Making money

When I first started this blog, I decided to start running Google advertising on it, mainly as an experiment for me to find out how it all worked in practise than with any aspirations to be the next Rupert Murdoch. Apart from anything else, the fact that I purposefully keep the existence of this blog reasonably quiet sort of stands in the way of significant traffic. Anyone who's stalking me will notice I've removed this blog from my profile, so I can promote my other blog without worrying about traffic spilling over onto this one. I'd like to be able to be as frank and honest as possible on this one, without worrying about who's reading it.

On Eating Auckland though, I actively promote it using things like Twitter, Facebook, Google and good ol' word of mouth, and traffic is picking up. One of the things I've found interesting recently is the way much more traffic than I expected is coming through feed readers, such as Google Reader. During April, I've had about 400 page impressions, and around 100 feed impressions; basically this more or less means about 20% of my audience don't tend to visit the site at all. Fortunately I use Feedburner to advertise within feeds, and peculiarly get a very good result from that.

The thing about this statistic is how it, in microcosm, outlines a changing behaviour pattern in media consumption in general. Apart from my daily visits to the Guardian website, all the news I consume comes through either Google Reader or Newsstand (on the iPod Touch). This means I'm reading articles without actually visiting any of the sites I use, so I'm not viewing any advertising on those sites. An online publisher is paid per ad displayed, effectively, so by the numbers I'm seeing, a fifth of potential revenue is being lost by users managing their own news consumption in this way.

What's weird is that, in all the feeds I consume, my feeds are the only ones with adverts in. Am I the only one who's worked this out?

Finally, to those of you who use ad-blocking tools, what you're doing is effectively theft, and to do so displays either astonishing ignorance or just plain unpleasantness. Please stop it.

Not about breadmaking

Amid all this sourdough nonsense of late, I've perhaps been avoiding the subject of what's actually going on over here. Coaxing my starter into life has occupied a fair bit of my time, admittedly, but I do have (part of) a life outside of the kitchen. Sort of.

So on the job front, I'm still bashing away at the market here, trying to find a suitable niche. Next week I'm to be subjected to a battery of psychometric tests as part of a conversation I'm having with an insurance company, and it's hard to say just how much I'm not looking forward to it. Still, needs must.

The Kiwi's faring a little better, but out of sheer superstition I'll refrain from commenting until the process has moved on a bit further, but at the moment things look good.

In other news, I have begun to miss London, and I always wondered when it would happen. It was sort of inevitable that springtime would be the time, as we slip into grey skies and all-too-obviously unheated houses, all I hear from the other side of the world is news of beautiful spring days, the optimism of the coming summer and the excitement of eating and drinking outside. I think what really precipitated this homesickness was a comment in this week's Popbitch newsletter, which simply said 'The sun is out. The sky is blue. The ska is on the stereo.' I've tried a bit of Desmond Dekker's superbly sunny '007' this morning, but it's not really having the desired effect and our sky is still a leaden grey.

Perhaps I might try a bit of the Specials later on.

Also, it seems that people I don't know are reading Eating Auckland and enjoying it - I started getting a bit of traffic from an unfamiliar site the other day, and it turns out it was a discussion on a (more popular) blog about maintaining a point of view whilst blogging. Someone was holding my site up as a great example of a totally impartial blog and said some lovely things about it too, which fair made my day.

Feeding... and feeding... and feeding...

Open the box. Examine contents for signs of life. Stir the mixture. Pour away 200ml of it. Combine 100g flour and 150ml water. Mix into mixture. Close box.

Twice a day. For two weeks. Apparently this is what it takes to get a sourdough starter to a stable existence, when one can actually make bread out of it. It'd better work.

I'm a bit less concerned about it now than I was, as it's still alive and bubbling, just very slowly. It's behaving a bit like a sulky teenager, responding only to the odd poke and regular feeding. I think the problem is that it's got a bit colder of late, and so our inside temperature is a bit lower than the required 20C (central heating has apparently not made it this far south), and so my little yeasts are working very sluggishly indeed. From what I can tell, this isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it might mean it'll take a while to get stable. I've been placing it in what sunlight our flat gets during the day, and feeding it with slightly warm water to try to keep it cosy.

