Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Christmas Pancakes & Orange Sauce (Recipe)

    So, we made this after we had the first failure with cooking that we’ve had for a very long time*, as we contemplated what to have for Christmas Breakfast, Kathryn suggested pancakes – which I made, and Orange Sauce, which she made. Excuse the mixed measures, but we run a kind of anglo-american kitchen and use cups/weights/litres/fl oz interchangeably, depending on what’s handy.

    For the pancakes:
    75g Plain white flour
    75g Wholemeal flour
    1/4 cup chopped pecans / pecans and hazelnuts
    1/3 cup dried cranberries
    1 tsp. Baking powder
    2 tbsp. Caster Sugar
    Pinch salt (we tend to use virtually no salt in our cooking, you may want more)
    ~ Two tablespoons melted butter (allowed to cool a bit)
    ~140ml milk
    One egg, beaten.

    Extra butter to cook in (or veg oil if you want to be a teeny bit healthier)

    Mix the dry ingredients *EXCEPT* blueberries in a large bowl. Keep aside the blueberries for later.
    Mix the egg, milk and butter together, add to the dry ingredients and whisk until a smooth batter with roughly the consistency of whipping cream (heavy cream) is obtained. Add milk if the mixture is too thick.

    Heat a small amount of butter in a frying pan on a low-moderate heat . Pour ~1/4 cup pancake batter into the pan; as soon as the batter is in the pan drop 3 or 4 blueberries into the batter in the pancake mix in the frying pan. Flip over when small holes appear in the top surface of the batter and fry briefly on the other side.

    We keep our pancakes warm in a low oven – and using a large frying pan we can fry 3 or 4 simultaneously :)

    For the Sauce:

    1/2 Pint Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice
    5-6 Tbsp. Caster Sugar
    A ‘splash’ of Brandy
    1/2tsp. Cornflour.

    Mix the Orange Juice, Caster Sugar and Brandy together and heat over a high heat until boiling gently and stirring regularly. Maintain a low boil to reduce it down. When down to ~1 cup add the cornflour and stir until dissolved a smooth syrup is obtained.

    Pour over buttered pancakes and serve hot.

    * I say we, mostly me. We were trying to make the hairy bikers hollandaise sauce. I don’t know quite what went wrong – I’m guessing that despite our best efforts it was too hot – and the metal bowl we were using transferred heat better than the bain-marie you’re meant to use. Anyway, what we made was basically butter with ultrafine scrambled eggs in butter. Twice.

  • A lush Xmas

    So, just a quick Xmas update. We had a lovely, if strangely tiring Xmas. Spent a very chilled out day eating pancakes*, opening presents in front of the fire** and eating rich foods. We have a vast amount of very tasty eggnog left over, and quite the best presents in the world. Indeed, I have a Tetris cushion (made by Kathryn) for the car to replace the scabby old pound shop filling-only cushion I’ve been using. And some quite lovely presents from Kathryn’s mom. Indeed, between Kathryn’s mom and my mum I now have actual smart casual clothing which I’m very tempted to wear :)

    Tetris Cushion FTW!

    Anyway, I must make uni work happen (since I unilaterally*** took Xmas Eve off).

    * Post to come with actual recipe. Yes, we’re branching out!
    ** Love the fire!
    *** Heh. Oh, okay, it amuses me.

  • Projects

    Just for me, so as I know how insane I am:

    – Finish Masters
    – Finish House (mainly Stairs / Kathryn’s Office / Bathroom, also floor in utility, building my desk, assisting Kathryn with the shelves wherever she wants assistance, a few small jobs in Kitchen)
    – Finish painting garage, sort crap in there and build shelves
    – Fix motorbike
    – Fix Enfield EV
    – Fix BluRay player
    – Fix Dead Bug Jumping record deck
    – Install Speakers, Parrot gidget and ‘interior’ in RebeccaMog
    – Paint outside of house

    I think that’s “it”. I think, perhaps, I should stop taking on new jobs.

  • the perils of early adoption

    It’s fairly rare that I’m an early adopter. Not for want of trying, but instead because for the most part I can’t afford to get new toys. When I switched from Acorn computers to PCs I was well behind the tech curve not because I wanted a scabby old AMD processor, but because the new Athlon & board was so far out of my price range it was laughable. I have occasionally been an early adopter. DVD springs to mind, I was quite quick off the mark with that (my 1st Gen DVD drive for the computer was region free because region coding post-dated the drive)*.

    Generally, not so much though. I run a Mac that’s now a couple of years old and am generally pretty happy with it**. The change to an LCD tv came about purely because we didn’t want to fill a big chunk of this room up with a pointless big box. But, digitised music? That I did early on.

