Australia is apparently experiencing the worst drought in living memory. You could've fooled me! Since moving back to Sydney from London it's rained more than it ever did in London, and that's the city with the reputation for rain. What's more, the rain here actually gets you soaked, unlike the light drizzle in London.
New Year was good. Part at Maz and Matt's place, which was loads of fun and everyone made an effort to dress up. Some photos up on Justine's site.
Well it's Xmas here in Sydney and it's pretty warm and humid, raining but it's supposed to clear in the morning for the big day. Xmas is more hectic, as expected, being in the same country as the family. Yesterday we went down to see Holly's Dad in Wollongong. Tomorrow we're opening presents with my niece in the morning, then dinner up on the Central Coast with the family in the evening.
Still, it's a nice change to be warm. Ben has a swimming pool so we can go swimming. Then up the Coast we can go surfing every day. Woo!
I'm back at work on the 2nd January.
Have a fun and safe break everyone. Be especially careful on the roads. Every dickhead going seems to be out there, and a good proportion of them are probably drunk as a skunk.
I read some of In Search of Perfection as described yesterday before going to sleep last night. Not a good idea. I woke up craving fish and chips. Not really breakfast food now, is it?
On Saturday I did some farting about in the house. Got flyscreens made for the windows, improved the window security a little, toyed around with my new Internode ADSL and Nodephone VOIP stuff. I also did my Driving Knowledge Test down at the RTA and got my learner's license. The test was bloody easy, and I can't believe you could fail it!
Sunday I went and (re-)joined Alfalfa House, a food co-operative on Enmore Road. I used to be a member before I moved over to London and it's changed a fair bit. It's no longer compulsory to do work, though you get an extra discount for one shop if you do a two hour shift. The range of foods has also improved, with lots more reasonably priced organic fruit and veg. Though in one area the selection has reduced: muesli. There used to be a great range, now there's only two. I might have to make my own.
Then I wandered down King Street and picked up a yummy Burek, got a hair cut, dropped into Fiji Market and bought some spices, then headed home.
I'm enjoying being back in the Inner West. Especially liking having a garden!
Russell Coker asks why people have blogs that don't allow comments. One thing: comment spam.
But there are other reasons. It's a weird in-the-middle-of-nowhere forum system that never gets looked at again, so there's not really going to be any meaninful conversation. Why not blog me a reply and let me know you've replied?
I have a link to my contact page if people want to get in touch.
I've been working my way through Heston Blumenthal's book In Search of Perfection, which accompanies the TV show of the same name.
Blumenthal is something of a food obsessive, to put it lightly. His three-star restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, England, is a palace of high-concept, creative and weird food. He uses new ingredients and techniques to inspire traditional and brand-new foods. He's most famous for his snail porridge and his bacon and egg ice cream, but there's more to his food than just flash and frizz.
Holly and I ate at the restaurant a couple of years ago and the only regret is that we opted for the cheaper lunch menu rather than the (£80 + wine + service) tasting menu. The food was just incredible, with a range of courses exploring different ideas and amuses bouche between courses. The most intriguing dish was a beetroot crumble served as a side. Only after you start eating do you realise it also has those pop-rock crystals which pop and crackle in your mouth. This gives you some idea of the playfulness of his food.
In Search of Perfection is somewhat more serious. Blumental has taken a eight classic dishes and attempts to find the perfect recipe for them, but using techniques that don't necessarily require a food laboratory or inaccessible ingredients.
He's often written in the Grauniad about brining and long, slow, low-temperature cooking as a technique for cooking meat without losing juices or tenderness. He takes this to a serious extreme in ISOP. His recipe for steak requires about thirty hours of cooking, including using an industrial blowtorch (a creme brulee type won't do) and cooking at 50° for eight hours! And this is one of the simpler, easier recipes in the book.
It's kind of daunting, seeing these kinds of recipes, but I'm also intrigued to know the results. Along the way he develops techniques that a home cook can actually do, such as the aerated chocolate layer (think aero bar) of his Black Forest Gateau. In his lab he'd use a special vacuum machine, but he demonstrates how to do it at home. Melt chocolate and butter, then quickly put it into a pre-warmed cream machine and charge with four bulbs. Squirt the chocolate into a plastic container with a hole in the top, place the whole thing into one of those vacuum storage bags and very quickly extract the air with a household vacuum cleaner. The dissolved gas from the cream machine expands as the pressure drops and you end up with a very light chocolate. Quite incredible!
I particularly appreciated his exploration of Napoli-style pizza. This is pretty much impossible to make in a standard oven, as the pros use pizza ovens that are at least 350° and you just can't get that in your domestic oven. When I finally own a home, I plan to build a pizza oven in the garden that also doubles as a grill and southern-style indirect-heat barbecue.
At some point, when I've got lots of time, I'm going to attempt some of these recipes. It should be fun. I only hope my oven can actually do temperatures that low!
Oh and if you're in the UK, make sure you get out to Bray and try The Fat Duck. Go for the tasting menu, yes it's expensive but you won't be disappointed. You can get to Bray by catching an overland train to Maidenhead and a taxi to the restaurant.
Mohammad Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He's notable for starting the Grameen Bank, which was notable for designing a system that allowed poor people to borrow small amounts of money and pull themselves out of poverty. The concept of microcredit has boomed and helped an enormous number of people.
It's an interesting idea and I've followed it for a long time. Basically it's pure capitalism, except that Yunus designed a different model for lending. They charge commercial interest rates and pay investors competitive rates, so it's not a charity, but the effect is to put power into their borrowers' hands.
One of the key enablers for Grameen's success is that most of the loans go to women. Women seem to be more responsible with money, and the loan default rate the Bank gets would be the envy of many a western bank.
So congratulations to Yunus and the Grameen Bank. Yunus' acceptable speech is here.
I guess I can now say I've met a Nobel Peace Prize winner. W00t!
Discovered this great word coined by Dilbert author Scott Adams: Confusopoly where instead of competing, companies instead try to bamboozle customers.
It's a great term and applies in so many areas. Banks, insurance companies, telcos. You can spot a confusopoly by the number of * and other symbols in the main text of their ads. A huge block of impenetrable legalese in 5 point font is a dead giveaway.
Just got this message from my ISP: Provisioned: DSL Service is fully provisioned!
Very nice, but due to Telstra fuckwittedness I can't get the lovely ADSL2+ speeds I wanted. Also still waiting on the ADSL modem to arrive before I can ditch the appallingly bad Unwired service.