Last autumn was taken over by the idea that I had time to do two evening classes in a single term. It turns out that I could, but that it didn’t leave much time to write home about it afterwards. The dinner party cooking class was as good as ever, but the real wake up call was doing Stanford University’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class. I’ve never had much of a computer science background and yet I’ve made a career out of bending computers to my will, so this was wonderful opportunity to find out if I could still learn university level stuff after 12 years. The answer was yes I could, but it helped that I was properly interested in learning it and it was taught by two experts both in their subject matter and in teaching it to people. Whilst I am proud of getting an “84%” for my efforts, there were enough other people in the class of dozens of thousands who were distraught at the idea of not getting 100%, so that was a different idea of ‘normal’ I hadn’t met before. I could write pages and pages about my experiences, and perhaps I will, but this isn’t yet the time.

What has really rekindled my energy and focus was a game changing conference I attended in London last weekend, PHP UK 2012. I’ve been to a few techy conferences before, organised by The IET, vendors, or by the community of customers they serve. Scotch on the Rocks has been, and will probably continue to be my primary conference simply because it’s based on the language I’m most practiced in, but CFML will never have the same sized audience as PHP.

The London PHP user group has retained enough critical mass to host an increasingly awesome conference for 7 years now, attracting some top tier speakers and a good sized audience, but not so big that you can’t move or get close to the speakers or exhibitors. Who do I call a top tier speaker? You’ve probably come across names like eBay, the BBC, WordPress.com, Etsy.com and Rasmus Lerdorf, but there were some excellent talks from engineers closer to those I would consider my peers. I took home nearly as many points on presentation skills as I did technical ideas. I was able to speak with a few of speakers and many had spent weeks of their spare time preparing, practicing and refining their 40 minute presentations for this event, which is an inspiring amount of effort.

I realise that we were in the capital city, but I was surprised by how many people wrote on their delegate badges, or on their presentation slides “we’re hiring”. Some people even trolled the twitterfall (more on that in another post) to say things like ‘I’m hiring, DM me’. Thinking about it, it’s a great way to meet like minded people who might want to help you do whatever it is you’re trying to do, but I hadn’t encountered it before.

One of the more interesting debates was on release controls. How often should one release code and how easy should it be to release code? I’ve always been lucky enough to think that you should trust your developers, that you should have a team who’s not afraid to learn, and that you learn most quickly when you’re fixing a bug that you’ve just deployed to your application

Did you take more than 10 seconds to revert the change once you realised something was wrong? Did anybody die? Did your company lose a significant amount of trust, goodwill or money? If the answer to all of the above was ‘no’, then no harm was done and aforementioned developer has just learned some very valuable lessons and won’t be doing that again in a hurry. Clearly this approach only applies to a certain category of applications and user bases, you wouldn’t want to bork something like Amazon’s checkout system, or Google’s landing page for even a couple of seconds, but I believe that the person who best understands the implications of releasing some code is the person who’s just written it.

This approach works in practice if you force yourself to make lots of small releases, rather than fewer enormous ones, so it only really works for web-based projects. To quote Mike Williams (one of Erlang’s inventors): “Make mistakes on a small scale, not in a production project.”

I think the audience was split 50/50 between those that thought this approach was normal and why would you take the time to do it another way, and those that couldn’t believe somebody could even contemplate such a thing and how could they get away with such a cowboy attitude, but it can’t be all that terrible with services like Flickr and WordPress doing it. Some people call this continuous deployment, for me this falls into the mantra of ‘minimum necessary to get the job done well’.

From a personal point of view, the biggest ‘whoa’ moment came out of a panel discussion on scalability. Like most of the panel members, I think scalability is a function of systems architecture and how inspired your engineers are, not the programming language you use (assuming one’s code isn’t crap of course), so the conversation was widely applicable. It was a very good discussion and well worth the time to re-watch.

I’ll have to wait for the videos to be edited and published to check the exact words, but one question was about fixing technical problems when a bug only manifests for 1/4% of your 10^7 hits. Hugh E Williams from eBay said that if you hired engineers who were good at learning then they’d figure out almost anything, but it helped to be able to wheel out ‘that one guy’ who had that rare blend of curiosity, enthusiasm and doggedness who’s highly skilled in system operations and software engineering who could meditate on the problem (Amiga style) for a week and then fix it. Rasmus weighed in with a comment along the lines of ‘hire him. just hire him’.

A few people in the audience weren’t certain what they meant, isn’t this a really big single point of failure and anyway the split between programming and sysops exists for a reason. I think halfway through the explanation, Rasmus said something like ‘yep, we get it’. I don’t know whether it’s the weight of culture or if devops has taken sufficient root in The Valley for this to be normal, but whatever the understanding, it was like they’d just described me and what I do in just a few words. Whoa.

So there we have it, community conferences make you feel more connected with other people doing what you do. Who knew?

It’s not all good news unfortunately, a number of my woody bush fruits were more dead than I’d hoped, including last year’s fun guavas. Apparently they’re not hardy to -Yorkshire after all, neither was the rose nor the goji berry. The Honeyberry coped ok, and the currants and gooseberries are roaring back into growth.

Gooseberries Before

I took the time to give the Gooseberries their bi annual prune, clearing out the mass of growth and restoring their goblet shape a little. I’ve put the prunings into some gritty compost in the hope that they will strike and I’ll have even more bushes. I tried that last year with one of my red currants and whilst only one of those cuttings rooted, that’s growing on nicely.

Gooseberries after their prune

I’ve done quite well for a breadth of varieties of Stuff this year. A friend at work generously gave me a pile of accidentally chitted Jerusalem Artichokes, so I’m hoping they do better than this time last year. The roots are in season at the moment, which is suitably tasty.

I had a really good seed trading session with another friend yesterday, who introduced me to the Real Seed Company who seem to be a good halfway house between Chase Organics and the HDRA’s Heritage library service.

The beds have been dug over and raked and are warming up nicely in the sun, so I’ve direct sown a few rows of Spinach, Chard, Beetroot, Strawberry Spinach (it didn’t germinate last time I tried it but hey, optimism!), French, Runner and Borlotti Beans, Mangetout Peas, and Unwin’s Rainbow Mix of Carrots that I got for Christmas.

My usual potato buckets have been potatoed, I’m going for a lazy earthing up approach by half filling them now and I’ll finish filling the up in a couple of months time. It worked last year.

