Experimentation

I came across this page for doing experiments in 2 litre drinks bottles. It got my interest, and I’ve been trying to get my head around which I could do. I like the idea of doing a fun project/experiment at home, and a bottle is small. Initially I was planning to go for the Decomposition one or the TerrAqua one, but then I realised they caused a few problems:-

• They are more complicated
• Require more bottles
• They need holes in the side of the bottles

I’ve decided to make the a bottle fermentation chamber, and make either kimchee or sauerkraut – pickled cabbage. It’s a simple experiment just involving the food ingredients:

• cabbage (chinese one for Kimchee or round headed green one for sauerkraut),
• salt (plus garlic and chilli if making kimchee),
• and PH paper (but you can make your own with the liquid from a red cabbage and some paper).

Sounds good to me, just means I need to buy some cabbage. At the end of it (up to 3 weeks) I will have something that I can eat or keep.

Then I might go onto one of the others. I’d love to do a hanging plant or compost one. We have hanging basket brackets outside, so I could hang them from there, so they won’t have to live in the flat.

Sorry I’m only popping by here every so often. I just made and ate a yummy healthy salad, and thought I’d share it on here:

Ingredients:

Spinach leaves (you could use any kind of salad type leaves, but I only had spinach)
Cucumber
Small tomatoes (I used the small plum tomatoes)
Grated carrot
Chopped up crab stick

I dressed it with a sprinkling of lemon juice and balsamic vinegar. I’m not sure if they were a good idea, but it seemed to work.

It tasted good, and the great thing is that it’s really healthy and VERY low in “points” (Weightwatchers).

Now that Christmas has come and gone, and the truffles have been received (and probably eaten), I can post about my truffles.

Let me first say a HUGE thank you to The Pioneer Woman, who told me the recipe on her blog – have a look here, there’s a pictorial step by step guide, unlike mine I’m afraid! I took her recipe, removed the Sea salt (I’m sure it’s lovely, but wasn’t what I was aiming for), compared her measurements to other webpages, to check how the American measurements compared to the British ones.

I ended up doing two batches of truffles, one with Green and Blacks chocolate, and one with Sainsburys Belgian dark chocolate

Here’s the ingredients:

150g melted, with all of this   stirred in. Add a teaspoon of (mmm vanilla!)

Cover withor

OR

150g melted, with all of this   stirred in. Add a teaspoon of (mmm vanilla!)

Cover withor

(Just don’t pay any attention to the red sections of the pie chart, or you’ll never make this!)

OK, a bit more detail hey?!

You need 150g of a dark chocolate, the better the chocolate and higher cocoa content the better. You need to melt the chocolate, the easiest method I find is to break the chocolate up and put it in a glass bowl, which is over a saucepan of water (preferably the bowl is big enough not to touch the pan or water, but fits inside the pan a bit). Heat up the water, and keep an eye on the chocolate, stiring it once it starts to melt, and turning the heat off soon after – even if there are a few lumps, they’ll melt, it’s more important not to overheat (and ruin) the chocolate.

Add the whole of a 397g tin of condensed milk to the melted chocolate and stir. I see it’s possible to get light condensed milk, but really not sure what that would do, so stayed with the unhealthy treat angle!

Leave the yummy gooey mixture to cool down, you want to put it into the fridge, without heating up your fridge! It needs to cool in the fridge for a few hours.

Now comes the messy part. Now I tried two methods. The first, and most messy was to scoop out some mixture and roll it in the palm of my hands to make it into balls, then lay on a tray/greaseproof paper. This works, but is very messy, sticky and cold! The second method was to scoop up the mixture into the right amount, pull it off spoons and straight onto a tray. The balls need to go into the freezer, and if your freezer is anything like ours (a fridge freezer, with not a lot of flat space available), finding space for that many balls is not easy. I did quite a few batches! I ended up finding the easiest thing to use was a large casserole lid (and cover it with greaseproof). They need to sit in the freezer for at least 15mins, so that they are hard and no longer sticky.

I then melted some chocolate to cover the truffles. I decided to cover some with milk chocolate and some with white. Having melted the chocolate, take the container off the heat (so it can cool a little). Lay some greaseproof paper across a worktop, find a spoon, a fork and either some cocktail sticks or wooden skewers (I used the later, as they were easier to find). Take the truffles out of the freezer, roll them between your palms if needed (if you made lumps, you will be able to turn them into balls at this stage without too much mess). Drop a truffle into the melted chocolate, and use the spoon to cover it with chocolate. Pick up the truffle with the fork, and allow the excess chocolate to pour off (helps to give it a gentle tap too). Put the truffle onto the greaseproof paper, using the stick/skewer to remove it. See Pioneer Womans post for a great pic of this. You can also use the stick to scratch a line in the run off chocolate.

If you are adding something on top, now is the time – before the chocolate hardens, be quick! I put some chocolate curls (which I got from Morrisons) on top.

Another idea, which I considered, but never did in the end, would be to drizzle a different type of chocolate over the top – so white over milk, or milk over white. Once the chocolate is hardened, I found that I needed to check the bottoms of the truffles, and covering any areas not covered in chocolate.

Once finished, put them in the fridge to keep them at their best. Then the most important part: eat and enjoy!!

