Normal service is resumed

It's been a fun week back at work, with a 'project manager' (who is also my boss) who has told someone else in the team that he "can't do the job and only said he would to get me off his back". He's now not talking to me and instead asks other people to tell me things. *sigh*. It should be a fun Christmas party - alert the Office production team, they could get some inspiration.

Anyway - on to the interesting stuff.

Cranes were a band from the South of England that were around at the same time as last weeks 'feature artist', Slowdive. I was lucky enough to see them both play at a double-header gig in Leeds back in the day, and it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. So good that I followed them to Sheffield the next day and watched it again. Turn it up, spook your neighbours and enjoy.

Ripping up the pennytrack

Best photo* of the year?

Good work, you crazy loons. It may be a Penny Farthing but riding it on singletrack makes no cents.

*Regretably not mine....

Pennywise

There was a Penny Farthing stack in North Brisbane at the weekend. That's not an accident but a gathering of Penny Farthing owners, of which there are a surprising number around (helped by a local TAFE college that runs a 'Build your own' course).

Here are a few proud builder / owners

 A few months ago these were just unshaped lengths of steel

 The workmanship was great - is it any wonder they look so proud?

The 'stack' part of a Penny Farthing stack is where the riders mount in a line and hold their balance for three minutes or more.

 At first it seemed fun

 But as time went on there were more than a few wobbles and the knuckles started to whiten

Scary though the stack looked, actually riding the things looked far worse. I was thinking of giving it a go but got spooked by the size of the wheel and the height of the saddle.

 Although after a few runs Gordy was looking relaxed

 and even styling it up

 

Soon it was time to leave the bike and grab a coffee - although the bikerack wasn't really up to the task

 but it was obviously hard to stop...

Great work guys, we are all seriously impressed.

If enough people ask I reckon we can convince Gordy to do another guest post on the build - anyone interested?

Gold Coast parties

We were lucky and didn't see much evidence of schoolies week  - this is the closest we got, you can see the lights of the night-time entertainment on the beach like the illuminated toenails of the beast

Things were more sedate at Burleigh, although on Sunday night there was a drum circle & firespinning on the shore front

I used to firespin and play djemebe so it can be hard to just watch on, and it gave me the urge to dig out my firestick again. An uncoordinated 42 year old trying to revisit his youth, a firestick & high fire risk conditions. What could possibly go wrong?

Chilled out

It's been a very relaxing few days, and the perfect time to post up some Slowdive. Another early 90's band (regular readers may be spotting a theme) and in my humble view the finest of all the 'shoegazing' bands of the era.

 They're equally lovely live, albeit with some dodgy camera panning...

 

Schoolies and Toolies

Non-Australian readers (hi Mum!) may have been a bit confused over the phrase 'schoolies' made in the comments section of the previous post. Schoolies is an Australian equivalent to Spring Break in the US where year 12 students (ie 16-18yr olds) celebrate the finish of their school days by partying en-masse in holiday get-aways like Surfers Paradise. There's no real equivalent in the UK, or at least there wasn't in my day where we basically gave a collective sigh, had a few beers, got thrown out of the Coach & Horses and blamed any next-day queasiness on the kebab we got from a van on the way home.

Schoolies is big business over here, and around 50,000 teens will descend on Surfers Paradise this week. The presence of so many drunken teenage girls attracts more than a few unsavoury males who are keen to take advantage of the situation, and these are known as 'toolies'.

Because of all this we were a bit uncertain about coming South for a week, but we hoped that Burleigh Heads was away from the main action. The hotel was a good choice and I guess you could say that the view from the living room & balcony is OK

If the sight of all that sea gets dull just look inland over the local bowls club and the town to the mountains beyond

We basically have a 270 degree view from the living room, although we do need to change seats to see it all. Life is tough.

It's hard to get out of the apartment because we can sit on the balcony and watch the world come to us. I'm an inveterate people watcher and it's the perfect position to sit and watch the surfers, joggers, skateboarders, cyclists, locals and tourists pass by below. I almost wish I'd bought binoculars, but then again that might make me considered to be a toolie..... 