Hmmm. Ten days or so to go, possibly more.

Phase 2 begins...

After two days of seeming inactivity, I've decided my starter needs feeding. We're six days after birth, well short of the stated ten day minimum in my recipe, but after the five day period that some online recipes say. Also, the book I'm following (Moro) says that after ten days the bag containing the crushed grapes should be inflated - this happened after about three days for me. So here we go, moving on a little early.

As you can see, it's all gone a bit quiet and has separated out quite a bit. After so much activity at the start, I've got a bit nervous with all this quietness.

A quick look in the top shows that there's a healthy-looking yeast bloom on the surface of the liquid and the bag, and there are still a few bubbles coming up from the gunge in the bottom. I'm not sure what this means, but I've embarked on this feeding lark and I'm going to see it through. I suspect yeast needs a firm, decisive hand to coax it into full, breadmaking productivity.

Odour-wise, it's not actually as bad as I thought. It's hardly Chanel No.5, but it's clean-smelling, sour and definitely grapey, with a growing yeasty character. It doesn't smell rotten, and the slight cheesiness I got off it the other day has gone.

So I lifted out the bag, scraped off as much gunge as I could, and squeezed the residual juice out of it, which by now had taken a decent amount of colour from the grape skins. This went into the sink, to be dealt with later on.

A quick stir, and in went the requisite 100g of flour and 150ml water, more stirring and we're done. I realised with some horror that I'd forgotten to discard a third or so of the total mass first, as all the recipes tell you to do, but there's plenty of room in the container, so I think (hope) it'll be ok this once. I've made a mark on the side where the mixture comes up to, so I'll keep an eye on it and see if it's getting unruly.

Here it is after its first feed. It looks quite contented and settled I think. The lumps of flour in it are apparently ok - I've broken them down a bit but didn't want to work the mixture too much. We'll see; if it's still lumpy in a few days I might give it a bit of a go with a whisk or something.

So here we go - two feeds a day at regular intervals for two weeks. Who knows though, this might come together sooner if the process to date is anything to go by. This is the bit I've been worrying about a bit to be honest - it all seems like rather a lot of work, but I'm sure it'll pay off in the end.

I'll post a next instalment either in a week or so, or if anything astonishing happens, whichever comes first.

Poor willpower and over-attentiveness

I've been getting a bit concerned the past few days about the health of my starter. It's turned itself back over, with the liquid now sitting on the top, and the bag of grapes which was quite inflated is starting to sag a bit. It doesn't look at all as lively as it did, either. It smells pretty unusual, but it's not a mouldy or overly unpleasant smell, sort of cheesy and yeasty with a bit of sourness on it, so I think we could still be on the right track.

So I've given in to temptation and given it a stir. I've also turned the bag over in the liquid as it was starting to dry out on the top. Finally, in response to a number of internet sources, I've unclipped the lid, so that the seal isn't airtight, which should let the thing breathe a little whilst ensuring it's not entirely sterile. Letting natural yeasts and things in from the air is apparently to be encouraged. It may start to make the kitchen smell funny though, in which case it's back on with the clips.

I'm also starting to doubt our recipe a little, which says to leave the starter to build for two weeks prior to the first feed. Some online recipes have you feeding it in five days or even less, and normally say it's ready for one once it starts to get active, which it certainly was a few days ago. I hope I'm not starving it. I reckon that if it's not done anything by tomorrow afternoon I'll feed it, as that'll make five days. Perhaps I have peculiarly lively (and hungry) yeasts going on in there, who knows.

Real world vs Twitter

Tonight, the Kiwi and I took part in a wine tasting on Twitter. Interesting concept, one that was dreamt up by three guys, the owner of a wine store in Auckland, a wine writer in Oamaru and a winemaker in Marlborough about two months ago. The deal is simple; you buy a bottle of Fiasco's 'Black Pearl' Pinot Noir, have your first taste at 2000 on April 19th, and post your tasting notes on Twitter.

