10.27.08
Posted in food at 10:30 pm by coldclimate
I’ll add photos just as soon as I find a cable in the depths of the bag of cables under my desk.
So, this weekend I bit the bullet and set about juicing all the fallen apples from our tree. It’s not a complex proceedure, but it is one that has taken us three years to get roughly right, so I throught I would share and maybe save people some time if they are doing the same thing.
Firstly - an equipment list. This is what I used…
- A wire basket, such as found in supermarkets. I have no idea where it came from but being able to wash off apples in it is very handy
- A hose pipe - with one of the gun things attached so you aren’t running back and forth to the tap
- A large juice bucket with a lid - I use a 3 gallon brewing tub. The lid helps the juice to stop going brown and keeps out flies and rain
- A big pan or bucket for catching apple shreddings
- A pair of smaller bowls - to catch juice as it comes out of….
- A fruit press - mine looks a bit like this one - but cheaper
- A garden shredder - the best way to shred the apples is to use a new shredder. MIne looks a bit like this one (but again, much cheaper)
- A pocket full of plastic carrier bags
- A couple of bin bags
- Bleach
- A couple of lemons
Firstly - gather up your apples. I was using all the windfalls, so i discarded all the ones which were slug houses, brown and squishy etc. They don’t have to be pristeen, but they shouldn’t be too crappy. I use plastic carrier bags because one carrier bag full is about as many as will fit in my press.
Next - clean all your kit, especially the end juice reseptical, especially if you are then going on to brewing. I use hotwater, a squirt of bleach, and clean teatowels. I dry everything off in the airing cupboard too.
Now on to the fun. Set up everything in a row - apples, basket, shredder (with big pan under it to catch the pulp), press, (with shallow bowl under the drip point), bin bag for used pulp and finally juice bucket.
The aim of the game is to get the most juice, with it being the least browned by the air. There are a couple of tricks:
- Keep the juice in the apple as long as possible - from the moment you shred the apple, it is browning
- Chuck in a lemon every so often - the citric acid helps to stop the apple browning
- Keep a lid on the bucket - this helps to stop too much air circulating, and hopefully a layer of carbon dioxide will form and help keep your juice clear
- Press small batches quickly, rather than large batches slowly
So, the steps for juicing…
- Pour a carrier bag full of apples into the wire basket, and blast clean with the hose pipe
- Feed them into the shredder a couple at a time. Too quick and it jams, to slow and they jump out. I found 2 or 3 at a time was about right
- Fire a halfed lemon through every so often
- Once you have enough shredded apples to fill your press, push it all in, and start squeezing
- Have a bowl ready to catch the juice, and another to take over when you are full
- As soon as you have any volume of juice, swap the bowls and pour into your bigger and lidded bucket, replace the lid.
- Once juice stops flowing, don’t press too much, unscrew it all and “tump” the pressed apple into the bin bag. This can be hard work - I ended up punching it out by hand.
In an hour I made 15 litres of juice, and that was from 3 full carrier bags of apple juice. Not bad for an hour in the rain and wind. From experience, the key seems to be how you shred the apples. first year we cut them up into chunks and got bugger all. Second year, we MagiMixed them, and it was a bit better. Nothing have beaten the shredder yet - it’s like running them through a rough grater.
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10.25.08
Posted in food at 1:08 pm by coldclimate
Well, I arrived home on friday to a box from Berocca. I must have registered at some point to recieve it, but I don’t really remember doing so. However, freebies are freebies, and I don’t think I’m endangering my credability by (ab)using their products and telling the world about it.
The thing that I remember most about Berocca, is two fold, firstly its meant to be good at curing hangovers (or at least helping) and secondly that it makes you wee green.
So, I set out to test both, with the aid of beer (4 bottles for £3, with rip caps and about 5%), peach schnapps (the dry stuff from Austria not the liquid knicker remover that is Archers), and erm, weeing. Being a scientific type fella, I did this using a laboritory log, kept on Post-It notes and is reproduced here (with elaboration from my scribbles).