Heading down the coast

I'm off on holidays tomorrow - we're heading down to Burleigh Heads for a few nights and a well deserved break.  I may even attempt to get my weak, pale flabby body out on a surfboard once or twice.

It always seems so appealing beforehand, but the allure quickly dissipates after getting dumped upside down on the 18th attempt to paddle out beyond the break with arms like wet noodles and a face full of salt water. When you finally make it out the first wave you try to catch leaves you half-drowning whilst being beaten around the head with a lump of laminated foam. A few hours later your aching beaten body gets gently washed to shore and you stumble to the nearest bar on wobbly legs. When feeling has finally returned and you're talking up your day your nasal passages decide it's time to let go of the litres of mucus-infused salt water they've been storing up in a long drooling stream. It's a soul thing.

 

Partially eclipsed and generally obscured

Queensland experienced a solar eclipse on Wednesday morning. The total eclipse was only visible in the far north of the state, but down in Brisbane we got to see around 80% cover. You couldn't easily spot it by squinting at the sun but the light was strangely diffuse and lacked some of it's usual bitey heat.

I tried to get some pictures of it, but sadly my photographic skills weren't up to scratch and all  I ended up with was a lot of lens flare and a touch of arc eye. I did manage to get some strangely impressive shots though

 

 

In this one you can see the shape of the partial eclipse somehow reflected upside down in the lens flare

The best picture I've seen comes from friend and regular commenter Pete, who noticed this dappled effect on his back patio

Sometimes you need to look away from the light to see what's really going on....

When life makes you sour,

make sourdough!*

A friend of mine gave me some sourdough starter the other week and after a false start last weekend I thought I'd complete a fermentation triptych yesterday. read up on what I was supposed to do with it and give it a go. Turns out that there is a lot of information on sourdough out there, and unlike the brewing and cheese making websites & forums (which are generally pretty easy-going) sourdough people seem to have strong views on what it is and how it should be used. You get the impression that if you get it wrong your starter will tweet your failure for the world to know and a collective of eye-rolling San Franciscon arthisans will hold a memorial ceremony for it.

Luckily I also have a copy of 'Wild Fermentation' by Sandor Ellix Katz, a great reference book for all things fermentable. He follows the 'as much as you think and then a bit more' school of recipe construction and was the original guide for my kimchi experiments. He also has a section on sourdough which offered some good advice on how it all works and that, coupled with Liz's previous experiences in breadmaking, helped a lot.

First off make sure that you have at least two cup fulls of good, bubbly sourdough starter

In a large bowl, mix the starter with around 4 cup fulls of breadmaking flour and stir well

 Add some lukewarm water as it thickens up and keep stirring - you're looking to make a stiff batter

Cover & leave it in a warm place for anywhere between 8 and 24 hrs and stir it occasionally. This is called a sponge, and gives the yeast some time to prepare for the trials ahead  

 When the sponge has increased in size and is good and bubbly you can start stage 2

Mix in another 3-4 cups of flour into the bowl until you can't stir it with a spoon. Then take out of the bowl and put on a floured surface for working & kneading. Handy hint - prepare this before you get dough all over your fingers, or have a helpful partner who can assist with the minimum of eye-rolling and "I told you so's"

Keep kneading the dough for a good 10 minutes or so until it becomes smooth and elastic. You'll probably need to add more flour to the board, to replace both the flour that is being absorbed by the dough and the flour that is ending up all over your shirt, trousers, feet, floor, walls etc

Eventually you'll have a nice smooth ball of dough that is elastic and slightly springy.Leave in an oiled bowl under a damp tea towel for a few more hours until it has increased in size from this

 to this

You're almost ready. Next grease a bread pan or a baking tray and shape the dough.

Leave for another couple of hours for the dough to increase in size again (or until you realise that bedtime is fast approaching) and then pop in the over at 200 degrees C for 40 minutes or so

 And voila - 'easy' sourdough

It's nice, especially when it's hot and fresh, but I'm not convinced. I reckon making two loaves of sourdough took almost as long as the brewing part of making 24l of beer......  

