The Oven Saga, Pt 2

It's in! The beast was fitted by a nice Yorkshire chap a couple of days ago, who's done a pretty good job of it. It turns out that our kitchen wall isn't quite straight, so there's a tiny alteration to the rangehood that needs doing, and I need to plaster over the holes left by the old rangehood, but otherwise we're there.

Before and after pics:

Looks a bit ornery, doesn't it? This is what we're working with now:

5 burners of gas-fueled fury, plus a rangehood that coped perfectly with me searing a massive steak last night, and a double-width electric fan oven that will be crisping up a lamb wellington for this evening.

It's all been worth it.

The Oven Saga

I mentioned in the last post about getting a new oven installed, and I feel that for the sake of my karma I should come clean about what that whole story actually contains.

My wife (My Wife!) and I have been talking for a while about replacing the crappy four-burner electric stove that came with the house. Fortunately, it's a standalone oven / cooker, which as it isn't built into the work surfaces would be comparatively simple to replace. However, as I mentioned below, we're keen to move to gas hobs rather than the awful electric ones we have.

So a few weeks ago, we were out for coffee and a few basic errands (I was buying pants, if you must know), and whilst the Kiwi was in a girl shop doing girl things, I wandered a few doors down to where a local appliance store was having the final weekend of a closing down sale. It was like appliance deal heaven in there, and I looked further in and found a five-burner gas / electric oven for around $2,000 off, which was intriguing. I pulled the Kiwi in and pointed this out. A sales assistant materialised, and offered a number of compelling things - free delivery, interest free credit, that sort of thing.

So we bought it. Despite the following:

• We have no mains gas at our house
• The five-burner stove is somewhat wider than our four-burner one, and thus slightly wider than the gap our cupboards allow
• The addition of a differently-sized oven will require a differently-sized rangehood, and thus a new hole in the wall in a slightly different place

Carpe diem, and all that. So once the thing was safely ensconced in our downstairs spare bedroom, we set about getting quotes to have it installed. Fortunately, we found out that the current rangehood, whilst slightly offset for the new oven, was actually within compliance codes and wouldn't have to be replaced right away. This is good as they're expensive, and I imagined that cutting a new hole in our expensive cedar external wall and filling the old one in would also be somewhat costly.

So we found a gasfitter who'll pipe bottled gas in from outside, remove one of the kitchen cupboards, install the oven and put some cheap glaze over the back wall for not a reasonable sum.

Thing is, that cheap glaze was proving a bit of a challenge. The thinking behind doing it cheaply was that we're probably going to get the rest of the kitchen done sooner or later so we didn't want to put anything too permanent in. However, it's probably not going to be this year, so it does need to look reasonable. This prompted us to look at a nice steel splashback this weekend whilst we were looking at how cheap the cheap wall glaze actually was (the answer was 'very'). We decided on one, and I diligently measured it to ensure it would fit under our existing rangehood - remember we'd decided not to replace the current one.

We had my car with us at the time (two seater roadster), so we headed home to pick up the Kiwi's car (estate (sorry 'sport') wagon) and to measure up. I took the bigger car, returned, and bought the splashback. Job done.

This evening, the Kiwi asked 'did you measure the rangehood in the end?'. Cue small moment of discomfort from your author. I had not, having been distracted by a toasted sandwich on our return home.

As it turns out, the splashback we have bought is about 15cm too tall for the current rangehood, which means that not only will we have to buy a new one in order to get our oven installed, we'll have to have it fitted, which is no small task.

I suspect that our gasfitter finds this all highly amusing. As does my wife.

... and we're back

I'm not sure why I've not been at the blog lately, have been struggling with an explanation for a while now. I could say I've been too busy, but that would be a lie really, and I suppose I could say something about being happy, which I am, but none of that would seem like a genuine reason for apparently having nothing to say. Truth is, there's been numerous times over the past six months or so where I've thought 'I should blog about that', but the thought of going through the process of rekindling this blog kind of put me off. I like continuity, you see, and feel I'd need to fill in the gaps between then and now before writing anything new.

But I'm not going to. Otherwise I'd never get around to starting again. Surely through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and the rumour mill (or because you've visited recently), you know about the kitten and the wedding and all of that, so no need to post about any of that, and what a weight off my shoulders is that?

