Looking Out To Sea

I’ve just had to defrost the freezer again — just three months since the last defrost — and it’s currently humming away trying to get back down to temperature. This time it was dual-hairdryer action! We discovered the fridge compartment warm and the milk sour this morning. See the story in the previous post to learn why the fridge dies when the freezer is choked with ice.

I think the time between defrosts is so short now because the inside of the freezer, and in particular the refrigerator element, were still quite wet when I connected everything back up. In order to get everything properly dry it really needs to sit for 24 hours. But we don’t really have that luxury when there’s a freezer full of frozen food sitting on the floor wrapped only in towels.

So within the next month or so we’ll try to run the freezer down and, if necessary, have some kind of defrost party to use up random things which we can’t eat on our own.

For the first time this year we spent the weekend working and lounging in the garden. The sun was warm and the walls high enough to keep out the wind.

Over the autumn and winter the weeds have come in great force. What few plants were there have been choked. A series of scaffolders, builders and glaziers have made a real mess of the lawn and there’s rubble in the beds. The remains of two windows — frames, broken glass, weights and plaster — were dumped on a bed of herbs in one corner.

On Saturday Helen worked on taking out a large bramble and trying to discriminate plants from weeds. I fought with the gate, which had rusted and buckled hinges. I replaced the middle hinge and removed the bottom one without being able to properly replace it. The rusted hinge is stuck fast to the gatepost and every attempt I make on it just destroys the gatepost further. So at the moment it only has the top two of three hinges, which is a bit top-heavy.

On Sunday we got outside earlier and went to B&Q for gardening gloves and plants. There were no plants but I did get a neat little barbecue. And those gloves. Then we had lunch in the garden, with potato salad and mini scotch eggs and mini pork pies and sweet chilli-flavoured Ryvita bite-size crisps and assorted things. Ella and Ben came and we tracked the sun around the garden and talked of all sorts. It was nice and I hope there will be many more days like it this summer.

When we moved into our flat on Leith Walk there was an arrangement with a man from Penicuik to get the stair cleaned. At each visit he’d post a bill through someone’s door, so each person only had to pay every eighth time. He’s stopped coming — in fact, he’s stopped business altogether — and he didn’t tell us. And because there was always a long gap between bills anyway it took a while to sink in that the stair was definitely getting dirtier.

At the weekend we sent round a note asking people to come in on Monday evening for a meeting to decide what we wanted to do. Helen had done some research and found prices for the council and for a local company to clean, and we were also willing to entertain a bucket-and-mop rota if that was the consensus.

Out of the 7 other flats we had one apology and two shows, which leaves four flats technically unaccounted for. Someone is apparently on holiday for 3 weeks, so that seems a reasonable excuse. Another were only just moving in that day so maybe they’re just snowed under. Overall I’m still annoyed by the lack of communication. As I guessed would happen, we settled on our preferred option. Of course now we have to get people to go along with this — to agree to paying regularly. If we can’t do that where are we? Whatever happens we lose if there are people who can’t be bothered — if the stair gets slowly more filthy that’s rubbish for everyone, but some care less than others; if some of us pay then we’re taking a bigger hit and others are free-loading; and if no-one wants to pay then people who care about the stairwell end up cleaning it themselves, when they can, while others look on. It may be worth noting that the people who bothered their arses this time round are the ones who own their flats.

(A similar issue can be found when you look at the garden. Who uses it? Who cares about it? Who weeds and tends it? Who has a lawnmower or can pay someone to trim the grass? This is made much harder because the dividing fence between our half of the garden and the half belonging to the adjacent tenement has been removed. It’s a bigger, nicer garden, but there are double the number of people to rope into any discussion.)

To help foster the impression that it’s not just me or Helen forcing the issue one of our neighbours is going to write up a wee note saying what we decided and who decided it. Once everyone knows what our decision was we have to work on getting the other tenants of the stair involved. Knocking on doors and such. It’s not the kind of thing I’m very good at or relish in particular but it has to be done and right now there is no real community here. I want to see if we can sort some of that out. Just starting with a core of two or three households that hold a common opinion, and working from there.

And that also leads onto the garden and the issue of the next tenement over. We need to make some friends there too — to even see some faces would be an incredible help. Last summer there were regular barbecues from the other tenement so maybe we’ll be able to build on that too.

I’m sure this is a recurrent problem. The renting tenants in the stair just seem to come and go, and we’ve recently lost two owners who had been for a long time, so we lost a lot of common understanding and knowledge in a short period of time. This happens all over the city, all over the country. But how, right now, do we deal with it?

Last week I pulled some butter out of the fridge and thought it felt a bit soft. The temperature display inside the fridge said +5 which is the upper limit for most purposes, so I pressed the “cooler” button a couple of times so that it would aim at +2 degrees and forgot about it.

On Friday night it was definitely on +5 and feeling distinctly warm. There wasn’t much we could do about it at the time. We tried the IT support routine (turn it off, turn it back on again) and went to bed in the hope that things would have stabilised by the next day. On Saturday morning the milk had turned and it was about 6 degrees Celsius inside the fridge. Thankfully the freezer was operating as normal.