I didn’t get on with Spinach Tarpy last year, I didn’t like its leaves as much as a traditional breed and it bolted too easily, so I’ve gone for Thompson and Morgan’s Heritage Bloomsdale this year.

I’ve pinned this year’s tomato hopes on an RHS stamped bushy variety called Vilma, another dwarf early, which I’ve paired up with another super early bush variety called Latah, I really associate with its description “The plants are quite untidy. To be honest, you can’t really train them or support them in any way – but if you let them get on with it they really will make ripe tasty tomatoes earlier than you thought possible”.

I’ve sown a few flowers as well, including my fourth generation of Morning Glorys, I’m not exactly following a breeding programme, more that they’re dead easy to grow from seed that you’ve saved yourself. I’ve also got a few clumps of Alyssum and some third generation Marigolds.

A couple of pots of Coriander and Basil from Suffolk Herbs of Kelevedon, Essex for the Kitchen Window Sill have completed the collection.

1) Winter Tyres. Oh my god do these make a difference. I left it until well past the last minute (well, ok, Monday morning) to get some and was lucky enough to get the last two Michelin Alpins from Ian Brown Tyres. I would have preferred something less eye wateringly expensive, but they’ve probably paid for themselves already and they had darned well better last many years worth of winters. These are not magic, but they give you a fighting chance when the temperature is below 7 degrees C or it’s very wet and snowy, some (presumably quite rich) people use them all year round. My car has been a complete liability in previous winters, with the brakes freezing on, the front wheels not being able to grip on the snow on flat carparks and generally been more hassle than just walking. In contrast, this week’s been almost completely uneventful, with the front wheels able to accelerate, turn and brake adequately on a surface that it otherwise wouldn’t have even been able to move on. Driving along our tiny lane and along country roads has been with caution rather than abject panic. The back wheels are just as crap as ever though, so don’t be too surprised by the conservation of momentum when going round corners…

2) Remember chemistry. This is one of today’s lessons that I wish I’d thought of. If you can’t quite get enough grip on ice to reverse out of the snow drift you’ve just gently slid into, then melt it by pouring out your spray bottle of windscreen deicer. This melts the ice a treat and lets you use your sturdy plastic scraper to dig down to the road. It turns out that concentrated screenwash with antifreeze does not work. Chemistry may apply, no purchase necessary, your mileage may vary.

3) Gently does it. Unless you’re practicing your 15mph powerslides in a deserted car park, try to remember momentum. Give yourself bags of time for your car to respond to each command you give it, otherwise you may not accelerate, slow down or turn in time to follow the road or the car in front. Patience also applies. If necessary, carry a spare Little Book Of Calm to chew upon. You’ll get there in the end.

4) Try to be prepared. Make sure your portable sources of energy are as full as possible, be that refined dead dinosaurs in the car’s tank, or mobile phone batteries being full, not half full, or a packet of biscuits in the glovebox. That way, you’re able to call for help and then calmly eat a tasty snack whilst awaiting the cavalry. Pack a 2 ton tow rope and know where your car’s towing points are, it’ll have them front and rear.

I’d best finish with a disclaimer, these are just our thoughts of the week and should be considered to have less credibility than any other unreviewed words you might find lying around the internet. Now go mail order some mid-range winter tyres (because the internet’s the only place with any stock left) and get your local garage to fit them.

Shiny icy lane

Pretty Trees

First was another installation of the remarkably successful Northumberland Lights, have a look at their Facebook album and the BBC to see what it was like. This was to be followed by a party with fireworks, music, food, stalls and some local lantern lit processions, this was so popular it sold over 1500 tickets and they had to organise a number of park and ride venues just to get everybody to the site.

Unfortunately, 4 inches of snow dropped on the Rothbury area on the day and the A1 jammed solid at Newcastle so all in all, I’m very glad that they emailed me to say it was cancelled. Shortly afterwards, the snow started landing on the rest of Yorkshire, including the four day Christmas markets in York that apparently attracted record crowds. I wasn’t so impressed with the retail offering this year, but I was mighty glad I caught the hot apple punch seller as he was packing away when I walked through town to the whisky tasting yesterday evening. Mmmm, hot punch…

By the time I got around to phoning my favourite tyre company, they’d all but sold out of winter blend tyres, so I’ll be trying again on Monday when their suppliers have replenished their stocks. If you haven’t come across them before, Winter Tyres are mostly a different blend of rubber that keeps sofer at lower temperatures. Mix that with a different tread pattern and you get a 2 wheel drive car performing substantially better than a 4WD car on the snow and ice, so it’s well worth the effort of swapping them over twice a year if you’re at all uncertain. You don’t have to wait for the snow to fall either, they are supposed to be better performing when the temperature dips under 5-7 degrees, so it’s no wonder that many countries mandate their use by law. You don’t have to take my word for it though, just ask the AA. I don’t think I’ll be getting a full set of four spare wheels though, I’ll just get a local garage to swap the rubber on the front wheels as necessary.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, the local Shoot missed a few this year and I’ve seen both male and female pheasant running around the trees and hedgerows in the snow. I snapped this photo earlier on this afternoon of one of the snowiest hen parties I’ve come across and, whilst I’m playing with the camera, I’m writing this not too far from the wood burning stove, trying not to think about how I’m going to get the car off our lane in the morning and wondering how best to oven some duck legs I’ve got for tea.

Slainte!

Female pheasants in the snow

Toasty fire

After a dawdle around the market stands, I haven’t yet found a use for the great slab of Cumbria pancetta from Shaw’s, that could take some eating..

We started back in the increasingly familiar demonstration tent, with another short rant from Food Consultant Phil Leverington about excessive supermarket packaging costing us an extra £465 per year on average. With the cooks from one of Leeds’ vegetarian Indian restaurants stuck in traffic, he stepped in to whip up a demonstration with whatever ingredients he could beg, steal or borrow from their prep kitchen and the market outside. The answer turned out to be wood pigeon breast from Shaw’s meat, with smoked bacon mashed potato (big waxy spuds, not floury ones) and a sauce made by reducing some bramble infused whisky.

Food demo on left using ingredients from producer on right

How tracable do you like your sheep?

The demonstration was interspersed with short talks by the people who produced the ingredients on show. The first up was Rosemary Wass of Newfields Organics, who’s been producing seasonal vegetables from her 25 acre farm in Fadmore for 18 years. We heard from Adam and his Yorkshire rapseed oil, which carries half the saturated fats of an olive oil and doesn’t burn anything like so easily, which is handy when stirfrying.

