We’re going away for six months on a long break with sixteen month Camilla in tow. Here’s a map of where we are going:
View USA Road Trip in a larger map
If you would like to follow us on our voyages then the main blog is Prisky Adventures
Filed under Travel - No Comments »My computer at work has decided to give up after a couple of years of faithful but not always reliable service. While backing up everything I found some files which turned out to be a diary I kept on my mobile while traveling. The trip in question was a month long journey to England, Paris, Portugal and Spain but I only started writing on the last week and a bit before the trip was over. Obviously a little tired and cranky given some of the comments. So here I present my writings, along with some photos and commentary. The commentary is there because two years worth of reflection helps mellow the mind.
Sintra is what I imagine Campos Do Jordao is like in Brazil from the descriptions Priscilla’s family have given me. However, Sintra is the most expensive tourist trap ever – €4.50 for a return bus ticket up a hill. To enter the palace we are going to is €11. I brought 40 with me and thought we’d never spend it…
The place is beautiful though, like the jenolan caves but with palaces and gardens everywhere. I can understand why it attracted the rich and powerful for thousands of years.
Unfortunately I suffer from the same affliction many Australians do and that is I believe that every country should be cheaper than Australia. Much, much cheaper. It doesn’t matter where you are and sometimes even how much things cost. Quite silly really considering overall Portugal was a lot cheaper than back home.
Went to prado and its free after 6pm on sat. saw goya’s 2nd and 3rd of may paintings. plus so many “famouso” paintings it wasn’t funny.
I appreciate pris’ innocence when it comes to art and almost feel ashamed of my idolatry. I was running around saying which was famous and she was just appreciating what she liked. She simply asked why or who decides a painting Is famous. I answered “the critics of the day and it helps if the artist knows the right people”. A man at the ticket queue before we went in put it quite succinctly … “picasso was sitting at a cafe and a man asked him for some money picasso merely signed a napkin and said something like here’s $ 1000 “.
They sell bread without crust here. Weird. Supermarket was open until 2am. €17 for some bread, cheese, cereal etc. Seems that nowhere in spain or portugal can u get fresh milk. No wonder they are all so short.
Madrid – day 2
Slept in until 11am and ate our supermarket breakfast.
Went to Sophia Reina museum of modern art. Free on Sundays.
So much Picasso and so much proof he was nuts. Look up some of his contemporaries. They look interesting.
the royal palace is another one of a line of royal palaces starting with Versailles that just sicken me…. Especially with the influence of reading the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Roark was right. The rooms in these palaces served no reason. They were simply filled with as much expensive crap as possible. One room in the palace real in Madrid was so bad it had beautiful Chinese tiles on the walls but the ceiling had a renaissance style sky with angels. Pris once again had a beautifully simple answer to it “they probably weren’t into minimalism”. I just felt they were like the neuvo riche of today. No idea what to do with their money. also symbolized in their armour. Rooms full of ceremonial and jousting armour never to be used for a practical purpose. Most made well after the gun. Its a pity no photos were allowed.
Went to plaza Espana and saw Edificio de Espana and saw Torres de Madrid. Look these up as they looked quite old but were very tall for Europe… 20 stories plus.
Ate the biggest plate of calamari ever. €9 – must remember to say “Media Ratione” in future.
More to follow when I have the time to put up more.
It’s the break between Christmas and New Year in Sydney and despite average highs reaching the high twenties or even early thirties we had a cool day. Having withdrawals from brewing I had to take a chance despite the forecast for the next few days soaring back into the high twenties.
This beer partly came about because I was running low on ingredients and partly inspired by the malt forward taste of Marston’s IPA. I found Marston’s quite mild hop wise, which is good, because I think I’m sick of drowning my beers in hops.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »White Rabbit Dark Ale
It’s close to my Black IPA but lighter in colour, hops and alcohol. So should be easy to do and taste just as good.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »I have to start this recipe by firstly admitting that I have never tasted a cream ale – so I will have no idea whether I got it right or not. They’re a fairly rare beer in terms of commercial varieties and none of the Australian boutique bottle shops seem to stock any. Not even slowbeer.com.au.
I also decided to make it because I was doing some late night home brew shopping online and came across flaked maize. Wondering why anyone would use such an ingredient in home brew I felt I must take up the challenge of trying it. Little did I realise there are only two real styles that ask for it (unless you count American piss lager). Cream ale and a few ESB recipes, and I get the feeling the ESB recipes only ask for it because a lot of them ask for everything, including the kitchen sink.
