Scrumpy kinoptic
Could watch this all day… My supermarket scrumpy »
Sangrita Recipe
I’m sharing Pinguino Frog’s recipe for home-made sangrita (non-alcoholic drink to accompany sipping Tequila) for posterity
Para hacer un litro:
- 3/5 de jugo de naranja…si es natural mejor…
- 2/5 de jugo de tomate ese sí, de bote a menos que tengas extractor de jugos
- Limón al gusto (el verde, no el amarillo)
- 2 cucharadas de azucar
- Pizquita de sal
- Unos chingadazos de salsita tabasco
- Otros tantos de salsita inglesa
Y mezclar bien y ya está con eso es tocho morocho…enjoy (jajaja)
To make a litre:
- 3/5 orange juice… preferably natural…
- 2/5 tomato juice- this can be from a can, unless you’ve got a juicer
- Lime to taste (green, not yellow)
- 2 spoonfuls of sugar
- Pinch of salt
- A good few ‘chingadazos‘ of tabasco sauce
- And a few chingadazos of Worcestershire sauce too
mix well, and that’s it!… Enjoy (hahaha)
Easy Tomato Chutney Recipe
The frost got the vast majority of our tomatoes but between me and our neighbours we managed to salvage a fair few green ones and ripen them on the window sill. Every year in living memory my folks have made chutney from the tomatoes in Dad’s greenhouse so I asked Mum for the recipe and she sent the email below. Thanks Mum! We tasted the chutney last night, and it was by all accounts delicious and having a house full of boiling vinegar vapours on Friday afternoon fair took me right back to KSM… Without further cliché, below’s mum’s guide to how to make your own:
Hi Gwyn,
Here is a quick tomato chutney recipe. As long as you use a reasonable amt of sugar and vinegar, you can chuck in anything that you have surplus/ handy.
Red tomato Chutney.
- 5lbs of ripe tomatoes
- 1 lb onions
- 3 cloves garlic
- 2 tsps salt and of paprika
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
- 2 tsps crushed mustard seed
- 0.5 lbs of sugar
- 0.5 litre white vinegar
Peel toms by plunging in boiling water for a few mins, then remove skins. I don’t bother though. Chop roughly.
Put in large saucepan with chopped onions, garlic and a little vinegar.
Cook slowly till onions are soft.
Add all other ingredients and cook till chutney is thick and well blended.Could take a few hours, 2?
Bottle into clean, dry, jars and cover. Mixture can be hot or cold.
Can add apples, sultanas, peppers, chilis, mustard or use malt ( brown Welsh) vinegar or use brown muscovado / demerara sugar. Whatever you have works. Add ginger and other spices for apple chutney. Try curry powder/ paste.
Have fun.
Love Mum xxx
I tried the ginger and curry paste variations and didn’t have any mustard seed. Also I used cider vinegar instead of white vinegar. Utah is famous for its canning (something to do with Mormon apocalypse ‘hard times’ preparedness) so I tried a fancy method that involves special jars and boiling them in water to seal them. In theory this will stop it going mouldy for a year or so. Anyroad, comment if you have any questions about the above.
Easy Apple Crumble Recipe
I know I shouldn’t criticise until I stop weighing myself in stone and pounds, but Pecks? Really? Anyway I purchased half a peck of pommes to practice providing puddings to my peeps.
You might have already seen the recipe over at Flickr, but just in case you’re desperate for the info and Flick has the hiccups, please hold your clicks or summat:
Cut up apples, sprinkle with sugar (and cinnamon if you remember), mix marge into flour till it’s crumbley, cover them apples with crumble. Put more sugar on top… oven it on 350° for about 45 minutes, serve, add generous dollop of your local vanilla ice cream.
Mum, if I’ve missed anything or you notice any other oversight therein, comment away… and thanks for the Autumn cooking lesson series 🙂
The International Section in our local supermarket
The Hefty Carbon Footprint aisle in Shaws supermarket (click to embiggen)
No idea who keeps buying all their Bounties…
Amherst at the weekend was lovely, thanks again Jesse, ‘Manda & Pat.
Well busy at this end, just posting cos I can.
