Yeah, apparently they are a thing. It is a bunch of presents, predominantly nappies, arranged into a cake shape. I had never heard of it until Elina came home from her last day at work carrying one. Then, in a pleasant coincidence, we arrive at my parents to be handed another one from my auntie. More are welcome: you can’t have too many nappies!
As if vinegars are not exciting enough on their own, they can be made even more exciting by adding other stuff. In these bottles I am making a garlic vinegar using white wine vinegar and a rosemary vinegar using a red wine vinegar.
You blanch the ingredients for one minute before refreshing them, then inserting them into a steralised bottle and filling the rest with the vinegar.
I cannot say whether it has been a success yet as you need to leave them for two months before use!
Recently I launched a new website, Rena Men. It is deployed onto the Heroku platform and does quite a bit of cool stuff, so I thought I would document what I have done here.
Code
It is implemented in PHP, using the Rauma framework. Rauma is a project I developed for Learn Finnish and subsequently open-sourced.
Rena Men is built in several modules. There is a website, a content management system (CMS) and an image server. Because they use common functionality like the entity classes, there is also a shared library which is brought in as a Composer dependency.
The website itself is fairly straight forward. Beyond the PHP, there is only the CSS, pre-processed with SASS, and a tiny amount of JavaScript loaded in with require. The CMS is a bit more complicated, using Babel to transpile the ES6 JavaScript, and styled up with Bootstrap.
Deployment
Each module is deployed onto the Heroku platform. This makes it really easy to do as I can roll out an update just using git push. The code itself is stored in a series of private repos on BitBucket, and the Heroku build process fetches them from there.
In the case of the CMS, it also uses the Node build pack to run a Bower install. Third-party additions such as Bootstrap are pulled in on-the-fly just like we do with Composer dependencies. Heroku does not have SSH key integration for Bitbucket (it does for Github) so I’m using a ready-only account with Basic HTTP auth access.
The database is provided by one of the Heroku app add-ons. The storage is provided by Amazon S3. Heroku is built in AWS, so that fits nicely. We store originals in the file system and then crop them on-demand using the image server.
Delivery
Because cropping images is expensive, the image server originally had a local file cache where it would store each crop. However, as Heroku has an ephemeral file system, you cannot write to it, so I had to turn that off in production.
Instead, we’re using the AWS CloudFront CDN. This was super easy to implement. I just created the settings in AWS, pointed CDN subdomain at AWS and it started working. Like other web proxies, it caches your content based on the headers you send it.
This is one of Michel Roux’s recipes. You heat half a litre of oil (I used sunflower) then dump some herbs into it. I used parsley and tarragon. Leave it to cool and infuse, then strain it and pour it into a steralised bottle.
Whether I can tell the difference between regular oil and herb oil remains to be seen.
Last month, Jeremy Corbyn won another significant victory in winning the Labour Party leadership election. He increased his share of the vote to 61.8%. This is especially notable because Labour banned any member who had joined in the past 9 months from voting. Therefore, his share of the vote is going to continue to increase for the next nine months as well.
The question still remains as to whether he can win a General Election. Clearly he is electable in almost every other situation. However, Labour trail in the General Election polls by a significant amount. How much of this is due to Corbyn and how much to the attitude of the rest of the Labour party is unclear, but it is difficult to extricate a party leader from responsibility.
Here is the problem though: I think people chose to vote for Jeremy Corbyn because they wanted someone who was genuinely different. They were given the choice between electable business-as-usual candidates, and Corbyn, and they chose the latter. This is not unusual. Those of us who vote for the Liberal Democrats, Greens, or any of the minor parties, know the feeling of deciding to stick with your principles rather than compromising them for electoral glory. We would rather stand up for what we believe in than take a distant second best to have our candidate in Number 10.
My guess is that Corbyn has been elected an on a tide of this feeling. Many Corbyn voters believe he can win (his record in elections is now 11 for 11 undefeated), but perhaps many of them simply do not care whether he is electable or not. They are making a stand for working-class people, for the NHS and for traditional Labour values.
