French failures

The French cheeses were eagerly awaited but unfortunately didn't live up to their original promise. After a few weeks of ageing in the fridge the Brie looked goo-ily good to go

The Camembert was a little firm looking but still was wonderfully creamy inside it's soft white shell

Unfortunately the flavour wasn't there to back it up. Both cheeses smelt great but were very bitter and hard to eat. You could pick out some of the intended flavours but then they were over-ridden with a harsh strong flavour that shouldn't have been there. Sadly we had to throw them all away :(. I got a magnificent cheese-making book for my birthday and it reckons that soft french cheeses are very temperature-dependent and hard to get right, so I guess the cheese cave needs a renovation.

My next cheese was a herbed feta that came out overly-soft and overly-herby, so I was a bit disheartened after that. So this weekend I decided it was time to get back on the cheese-horse. There was a beer ride planned the same time but the persistent drizzle that was falling at the time that I would have needed to leave helped me resist. Predictably the weather then cleared and I got a picture message from of the boys showing how much they were missing me

but by that point I was committed

    

and the end result was 8 litres of milk converting to this much halloumi - the squares at the back are infused with birdseye chilli, garlic & pepper. This is ready for 'cooking', as halloumi is almost-boiled in it's own whey for an hour or so to give it it's firmness and ability to be cooked without melting.

Cheese making is basically lots of waiting around so whilst I was doing that I also decided to upgrade the Ubuntu operating system on my Dell Mini-9 travel computer (I take this instead of a tablet as it has an SD card slot so I can upload photos). This is one of those things that computer people say which sounds nerdily impressive, but in reality it's a lot of downloading, waiting and swearing interspersed with frantic google searches. Ubuntu 11.10 only part installed and wouldn't boot, I could reinstall the previous Ubuntu 9.10 but some of the patches that were needed to get the wireless working were no longer available and so several hours later I managed to get Ubuntu 10.04 on and running. The battery now isn't charging, but anywhere that has Wi-fi will also have powerpoints so I'll look at that another day.*

Nerd humour - when I uploaded this I realised that there were 4 operating systems on display - using a Windows laptop to download the software, loading it onto a Ubuntu netbook, listening to the radio on an Android phone and resting the Mini-9 on a Mac. Who says that Apple's aren't versatile?

*Addendum - after trying pretty much every suggestion I could find on-line to no avail I gave up and ordered a new battery from e-bay for $20. When I looked back at the netbook it was charging. This is now being written on the netbook with battery power. Go figure!