Chris Worfolk's Blog

I have already written some stuff about January being fish month. See raw fish, turbot and shellfish. What was it all in aid of you wonder? I have been working my way through the River Cottage Fish Book. Co-written by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his aptly-named friend Nick Fisher.

It is a comprehensive book. Hugh talks a lot about conversation before moving on to fish skills. Things like how to prepare fish, skin them, clean them, dress shellfish, etc. There is then a large selection of recipes broken down by cooking method. Finally, the book finishes with an in-detail description of the fish you can find around Britain.

I have gone into detail about some of the recipes below.

Chinese fish parcels. You make a bed of vegetables, then layer up fish fillets and soy sauce. Wrap it neatly in kitchen foil and roast the whole thing. It is difficult to get out of the parcel gracefully, but great for eating outdoors when you can eat it straight from the parcel.

This was a great chance to try out the cutting blades on my food processor. They are pretty brutal.

Slow-cooked squid. While it does produce a rather tender squid, I was not a big fan of this dish. Even when I tried it’s close-cousin the stuffed squid.

I also tried the slow-cooked mackerel with similar results. It does have some bold flavours, but it was not quite to my taste.

The squid rings proved more to my taste. Even the homemade garlic mayo was acceptable. This was a good chance to attack my fear of deep-frying. I have always been dubious about doing it at home. At McDonald’s, I knew I had a ring to pull that would coat the entire kitchen in foam if things went wrong. Without that safety net the prospect of heating a large pain oil to 180 degrees Celsius has always been a frightening one. But I did it and the results were good.

Overall the book is excellent for those who love fish and want to do interesting things with them. Will the recipes make it into my regular rotation? Maybe. Though River Cottage Every Day still provides my every day basic fish recipes. It was also an interesting read though, one that you could do without even looking at the recipes.

January was fish month, which really meant seafood month. As a result, we ate our way through a lot of shellfish too. Unfortunately, I’m not hipster enough to take a photo of every single dish I eat, but here are some thoughts.

We made the mistake of trying lobster again. It is disappointing every time. The taste is fine. But it is so expensive. For what is essentially a giant prawn that you have to smash your way into yourself.

Dressed crab. Boil your crab, scoop the meat out and use the shell as a miniature serving platter. I used velvet crabs. I wouldn’t recommend them. The flavour was okay but there was almost no brown meat on them. They were both about the same size, but one yielded much more meat than the other: the is a big difference between freshly malted vs old shells (you want the latter).

My kilogram of mussels turned out to be 10% stone.

It has been two and a half years since we launched the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It originally came out as an eBook. This is a natural format for it. You can search it, index it and update it. It works great as an eBook.

However, there is something magical about a physical book. Something that you cannot replicate with an electronic copy. I always wanted to do a print edition alongside it but the logistics of it were sizeable.

One of the great things about the eBook edition is the speed we can put out updates. In its basic form, the guide is not a book: it’s a database. In fact, that is how we store all the information. I wrote a custom content management system to handle it all. This takes all the reviews in and spits out an eBook in a matter of minutes. If we wanted to publish a new edition, we could do within an hour.

The print route is more difficult. Print books do not have the fluid content support that eBooks do. You have to design for a fixed layout, fudge pages and spend a huge amount of time getting it all right. Then if you want to make any changes, you have to re-done everything. Possibly the entire book. That would cause a huge time-lag and that just did not cut it for me. The guide evolves and the print edition needed to be able to evolve with it.

Thankfully, after several failed attempts at getting the system correct, we finally have it in place. It is not quite as fast as the eBook, but gives us the ability to publish a new edition within 24 hours. This means that the print edition will not be a second-class citizen in comparison to the eBook.

Initially, the book is available on Amazon. In the future: who knows where else!

My Toastmasters speech for Speaking to Inform project #5 “The Abstract Concept”. In this talk I discuss how morality and altruism can work within the context of natural selection.

Dock 29 is a bar at Leeds Dock. They recently ran a competition where they gave away 29 sets of breakfasts at no cost to people working at the Sky office. It was a competition that most people won. I felt a bit bad for the select few who didn’t.

It was very nice of them, and a good way to promote their breakfast delivery service.

I am dubious about their business model however. The sandwiches are £4.50 each. For this you get your choice of sauce, bacon or egg, which s a vegetable topping and a sauce. Or you can have the whole lot for £7.50. Ideally I think the system would be more flexible.

£4.50 for a bacon sandwich is a lot of money. Even in Harrogate I Was paying significantly less than that. That might be okay if it was an especially large and tasty sandwich, but the one I had was neither of those.

The other problem is that you have to order a minimum of five items. That means convincing four friends that they also want to spend £4.50, putting a minimum spend of £22.50 for breakfast. Not only is that a lot of money, but that is a lot of effort. You have to self-organise into teams of five to get your sandwich and you have to do all of this by a deadline of 9:30am.

Why I would do this when I could simply pop in to Greg’s on the way to work and save myself significant time/hassle and money seems a bit of a mystery to me.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers is a 2014 book by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz worked at Netscape before founding Opsware/Loudcloud and later the venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz.