So here we are, happily married and settling into a cosy Sunday evening in our house, with a chilled weekend (involving a visit to the zoo!) behind us and a productive week of good things ahead of us. At the moment we're furiously saving to have a new oven installed, one with gas hobs, so entertainment has to be of the 'free' or 'extraordinarily cheap' varieties for a while. It'll be worth it to have some degree of control over what I'm cooking, plus we received a number of excellent cooking vessels as wedding gifts and I'm keen not to screw them up on those horrible electrical elements.

It's been a good weekend for food, even with our crappy oven. As the weather here's turning cooler, my thoughts have turned to comfort food (although it's still around 20C at the moment), and so on Friday evening I made tartiflette, that amazing French Alpine concoction of potato, bacon, onion, white wine and cheese. It was phenomenal, even with raclette substituted in place of the traditional reblochon - the latter being entirely unavailable in Auckland and the Kapiti Cheese Co making a great raclette.

I'm slowly getting my head around the food here. It helps that we live close to the Westmere Butcher, one of (if not THE) best butchers in Auckland. The Auckland Fish Market is also just a small detour from my journey home from work, so that helps too. The Kapiti shop is across the road from my office building, and I'm beginning to build a list of places that usually have what I'm looking for.

Funnily enough, that list is potentially not what you'd expect. Self-styled 'speciality' food stores like Sabato and Nosh tend to fail me every single time, with shelves groaning under the weight of super-priced olive oils and comedically useless condiments, but not a single hard to find ingredient in there I couldn't have bought in Tesco in the UK. They seem to exist solely for fabulously wealthy people to spend a whole heap of cash whilst not buying any actual food. What bugs me the most is the cynical pricing, basically an attraction in itself to a certain type of customer. I'm still deciding whether or not to continue this rant over on Eating Auckland.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that stuff is good. We're headed back to the UK for a visit over next Christmas, and the knowledge that that's there helps a lot from day to day. The days straight after the wedding were weird, with no 'big thing' on the horizon involving seeing friends from the UK, but Christmas has taken its place. Here's looking forwards to that...

New House, New Bread

So, if you remember, a little while ago we bought a house. A little while ago (about two weeks now), we moved in, and since then have been slowly sort of synchronising ourselves with it. For me, meshing with the new house has involved things like unpacking (of course), going for a run, making stock, baking bread, planting a lime tree and (eventually) blogging about it all. Feels good.

The bread in question is currently cooling on a rack in the kitchen, and despite being a bit of a funny shape I think it's ok. I was worried about how the starter would cope with being moved, but it seems to have managed. I think that sometimes I'm a bit overprotective of it. On the stock front, we managed to defrost the freezer a while ago (not on purpose) and so what better reason to make a full five litres of chickeny goodness? Beef stock this weekend coming, plus possibly some Spanish-accented pork rillettes if I can be arsed.

Work, then. Work is mental. I'm wondering if I've not bitten off a bit more than I can chew, as what started as a relatively simple website re-platforming has turned into the mother of all heaving, beastly complicated program of work, encompassing CRM, contact centre applications, claims management and a fair bit more besides. Add in to that a healthy dollop of intra-group politics and a business that's totally unaware of how to take control of the technology development process, and you have something of a challenge.

It's an enjoyable one though, and so far we seem to be making progress. I'm still confident we'll deliver something by the end of the year; I'm just not totally sure what. It'll be fun finding out though.

Feeling old

You know that saying about how when you notice how young policemen are these days, it's time to start feeling old? Well, I don't know about policemen, but the recent news of the passing of Keith Floyd has certainly made me stop and think.

Before wine, food was one of the first things I got really excited about for more than a month or two - an obsession that has stayed with me. Two things promoted this: Robert Carrier's phenomenal Robert Carrier's Cookbook, and Keith Floyd's book Floyd on Fish (plus the occasional TV appearance), both of which owned by my mother. I would pore over these books for hours, reading recipes over and over, imagining the meals I would cook, how I would plan the preparation, and the way I would serve them.

