Breakfast rides

A few of us meet up in the city most Saturdays for breakfast and maybe a ride afterwards. Today we were joined by Nikko, who had obviously had one too many coffees with his breakfast cheesecake (!)

I had a play with cropping the original photo, so let me know which one you prefer - a fairly wide pan and some playing around with the colours (above), which is my favourite

A much closer crop (second favourite)

Or something midway between the two (a bit messy).

It's not all mountain bike madness though - Gordy often turns up on his tourer, sometimes when he's least expected :)

Dull photographic note - the first picture was taken using burst mode, the second using burst mode with flash. The use of flash obviously slowed down the shutter speed which blurred out Nick. Although I quite like the effect - I mean, it's what I was aiming for.....

Thanks to Nikko for busting out phat moves several times in a row, and Gordy for still smiling despite the obvious!

Say Cheese

This is the cheese straight out of the moulds - a disc of feta from the press, a bud of feta from the bag and the ricotta that I made up from the left-over whey (ricotta is italian for 're-cooked', and is made by almost boiling the whey and adding a few drops of vinegar to tempt out all the remaining cheesey proteins) 

 I put the cheese in the fridge over night to solidify and used the ricotta as a weight to help flatten out the bud of feta in the mould - worked suprisingly well 

Feta is aged in salt and there are two ways of doing it - either by sprinkling with salt or by soaking / piuckling in brine. I'm trying both to see which works out best

It's already pretty tasty :)

Christmas feasting

Is it just me, or did Christmas feel weirder this year because it fell on the weekend? Christmas day was done & dusted and then we still had two more days off work. And coupled with the usual contrasts of an Australian Christmas (30 degree heat, blue skies, summer storms) it's been a funny few days.

Luckily I was able to distract myself with cooking. First off we cooked up our xmas turkey three ways - smoked breast

 barbecued leg & wing, and then the other half roast in the oven.

On Christmas Day we also had some magnificent glazed ham - something very common in Australia, but not so elsewhere - along with a slap-up buffet & some fine whiskey at Liz's parents place.

Boxing Day felt like a normal day, and at 10am I was in the queue at the supermarket getting some fresh water to brew with for the first Saison of the summer - of course entitled ''Tis the Saison to be merry'. Which will be funny up to the point where I have to write it on 30odd bottle labels. No pictures of the brewing, and the only thing different to normal was the re-use of saison yeast that has been in the fridge for 10 months. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't re-animate but after plentiful sugars and yeast nutrient and many murmers of encouragement from me it seemed to pick itself up. As Charles Papazian (one of the gods of homebrewing) says when things don't seem to be working out - 'don't worry, have a homebrew'. He suggests the same when things go smoothly, and it was a merry boxing day in Villa St because of it. I also have circumstantial evidence that yeast responds to Christmas carols.  

Today was cheese-making day, inspired by a cheese press I received as a present (thanks Jan & Laurie!). Instead of halloumi I decided to try a Christmas Fete(a), although the processes are much the same. Heat up milk to 30 odd degrees C, add culture, leave for an hour, add rennet, leave for an hour or until you get a clean break. What's a clean break you ask? Well, pretty much this

This happened exactly on cue, unlike my other cheese-making experiences where I've had to wait for hours. I think this was partly due to a stable temperature control - the recipe said 'hold the milk at 30 degrees' and since that was pretty much ambient temperature in the kitchen it wasn't hard to do!

After slicing the curds and giving them a stir I got to use my cheese press

 This helps press the whey out of the curds and will give a nicely formed disc of cheese - it's also much more controllable than balancing plates and cups of water onto the curds in a colander. However there were too many curds so I also had to resort to a more rustic solution - hanging the curds in cheesecloth. Note the authentic use of rubber bands and shoelaces. 

It does give a great shape to the cheese, although you can reduce this by turning the cheese in the cloth mid-hang.

This worked OK until the storm hit and re-soaked everything. More pics tomorrow when everything is drained, salted  and ready to brine :).

Cheese making sounds time consuming but most of it is just waiting around for things to happen, so it helps to have other things to do. I also watched the cricket and overclocked my HP Touchpad tablet - just like the cheesemakers of yore I'm sure. 

Happy Christmas!

Hope you're having happy holidays, whatever you believe and wherever you are :)

  

Ginger minger

Bad news for those awaiting the ginger beer - I opened one yesterday and it was completely flat. I must have left it for too long in the primary fermenter, so all the yeast settled out. And without yeast in the bottle, there's nothing to munch on the priming sugar (additional sugar you add when you bottle the beer) and produce carbon dioxide (aka 'fizz') as a side product.

Not the end of the world as I can reintroduce more yeast. I've reopened all of the bottles and tipped in some additional dried yeast into each, and this should hopefully be enough to get some fizz going (but hopefully not enough to produce bottle bombs). If not, well as Niel said this morning soda streams are back in fashion this year.

Home smoked salmon

It's the 23rd December (also known as Christmas Eve Eve) and that's reason enough for a celebration. So tonight we had tea-smoked salmon, with orange peel and dried chillis added to the tea for extra flavouring

  The chilli made the smoke pretty acrid - this picture required a respirator

We served it up with cumin-infused sauteed potatoes, mixed fried veg and a dill white sauce. Lovely.

Tomorrow we roast turkey and (unsurprisingly) smoke turkey breast. Yum.

Smokin'......!

We picked up a smoker at the weekend as a reward for finishing our Xmas shopping. It's a stainless steel box with a lid and two racks - the idea is that you sprinkle sawdust on the base of the box, put meat or fish on the racks, put the lid on and then place it over a dish filled with flaming methylated spirits. The sawdust smokes cooks the steak.

I wasn't sure how efficient the cooking would be so I tried it out with steak marinated in lemon juice last night, figuring that if it's undercooked it's not going to kill us and we can always slap it on the barbie to finish off.

Fire, meat and a beer close to hand - how happy can a man get? The burner is on the base of our brazier, which I'd flipped upside down so the smoker wasn't sitting on a lip and was instead flush to the base. This turned out to be a blunder.

  All set up and ready to smoke

It turned out that it actually cooked pretty quickly, the flame was bigger than expected. Note to self - do not cook near flammable objects. The intense flame on the near corner of the box is from the rubber foot on the base of the brazier. Oops. 

After 20 mins I noticed the fire had gone out, but by then the steak was already cooked (if not a bit overcooked).  Surprisingly effective!

Another blunder was using the lower rack in the smoker, so the meat was only half an inch or so above the sawdust. As the fat dripped off the steak onto the base of the smoker it spat and blew bits of half-burnt charcoal over the bottom of the steak. I needed to wash them before we could eat.

Despite my blunders but the steak came out juicy, smokey and really tasty. There's a whole raft of different sawdusts, teas and foliage out there to give different flavours so I'm looking forward to some experimentation over the coming months.