I was willing to go delving if need be but I tried doing some research first. The manual was basically useless but it did have the model number writ large so I could search for it.

The ADM6855 is a common fridge/freezer combined unit for fitted kitchens, and it has a design flaw. It’s a “parasite” design, whereby the cooling mechanism works on the freezer and a separate fan extracts cold air to cool the fridge when necessary. This suffers a similar problem to the vacuum cleaners of old — when the cooling elements get clogged with ice they don’t allow air to flow and so the fan is sucking on empty. The slow clogging of elements hides what’s happening until one day your butter’s all soft because there’s not enough cool air making it through. I imagine in its final moments the same suction through constricted airways causes the elements to freeze up even faster.

Anyway, that’s what happens, and that’s what I had to undo. As I said, it’s a design flaw so reversing the effect is not as simple as scraping ice off the inside of the freeze box. It’s not the kind of procedure you’re expected to perform at home, and there’s no mention in the user guide. I found some great instructions for the process, which basically involved a 48h defrost or some disassembly and hairdryer work on the frozen elements. I chose the latter because I wanted to get our frozen food out and back again before it all wasted.

Well I did the deed and the fridge has been operating at the desired temperature now for two days. We shall have to see how long it takes before this happens again. I don’t know if there’s anything in particular we can do to avoid the problem because we don’t know (1) what causes it; (2) whether it’s new or recurrent; (3) if it’s happened before, what date the previous owners dealt with it; and so on. We’ve been here 18 months now without issue, and I don’t think the previous owners will have defrosted the freezer just before they left. (Unless the fridge was turned off when we got here? I can’t remember, but I seem to recall they had left us a bottle of fizz in the fridge as a gift, so it must have been working.) We can’t even tell how quickly it’s frosting over again because it’s so deeply buried in the back of the freezer. I’m guessing some kind of airflow gauge inside the fridge would be able to tell if the fan was pulling in cool air or just sucking on empty. Next time we’ll know what to do, anyway.

I should also send an email to the writer of that guide for providing excellent instructions.

Busy weekend. On Friday night I left work and went straight to The Shore for a pub meet — Greener Leith and Green Drinks teaming up, and we took over the largest chunk of the pub. It was fun and though I didn’t meet many Leith people it was a nice evening.

On Saturday we had a very slow start. The plan had been an early rise and get a final coat of paint on two walls in the living room, and make a start on walls in the turret/alcove. But the previous night’s revelry slowed down things a bit, and then lack of planning (ie, not enough paint) meant we didn’t start until after we’d eaten lunch. Also, I saw a bush-baby in the peeling paint after we removed the curtain rail. That beats seeing Cthulhu in the Nutella, I think.

We did get some good stuff done round the window though the walls are looking as patchy as ever. On Sunday morning we did the biggest wall and then went out to Roseleaf to meet Gemma, David and Graeme. Spent the afternoon wandering from pub to pub. The Halt and Mops Malt and Hops and then Sofi’s, then up the hill to La Favorita for takeaway pizza which we ate in the flat. Naturally, we have no photos cos we’re dead organised innit.

I’ve been on a quest for some time now to get a baking stone for making nice crusty bread in our domestic oven. Most of the baking stones to buy are small and expensive, particularly the ones branded as “pizza stones”, which are actually circular and so of limited practical use for long loaves.

A few people sell more conventionally-shaped slabs of stone for your oven, but they are still awfully pricy. (I found one at a garden centre for thirty pounds. For some reason it’s always the garden centres that sell these things.) Until last week, when I stumbled across an alternative: a “worktop saver”.

Now, I honestly don’t know what a worktop saver is. They seem to be made of glass or stone. You can’t use them to put hot pans on, because the thermal shock would do for them pretty quickly. And I can’t imagine anyone using them as a chopping board unless they wanted to blunt their knives in short order.

But whatever the original purpose of these things, you can get a lump of granite about the same dimensions as the inside of an oven for between ten and twenty pounds. The one I bought was £20 from Debenhams because Asda didn’t have any £10 ones in stock. These things are ubiquitous, if you just know what to look for. (Curiously, I’m not the only one to delight in these things — they are useful for stabilising hi-fi equipment.)

I haven’t used mine extensively yet (a few pizzas in one baking session) but it’s holding up fine so far. I was careful not to put it cold into a hot oven, and it takes longer to come up to temperature, but it works well and radiates a lot of heat even when the oven is cooling.

Do it yourself

If you buy a granite worktop saver like mine you’ll probably need to prepare it first. Mine came with six foam-rubber feet on the unpolished side. I cut these off with a pen knife and then sanded down the remaining residue with the coarsest sandpaper I had. You’ll probably find that the unpolished side has very obvious grooves — presumably from where the stone was cut — and scraping/sanding along these ruts makes your job a bit easier.

Give it a quick once-over with a damp cloth to remove the dust and leave it to dry. I have used the stone polished-side up though I will probably try it upside down in future. The marks from the feet are still there, and very obvious when the stone is wet, but there is no smell of burning foam so I’m quite happy!

