migrant|roo

I'm now the proud owner of a Specialized Sirrus bike!

My bike got stolen from the station a few weeks ago, which coincided nicely with Poke joining Evans' very noble Ride2Work scheme, meaning I got a cool 35% off the price :)

Here she is:

I am so, so impressed! The ride is extremely fast, and the bike itself is so much lighter than I thought it would be. Riding on London's shitty potholed roads is a bit, ahem, jarring.. but I'm going to be using this mostly out around the countryside near Milton Keynes, so i'm not really bothered.

If you're looking for a fast, racey bike but that isn't actually a racer, look no further. At £400 you get a lot of quality for your money, and a bike that should cope really well with any kind of road riding.

It's something I've been talking about for a while, and today i've actually done it - I've permanently removed myself from Facebook.

I'd never really taken to it, preferring to use lots of the tried and tested methods to keep in touch with people I like, and found it was mostly useful for having inane twice-yearly "conversations" with people I intentionally stopped speaking to.

I've always steered clear of making pies and other items in the Pie Family (quiche, tart, flan, pastry), but I guess something spurred me into trying it because here's an apple pie I made this afternoon:

Closed

Slightly eated

Apple Pie Recipe

• 5 bramley apples, cut into sugar-cube sized pieces
• 2 teaspoons of freshly ground cinnamon sticks
• 3 tablespoons of caster sugar
• squeeze of lemon juice

I used some off-the-shelf shortcrust pastry and rolled it out into a bottom-up cake tin, and brushed milk and sprinkled sugar over the top before sticking in a medium oven until it looked wicked.

Look how taken with the pie Suki was:

Can naughty cats eat pie?

I saw a technique using home made tilt-shift lenses a while back, using , but not having one around I followed a quick tutorial on recreating the effect of a tilt-shift lense on a photo I took from a helicopter in New York.

Original

Post processed

I jacked the saturation and white balance right up to give it a more artificial, plasticky feel.

Few things have ever blown my mind like this did - making bread without kneading:

I'm going to try this as soon as I can.

I spent about an hour on Sunday strolling around the internet looking at food related stuff. I've realised that BBC Good Food is a great resource for recipes and also exhibits excellent food photography - something that most definitely floats my boat!

Inspired by some of the recipes, I decided to embark on a concerted flurry of cookery on this Sunny Snowy Sunday in an attempt to delight the tastebuds of my visiting parents and sister.

Breaded goats cheese and caramelised red onions on rocket

We've been eating Soignon goats cheese (tried to find a link, but they're obviously too busy cheese-creating to faff around with silly internets) for a while now, indulging ourselves in it mostly using pizza. However, I decided to breadcrumb it and gently shallow fry it - hoping for some oozy soft cheese and crunchy crust.

First, I cut the cheese into rounds. Can you guess how many of us there were?

For the breadcrumbs, I put the following into a mini-blender:

• Stale bread
• Salt
• Pepper
• Oregano and basil
• Olive oil
• Parmesan

Using egg as glue, I generously double-coated (dip, coat, then dip, coat again) the cheese rounds, until they looked like this:

To complement the strong, salty goats cheese, I wanted something sweet and tarte, so I quickly caramelised some red onions with balsamic vinegar, a pinch of sugar and a tiny dash of soy sauce (don't tell anyone). About 2 minutes in, the onions looked like this:

I continued cooking them for about 10 minutes at least, until they were extremely dark and soft.

While the recently breaded goats cheese rounds were on a very low heat on a lightly oiled griddle pan, I dressed rocket leaves with balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt.

After 5-6 minutes the breaded rounds were perfectly golden and crunchy on the outside, and soft and gooey inside. I served them on the dressed rocket leaves with a generous portion of the caramelised red onions on top, voila:

Tomato, Rosemary and Garlic flatbread

Tomatos in this country suck. More often than not they're hard, tasteless and a pathetic off-red colour. To significantly improve the experience of eating such sub-par fruits, I cook them for absolutely ages with my favourite things:

My favourite things to slow-roast tomatoes with:

• Garlic
• Really good quality sea salt
• Fresh basil
• Olive oil

Halve the tomatos, chop the garlic, tear up the basil and use olive oil like it's going out of fashion and you'll end up with something like I did, this:

After being in the oven for 1 hour on a low heat (80C?), everything is soft and delicious. There's a rich, red oil left with the tomatos, and if you do enough it'll keep in the fridge in a jar.

I made a quick flatbread and threw on rosemary from the garden, garlic slivers and the roasted tomatoes (as well as some of that awesome oil) to have with an excellent macaroni cheese that Jo made (the photos of the macaroni cheese came out terrible unfortunately):

We sat around our new japanese-style dining table (read: re-purposed Ikea coffee table) to eat and drink together:

Lovely.