I loved Robert Carrier's tone, his slightly camp flamboyance tempered with a staunchly cheffy and classically-trained firmess and detail. Floyd though, I loved for his portrayal of the only sort of Englishness I'd been able to admire - the sort of enjoyable, cultured, slightly damaged and helpless charm, and above all the knowledge not only of how to have a jolly good time but how to prepare one for others. I remember promising my 13-year-old self that I too, on my 40th birthday, would crack my way through 40 fat oysters, just as Keith had. You watch - only 8 years to go.

So the passing of the second one (Carrier died in 2006) makes me realise that most of the people in the culinary world who I most admire are dead (these two along with MFK Fisher and Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin). This makes me feel old.

Added to this, the Kiwi and I are about to move into a house on Tuesday, a house which we, thanks to the munificence of a local bank, own. Although this is a truly terrifying thought, I'm excited enough about the prospect to make up for it - far from making me feel grown up, it makes me resent that cash paid out ever month for rent a bit less; now it's a mortgage payment it's actually going somewhere sensible for a change. Aged 32, it's about time.

And so, in honour of Mr Floyd, whom everyone I've ever cooked for should thank (or curse, depending on how well I did on that occasion), I'll be raising a glass this evening. He did a huge amount for food culture in the UK, but more importantly for me, he helped show me that a carefully-prepared meal, of good ingredients, can lift you out of your day-to-day life and into somewhere very special indeed.

Snow, hard work again, honeymoon

Our last holiday until our honeymoon has just happened, and as most of you will already know from emails, Facebook and Twitter, it was an incredible four days spent at Mount Ruapehu, snowboarding, eating, drinking, snowboarding, and generally not being at work. This last bit was good, as it's been a fairly intense three months (only three months!!) and I was beginning to fear a little bit of burnout approaching.

So, for those of you who're not in New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu is an active volcano in the North Island, about four and a half hours' drive from Auckland on a good day. We were boarding at Turoa, and staying in Ohakune, about 20 minutes' drive down the hill and a genuinely lovely little town. The mountain's profile might be recognisable to some as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings - it's more covered in snowboarders in real life.

To save a bit of time, we headed to Hamilton on Wednesday night, to stay with the Kiwi's sister and other half, which shortened the morning's drive by an hour or so and provided a great lasagne courtesy of the younger Kiwi. Stupidly early on Thursday we headed south, and some time after breakfast we could spot the mountain in the distance. We were on the hill by mid-morning, my initial nerves about having forgotten how to do it long gone by the end of the first run. That said, it was only December we were in Whistler.

Thursday was good - Friday was better. The snow was some of the best I've seen in all my three snowboarding trips; as good as Whistler at its best. They'd had 10cm on the Wednesday, and the perfect balance of clear, sunny days, cool temperatures and cold nights ensured it stayed deep and soft until we left. Saturday was good, but busy - obviously word had spread and the world and his dog had made the trip to the mountain. Sunday we managed a good breakfast before making an unhurried journey back home through stunning scenery.

Work, which we temporarily escaped, is intense. I can't speak for the Kiwi, although I know she's mentally busy, but for my part the pace and strain are fantastic. I've just convinced the business to hire another member of staff to support me, which should help, and with another project workstream about to kick off I'll need it, I think. Development is moving slowly even so, which is a bit of a concern as I'm burning through my credibility with every extra dollar I spend without showing a result. Hopefully I've built up enough of it to last another six weeks or so.

As for the last point - we have booked our honeymoon finally. Torn between heading from a southern hemisphere summer to the UK in February, and going to a beach not far from here, we chose the latter. We're going to Aitutaki, a tiny island north of Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. Following a long time without any time off, and a wedding to boot, I think a week spent on a beach doing as close to nothing as possible will be just the thing.

Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.

Home Sweet Home

Although I've been a bit slack in terms of blogging recently, I'd hoped to be able to document the house-buying process as it unfolded, outlining the ups and downs, the excitement and disappointment etc etc etc. Unfortunately for the content of this blog, we've just bought one.

We've been going through open homes for a while now, traipsing through other peoples' houses several times a weekend, nosing through closets and tutting at wallpaper, diligently leaving our shoes at the door. Last weekend, we went to a few more, including one place in Point Chevalier which was a bit of a departure for us. Being naive foreigners (the Kiwi counts as a foreigner, having as much experience of housebuying in Auckland as I do), we'd been looking for one of the lovely old villas they have round here. Most of them have been done up to one standard or another, but in reality they're all 70+ years old and held together with plaster and old wallpaper paste in the main.