    Whilst I love my vinyl collection, the simple availability of all my music on one box, and the ability to throw it from there onto (now) my iPhone (but back then stacks of ‘mix CD-Rs’ was instantly appealing to me. My first MP3s were ripped using the original port of a command line program to the Risc PC. The Risc PC literally spent more than a day encoding one track. When later versions came around (versions which didn’t take a day to encode a track) I ripped the odd CD (but it was always painfully slow on my Risc PC).

    As soon as I had a PC I started ripping tracks more effectively, and when I started working from home brought the sheer might of ‘time at home’ to bear on the problem. I ripped every track on every CD. I killed at least 2 CD Burners in the process just because there were so many disks. I spent hours typing track names in because the few music databases that existed were small and inadequate, or didn’t have any of the UK versions of disks in.

    It was slow and generally a bit painful.

    It lives in my memory as a slow torment.

    And now I might have to repeat it. Not because I’ve failed to transfer data successfully, but simply because TuneUp has singularly failed to fix the many and manifold problems that exist in my music collection. See, there are tracks ripped at hideously low bit rate. That I accept is purely an unfixable. But the lack of album artwork, the somewhat variable naming policy, the failure to fully complete some of the tags… some of that’s down to me. Some of it’s because I have vinyl of some albums and thus downloaded digital versions, and the person who ripped them made an arse of naming the files.

    @pinkemma suggested that I should re-rip them all, anyway, as FLAC. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t support FLAC (obviously) and the VMP74 doesn’t support Apple’s lossless format. So, uh, yeah. Seems to be a lose-lose situation there. Feh, is generally my feeling on this at the moment.

    And don’t tell me about Cloud computing. Given that the computer won’t even sync my calendar across to iCloud you think I’m going to trust you with music, one of the most important things in my life?

    Bah. And possibly humbug.

    Still, Ug made fire today, so that’s cool :)

    Ug make fire. Ug happy. ;)

    * Although I did take great pleasure in watching my DVDs on my first generation colour TV (A Mark 1 Ferguson Colourstar).
    ** Issues with iCal and the fact it desperately wants more memory notwithstanding.

  • High impact interventions

    So, in the last week since being sick I’ve endevoured to make some progress, and regain that lost inertia towards finishing the house. It’s not really worked, perhaps part of this is the low impact of many of the jobs on the list.

    Whilst the skirting is all but done (I need to bring a small bit up from the garage, see if it fits, and attach it if it does, then attach the final (already cut) run); much of it sits behind the bench (not finished) and the table and it’s impact is largely dissipated. Indeed, I barely notice it. Which I suppose is sort of a good thing. It needs some decorator’s caulk run around the edges, but essentially done. Also, I cut the picture rail, and have put it up. It also makes the room look more finished, but doesn’t really do massive things.

    There’s some filling to do around that too, and some filling on the walls. But really, it’s difficult.

    I’ve painted much of the garage having removed the mould too, and done this:

    On the plus side, phase one of desk construction is drying :)

    Which is the first part of my desk for upstairs. That led to this, unfortunately:

    Arse.

    Which I’ve now hopefully repaired….

    However, today I started putting paint on the walls of the stairs. I know, starting a new job when the old one isn’t done yet. Bad, bad, bad. But the painting’s coming, and our kitchen heaters are running 20 hours of the day trying to heat the entire stairwell as well as the hall and the kitchen. It felt good. P’raps this will stun me out of my inertia.

    Anyhow… nights again this week :(

  • General thoughts of a political nature

    1) MPs should not receive a second home allowance of any sort. A ‘residence’ should be maintained for all MPs in London which is provided free. I suggest a nicely renovated towerblock. MPs continue to pay full council tax on their current properties.
    2) MPs & senior civil servants should not be allowed to be employed in any private industry in which legislation passed by them or their department has direct impact for 10 years following the last provision being enacted from that legislation.
    3) Green energy and sustainability. All the money currently given as tax breaks and subsidies to large corporations pulled and reinvested in green energy and sustainability projects.
    4) A proper, integrated public transport system.
    5) A-political reform of healthcare (removing it from the government’s direct control, but maintaining the requirement for universal provision of public healthcare).
    6) Change corporate law to require not just a a duty to shareholders, but also a duty to the environment in their actions.
    7) Using deliberately misleading or incorrect statistics in a debate or to promote a policy or legislation results in

    • a requirement for an apology on the floor of the house
    • the policy or legislation, if passed, immediately being repealed and returned for a fresh debate

    8) Council tax on second homes? Charged at 1.5x standard rate (rather than no council tax). My experience of second homes? They kill the villages they appear in.
    I’m sure there’s more. Just some immediate thoughts.