Topically, we also heard about Nelly’s moorland Shearlings, which I read about the other week. The jist of this community supported agriculture scheme was that each consumer signed up at the start of the 8 month season to buy the equivalent of one (1) Shearling sheep, delivered every four weeks in manageable, ready to cook, cuts. I haven’t yet worked out the difference betweeen Shearling and Hogget, they both seem to be names for sheep that are slightly older than lambs but haven’t got as far as mutton, so should be tender but more flavoursome. Overall, it worked out at £7.50 per kilo which is incredibly cheap when you compare it to 3 week hung longhorn sirloin steak (£24 / kg), and still reasonably cheap when you compare it to supermarket sourced lamb (6-13 / kg, depending upon the cut. or 25 if you get the who-the-heck-would-pay-that-much-for-get-thee-hence-to-your-local-family-butcher-priced rack of ribs). I didn’t bite though, I’d rather pay a bit more and buy it from the local farm shop when and if I want it, rather than signing up for a major quantity of meat that we might not even like eating. I don’t get through all that much meat in a given week, so we’d run the risk of eating nothing but Shearling between now and next Easter. Nice idea, I can see why that business model is in the press a lot in recent years, but I’d need more hungry mouths to feed before signing up.

Most of the afternoon was spent spinning gently round round the Field and Fawcett Wine Fair, which I’ll come onto in a later post, once I’ve finished decyphering and dereferencing our notes (apparently we quite liked table 6 wine 8 and table 2 wine 7. so there you go, another wine fact!).

Making a kitkat. tray of biscuits, choc, slab, cold chisel and filled mould.

Kitkats. Spot the pro amongst the amateurs

We finished up with a demonstration from a company that’s been in the city for a year or 148, two people from Rowntree’s experimental kitchens were showing us how easy it isn’t to make Kit Kat’s by hand. They glossed over how they turn the individual slices of wafer into the stacks in the middle of the biscuit, probably either a trade secret or just not very interesting to watch. Like last week’s chocolate demonstration, they tempered their melted choc by working it with a trowel on a marble slab until it got to the correct temperature for adding to the 4-finger mould. By hand, they can turn out several hundred of these each day when they’re running small scale trials of different chocolate mixes.

A few willing volunteers from the crowd stepped up to try their hand with varying degrees of success, mostly the choc wasn’t at the right temperature or wasn’t fully worked into the mould so it all fell apart at the seams. Tasted alright though.

I’ll finish this off with my take on what to do with some hot-smoked duck I picked up from one of the marketeers, a bit like a salad nicoise but with eggs, quick-pickled tomatoes, beetroot and chard from the garden, salad leaves from Thirsk, cider spiked Wensleydale and the smoked duck from (can’t read notes).

Smoked Duck Salad

The first exhibitor I spent time with was Compass Box. This bold company has spent the past 10 years working on their own bespoke maturation and vatted malts to produce some very interesting drams. Their first attempts at adding a year or two of extra maturation in european oak or a sherry cask were foiled by the SWA, who flexed their muscles and said No they’re not allowed to sell whisky that was aged in a normal bourbon cask that had a few staves suspended in the middle of it. They fixed that by retaining the services of a cooper and making their own barrels out of used bourbon staves and brand new european ends.

The Whisky Festival

Their core range of five whiskys is well documented on their website and we were guided through them by an exhibitor who knew his range well. I wasn’t too fussed about Asyla, a 50/50 blend of malt and grain that was summery and fruity but lacked punch. I skipped Oak Cross, which looked designed to appeal straight to the Bourbon crowd and moved onto The Spice Tree. This strong, spicy and zingy dram made me mentally sit up and start paying attention, which was just as well because their Peat Monster packed a real bite. It had many layers of smoky, spicy, salty heavy oak Islay goodness and for the third dram of the evening boded very well indeed. Next up was Hedonism, which was very new to me. It’s a blend of 3 grain whiskys, matured in the usual way for between 20 and 29 years. It started subtle and creamy, built through a pile of spice and ended quickly with a short, sweet finish. I found it hard to quantify because I hadn’t had matured Grain whisky before, but it was very characterful. Unfortunately its price reflected the very limited supply, so I left empty handed. But not before trying their Orangerie concoction. They took their Asyla whisky and infused it with a big pile of oranges, so whilst it’s not just whisky any more, it’s bound to appeal to some people. I wasn’t one of them, it was sweet, tasted of nothing but oranges and its smell was square in my deadspot. However, my description of it to my friends and family have left them all hunting it, so it can’t be so bad.

Next up was Berry Brothers, who had managed to whittle their full range down to ‘just’ the 20 or so bottles on show, which was way too many to try to get through in the time. The first to stand out was a dark, richly oak-aged Trinidad rum which got the thumbs up from the whisky fans who hadn’t come across it before. Teaninich is a large Diageo speyside distillery that puts out a maximum 2.7 million litres of spirit that mostly goes into Johnnie Walker, single malt bottlings are rare and independant ones doubly so. It’s a good example of the robust Highland character and was remarkable.

With a regretful glance at the watch, I pressed onto the Morrison Bowmore stand to briefly explore their Auchentoshens. Auchentoshen is unusual even for a lowland because it actually does triple distill its spirit. For me, the money was with their Threewood. Their nutty spirit is aged for 12 years in bourbon, then 1 year in Olosoro and yet another year in Pedro Ximinez butts. You’d think you’d want a flake in that after all that time with the sherry but I found it characterful and interesting.

LVMH were well represented by Glenmorangie and Ardbeg. Ardbeg rarely disappoints and their Uigeadail was up there with the best, retaining its stereotypical flavours but managing to turn them up to 11 without resorting to bottling at full cask strength. We had a detailed Glenmorangie Tasting earlier on this year, but felt it would be a useful test to try the Sonalta again, in the interests of science of course.. Yep, just as good as we remembered, retaining the core characteristics of GlenM balanced with some body from the sherry.