You can overlook all this to a degree, as most of them really are lovely houses. However, when you talk to someone who lives in one, words like draughty, cold, damp, money pit, mould and pleaseletmeliveinamodernhouse start to come out, so we thought we'd take a chance and look at a recently built place.

On Monday our offer was accepted:


It's a three-bedroomed free-standing place over two floors, with a little garden and a deck (just behind the fence on the left of the photo). The couple selling it are moving north of the harbour with their new baby, and have kept the place beautifully. Brilliantly, the HRV system they've installed keeps the house both warm and dry more or less all the time, something which I've come to see the value of during the cold, damp Auckland winter.

So there's one more stage of paperwork to get through, and with luck our offer will go unconditional on Monday. We'll be in by the end of September, having given the vendors a bit of time to find a new place of their own as we're in no desperate hurry to move. On that note, it's amazing to notice how much simpler and friendlier the New Zealand purchase process is than the English one. I say English advisedly, as I'm told that north of the border things are again simpler. There's no gazumping, no massive stress over completion and exchange dates. There are penalties levied if the agreed move-in date isn't kept to, and the party at fault is charged. The estate agent pretty much does the lot for you.

Your fiancée does a fair bit too, apparently. It's obviously hard work, as this (Saturday) morning she's looking very tired indeed and was quite incoherent when she got home this morning. Poor thing.

More on this as we get it. Today involves meeting a friend from the UK, who now lives in Melbourne, at the airport and pootling round Auckland for the rest of the day, which should be pleasant as it's beautifully sunny outside and the city will be sparkling and shining by the harbour. It might even be an opportunity to take the top down...

So how's it going?

So I've been blogging (rarely) about stuff that's going on here, but I'm not sure (and can't be bothered checking) that I've actually mentioned anything about how it's feeling. So I thought I should try. Now, a recent Myers-Briggs test showed that by quite a long shot, I'm 'Thinking' rather than 'Feeling', so this could be a bit of a challenge.

It's been just over six months since we arrived in New Zealand, and over seven since we left London. It really doesn't seem that long. In that time, we've moved all our possessions to the other side of the world, acquired cars, bank accounts, jobs, furniture, kitchen stuff, towels and stuff like that. We are now looking for a house to keep it all in.

Funnily enough, just when I think I'm getting round to be able to answer the question, people have stopped asking us if we've settled in ok. Settling in is a process, and I think we're definitely moving through it comfortably enough.

I rant a lot about things I don't like - this is just part of me. This means it can seem though, that I'm generally unhappy with my lot, but this isn't really the case. I could go on for hours about the superficial good things and not-so-good things about living here, but realistically they don't add up to more or less than anywhere else. Good pies / dodgy road rules. Positive working culture / stupidly expensive dairy produce. You know the sort of conversation - the sort of phatic communion* that forms 80% of human conversation. More, probably.

I am happy here. Happy-er than I was before we left, in many ways. I miss people very much, family, old friends, colleagues who've become close friends - lots of people. I miss meeting people on Sundays in the pub that you could get to without driving. But on the other hand, there's email, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Facebook - all helping those people seem a little less distant. The pub I can live without to an extent - and my bank balance thanks me for that.

I like having our own television. Watching it whilst sitting on our own sofa. Working with people who do what they say they'll do, and who're genuinely open to change. Leaving the office at a reasonable time and getting home to enjoy the rest of the day. I like that Auckland is such a beautiful city, and I like even more that no one here seems to realise that. I like that we have plans in place, that we know what we want out of our immediate lives and that we're taking steps to get there. That feels pretty good.

So yes - it's going well, on the whole. Very well.





* I've been looking for an opportunity to use this phrase for a while now. Score!

