I helped launch The Sound of Orange Rockcorps with POKE.
It's a midi-based Flash sequencer, where you and your Facebook friends can create a bank of notes to make your song. Like this:
Wasn't an easy road by a long way, but we're all dead proud of the final result :)
I'm doing some big bike rides again this summer!
This weekend Oli and I are cycling from Manchester to the Peak District. Oli works for British Cycling and has 2 meter legs, so I'm expecting to die. Hard.
I'm also taking part in the London to Brighton ride for the British Heart Foundation, and on that ride I'll have the excellent company of POKE! There are about 12 of us doing it which should be great fun.
If you'd like to sponsor us, which would be really appreciated, you can do that here:
Rob and Dave, a couple of old Uni friends, swung by to stay with us this weekend which was really awesome. Awesome and full of long afternoons in the pub, loads of cooking and loads of Guitar Hero.
I cooked Vietnamese chili, salt and pepper squid - which is becoming a real favourite - and chicken with chilli and lemon grass. Cooking it was a bit of a haze; no photos I'm afraid, doing it after hours in the pub plus the whirlwind I'd creating in the kitchen, and Guitar Hero duels were a little too distracting.
Sunday started slowly (with a hangover) but good coffee and eggs on potato farls got us moving soon enough. Moving enough to somehow end up in an oriental supermarket shopping for lunch.
Lots of chopping eh? I had lots of help in the kitchen from Jo, Dave and Rob luckily! Mix it all up and you're ready to roll (I fried a test gyoza off to test the seasoning).
The gyoza wrappers were frozen, but by the time they'd been out for 30 minutes or so they were easy to handle.
We learnt quickly that dry hands really help, so that the wrappers don't stick to your hands. Stick a bit of the pork and prawn mix (not too much), and then use a bit of water around the edge to act as glue to seal it. Squeeze it close, and line 'em up.
We made 50. Less 1 that was the test, and 1 that was put down because of severe deformity.
It might seem that 48 gyoza is a lot for 4 people, but as soon as we cooked half and started eating it was pretty obvious that we weren't going to be able to stop until they were all gone ;)
I wonder if I'll ever get bored of cooking Asian food..
There are a few very excellent film photographers at POKE and I've felt a growing desire to try out film photography over the past few months. It's not that I think that I can start to suddenly take photos as good as those folks, but just that there's a lo-fi charm about the whole thing I really like. No chips, or beeping, or card readers or Photoshop.
So, I bought some film cameras. I was tempted by the very famous and popular Lomo LCA, but kept exploring other options. After doing a lot of research and Flickr-ing, the camera I arrived at was the magnificent Olympus XA:
(I also bought a couple of it's newer brothers, the Olympus XA2)
All in all, it's absolutely great fun. I'm getting my films processed at ASDA after some truly awful results from Spectrum Imaging (and some snotty customer service too) and I'm so impressed - giant supermarket doing awesome scans for £1.50 a roll, within the hour - who would've guessed?
Here are some photos off the first couple of rolls I got back from the XA and XA2:
Big thanks to Marc, Greg, Will and the rest of the filmnerds at Poke who opened my eyes to another side of photography :)
I'm also fully aware that I have done any food-blogging in bloody ages. I have loads of photos to blog, and now that I've got over blank-blog syndrome it should be easier to get them posted.
With peanut butter and M and Ms - for Buzz's send off tomorrow :)
I made a pie today.
In fact, it was a birthday request from my Dad who had been craving a traditional chicken and mushroom pie - he got one for his birthday!
I used chicken thighs (poached for 40 minutes in stock, then carefully and lovingly de-boned and diced) instead of breast to ensure the chicken didn't go dry, and it worked really well. The filling was essentially a bechamel sauce (but with more chicken stock than milk) with sauteed mushrooms, tarragon and chicken.
Shortcrust pastry unashamedly bought off the shelf. Here's the beast in all it's glory - fed 6 people easily.
Served with chunky chips, roast butternut squash and thick gravy.
There was something satisfying about making one big "thing" that everyone shares, and it was fun to make something a bit more rustic and English after 2 weeks of south-east Asian cooking too.
Vietnam was undoubtedly my favourite country when we went around the world. A big reason for this was the food; I fell in love.
All this made the fact that I couldn't find a good Vietnamese cookbook even more disappointing, until now:
The Secrets of the Red Lantern is now my favourite cookbook. Ever! It's not just a cookbook, it's a beautifully presented story of one family's escape from the Vietnam war, leading eventually (I won't spoil the story) to The Red Lantern, a revered Vietnamese restaurent in Sydney.
We'd invited Flo, Tracy and Monkey over for dinner on Saturday night, so I thought "Hey! Why not cook 4 dishes from this fantastic new book?".
Vietnamese food, although quick to cook, is not simple. There is an elegant simplicity to the approach of each dish; fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, fresh seafood - do you see the pattern? However, there is a lot of preparation involved, and I spent 4 hours in the kitchen frantically chopping, soaking, folding, tearing, picking, slicing, coating, marinading.. phew!
