Nick’s masked birthday party last week had a large cask, courtesy of Stewart Brewery. The beer didn’t all get finished on the night, so Nick ended up decanting the remains into whatever containers were lying around and brought us a two litre bottle of beer when he visited.
It’s flat now, and not very exciting to drink any more but it makes great bread. I used a recipe from Crust, the “ale and yeast poolish”, and made four small loaves. There is still a lot of beer left, so I’ll need some other means to use up the remainder. If there are no better ideas I might try stewing with it.
If I’d been sensible I would have started the poolish for this bread early so I wouldn’t be baking last thing at night. Best laid plans, etc. Whatever the regrets about timing, the loaves turned out beautifully. I haven’t had much practice at shaping loaves, so they were a bit haphazard. But this turned out to be a good thing because the varying shapes of loaves reacted differently in the oven, and I got a much better impression of how the bread reacts in general.
Specifically, the two loaves which were more compact and loaf-shaped developed a really beautiful burst and a tantalising crust. They expanded up instead of out, which is an effect I’ve been trying to achieve for some time. The two that were more baguette-shaped (flatter and longer) spread apart where they were slashed, rather than bursting up the way. I consider this a very tasty and successful experiment. We’re learning here!
I’m still not completely sure how to maintain the crispy crust after I pull the loaves out of the oven. When I made the pain de campagne last week I didn’t care about the state of the loaves because I wanted them to go stale for the fondue. So I just left them out. And the crust stayed nice and crunchy. So should I stop putting the bread away until they’ve had several more hours to cool? Helen reckons that the heat and moisture inside the bread gets trapped when the bread is trapped in a container, and softens this the crusts again. This seems reasonable to me. Or maybe the only reason the pains de campagne had nice crusts was because they were baked for longer? Something to experiment with on the next attempt.
I gave one loaf to Nick, along with the money I owed him for the beer. (Sorry for being late in my debts!) The recipe suggests that it’s good with a cassoulet and a glass of red wine. Helen improvised a not-cassoulet from the wrong type of beans and some very old sausages from the freezer. It turned out rather fantastic in the end.
This is the bread I was talking about yesterday. After last night and lunch today we have less than half a loaf left. But I have more bread in the works.
I was up pretty late last night, baking. I didn’t particularly enjoy getting out of bed this morning (…but when do I ever?) but the bread was totally worth it.
I made two pains de campagne. They’re mostly plain flour with a little rye for flavour and colour. They start off with a ferment, which I tend not to do for other loaves because I’m lazy and it doesn’t easily fit into my day — but I thought I would make the effort this time.
(Mostly I make up a ferment the night before and put it in the fridge until the following evening. But a chilled ferment is pretty difficult to work and the yeast is obviously sluggish. It becomes a trade-off between letting the ferment come back up to room temperature, and not leaving it too late in the day to take the loaf to completion. In future I might try putting together a ferment just before I leave the house in the morning. The temperature is probably cool enough outside the fridge anyway!)
The loaves, in the end, looked rather beautiful and smelled fantastic. I’m sorry I haven’t uploaded the photographs that I took last night. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
Last Friday… it seems so long ago… we went out to Nick’s for a Birthday Masquerade Ball. There were a small number of people who made their own masks, though not always successfully. José made himself a Zorro-style mask with the eye holes too far apart, so wore it round his forehead all evening instead. Oh well.
We decided to go the extra effort and made some moulded masks using a technique Helen learned from a youth drama group. This is how it’s done.
There’s been a [really interesting discussion] [discussion] going on in various circles about [a bug report that was filed against the Firefox 3 browser] [bug]. The user who reported the problem had been annoyed that Firefox seemed to reject the security certificates of every major website she visited — Paypal, Facebook, Amazon. Each time the browser put up an error message the user would press the button that said “this is all okay, accept this as valid and secure”.
