I completely forgot about doing the blog today!
What I normally tend to do is write it in the morning, but today I cracked on with a piece of work that I needed to get done and it slipped my mind.
So yeah, that's about all there is to say :/.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
dough you know what i mean
I'd normally be putting a film review on the blog today, but the Love Film scheduling means that this weekend I was without a rental (I only get 3 a month - it's a legacy thin from when it was Amazon rental) but also of course I didn't watch any of my bought DVD films because I was so busy watching all the telly recorded.
So instead I thought I'd talk about last night's second attempt at roll making.
It had the same basic outcome as the last time - the dough that came out of the machine was very sticky and I had to add extra flour and knead that in, in order to be able to form it into the roll shapes.
The problem was I don't know if that was because I messed the recipe up again or not, because what I tried to do was tweak the recipe. The last lot of roles was too much - I mentioned they used a lot of flour and that resulted in really big rolls that were too much to really eat in a sensible fashion.
So what I tried to do was halve the recipe, only the measure are such that that isn't easy to do. I mean, what's half of 3 & 1/4 cups? 1.5 cups and 1/8th of a cup is the answer, but that's not easy to measure. That means I could easily have botched the recipe again.
The other problem was that my timing wasn't great - last night I had quite a complicated dinner to cook as well. If I'd really been thinking I'd have just done a normal loaf, but I wasn't and so ended up adding more effort into an already hectic schedule.
So, for example, if I'd really been thinking about it I'd have actually only made the dough into four reasonably sized rolls, rather than the 6 half sized ones I did. But with me dashing about I didn't think, so I made that error.
However, I'm actually fairly convinced I got the recipe about right, but still it gave me the really sticky dough. I mean, the end result was okay, but the super-sticky dough makes it quite a complicated process. I'm therefore coming around to the idea of maybe not doing rolls as frequently as envisaged, owing to how messy the kneading is. I could maybe do them just for the weekend or something.
I've been continuing to watch Saki and it's Mah-jong related antics. I've still got the very strong feeling that if I properly understood Mah-jong then I'd enjoy it a little more, but I can still get the general jist as it's quite well done.
One of the interesting aspects of the show is that Yuri (basically lesbianism) seems to abound. Like 75% of all anime, the series is set in high school, and if the series is to be believed, it would seem that if a girl is interested in Mah-jong she's also interested in the contents of her fellow female team-mates knickers.
Not that there's anything wrong with that of course (No, Sir), but it does get a bit silly at times.
The other interesting thing about it is the way they depict the games of Mah-jong. It's done like one of those Beyblade/Pokemon tournament battle anime, with all like special moves. Lightning forks are everywhere and we keep slipping into a kind of virtual representation world where the characters are engaged in physical combat.
But it's for Mah-jong. Which is closer to chess than karate. The clever thing is that it manages to strike a good balance between knowing this approach is silly and also taking it seriously that really works.
So instead I thought I'd talk about last night's second attempt at roll making.
It had the same basic outcome as the last time - the dough that came out of the machine was very sticky and I had to add extra flour and knead that in, in order to be able to form it into the roll shapes.
The problem was I don't know if that was because I messed the recipe up again or not, because what I tried to do was tweak the recipe. The last lot of roles was too much - I mentioned they used a lot of flour and that resulted in really big rolls that were too much to really eat in a sensible fashion.
So what I tried to do was halve the recipe, only the measure are such that that isn't easy to do. I mean, what's half of 3 & 1/4 cups? 1.5 cups and 1/8th of a cup is the answer, but that's not easy to measure. That means I could easily have botched the recipe again.
The other problem was that my timing wasn't great - last night I had quite a complicated dinner to cook as well. If I'd really been thinking I'd have just done a normal loaf, but I wasn't and so ended up adding more effort into an already hectic schedule.
So, for example, if I'd really been thinking about it I'd have actually only made the dough into four reasonably sized rolls, rather than the 6 half sized ones I did. But with me dashing about I didn't think, so I made that error.
However, I'm actually fairly convinced I got the recipe about right, but still it gave me the really sticky dough. I mean, the end result was okay, but the super-sticky dough makes it quite a complicated process. I'm therefore coming around to the idea of maybe not doing rolls as frequently as envisaged, owing to how messy the kneading is. I could maybe do them just for the weekend or something.
I've been continuing to watch Saki and it's Mah-jong related antics. I've still got the very strong feeling that if I properly understood Mah-jong then I'd enjoy it a little more, but I can still get the general jist as it's quite well done.
One of the interesting aspects of the show is that Yuri (basically lesbianism) seems to abound. Like 75% of all anime, the series is set in high school, and if the series is to be believed, it would seem that if a girl is interested in Mah-jong she's also interested in the contents of her fellow female team-mates knickers.