Walking on the beaches…
So a new high score on Facebook’s PacMan game early Sunday morning shamed me into leaving the house and exploring the locality a bit. Bowdoin gave its new professors a 4 page “what to do and see” round Brunswick manual and one of the places suggested was Wolfe’s Neck State Park. I drove over and it was definitely worth it. It’s just down the coast and has all kinds of paths round the woods and is surrounded by rocky, seaweedy coastline. I was using my 50mm (manual focus) lens and there was lots of nature and the like to snap. I’ve already got my eyes on my christmas present to myself (or if eBay has it cheaper, maybe hallowe’en), this: Pentax SMCP-FA 50mm f/1.4 Lens . It costs more than your average camera, but I reckon it’ll be well worth it.
Anyroad, Wolfe’s Neck was $1.50 per person well spent here’s a photo:
We then rented ‘Ne le dis à personne‘ from Bart & Greg’s fine little video shop but the DVD was scratched or something so we watched The Garden, a documentary about a 40 acre allotment in the middle of LA that (Spoiler) gets closed down by greedy landowners and is on one of DrSita’s syllabi. Therein we learnt that polititians suck. There are probably Marxist interpretations too but I missed those. Then we committed a terrible mistake and watched the final of HGTV’s Design Star rather than Mad Men which we’d forgotten was on the other side.
This week, in theory I’ve got a lot of work on. Santa Cruz nutrition e-commerce, new offices for Portland Therapists, finishing up Baked Beans, starting on Maine Latino, & developing a Belgian kitchenware site and finalising a poster for L&C on Southern Discomfort. However all of those are in stasis until I get the next steps confirmed from everyone. I’ll probably work on my new business cards today and update my business blog with recent work and recommendations. And play pacman on facebook.
Sad news about Keith Floyd innit. He was a star. Here’s The Stranglers’ Peaches as a tribute…
(it was the unlikely theme tune to his tv programme)
Also, I cooked yesterday. Without a glass of red in me hand mind. Here’s the results.
As usual, needed more salt. But that’s better than needing less, right?
Step #4, Alligator sandwiches, Navelgazing and Last Thursday
DrSita comes back late this evening and in the meantime, I’m baking bread. Sudarat gave me a bread baking stone and it’s getting it’s baptism by yeast today. When DrSita rang yesterday she seemed to be reeling from culture shock from visiting New Orleans, and this morning I turned my computer on and got this Skype message:
[6:21:11 AM] WIFEY! says: i can’t believe i forgot to tell you: i ate alligator!
I dunno, you let her wander off for 48 hours and this kind of thing happens…
What else? I went to Bertie Lou’s this morning for breakfast, had a long chat with Stu & Anne yesterday, watched Cloverfield last night, Hancock the night before, and life’s pretty quiet all in all.
I got tagged by Colibrí and El Charro Negro for an “upload a photo and say 16 things about yourself” Flickr meme thing, so i have to do that. I didn’t realise it had to be in Spanish though, and thinking of 16 things to say was harder than I thought so I just googled about for ’50 questions’ type posts and came up with the following:
1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought?
Jesus, that’s a lot of white hairs in me beard. Time for a shave…
2. What is your favourite ringtone on your phone?
Any of them are fine EXCEPT the one that I used to have as an alarm at 6am meaning it was time to commute to Sunnyvale for Yahoo(!). Still gives me shivers when I hear it.
3. What were you doing at midnight last night?
Hoping DrSita was alright in her haunted hotel in Louisiana. Wishing the Colbert Report would go on a bit longer, and mulling over the implications and repercussions of time travel in LOST.
4. What’s a word that you say a lot?
In English, anyroad
In Spanish, orale
5. Favorite age you have been so far?
23 was a good vintage.
6. What is your current desktop picture?
Laptop: That Ubuntu heron thing
Home PC: Bokeh-y grass
Work PC: Yes we canine. On black.
7. What do you do when vending machines steal your money?
Pump the return me money button, rock the machine a bit, send another coin in after it, swear, weep.
8. Last magazine you bought?
Word magazine. Best music magazine on the planet. If we lived in the same country for more than 10 months at a time, I’d subscribe.
9. Can you cook?
Now and again. I can follow a recipe if it has pictures of what the result’s meant to look like. The House Speciality is Shepherd’s Pie. And right now I’m 6 hours into a bread recipe.
10. Last movie you watched?
Cloverfield, 2 hours ago. Monsters rock!