Half-toast pitta bread and split them in half once they've puffed out a bit.

For the tomato base, there's an ultra-quick way (tomato puree, plenty of salt, oregano, olive oil, garlic) and a slower way (can of good quality chopped tomatoes, salt, sugar, garlic, basil, oregano, cooked down for 10 minutes).

Add whatever toppings you've got lying around - i've yet to make a bad one! I can recommend tuna, capers, olives, red onions and basil (no cheese).

Stick under a very hot grill for 2-3 minutes until very golden, drizzle loads of olive oil and enjoy!

I've only gone and made a new website!

Yeah, it's taken ages to get it live but i'm pretty happy with it. There are a few bits and pieces missing, but it's going to be a much nicer place for me to put my thoughts and ideas.

Be sure to check out the Photos tab, which is hooked up to my Flickr photostream.

Also, i'll be posting a few geeky bobs in Projects (but is empty at the moment).

I supposed I should also promise to post more so that you know, there's actually stuff to look at on here. I do.

"Lasagne of the sea" (Adapted from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's "Cook with Jamie" book)

Into a heavy-bottomed pan on a low heat with some olive oil, I put (all very finely chopped):

• Carrot
• Onion
• Celery
• Fennel
• Garlic
• Parsely

I left the lid on and let it sweat for 10 minutes or so until the mixture is really soft. Then added about a pint of milk and brought to the boil.

In a separate pan, I melted some butter and added some flour to make a roux - then ladelled in the milk and vegetable mixture gradually until I had a semi-thick sauce.

Seasoned the sauce and added a bit of parmesan some more chopped parsely and it was ready to go.

Now it was time to build the lasagne.

I layered the sauce, with chunks of salmon, haddock and whole tiger prawns, along with halved cherry tomatoes.

Seafood

Layering the lasagne

I made two layers, and then topped it with breadcrumbs (2 slices of toast in a mini-blender, with parmesan) and yet more curley parsely.

Stuck it all in the oven for 45 minutes (but for 30 minutes covered in tinfoil) and it came out looking like this:

I served it like this:

With baby spinach leaves in a light olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing.

Spot on!

Aaah - lots and lots of relaxing this weekend. After a hectic couple of weeks, we got back to chilling out and cooking nice food.

There's lots to tell, too.

Focaccia

Ingredients for the focaccia

Knead flour, water, olive oil, salt, yeast and pepper into a wetish dough. Roll out and cover in whole granules of rock salt, coarse cut garlic and rosemary, being generous with everything. Simple but awesome.

Focaccia

Traditional Lasagna with an onion gratin

For lasagna filling: beef, onions, garlic, lots of pepper, sugar, half a can of tinned chopped tomatoes, celery, a little tomato puree and plenty of olive oil. Cook for 40 minutes at least, until rich.

The onion gratin was something inspired by Jamie Oliver's How to Cook. Mixed onions in baked with rock salt and olive oil until very soft, then covered with creme fraiche, pepper, Gruyere and Parmesan and more baking until really crisp and golden.

Lasagna

Onion gratin

Jo's Roast

Jo boshed together an absolutely kicking roast with her mum Linda which was the perfect complement to a bottle of white wine and a lazy Sunday.

Here are the highlights, look at the spread at the end!:

Chocolate and Hazelnut Torte

This was the most ambitious recipe this weekend.. and started badly when I realised how hard hazelnuts are to shell! It's my fault, Jo went to the supermarket to get them and I insisted on the phone to get the ones in shells rather than pre-peeled because they'd be "more fresh". Bleh. Next time getting pre-peeled.

How I made it might be a bit unconventional but I made this up so here goes:

2 big bars of Galaxy chocolate A small pot of double cream 30g of butter 6 digestive biscuits About 50 hazelnuts, ground to dust

Melt the chocolate then add butter and cream. Keep the heat high - I made the mistake of turning the heat down, but when the cold ingredients went into stuff started to solidify and it was scary. High heat :)

Whisk the ground hazelnuts (which smelt absolutely incredible) very vigorously into the chocolate mixture.

Crush up 6 digestive biscuits and melted butter.

Press the base into a torte dish (one of those where the bottom comes up), then pour the mixture on top. Set in the fridge for at least 6 hours.

All set and ready to eat

Would you like a piece?

Oh yeah! It tasted as good as it looks. A bit underprepared, no ice cream - I think it'd be the finished article with a scoop of the best vanilla you can find.