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In a way, it’s a sad day – I’ve harvested the last of the beetroot for this year. We’ve never grown them before, but they’ll definitely be here every year from now on. They’re really easy, very tasty and you get loads. As well as eating the root part (roasted is good) you can eat the leaves, which are great as salad leaves but even better cooked like spinach.
I decided to make some nettle beer. As well as continuing the process of making good use out of the so-called bad plants in the garden, the idea of free booze is always appealing. Even more so when it means you aren’t paying taxes to fund the government’s latest ridiculous schemes or expenses claims.
I used this River Cottage recipe as a guide, but here is what I did:
I wasn’t expecting these to be as nice as they were, but seeing as there are millions of them about the place getting on my nerves I thought it was better to make friends with them than be constantly annoyed. Most of them have gone to make wine (more on that another day) but these ones became a friendly lunch, in the following way:
There is such a thing as a free lunch after all.
I’ve been called cynical more than once. In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself cynical, and being cynical is a healthy thing if you ask me. Another thing that’s healthy, all of a sudden, and once again, according to the media, is eggs. They used to be good for you, you should have one every day. Then they were bad, you should only have your allotted quota of standard egg units per week. Now you can, and indeed should, have as many as you like again.
Of course, all reasonable people are used to this backwards and forwards nonsense with every kind of food and drink under the sun and routinely laugh it off with a good dose of “all things in moderation” common sense. Only the media seem to suck it up like a sponge, with this latest egg story apparently being headline news everywhere.
I was blissfully unaware until it was given a prime slot on the BBC evening news, the highlight being the way they managed to wheel out the amusingly named Lucy Egerton from the British Egg Information Service without cracking so much as a childish grin.
The cynical side of me though, as always, responded with a weary “who paid for this ‘research’ then?” No surprises in the answer, or the fact that you have to dig a bit deeper than the news stories (a.k.a. press releases) to find out. It was of course the egg industry, which also seems to double up as the acronym industry, what with the BEIS (British Egg Information Service), the BEIC (British Egg Industry Council), BEPA (British Egg Products Association), the BEA (British Egg Association) and many more.
None of this though, should detract from the fact that you should eat eggs. Because they’re nice. Poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or omeletted – you can’t go wrong with an egg. Ok, you could – there is eggnog, for example. But in general, my advice, which I say is just as valuable as some ’scientific’ research paid for by a vested interest, is to eat plenty of eggs. I wouldn’t advise eating eggs produced by an industry though – instead, eat eggs produced by a free* and happy chicken, preferably your own.
*As with free software, the “free” is as in freedom, although of course if they’re your own chickens you don’t pay for the eggs)
APNG is a backwards-compatible extension to the PNG format that handles animation – a modern day, less klunky equivalent of the much abused animated GIF. A pea is a vegetable. Or is it? I am saying no, the pod is a fruit, and the pea itself is a seed. Feel free to argue amongst yourselves.
The above won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer (stop doing that), and possibly not if you’re one of those Apple types either, though I’m not sure.
Update: I’m told this actually crashes Aurora, Midori and Kazehakase. I can’t help but wonder if that’s exploitable.
According to Google nobody has ever seen fit to utter the phrase “trains and grapes” on the internet before, so it’s lucky I’m here to put that right. In my defence, the real purpose is a bit of testing of video encoding and embedding. Firstly, Saturday morning fun with Duplo trains:
Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:
Get the Flash Player to see this content.
The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.
Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.
According to research funded by ‘The Tea Council’, tea is really good for you. Whatever next?
Hmm, I’d never heard of Dr Gillian McKeith before Sunday, when I for some strange reason picked up one of her “Energy Bars” in Morrisons. I figured any food with Dr Anybody on it had to be good for a laugh.
This may sound odd, even relative to some of the other stuff here, but I have found myself on many occasions to be embroiled in a discussion with people who don’t know the difference between a swede and a turnip. The reasons include apathy, ignorance, and differences in the way the terms are used both regionally in the UK and also internationally. Anyway, if you’re one of these people in future, this is one of the pictures I’ll be directing you towards. It’s a picture of some turnips.
Observe, (a) there is some purple to the skin, but also some white – more commonly they can be white only, or white with green, and (b) the flesh is as white as a goth on a ghost train, (c) the size, which you can’t really observe from the picture, but take it from me that they’re a bit smaller than tennis balls.
These turnips are actually quite swede-like in appearance, I have to admit, but turnips they are.
These particular turnips went into what I call a ‘vegetable pot’, which involves throwing loads of different root vegetables into a giant casserole dish with a little bit of stock and cooking slowly in the oven.
