Once again, my inconsistency in posting has been revealed – apologies to those of you who check this page in the vain hope I’ll get around to posting again 🙂

So, quick summary of the story so far to fill you in:
We packed up the house and put it all in a van to go onto a boat that will go across the Atlantic.
We went on holiday for a week (see separate post).
We are now back in the UK and looking for a new place.

I have spent the day instructing young and eager estate agents in our requirements for a flat – how good they are at sticking to them remains to be seen.

I used to love the Observer magazine’s column titled “This much I know” (it was one of the only things worth reading in there – along with Nigel Slater). I haven’t read it in a while, California not having very many places where you can buy the Observer, but I’m very glad that Green Fairy pointed me to this one by Stephen Fry:

“…coriander is a giant hoax perpetrated by a perverted society”

The cinema in the centre of Palo Alto, The Stanford, has recently reopened after a 3 month refurbishment. It’s a great little cinema, with original features now restored, and has a working Wurlitzer organ which is used before and after performances, and is also used to provide music when they screen silent films.

I am looking forward to many films in the programme for the next couple of months, but one of my favourites came up in the first week – The Philadelphia Story. In case you don’t already know (and check the link for more details), this comedy stars Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant – you could not wish for a more wonderful cast.

I won’t rehash the story here – you’ll just have to go and watch it yourselves – but a few things struck me about it when I was re-watching it in the cinema. The first was that the dialogue was so sharp and fast – it was the sort of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it repartee that you very seldom see now. The best current parallel I can think of is The Simpsons at it’s best: so filled with jokes and current affairs references that you’re lucky if you can catch them all in one viewing.

The other thing that struck me about the film was how ambiguous the plot was. You have 3 people vying for the heroine’s affection, and while one is obviously unsuitable, the remaining two (Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, of course) both have their wonderful moments as well as their faults. Every time I watch, I wait to see who she’ll pick. I can think of very few modern romantic comedies that you can say that about.

And my favourite part? Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn getting drunk and more drunk…

We spent last weekend in Sonoma with my parents. Sonoma is the neighbouring valley to Napa, with just as many vineyards but slightly nicer views and fewer tourists. We stayed just outside Healdsburg, a small town with a little plaza in the center which I’m sure triples or quadruples in population on weekends. Arriving Friday night, we spent Saturday wine tasting and driving around the various vineyards, and then meandered back to the Peninsula on Sunday (where it was foggy).

The countryside around there is really beautiful – a lot like the wine growing regions in the south of France or in Italy, but greener. There is a winery about every 20 yards and most of them do tastings, so you can just drop in and taste their wines (although some charge a tasting fee which is refunded if you buy a bottle).

We decided to take a tour of one of the larger wineries in the Dry Creek area, Ferrari-Carano. It is owned by a couple from Reno who made their money in property and casinos, and created a winery in Sonoma. They have built a beautiful house and enormous winery with gardens (although it all betrays Bellagio-esque touches – fountains, faux-italian villas). The tour was very good, though – the tour guide really knew her stuff. After that, we had to taste some of their wines. They were good, but none were remarkable. One unusual wine was their Black Muscat, which I’d never tasted before. It’s a dessert wine that tastes of cherries and chocolate – a bit like a cross between a red wine and muscat. They served it at the winery with chocolate-coated, wine-soaked dried cherries – mmmmm. So we bought a couple of bottles of that 🙂

That evening we ate at Dry Creek Kitchen, a restaurant in Healdsburg. Very unusual dishes, included a soft-boiled egg with asparagus puree injected into it. All very good though.

Last week we covered Offal at cooking school. I was determined to at least taste everything we did, so here are the verdicts, saving you the trouble of sampling them all for yourselves:

Heart
We prepared beef heart Peruvian-style by slicing it very thin, marinading it overnight in a spicy marinade and then barbequing it over charcoal. It was actually very good – meaty with a slightly softer texture than beef.

Tongue
Also beef, this was not a pleasant dish to prepare. The whole tongue is boiled for several hours with vegetables, then peeled (yes, peeled) while still warm. The whole thing is then pressed and cooled (to make it look less like what it is) and sliced thinly and served cold with a gribiche sauce of herbs, capers and chopped hard boiled egg. The sauce was good – the texture of the tongue was too soft for me.

Kidneys
This was another dish that was not at all pleasant to prepare. The kidneys (lambs’) were split in half and trimmed, then pan-fryed over high heat and finished with a mustard-butter sauce. The sauce was good. The smell emanating from the frying kidneys was not – after all, we all know what kidneys do in the body …

Liver
We prepared pan-fried calves’ liver with caramelised onions and a red wine and cream sauce. This was also good – a much more meaty texture than most of the organs. It was tricky to get it cooked just right though – when over-cooked it had a mealy texture.

Sweetbreads
Sweetbreads is the rather euphemistic name given to either the thymus (from calves and other young animals) or the pancreas (from older animals). These were poached, then cooled and pressed and some of the membranes removed. They were then coated in seasoned flour and pan-fried to make them crispy and served with a black butter sauce and capers. These weren’t bad – a slightly creamy texture which worked well as long as the outside got good and crispy. Not something I’d order in a restaurant or make, but I would eat it if it were presented to me.

Tripe
As I’m sure you know, tripe is cow’s stomach. Sounds appetising already, doesn’t it? This was brought to a boil in salted water, then drained and simmered for 6 hours with vegetables. It was then drained, rolled up and chilled. Once cold, we sliced it into thin strips, coated in flour and fried over high heat to make it crispy. This was also served with caramelised onions. It didn’t really taste of anything (perhaps not surprising after all that boiling). The crispy parts were fine, but the texture of the rest was predictably gelatinous. That, plus the fact that it smelled disgusting while boiling made it very much not worth the effort.

