Thursday 24 September 2020

Making #Chutney in the Slow Cooker



There's a small orchard behind the allotments, which means if you time it right, you can scallywag on over there and help yourself to windfalls.  This is exactly what I did on Sunday, returning home with armfuls of apples.  Now, I don't really like apples or that much - I'll eat them in a crumble or a pie, and just try and stop me blending them into a green breakfast smoothie, but they're not my favourite fruit.  And cooking apples can just bugger off.  What I do like, though, is chutney.




I feel like it's very difficult to go wrong when making chutney.  You get your ingredients, your vinegar, assorted flavourings, salt and sugar; and you chop and simmer them all together into mush.  Then you spoon said mush into sterilised jars, seal, and wait.  The thing is, there are no wrong ingredients - or if there are, I haven't found them yet.  On this occasion, I fed the following to my slow cooker: apples, fermented carrots, nasturtium seeds, onions, dried sage and brown vinegar.  The vinegar is flavoured with salt and sugar (probably the only essential ingredients) along with garlic, mustard seeds, peppercorns, chilli pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon.  Four of five hours of simmering, during which time I took a long and luxurious nap, turned the mixture from this...


...to this:


It was at this stage I added more apples, because I still had some, and the mixture was still quite thin.  What you want is for almost all the vinegar to be absorbed by the solid ingredients.  (I don't know if that's true, but it feels true.  I read it in one chutney recipe and have decided it applies to all chutney recipes).

I left it for another few hours, before sterilising my Branston pickle jars, and spooning in the now perfectly goopy chutney splodge.


 
And there we have it.  Not to be disturbed before November.  The winter stockpile grows.













Related posts

******

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Sunday 20 September 2020

How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (and Get Away With It) (Part Two)



I would never normally promote, well, anything that can be bought, but today I'm making an exception because I think I may have discovered the perfect pair of shoes, which means I may well never need to buy another pair of shoes again. They're made by a company called Freet - "freedom for feet" - and they're already most comfortable, and I have every confidence they will become the most durable - shoes I've ever worn. The whole schtick of Freet is that shoes should be shaped like your feet actually are, and not squeeze your toes together or raise your heel pointlessly and uncomfortably, as almost all shoes do. Which is so obviously correct and brilliantly simple it's no great surprise it's taken this long for anybody to realise that.  (Google "barefoot shoes" - they're a very recent phenomenon). Truly obvious things are only obvious retrospectively. Why are all shoes not designed to correspond to the actual shape of your feet? I've no idea. It's bonkers, but here we are. Freet. (A fun word to say, too).

Wearing a pair of Freet is as close as you're going to get to feeling as if you're walking around barefoot than, erm, walking around barefoot. Which we'd probably be doing if the surface of the whole world was covered in soft, damp moss or luxurious deep pile carpet, but this of course is not the case. The world is covered in tarmac, concrete, sharp stones, broken glass, twigs, litter, dog poo, and bits of Lego. None of these are things you want to tread on with unprotected feet. Hence, the existence of shoes. 


Now then.  A few years ago I placed my overconfidence in a cheap pair of shoes, glue and some black leather paint.  The belief I had was that I could repair them indefinitely.  This belief was false.  Turns out cheap shoes not only aren't built to last, but aren't built to be repaired either.  This is of course obvious, but it's taken me several years to actually learn it.

Will I be able to repair my Freet shoes indefinitely?  It's too soon to tell.  I've had them about a month now and they still feel good as new.  No signs of wear or tear, places where the rain might get in, and their suitable for all situations - work, casual, probably even formal.  This post is starting to feel like an advertisement, which was not my intention, so I'll stop.  I think I've made my point.  Invest in a good pair of shoes.  The end.






Related posts


******

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Monday 14 September 2020

Breakfast Smoothie Love








You're never going to sit down in the morning to a plate of cooked lentils, cucumber, raw kale, avacado, apples and bananas. Let's face it. It just isn't going to happen. That would be insane. 

Take those same ingredients and blend the into a green smoothie, on the other hand, and you've got yourself a breakfast of champions.


It's also portable, but never mind about that now.  I didn't expect a smoothie containing two savory ingredients - the lentil and the kale - would be at all palatable in combination with the sweetness of the fruit, but it works perfectly. Along with three tablespoons of cooked lentils and two stalks of curly kale (fresh from the allotment, I might add) I crammed in two bananas, and apple, an avacado and one third of a cucumber. Protein enhanced! And delicious! Yes, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. Highly recommended. 






Related posts


******

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Saturday 12 September 2020

Duct Tape Solutions and Fresh Green Smoothies



This week I upgraded my duct tape wallet.  So I suppose that means I'm now on version 3.  I like to think I've perfected the design: minimal, but accommodating of my needs.  My favourite part is the outer compartment that contains both my bus pass and attaches to the key ring I can clip to my trousers.  Then inside, as you'd expect from a wallet, there's spaces for cards and cash.



So, having perfected my wallet, I began to wonder what else you might be able to make out of duct tape.  The first answer that came: a chopping board.




As with the wallet, your material is strips of tape, stuck to each other to make a kind of fabric.  Then you simply overlap and build into the shape and size you want.  For the chopping board it felt right to make it several layers thick, so I overlapped and cut accordingly, trying to waste as little tape as possible in the process - off cuts can be used as "border" material, giving your board a more robust edge.

I put mine to the test chopping up some fruit for my current breakfast of choice: a fresh green smoothie.  You've probably been downing them for years, but they're a completely new concept to me, and a truly excellent breakfast, I can tell you that.  I mostly use spinach or kale, apples, bananas, cucumber, avocado and fruit juice.  I've also used blueberries, peaches and started adding touches of things like ginger and tumeric for a spicier kick.  The possibilities are obvious: and it's a really easy way to get your daily fruit and veg intake up.  I didn't think spinach or kale would go at all well with sweet fruit, but I was wrong.



The smoothie, once smoothed, looked like this:


...and the chopping board looks like this:




We'll see how long it lasts.  The good thing is, if it starts to fray or deteriorate too quickly, it can always be patched up with more duct tape.  It rolls up, making it easier to find a place to store it, and wipes clean, keeping it nice and hygienic in this dangerous times.  Less could be said for its predecessor, which looks like this:


Not something I want to throw away; but it's achieved a level of mankiness that renders it unsuitable for the kitchen.  Time to find another use for it.  Meanwhile, breakfast.






Related posts

Greenhousing It
******

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Thursday 3 September 2020

David Graeber, 1961-2020



Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,” “park ranger,” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment, and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was, “What do you do for a living?”

- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs


Rest in peace, Professor.












Related posts


******

Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.