My dad hired a boat to go fishing in the Thames Estuary last weekend, and so half a dozen of us arrived bleary-eyed at the dock under Rochester Bridge at about 05:00 to cruise out in the buffeting wind and driving rain for a day of rods, hooks, worms and fish guts.
Once the sun came up and the weather calmed down it turned out to be a whole lot more fun. We all caught our fair share of dogfish and whiting, although I managed to blag what felt like a whale when I hooked it. When I eventually pulled it up to the surface it was apparently a large (for the season) cod. Large enough, in fact, for me to win an award in a competition that weekend that I didn't even enter, and get my photo in the local paper!
Cod of the Weekend! And a new nickname: "Mick".
Note: There were no other codling caught on the trip. Graham East is telling porkies.
Anyway, once I got that little fella home (the cod, not Graham), I filleted him down and made some nice fish and chips and home-made tartare sauce.
It was a friend's sister's 30th birthday last weekend and a bunch of us hired a couple of boats on the Norfolk Broads for a little celebratory holiday. I figured that since they'd been nice enough to invite me along, I'd do something nice and make a cake in the shape of the boats we were hiring...
This was the initial design after learning that we'd be spending the weekend on a barge...
...except on further digging I found we were staying on something more like this so I had to go back to the drawing board with very little time left to make it.
Here's the basic sponge cake, all jammed-up and ready for the marzipan.
Marzipan layer added.
Iced and decorated.
In the end, the boat was small, cramped and very very warm at night. However the beer, boating and company more than made up for it, including the massive game of water-pistol pirates in small lake off the side of the main river, which the locals really weren't impressed with :-).
I also slightly overestimated the amount of cake for the number of people, so the leftovers were given to the swans that had been following us all holiday, but they weren't impressed either when it sank without a trace. Too much icing, maybe?
After going to Lamb Chop back in March, it seemed like a good idea to put our new-found butchery skills to use. Armed with a couple of pages of scrawled notes, some sharp Global knives and vague recollections of where to cut and in what order, we bought a whole lamb carcass from Borough Market and hauled it back to my flat.
It took most of the day to prepare, but the end result looked pretty special laid out on the kitchen table. See for yourselves below...
Step 1 - cut the neck (scrag) off to cut into chops later.
Next, cut the whole carcass into three primal cuts. Cousin matt is demonstrating "The Forsythe" in the background.
My flat isn't temperature controlled like the processing plant was, so spare parts have to kept in the fridge when not working on them.
A good way through the process you'll have a load of lamb joints like this. Note the tenderloins near the middle of the picture - these are the most tender parts of the animal and are amazing flash-fried and served with some roast veg.
A bit more hacking and chopping later, and the result is a vast array of chops and joints. We used Cousin Matt's mincing machine to mince the offcuts.
Waste-not want-not. We used the bones to make a few pints of fresh stock. The end result was about 16kg of meat for £160. That's about the same as regular supermarket meat, but ours is certified organic Salt Marsh lamb from Rhug Farm in Wales, instead of anonymous prepacked produce.
Inspired by an episode of River Cottage where Hugh Fearnly Whats-His-Face gets a life-long vegetarian to butcher down a whole lamb, I recently visited a meat processing plant in Norfolk with Cousin Matt to attend an amateur butchery course.
Once the novelty of wearing a protective chainmail apron and glove wore off we knuckled down and spent a few closely-supervised hours butchering a whole carcass down into the primal cuts, then into joints and finally preparing them for a real butchers shop display.
We made copious notes on the train home to prepare ourselves for a bit of home butchery later in the year, although after spending a whole day in a meat locker I started to feel a bit queasy about halfway home. No mishaps, but it was a close call...
There's some links at the end of this post if you want more info / contact details.
Cousin Matt suiting up into his protective chainmail apron. They're quite heavy although you get used to them pretty quickly.
The first primal cut removed from the carcass.
Skip forward a few hours and the carcass is reduced to a table full of joints and chops. Nom nom.
Last year me, my brother and my cousin cooked Christmas Dinner for the family. It went down pretty well so we were allowed to do it again this year. We took the safe option last year though, so we thought we'd mix it up a little bit this time around. We kept it traditional, but added some interesting twists.
The main centrepiece was a multi-bird roast - a grouse inside a poulette inside a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. It was pretty gruesome work preparing it, but the end result was unbelieveably tasty.
This was the starting point for the multi-bird roast, all bought from Borough Market a couple of days beforehand.
First step was to fully debone the birds since we're wrapping them inside each other. I left the bones in the legs and wings of the turkey so it held some of its shape.
The leftover bones. Gruesome, although they made an amazing stock to use in the gravy - even my vegetarian brother tried it!
Next, we stacked the deboned birds up biggest to smallest with a layer of stuffing in between. Yeah, I know - right now this doesn't look much better than the piles of bones.
Finally, wrap it all up and sew the skin together on the turkey. I.. I'm still not sure I really want to eat this.
However, after adding a bacon lattice and cooking for about 7 hours it suddenly looks pretty appetising. Fortunately it also tasted pretty amazing so it was worth all the effort.
Not to be outdone, Cousin Matt also cooked a joint of beef to perfection.
I cycled to the New Forest with my brother at the weekend and did about 200 kilometres in 3 days. About 130 of them were on the first day because we forgot to book a campsite and the only one with free space was a bit further than we'd hoped.
Now, if you remember this post then you'll also remember this picture...
... which meant I got a nice little surprise when we stopped at the top of one particularly long and gruesome hill and I looked at the "Total. Distance. Ever" setting on my cycle computer:
Expect another photo in another 12,040 kilometres :-)
My brother's having a bear-themed fancy dress party this weekend, and I said I'd make cake for him if he came up with a concept. One of his friends suggested a severed hand - the result, I suppose, of an unlucky encounter with a bear.