Despite the siren song from the people serving hot falafels or pork butties in the corner, enough people in the crowd had asked us if we’d tried the Bonny Haven yet for us to think this was worth fixing. Whilst Eddie was starting to announce the best of the festival tasting, we pounced on the Creative Whisky Company to see what all the fuss was aboot. They’re an independant bottler and have a strong range, not too big and not too small. Their 4 year old Bunnahabhain was just stellar for a young spirit. I don’t know quite how they talked the distillery out of this particular barrel, but it was an unusually clean and clear taste, capturing the sweet peaty essence of that corner of Islay with a generous warming finish. Indy single cask bottlings are always limited in supply, but this was almost comic with the tally ticking down of how many they had left under the table. 11 bottles remained when we were there. I just had time to sneak in a try of their Glen Ord. whilst reliable, it’s still something special and I don’t think I’ve got anything like it in my cupboard at the moment. It’s a true heavyweight Highland spirit with big spicy notes of fruitcake finished off with smooth vanilla. It’s unusual to find it as a indy single malt, the majority of its 3.2 million litre capacity is used for Diageo’s blends.

At this point we had to dash off to be spoilt for life by the Best of the Festival Tasting, which I think is worth a post all to itself so I’ll save trying to decipher those notes for another day.

Eddie’s got a good selection of photos up of the event, including a couple of me doing my bit schilling for Bruichladdich in my Academy t-shirt. If I can’t show it off there, when can I?

I will mention that on my way out, I paused to buy one of the last three bottles of Bunnahabnain 4 yr old. I thought it was sufficiently unusual and interesting to pass by and I haven’t got anything quite like it already. And yes, I did get in trouble for trying to jam yet another bottle into the cupboard.

Overall, I found the evening to be slightly disappointing and totally overwhelming in equal measures. It was a bit annoying that all the drams I made notes about were the wrong side of £50 per bottle. I know they’re special, but a whisky has got to be truly stellar for me to justify that many spends, even when drunk and silly in charge of a credit card. I’m also a bit worried about my tendancy towards not missing out on something that’s strictly limited edition. Yes, it won’t go off when it’s in glass and it can be an investment and all that. but it’s also flipping expensive..

Going to the best of the festival masterclass meant I had the chance to sample and learn a bit about some fantastic drams, total sensory overload. But it came at a price (and I don’t mean the cost of the extra ticket). I had the chance to look at less than a quarter of the tables and whilst I did come away both very merry and (it was an accident guv’ner) another bottle for the collection, there were many people I didn’t get chance to talk to and many characterful and unusual spirits I didn’t get chance to experience. That’ll teach me to hang about watching chefs play with chocolate rather than heading straight into the festival as soon as it opened, that was a crucial 40 minutes that I won’t see again. Manchester’s sold out, so I’ll just have to wait for next year. And the Springbank Tasting at the end of next month. Oh shame.

Slange Var!

I didn’t want to miss out on the rest of the festival though, so I started mid afternoon with a demonstration from Temujin restaurant, who specialise in totally customised stir fries. The chef, who originally hailed from Zimbambwe, was clearly used to teaching a young audience, taking great care over explaining different colours of chopping boards and keeping raw meat apart from cooked. I’m not sure I’ll be duplicating his recipes at home though, our local supermarkets don’t yet stock farmed crocodile steaks. He knew his audience well, I was surprised how many people in the audience hadn’t come across ginger root before and thought it exotic and spicy. He had some interesting numbers to share, a professional gas powered wok burner gets through about 60,000 BTUs an hour into a single wok. No wonder it cooks through in 2 and a half minutes flat! For a comparison, a good home range might get through 20,000 BTUs per hour if all 5 rings are going at once.

Crowds in town

Grazing tent

That was followed by a wander through the stands on Parliament Street to see what this year would bring. In their usual corner by M&S were Kippers By Post (.com), complete with a couple of market sized smoking huts to keep the smells wafting and make sure that demand is kept supplied. I’m not a fan myself, they’re just a little too fishy for my taste, but they’re an excellent example of picking one thing and doing it well. The fountain has been roofed over by a large tent, containing a variety of places to graze from, as well as a portable pub. One very topical stand was selling Yee Kwan‘s oriental inspired ice creams and sorbets, which confirmed my suspicions that it’s possible to make ginger ice cream and that lemongrass is just fine to infuse into syrup when making a sorbet. Watch this space.

Oriental Ices

Bespoke Stirfries in a tent

A generous vension burger provided an early evening bite whilst I wandered over to the demonstration tent for the twilight chocolate session. The head chef from a nearby hotel showed us how to hand make ganache chocolates and how easy it is to make a popular type of branded aerated chocolate bar. Luckily I can read the notes I made this early in the evening, because there were yet more numbers to keep track of. Chocolate is a precise science!

So, a base ganache mix is 640g of 50-60% chocolate, 250g of cream, 70g glucose and 60g of a liqueur such as Grand Marnier or Kirsch. Boil the cream to sterilise it, makes the finished product keep that much longer. Mix in the glucose to the cream, then let it start to cool. Use the heat within the cream to melt the chocolate through the mixture. Chocolate must not be heated above 45C. Likewise, chocolate and water don’t mix, so be careful of condensation when setting in the fridge. Stir in a handful of unsalted butter to give the chocolate a shine and to help it stay set at room temperature. Pour into a greased, lined tray to set for a few hours. Then cut into squares. You can cover your ganache in a variety of things, cocoa powder or ground up nuts are popular choices. To make the covering stick to the ganache, you need yet more chocolate to use as glue. This time the melted choc should be at 32C so that it just covers the cubes. Use gloves, as this is a sticky operation!

Coating ganache

To make bubbly chocolate, you need one of the professional metal cream whipping bottles that you see on the TV. Melt about 1kg of good milk 35-40% choc. Don’t use dairy milk and friends because they’ve got a high vegetable fat content that doesn’t play nice. Pour into the bottle and use two cylinders of gas to charge it. Shake up the melted choc through the gas, then spray it all out into a greased, lined tray and leave it to very gently set. don’t bash it, or you’ll knock the bubbles out.

He paid careful attention to tempering his chocolate by gradually cooling it by working the choc with a scraper or spatula on a marble slab. This does things to the crystal size and alignment that gives the chocolate its glossy finish and a good clean snap. Otherwise it’ll crumble.