You can read all about the style guidelines on the BJCP’s site but essentially cream ale is an ale version of an american lager. Low on malt and hops, a large percentage of the sugars come from corn, in the form of flaked maize or from corn based sugar products such as dextrose.
It should be fermented at low temperatures and lagered. Unfortunately it’s both October in Sydney with an average temperature in the early twenties and I have no fridge to lager in so I’m hoping it still turns out ok.
Steep grains in 3 litres at 70c for 60 mins and sparge with 4 litres of water at 70c.
Bring to boil and stir in 500 grams of dry malt extract to help isomerise the hops.
40 grams hallertau AA 5.9% 60 mins
25 grams saaz 15 mins (AA 3.5%)
Teaspoon of Irish moss at 15 mins
15 grams saaz 1 min
10 grams hallertau 1 min
Some time during the boil the dextrose can be added. Where is not important. As soon as the flame goes out add the liquid malt extract tin. One issue with adding the liquid malt extract so late was that with the aggressive cooling of the wort employed there was a thick layer of extract left on the bottom of the kettle. After the majority of the wort was poured into the fermenter there was a need to pour some hot water into the bottom of the kettle to mix up the remaining extract to be poured out. Hopefully no contamination made it in.
Original gravity was 1048 and the sample and at 73 – 77% efficiency the final gravity should turn out around 1012 but given the high ratio of straight up sugars and corn products which I’m hoping for closer to 1006 which will be the lowest final gravity of any of my brews so far.
Luckily for this brew Sydney decided to have a cool Spring. Most of the fermentation was done in temperatures below 22 degrees celsius which seems to be important to the cream ale style. One week in the primary and a healthy yeast cake had developed. The beer was transferred into the secondary and so far has been in there for a week.
After an unintentionally long eight week conditioning in the secondary (who knew having a baby was so hard) the remaining 17 litres were bottled with 150 grams of dextrose. Unfortunately by then the weather had warmed up so the small fermentation that happens to carbonate the beer won’t be under the most favourable conditions but I don’t expect an impact on flavour.
A week after being bottled the beer is not highly carbonated yet and does have some residual sweetness but I’m quite happy. The first question you may have while reading off the ingredients list is: Does it taste of corn? The answer is, no.
It’s a light beer that still tastes distinctly like an ale but much less heavy, fruity and sweet than most ales. It’s quite bitter and as expected from the hop schedule it has a very distinct saaz taste. There is a tiny hint of oxidisation, no doubt from the eight weeks in the secondary. Colour and clarity are still the same as the picture of the sample above. Lemon with a hint of gold and fairly cloudy. It should make a nice sessional drop when it’s had a little time to bottle mature.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »I’ve been to Rome once and even though I spent three out of the five days I was there in our hotel room with an acute case of food poisoning hoping to whichever god I could think of that I could be put out of my misery I was impressed with their pizza. So much so when I got back to Sydney I wanted to open a pizza shop. “Rome by the slice” I think it was to be called.
The thin, delicate nature of the crust and the commitment to the pizza gods that they will not sway from the code of the brotherhood of the Roman pizza by putting more than one or two toppings on it. All I could do once I could actually keep them down was to eat more and more pizza. One style in particular, the mushroom pizza – probably made with porcini really stuck with me.
This style of pizza is very hard to find in a country like Australia, which like the US tends to measure the worth of a pizza by the number of toppings and the amount of cheese that is slathered on top. So I present my version of the Roman mushroom pizza, with prosciutto in this case but it is just as tasty with or without.
Dough
Making the dough yourself is a must. Pre bought bases are just not as good and besides, it’s very easy.
Ingredients
There’s no set rule to the amounts used to make the pizza base. It all depends on how much you need to make.
Add the yeast and sugar to a glass of warm water and let it sit for 15 minutes. This will activate the yeast. Place flour, salt and olive oil in a bowl and when the yeast and water mixture is ready slowly add and mix until you end up with a sticky mixture.
You will then need to knead and beat this mixture to activate the gluten. This will make the dough elastic and after a good ten minutes of this when pulled it should not tear. If it is sticky add more flour. If it tears add more water. Either way keep kneading for another five minutes.
