Finding the chase and cutting to it

We don’t have many biscuits in the house, but those that do make it over the threshold tend to be plain chocolate digestives.

My fault: I am not a fan of the milk chocolate used for biscuits, it’s a bit sickly. So plain chocolate digestives were the compromise because I really am not a fan of digestives either.

Once you’ve switched from milk chocolate diggies to plain ones, you never look back.

But weirdly, this few millimetres of plain chocolate make them a luxury item so liable to VAT or value added tax.

Where on earth are you going with this?

Chocolate, plain chocolate diggies and sweets are all liable to VAT, at 20%, that’s quite a mark up.

But cakes are not. They are deemed a staple food, seriously. A chocolate cake is deemed an essential: so a 400g chocolate cake is £2.75 and 400g of chocolate is also £4 but with 80p going to the exchequor.

So?

Well, what is more luxorious than a cake? What has more labour and effort put into it than a cake?
More importantly, our 400g of chocolate contains 266 Calories (kCal) in it, where-as the cake contains 424 Calories (kCal).

If you go to the nutrition, the cake is flagged as a “high fat” food and even the most basic cake is that, but it also flags highly on the sugar stakes

We don’t have many biscuits in the house, but those that do make it over the threshold tend to be plain chocolate digestives.

My fault: I am not a fan of the milk chocolate used for biscuits, it’s a bit sickly. So plain chocolate digestives were the compromise because I really am not a fan of digestives either.

Once you’ve switched from milk chocolate diggies to plain ones, you never look back.

But weirdly, this few millimetres of plain chocolate make them a luxury item so liable to VAT or value added tax.

Where on earth are you going with this?

Chocolate, plain chocolate diggies and sweets are all liable to VAT, at 20%, that’s quite a markup.

But cakes are not. They are deemed a staple food, seriously. A chocolate cake is deemed an essential: so a 400g chocolate cake is £2.75 and 400g of chocolate is also £4 but with 80p going to the exchequer.

So?

Well, what is more luxurious than a cake? What has more labour and effort put into it than a cake?
More importantly, our 400g of chocolate contains 266 Calories (kCal) in it, where-as the cake contains 424 Calories (kCal).

If you go to the nutrition, the cake is flagged as a “high fat” food and even the most basic cake is that, but it also flags highly on the sugar stakes. A sponge cake in its most basic form is a third sugar, a third fat and a third flour – given that most flours are 50-75% sugar, that makes the humble cake a hugely luxurious food in terms of impact to health.

Which begs the question, why are we not charging VAT on cakes, please?

. A sponge cake in its most basic form is a third sugar, a third fat and a third flour – given that most flours are 50-75% sugar, that makes the humble cake a hugely luxorious food in terms of impact to health.

Which begs the question, why are we not charging VAT on cakes, please?

I’ve never had french onion soup – there’s a fundamental problem with it when I eat out and that’s the edition of a layer of cheese on the top.

I love cheese and onion and gravy – believe me, French onion soup is the equivalent of onion gravy and who doesn’t like onion gravy? – so it’s a wonder this isn’t my ideal dish apart from the fact the cheese is melted in to the dish making bolusing difficult.

I think due to lockdown, the mincing attachment for my mixer came with a “continuous slicer/grater” which promises to process high volumes of veggies and other materials quickly and efficiently. I had visions of it languishing in my cupboard. But I’ve been making a few soups recently and thought I’d give it a go.

I even mentioned in during the weekly Covid-call we’ve been having with our friends. “Oh, I tried that,” said Chris a particularly keen home cook and someone I consider the Ivan Lendl out of us when it comes to cooking: text book perfection. “I couldn’t make a decent one. Disaster every time.

Daunted, me? No way. I looked at several recipes, in particular the directions and formed my plan.

I have to say, I wasn’t helped by the fact the principle recipe I chose was for a soup maker rather than cooking in a pot on the stove. But I’m a human being, most adaptable creature on the planet; I could do this.

Bearing in mind the onion gravy comment, that was one of the things I did differently. I put gravy granules in as well as the beef stock.

You also need to bear in mind you get a burnt layer on your pan bottom. Comes off with the second stage of the cooking but is a little nerve wracking to look at 5 minutes into cooking. I did wash the pan immediately too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; what was it like?

Good, actually. A lot like onion gravy.

The past few weeks have been spent in a couple of key ways while using up some leave.

Oh yeah?