So imagine my surprise two weekends ago when I was quietly reading a book in my living room, when I heard a plane approach. We often get the odd aircraft go past, the kitkat air balloons, gliders from the local club and the occasional wing of attack helicopters, but this roar was bigger than anything I’d heard before. I glaced out of the window and saw a large delta wing rumble into view over the tops of the trees. There was a moment when I just could not believe my eyes, whilst the Vulcan is unique and instantly recognisable, it was just too unlikely to be flying over my house. Luckily, my camera was only in the next room so I was able to lunge for it and then outside where I held down the ‘take a photo of this’ button until it was out of sight. It was probably all over within 15 seconds.

I did a bit of reading around, because XH558 is limited to Visual Flight Rules, it’s easily low enough over the ground for the crew to tweet using a mobile phone. It turns out I was under their route from their base at RAF Brize Norton to a show at RAF Leuchars in Scotland.

The Vulcan flying past

The vulcan's rear end

The Sunday afterwards, they obligingly flew back again on their way home! Remarkably, they must have been within about 50m of their original course, which seems an unnecessarily good piece of navigating.

It’s unusual that something can shock me, I’ll take in most things my stride, but I have no shame in admitting to a few giggly aftershocks whilst it soaked in

The charitable trust that operates XH558 is always on the look out for donations, it costs on the order of £19,000 per hour to fly, so why not join the growing number of people who contribute towards this piece of our country’s heritage.

To learn a bit more about why this plane is seen by some as heroic, I can recommend reading about XM-607′s trip to the Falklands and back. Or if you fancy a laugh, there’s a Haynes Manual on the subject too

I can’t say the same for the legumes though, I blinked and missed the peas, they went from unripe to brown and dry before I really noticed and the local wasps continued their bid to win the Pest Of The Year award by getting at my ripe beans before I did, so I left them mostly to grow so I’ve got some seeds to plant for next year. I’ve still got three cabbages left, despite something having done its best to turn their leaves into lace so I’m hopeful they’ll be big enough to start picking soon. Not sure that two year vegetables are worth the effort, perhaps next year I’ll try this new Kale/Brussel Sprout hybrid that looks so fun. Sweeter than sprouts, taller than Kale and it’s a relatively quick brassica, 9-11 months.

To help celebrate things, what better than steaming bowls of home made soup accompanied with hot crusty rolls, fresh from the oven. Yum.

A week passes…

Oops, I’m sure I pressed the Publish button on this last weekend. No matter, part two fits neatly onto the end.

Picked another bowl load of tomatoes from the vines and noticed that the wasps had started digging their way into the rosy red patches of my apples! Gerrof! Just to be annoying, rather than all eating one apple, they had to be greedy and go for one each. Oh well, the apples can come in too then. Not a bad size and yield considering I removed most of the blooms earlier this year. Now to find a use for them that isn’t a waste. Mmm, apple and blackberry muffins.. The chilli plant is looking a bit worse for wear too, so that can be picked. The fruit might not be very big, but there’s a least a year’s supply of chilli peppers for the kitchen. They’re not thick and juicy enough to warrant turning into powder though, so it’s into the freezer for them.

Looking through my posts index for previous years, I’m about 4 weeks early with my first batch of chutney this year. Who knew we were actually ahead? My informal tomato growing trial was succesful, same batch of seeds from the same variety but grew and ripened very differently. One set was grown in a long, shallow trough with fresh expensive compost with a trellis to climb up. One set was grown in a deep trough (this container won last year) but shared with some old bulbs I couldn’t be bothered to fish out first. And a final set was grown in the open ground with lots of organic matter (yay, horse poo, woo) and bambooo canes to climb up.

The winner was the fresh compost, despite the shallow trough that needed watering every day. I suppose this just reinforces the usefulness of grow bags. The ones in the open ground had the bushiest and sturdiest growth, but didn’t match the brick wall for heat retention and speed of ripening. The deepest trough produced some pretty manky plants, so yes, hungry fruits need as much compost as you can give them, but only when coupled with shelter. Groundbreaking stuff….not.

Anyway, despite a burnt lip (hot chutney is hot, who knew?), I made up my fiirst batch of red chutney for the year. Just ripe tomatoes, onions, sugar and vinegar this time around, mostly because that’s what I happened to have in stock. Helpfully, whilst I was waiting for it to reduce down during its two hour simmer, there was a Rick Stein video on Saturday Kitchen Live that showed how to make Sri Lankan Chutneys. My approach is to reduce the fruit down a bit, then add all the other ingredients and then simmer it for ages and ages to get rid of most of the water. This has the advantage of producing a very deep, rich flavour, but it also very much reduces the fruit and probably the quantity of output. The approach on TV was to do most of your reducing at the start of the cooking process. Mix the vinegar and sugar at the start, add whatever spices you’re adding (a lot more than you might imagine) and then reduce that to a thick syrup as quickly as you can. Burning to the bottom of the pan should be much less of a problem because there’s only the sugar that could caramelise. Then stir in the fruits, whatever you’re using, and give it the beans for about 20 minutes. I’ll be giving that a whirl when it’s time to make the Green.

Tomato chutney

Thus heralded the results of my vaguely scientific trial, does one really need to earth up potato crops to maximise your dinner?

My crop of potatoes were carefully grown in a couple of surplus buckets and started off as a couple of supermarket potatoes that I’d left for too long and had started chitting on their own. They’re one of my favourite varieties, Charlotte, coping well with any use in the kitchen and still being reasonably early in the year.

I’m not the only one enjoying home grown potatoes at this time of year, but I do think it’s one of the more interesting crops to harvest. All you can see during the growing season is an increasingly straggly stem, the mystery of how successful you were isn’t dispelled until you start rooting around for the, err, roots.

Bucket o spuds

The bucket that I earthed up probably won the contest by two medium sized tubers. The lazy version had quite a few roots near the edges of the bucket but nothing in the middle, whereas the second layer of compost in the earthed up bucket had extras in the middle. It had none in the upper layers of compost, despite the stem and leaves growing on to match.

Potato trial results

The results. The top row was from a potato left in some compost and forgotten about, the bottom row was earthed up 4 or 5 times over the growing season.

Apples packed with Elderflowers

My holiday was well timed to help with another experiment. When we were at the NEC in June, Alys Folwer mentioned that apples packed in Elderflowers for a month came out tasting like pineapples. Well, going away for three weeks seemed an ideal space of time to try it. We caught the tail end of the local elderflower crop, but there were plenty of creamy clusters of flowers in the hedgerows, some were even without bugs.

