Adrian Garside

So, I am going to use me as the example, but that is only because it’s easier.

Most of you know I do a bit of off road cycling, less than I used to, admittedly, but I cycle off road becuase cycling on road scares the living daylights out of me – because of the cars.

Now, technically the rule is that a cyclist is entitled to ‘wobble room’.

Some motorists leave me wobble room. Some assume that I am a fixed object and just require missing…and an inch is as good as a mile, right?

Truck drivers are told that they must leave enough room for me to fall off in the road direction and they must still miss my head – I find that reassuring, my helmet meets all the current legislation, but I suspect a truck tyre would squish it in a bit.

Anyway, lets say a motorist caught my elbow with his wing mirror (so far the closest has been a vectra catching the material on my jacket). And, we’d better assume I’m not wobbling all over the shop, I’m cycling where I should be, about 18 inches from the kerb.

So, the motorist catches me, and I fall off.

My bike is a write off and I am injured and can’t work for a while and need alot of treatment and maybe my leg ‘will never be the same again’.

The car has wing mirror damage.

So – do I claim for my bike, lost earnings and treatment off the motorists car insurance?

Well, you’d think so wouldn’t you.

But, if I am not wearing a high vis jacket and reflective ankle clips, apparently that is good enough defence for the motorist and I’ll get diddly squat.

Yes, you catch my drift – if cycle on the road without full reflective garb, then drivers can drive into me with impunity.

Oh, and I know a few of my readers are devients and do ‘running’ – same rules for you too, get your high viz lycra out of the cupboard, black is out, in with neon yellow!

Back on 16th March I made my first cheese…

Since then, I let it dry for a while and then waxed it – so it looked like a baby bel…a 2lb baby bel.

I’ve left it to mature for almost 2 months…but today curiousity got the better of me and I cut the cheese. Di captured the moment on video…and if you are looking at my hand wondering if I have buboes (as in ‘bubonic plague’) let me reassure you, they are just some burns from some carrot soup I made the other day.

We’ve had some cheese on some nice walnut bread and it tastes delicious. The flavour is like a mild cheddar and quite soft and crumbly…more crumbly than lancashire. I think that is because I didn’t let the curd get firm enough when I made it, I’ll be more patient with my next batch.

I’ve never made soda bread before…can’t even be certain I’ve eaten it before, but saw it being made on TV last night and it looked easy and fairly flexible about ingredients.

Not completely flexible, you understand, there were basics involved – 500g flour, a big teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and a teaspoon of salt.

From there, one of the bakers last night used guinness as his ‘liquid’ and the other used buttermilk.

Now, I had neither, but I did have some creme fraiche in the fridge…which is made of yogurt and butter milk and that seemed pretty close, so I reckoned I’d give it a shot.

At 8.50 I asked Di if she wanted bagels or soda bread for breakfast… on the basis that I wanted to be sat in front of the TV by 9am to watch the Grand Prix. She opted for Soda bread, mainly out of curiosity I think, since there was none in the house and I was just stood there making a cup of coffee and obviously not doing baking.

So, with 10 minutes available, and humming the Benny Hill theme tune I set to work. Di gave me a minute by minute countdown. I put the oven on.

I had a bag of flour – weighed it – 600g. I tipped it into a large bowl from a height (I figured that by doing this I avoided the need to sieve it) and made sure I was a bit more generous with the Bicarb and the salt and I grabbed the Creme Fraiche (1 Minute) – there didn’t seem enough, so I threw some milk in too, I don’t know how much, but I was aiming for a total of about 600ml.  I think next time I will aim for less liquid than flour, it was slightly too sticky.

I mixed the lot, (2 minutes) firstly with a knife and then with one hand until it bound together (3 minutes)…no kneading like normal dough, Soda bread is better if it receives literally the least mixing you can do.

I put it on a baking tray (4 minutes) and popped it in the oven, grabbed my coffee and settled down in front of the TV to watch the parade lap and start of the grand prix.

…45 minutes later this came out of the oven, fantastically rustic looking and soft on the inside…

We ate it with some home made marmalade and home made raspberry jam….delicious…

photo credit: Photos by Mavis

This is interesting…I hope I can remember it, I really need to!

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

I have been dying to make some cheese for ages…years even, and yesterday I thought I’d have a go. I’ve got some cheese making stuff, but having just got hold of a very big pan it all became possible.