Geoff Pullum had a good whinge about poor user interface design the other day, so I feel inspired to do the same. Or similar.

We really had no clue what to judge when we started looking for a television but we quickly realised that nobody puts any effort into the design of the remote control. In the end we went for the TV with the nicest picture because that’s where the manufacturers put their effort. There was almost nothing to choose between the remotes. They were pretty much all terrible.

Even worse, though, is the design of the remote for our Humax PVR. With a PVR you either want to record or to play previous recordings. So why is the first step to playing previous recordings, the button to list everything you have recorded, hidden beneath a sliding plastic cover? To prevent you accidentally watching TV?!

But it’s sad that there are no good television remotes. It’s impossible to buy something to encourage the good manufacturers if they’re all equally bad. Though if you do a search for criticism of remote controls most of the complaints revolve around how ugly it looks. Clearly no one cares whether the device is usable as long as it looks like a bloody Apple product.

We’ve been neatly sidestepping the “massive pile of books, slowly growing” issue for… well, long enough anyway. And just at the point where it seemed we’d make our merry way to IKEA and find something suitably jolly-sounding — Billy or Lindesfarne or similar — I had one of those crazy ideas that stalls us for many weeks or months to come.

We were at an art exhibit at the Corn Exchange before Christmas, discussing mahoosive paintings. We do have a couple of pictures up in the flat, but it wouldn’t be terrible to have more, or at least space for more. But the only big wall left in the flat is where the bookshelves would go.

I had an interesting thought. The problem is that we have too little storage space (or maybe we have too many books? I’m not sure) to display everything nicely. We’d also like to keep as much wall space as we can. I imagined some kind of work surface, maybe about waist height, with all the books stored underneath. But they would be side-on bookshelves, that slid out on rails like the wardrobe space we had in our old flat. In fact, the nearest thing I can think of are full height versions used in kitchens — from the front they are quite slim, but seem to be quite effective.

We had a visit today from Jackie and Carley from Ampersand to discuss it. I gave them some sketches, showed them a photo of the kitchen equivalent that provided the inspiration, they measured the wall and were off. Now it’s just a question of waiting to see what they can come up with. Quite alarming, really.

The year of the cookery challenge has ended now. That’s a whole recipe book, experienced and tasted and documented. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you do more than once. There is someone out there who did a year of Rachel Ray’s 365 Day No Repeat Meals book, but quickly gave up after trying another (less strenuous) cooking challenge. With the knowledge it can be done, the actual doing becomes less interesting…

But we are by no means “done” with cooking itself. How could we be? The plan this year, he says tentatively, is more freeform. We have seen what it is to cook a cookery book. But we are still surrounded by recipes that we have never tried — many other cookery books, recipe cards from supermarkets, not to mention the innumerable recipes written on the bags of flour, sugar, spices and flavoured syrups. (I’m not going to include the “serving suggestion” printed on the Honey Loops packet, which amounts to cereal in a bowl with milk. Though sometimes Rice Krispies has a recipe for chocolate krispie cake.)

We intend to reduce our meat intake a bit, because the quantity that Nigella demanded wasn’t really sustainable. It’s expensive stuff if you want to buy meat that’s worth eating. We intend to set up a box scheme to ensure that we have a steady and ample supply of vegetables. Less meat, more vegetables.

The King of River Cottage
© Gary

To add a bit of tension to this plan, we also plan to use the River Cottage Meat Book and Fish Book more fully. You can see how that might not fit elegantly with the plan to consume less meat. But I hope we can spend the money we do on less fashionable meats and less popular fishes. That seems to mean irregular and bony cuts of meat and fish with unknown names that get landed anyway. I’m sure we can find something interesting.

I wander past many fishmongers and a butcher on the way to work, so I feel sure I can pick up some cheap bits of this and that. My only concern is that if I buy something I won’t have a recipe I can consult in order to pick up the appropriate ingredients on the way home that evening. I can’t really justify buying another two copies to keep on my desk at work!

Which leads us inexorably to PDF books. Why oh why don’t all reference books come with a CD? It would be brilliant to have a list of recipes and their ingredients in a searchable format. All those people with PDAs and swanky phones can load them on for use in the shops and the rest of us can keep them on USB pens, hard disks or wherever else we’ll need them. For a very long while Helen had a note pad dedicated to scribblings of recipe ingredients when she was in full challenge mode. How much easier it would be if the list was already on computer. Even my original transcription of the recipe and chapter titles onto the Challenge page would have been quicker and (as it turns out) contain fewer mistakes.

It’s possible to buy some books in electronic format, but that’s not really what we’re interested in. We already own the real thing, and very nice it is too. We just want the hard work of transfer to computer to be done by someone else. And let’s be fair, it’s not like we’re asking for something very outlandish — the data starts on computer in the first place. (Unless you want to convince me that all these books are typeset by hand.) However, it’s probably as likely to happen as CDs coming with usable MP3s alongside the audio.

Now you must excuse me, I have a muffin from a supermarket recipe card to make!

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.