Once that’s done cover the dough and leave it somewhere warm for a couple of hours to let it rise.
Topping
With the mushrooms we are trying to emulate a full porcini mushroom using cheaper local mushrooms and dried porcini. Of course if you live in a country where you can buy fresh porcini then please do use them.
Pour approximately half a cup of boiling water over dried porcini mushrooms. If they aren’t swimming in it add more until they are. Then add a dash of salt, pepper and a teaspoon or two of crushed garlic. Leave this mixture to marinate for a couple of hours.
When the porcini “soup” is ready slice up your regular mushrooms thinly and fry them for a couple of minutes in a couple of teaspoons of olive oil. When the mushrooms have softened up throw in the porcini soup and simmer for a few more minutes. Remove the mushrooms and continue simmering the soup until you end up with a nice condensed mushroom consume. Save it for later.
I like to prebake the pizza base on my pizza stone. To do this pre heat your oven to around 180c or 200c for a fan forced oven. Place the pizza base on the stone and cook for about ten minutes or until it starts to go slightly golden. Remove the base once pre-cooked and place toppings.
For a prosciutto and mushroom pizza a tomato sauce is employed but for the purely mushroom pizza just brush the base with olive oil. Place the mushroom generously on top and then add thinly sliced layers of prosciutto. Cover with a thin layer of shaved parmesan and another thin layer of mozarella. Bake until golden.
For a mushroom only pizza we just smother the pizza base with some garlic and olive oil then place the mushrooms on top followed by a generous layer of parmesan and then mozarella.
This has to be amongst the tastiest of pizzas I have ever had. The medley of dried porcini mushrooms, swiss mushrooms, garlic, salt, pepper and thyme have created a flavour sensation. Combined with the bite of parmesan cheese it’s a perfect mix.
Pizza is notoriously difficult to photograph with all sorts of tricks employed to make the pizza look as tasty and as fresh as possible. In my case as you can no doubt see, I didn’t fair much better than your average happy snapper. The important part is that the pizza tasted good.
Filed under Food - 2 Comments »The second India Black Ale I made was an outstanding success both for myself and importantly a hit with others. So much so 25 bottles of it went within a couple of weeks. So I decided to make it again but try a few of my new tricks – partial mashing, gypsum for intense hop flavour and late extract addition. Of course I thought I’d try hop it up a bit more which, because of the late extract additions and gypsum, isn’t actually necessary. The hop flavour is intensified through these two process changes. As a result there’ll be about the same weight of hops but the total alpha acids in the hop bill will surpass the last IBA.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »This one started off as a Little Creatures Bright Ale (LCBA) clone then I realised that the Saaz B hops in LCBA are nothing like Saaz hops which were the only Saazl I had so I decided to explore a little. This batch will be my first real mini-mash with over a kilo worth of grains being used, plus I’ll use late extract addition again in an attempt to make a very pale ale. It follows no known style but maybe this could be the start of a new one.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »With this recipe I was trying to emulate your typical English pub bitter. Amber in colour, quite bitter and caramel tasting but without any burnt notes. They always seem to have a wonderful fruity bouquet so dry hopping will be employed once again.
There are two new tricks I used with this one though. The first is that I’m using Gypsum (calcium sulfate) in an attempt to Burtonise the brewing water. I know it’s all very un-scientific but I’m hoping the addition at least helps bring out the flavours a little better than plain old Sydney water. The second trick I’m trying is late extract addition. Normally when you add most of your base malt through extract the DME or LME will get scorched and caramelise giving a nice but not always desirable smokey toffee flavour. In this recipe I added only half the LME to the boil and added the rest of the sugars at the end of the boil. It had the desired effect of lightening the beer, maybe too light as this wort was almost yellow.
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »I first attempted an India Black Ale long before I knew other home brewers had made an actual style out of it. My India Black Ale (IBA) or dark IPA was a failure, well at least in that it turned out to be a beautiful amber colour. It tasted fantastic though. Back then I was naive and believed I could affect the colour of a kit beer by adding some raw sugar to the mix. Since then I’ve started extract and mini-mash brewing which has allowed me to experiment with the colours different grains can give beers – like my Red Ale, which was effectively a British bitter with some dark grains thrown in. Very tasty and very close to red. (more)
Filed under homebrew - No Comments »Twitter links powered by Tweet This v1.8.1, a WordPress plugin for Twitter.