Yes. Firstly having been given a kit by a friend to enable my food mixer to be used as a meat mincer, or grinder to my American friends, and finding neither me or my husband could get it attached to the mixer, I went and bought a device which would work.

Phew, long sentence

It really did feel like that. Working out how the equipment worked and doing it all for the first time, plus, of course the washing up…

Anyway, the idea was to make use of big joints of meat that would be too large for the two or three of us in a roast meal that we’d end up throwing away and use as mincemeat instead.

When the newer mincer arrived, we still couldn’t see how it fitted even with the adapter I’d bought. Having finally worked it out, 45 minutes later, I was ready to go.

I made mince with some left over beef and a tasty fresh Bolognese sauce.

That’s one thing then…

The 2nd is having seen the mincer on the Kenwood world site, I gave in to curiousity and bought a pasta maker attachment too 🙂

Pasta? Doesn’t that come in nice packets and you cook it for 10 minutes as a foil for pasta sauces?

Yes, yes it does. I’ve never had ambitions to make my own pasta. But the past few weeks, I have been making my own. Check out Home made pasta. The first lot I made with for a Pasta alla Genovese and the 2nd with the home minced beef. It’s tasty and once you’ve worked out how all the equipment works, pretty quick. Cooking it is mind blowingly quick: 2 minutes for really fresh pasta, 3 minutes if you’ve kept it a couple of days.

Oh yeah, as quick as opening the packet, measuring out what you want and bunging in some hot water?

No, of course not. But the pasta keeps for a week in the fridge and the texture is amazing. Of course, it is reducing plastic waste too.

Cost-wise it’s a dead-end, not worth the effort. A dried packet of pasta is £0.75-£3.00 depending on where you shop per 1kg.

The flour alone is £0.60 per portion and then you have eggs on top. That only makes enough for 4 servings.

But wow, it does taste amazing and cook incrediably quickly (after all the prep 😉 ).

OK, so that’s four weeks worth of time then?

Last night, with a penultimate afternoon off, I bought some venison, steak and made three burgers; one for me, my husband and son. I’ve not found anywhere that will sell me just three burgers so we end up splitting the last one.

This took a long time, from start to eating was just under 90minutes.

But wow, tasty for a burger that didn’t have any salt or pepper added. Cooked over a barbeque (and it was cold out there, so thanks Jon) and served with onions, the burgers were very different to the normal shop bought ones as it had the venison. They were darker in colour and flavoursome. I wasn’t planning on making them either – looking for steak, the venison was on special offer.

Of course, next time, I’ll be much quicker making them. The onions, parsely and garlic I add will be done in my hand blender mincer instead of the Kenwood Chef, meaning I can mince and do that at the same time. It will also reduce the washing up – that device being much simpler than the one I’d used instead.

But definitely, something to try again. I did buy the rolls the burgers… but I could do everything?!

Lockdown, in the UK, has afford many of us opportunities as our busy commute and work lives have dramatically changed.

Due to shortages last year, I have started making bread from scratch in my bread maker rather than using packets. To be honest, the mixes are interesting because someone has done all the experimenting for you and worked out the perfect ratios of the ingredients for a perfect result everytime.

Where-as I’ve spent the last 10 months doing just that.

Is there a point to this?

I’m getting there, hold your horses.

Today’s adventure is making pasta from home, and hence the title above. Pasta is an involved process. Using strong flour, like the bread, this is more hands on (no handy pasta maker here) and uses various pieces of equipment.

The first step of the process is making the dough, no it doesn’t have yeast, but the glutenous features of durum wheat means, much like bread, there are resting periods.

You make the dough (or rather the food mixer does) and “rest the dough” in the fridge, 30-35 minutes.

You then roll the pasta into thin wafers, another 10-20 minutes (I suspect longer this first time) and then cut, another 3-5 minutes. The “dry the pasta”, another 30 minutes.

Seriously, 1hr 40 minutes?

Seriously. This is not a spur of the minute thing and there’s also the washing up and all. This time, I am not going to be making the mince for a bolognese but a home cooked alla genovese sauce (delicious, and using shop bought pesto and frozen veg, really quick to make).

The pasta, if fully dried, should keep for a week and one of the big benefits should be a very quick cook time – 2 minutes or so.

There are other points to notice. 200g of flour makes a BIG protion each for three. Worth dividing in two and making two different shapes with the amount. It should keep for a week.

Is it worth it?