Not that there's anything wrong with that of course (No, Sir), but it does get a bit silly at times.
The other interesting thing about it is the way they depict the games of Mah-jong. It's done like one of those Beyblade/Pokemon tournament battle anime, with all like special moves. Lightning forks are everywhere and we keep slipping into a kind of virtual representation world where the characters are engaged in physical combat.
But it's for Mah-jong. Which is closer to chess than karate. The clever thing is that it manages to strike a good balance between knowing this approach is silly and also taking it seriously that really works.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
rollover
This last weekend I finally had my first crack at making bread rolls.
My dad bought me a bread maker for me last birthday and I've pretty much used it constantly since then. However, I haven't been particularly adventurous with it, having stuck basically to standard white/brown loafs.
But the machine itself has loads of different settings that led you make all sorts of different breads. Of these, the one that intrigued me the most was bread rolls.
One of the problems with the loaves is that, without the preservatives and other things they put into supermarket bread, they go stale really quickly. Now stale bread is something I'm not at all keen on, so it means I have to use up the bread quickly, which can restrict my meal options, or throw it away, which is rather wasteful.
My hope is that rolls will last a little longer, or at the very least will be slightly more manageable from a meal-eating point of view. But there were two potential issues that were holding me back from trying.
First off the recipe seemed a bit complicated. Basically, when you make normal, yeast-based bread you have to have two periods of 'proving'. This is when the yeast really does its 'thing', pumping out carbon dioxide that forms the bubbles that make bread the fluffy thing we all love.
With the normal loaves, these proving periods are covered in the machine's program where it just sits and waits, before doing more mixing. For the rolls you use a setting called 'dough' that only has 1 period of mixing and proving.
The idea then is that you hoik the dough out, knead it, chop it into individual rolls that you shape and then leave, covered, to prove a second time.
This sounded rather complicated and prone to error, so I've been afraid to try it. The other issue was that the recipe uses loads of flour - nearly twice as much as the loaves I've been doing - so I was afraid I'd balls it up and use up the flour.
My plan then was to make a normal loaf and then immediately try out the rolls. Given that a normal loaf takes 3 hours and the dough setting takes 1.5 hours, the 2nd proving period takes half an hour and the baking takes at least 15 minutes, you can therefore see why I waited until the weekend!
The final result was... (drum-roll)... actually not all that bad.
I did fuck up the recipe a little. Ironically I realised I didn't put the correct amount of flour in. This had the effect of making the dough very sticky, but with some good old fashioned elbow-grease, I kneaded in the extra dough.
I think the lack of flour also made it rise too much - not enough weight to stop it, if you see what I mean. And I was afraid my error and attempt to correct would have the opposite effect.
But nope, after the 2nd resting, the rolls did indeed inflate, and after baking I tried one out and it was really quite nice.
I left the rest of them and checked them out last night. They'd definitely declined in freshness like the normal loafs, but they seemed better and were still quite soft and moist.
Altogether then, I'd say it was something of a success.
My dad bought me a bread maker for me last birthday and I've pretty much used it constantly since then. However, I haven't been particularly adventurous with it, having stuck basically to standard white/brown loafs.
But the machine itself has loads of different settings that led you make all sorts of different breads. Of these, the one that intrigued me the most was bread rolls.
One of the problems with the loaves is that, without the preservatives and other things they put into supermarket bread, they go stale really quickly. Now stale bread is something I'm not at all keen on, so it means I have to use up the bread quickly, which can restrict my meal options, or throw it away, which is rather wasteful.
My hope is that rolls will last a little longer, or at the very least will be slightly more manageable from a meal-eating point of view. But there were two potential issues that were holding me back from trying.
First off the recipe seemed a bit complicated. Basically, when you make normal, yeast-based bread you have to have two periods of 'proving'. This is when the yeast really does its 'thing', pumping out carbon dioxide that forms the bubbles that make bread the fluffy thing we all love.
With the normal loaves, these proving periods are covered in the machine's program where it just sits and waits, before doing more mixing. For the rolls you use a setting called 'dough' that only has 1 period of mixing and proving.
The idea then is that you hoik the dough out, knead it, chop it into individual rolls that you shape and then leave, covered, to prove a second time.
This sounded rather complicated and prone to error, so I've been afraid to try it. The other issue was that the recipe uses loads of flour - nearly twice as much as the loaves I've been doing - so I was afraid I'd balls it up and use up the flour.
My plan then was to make a normal loaf and then immediately try out the rolls. Given that a normal loaf takes 3 hours and the dough setting takes 1.5 hours, the 2nd proving period takes half an hour and the baking takes at least 15 minutes, you can therefore see why I waited until the weekend!