  • Wild stabbing in the dark

    So, I’ve completed the wild stabbing in the dark that is my ‘blog’ component of this module. I’m not very happy with it, because whereas last time I sort of managed to shoe-horn in a literature review of sorts, this one had 8 questions (well, 8 questions, but one had 3 sub parts) which, realistically, I can’t be expected to do 8 literature reviews for (not in 4 weeks).

    Not only that but it had ‘Describe’ questions. Describe isn’t masters level thinking. Evaluate, explore, examine? All of them I can do. Describe, though? Well it’s just describing innit. I can describe it and vaguely compare it to other things, but it doesn’t feel very…well, it doesn’t feel enough.

    I’ve done it though, and got some positive remarks on some of the postings. I’ll probably poke at it a little tomorrow – with the space of an evening off to allow it to mull in my head (like wine).

    Next week, the next section starts, and assuming that I’m well enough I’m planning to get back to doing the house. It’s been quite upsetting having time off and being relegated to the couch. Apart from the fact my back is really not very impressed with me sitting on the sofa and-or bed all day and night, and the rest of me is yearning for outsideyness, the kitchen is so close. So close. I can taste it.

    Also, we are having our splash-out piece of artwork delivered in January (I hope) which means that ideally, we should have finished painting the bit of the house in which it’s supposed to hang by then. Also handy, since we have picture rails, would be a picture rail hanging system – not least because we’d quite like some of our paintings and pictures up and hanging on our somewhat blank walls.

    So, let’s get one thing straight, I’d like to be well so that I can:
    – Put the skirting (baseboard) on the walls in the kitchen and hall.
    – Put the picture rail up where it’s missing in the kitchen.
    – Touch up the paint.
    – Seal the sink and replace the drainer on our kitchen sink with one that has an overflow.
    – Level the sink with the worksurface.
    – Repoint and paint the grotty bit of wall.
    – Hang the painting.

    Then, in a change to advertised plan (which was, I think, Kathryn’s office and the Bathroom then the stairs)
    – Sand the last few bits of filler in the stairwell that need sanding.
    – Drill the holes to mount the phone downstairs (we have an A-B Payphone (sadly without the nice chrome bits for the free police calls) which needs installing).
    – Paint the right hand wall and all of upstairs
    – Reattach the heater downstairs (because it’s bloody cold and our heating is struggling without it – this job may get done out of sync).
    – Strip off the last bit of the other wall downstairs, fill and paint.
    – Paint that and the downstairs ceiling.

    …then it’s just Kathryn’s office (strip, fill, paint), the bathroom (strip, fill, paint, install shower and shower curtain, lift floor and replace then tile), and my desk that need doing. Oh, and the bookshelves. Uh. I think that’s it. Oh, and painting the inside of the garage which has gone distressingly furry (untreated ply on the internal walls). And sorting the garage which is, it must be said, a hideous disaster area.

    Yeah, so not much.

    But some of that? Some of that before January.

  • Getting it out of my chest

    So, lack of success has been plaguing me the last week or so. The sink still leaks, or I assume it does. I may have to resort to a whole different bodge to get it to seal. Granted, sealing a 1930s sink is a bit more of an art, probably intended to involve lead plumbing, but my attempts have proven to be less successful than I’d hoped.

    Similarly, our trip to Cornwall to revive the Volvo was a failure. Well, semi-failure. I’ve not been able to find my 6-sided socket set for a while, and resorted to using my dad’s 12 sided set when I went down. This proved to be a mistake, because when we got down there I ended up rounding off the 17mm caliper retaining bolts (with the impact driver) and destroying my 17mm spanner (it’s now about an 18mm spanner with some gouges out of it). Granted it’s a Blackspur tool I bought, as part of a roll of spanners, for a very low price from Bristol Tools a long time ago. But the caliper bolts wouldn’t shift, and in the end I resorted to ringing a recovery firm to take the car to a local garage (none of the local garages seem to do recovery) who’ve fitted the new leg. So I’ll be back down in Cornwall on Tuesday retrieving the car.

    I’ve also failed to stay well! I had a bit of a sore throat when we were down in Cornwall (in the diagonal rain), and by Wednesday (strike day) it’d turned into a real cold. I downed some Day Nurse so I could go march…

    …Now, there seems to be some discussion about the fact that Public Sector pensions are better than private sector ones, which is possibly true. And that we should be glad to work later and pay more (although I find the idea of me being in my late 60s and performing CPR hilarious, given my family history of osteoporosis, I’d probably break something). I’m not quite sure I get this argument though. It seems to speak to the worst sort of childish jealousy. What you’ve got is better than what I’ve got therefore you should get less. Made more frustrating by the fact that government’s own report concluded that the public pension scheme was sustainable until 2031 (which is, as I understand it, as far as it went), and would cost the government no more than it does now as a percentage of GDP (also, the NHS pension scheme gave the government 2 billion pounds in extra takings. That’s 2 billion given to the government, not to people on NHS pensions because of the way the scheme works).