I'm not going to cook four dishes I've never cooked before when hosting a dinner party. Thankfully, Tracy and Flo were 45 minutes late, but even so, I was shattered and the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it!
Don't skimp on quality of ingredients. I know this might seem obvious, and it's something I try to do myself but it's worth mentioned here, if only because I'm feeling a bit smug. We made a huge effort on Saturday afternoon legging it around the city trying to find everything we needed totally fresh (not frozen or jarred if we could help it) and I think it played the most crucial part in the quality of the meal.
So, lessons over, how did it go? Well, at 5pm you I wouldn't have believed it, but by 7pm we were eating a really, really delicious, authentic tasting meal complete with home-made dipping sauces.
There's a downshot though - I was so stressed, snowed under with cooking that I didn't take many good photos. In fact, I didn't even get any photos of some of the dishes :(
A favourite of mine from when I was in Vietnam, these ended up being 10 out of 10 on the authenticity-scale, but it didn't come free; 15 rolls took me over an hour to make.
NO PHOTO
I've never deep fried anything before, so I was really worried about this. Luckily, we got some freshly caught squid which I sliced into thin strips so they'd cook quickly, then coat in egg-white and work in potato starch (heh, that was easy to find..). They cooked in hot oil in about a minute, whereupon I tossed them in sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, red chillies and 4 slices, fried spring onions.
It's hard to explain the disbelief at how good they tasted when I tried them!
This dish had about 30 ingredients! Even the marinade had 10+ ingedients, but it was all worth it. I cooked the rump steak on a really hot griddle for 3 minutes each side and sliced it ultra thin. The salad was essentially a herb salad (basil, thai basil, corriander, perilla and mint) with glass noodles, red onions and cucumber, dressed (a mix of soy, garlic, corrainder, sugar and fish sauce blended together) and finally garnished with roasted peanuts.
The result was so fresh tasting, an absolute explosion of flavours.
Another favourite of ours from Vietnam, I learnt the secret to cooking this one (aside from chopping the lemongrass really, really fine) was to let it cook longer than you think. It's not a stir-fry, it needs time for the sauce to really come together (I deglazed the wok in the middle, too) and for the onions and garlic to caramelize.
I'm so pleased, I feel like I've finally got a crack at mastering Vietnamese, one of my favourite cuisines. I learnt a few lessons, but I'm not put off at all - just totally exhilerated by that most fantastic cookbook.
I've actually got an excuse for the couple of weeks silence around here - I was on holiday!
In Surfcastle, I think I've found a place I'll go back to over and over, year after year.
Before I go on - please check out my Surfcastle 2008 Flickr Photoset/album - it speaks volumes, more than I could in this post.
It's a big, beautiful old house in the village of Baleal, which happens to be one of the top surf spots in Portugal, if not Europe.
What makes Surfcastle isn't just the location or the perfect surfy house - the people who run it are completely awesome.
Our surf coaches for the week, Dan and Ginjes were so helpful and so keen to help us improve and coach us almost one-to-one. There are heaps of surf camps that do lessons of 50 people plus, but not the Surfcastle guys. We had Ginjes and Dan between 6 or 7 of us most days!
Joao, Elfie and Laura were the perfect hosts, making sure we were extremely well fed and looked after.
The whole experience was a little bit perfect to be honest. A tiny, quiet village out of tourist season. A really hard but addictive new sport to learn. Beaming sunshine away from cold, dark England. Most of all, meeting some absolutely amazing people who just want to kick back, have a little fun and surf.
As far as the surfing itself goes, I love it! I got the hang of it slowly but surely, but it's definitely he hardest sport I've ever turned my hand to. The constant paddling, watching the waves, balance and timing make it almost impossible to nail in the beginning, but as I touched on earlier we had two brilliant coaches who worked hard to make sure we understood how to nail it.
So by the end of the week, we were exhausted from the sun, beer, partying and most of all surfing - there's nothing like coming home from holiday feeling knackered by wanting more.
It won't be long before I'm back at Surfcastle, and that's a promise!
Man, it's rare that I spend so long preparing and cooking something that ends up looking a bit unspectacular, but today was one of those.
Taking the meat off the shoulder and trimming the fat took bloody ages! Satisfying seeing it brown off in a very hot griddle pan before being stuck in the oven for an hour with an onion, a touch of stock and and oregano.
I thought I'd double experiment with the gnocchi - attempt them for first time, and also try and inject some earthy mushroom flavour into them. Did you know that 12 mushrooms, finely blitzed in a mini-food processor then gentle fried in olive oil disappear to almost nothing? The yield was about 2 tablespoons of fine mushroom paste.
I used Jamie Oliver's gnocchi recipe - classic potato (none of yer fancy Roman semolina brand here) - adding in the mushroom paste half way through.