Oxtail
Not technically offal (it’s just the tail) but requires a little bit of elaborate preparation as it is mostly bone and quite fatty. It made a very good, rich beef stew.

If this has whetted your appetite, firstly you’re a better eater than me, and secondly, you should check out Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest tome, The River Cottage Meat Book, which has all these and the even more scary Lights and Fries (also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters).

Technorati Tags: food, offal

Two weeks ago, Apple launched a version of iTunes that supports podcasting. If you are currently mystified by this phrase, fear not, as today I shall attempt to reveal all. Or at least a little more.

Broadly, in my view ‘Media’ (see also ‘meeja’) can be divided into print, audio and video, with each of these having traditional versions and online or digital counterparts. For example, newspapers and magazines have well established presences online, and many radio stations have a website where their shows can be ‘streamed’ or downloaded. The new component that the internet has added is that it is a publishing and distribution medium with a very low barrier to entry. So if you have something to say, you don’t have to pay to print pamphlets, or get yourself a radio show or make a TV programme. Instead, you can write a blog (like this one), create a podcast or make a vlog.

As you have probably worked out, a blog is usually an online diary written by anyone from politicians to twentysomething londoners to ex-star trek actors. They can also be contributed to by a group to act more like a news feed (see slashdot and boingboing, for example).

To manage the huge number of blogs out there and the need to check them regularly for updates, RSS readers (or aggregators) were created. These pieces of software allow you to subscribe to a series of different blogs that generate RSS feeds (usually indicated by a little orange XML box, just to confuse things further). Both Safari (Apple’s browser) and Firefox have support for RSS as part of the browser.

Blog are to newspapers as podcasts are to radio. To create one, you record a show (which can be done on any computer with a microphone) and generate an MP3 file. This is attached to an RSS file and uploaded to a web server. Software such as iPodder or iTunes can then detect when a new file is available and download it automatically if you are subscribed to that podcast.

There are an enormous number of podcasts out there for a phenomenon that has been going for only 18 months or so, and of all standards. One of the pioneers of the format was american Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ who now produces a podcast called the Daily Source Code from his house in Guildford. The BBC are great at adopting new phenomena as they come along and have been making selected radio programs available for download for some time. They are now a part of Apple’s podcasting directory, so that you can automatically receive the 8.10 interview from the Today programme, for example.

The latest addition to this crop of new formats is the vlog, which Wired has a good set of articles on at the moment. This format is in it’s early days and lacks a majority single format and a popular way of making it portable.

Tags: Podcast | Technology | Vlog | Blogging

I’m sorry. I’ve been busy – no really I have. I meant to call. But I’m back now.

So, to update:

• We’ve had some people to stay, visted Yosemite and Monterey.
• I’m on a two-week break from the course at the moment
• and we’re in Hawaii!

We are staying on the Big Island, and so far it has rained a good deal of the time – not really what you imagine when you come to Hawaii! So taday, we made the best of the rain and went to visit the Volcanoes National Park. We didn’t actually see flowing lava – that was a 4 hour hike – but we saw the Kilauea crater, which erupted as recently as 1982. It’s a very weird landscape – different types of lava over every surface, with steam and sulphur vents all over the rock, and plants pushing through the crust of rock.

More updates throughout the week. Honest. No really, this time I’ll be good.

So it is a pretty unusual site to see a blog from me. However, I am waiting for a document to print out on our handy-dandy HP all-in-one (It prints! It faxes! It scans! It vibrates so much in ‘economode’ you start to panic about earthquakes)

Speaking about earthquakes, there have been 5 reasonably sized ones in or around west coast area in the last few days http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-quake15jun15,1,6059376.story?coll=la-news-state

In any case, we will be swapping this earthquake prone area for Japan for a little while in September, so that will be much safer…hang on…..

This one is a little off-topic, as it’s not food related – although that probably comes as a relief to some of you.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Levi’s Store in San Francisco was due to get a body scanning machine in. Having seen something similar on Tomorrow’s World many moons ago (not to mention Woody Allen’s Sleeper), I wanted to have a go and took a note of the dates. I also wanted to find some low-rise jeans that actually fitted, so I had a good excuse too.

So yesterday I popped into the store on the way back from school and the machine was there, scanning away. It is produced by Intellifit, who work with a number of companies, usign their scanner to take measurements which are then compared to a company database to find styles and sizes to match. They also aggregate the data anonymously to give retailers feedback on the actual sizes of the clothes-buying public (like that much publicised M&S survey a few years ago).

The scanner is a big cylindrical clear booth that you stand in the centre of while a vertical arm rotates around you. It uses short-range radio waves to detect the water in your skin, so it can take accurate measurements through your clothes. A Levi’s sales person asks you what sort of jeans you’re looking for before the scan (on the waist or below, fitted or relaxed) so that they can pull a relevant list of styles for your size. You have to remove big pieces of metal (watches, belt buckles) but otherwise it’s pretty hassle-free and very quick (but there was no queue when I was there).

And did it work? Well, of the 4 styles it recommended, one was the exact pair I was wearing at the time, the other 3 fitted, and I bought one of those (the 515s, for those who care)! It’s only there this week, but this is a trial for Levi’s, so maybe you’ll see them in a store near you at some point.

An important aspect of cooking, but one that is often overlooked, is the possible methods. When you buy a piece of meat for dinner, the methods are all the ways that you can cook what you have bought. Being familiar with them allows you to make the most appropriate choice for the ingredients you have. Probably the most versatile piece of meat is the chicken – it can be cooked using all the methods listed here.