Feb 1 2011

Homemade Sausage Sausage Dog

Greg

2011 – the year of the sausage! or so it seems. Having received a sausage stuffing machine for Christmas, I spent most of my January weekends making sausages. The Sausage Sausage dog is the sequel to our Dalek Bread in our food with silly names series.

Sausage making is great fun, like all good hobbies it’s easy to pick up but difficult to master. Homemade sausages are easily more tasty than the cheap supermarket ones, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to make ones as nice as our local butcher.

The sausage sausage dog came from my third attempt, my first at a fancy sausage, namely pork and apple. These were much better than the first two tries earlier in the monnth, I had a better idea of the required consistency and soaking the meat for 24 hour in apple juice surely helped as well.

My guide through what i can legitimately call a sausage fest has been
The Sausge Book by Paul Peacock an excellant book that explains an awful lot (even how to twist and bunch them up). The skins I’ve been using are from this eBay store.

More Sausage making pictures can be seen in this flickr set. Sadly, things didn’t end well for the sausage sausage dog, he died due to a fatal frying pan related incident the following morning, just before breakfast :)


Nov 30 2010

Ultimate Chocolate Advent Calendar

Greg

Ultimate Chocolate Advent Calendar

My wife likes chocolate yet she never wants an advent calendar, so I decided to make her the ultimate chocolate advent calendar.

Materials

  • 22 x standard bars of Cadbury’s dairy milk
  • 1 x medium sized bar (her birthday is on the 4th of December)
  • 1 x 1kg bar of dairy milk
  • Tinsel
  • 4′x2′ sheet of mdf
  • Hot glue
  • Sticky foam pads
  • Sticky bows
  • Silver spray paint
  • Sticky Shiny Numbers 1-24

The MDF sheet was spray painted silver and tinsel hot glued around the edge for decoration. Each small had 2 sticky pads stuck to the back and a square of purple card with the appropiate number stuck to the front. The kilogram bar had several sheets of sticky pads and 2 sticks of hot glue to hold it on.

Construction time was about 3 hours (an awful lot of sticky pad peeling was involved) with an hour or so of that waiting for the paint to dry.

My Wife loved it (it was after all mostly chocolate) and has a few jealous friends who have to make do with the a standard advent calendar.

More photos on Flickr


Jul 13 2010

Mushroom Cloning – Part 1

Owen

Oyster mushroom clone

9 days of growth

I’ve begun some experiments in mushroom growing recently. My first step is trying to clone supermarket bought gourmet mushrooms, such as Oyster and Shiitake.

The main motivation behind this started out as an effort to save money, but as is often the case with these things, I’ll probably end up spending way more than I can hope to save on various bits of equipment and massive cock-ups. Either way, I’ll be documenting my progress here.

Continue reading


Jan 1 2010

Dalek Bread

Greg

Exterminate!Ever Noticed that ‘Garlic’ and ‘Dalek’ sound the same? I have!. One is a close relation to an onion and official deodoriser of the French, the other is grotesque mutated organism integrated with a tank-like mechanical casing made of “dalekenium”. All these similarities (yes, all of them) got me thinking, maybe we could somehow fuse xenophobic killer mutants-in-a-box with dough and create…wait for it… Dalek Bread. Lets begin. Continue reading