stumblelog
— Stephen Fry on the iPad.One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide that humankind has yet devised.
Sandwich
One of the smaller benefits of working from home is the ability to make yourself nice lunches rather than brave the tasteless morsels the high street chains have on offer. Of late, my favoured lunchtime fancy is The Sandwich. Here’s how I make it.
Usually I make it with fresh white bread, but since mine was a couple of days old, I decided to toast it for this example. Now, it’s very important when toasting the bread that you give it time to cool, so whilst my toast cooked I started preparing the other ingredients.
First, the cheese. I’m using Davidstow Mature Cheddar, which for me strikes the right balance between sharpness and texture. It’s not rubbery or too crumbly, which means it works well in sandwiches.
Next, the tomato. Since I keep my tomatoes in the fridge, what I’ve taken to doing is zapping it in the microwave for about 10-20 seconds before slicing it. This helps warm it up ever so slightly so that it tastes better. Once sliced, I grind sea salt and black pepper over it, and drizzle in olive oil. Set aside for a few minutes whilst we wait for the toast to cook. Speaking of which…
Okay, that’ll need a few minutes to cool down. Go back to work for a couple of minutes or something. Once that’s done, butter lightly; I prefer Lurpak Spreadable (Slightly Salted).
First layer down the cheese, and then arrange the sliced tomato on top of that. Save the leftover dressing of olive oil and tomato juice; we’ll need that for later.
Over the tomatoes, I drizzle a little French’s Mustard. It might sound cheap and nasty, but it really adds zing to both the tomatoes and the ham (which will be coming next).
With three slices of thinly-cut Applewood-smoked ham, I roll each slice up so that it’s roughly a third the width of the slice of bread once flattened. This helps give it depth once flattened down better than just stacking them on top of each other. To this I add a dollop of Hellman’s Mayonnaise, spread over the ham.
The final ingredient is a generous handful of mixed salad, piled on top of the mayonnaise. Drizzle the olive oil and tomato juice saved from before, and add more salt and pepper as you see fit.
And hey presto! Ready for om nom nom-age. Serve with sundries to taste (Waitrose do some fabulous crinkle cut crisps that I would highly recommend).
When the devs say they’re taking inspiration from the G1 comics and the ‘80s movie, you know they’re on the right track. Also: I like the subtle hint that Hasbro wants this to be the start of something bigger. I’m still hoping we’ll see a Transformers MMO one day.
Tablet
Two weeks ago, dissatisfied with the shortcomings of offerings unveiled elsewhere, I decided to set upon the task of making my own tablet. What? Oh! No, not that sort of tablet.
I decided to follow what is by all appearances the canonical page on the subject of making tablet on the Internets; Stewart Russell’s recipe. Firstly, I decided to go with his recommendation of using vanilla sugar, which meant leaving a vanilla pod inside a bag of sugar for two weeks to allow the flavour to be absorbed.
— Two Week Intermission —
Having removed the vanilla pod from the sugar, I then assembled the other ingredients; condensed milk, unsalted butter and half a cup of milk.
First, I added the sugar to the pan along with the milk. Stirred together, this made a slow-moving, gritty thick paste to which I added the butter (sliced up into smaller pats) and the condensed milk. Once this was reasonably well mixed and there were no dry patches, I turned on the heat to begin to bring the mixture to the boil.
Within a few minutes, the mixture began to froth and expand massively — Stewart wasn’t kidding that you need to use a much bigger pan than the ingredients themselves require. After about 10 minutes, the mixture will be properly boiling and the heat will need turning down, to allow it to caramelise.
After about 20 minutes of simmering, with occasional stirring, the mixture is not only frothy, but will begin to turn a golden, caramel colour. This means it’s nearly ready for the final stage. As our recipe suggests, if you take a teaspoon full of the mixture and immerse it in cold water, it’ll quickly cool (at least, on the outside!) and you can see how it flows at low temperature. If it slowly drips then it’s ready for the next step.
The recipe wasn’t explicit about this, so I had to do this step with one hand stirring whilst the other reached desperately for the fridge and the rest of the block of butter; grease a tin or pan of suitable size (about 18”x12”) and take the mixture off the heat. Stirring the whole time, feel for when the mixture begins to thicken slightly and the bottom of the pan starts to feel slightly gritty. At this point, pour the mixture into the tray.
I’ll have to report back on how good this stuff tastes once it’s had time to set. It certainly tastes good when molten (but really; be careful — it’s incredibly hot when in liquid form). Now I have to go wash the saucepan before it becomes a permanent fixture…
How to convert a monaural PCM audio file to stereo using mplayer from the command line
for i in *.wav; do mplayer "$i" -af pan=2:1:1 -benchmark -ao pcm:file="`basename -s .wav "$i"`.stereo.wav"; done
— Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve, writing as Dan Lyons; he gets it.You shouldn’t need to know anything to use our products. You should just pick them up and use them. I know that this offends some people, and I don’t care, because I’m right and they’re wrong.