[bug]:
[discussion]:
Of course, the sting in the tail is that it was not Firefox that was in error. This user was being subjected to repeated Man-In-The-Middle attacks — there was someone else between her and the desired website, intercepting all her traffic and putting her privacy in serious jeopardy.
The interesting aspect is that every single error message which Firefox displayed to the user was valid and pertinent. She really was under attack. But the user, savvy enough to report this bug, didn’t realise that these messages weren’t in error. Clearly there is something very wrong with the usability of this system.
The tanning salon down the hill sells leather handbags. Wicked humour or carefully thought-out marketing?
It’s amazing how easy making your own (paper) masks is. Will post more on this when I have the time and the photographs.
Finally registered for a doctor on Wednesday. Finally.
It appears shirts are not made for people who don’t have a middle-aged paunch. Took me ages on Thursday to get something suitable. Thomas Pink, you suck! For reference, the man in TM Lewin was very helpful.
I got IDed buying soft drinks on Wednesday… well, that’s exaggeration for effect, but it’s still true. I was buying cordials from The Drink Shop and they phoned me up to verify that I was over eighteen. So if I want to buy booze closer to Christmas they can rush it out the door now that I’m in their system. Still, it was a bit surreal!
Started reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale and enjoying it so far. Helen actually complains that she really wants to read the book I’m reading right now, but she’ll just have to wait. I bought her Bad Science last month, but has she opened it?
I finished The Princess Bride a couple of days, the book from which they made the film. I don’t remember much about the film. I tried to find it recently in HMV but it wasn’t there. A lot of other rubbish, but not The Princess Bride. Inconceivable, I know.
I was prompted to buy the book because of a conversation in the pub (it is always the way — pub conversations are the cause of most things, I think) a month or so ago. The interesting thing, I was told after the fourth glass of wine, was that the author of the book doesn’t exist. He is entirely made up by the person who is abridging the book. The abridgement, in fact, is a witty excuse to write a naive and effortlessly silly tale of derring-do — or as they would have it, “true love and high adventure”.
In this respect the book is just like the film, so if you loved that why not check out the book? If you like, you can imagine it being narrated by Peter Falk, or someone else entirely.
If you’ve not seen the film, what more can I say to convince you? It’s whimsical, exciting, comical and dastardly. You can’t really fit much more in 300 pages.
I can’t imagine the pain actors must go through when they’re being layered in latex for 5 hours before shooting for things like Lord of the Rings. Especially if, like John Rhys Davies, you learn that you’re allergic to the make-up that you have to wear every day of filming.
My own face is layered in paper and glue at the moment, in a hopeful attempt to have a beautiful, original, exciting mask for a Masquerade Ball, chez Nick. There is still peeling to come, and then the artistry begins. But what kind of mask and, therefore, what to wear on the rest of me? As much as I’d like to go for a very traditional masquerade ball attire, that’s not so easy to knock up from the stuff we have to hand.
Today I fixed my parents’ computer (Mac Mini) after receiving many obscure and unhelpful complaints that it wasn’t working properly. I was really dubious that there was going to be something wrong with the monitor, because the problem only manifested with my father’s login.
It turns out he’d managed to — somehow — turn the screen contrast up from Normal to Maximum. (Those playing along at home can look in System Preferences then Universal Access for the relevant setting.) This renders much of the text invisible, and what’s left wispy and hard to read. I really don’t know what this option was supposed to accomplish, given that it’s presumably meant as a accessibility feature.
I also don’t know how it was accidentally enabled. The effect is very obvious, so I don’t know how it could be turned on without it being very obvious what happened. The hotkey (why the hell does this thing need a hotkey?!) is Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-. to increase contrast and Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-, to decrease it. It’s conceivable that the hotkey could be leaned on, but I tried it on Helen’s machine and it doesn’t seem possible to enable it without going in to the System Preferences first.
The conclusion was happy — I disabled the stupid option so reading email and watching iPlayer is now unimpeded. But how it happened in the first place is completely beyond me.