Vic Chesnutt, Kings Arms Tavern, 4 July 2009

Whilst working at Virgin Digital many years ago, my colleague Mark passed me an unmarked CD, and said 'play this - it's going to be massive'. The track started with a donk-donk-donk-donk that would become terribly familiar over the coming year as Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy', a track which I still rather like despite having heard it over a gazillion times. It's a bit bittersweet actually, as I remember the conversation with our PR company the day after the track was released. Being the first digital-only single to be chart elegible (I think... something like that anyway) they were keen to make a big song and dance over our day one sales. Asked for the number, I said 'Thirty-two'. '32 thousand? Brilliant news, I'll get the release out'. 'No mate. Thirty-two.'

How depressing. The track went on to deliver about 31,000 digital sales in the UK that week, of which we did, um, about fifty.

Anyway, moving to the nub of this post, earlier this year, one half of Gnarls (Dangermouse) hooked up with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and David Lynch, on a project known as 'Dark Night of the Soul'. This was to be a bit of a masterpiece, with a 100-page booklet featuring Lynch's photography, numerous guest spots and Dangermouse's trademark unorthodox, brilliant production.

One dispute with the record label later, and the album was put out, minus the actual audio content. Contained within the box was a blank CD, with a bit of text exhorting the user to 'use the CD as they saw fit'. The subtext here, naturally, was that they'd leaked the content online and an enterprising fan could easily find it. I may have done. And it's a great album.

The final two tracks feature one Vic Chesnutt, about whom you can read more here, but suffice it to say that he's seen as a bit of a legend in some parts. As a songwriter he's intelligent, emotive and darkly humourous, as a performer that gallows humour comes across even more strongly. So when I noticed he was touring New Zealand and playing in Auckland this weekend I grabbed a pair of tickets.

So into the largely empty venue we walked at about quarter to nine. We got drinks, settled against a wall at the back (no seats in this place). A few more punters filtered in as the support cranked his way through a few fairly hackneyed tracks. A couple of people came in towards the end of his set - one in a wheelchair (Chesnutt is paraplegic, easy to spot...), one a short, older lady who looked a bit confused, wearing trademark 'crazy lady' clothes. She wandered around for a bit, conspicuous in the nearly-empty venue, and then got up on the stage. And picked up a guitar. And began some stretches.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Victoria Williams. A bit of a legend in her own right, apparently, and it's fair to say that for portions of her performance I was completely transfixed, and there was a definite musical brilliance going on there throughout. Shambolic, unselfconscious, at times fascinating, but her habit of stopping songs part-way through because she'd forgotten the rest, or constantly detuning and retuning, slipping the beat every few bars and forcing Vic (on drums) to stop and restart, got a bit much. 90 minutes of this though was a challenge, one which as it happens was too much for the Kiwi - she went home.

I'm still in two minds about this. I'd never heard of her prior to this gig, and I'm still not sure whether this was amazing or awful. I suspect it's a perfect mix of both. On the occasions where she found a bit of form and let rip, she was amazing. The initial shambling ineptitude was charming, but rapidly got tiresome.

After all this, Vic (with whom she's been friends for over 20 years, apparently) did his thing, getting an unbelievable sound out of his battered acoustic. He did play one of the Dangermouse tracks (Grim Augury, which stripped of its electronica was startlingly raw and bleak), and for the majority of the show played older stuff and audience requests. In such an intimate venue (which had filled a bit by now), his style came across fantastically; personal, human and warm whilst at the same time searingly emotional.

What really threw all this into perspective for me though was the car ride home. After nearly three hours of emotionally intelligent, personal, richly descriptive music performed in a variety of unique ways, the noise that vomited out of the car radio was just too much and had to be turned off. Overproduced, sterile, facile and sickeningly meaningless. Some genres make a virtue of this and that I applaud, but when it's glossy synthetics masquerading as indie pop I just can't take it.

So on reflection, I'm really glad I went. Challenging, yes. But so very, very good. Don't know if I could do it every week though. Fortunately in Auckland that's not much of a likelihood.

About the bread

It's been a bad few weeks for bread. For some reason the last three weekends have produced really dodgy loaves, weirdly rubbery and a bit moist, heavy on the bottom and ridiculously over-aerated at the top. Not nice at all - one particularly bad one wasn't even good enough for toast.