*OK, I recognise that I've worn that title joke out....

And when life gives you beetroots.....

I saw these at the markets for $3 and they looked so good that I couldn't say no

We have a cookbook of old Australian recipes called 'Possum Pie, Beetroot Beer & Lamingtons', so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give one of the title recipes a shot.

This isn't your usual ingredients list - anyone with German sensitivities for beer should look away now -

• 1kg sugar (the book suggested 3/4 lb or around 400g, but see below) 
• 30g hops
• 1 beetroot
• 1 tablespoon grated ginger 

The recipe is pretty simple -

• Bring water to boil and add in hops and some grated ginger. I misread and added the sugar at this point as well, but that should have come later.
• Boil for 20 mins and then add the beetroot and the sugar (if you haven't done so already).
• Boil for another 30 minutes or so and then allow to cool.

At first I though the colour wasn't coming out of the beetroot

But after it had cooled it was looking much 'beetter' (*arf*)

The actual recipe suggests that you bottle at this point with 'barm' (I think that's yeast cake left over from making bread) and then it's ready to serve 5 days later. This wouldn't give much chance for alcohol production and you'd end up with a bitter fizzy 'soft drink'.

I decided to take it to the next level so once the wort was cooled & strained I added it to a fermentor. Then i pitched some S-04 ale yeast and let 'godisgoode' work its magic. The next day everything was bubbling nicely and the colour was developing beautifully. Once the initial fermentation dies down I'll top it up and leave for a couple of weeks.

Boiling 30g of hops for almost an hour gives a intensely hoppy brew - in fact by adding the hops to the wort and then bringing it to boil you're actually 'first wort hopping', which is an old way of ensuring maximum bitterness in the body of the brew. So far from being a novelty drink, I think this will turn out more like a beetroot IPA and I'm already planning a full size batch :)

All I have to do now is catch a possum for the next recipe...

When life gives you lemons...

....make hard lemonade!

'Hard' (ie alcoholic) lemonade, something that's more popular in the US than over here*. The leading brand in the US is coincidentally "Mike's hard lemonade", and is generally considered to be a disgusting alco-pop style drink where flavours & sugars are added to cleanly fermented alcohol to give a children-friendly beverage. I was after something a little different.

First off take your lemons - I got 3kg for $6 - and give them a soak to clean the skins and peel the labels off

Next chop them into small chunks. This is like writing beer labels - it doesn't seem like a big job when you decide to do it but the hand cramps aren't long in catching up with you.

Throw the chopped lemon and a few inches of chopped ginger into a pan of boiling water for 45 minutes or so. The whole flat will smell of lemons and you will have a craving for pancakes.

 After 45 mins or so, boil up a kettles worth of water. Take the pan off the heat and chuck in the fermentables

Here I'm using 2kg of dextrose, 1/2 kg of wheat malt extract and a pack of 'dry body' brewing sugar (600g dextrose, 400g maltodextrin). Sugar would probably work just was well but I was trying to keep it light with the wheat malt adding a touch of head and protein haze.

Bring the wort back to the boil, chuck in around 30g of Saaz hops and remove from the heat. The hops were an experiment on my part - I'm hoping they'll add a spicy note to the nose but not affect the flavour to much.

After that it's just regular brewing. Cool the wort & mix with cold water in the fermentor, add the yeast and agitate. I asked for champagne yeast at the homebrew shop (it's supposed to handle the high acidity better) but got given a hand labelled ziplock bag of 'All Purpose Wine Yeast' so decided to go with S-04 ale yeast instead. If it doesn't take off I can always re-pitch with something more appropriate.

I ended up with 24l of wort with a starting gravity of around 1.050, which if this ferments to dry will give me something with a strength of around 5.5%. As long as it gets active in the next few days I'll just leave it for a couple of weeks and then bottle it straight away. It should be ready in time for the lead up to Christmas. 