    So, why not instead start talking about how the private sector really should be doing better by its staff?

    The phrase ‘race to the bottom’ has been said many times, and seems terribly apt. As Cameron/Cronies say that we should relax labour laws so we can compete with China and the like, I wonder what, exactly the future they envisage looks like. Having chucked planning laws, and protection for areas of beauty in the bin, the images that appear in my head are of the areas where vast private companies have been allowed to exercise their ethical principles in the protection of the environment.

    And I find it deeply depressing.

    As I marched through Bath, the walls seemed to speak to me. I felt like I could hear the poor and the sick in the workhouse. The city is so close to its history, and all that progress that we’ve made towards a more civilised society? All that feels more and more at risk.

  • Getting it off my chest (again)

    Anyone who has the misfortune to be near me when I’m doing research or who follows my twitter stream (@pyoor) will probably have encountered my rants about doing literature searches and finding papers.

    Essentially, it boils down to this. It doesn’t work very well.

    For those of you who’ve not had the joy of searching the literature (by which I mean the miriad journals of medicine) there are several (many) databases, all of which contain a subset of the available journals which you might want to examine.

    If you are conducting any kind of proper literature search then you have to search multiple databases to attempt to ensure you’re getting all of the available data on any given subject.

    Each database is subtly finicky and requires it’s own version of what you’re searching for to make sure you’re actually searching for what you want, and not say, topics that are distantly related to what you want. Or missing great chunks of what you want because it wants a different wildcard after the search term so you get words including that term.

    Then you have to narrow each search individually to, say, human studies, or studies done in the last five years.

    Then it gets really fun.

    See, some journals have their text available online. Some don’t. For this bit of my course, essentially if it’s not online I can’t see it, because the time it takes to get a paper (minimum of days if it’s not in my work library) in dead tree form means it’ll arrive after I’ve finished trying to answer the question. However if it is online, the excitement just continues.

    You might think I’d click ‘full text’ and lo, there it would be.

    Ha.

    Ha ha.

    Ha ha ha.

    No.

    No, what happens is this:

    Click ‘full text’. Oh, not held by my uni’s library.
    Go back to database. Click on find full text, follow succession of links. Oh, only available to buy online.
    Find journal on site. Oh, that’s a Science Direct, or Ovid, or Whateversville journal. Attempt a further login (“institutional login”) and find that…no, it’s not available.
    Check if it’s on the list of journals which the university individually provide access for, which aren’t accessible through the access federation (an organisation which provides access to lots of journals) – it’s usually not because it’s quite a small list.
    Pause, search Google. Find that…no, it’s not available.
    Log in to Athens, which is what the NHS uses to provide full text access to journals.
    Find link to journal.
    Find that I don’t have access to this particular journal through the NHS either.
    Swear.

    Repeat for next article.

    Each time it takes me minutes of searching, sometimes, at some point in the process I find success. Sometimes it’s been republished on an author’s site as a handy, free, usable PDF.

    At every stage though it’s frustrating. Really, truly, this should be a three step process.
    Search. Select. Read.

    Search should search all the available databases, and should exclude multiple results for the same article (always hilarious). And should do so from one place.
    Select should allow me to see, in one place all the articles I have access to under every login that I have. My uni provide logins for things like ‘The Lancet’ which aren’t available thorough my databases and which aren’t provided thorough the federation. It’s a complete pain in the arse to have to go and get the password and username for these each time.
    Read should be just that.

    And then I could spend my time swearing about the poor quality of most papers, as opposed to swearing about not being able to find them.

  • A Happy Thanksgiving

    So, yesterday we celebrated (slightly belatedly) Thanksgiving. And it rocked. While, as we put it gently, the history of Thanksgiving’s a bit…well…dubious. The whole family friends gathering / giving thanks for what you’ve got / etc idea is something I rather like. And Sweet Potato Casserole rocks my little world.

    So the menu was pretty much as given, our kitchen got an awesome workout – I must admit to getting a bit stressed as dinner got later and later , the pop-out thermostat on the turkey had failed and I was waiting and waiting. Eventually we gave up and stabbed it with a knife, the juices ran clear and declared it done. Our kitchen did look like a disaster area afterwards though!

    And getting everyone around the tables was somewhat of a challenge, something like tetris, but with a bit of shuffling we managed to get people around the table and dinner was – happily – served :)

    But perhaps the best thing was seeing our friends we’ve not seen for a very long time, and chilling out afterwards talking :)

    So Yay for Thanksgiving. But only once a year eh.