That’s always a tough question. If you count the time, it’s a big investment and that’s not including the equipment (processor, rollers and pasta cutters). True, you only pay that once, but it makes that first batch incrediably expensive.

It did cook beautifully: al dente, thick spaghetti, which the sauce clung to. Buon appetito!

This week has been interesting in a few of ways. Firstly, we got a reminder about the 2021 census which we’re keen to do.

Government grabbing data to chase us on taxes…

No, way of establishing the make up of the country and working out where budgets should be provided.

Plus of course, it allows people following family trees in the future vital records of where people are when. It’s a way of leaving your stamp on the world.

We also got our voting cards for the upcoming local elections. Due to the pandemic, they are offering everyone the chance to vote via mail.

I’ve never taken part in an exit poll but surely there’s no chance of that happening if I post my vote?

We’ve also been asked about our thoughts regarding a proposed blocking of a neighbouring road to through traffic. Which is nice, but the letter arrived on Wednesday and they want the answer in the “Traffic strategy office” by Monday. Obviously true democracy is only available to those with the time to invest in it and not people running part of their metabolism and working from home.

The funniest thing about this, and as a liberal I feel there some be as much freedom of movement as possible to allow free flowing traffic and basically options if things foul up not to mention the barrier this would form to health care officials in reaching some of the residents of this road.

The fact is, the road in question is very close to the park and during the pandemic as at other times, the road is often blocked by people parking their cars their to enjoy the park. Which would not be stopped by blocking off one end, indeed it may encourage the behaviour. The argument to put them in is to reduce noise for the local residents: this is not true on that road which is a 20mph limit and modern cars obeying the noise pollution act (not to mention EVs) are really quiet anyway.

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This week has been interesting in a few of ways. Firstly, we got a reminder about the 2021 census which we’re keen to do.

Government grabbing data to chase us on taxes…

No, way of establishing the make up of the country and working out where budgets should be provided.

Plus of course, it allows people following family trees in the future vital records of where people are when. It’s a way of leaving your stamp on the world.

We also got our voting cards for the upcoming local elections. Due to the pandemic, they are offering everyone the chance to vote via mail.

I’ve never taken part in an exit poll but surely there’s no chance of that happening if I post my vote?

We’ve also been asked about our thoughts regarding a proposed blocking of a neighbouring road to through traffic. Which is nice, but the letter arrived on Wednesday and they want the answer in the “Traffic strategy office” by Monday. Obviously true democracy is only available to those with the time to invest in it and not people running part of their metabolism and working from home.

The funniest thing about this, and as a liberal I feel there some be as much freedom of movement as possible to allow free flowing traffic and basically options if things foul up not to mention the barrier this would form to health care officials in reaching some of the residents of this road.

The fact is, the road in question is very close to the park and during the pandemic as at other times, the road is often blocked by people parking their cars their to enjoy the park. Which would not be stopped by blocking off one end, indeed it may encourage the behaviour. The argument to put them in is to reduce noise for the local residents: this is not true on that road which is a 20mph limit and modern cars obeying the noise pollution act (not to mention EVs) are really quiet anyway.

Anyway, being consulted is nice. We are exercising our democratic prerogative and all three of us our voicing why this is bad. Me to allow ambulance traffic, my family for relief on the main road when things are difficult road-wise.

This is a bit of a sore point as sections of the cycle lanes have been blocked off by “wands” – vertical rods sticking out of the road to section off the cycle lane from non-cycling traffic.

As a cyclist, I think these have been put in the wrong place for many reasons but I hadn’t considered that some cyclists may be forced out of cycle lanes by them and that’s the trailer buggies for very small children. I witnessed a man with his two children have to fight with normal traffic instead of just hanging out of the cycle lane a little because of the wands. He looked horrified that he was put in that position – what I should have done was taken a photo but now I know who to write to, I’m doing that.

I have not mentioned the impact this has on roundabout usage for cyclists (which as someone who needs to turn right to get into our place) denying them the usual path round a roundabout. Our roundabout has several collisions anyway, I spotted the fact a driver pulling out hadn’t looked my way a few years ago which allowed me the chance to avoid an accident. If I’d been in the outer lane, a driver is not going to see a cyclist on the “natural flow” of the traffic far more often. This happens when we drive too, cars heading from the west to the east on this particular roundabout often don’t look left before joining the roundabout. Which is a pretty basic failure of driving competence.

nyway, being consulted is nice. We are exercising our democratic perogative and all three of us our voicing why this is bad. Me to allow ambulance traffic, my family for relief on the main road when things are difficult road-wise.