If this is the case, then there is no point putting up candidates like Owen Smith to try and win back the voters. They are not interested in whether Owen Smith has a more expensive suit or more-neatly trimmed beard. They are not in the market for a more-mainstream looking candidate. You cannot win them over with talk about election polls, because it is values they are interested in.
Nor will votes of no confidence, nor continued party scheming and in-fighting do any good. All of this is based on the idea that once Corbyn voters see the pragmatic option is a new leader, they will abandon their hero. But this premise could be entirely misleading. Instead, perhaps it is the case that after 20 years of New Labour, the membership has finally found the balls to stick up for traditional Labour values.
If so, campaigning against Corbyn is futile. Setting your own house on fire does not work when everyone else is willing to burn.
I’ve seen a couple of restaurants offering a fruits der mer platter recently, so thought i would give it a crack myself. The name is French and translates to “fruits of the sea”. It typically consists of a mix of shellfish, served over ice.
Mine included a lobster, cut in half down the middle, a crab, crayfish, prawns in the shell, muscles and clams. All of it was bought live from the fish market. I am not normally a lobster fan, but serving it on ice worked really well.
The downside of serving it all on ice is that it created a very slippy base: when carrying the platter the whole array of food slid from side to side, and I even lost a prawn or two moving it to the table.
I served it with two mayonnaises. This was not the plan, but my first one turned out too thin, so I did a second one. I also did a gribiche sauce, which is the pale one in the bowl and a honey mustard sauce (bottom left).
I won’t be doing it again in a hurry: it was too much of a hassle.
The 2016 pride parade was pretty standard. There were lots of people marching, it took about 30-40 minutes for the whole parade to pass. A few floats, but these were almost all corporate buses. Lots of people marching against the Tories this year, and I don’t think the Tories themselves turned up at all.
The biggest change this year was the amount of people watching. Typically there are only a few people on The Headrow and you can pretty much have a traffic island or road-side bench to yourself. This year there were people lining the whole way and it was difficult to get a spot.
We never buy pre-made pizzas in at the Worfolk household. However, I had begun to wonder whether we would actually get better results buying them frozen. My homemade ones were okay, but not the magic I was hoping for. For one, I could not get them crispy enough. I even tried pan frying them.
However, a few weeks ago everything finally came together. Reviewing what I did, I think it was a combination of all the different things I have been trying. So I have tried to codify them into one list.
Give the dough a good knead
I use my stand mixer to knead, so it is easy to leave it running for a while. So I did. I did not time it exactly but I think it was in there for over 10 minutes. I also gave it a longer rise: 2 hours compared to 90 minutes.
Get the oven really hot
Your oven wants to be as hot as possible. Mine, like many domestic ovens, only goes to 250 degrees, so I turn it up to that. I have a granite pizza stone and I have been gradually increasing the time I put it in the oven to heat up. Now I put it into heat up for at least an hour, maybe even longer. If the pizza does not sizzle when it goes on there, it is not hot enough.
Spin the dough
I have tried spinning the dough round in the air, but not with any real structure to it. Now I use a proper system. Roll it out, then spin it. Does this a little at a time and repeat the process over and over. Each spin moves the dough to the edge of the pizza, so you can then roll that out a bit more. This allowed me to get the dough thinner than I have previously.
Leave a gap
When dressing the pizza with the sauce, cheese and toppings, you want to leave a nice thick border around it. This allows the edges of the pizza to puff up and create a lovely light by crispy edge.
Use a wooden peel
I was using a metal peel (pizza paddle) because I was hoping the pizza would stick to it less. Actually, it turns out it sticks to it more. This meant I had to dust it with loads of flour, and so the base ended up tasting of flour if I was not careful. Using the wooden peel means I have to dust less, avoiding any flour left on the base.