Anyway, this is attempt number 1. I haven’t followed all the golden rules of cheese making about extreme hygiene – I ran out of Milton, so the spoons I used were just ‘clean’ like humans think of the meaning of the word clean rather than CLEAN, in the way dairy people think of the word.

Oh, and I also made errors with the ingredients – the (american) recipe list of ingredients said ‘skim’ milk so I bought regular skimmed milk, but in the instructions it said ‘add the whole milk’. Anyway, scoured the internet and found that skimmed milk isn’t the end of the world. So I carried on.

Inexperience made me take the curds of of the whey before they had become firm enough, and so the cheese isn’t as firm as it should be. It looks OK on the picture – here I am supposed to be turning the cheese and putting it back into the mould upside down – something I am supposed to be able to do after an hour – this is 12 hours on and while I got it out of the mould OK (and caught the moment here) (clean work surface, not CLEAN, but that may not matter anymore) the cheese disintegrated as I put it back in the mould, so I am unsure about what I will end up with. However, I think the is the way with cheese – it’s about practice, you can’t just knock it up.

The disintegration gave me an excuse to try some – this was a curious moment.

Up until now cheese has been cheese. Trying home made cheese is different – there are the expectations of fabulousness, the years of ‘excitement build up’ and just that niggly thing in the back of your mind that you made this from separated milk…

It tastes like mozzarella – very mild. It will hopefully taste of cheddar in 3 months, but I’m not sure – I stuffed it back in the mould, but I don’t know if it will reform or just be crumbly. I’ll look in a few days and make a judgement call about whether to continue or start again.

I’ve have ‘making’ days – said in the same way as someone who does baking.

So, over the weekend I noticed that I could buy 20 garlic bulbs on a string for £2 or buy single bulbs at 30p each. Well, you can pickle garlic so I got the string.

Pickling garlic is easy, just peel the garlic, stick it in a jar with some  bay leaves, fennel seeds and peppercorns and add some boiling vinegar – I used organic cider vinegar for these, but ran out with the last jar, so tried that with red wine vinegar.

From here, I just use the garlic in the place of normal garlic.

Apparently there was a whiff of garlic about the kitchen, but I have a cold and was completely unaware of it!

A couple of weeks ago a friend introduced me to Groupon. I’d never heard of them before, but there was an offer through them for a meal for 2 for £30 instead of £75…6 of us are out tonight for a fairly swanky meal at a modest price.

Anyway, since then I have had an e-mail almost every day with other deals, some of which seemed less attractive than others – Bodyshop – buy £30 of stuff for £12, another offer was for colonic irrigation (£28, down from £75)…today is Greyhound racing (£8.50, down from £25). I reckon I’m a bit heavy for that, they don’t look very robust, those greyhounds.

I had been ignoring these e-mails, not really grasping the concept, but a couple of days ago, it might have been on the Gadget Show they had an article of this scheme and some others.

They are an example of internet bulk purchase – Groupon will know roughly the response rate of it’s members so can go to Bodyshop and get a deal. £30 worth of stuff for £12 is good and Bodyshop will see benefits too.

The deals are local – you set your nearest town and they are all relevent.

And National, so I see on the website there is a holiday that is half price. They also seem to have a constant supply of hotels with offers.

You can see previous deals here – GROUPON

This appealed to me!

photo credit: Tom Anderson

I’ve been in ultra money geek mode today.

I’ve bought postage stamps on my Utility Warehouse cashback card through Viking Direct.

I get a 5% discount on my purchase – but that’s not all!

For added geekiness I bought about a years supply of stamps because there is a postage price rise in April as well, they go up from 41p to 46p for 1st class stamps….if you are buying several hundred, that is a big saving to bank!

photo credit: respres

Petrol Prices are about £1.33 per litre.

Of that, about 59p is fuel duty and VAT is 22p and the fuel itself is 52p

In April fuel duty is due to rise by RPI +1p – Labour set this level of tax increase a few years back and happily George Osborne is thinking he can waive the 1p

Now, for a government that is saving cash by any which way, scrapping the 1p seems a luxury, so can they afford it?

Well, RPI is supposed to be near, but slightly above 2% and fuel is supposed to be below 40p per litre.

So, they expected to be putting fuel duty up by roughly 0.8p +1p so 1.8p per litre + VAT (total 2.16p)

So, with RPI at 4.8% and fuel at 52p,  fuel duty is scheduled to go up by 3.5p + VAT (total 4.2p)

So, if George Osborne  waives the 1p +VAT  on duty he’ll still be making more than he expected. (He’ll still make 3p instead of the expected 2.16p)