It is mostly a book for people who are running tech companies. This is mostlu obviously from the title. However, it’s appeal outside that setting is quite limited. If you’re not in that situation I would probably say that it is not a particularly useful read.

He covers a wide variety of topics. Primarily these are hard topics with no obvious answers. His conclusion is that some things are really hard and you can only learn to be a CEO by being a CEO. Nevertheless, there is good advice dispensed along the way.

It’s important to draw a line between facts and perceptions for example. It sounds obvious, but is difficult to do in the moment. He also says that if you want to do a successful start-up, you need to be doing things 10 times better than the competition if you want to succeed. It’s a high bar, though perhaps lower than Peter Thiel sets in Zero to One, who makes the case for only entering markets you can have a monopoly on.

What should you do about titles? Mark Andreessen suggests giving them out because they are the cheapest benefit you can provide for employees. In constrast Mark Zuckerberg gives deliberately deflated titles to ensure everyone is re-levelled when they enter Facebook.

He also mention’s the Facebook slogan “move fast and break things”. I have always liked this mindset. I am doing a lot of this at Sky at the moment, usually with a bug fix right behind it, and everyone seems to be happy with my delivery so far. If you want to change the world, you have to be bold.

Horowitz also recommends the film Freaky Friday as a great management resource. When sales and customer support went to war with each other at Opsware, he simply switched the heads of department with each other. They soon understood the other side and began working together to solve problems.

Reasons to Stay Alive is a book by Matt Haig about depression. He talks about his own breakdown in his twenties and how he survived it.

It’s a short read. Not only is it a short book but Haig keeps the chapters very short too. He mixes up the content. Sometimes he talks about his personal story, sometimes offers a list up and sometimes presents it as a discussion across time with his younger self.

I did not learn anything, but I did identity with a lot of the content. As such, I think for someone coming into contact with depression and anxiety for the first time, it would be a valuable read.

There are some excellent tools out there if you want to learn French or German. There are plenty of tools out there if you want to learn Spanish, or Italian, or Polish. Finnish, not so much. There are a few resources out there, but nothing that really rocks.

So we are developing our own. Learn Finnish will be launching this summer. It will be a premium subscription service. Sign up for beta testing opportunities and advanced offers.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich is a book by Tim Ferriss. It it he lays out his history of how we reduced his commitments and built a living from outsourcing everything to free up his time to live a fulfilling live.

He starts by laying out his vision for how everyone can do it. I was skeptical given how much of a classic self-help scam it sounded like it. I was full of promises about how great my life would be and case studies of people transforming their lives. I stuck with it because if nothing else, it was interesting.

Having finished it, I’m now sold though. This is a great book.

Ferriss makes some key points. Nobody really wants to be rich. What you want is a rich person’s lifestyle. Therefore having loads of money may not be required. Secondly, once you accept this, the aim is not to make loads of money. You just need to make enough money to cover what you want to do. Therefore the aim is to cover your costs with the minimum amount of time, thereby freeing up the maximum time for living.

He suggests doing this in a number of ways. Remote working for example. If you can get a remote working agreement, you can work anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. This is most of the world these days. Once you are out of the office you can focus on being productive and probably do your work in half the time (avoiding the half where you spend answering emails, sitting in pointless meetings and procrastinating).

Muse products are even better. These are small online retail businesses. You import a product in a tiny niche and sell it on for a large markup. You don’t compete on price because you are not bothered about building a huge business, you just want a revenue stream. Then you outsource everything – manufacturing, distribution, customer services. It then runs with very little input.

Finally, he talks about outsourcing your personal life. Get a virtual assistant, either in the UK or a cheaper one in India. Have them do your boring and repetitive tasks such as filtering emails, managing your diary, doing background research, paying bills and a million other small tasks.

He recommends not reading the news. I agree, and wrote about this last summer. He also advocates speed reading, which probably isn’t a thing. He reminds you of great strategies like reversal trials: it makes everything more palatable even though it is hardly ever switched back.

Of course just being able to think of a high-mark-up product in a forgotten niche is no easy thing. It reminds me a lot of the draw an owl meme:

The step is essentially “find the magic product” and that is never going to be easy. However, what impressed me about the book was its comprehensive advice as to how to do everything else. Want to know how to find suppliers, test the market with advertising then outsource distribution? It’s all in the book.

Ferriss gives details of all the companies, services and websites he uses. A bold thing to do in a world that moves so fast as your book will be out-of-date quickly. There are no abstract details here, it is all about exactly how he did it and practical strategies to implement.

How much of the stuff in this book I will actually be able to implement remains to be seen. Ferriss is clearly an intelligent guy with business smarts, and so replicating his success is a tough challenge. However, I was impressed and inspired by the message that it is possible to escape the 9-5. It is not the hollow book you might expect.

I am currently working on a printed version of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It has been a long time coming. Three years ago, when we launched the guide, I always wanted to do a print version. However, the logistics of doing so have been complicated. Multiple attempts have been made. This time though, I think we have the setup correct.

This proofs represent the first attempt. They have gone back with changes, so it depends on how that goes. However, it’s a good first step towards the end goal.