I opened up a Google+ account last week. I haven’t really used it yet and I can’t really work out how I feel about it. Google have obviously tried to roll up some of the key features that make Facebook and Twitter distinct into one new application. The main difference between Facebook and Twitter, in [...]
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!
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Day Two is the first salt day – proper curing! After 24 hours in the syrup our bacon had changed colour a bit. Not a massive amount but a definte darkening, particularly the loose bits of intercostal muscle (the bits between your individual ribs) which have had the greatest surface area exposed. The first shot [...]
Mike found some reasonably priced maple syrup in the end. Also, thanks to the awseome power of the Internet, the food journalist who originally gave us the idea actually came across this blog and posted some valuable advice as a comment. So here’s a link (the blogger’s salute) to Tim Hayward’s personal website. Just a [...]
What’s this? Nothing to do with Robert Smith’s musical genius, nor with the advancement of medical science, but following hot on the heels of the Guardian’s Tim Hayward, my temporary house-mate Mike and I are curing our own bacon. I will post daily photographs of the bacon as it ‘matures’ over the next week. If [...]
Check out Wordle, an application for creating artistic ‘word clouds’. Just feed the app a url or paste a wad of whatever text takes your fancy into the box, choose your colour and layout options, and you’re away. You can get some good results by feeding it song lyrics! Here’s a wordle created using my [...]