This is a bit of a sore point as sections of the cycle lanes have been blocked off by “wands” – vertical rods sticking out of the road to section off the cycle lane from non-cycling traffic.

As a cyclist, I think these have been put in the wrong place for many reasons but I hadn’t considered that some cyclists may be forced out of cycle lanes by them and that’s the trailer buggies for very small children. I witnessed a man with his two children have to fight with normal traffic instead of just hanging out of the cycle lane a little because of the wands. He looked horrified that he was put in that position – what I should have done was taken a photo but now I know who to write to, I’m doing that.

I have not mentioned the impact this has on roundabout usage for cyclists (which as someone who needs to turn right to get into our place) denying them the usual path round a roundabout. Our roundabout has several collisions anyway, I spotted the fact a driver pulling out hadn’t looked my way a few years ago which allowed me the chance to avoid an accident. If I’d been in the outer lane, a driver is not going to see a cyclist on the “natural flow” of the traffic far more often. This happens when we drive too, cars heading from the west to the east on this particular roundabout often don’t look left before joining the roundabout. Which is a pretty basic failure of driving competenance.

Hope your experiences are better, have a beautiful day.

It’s such a mixed phrase, welcome back.

Thing is, if there has been a long period, life moves on. When this site died in early January, Christmas was coming to an end and because of my situation we were still being VERY careful.

Today, there’s cautious optimism as one of the vulnerable, I got my Astra Zeneca injection last week (though I am waiting on the date for my second dose).

First 24 hours were fine, then I started to react – my temperature rose and I felt like I’d had an argument with a ten ton truck!

That doesn’t sound good!

True, but it’s just for a few days and if I’d reacted that badly to the vaccine, what would covid-19 have done for me? (At least I am now 100% I hadn’t had it yet).

All exciting in your world then…

Don’t be sarky! Life is always interesting. Look outside the window (bad example, February in the UK is giving us a dull and overcast day), buds are springy from the ground while the snowdrops are nodding in the wind.

When did you get poetic?

Sorry, I’ve missed this.

I’m just finishing the last of six days off and am raring to go. And my server is rebuilt, with a new certificate server and all feels good in the world. Not least because instead of spending a few hundred quid to get my certificate signed I did so for less than fifty quid.

Bargin.

Speaking of which, I just need to include the certificate bundle. Have a good one.

Gas, not electricity.
Four weeks ago, we noticed that our boiler light was red and the unit was definitively not heating anything: not the floor or the water which (during the summer) is its sole raison d’etre.

Oh dear, we said, how annoying or words to that effect 😮

Still, the sun was shining and we had a chance to fix it afore autumn arrived.

Afore?!!

Sorry, I’ve done many, many crosswords during lockdown.  My vocab is wide, my spelling and typing still bad…

Any way,  We had some time, only it did become much colder after the plumber turned up and said it would either be a case of swapping out a sensor or needing a new boiler.

The plumber who did the first and final fit of the house chose an unusual boiler for the UK, so parts are not easy to find.  No worries, there’s a bit of space and after all, we have the solar electric heating the water during the summer when we have more power than we can usefully use.

Now my husband has his shower in the morning and the first week, got up at 5am to turn on the emersion heater!!!

We had a power cut in the area that weekend and the clock on the box that turned on the electric heater in the hot water tank when we have a great deal of energy being generated needed to be reset.  I had a quick work through the menus and not only set the clock but it has two “automatic” timers – we now have a programmable heater in the hot water tank – one first thing in the morning and one in the evening for a bath and washing up.

How civilised and now we had a chance to get the sensor fixed in the boiler.

Only, time was ticking by and still no sensor!  Phoning our plumber on Monday to chase it up we found that they hadn’t received it and had started to chase it up only to find the order had been fluffed 🙁

Could they pop round and check the part numbers.  Of course, please do.

They came today and disabled the sensor which allowed the boiler to start – so that’s great news and they’ve got the right part and it’s in stock.

Hopefully, we’ll have a working boiler by this time next week.

OK, so what?

Two main things.  Obviously, we’ve not used any gas since the first week of August which has saved about £15 just in heating the hot water.

But we have been using electricity to do that instead.  And indeed we are spending a bit more, but that’s being offset by the money we’re earning from the vehicle to grid and the solar generation.