So, remedial action. I'd noticed that the dough, which is normally quite loose in this recipe, had been getting more and more liquid, up to the point where it was really more of a batter, and was behaving a bit like crumpet batter at that. So towards the end of last week, I woke my starter up, poured off some of the goopy liquid that was collecting on the top, and fed it with a much more flour-heavy feed than usual. One more chunky feed later and the weekend's baking could start. Again, I added a bit more flour than the recipe demanded.

The most important thing I did was to use the right amount of starter in the initial rise. I'd been using double the amount, which was probably the root of my problems.

The result? We're back in the game. A great, fluffy, flavoursome loaf this time, this one almost too good for toast. It did get a bit lively during the second prove, as the following will show:


The dough was pretty powerful - aggressive, one might almost say. Rumours of my starter's demise are greatly exaggerated :)

How is it nearly JULY already?

I promise this won't be a monthly thing - constantly harping on about the way time seems to be speeding up, when all along we know it's all part of the theory of relativity; the each passing month and year being, relatively speaking, a smaller part of the whole thing.

Anyway, things do seem to be going rather quickly. Like when, during a meeting with a mortgage advisor (another story...) this evening I said I'd been working for four weeks. The Kiwi corrected me with the actual story - six. Six weeks of brain-melting, mind-bending getting my head around not only the wacky world of insurance but a rather labyrinthine group of companies to boot. It's a weird one - a massive mental challenge in understanding stuff, but comparatively little in the way of stuff to, like, do. Still, I'm keeping myself busy by making outlandish promises and then struggling to keep up with them, usual story.

In other news, we have a dining room table! This is a bigger deal than it perhaps sounds, but I'll not go into the detail. Trust me, it's changed our lives. Eating sitting at a table still feels like a bit of a luxury. That, and being able to go places without cadging a lift off the Kiwi or ruining yet another pair of shoes. The car is turning out to be a lot of fun, something to look forward to at the end of the day. It's in the garage at the moment having its wheel alignment done, which I'm hoping will correct a little niggle it's been having lately where the power steering gets a bit twitchy.

Here's a thing for all of you back in the land of sensible driving: the New Zealanders are well known for their love of adrenalin sports, being the No.1 place in the world for life-threatening leisure pursuits. This extends to driving, apparently, with a road rule (A RULE!) which says that if you're turning right into a road, and an oncoming car is turning left into the same road, the oncoming car has to give way. They sort of slow down and tuck their car into the kerb, whilst you wait to see if they actually are stopping or not, and they keep moving because they don't know whether you're going to turn ahead of them or not, and then you both step on it at the same time and narrowly avoid a collision with either the car in question or one of the many which get bored of waiting and swerve around you both. This rule appears to be designed to make even the simplest manoevre something which gets the heart pumping and the adrenalin flowing. I'm not keen on it, as you might have guessed.

Other than that, not a lot's been going on. We work, we cook, we sleep. And it's brilliant.

How is it JUNE already?

Seriously, I turn around for five minutes and half the year's gone - is this what getting old's all about? A gentle nudge from my sister reminded me yesterday that I'd not actually posted anything in quite some time, let alone anything that wasn't about baking, so here we are - another post which might not be all about breadmaking.

Work has been taking up an indecent amount of my time lately, as I seem to remember it doing back in 2008, and on the whole things seem to be going well. The pace is somewhat slower than I'm used to, so on the one hand I can seem reasonably dynamic without too much effort, and on the other the stress levels probably aren't as high. The Kiwi, on the other hand, seems to spend her entire day moving at 100kph, so we're in slightly different zones for an hour or so once we get home.

What I'm doing at the moment isn't really for discussion this openly, but suffice it to say we're making some very definite plans to move forward, taking overall company strategy and working out ways to implement it in some hopefully market-changing ways. If my plans come together, all should become clear. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I bought a car today - my first one ever (aged 31). Living either in Manchester or London, both places with pretty good public transport networks, I've never really needed a car more than four or five times a year, so renting has always been good enough. However, living in Auckland, not having a car basically means you either remain confined to a walking distance around your house (during which you will get rained on), or put yourself at the mercy of public transport, which effectively means you will probably get where you want to go, but probably not before the moon has gone once around the earth.