While this was going on I continued to develop my mild addiction to oven-roasted tomatoes - I put 12 of them, quartered, into the oven for 90 minutes with salt, basil and olive oil. Also in an already full oven was half a butternut squash cut into a thin, long strips (for extra crispness keep them thin) drizzled with olive oil.
All that was left was to combine the shrunken, intense tomatoes into the lamb making a rustic lamb ragu of sorts - then serving over the gnocchi, a scattering of crispy butternut squash pieces and some grated parmesan.
Warming, autumnal, rustic and bloody hard work.
After a very busy few months at work (remember Balloonacy?) and a lot happening over a busy, social summer, I was feeling really run down and low on energy and motivation.
So I went on a long bike ride. About 4 days long in fact; I did the C2C (Coast to Coast) bike ride. Some stats before the gorey details:
Check out my Flickr album with the best photos from the trip.
Here's a rough map of the route:
The trip was spread over 4 days, where I did around 40 miles a day until the last day where I did nearer 70.
I did the trip alone, which turned out to be both good and bad. I'm not really very used to being on my own, coming from a big, loud family and having been with Jo for nearly 6 years. Not being used to it, I don't like it very much, meaning I didn't like a lot of the solitude I found whilst out there - but on reflection, I can see that it's definitely good for me to be out of my comfort zone for a while.
.. was absolutely stunning! Loosely, the first 2 days were across and out of the Lake District, and the last 2 days were a long, winding traversal of the Northern Penines.
The weather on days 1 and 2 was really good; sunny in spells, but mostly cloudy - very easy to cycle in. The scenery was breaktaking as I rode up and out of countless valleys with lakes dotted around in every direction.
On the 3rd day, however, the rain came..
Unbelievably, I left my water and winproof jacket in the B&B on the very first night. Nice. The rain on day 3 was weird, not heavy, but very dense.
I had 2 notably huge climbs: the first up Hartside at 1900ft and Black Hill at 2000ft. The view from Hartside was amazing and after a long rest and drink I set off towards Black Hill.
The climb was so much tougher (lots of sharp, steep hills) and when nearly at the top the fog made it impossible to see more than 10 meters around me! I know that there were roads I was cycling on with sheer drops that I simply couldn't see because of the blanket of white. Mental stuff, and to be honest really daunting and scary.
After more climbing, more fog and more rain I don't think I've ever been as relieved to see a warm pub with a room than I was when I rode into Allenheads, some 7 and a half hours after setting off. Brutal.
Right, I bought a map from Sustrans (the excellent UK cycling charity) which mapped out the route (beautifully and thoroughly might I add) and it also provided route profiles - simple line charts that show the size of the hills between places on the route.
Based on that I decided to ride a much further distance on the last day because the route profiles showed 2 climbs out and then downhill all the way to Sunderland, and I figured it should be a cruise.
Wrong!
The route profiles for that last part, in my opinion, completely wrong. 2 climbs turned into 8 and I found myself on a very weird, wide B-road with no road markings. The rain was driving so hard and the landscape had turned from intricate valleys to vast, open expanses.
In this expanse was little me, on my little bike, on a fucking long road shared only by these gigantic "Tyne and Wear Road Rock" juggernauts.
Because the climbing had already been so tough I really started to become freaked out about how little ground I'd covered and once I was truly in the middle of absolutely nowhere and could see no houses, towns, huts, animals, nothing at all whatsoever I started to truly freak out.
There was no mobile reception at all, I couldn't make any sense of the map I decided there's no way I was riding down the 6 mile monster-hill I'd just climbed so I'd keep going.
Just like that, half a mile down I see a blue glimmer through the fog - the turn off for the Waskerley Way, a 25 mile "dedicated cycle track" which offered a "superbly relaxing cruise down to the Tyne".
Bollocks. "Dedicated cycle track" meant for the most part a shingle, dirt and rock track. "Superbly relaxing" turned into "Arduous and exhausting" due to the fact that it'd been raining for 2 weeks and there was surface water all the way down. For 25 miles and 2 hours, I was constantly riding through puddles and mud pits. I became completely caked in mud - water pouring off me, out of my shoes, off the bike.
Once I'd come out of the sheer wilderness, the Waskerley Way continues into frankly flat, boring riverside rides through post-industrial Tyne and Wear area. I was so tired and so beaten up, I was counting the meters to the station so I could come home.
It got better - the grit, water and 25 mile downhill wore both sets of brakepads to a nub rendering them useless meaning I had to freewheel the last couple of miles into Newcastle.
That was after I washed self and bike using a bucket and tap at a petrol station 5 miles out of Newcastle (stuffing a snickers bar in the process) so that I wasn't in such a rank state that they'd turn me and mucky bike away from the train.
I made it in, and following lots of waiting and long train journeys I was home on Tuesday evening, some 91 hours after leaving.
I'm so proud of myself that I did it. Its not the kind of thing I do a lot, but it's certainly something I'm going to do a hell of a lot more of. The scenery, adventure, focus and solitude have left me feeling genuinely refreshed :)
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