Here's the feed: http://bit.ly/9UGeH

On the whole, a bit of a success. The wine itself is excellent, not only superbly priced at $20 (special Tweetbunch price, apparently), but it's Aaron's first Pinot of his own, I think, which is a fair achievement in itself. It's actually quite European in style, with a bit more juicy acidity and slightly more forward fruit, but with a great earthiness that NZ Pinots often don't have, certainly not this young (2008).

You lot in the UK probably won't see hide nor hair of it though, as I don't think he makes all that much. Such is life.

And of the event? A great idea, I think, and it went really well. True, there's the lack of face-to-face interaction that's the hallmark of online social interaction, but realistically that takes nothing away from it. You're still chatting away to a group of similarly-minded people, still tasting wine, still enjoying the experience, but with the added bonus of not only being able to talk directly to the winemaker, but not having to leave the house. I know there'll be a few 'social networking stunts our emotional growth' comments bandied about, as there always are, but the long and short of it is that this was a really innovative use of Twitter which worked tremendously well.

I think there may be more in future. Also, we made it onto Twitscoop, but that might be as much to do with the rest of the world being asleep / just waking up as because a few dozen of us were tasting wine at the time :)

It's alive!

This is bizarre, truly bizarre stuff. About 24 hours after kicking off the starter, a layer of yellowish liquid appeared on the surface of my starter, presumably some of the water and grape juice separating out. It got steadily deeper, and I considered stirring it in but thought better of it, deciding to follow the book (which doesn't say to do anything to it for two weeks).



This morning, the Kiwi pointed out (with some alarm) that things had changed somewhat. As you can see from the picture, the whitish goop has surged up from beneath the liquid and is full of bubbles, proving that something is active within the box. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how mental this thing's gone, and we've still got a minimum of eight days left to go before I'm allowed to tinker with it. The recipe says ten days to two weeks, and I'm sticking to it. The one thing I'm allowing myself to do is to pop the lid every now and then to release any gas - I don't fancy scraping fermenting yeast and flour off my kitchen walls in the event of an explosion.

This is brilliant - a great sign that my starter is alive, for now at least. I'm very proud. More on this as we get it.

Starting the starter

Finding myself recently with quite a bit of spare time, I've begun a project I've been meaning to get into for a while. I'm going to bake my own sourdough bread, but rather than using brewer's yeast of the sort you can get fresh from a friendly baker or dried in packets, I'm making my own sourdough starter, using natural wild yeasts. This is a bit of an undertaking for me, so I'm going to document the process on this blog - it should take about four weeks until I can make some bread, and we're dealing with me trying to keep a bucket of micro-organisms alive for that time, so it could be interesting.

The way this is supposed to work, I think, is that we try to slowly culture yeasts, found both naturally in flour and on the skins of organic grapes, in a food-rich mixture of flour and water, until we get to the point where the starter is a more or less stable environment containing both active yeast colonies and a fair bit of acids and all sorts of good things. Once we're stable, we use a bit of the starter to bake some bread, and feed the starter to replace the lost volume and kick it off again. That's the rough theory, anyway.



So here's where we begin, with the stuff needed to make the starter. I decided that spending a small fortune on organic flour was probably out of the question at this point, so for this run I'm attempting this with normal high grade bread flour. The grapes are organic, all $11.00 of the blighters. I'm also using water that's been out of the tap for a while, to let some of the chlorine gas escape (our water here is somewhat aggressively treated). The water and flour variables are ones I'll change if this doesn't work.



Here's it all mixed together. The grapes are tied up in a light tea towel, so they can be lifted out later on. They're lightly crushed, with the juice mixed in with the flour and water, and then submerged in the goop. Lid on, wait two weeks for stuff to happen. I will report back.

Woohoo! Mantis!

A few weeks ago, I noticed a praying mantis clinging to the wall above the mystery tree, and it freaked me the hell out. Today it's still there, and from a quick check on Wikipedia, it seems it's to be encouraged as it's entirely carnivorous, so I'm ok with it now. Right now, it's standing guard over the basil (although from the looks of it it'd be better off in the spinach pot), as you can sort of see in this mildly out-of-focus picture. My phone isn't good at close ups.