I’ve just been having a browse on Ebay, looking for nice writing paper (since it’s hard to buy fun/good stuff in shops these days). I came across this for 50 plastic money/coin bags!! For 50p plus £2 (or £2.50 if you choose the wrong posting – he’s got 9 lots) for postage and packaging you can own 50 plastic bags.  They are useful bags, but as far as I was aware (unless the banks are being stingey these days), you can get them for free from your bank! They are very useful for getting rid of a small change, like 1ps and 2ps – fill up a bag with £1’s worth of each and take it to a bank where you have an account. The only things to remember are: it needs to the correct amount (although they’ll weigh it to check), no mixed coins, don’t go to the bank when it’s busy or at least do another transaction (at the counter) at the same time – they have to put the money into your account, they can’t just swap it for a larger coin.

Or you could just stick your spare change in a charities collecting tin, saving yourself the hassle and time and helping them gain a bit of money…even if they have to them fill up the bags!

This morning, I decided to have a go at posting on my blog from my Ipod Touch…it didn’t work. When I tried on the safari browser I could add in the title, but I couldn’t seem to get it to write in the main text box!! Not very helpful! So I looked through the apps on the Ipod – I knew there would be something, because the Ipod was Andy’s and he would have set it up so that he could blog from it. I found a Wordpress app, so started adding my blog login details to it, but no that wouldn’t work! It seems that I need to update the version of Wordpress that my blog uses. This is where I’m glad that I have married my own geek, who I can flutter my eye lashes at (or threaten not to make cakes/truffles) (I didn’t know about more truffles – geek) and get him to sort it out for me – therefore saving me stuffing it up!

This is my last post before he sorted it…once he’s off the Wii fit plus! He wants to watch an old Dr Who (Deadly Assassin) this afternoon, so I said that was fine as long as he sorted out my blog first!!

60 years ago today, my Grandparents got married!! Now that is something to celebrate! This is therefore their Diamond wedding anniversary. Sorry Granny and Grandad, I can’t afford diamonds, but instead you get me journeying up to visit you!

It’s very unlikely that they will read this, but my Uncle might see it.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen my Grandparents, because the travel down is not so easy for them now, and although my parents have popped in to see them on various occasions, I haven’t been near to their neck of the woods to pop in.

Wow, after this morning I feel old. Andy and I had a meeting about setting up a Will! We’ve just set the ball in motion for a joint (“mirror”) will, set up Executors and also people to have Power of Attorney if the need should arise in the future!!

Scary stuff!

We’d been meaning to write a will since we bought our flat last year – because we’ve now got property, we just never got round to actually getting one sorted.

Time flies by so fast. Christmas is fast creeping up on us. This is not a bad thing, I just feel like I need to get things organised a bit faster. My plan for a general Christmas present idea, for various people, involves some time spent making it. It is something new for me, so I’m trying to get it done first time if possible. I’ll try to remember to blog about it afterwards – but obviously can’t say more at the moment, because people who read this blog will be the recipients of the presents!! Anyone out there feeling curious now!?!

I’ve got lots of time off work this month. I’d planned to take holiday for the trip to my Grandparents the weekend before Christmas (it’s their 60th wedding anniversary – can’t miss that), and because I had so much holiday left, to use it all up, I decided I might as well take from 18th to the end of the year off. I’ve also now ended up with a few hours of holiday next week as well, this was not planned. Normally I give my relief hours to my contracted job, and the hours get fitted around, but this time the rota for the contracted job was sorted earlier than normal, and some of the shifts clashed! I couldn’t be offered any different hours, so I was told to take it as holiday.

I’m not quite sure what’s up with my stomach today – well since about Midnight really! Before going to bed last night, my stomach started to ache, almost like it was hungry, but it was too late to eat. It then got a bit worse and I ended up trying to find the most comfortable position in bed so that I could go to sleep. It stopped feeling so bad at some point during the night, because I definitely slept, but this morning it still doesn’t feel right. It feels unsettled. There’s been no D or V (I do hate V!!) and I don’t think any of the things that I ate yesterday would cause me a problem. I was planning on walking to work this morning, but I’ve decided to drive.

I’ve recently come across a great Christian website called Eden.co.uk which seems to be striving to offer competitive prices online. We wanted to buy the Glo Bible, which is for sale in the Christian books shops at £49.99, but wanted to pay a bit less. The Glo Bible is an interactive software programme, which the Bible in various translations, it also has pictures, videos, commentaries, timelines, maps… It’s pretty massive. Things link together, and it’s updated through an Internet connection.

For a better description:

“NIV Anglicised Text
7,500 encyclopedia articles
463 virtual reality tours
102 expert videos
2,382 high resolution photos
689 works of art
147 maps and much more

Glo features the whole of the NIV Bible with British spelling, grammar and punctuation. Within 2 clicks, find a chapter faster than a paper Bible. The Bible is in its natural order and easy to read in a magazine format.

With a timeline, readers of Glo can view where events happened chronologically and in context with one another through a zoomable interface.

There is an atlas in Glo where major stories and locations of the Bible appear geographically with a zoomable Google-maps style interface along with map overlays, tours, photos, and videos from experts.

Glo is topical. Relevant verses for thousands of subjects are searchable by keyword and include commentary from leading authors, scholars and other experts.

With Glo, there is a huge collection of media to browse through, including HD video, virtual tours, articles, high-resolution photos, artwork, maps, and historical animations. The video library includes the “IN His Shoes” HD interactive documentary, that has stunning on-location footage and expert insight from Norman Geisler, Max Lucado, William P Young, Dr Joel Hunter and other scholars.

You can also personalise your reading plan with Glo with MyGlo. This is a special section that houses all your notes, experiences and content. MyGlo also includes a Bible reading plan to help you track your progress and set Bible reading goals.”

I’ve just ordered ours for £41.99!!