Apple and Elderflower Crumble

The answer? Perhaps I didn’t use sufficient flowers. They scented the house gloriously for a week, but the apples just tasted like both apples and elderflowers. I probably should have packed the apples in something too, they were somewhat bruised at the end despite not having been moved about. They still tasted good, so we combined them with a few spoons of last year’s Elderflower Cordial and turned them into an extremely summery Apple and Elderflower Crumble. Served with a generous helping of Yorkshire Vanilla Ice cream.

Last night was enjoyable tho, a swift stroll by the lake after a positively riotous evening meal sharing a table with 2 British couples. A doctor was singing Nellie the Elephant to illustrate proper CPR technique, that song is forever tainted now..

Our modes varied slightly because I’m on holiday, rather than a mission, so I took the bus, train and cable car along the valley instead.

I got chatting to a couple of guys from North Carolina, they were roughly following Kev’s C-Z route, but with a couple of approximations made by the company they contracted with to handle all the arrangements. I thought 31 C was 10 degrees too hot to do anything, they thought it was pleasantly cool. Different idea of normal I guess.

It was more than a bit novel to be the expert French speaker in the group! Their idea of the cable car up from La Chable was a pleasant finish, only a couple of Francs more than the bus. Then i promptly got us lost leaving the telecabane station.

My mission for the day was finding us somewhere reasonable to stay, it’s still quiet – medium season in Verbier so I had the pick of 2 or 3 places within budget. So I’m typing this from my private balcony over looking le place centrale over the third ice tea of the day. Holiday much?

much of the town is under construction, lots of big lorries and cement mixers feeding the many hungry big cranes.
Found a family pharmacy for a throat spray and joy of joys, they stocked Fisherman’s Friends and the kindly man spoke great English, tho I amused what I’m guessing was their daughter with my broken french and glee at finding yeehar strength mint tablets.

I perplexed half the town’s sports and shoe shops looking for size 50 insoles, mostly not available until ski season, tho I did fine a pair of size 50 boots on sale. “Le Cinqante?!” *surprise and bafflement*

I also finished devouring the novel I brought along for the ride, so that’ll get posted home in a bit, dead weight ftl.

tomorrow is the start of the real mountain leg of the holiday, the point of the exercise as it were. Up to 2600m at Col Terman and sleeping at 2200m at Lac de Louvie. Up close and personal with the mountains. Could be interesting or it could be seriously annoying if the promised thunderstorm hits.

I can’t promise much phone signal until Grimentz in a week’s time, but I’ve ceased being surprised where Swisscom put cells..

LBA’s baggage belts were broken, so there was more than no pandemonium as Jet2 tried to get three 7am flights sent off at once.

Still, we got to Geneva 10mins early and wandered off to stock up on noms from the Migros. The nice people running ChamExpress(.com) managed to fit us in a minibus an hour early, I can thoroughly recommend their service.

Paused in Chamonix for an hour to take the obligatory photos and an ice cream before letting the train take the strain up to our home for the next two nights, Belle Vue Alpine Lodge.

The sun was scorchio down in the valley, but there’s a gorgeous cooling breeze here, probably about 20ish degrees, which perfectly matched a cool bottle of wheat beer from Brasserie Du Mont Blanc ‘La Blanche’.

oh, and Mountains!

Another of the small recipes I picked up from this year’s NEC show is from Alys Fowler. Apparently if you pack some apples in elderflowers for a month, they come out tasting like pineapples. Knowing my luck they’ll turn out tasting of pollen beetle, but I’ll let you know how I get on

Alys Fowler

I picked up a couple of cheap pineapples from the supermarket, which was a good excuse to restock my jam supplies. It’s also nice to spread the bounty around a bit, it can make a fun, if horribly sweet, gift. It’s pictured here with some olive oil and herb foccacia bread I made.

The garden is showing some positive signs too, although more water would be nice. My pineapple guava plants are putting on lots of new growth, albeit from the bottom rather than the top, so it’s more hedging than a goblet shape at the moment. I’m hoping it will eventually flower like the professionally grown ones, here’s one I spotted at the NEC:

Pineapple Guava

I suspect that hoping for Yorkshire guavas is a touch optimistic though

The sweet peas are making steady progress up their supports and the garden peas are starting to swell nicely. Some of the tomato plants are looking very green and healthy, though the uneven watering has encouraged my spinach and cabbages to bolt like the oil seed rape in the field next door. Maybe next year I’ll find some seeds for this fun looking spinach variety:

Mexican tree spinach

Automating the process took a little bit of thought, so I’m putting it online so it’s easier for me to find next time I format my computer and forget to back it all up.

Getting the files off the PVR

If you’re still running a 32bit copy of Windows XP, then use Humax’s Media e-linker application to copy the files onto your laptop. If, however, you’re using something that isn’t 9 years old, then you’ll need the help of some community experts to download from it.

I’m discounting the method of connecting a computer directly to the Humax’s builtin hard disk because many users at home aren’t comfortable with that level of hardware modifications, so this is strictly USB file transers.

First you’ll need a copy of Andy Chappell’s Humax Media Controller. This is a command line rewrite of media e-linker and uses the open source Libusb-win32 library to do the interfacing. However, the 2007 version of this library didn’t support 64bit windows, so you’ll need Mike Dimmick’s remarkably handy updated driver and specially compiled copy of libusb0.dll to make it work with your OS and HMC.

Transcoding from .ts into .mp3

Once you’ve got the files transferred onto your computer, you will likely want to convert it into something your phone or mp3 player will cope with. It comes as MPEG2 Transport Streams (.ts.) which VLC media player copes with just fine, and you can use it to transcode it into an mp3 and attempt to put an ID3 tag or two in using a tool like id3 mass tagger

This approach works just as well for video as it does for audio but because of the size of the files involved, you really do need two seperate hard drive spindles to split the reading from the writing, otherwise you’ll be there for hours.