Recently I trialled using iA Writer as my word processor of choice for writing. Previously I would use Google Docs, which has been very good. It has all the features you would expect from a word processor and automatically generates a navigation structure on the left hand side so you can quickly jump around the document.
iA Writer is very different in that it is a pure text editor. It uses the Markdown syntax, so instead of a WYSIWYG editor, you get text on one side, that you have to use markup in, and a preview pane on the other. The big advantage for me, over Google Docs, is that it can handle large files. Google Docs works great, but as you start getting up to 50,000+ plus it starts to really struggle.
iA Writer handles these large files fine, but the rest is a mixed bag.
It looks really nice
The idea behind iA Writer is to allow you to concentrate on the words. This is does very nicely. You get a simple interface that you can take full screen to remove all distractions, and the layout and style are well thought out. You can enable typewriter mode so the current line is always centred on the screen, though this feels a bit like a gimmick so far.
The image support is not great/strong>
You can embed images in your articles, but you have to give them a URL. Markdown requires this, but I would have expected URI support. So I could just drop an image into the directory and say image 5 is “example.jpg”. Not so. The only way to do it is to upload it to the web, or use a full file path, such as file:///Users/me/Documents/Book/images/example.jpg.
Preview panel scrolls independently
This is one of the most annoying features: the text panel and the preview panel are not properly synced. As I scroll down one, the other one scrolls, but at a slightly different speed. Therefore the text and preview panel are always out of sync. You cannot see what you are working on, and if you scroll to that point in the preview panel, you lose your place where you are writing.
There is no navigation
Google Docs automatically generates a navigation bar on the left, based on all of your chapter titles and sub-headings. iA Writer does not do this, so the only way to navigate around a large document is to remember all of your headings and use the text search to locate them again.
This comes up a lot because you have to put references in the bottom of the document, so I am constantly scrolling down to the bottom, adding a reference, then trying to find where I was writing so that I can insert the appropriate footnote marker and continue working.
Summary
iA Writer is a nice piece of software. However, it feels like nobody has put a really large document in there and thought “is this usable?” Given it is specifically targeted at writers, I am not sure how they imagined it would be used, or maybe did not think through the use-cases beyond somebody writing fiction linearly.
In June we travelled to Iceland for our honeymoon, and were very impressed with a Reykjavik restaurant known as The Fish Market. So impressed in fact, that we shelled out for the cookbook while we were there.
The production values are high quality. Once you get past the menacing photo of head chef Hrefna Rósa Sætran wielding a knife on the cover, you find a hardback book, just under A4 size with a full colour photo of every dish. This is everything I want in a cookbook.
The recipes themselves are a bit more challenging however. I struggled to follow a lot of them. Perhaps they make more sense to a trained cook, but I could have done with many of the blanks filling in. The photography of the dishes is quite artistic and therefore, even though you have a photo, it is not always clear what you are aiming for.
I haven’t written about much from the book, but here is the breaded pork tenderloin I made.
The language can also be a bit confusing. It is written in American English, rather than proper English. I was struggling to find shrimp chips, until I realised they were prawn crackers. A few times I wondered whether the translation had become a bit muddled. Some of it appears to be in need of a proofread too. The hot chocolate cake recipe for example: it says “melt the chocolate and water in a double boiler.” There is no water in the recipe, but there is some butter that is never mentioned. The word was almost certainly supposed to be butter.
This resulted in a lot of the recipes being duds for me. I simply couldn’t re-create them, and even when I could, they did not even resemble the picture most of the time.
Then there was the search for ingredients. Leeds has twice the population of Iceland, and four times the population of Reykjavik. Why can’t I find these ingredients? We did venture in to the Thai supermarket and international supermarket, with some success, but there is still much on my list that I have not been able to locate. Not that that is the book’s fault of course.
When the recipes did work though, they were delicious. The pomelo and papaya salad with sweet cashews have quickly become a go-to salad for parties, and the white chocolate cheesecake is so easy and so delicious that we have had a continually rolling batch of them on the go for about a month now.
It might not be the most practical cookbook ever. However, it has produced a few tasty recipes and is a lovely way to remember our trip.