Of course, it’s significantly better for the environment being carbon neutral at that point and all the convenience of gas…

Sounds goodish

The modern alternative to a gas boiler is a heat pump: the options being air or ground source.

Living in the UK, air heat pumps are OK during the summer but not so good during the winter.  Leaving a ground source heat pump.

Now, cost wise these are £3-4k pounds more than a gas boiler and teamed with solar and v2g, which cost in.

Only installation is significantly more than a gas boiler or air pump.

Ouch.  We’d better get saving.

I wrote my first code in 1986 on a Vic 20. In those days, printers were tremendously expensive compared to multi-purpose computers, so “publishing your code” meant writing it down by hand or saving it to a cassette your friend or client could then use, if they had a tape drive.

But back to printers and hard copy for humans. I got my first bubble jet printer in 1993 and my world was transformed. I could now work on documents at home and print them out and hand in my assignments. I even had a programme for drawing circuits, so there wasn’t anything work wise I couldn’t do with my trusty Amiga at home. FredFish disks meant software was affordable.

This trip down memory lane reminds me there are always other ways to approach how to get to the solution you want.

Recently, I’ve been working on modelling tools to enable augmented delivery (assisted not automated). Which has been great until someone asked for that to be delivered out to a Word document.

Microsoft Word, the industry standard word mangler with many interfaces to it including Powershell to allow automation.

Microsoft have gone one better though and produced Flow: a means of orchestrating tasks including, through a 3rd part add-on, “Creating docx from template”.

This looks like gobbledygook, but taking in a templated document and some input you can produce a new, instantiated in seconds. Reasonably easily.

Sounds like a lot of fuss…

Magically, it’s not.

Say I want to print out an invitation to an event. I could do a traditional mail merge or I could transform my address book in JSON format.

Each field would be very simply defined as “header”:”content”; “surname”:”Watkins”, “title”:”Ms”.

The headers I want to use would be placed into the document as {{surname}} for example.

In a couple of minutes, I’d have my Flow reading the template, applying the JSON formatted data and producing a new document.

All without having to touch Word to do this once the template were set up.

Back when I launched my first web service, I came across the SSL Labs. This is a free service that allows you to check the status of a website in terms of its encrypted transport layer

Eh?

You know, the little green or grey lock symbol on your web address bar that let’s you know the traffic between you and that site is encrypted.

Fundamentally, you probably don’t care about this unless you are buying something with a credit card over the web or asking your bank to do something.

People discuss that you should ALWAYS have encryption to establish trust but actually, all people say and do stupid things sometimes so for me it’s more about ensuring someone who shouldn’t have my data doesn’t have it.

Anyway, when I first set up these protocols on my server, SSL labs gave me an A+.

I’m guessing you lost it?

Yes, as time moved on, standards naturally rise but as a hobbyist, it became non-trivial to keep up the good fight. Especially as my chosen OS doesn’t natively support the latest and greatest protocol.

Which means heading off into new water.

If you’re playing with Centos 7, this site is really useful and helped me get my A+ back: https://zurgl.com/how-to-get-a-100-score-on-ssl-labs-red-hat-centos-7-x-apache-lets-encrypt/.

The past few weeks have been fun and games recovering from a cracked rib – 12 weeks it took in the end, which is a little quicker than the average type 1 but still significantly more than I’ve ever given a broken bone to heal…

I caught a cold/cough while the rib was painful which meant despite wanting to shift a load, nothing was happening.

I’m also one of the groups who should get a flu vaccination and mostly, I do. The caveat being that I like to be reasonably healthy before it happens as in past experience, the vaccine can be a little unpredictable if I’m under the weather. This aligns with NHS guidelines too.

Feeling way better than I have in weeks, I make the call to the surgery.

“Can you come in for 14:24?”

“In 34 minutes time?”

“Er, yes. Is that too soon?”

“I’ll need to bring the car to guarantee it,” wind, cold and showers being my concern (I know, I’m a wimp), “but yes, I can make that.”

I grab my wallet and head out the door and arrive way too early. Book an appointment to discuss my HRT (another interesting conversation) and settle in for the wait – bang on 14:24, I get called have the conversation about being able to do the shot myself and have enormous difficulty relaxing the muscle (it is prefered to go deep into the muscle) enough to break the skin.

The nurse really wants to do it for me which isn’t helping and I just drop the muscle – nice and floppy, I break skin and drive the punger home.