The script that does the work is just below. Call it either one at a time or as a

for /f %i in (*.ts) do @transcodeThis.cmd

@echo off
echo %1
set out=%1
set out=%OUT: =%
set out=%OUT:'=%
set out=%OUT:ts=mp3%
echo %OUT%

set thisfile=%out%
set thisfile=%OUT:"=%
set thisyear=%thisfile:~0,4%
set thismonth=%thisfile:~4,2%
set thisday=%thisfile:~6,2%
set thishour=%thisfile:~8,2%
set thismin=%thisfile:~10,2%
set thistitle=%thisfile:~12,-4%

start /wait f:\Progra~2\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe %1 --sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128}:standard{access=file,mux=dummy,dst=%OUT%} vlc://quit

rem ID3 v2 tag
rem f:\datafiles\pvr\id3.exe -2 -M -g "Podcast" -a "%thistitle%" -t "%thistitle% %thisyear%/%thismonth%/%thisday% %thishour%:%thismin%" -y "%thisyear%" %1
rem ID3 v1 tag
f:\datafiles\pvr\id3.exe -M -g "Speech" -a "%thistitle%" -t "%thistitle% %thisyear%/%thismonth%/%thisday% %thishour%:%thismin%" -y "%thisyear%" %out%

The lawn’s had its first weeding and haircut of the year, I’ve put some seeds in some compost, the veg plots have had their thick mulch of organic matter applied for about a month and have been dug over ready for the soil to warm up enough for some direct sowing and my amaryllis has flowered. I even spent a good 30 minutes with a screwdriver, can of air and vacuum cleaner to spring clean the inside of my computer, the dust filters over its inlet fans were gross.

After last year’s mixed successes in my current garden, I’m changing my planting plan slightly to match. The tomatoes are the same variety (F1 Totem) and I’ll be carrying on with the same spinach, chard and beetrooot varieties (largely because I’ve got loads of seed left over) but gone are the Nasturtiums and Strawberry Spinach, the round cucumbers (waah!) and squashes. In their place, however, will be a japanese variety of parsley, some more second early potatoes, three varieties of shallot and possibly a standard issue Pumpkin vine for my work’s annual competition.

I’m going to be doing three sowings of spinach and chard, 3 to 4 weeks apart, which should give a steady supply through the summer and not leave just the old and tough stalks in the autumn. In effect, I’m growing things that I use a lot of, but can be expensive to buy and I’m leaving alone the things I use but are cheap to buy.

My Amaryllis took a little over two years to flower again from when it flowered the first time and only had two blooms instead of four, possibly because I didn’t keep it sufficiently fed and watered. It was an interesting exercise to see if it works, but I don’t think it’s worth the space the pot and large spread of leaves take up. One of my bulbs was happy enough to split off a child, which is growing on strongly and might flower next year, if I keep it around that long. I may just to find a sheltered and sunny corner somewhere and plant them out so I’ve got space for the next fun things I’ve got in mind.

Amaryllis flower

It’s getting close to Easter, so I’ve had a quick experiment with a coffee chocolate fudge; mix up a quantity of plain fudge, melt 75g of good quality coffee chocolate and swirl one through the other.

Chocolate fudge

Ah, snow. Like it or loathe it, it’s impossible to ignore it.
England isn’t used to snow in any real quantity, which is why these past couple of weeks have been so newsworthy.
Apart from my Scandinavian car not coping with ice as well as I’d prefer, I’ve been lucky enough to not be significantly inconvenienced by it all. Things are just different, Being Prepared helps more than ever, driving to work just takes 3 times as long and you can’t always rely on shopping at the last minute.

Parliament Street

But that’s not a bad thing, with roads, rails and runways all suffering from the snow, travel suddenly becomes hugely more valuable. When driving, you have to take your time to be aware of the road and your car’s reactions to it. We’re all used to being able to quickly go wherever we want, whenever we want, so this is an incentive to be aware of, and enjoy our surroundings more.

If I lived nearer the Wolds, I’d be considering getting some skis for a bit of fun, the snow round my home is perfect, just need a slope

The thick blanket of snow on the fields is refreshingly like a canvas, showing what and who has passed by, the low winter sun picking out in orange contrast all the foot, tyre and hoof prints left on the lane as the day’s business goes past. Only to be filled in after darkness and snow falls anew, ready for the next days activity.

Chilly Busking

Most people round the city centre seemed to be enjoying themselves, from the kids throwing snowballs at each other and the world in general by the fountain in the middle to the slightly bonkers but very good busker by the Minster, effortlessly playing the piano with gloves on in the subzero wind.

Unless you’re in the market for a large television, I recommend a reasonably large LCD monitor instead, their LCD panels tend to be much higher quality than an LCD TV and are also generally cheaper because they don’t have unnecessary rubbish inside like TV tuners and remote control receivers. Why these are unnecessary will be introduced in just a moment.

The choice of monitor should be limited to those with a native resolution of 1920×1080, or just “1080p” in current parlance, it allows you to use the same device to watch TV, play XBox and run your computer though and generally saves space, money and the planet. This year has seen the release of a lot of 21.5″ LCD panels that run at this resolution, but I’d pick one with a larger pixel size because you’ll be watching it from a few feet away.

These are a few options in various sizes:

Watching digital TV without the help of a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is missing out on some major opportunities, such as recording two channels at once whilst watching a third, pausing live TV whilst you answer the [phone/oven/small child], and series link recording. Series Link is one of the most misunderstood techologies out at the moment and people usually expect miracles, even though they didn’t when they used VHS or DVD recorders. The implementation also varies between different Manufacturers, so you must read and understand how it does it.

Anyway, the current PVR I recommend is the Topfield TF5810. As long as the PVR of your choice has an HDMI output and contains a function called an ‘upsizer’ which just takes normal TV and scales it up to fill a HighDef screen, you’re good. Be careful, upsizing is a generally a software function and a lot of them are of an unwatchably low quality.

Unlike the Humax 9200T that I’ve been happy with for years, the Topfield’s menu system is fast to use, its USB download to computer function doesn’t crash it and, most importantly, the software is customisable. Which means that the community supplies user interface improvements way faster than the manufacturer can. http://www.toppy.org.uk/ is the place to start looking, but if you just get the addon (or TAP as they’re called) called MyStuff you won’t go far wrong. Download MyStuff.

Finally, don’t forget a good quality spare HDMI cable to connect things to the monitor with:

This setup isn’t for everybody because monitors generally don’t have as many video inputs as TVs, neither are they as large, but this article is just to point my friends and family towards and they can cope with moving a plug when they want to change inputs over

Edit:

I’ve been reminded that I forgot sound. In which case, pick one of these monitors with built in A/V switches and tinny little speakers:

For now, however, I’m going to contain myself into a bit of a rave about my latest toy. It’s one of those tools that’s going to have to last my lifetime, but I’ve recently succumbed to temptation and treated myself to a Santoku, made from Damascus folded steel by Tojiro.

