The Write Stuff

Pack ready, a few lessons from the Camino Portuguese, managed to get the pack down to a bit over 3kg since 2 years ago with @luishntattoo and @flavioamiel Bom camino!

No idea how they got here but it looks like I've got some barley randomly growing in my garden! I'm kind of wondering whether to preserve the seeds and sow them in a small patch next year, then do the same till I get enough to malt for a batch of beer. Commercial yield is about 600g/m2, so I'd need 10m2 to even think about it. Anybody got a bit of allotment space free in a few years?!

Simple and quick chicken shoyu tonight. Medium boiled eggs, purslane, sous vide pork belly and noodles both from the freezer. Decoration spring onions and borage, seasoning soy and chicken amino.

Pork and chicken broth ramen for home date night tonight. That's sous vide chasu pork belly, with homegrown komatsuna (a great, easy grow green leaf veg), steamed and seasoned with soy, sesame oil and seeds, ajitsume tamago (soy and sugar cured egg), homemade ramen noodles. Broth was a bit low on fat so I blended it with some garlic infused pork fat, and some rendered chicken fat to make it a bit more like a tonkotsu broth. Topped with chili and allium infused oil, black garlic oil and Spring onions from the garden. This may look like it took ages, it kind of collectively did, but not today.

Cheese unveil. This is a washed-rind aged ricotta, which isn't really a thing, just something I made. Ricotta isn't usually aged due to the fact that most of the bugs and enzymes are killed due to it being nearly boiled. However, I wanted to try it, and added some back in after the curds had cooled down. I also ended up washing with some brined whey, basically brushing some on during the early ageing process.

Holy hell batman that's a lot of dandelion root! Pull this up from my neglected "wild flower" lawn the last few days, question is whether it's worth bothering to clean and process for er, what? Anybody used this for coffee, tea, wine? Is it gonna be worth an hour of my time?!