;”  TextMate let me do this with a cunning regex
• Drop the following code into a library file in system/applications/libraries called Rediska_connector.php. I hand rolled this, so it’s probably “sub-optimal”.
  
  <?php
  class Rediska_connector {
  public $rediska;
  function __construct()
  {
  $options = array(
  'namespace' => 'Application_',
  'servers'   => array(
  array('host' => '127.0.0.1', 'port' => 6379)
  )
  );
  include(APPPATH.'libraries/Rediska.php');
  include(APPPATH.'libraries/Rediska/Key.php');
  $rediska = new Rediska($options);
  }
  }

• Include this connector library in your controller with $this->load->library(‘rediska_connector’);
• Access Redis as follows in your controller…
  
  $key="username";
  $value="password";$store = new Rediska_Key($key);

  $store->setValue($value);

  // and not to get it back again
  $key = "username";
  $store = new Rediska_Key($key);
  $retrieved = $store->getValue();

  If you need to investigate whats going on there’s no equivalent to a GUI mysql client of phpMyAdmin, so if you want to work out whats going on in your store, you’re going to need the command line.  I’d recommend reading Simon Willison’s slide deck.

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1. Handful of unpopped popcorn
2. Teaspoon of sunflower oil
3. Half teaspoon salt
4. Half teaspoon of whole black pepper corns
5. Half a dried birds eye chilli
6. A cap full of cider or sherry vinegar

Whack the popcorn and the oil into a big pan, give it a good shack about, and then put it on a hot ring.  Meantime grind up the salt, pepper and chilli in a morter and pestle until really fine.  The super fine salt will be absorbed much more easily than granular salt.

Once all the popcorn is popped, throw the ground up flavorings into the pan and with the lid on give it a good shake.  Tilt the pan over to one side and dump in the vinegar so it doesn’t land on the popcorn.  Hold the lid on and shake the pan so it all the popcorn gets coated in vinegar steamy goodness.

Now, if you ate it straight off, it would be a bit soggy, so take the lid off and give the whole pan a minute to dry out.  The metal is nice and hot, and given a minute or so it will soon crisp up.

Enjoy!

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I’ll explain more about this over the next few weeks, until then, there’s a live (well, updates every 15 minutes) feed from my spare room. Also, the camera is only on from 6am until 8pm, because otherwise it’s too dark to see much. I’ll write up a post about how I built this another evening.

And for those into time lapse – here’s the first 5 days or so…

Experimental time lapse of mushrooms from Oli on Vimeo.

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So whilst wander round the discount German retailer Lidl I was skeptical about their olives. When I spotted a massive jar of little green pre-stoned ones in for £1.50 I didn’t hold out much hope, but it looked a useful jar for pickling so I took a punt.

They were great. The top of the jar was a touch salty (they weren’t under brine and had tried out a bit), but the rest were brilliant, not too saltly, not too squishy (the bane of stoned olives) and plentyful (1.2kg for a £1.50!)

So tonight (once I finished off the last spoonful) I popped back and stocked up on the other things on the same shelf, all for less than £2 a jar. Olives, cornichon, pickled onions, roasted red peppers in light oil and a chorizo for a grand total of £7.50. If they live up to the olives thats a serious bargain.

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