- 8:30pm Experiment begins. Having thrashed down the motorway to the sounds of the best new bit of music I’ve heard in years - Ghosts and stuff by Deadmau5*, I have picked to some beers. First bottle pretty much goes in one, because it has been a really long week.
- 8:45pm Food is needed. One bolagnase sauce sandwich (with pickled onions added for crunchyness) latter, I am two beers and 1 schnapps to the wind. Face taking on first flush of booze.
- 9pm Get Shorty starts on TV. Excellent drinking TV this. 2nd beer nearly finished. Have taken to sipping schnapps and chasing it with beer as I saw being done in Austria. Seems to work well. My nose it going a bit numb.
- 9:15pm 3rd beer now finished and lost count of the schnapses. I think I’m 4 or 5 schnappes down.
- 9:30pm 4th beer going down slowly. I’m really not good at this drinking malaky, as now quite pissed.
- 9:45pm Out of beers now. Thinking I should have bought more as the schnapps on its own is not great. Might move to other booze but the port bottle is very far away.
At this point I lost track of time and the Post Its become unreadable. It was definetly somewhere near midnight when I went to bed, drinking a pint of water with half a Berocca tablet in it.
Woke up about 8am with a bit of a bad head, and a mouth like a dried out badger. Drank another pint of water witht he other half Berocca, and went back to sleep. Woke up at 9am feeling OK, which seems to be a good start.
Conclusions: I have no idea if the Berocca made my hangover any better, but considing I am a piss poor drinker, I think it probably dit.
As for the”It makes your wee green” theory… it did. I can only think this is the 800% RDA of vitamins each fiizy good make feel nice tablet provides you coming staight out through your system. One other noticable side effect - your wee smells a bit like grapefruit, or atleast it did to my foggy mind.
* Watching Layer Cake this afternoon I spotted where Mr Mau5 nicked the spooky intro riff. It’s the background song when Gene is looking at the Dukes head in the freezer.
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10.21.08
Posted in music at 10:11 pm by coldclimate
Sex and the City, my current guilty secret, turns out to have a brilliant soundtrack in the last two series. Series six is worth a look for the french hip hop alone. Sad, but true.
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10.19.08
Posted in rant at 6:12 pm by coldclimate
Slow living is all a bit fashionable at the moment, and I’d happily knock it without thinking like most other “ways to live” that rise to prominence, but I can see some merit in it.
This weekend, I spent a few hours in the launderette, watching my clothes go round in circles getting cleaner, as I read my book. I sent a few texts, but basically, I didn’t do a lot really.
My boiler is on the blink at the moment, and so getting clothes to dry in the house is a bit of a challenge. The washing machine works fine, but getting the 4kg of cold water to evaporate in a house which is pretty cold is a nightmare, so I packed it all into a Ikea big bag, and headed off to The House o’ Wash.
For the sake of a fiver (£3 for the wash, £2 of drying time), not only do you get a massive bag of warm clean washing, you get 2 hours of time to yourself, with no possibility of being able to do anything else, other than read and think. You have to stay there, you can’t spent all your time on your phone (well, you can, but everybody there will hate you), you spend the time wrapped in the warm, damp, clean smelling atmosphere.
Compare and contrast that with the “normal” washing cycle here at Coldclimate Tower. I sort it all, stuff the tiny machine, wait 3 hours (3 hours!) and repeat twice because domestic machines are dinky, then drag it all onto flimsy crappy wire racks, and forget about it for 3 days. Then there’s the ironing, the tripping over the rack, the being frustrated that its not being dry, etc etc. All in all it’s a massive waste of time, and very frustrating.
Trust me gang, store up your washing for a month, go to Soap Suzies Sink (all launderettes seem to have great names) and enjoy some quality time.