So here it is:
I wanted it to look like a hand when you cut through it so I dyed the cake mix pink with food colouring before cooking it, then carved out some channels for bones made from icing once it came out of the oven. The hand with the icing for bones in position. Probably not anatomically correct, but I did remember to put *two* bones in the arm - the ulna and radius. And yes, I did just have to Google their names :-). Making the rest of it was fairly pedestrian - just covering the cake with marzipan and ready-to-roll icing. The end result, however, was pretty gruesome. (The blood is some raspberry jam my brother made last month from the leftovers from the summer pudding).
I'll start by possibly repeating myself since I can't remember if I've already mentioned that I started a cake decorating course at the local college back in January. If I didn't before, then I have now...
Anyway, tonight was the last night of the course and instead of taking a cake along to decorate in class we had a little competition - we had to take along a pre-decorated cake and they all got judged like at a proper classy village fete.
It was a pretty good turnout but in the end it kind of boiled down to three cakes, which the judges took quite a while discussing and scoring. The full spread is below for your viewing pleasure:
As seen by the West-side posse. As seen by the East-side posse. In the end the winner was this one. Which also happens to be the one I made :-). I'm not sure I totally agree with their decision though. I mean, I was pleased with how mine turned out and everything, but the whole course was based around piping and more classical techniques. The turquoise basket in the middle of the table should really have won since all those flowers were piped and the basket weave itself must have taken a good couple of hours to make.
In any case, I accepted my prize with dignity, poise and graciousness, and wondered to myself whether my victory was owed in part to the Derren Brown mind tricked I played on them - this was the t-shirt I wore to class:
We went for a drive around Lake Tahoe the day before yesterday in the Durango and, surprisingly, survived some of the dodgy roads.
We stopped at a little snow-covered beach called Sand Harbor for a cheeky photo opportunity and I wanted to try the new (free) Photosynth software from Microsoft - you basically take a load of overlapping photos of a scene and then upload them to a site which stitches them together into a continuous, scrollable image. Well, sort of...
You need to download and install the Photosynth client to make it work, but here's my synth of Sand Harbour (click and drag to scroll the camera angle):
If that doesn't work or you don't want to download the client, here's a Flickr folder with the images in. (Incidentally, Flickr has recently started letting you create unlimited sets on free accounts).
I'm in the middle of a snowboarding holiday at the moment and since most of the gondolas are closed today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our hire car.
It's a Dodge Durango (see below) which boasts a spectacular 13mpg fuel consumption, and a top speed of about 70mph, if you dare take it up that far.
I'm not the one driving but I'm reliably informed it handles about as well as a small barge. In fact, there's even a warning on the driver's-side sun visor:
All-in-all, not the most reasurring thing to see when you've got a drop like this by the side of the road:
The scenery *is* pretty spectacular though if you can take your mind off the car's interesting handling quirks for long enough to enjoy it. More photos to follow...
I'm breaking the first rule of Scrap Club by talking about it here. I'm also breaking the second rule but, well, in for a penny, in for a pound...
My brother got tickets for an event on Saturday in a semi-legal event space behind Peckham Library. It's basically an abandoned workshop - think what a Kwik-Fit or similar would look like if you removed all the equipment and interior partitions.
When you get there the first thing you see is a great big pile of broken office equipment and kitchen goods like so:
The second thing you see is a bull pen made from railings, and a table with hard hats, safety goggles, gloves and loads of hammers, pipes and crowbars...
The rest of what happens should be obvious, but just in case anyone isn't sure:
and
There were about a hundred people there so it gets split into 10-minute sessions with about 8 people in the ring at a time. Here's my brother taking a filing cabinet to task:
and me following up on it in the very next session (I'm the one in mid-swing):
There wasn't much left of it by the time we were done with it:
All of this was accompanied by a live electro-band making weird deconstructed industrial ploinking and blooping noises on some rewired keyboards. I got some video as well which I'll post as soon as I've bothered to set up a YouTube account.
The whole thing was very odd. Once you get into full flow you kind of lose track of what's going on around you - there's just you, a hammer and whatever you're hitting. You sort of zone-out and get obsessed with smashing up whatever your target is, and you end up with a stupid grin when it's all over.
They only do a few of these events a year, so check the site for the next one. I'll be keeping an eye out for it and trying to get tickets for sure.
I'll keep this short because it's 02:00 and I'm quite tired now as I've just finished making my Halloween cake for work.
If you remember the sketch from a couple of weeks ago it was supposed to look like this. First, a little bit of prep work. I've been making some vanilla sugar for the last few weeks (I say 'making', but all I did was put a vanilla pod in some sugar) so I'm going to use that in the cake. ... and I need some coloured icing, too. I'll skip the cake baking thing, so it's just about making the pumpkin...
My first quadruple-decker cake :-). It's a bit burnt around the edges but I'm going to cut them off anyway so it doesn't really matter. I put it in the freezer for an hour so it was a bit firmer and easier to hack around with. A marzipan wrap so the icing has a smoother finish. I used apricot jam as a glue to hold it in place. It's also starting to creep me out a little bit. Another layer of jam and coloured icing creates the finished product. I've carved out the face just like the real thing. So there we go. I'm quite pleased with it, if I do say so myself...
Cod of the Weekend! And a new nickname: "Mick".
Note: There were no other codling caught on the trip. Graham East is telling porkies.
Anyway, once I got that little fella home (the cod, not Graham), I filleted him down and made some nice fish and chips and home-made tartare sauce.