So, and I know precisely who's going to take the piss at this point, I bought this:

Quite simply, I have always wanted a sports car. On the shopping list for me were the following:

• Engine in the back
• Two seats
• Roof that comes off

... and this little Toyota ticks all those boxes (even if it is technically mid-engined) and fits neatly into my price bracket. Whilst it's only a 1.8L, it weighs about as much as a matchbox and thus manages to be quite, um, quick, whilst the proportions make it superbly balanced. I drove four of them yesterday and any lingering doubt that I was doing the right thing went right out of the window. So, provided it passes its AA inspection next week, it will be mine before the weekend.

It has a frankly hilarious storage ability, about enough room for an overnight bag and a pork pie, but that's part of its charm, I reckon. Anyway, it's my first car. Forgive me for getting a bit gushy about it.

On the bread front (and I couldn't write a post without it), I've been baking every weekend, with the exception of the one we went away for recently (to Mount Maunganui, by the seaside). The bread's getting steadily better, with the flavour deepening and mellowing, and the texture getting more relaxed and open. I have two loaves proving right now in fact, basking in the glow of our electric heater along with the Kiwi. It's cold here at the moment, cold and sunny, and our electric heater, oil-filled heater and dehumidifier have been working overtime. Can't wait to see our power bill for this month...

Second sourdough batch

Before I begin, let me put your mind at ease - although I do intend to bake a couple of sourdough loaves every weekend, I'm not going to blog about each of them in turn. I thought I'd mention this week's as we're still in the early days of the process and the first one of this batch turned out a little odd.

I bought a new loaf tin this week, so I can bake two at once, instead of having to spend literally the whole weekend with something either baking or proving. This one's actually a little slimmer than the other, so it's producing a taller loaf. I've noticed that the base of this loaf turned out completely solid for about a centimetre up, which I'm putting down to there being too much dough in the tin - it would've risen past the top during the second prove if there hadn't been a teatowel covering it. I'm thinking that the weight of the dough on top flattened out the base a bit during this prove, possibly - the top was also unusually flat, so it didn't seem to rise much in the oven.

The texture on the whole is still looking good; getting more open still, and still nicely elastic. I'm a bit concerned about what seems to be a slightly moist, rubbery quality to it, which I'm putting down to fractional underbaking. Cooler for longer next weekend, I think, this could be me needing to get to grips with my oven. Flavour-wise I think I'm onto something good here, the sourness is really coming out now and the bread has a big, full flavour right through the crust. It's gaining character.

This far it's being mainly used for morning toast, and to accompany cheese. I may start attempting sandwiches with it at some point but I have yet to see what my new job's lunch arrangement is, so we'll see if it's worth bothering before going down that path. There's talk of a wine, cheese and bread event going on at our local wine merchant, so I need to get my bread in shape for that - there's some serious amateur bakers attending and I don't want to be shown up!

First loaves!

It's been a month or so in gestation, but my sourdough starter came of age this weekend. Hoping that it was finally stable, I made a couple of loaves out of it. Things seemed to go well, so I've stopped feeding it and it lives in the fridge now, instead of the sunny spots in the living room. The whole process to date has been about building a yeast colony which is stable - as you may remember from earlier posts, in the early days it changed appearance and smell quite frequently as the yeasts and various bacteria etc tried to reach equilibrium. Over the past week, it's been fairly unchanging, so I'm assuming that's proof of stability.

So, two loaves this weekend. I only have one loaf tin at the moment, so I'm making them in sequence rather than in parallel. Fortunately that gave me a bit of opportunity to make some changes to the second one. So here's the first:


Not a bad start, I reckon. It's a bit wonky, which doesn't really come across in the photo, but the texture is good, nice and elastic if a little less open than I was expecting. The crust is good too, and the flavour's typically sour, with a good depth and a nice, rounded fruity hint. I'm not happy that it split so much, and how lopsided the top is. A bit of research suggests this might be due to an overly speedy prove.

And so here's the second one - a much better shape, possibly due to an extra hour on the second prove. It got right up to the top of the tin this time (the first one fell a little short) before it went in the oven, so I think I need to benchmark it right there. This probably helped the shape too.