*Edit - I've been reliably informed (and mildly reprimanded) via the comments section that the first commercial 'hard lemonade' was in fact an Aussie brew called Two Dogs, made by a brewer in 1993 who had been talking to a farmer with too many lemons to sell. Imitators like Hoopers Hooch and Mike's Hard Lemonade just picked up on the idea and rolled it out in different countries. 

Just typing those names gives me mild flashbacks to distant dizzy decadent days, so I was obviously partial to it :)

Bonus track!

I heard this band on the radio yesterday morning (ah 4ZZZ - the station that's fun to wake up to) and got round to looking them up today. I was planning on holding off until next weeks music post but I can't help myself. I've got the EP and although my head is hurting and my ears are bleeding I can't stop listening to it......

 

The Rusty Datsuns

A more whimsical slant this week with the Rusty Datsuns. They're a local trio who play gorgeous bluegrass tinged folk & roots. They only have one 'video' out - Gypsy - which also shows some wonderful Australian landscapes

Also check out 'tattoo', which is good here and wonderful on their debut EP. Go buy it!

 

Make your own kimchi

Kimchi is a spicy Korean staple which is used as a condiment, a side dish, a main course and possibly a desert as well. There are lots of variants and lots of different ways to make it, but I've found a nice simple way of making a dish that isn't traditional but which produces a lovely spicy pickled vegetable dish.

The ingredients are pretty much what you can get your hands on, but it helps if you have some chinese cabbage (such as wombok) and some radish - preferably daikon but ordinary garden works too. I'm using -

Half a wombok cabbage
2 bunches of Gay Choi chinese veggies
1 daikon radish
1 fennel plant
Half a red onion
Half a white onion
A (french style) shallot
A couple of spring onions
A few cloves of garlic
A couple of inches of ginger root
A few chillis
Thai basil leaves

Roughly chop the wombok

 Peel & slice the daikon radish

 Slice the spring onion and the fennel

 Mix the ingredients up in a large bowl

Pour in enough salty brine to cover the vegetables - the brine should be good & salty and made with rock salt (ie no iodine to keep it from sticking) and preferably filtered water. Then hold the vegetables down under the surface of the water with a weight like so...

Leave the veg to sit in the brine for a few hours (or more) and whilst you're waiting, prepare your spices

 Peel the spices - although I like to leave a few chillis whole and push them in later

Chop the veggies into smaller chunks, add a bit of salt, mix together and leave for 10 minutes. Then mix together to make a rough paste - a blender works well but needs cleaning, a potato masher works just as well and is easier to tidy up. At this point you should be thinking about forgetting the kimchi and making a stirfry with the lovely zesty mix. And possibly crying from the onions too.

After a few hours of soaking, drain the brine into a saucepan. Don't dump it down the sink - you'll need it later! Try a few chunks - they should taste good & salty

Clean two or three jars with hot water and dry thoroughly. Hinge-top jars look pro, coffee jars work just as well

Make sure your hands are clean, and push and poke the vegetables into the jars. Fill them in stages and mix in the paste whilst you're doing it, then give them a good stir round. Add in the whole chillis, the thai basil leaves, black pepper corns, fennel seeds and whatever else you have to hand

Push the veggies down nice and hard and top up with excess brine. Cap the jars and put them somewhere warm.

Give the jars a shake every day and if they're in sunlight rotate them. After a few days you'll get bubbles forming as the fermentation gets under way, and the edges of the different vegetables will start to blur together.

The fermentation will increase the pressure in the jar. Not sure if there would ever be enough pressure to shatter a jar, but it's best to open it every day or so to depressurise it. You can see the bubbles at the edges here.

It also helps to push the veggies down under the surface of the brine every time you open it - make sure you use clean fingers! It also gives you a chance to see how it's tasting.

After a week or two the mix should be acidic, spicy and tasty. When it gets to the right level for you just leave it an extra few days (to make sure) and then move it into the fridge.

After that just eat it whenever you like!