The Blog:
Hello gentle reader. Sadly for you the blog has been relegated to the position of third most important page on the site since I did the redesign. It is still here however, and with all the old content. Check the links on the right for specific blogging episodes like Coursework 24 and The Bacon Project, and for the archives.
Enjoy...
Location Based Blogging
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
This post is being written on my phone whilst I am sitting in a flat in north London.
Testing out location based blogging services by geotagging this post.
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New Coupland Novel
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Just a quick post to share my excitement about the release of the latest Doug Coupland novel, Generation A. Anyone who has already read it and has an opinion feel free to share comments below!
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Destination Gym: New Site Release!
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
Just launched a brand-new site for Destination Gym, a Personal Training Gym based in central London. This site will be updated soon with images of this project, but for now here is a link to the site:
This was a full-service graphic design and implementation project. The build is a custom PHP back-end with fully validated XHTML & CSS on the front end. Photography supplied by the client.
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Validate This!
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Good news sportsfans. charlieperrins.com is now fully validated to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype. The W3C is my friend again.
Thanks to a nifty bit of PHP the validation link will only appear in the footer of pages which do actually validate on my site. That means that if I add new ones which have ‘teething troubles’ the link won’t display and no-one will be traumatised.
For example – the page you are reading right now doesn’t validate because WordPress’s comment form is buggy. I didn’t write this bit of code, it’s part of the WordPress core, so am loath to get into correcting it until I have a bit more time on my hands. Hence, you won’t find a validation link in the footer on individual blog posts. Blog category pages are OK, as are all the top-level pages on the site.
Only the most hard-core of standardistas will really be interested in this, but it’s worth highlighting charlieperrins.com’s compliance with W3C standards, because I bring the same level of dedication to my clients’ sites.
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Brand New Site Design
Sunday, October 5th, 2008
Hi all, just a quick post to celebrate the upload of my new site design. I’ve modified a wordpress theme to get the blogging platform to behave as a full-scale content management system.
The site is now a portfolio of my online work, in addition to the old blog which is still here.
I hope you enjoy the new site, I’ve had loads of fun putting it all together – getting wordpress and jQuery to talk to each other has been a valuable learning experience and I’ll definitely be putting my new skills to use on the next set of freelance projects I take on.
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New Site Installation – Bugs!
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Hi. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks building a custom wordpress theme that will transform by blog engine into a content management system for my web design work. I am in the process of uploading this new theme now, but for the next 12 hours or so there are going to be quite a few gaps in the various pages of the site. Sorry if these inconvenience you.
Charlie.
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The Cure – Final Day – Breakfast!
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
What a great project. The bacon looked authentic and tasted delicious. And it was all the more satisfying with the knowledge that we nurtured it from scratch. This pig gave its life for a pretty noble cause – I’m sure vegetarians would agree.
Below is a picture of our initial, slightly cack-handed efforts at slicing the bacon with a carving knife. Future curing projects may be well served if we can cultivate a relationship with the local butcher and get him to slice our produce professionally!
The bacon released fat, not water, when it was cooking just as Tim Hayward described. It also looked a bit paler than normal bacon at first. After a week of waiting we weren’t going to muck about and so Mike and I made a variety of bacon-based treats which, with the help of Mike’s brother Dave, we saw off pretty quickly.
We made: a round of classic bacon sandwiches, a bacon, egg and avacado toasted club sandwich and a plate of bacon with pancakes and maple syrup. This last seemed particularly appropriate given the sweet maple cure we used. The picture below looks like a Little Chef menu!
It’s been a brilliant week and I’m open to suggestions for my next extended foodie project. Front runners are currently: making jam, brewing beer/cider, smoking stuff (don’t mind what but this is bound to be fun) and rearing chickens in a coop on the bathroom roof. Maybe I’ll write a web-poll and open the vote to the public…
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The Cure – Day 5
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
Day 5 is the final day of the curing process, but because we started on Monday evening we can’t actually eat the bacon until Day 6 – Saturday morning. Imagine the restraint required for us to wash the syrup & salt off the bacon, leaving it moist and ready to cook, then wrapping it up in paper and replacing it in the fridge to mature for a final 12 hours before breakfast.
The odd smell disappeared with the final rinsing process leaving an unmistakably cured, pretty appetising piece of meat. I don’t know if that comes across in the photo above or not! Below is our bacon looking almost unbearably rustic, wrapped in baking parchment for its final night in the fridge.
Saturday’s breakfast will be a well earned celebration of the week’s work.
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The Cure – Day 4
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Very little to report today. The bacon still needs love and affection, plus regular rub-downs (rubs-down?) in the syrup & salt bath, but there are no new tasks to carry out. It looks about the same as it did yesterday so I won’t upload any new photos tonight.
I’m still a bit worried that we’re doing something wrong. Tim Hayward, if you’re reading this, did your bacon joint smell a bit odd on day 4? I understand you might not have chosen to mention it in your article but any reassurance would be welcome!
I’m trying to stay positive and think of rustic, wholesome words like ‘curing’, ‘preserving’ and ‘salting’. Unfortunately the rebellious voice in my head is quietly suggesting alternatives such as ‘decomposing’, ‘putrefying’ or simply ‘going off’.
This is surely no more than a crisis of confidence. I imagine older generations – those not brought up in a culture of supermarkets and ‘best before’ dates – will scorn my delicate sensibilities. I hope they’re right. I hope by Saturday I’ll have learned a valuable lesson. Or maybe I’ll eat an e-coli sandwich this weekend and you won’t ever hear from me again…
(There – no new photos tonight but you’ve got a bit of drama, a bit of social commentary and a cliff-hanging ending for your money.)
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The Cure – Day 3
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Today we washed off the first-stage cure and saw, for the first time since Monday, what our pork loin has become. It’s not bacon yet, but it’s definitely getting there. You can see in the picture below the contrast between the meat as it looks now and the fresh loin from Day One. The joint is a flatter shape, and the divide between the rind and the fat is now visible.
Tim Hayward’s account led us to expect a physical change in the bacon, and in that he was accurate. The meat has darkened and firmed up considerably. The second picture shows the meat standing up quite happily on its side, which should give you an idea of its solidity.
What came as a shock to both of us tonight was the smell. With the pleasant aroma of maple syrup washed away, and a fresh 300g of salt poured over the meat, we began to have some doubts about the bacon project. Mike as ever tried to stay positive, chirpily telling me that “the combination of salt and meat often smells like this”. When asked how on earth he knew what salt and three-day-old meat ‘usually’ smelled like Mike, unsurprisingly, had no answer.
After the dry-rub we plonked another 200ml of maple syrup onto the meat (which masked the funny salt-meat smell) and rubbed everything back in. There’s a final action shot below of the syrup mixing with the salt and the bacon.
Over the next 48 hours Mike and I are responsible for turning the joint and massaging the gloopy syrup/salt mixture into the flesh, but essentially things are now in the hands of the bacon gods. That said, our emotional bond with the meat grows ever stronger. Mike the corporate lawyer claims that making the bacon is giving his week ‘purpose’. I hope his clients don’t read my blog…