So there we go. I'm going to aim to do this every weekend (although I'll be getting a second bread tin, you mark my words), as it's not that much of a hassle. Friday night, combine starter, flour and water, feed the original starter. Saturday morning, beat in more flour and a bit of salt. Five or six hours later, bake. By my reckoning, excepting electricity charges, two loaves of sourdough a week should cost me about $2.30ish for the flour.

Still need to work on that shape though. Will be interesting to see how the flavour develops as the starter matures.

Excuses, excuses...

I've just noticed that the cheesy little Nike+ widget in the right-hand bar on this page is gently making fun of the fact that I've not been for a run in a while. The truth is that I have, but my Nike+ sensor has run out, so I need to buy a new one, which won't happen until I get paid. I'm still putting 50k a month in, don't you worry, it's just not being recorded.

Honest.

Brilliant

The waiting is over - this week I agreed terms with an employer, and I start work on the 19th May. After five months of not working, this is an overwhelming relief. We're not entirely out of the woods yet though, as there are bills to be paid at the end of this month which my pro-rated pay won't cover, but hopefully a client for whom I've been doing a little work back in the UK will actually bother to pay me for it at some point during this month.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much being unemployed had affected me. Friends of mine have told me in the past that my job (whatever it was at the time) was always far too important to me, and it's true to an extent that my sense of self-worth is entirely wrapped up in what I do for a living. So to be out of work, to me, is to have no social worth. Entertainingly, I don't view other people like this - this rule only applies to me, you understand. The Kiwi and I had a celebratory curry on Thursday night and I realised that I was smiling properly for the first time in ages; smiling with total happiness, without that lurking feeling that had been telling me up to this point that, until I had a job, I had nothing to smile about.

So I suppose there should be a learning experience here in finding self-worth in places other than the workplace, but I suspect I'll not really take it on board. This is the usual way of things.

And what of the job? Well, suffice it to say it's in the insurance industry, and involves me forming and implementing a strategy for the online channel. Currently the online arm of the business is... me, but over time it'll need to grow. The main challenge in moving a mainly offline business to a true multi-channel one is predominantly a cultural one, and although the top level of this organisation is open to the concept, it'll be convincing the troops that'll be the 'pushing water uphill' element of this particular engagement, I suspect.

I'm going to remain coy in this forum about who it is, so I can be reasonably open about how it's going, but most of you probably know. Very excited about starting indeed, they're a good bunch of people from what I can see, with a very clear and pragmatic view on the next steps for their business. Prior to that, though, I have a week of genuine holiday to get through, so with that, it's back to my baking... on which more later!

How to stretch a chicken

Today, I made chicken stock for the first time in ages. There's something very ritualistic and soothing about doing this, the preparation, the slow simmering, the straining and the portioning out into 500ml portions to freeze. If you have a freezer and a stove, and you don't make your own stock, you're cheating yourself out of the one thing that'll make your cooking taste really, really good. With no freezer in our rented flat in London, I've been grimacing at powdered stock in food for too long now.

Although the Kiwi now has a job (yay!), we're still very much on a budget, so I thought I'd see if I could stretch the bird a little further than normal. When I jointed it for the stock, I peeled the breasts off with the peg-bone attached (a supreme, I believe), and jointed the rest for the stock pan. These, once marinated in sumac, lemon, pomegranate molasses, garlic and thyme and olive oil for a while, were served on a bed of couscous for dinner tonight.

The stock, once simmered for three and a half hours, was strained, and whilst I would normally have chucked the resultant sieve-full of veg and chicken bits away, I took out the chicken pieces and whizzed the veg in the blender with a little stock to loosen it. Chopped and bones and gristle removed, the chicken went back into the mix. With a bit of seasoning and possibly some cumin, this will be tomorrow's lunch. Granted, most of the flavour in the pan went into the stock itself, and so the soup is a little less punchy than I'm used to, but needs must.

Tomorrow evening's dinner will be paella. The depth of the flavour will come from the stock absorbed by the rice grains, and the prawns and squid rings cooked in it. Two blocks of stock are also in the freezer, to be used at some point in the future. By my reckoning, that's three meals for two, plus the two more I'll get out of the frozen stock. Quite pleased with myself, I am.

Oh, and this weekend, if the starter's up to it, I'll bake my first sourdough loaf!

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.