Cooking With Richard

Some of them are a little bit uncanny actually.

I’m a bit sausaged out at the moment because I’ve just come back from Munich.

Update

Wurst für den Hund means “sausage for [your] dog”.

… of this.

Update

Eh-to-ne?

Who’s-it?

Grrraaarrrr:

This is not code:

This is code:

Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit! If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.

The old saw is that you should always check your oven temperature with an oven thermometer because oven settings themselves are very inaccurate. This is true, but if you buy an oven thermometer, how do you know it’s accurate either?

I went out and bought a very cheap (£10) oven thermometer. This one uses a bi-metalic strip and so it works the same way as the thermostat in the oven itself.

It’s not too accurate either.

If you take the reading on the oven thermometer and the oven’s own dial, they agree to within 10-15°C, at least between 60 and 140°C where I did my testing. Unfortunately when I added a small glass of water to an oven which was supposedly at 130140°C and left it there for 30 minutes, the water didn’t do very much. So either I have found some magical water which can be super-heated, or else both my oven and my oven thermometer are wildly inaccurate.

This is not just theoretical. I was hoping to cook a chicken tomorrow for 4½ hours at 60°C to obtain a succulent “perfect chicken”, but that’s not too clever if all my guests get food poisoning. (Chicken has to be raised to 60°C for 15 minutes or so to guarantee to kill nasties like salmonella. If the temperature is less than that, the salmonella have a little party).

Companies which sell oven thermometers compete, it seems, on two things: price and the supposed range of temperatures (eg. “our oven thermometer costs just £4 and covers 50-350°C!). Great. Well no, not great. I want to know how accurate the thermometer is, and that doesn’t just mean that it tells me the temperature is 123.45, but that it really is. The nearest degree would be fine — I don’t need to know about the point-four-five.

I don’t really have an answer to this. Is this £80 digital thermometer worth 80 quid? Perhaps I should spend £60 instead. Or is £15 enough?

How do I tell?

Edit

That photo is for real, no GIMP, really!

Newsnight just interviewed someone calling himself an “intelligent” designer, “Professor Andy McIntosh”. But who is this “Professor”?

He’s a creationist, someone who thinks the world was created 6,000 years ago. In other words, he doesn’t believe in the processes of science and technology, and therefore presumably has difficulty using computers or flying in planes. He does of course believe in the “Big Sky Daddy”.

A little Google research turns up a variety of creationism links:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22prof+andy+mcintosh%22

• www.bible-sermons.org.uk/preachers/36-Andy-McIntosh
• csm.org.uk/shop/shop.php?author=1 csm = Creation “Science” movement
• www.c-r-t.co.uk/events.htm crt = Creation Resources Trust
• www.evangelical-times.org/articles/dec03/dec03a08.htm

etc.

It appears that Mr McIntosh is a “professor” of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory, Fuel and Energy Department at the university of Leeds, that’s according to bible-sermons.org.uk anyhow, and that leads to perhaps a strange former life before he found the Big Sky Daddy as a legit combustion researcher.

I mean, he’s even researched beetle’s self-explosions.

He is a professor. It seems that some universities have low standards, or perhaps no way to get rid of people who have claimed to believe in scientific falsifiablity but who turned out to have tricked them.

Links to the Department of Fuel and Energy (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fuel/fuel.html) now redirect to http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/speme/. Finally amongst the creationist and god-nonsense I found a link to his page here: Professor Andrew C. McIntosh, Creationist.

More links:

• Truth in Science directors
• http://www.dunelmsystems.co.uk/mcintosh
• http://www.icr.org/research/index/research_physci_mcintosh/
• http://www.bible-sermons.org.uk/preachers/36-Andy-McIntosh
• Godless Dawkins blah blah blah
• Publications
• ’nuff said

Smallest exhibition in the world?

Here’s a report in Pravda erm I mean the respected People’s Daily:

The exhibition will showcase China’s achievements in regards to human rights. […] It will also promote the development of China’s human rights record and exchange and cooperation on international human rights issues.

You decide …

Pelican eats pigeon in St James’s park.

In the photo the pigeon looks a bit unconcerned, but apparently it flapped and struggled as it took twenty minutes to pass down the pelican’s throat. Onlookers were, according to the MSM, “shocked” (yeah, right).

Updates

Times article with a more disturbing photo.

The pigeon was still alive as it reached the pelican’s stomach says the Daily Mail rather obviously, which is exactly the reason we eat organic meat from animals that we prefer to see slaughtered.

Six weeks ago I made these preserved lemons. They’ve been sitting in the fridge in the old house and now the new house for that time. I took them out today to see what had happened:

What does it taste like Uncle Richard? (←voice of the reader)

Well, just like salty old lemons.

Apparently there are better preserved lemon recipes that I should have used:
http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/africa/morocco/preserved-lemons1.html and http://www.stuttercut.org/hungry/archives/recipes/000324.html both look very interesting.

Nevertheless I may well try the chicken, preserved lemons and olive recipe that I originally had in mind. Watch this space!

Funny video about what happens in men’s toilets. A lot of this stuff is true …

Click here to watch the video …

What’s very interesting about this short film from my point of view is that it was made entirely in Sims 2 (a computer game). The technique is called Machinima. Most films will be made this way in 10-20 years time, assuming the copyright cartel don’t have their way and destroy the internet and copying.

I’ve decided to go in for a little self-improvement …

A few odds and ends to clear up tonight.

First off, I made Bread and Butter Pudding for the first time ever, and it came out absolutely superb. The recipe is from Mary Berry. Could have perhaps done with 10-20% more milk+egg mixture to make it looser.

Tim Hunkin is an inventor, genius and writer. He wrote a series of cartoons entitled Almost Everything There Is To Know for the Observer during the 1980s. It lives up to its name. This is what it has to say about snails (click to get a super-sized version):

Circulus, in video:

Long long ago, in a land far away about 10 years ago I used to work with an extremely talented chap called Charlie Muirhead. He was young, good looking etc etc and therefore had lots of talentless blonde female friends. One day two of them called me up about some pointless waste of the web shopping site which they had got their rich daddies to buy for them. They wanted me to fix it for them the day before it was going to launch, and that’s a long story in itself. Well, fuck me if Trinny and Susannah didn’t become a lot richer and more famous than me soon after.
To add insult to injury, I can’t even go into to kitchen without seeing their talentless ugly faces:

I took this photo when I was drunk …

Word for today: scally
Nowadays we suffer from chavs, but back in my day we had scallies … in our school!