Jim's blog

Wednesday, November 14. 2007

The cheese passes the test

I took my older Cheshire style cheese along to lunch at a friends last Saturday and the general consensus was that it was pretty good and people said they would be quite happy to pay for a cheese like that. It had a slightly crumbly texture as Cheshire should but was really yellow which is not Cheshire-like at all. However given that it was made with (organic) whole milk its not really surprising. Even the cheddar I have that is ripening now is not as yellow but it was made with standard not whole milk.

I'm pleased with the outcome and am enjoying it on my lunch sandwiches. Time to get the next one underway and figure out how to ripen my Camembert properly - it dried out too much in the kitchen. Maybe a small fridge wound to highest temperature and then a tray of water to keep it humid - problem is we don't have a huge amount of space.

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in Food at 14:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, November 10. 2007

Another Resolution visit

Dropped in on Charlie while in Hamilton for Mum's 80th.

Resolution is slowly but surely progressing to completion. Hatch covers being finished and at that stage nearly ready for first primer. Charlie has since updated his blog with a photo or two.

Still some work to do on trim, paint and keel before moving her to Tauranga for rigging and finishing but I'm looking forward to being there still. Hope it doesn't happen when I'm elsewhere in December.

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in Boat building at 15:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Weather station

Well the iROX Plus-X is working fine and I am currently running the evaluation copy of Weather Display on XP under VMware to log the data.

I plan to implement a Linux interface to it and haven't yet made any progress except that I can monitor the data in Continue reading "Weather station" »

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in Blog at 14:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The pain of it

About 15 minutes into my walk to work on Thursday I was crossing a road with some traffic oncoming. I gave a small push to get over the last part more quickly and something went POP in my left calf muscle. Instant and severe pain and I hobbled off the road before I was run down.

Continue reading "The pain of it" »

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in Blog at 11:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, November 5. 2007

Chocolate Education

Yesterday afternoon Jo presented her first Chocolate Tasting session to a select group of women. Starting with a history of Chocolate and an overview of where cocao beans are grown now and how chocolate is made from them, Jo moved on to the tasting.

Starting with a standard Cadbury milk chocolate and moving on to Whittakers, Callebaut, Valrohona, Michel Cluizel, Venchi and more. 15 varieties in all, looking at the appearance, smell, taste. All the attendees were very interested in the process and were surprised at the range of flavours and smells they could detect across the set.

Watch this space for future tastings (or contact me if you want to arrange a special event).

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in Food at 10:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, November 1. 2007

Movember

About an hour ago my beard was shaved off for the first time since 1972....

A group of DIA male staff had offered to have their beards removed if staff pledged $1500 to the Movember fundraising activity.

A rash remark earlier in the day promising to join them if the pledges reached $2500 found me sitting in a line in the DIA cafeteria at 3pm. A few minutes later the trimmers reached me at number 3 in the lineup and then I was tidying up with a razor.

Its going to take a bit of getting used to but the general reaction has been positive. Hopefully the southerly won't chill me too much on the way home.

The evidence