The final result was... (drum-roll)... actually not all that bad.
I did fuck up the recipe a little. Ironically I realised I didn't put the correct amount of flour in. This had the effect of making the dough very sticky, but with some good old fashioned elbow-grease, I kneaded in the extra dough.
I think the lack of flour also made it rise too much - not enough weight to stop it, if you see what I mean. And I was afraid my error and attempt to correct would have the opposite effect.
But nope, after the 2nd resting, the rolls did indeed inflate, and after baking I tried one out and it was really quite nice.
I left the rest of them and checked them out last night. They'd definitely declined in freshness like the normal loafs, but they seemed better and were still quite soft and moist.
Altogether then, I'd say it was something of a success.
Monday, 2 November 2009
best efforts
Well, despite what I would basically call my 'best efforts', I didn't manage to watch all of the stuff I'd recorded last week.
I did manage to view all of the Lost s5 extras, mainly, if I'm honest, because they were a bit thin on the ground. The actual shows themselves lacked seriously for commentaries. Previous seasons have had at least 4 commentaries, but this only had two. The show's final two-part episode didn't even get a commentary, and the end usually does.
Anyway, as far as the telly goes there was just too much of it. I had more than 15 shows to get through and many of them were an hour long and it just proved too much. Not because there weren't enough hours available to watch stuff, but because after a while I just got sick of it all.
I mean, the reason I had all this stuff recorded was because I'd spent all my spare time watching TV during the week, and this was yet more telly to watch. Plus there was a Grand Prix on, so it's kinda understandable I just couldn't face it after a while.
By way of a distraction I played a bit of Anno, though I have to admit I got a bit bored off it after a while - perhaps the lustre has gone away a bit, but I think it's more because I keep rushing things in the game and ending up in less than ideal situations, in terms of resources and planning. I think I need to play a less complex game to really get my head around some of the stuff.
I also did a little bit of the stuff I've been putting off over the last few weeks. I didn't put my aircon away or clean up the detritus left from installing the cable lead, but I did some thing that needed to be done in order to prepare the way for those, if that makes sense.
One of them I think I need to adjust, though, as the end result was less than satisfactory. That sounds cryptic - it isn't meant to be, it's just a bit dull so I can't be arsed to explain properly.
One thing I really want to do is thoroughly clean my car. It's a rather unusual side-effect of these shit summers we've been having - if it constantly rains every weekend, then I never get the chance to wash or hoover my car, so it gets filthier and filthier, which is something I hate.
Trouble now of course is that it's winter so the odds are that I'm not going to get the chance to do it anyway. I've been considering taking it to one of these hand car wash or valet services that seem to be springing up all over the place, but obviously that'll cost money and I've been trying to tighten my belt.
I did manage to view all of the Lost s5 extras, mainly, if I'm honest, because they were a bit thin on the ground. The actual shows themselves lacked seriously for commentaries. Previous seasons have had at least 4 commentaries, but this only had two. The show's final two-part episode didn't even get a commentary, and the end usually does.
Anyway, as far as the telly goes there was just too much of it. I had more than 15 shows to get through and many of them were an hour long and it just proved too much. Not because there weren't enough hours available to watch stuff, but because after a while I just got sick of it all.
I mean, the reason I had all this stuff recorded was because I'd spent all my spare time watching TV during the week, and this was yet more telly to watch. Plus there was a Grand Prix on, so it's kinda understandable I just couldn't face it after a while.
By way of a distraction I played a bit of Anno, though I have to admit I got a bit bored off it after a while - perhaps the lustre has gone away a bit, but I think it's more because I keep rushing things in the game and ending up in less than ideal situations, in terms of resources and planning. I think I need to play a less complex game to really get my head around some of the stuff.
I also did a little bit of the stuff I've been putting off over the last few weeks. I didn't put my aircon away or clean up the detritus left from installing the cable lead, but I did some thing that needed to be done in order to prepare the way for those, if that makes sense.
One of them I think I need to adjust, though, as the end result was less than satisfactory. That sounds cryptic - it isn't meant to be, it's just a bit dull so I can't be arsed to explain properly.
One thing I really want to do is thoroughly clean my car. It's a rather unusual side-effect of these shit summers we've been having - if it constantly rains every weekend, then I never get the chance to wash or hoover my car, so it gets filthier and filthier, which is something I hate.
Trouble now of course is that it's winter so the odds are that I'm not going to get the chance to do it anyway. I've been considering taking it to one of these hand car wash or valet services that seem to be springing up all over the place, but obviously that'll cost money and I've been trying to tighten my belt.
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