11. Do you like marmite?
Hellz yeah! ‘cept nowadays it gives me terrible acid indigestion.
12. Favourite crisps?
US: Funyuns
UK: Quavers
Mexico: Lays, amarillo
13. Do you own a donor card?
Yep. Help yourselves.
14. Are you a collector of anything?
We move too often to amass a serious amount of anything, I’ve 11 and a half thousand photos on Flickr though and I think my two dual lens vintage cameras might be the start of something bigger….
15. Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope.
16. Have you ever done anything more self-obsessed than this?
Can I interest you in my blog..? agaveweb.com/blog
Now I have to translate all that…
The Continuing Adventures of Me’n’Mario’n’Ange:
Last Thursday. I shifted my hours at L&C to a bit later so we could explore the area a tad. It was a misty morning & Atticus was full of beans and came with us.
I thought the park by the Sellwood bridge would be pretty atmospheric what with all the fog so we had a little wander round there before heading up to Tryon park next to where I work. We managed a fairly large loop of the trails there, the mist had more or less disappeared but the sun was low in the sky and casting some nice beams through the trees. I also took advantage of having two experienced dog handlers to pass Atticus over to so I could use my TTV contraption. Here’s one I liked:
We walked briefly around the L&C campus then I went to a meeting about the new CMS we’re going to be adopting at the law school. It’s an impressive system and will eventually make everything run more smoothly… but I think the changeover is going to be a little bumpy. Nothing too severe though, and I likes a challenge.
After than we went CD & poster shopping round Hawthorn way. Word Magazine cost 17 bucks. But it’s rarer than hen’s teeth in Oregon so I bit the bullet and paid up. I shall read it very slowly…
In the evening, ‘tapas gringas’ and beer in Clinton with everyone + a Spanish friend of ours.
Lovely. Anyroad, off to try step #5 in Leif’s recipe…
Anyone need a website?
Seriously, anyone need a poster, bespoke powerpoint presentation, a logo, translation…anything dammit… huge discounts for friends. Since the answer to that question seems to be no (at the moment), I’ll keep perfecting my house-husband skillz.
I noticed George has published a photo of the banner I made t’other day, in action at the SF blues festival: (I’ll just link to the picture cos the site’s not live yet I think)
Yesterday seemed as good a day as any to make some bread. Drsita was out earning a living, Atticus was uncommonly mopey (he’s not big on low pressure fronts). So I downloaded a recipe, printed it out, decided it was wrong and thought to myself, well I can make pizza dough, I reckon bread’s probably the same with more yeast. So I nipped to New Seasons round the corner and assembled the ingredients. Flour and yeast, and some ‘erbs from the garden. A bit of mixing, kneading, prodding and one minor burn later…
Behold: Basic Portland, Oregano Bread…
Needs more salt, but it’s alright. The last time I cooked bread was probably in Kingston St Mary Primary School circa 1982. Now there’s someone whose site needs a makeover… even if it’s just replacing the MS Comic Sans with a real font…
Easy Welsh Cakes Recipe
Mum’s been making Welsh cakes for various civic occasions and passed on the recipe to me….
You’ll need:
UK Ingredients
US version or what I actually managed to find
- Milk, Semi-skimmed
- 2 x eggs
- Raisins
- Sugar
- Marge
- Mixed spices
- Self-raising flour
- Milk, 2%
- A splash of whatever the merry hell ReddiEgg in a carton is.
- Raisins
- Sugar
- Canola 0g Transfat Harvest Margerine
- Cinnamon
- Self-Rising Flour
- Mix up flour and marge. Half a pound of marge to a pound of flour…
- Blend it.
- Mix in 4 Tablespoons of sugar.
- Add mixed spice, cinnamon.
- Beat the egg and milk & mix it into the flour/marge/sugar stuff.
- Add your raisins/ dried fruit.
- If it’s too wet still, add more flour.
- Roll it out to about 1/4 inch thick.Cut it with a shape cutter, or something round.
- Heat an ungreased, non-stick frying pan up to around 3 (out of 10 on the dial)
- Heat each side for about 3 minutes till golden brown…
- Test them on the dog.
- Wait 10 minutes. If the dog’s still okay. Try one yourself.
I’m wondering what’s going to be served up in the ads that accompany this post…