It looks pretty mean. I wonder if I should put a warning sign on the gate.

Easter, more gardening

This weekend is unusually holiday-like for the Kiwi and me. The past few weeks have been unusually hectic, with the Kiwi's dad's 60th birthday going on last weekend and planning and execution of those plans taking up a bit of time. Well worth it though - what a weekend. So amid all the job-hunting and so on, we're taking these four days to actually have a break. I know it sounds a bit rubbish, given that we don't tend to actually do much during the week, but I think it's more that we're having a break from the constant stress of it all, knowing that there's nothing we can do about it over this weekend.



So I have been tending to our garden. It's been going a bit mental lately, with the spinach sprouting all over the place and the basil beginning to look a bit weird. I think it might be planning to bolt at some point, so I'm feverishly trying to work out how to inveigle some of it into our cooking plans over the coming days, so I can harvest it without just chucking it away. The lime tree, as I've mentioned, is seeming a little bit overenthusiastic, so I've repotted it and am trying to find out how best to prune things like this to keep it in line. I want it alive at least until it has a chance to fruit.

I've also put out a pot with some rosemary and thyme in it, although I'm not sure how well thyme does outside, particularly with the weather cooling down a bit. We'll see - it's quite sheltered where it is, and the plant seems reasonably mature, so it might make it. We'll have the full Simon & Garfunkel if I can find some sage, but apparently that's a right bugger to grow and it always reminds me spookily of rabbits' ears, so perhaps not.

The mystery tree seems to have gone back to sleep. I think it only likes it when there's tons of sunlight and constant warmth, so it looks like we're back to the 'is it just a dead stick?' phase for a while. Everything else seems to be thriving, especially the parsley, and the chilli plants are looking more promising by the day.

So that's the garden update so far - other highlights of the weekend are an Easter dinner out west tomorrow at which I'm cooking a paella (others are doing other bits), and some sort of networking event at a local wine merchant on Monday night which could be entertaining.

One last note before I go and read the paper or something - I had a truly bizarre dream last night which I'm moved to share with you all. Working back at my old job, my boss had sent me to work at a Virgin Megastore, under the sea. It was laid out like the old Piccadilly store, but was submerged a long way off the coast somewhere. The only customers were terrifically rich people with submarines, so whilst the footfall was quite low, the average spend was massive. My role here was to improve the customer service processes, specifically around the handling of telephone and email complaints. I came up with a few options but the staff involved were highly resistant to change and to be honest, seemed to be managing ok. Working in this store was seen as a really great job for most of the staff, who spent most of their days sitting around listening to music and maintaining their spotless racking and promotion spaces, rarely troubled by customers. I remember looking out of the front window to the parked submarines outside and thinking what a great idea it had been to open a branch under the sea.

I would like to point out though, that this is in no way indicative of my normal thought processes whilst acting as a retail business consultant.

Another month...

You may have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of posts here of late. This is mainly as very little has changed over here - we're still looking for work, still getting up in the morning and scouring the job sites, still getting remarkably little traction from doing so. A promising conversation I've been clinging onto for three months fell through yesterday, so we're back to square one again. This ceased to be funny a very long time ago; now it's just boring, and not a little terrifying.

I am not, though, at the point yet where I'm questioning whether or not this was a good idea. It'll take a little longer for that to happen, and a few more rejections too, I think. Oh, and the UK economy would need to be in a better shape than the NZ one, which will take some time, I reckon.

It's still sunny here, although as we move into autumn the breeze is getting a little cooler. What's funny from my perspective is, whilst walking around in jeans and a t-shirt and finding it quite temperate, hearing other people shiver and complain. It's still over 15C and beautifully sunny, FFS people! Man up a little!

The garden, such as it is, is going great guns, although something or other is eating our spinach and some of the leaves on my chilli plant. We've been using the flat-leaf parsley, the basil and the (uneaten) spinach quite happily for a while now, which is nice, and I think the lime tree needs pruning as some of the topmost leaves are looking a bit sickly. Oh, and the Kiwi's spring onions seem to have, er, sprung, finally.

More news as we get it, on all fronts.