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Posted in food at 5:34 pm by coldclimate
As the weather gets colder, and your boiler packs in leaving you freezing your bits off*, its a great time to make sure of some seasonal vegetables and make soup. Pumpkin lanterns might be one of the most dreadful imports to this country from America, but they are damned tasty, and in a few weeks will be cheap as chips in your average supermarket. Bring on… Punkin, sweat potato and peanut soup.
You will need…
- one pumpkin about the size of a football
- 2 large sweet potatoes
- a litre of stock (chicken or veg)
Peel and then chop up your sweet potatoes into cube about 2 inches across. Dump them into a big metal roasting dish. Chop your pumpkin into wedges (easiest down if you take the top and botton off. Scoop out the seeds and very soft flesh. Chop the remaining flesh (still on the skin) into chunks about the size of the palm of your hand. Throw it in with the sweet potato, add a glug of olive oil, shake it all about an stick in a red hot oven for 20 minutes until softer and blacken round the edge.
Once time is up, scrape all the soft flesh off the skin of the pumpkin, and put all veg flesh into a big stock pot on a high heat with a lug of olive oil. Frazzle it all for a few minutes, and then pour over the hot stock. Add a heaped tablespoon of peanut butter, and give it all a gentle boil for 10 minutes. Blend until smooth.
*boiler being off optional, but sadly not for me.
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10.12.08
Posted in food at 9:34 pm by coldclimate
Many many years ago, I used to make flavoured spirits from fun and profit. One of my most successful (in both catagories) was made at Christmas. I called it Mince Pie Vodka, but one of my good friends renamed it Christmas Spirit. The instructions I kept hidden, telling no man, but now this all changes. Here I release all the notes, under a Creative Commons License.
If you get started now, you should be able to crack a few bottles out before the season is upon you.
These numbers will scale, and it might be better made in volume. I’ve never done it in batches of more than a couple of litres, but most of these things work best done a gallon at a time.
You will need:
- 1 bottle of vodka, 700ml or 750ml, not the cheapest going, but don’t waste money on it
- 1 orange, unwaxed or run under a very hot tap and toweled roughly
- 1 handful of raisins
- 1 desert spoon of mixed spice
- 2 desert spoons of dark sugar
- 1 desert spoons of chopped mixed peel
So, all you need to do is…
- Zest the orange.
- Do it above a bowl and catch the oily spray in the bowl - this is the good stuff.
- Wash the bowl out with some of the vodka.
- Pour everything back in, and add all the other ingredients (including the orange peel).
- Give it a good shake.
Now all you have to do is wait. About 2 weeks, give or take. You can probably get by with 24 hours, but the longer the better. Once you can wait no longer strain the whole lot through a coffee filter, or a fine mesh seive, even a pair of tights will do I imagine. Have a taste, and maybe add a little more sugar.
Thats it - you’re done - pour, sip and enjoy the results.
Christmas Spirit by coldclimate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.coldclimate.co.uk.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/2008/10/12/christmas-spirit/.
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10.04.08
Posted in food, randomosity at 6:11 pm by coldclimate
What a strange day. I got locked out of my house. My spare keys were in my car. My car keys were in the house. Epic fail on so many levels. Anyway, life got a bit better when I opened my rss feeds:
Flickr Panda - truly this is a very strange thing.
The prime number shitting bear - possibly this is even stranger (thanks Mr Wilson)
Seth makes two interesting points - hire experts (not just people who are really good at a few things), and don’t let let your marketing change your company (though I would add, unless you completely orientate your business model how people find out )
code.flickr.com - more rainbow powered Flickr goodness. This time, its all APIness.
No Kneed Bread - famous in online cooking circles, and it just got a whole lot easier.
The brilliantly named Scuppernong Cake - I wish I’d found this before I threw out all the over ripe grapes - how tasty does it look?
Enjoy kiddies, I’m of for another glass of chardonnay and a second helping of 4 bean casserole,
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