After deciding which knife to get, there was a lot of shopping around to be done. It turns out that the cheapest place was York’s very own Barnitts! Whilst they had to order it in especially for me (“these don’t exactly fly off the shelves you know”), it was still £45 cheaper than the RRP. This isn’t exactly an impulse buy, I don’t part with that much money at all easily, so being an Engineer, I made sure the specification was right before I chose my product

Unlike its cheaper counterparts from, say, QVC shopping channel, the pattern isn’t so much painted onto the blade as reflected out from inside it. Beautiful stuff.

Tojiro 180mm Santoku

It wasn’t just the appearance that I chose this material for the blade, however,I wanted steel that was malleable enough to be able to be sharpened but hard enough to keep its edge once it got it, anything over 60 on the Rockwell scale would do. I also wanted a sensible grip on the handle. I’ve tried a few other knives, IO Shen were good, but I felt were edged out by Tojiro. Despite their innovative sharpening gadgetry and the genius marketing man that is Mr Global, Min, I don’t rate Global’s style at all (although they sell a huge volume of good quality knives to Western Europe, so I’m in the minority with this opinion).

The weight is perfect for me, it’s heavy enough to have a heft of its own and unlike my French knives, the balance is slightly forward of the handle which makes my life easier. The shape of the blade is a great compromise between piercing, chopping and rocking whilst still being thick enough for me to rest my knuckles against whilst using (big hands aren’t always a bonus). Whilst I will still use my 6 and 8 inch Sabatier cooks knives, it’s immediately clear why this shape of blade outsells all others in Japan.

I thought I’d used sharp knives before, but Oh My God. I chopped a stir fry this evening and I eventually had to be told me to stop giggling before I cut myself. Not a chance with that knife, it was completely controlled. I wasn’t bored enough to make a video of it, but this will cut through a ripe tomato, perfectly, under its own action alone. No need to put the point through the skin and cut back through it, or to draw the cutting edge across the skin like a serrated edge.

It literally cut through vegetables as if they weren’t there. Now I begin to underst how TV chefs do their rapid fire showing off action, they use properly sharp knives.

Carols, dixieland style

The sound track was provided by a local dixieland jazz band playing christmas carols, I forgot to note the groups name, but I’m sure I recognised their trumpet player from the old Wednesday night jazz jam session in the Black Swan from a year or 10 ago.

Barley Hall

Barley Hall was doing it’s usual historic market, with stall keepers dressed in costume and happy to cater to all of your needs, provided they can be made from hand stitched leather, hand woven wool or properly blacksmithed.

One brand that’s really taken off this year is delicouslyorkshire who had taken over the top end of Parliament St with their usual made in Yorkshire market. My bag came out a good deal heavier than it went in..

I try to make a rule of not shopping round a supermarket when hungry, but that should also apply to markets. I stopped by Cross of York to see if they had any fish left for dinner tonight and was reminded of how good a skilled fishmonger can be, watching them fillet my choice of fish ready for the pan. So tonight will probably be pan fried butterflied-fillet of Trout on a bed of steamed kale with a sage risotto, followed by a baked apple because it’s cold and dark and I like that sort of thing

Baked goods aside, I didn’t really achive much Christmas shopping, I did pop into Borders to see what the effects of its administration were. The 20% sale coupled with the seasonal pile of customers led to an epic queue, so I’ll leave that shop until next time I’m in town.

Speaking of which, next weekend’s looking busy with a walking club trip to the famous Lion on Blakey Ridge, and the weekend after is my second favourite (after the fortnight’s worth of Food and Drink Festival) time in York, Festival of Angels.

There were a lot of neat touches with the event’s organisation, including doing a deal with some off site parking in Stamford Bridge and making the “torch lit procession” part of the event.

Otherwise it was pretty much a fireworks event. There was a nice big bonfire that you could get close enough to to feel the benefit from, a mulled wine tent was doing steady business, which gave something warming to hold and sip whilst queuing up for the hog roast and traditional barbequeued burgers and hot dogs. We thought the burgers didn’t look too wide so I had the double, turned out they were just thick instead, which coupled with the serve-it-yourself onions and ketchup meant I was mostly wearing my dinner at the end. Very tasty though.

There were a couple of decoratively lit horse trailers with party games and people selling the sort of glowy light sticks you get these days, there was even a barrel for children of all ages to try their mouth at bobbing for apples grown on the premises. The bar was well stocked, though I couldn’t get near it, with optics as well as draught beer. The local Guides were present, running a tombola with prizes that were collected over the recent weeks.

The brass band kept up a very good set, and were well organised and didn’t compete with either the fireworks or the tent from Minster FM who were compereing the night’s proceedings. They even got the timing spot on with getting the crowd to chant “10..9..8..etc..1..FIRE!” which led to a remarkably good display of *whoosh* *kablam* *aahh*.

The fireworks were a good selection and well sequenced, with pretty much all the childhood favourites apart from a catherine wheel. I think the crowd was about 100m away from the fairly modest looking launching apparatus, so the bigger rockets really did explode overhead. It went on for what seemed like about 20 minutes and was remarkably dense. Way better than the Scout displays I used to help, although computer firing sequences are much less fun than running between the milk bottles and the back of the landrover to get the next rocket.

There were a few picnic tables dotted about and plenty straw bales to perch on if standing up for the full display wasn’t your thing. There was plenty of space, so the crowd wasn’t too deep and even the car park was well organised (it would have to be for that many cars).

The Cadets were doing the parking and they made good use of the glowy sticks, having one in each hand to direct the traffic like you see people on TV doing with planes. There were a couple of tractors doing the rounds to tow out the people who got stuck in the mud, which was fine from our point of view because we were smug cyclists but would have been highly fustrating for the drivers who would have had to wait for their turn for quite some time. But then, everybody was parking in muddy fields so there was bound to be a fair number of stuck cars.

All in all, it was a very accomplished event, certainly better then the Castle Howard one last year, possibly because it involved less traffic jams.

I had a gossip with one of the Balloon Tree’s staff earlier on, they apparently sold out of all 1600 tickets (that’s all they were brave enough to sell) with a week or so to go, so I’m glad I got mine when I did. They found it succesful enough to have already started planning next year’s, so fingers crossed that a small, succesful enterprise will triumph where other, larger organisations have chickened out from.

So, yes, good traditional British nights out are still going strong. Yay.