Cooking For One Or More - Lamb Red Wine Roast

Take a small rolled shoulder joint and place it in a suitable porcelain oven dish.

Stab or slice into the top of the lamb and push chopped garlic into the holes you've made.

Liberally cover with herbs, seeds, and corns to suit your taste and then pour over around 250 ml of a rich red wine. I used a nice Malbec, ground mustard seed, rosemary, thyme, ground szechuan peppercorns, and a sprinkling of garlic salt and chilli powder.

Cover with foil and leave on a low heat (Gas mark 1) for a couple of hours, this allows the wine time to soak up some of the fat and seasoning while keeping the meat moist.

Up the heat (gas mark 6 or 7) and remove the foil, cook for a further 40 minutes or until browned. The outer layer of garlic, fat, and herbs should crisp up nicely and the wine should reduce down a little.

Make some gravy using the juices in the oven dish. Serve with duck fat roasted maris piper potatoes and some vegetables of your choosing.

The pooch I am currently fostering for a few days went back to check his bowl was actually definitely really absolutely empty three times. I'll take that as a sign of his approval.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 3

I made a new LED strip light for the kitchen.

First I grabbed one of the pieces of wood I've recovered from a recycled pallet and placed a centre mark. From this mark I marked off 2cm intervals. I cut 30 or so short strips of 3 LEDs from an LED ribbon purchased on eBay for a couple of quid. You can find such strips here http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=5050+300+LED+warm+white

I laid each of the small strips out on the piece of wood, removed the backing tape that covers the adhesive, and stuck them down using a fingernail to apply pressure around the edges.

Each strip of three LEDs has a positive and negative connection at each end of the strip. The intention was to connect all the positive contacts down one side to what would become the positive rail and all the negative contacts down the other side to what would become the negative rail. I therefore needed two power rails.


I added a strip of self adhesive copper tape along each edge of the wood. The copper strips were laid close to, but not touching, the LED power contacts.

To connect the power rails to the LEDS I soldered a small bare copper bridging wire between each of the power contacts on the LEDS and the appropriate polarity rail.

I screwed on a terminal block and created some connecting wires to be soldered on the the rails. This aids easy fitting and removal of the light.

The only thing left was to add a couple of eye screws on the back to mount the light to the ceiling and to run the power feed from the transistor connected to the PIR that controls the existing lights.

And test in place.

Pretty happy with how this prototype turned out. It can be used connected directly to a 12v power source (as seen here), in which case it's super bright, or it can be controlled by the automatic circuit where it gives a good glow and only draws 1 watt.

Cooking For One Or More - Bacon Wrapped Chicken

Chop half a medium sized red onion into thin slices and scatter it across the bottom of an oven proof dish.

Grind some mustard seed over the onion base and add a small amount of any other seasoning that goes well with chicken gravy.

Lay a few sticks of frozen asparagus over the top of the onion and generously add some chopped garlic.

Wrap some frozen mini chicken breasts in streaky bacon and lay them over the top of the asparagus sticks.

Place a small knob of butter on each wrap and season them. I used more ground mustard seed, a little ground szechuan pepper, some garlic salt, and ground black pepper.

Place in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes around gas mark six. Carefully take the dish out of the oven and sprinkle some finely grated mature cheddar over the chicken wraps. Return to the oven for another 10 minutes or until the cheese starts to brown.

Put the oven on its lowest setting and remove the dish. Carefully pour off the run off from the roast chicken breasts and butter into a measuring jug. Return the dish to the oven while you make some chicken gravy using the juices in the measuring jug.

Serve with crispy and fluffy roast potatoes and the tasty gravy.

Human After All

I don't know the origin of the original meme, frankly I can't be bothered to waste the time looking for the source, but I've corrected it.

Not a single one of us is pedigree. How black is black? How white is white? How yellow is yellow? 

What exact genome means you are any one of them? What genome variation means you are not one of them? What about mutant variations within standard patterns?

Why does a race definition fall down once you start to try and apply it to different human collectives around the planet?

Race is a social construct not an actual thing. It's most often used to give a prejudice a name so that it can be excused.

The colour of someone's skin has everything to do with the evolutionary environment a particular localised variant of human grew up in and nothing to do with a label we made up somewhere along the way.

Our species is human and race as a label serves no constructive purpose. It does not define the culture you choose to subscribe to, it does not define your chosen tribal rituals. This is the same sort of crap that divides humans at a border level. 

If there is such as thing as race then every country border defines a different race and there is by definition no possibility of there being a race of Europeans, or Asians, or Africans because they would already be divided into races of Scottish, Welsh, English, French, German, Spanish, etc... How could there be a German race when Germany has only existed for such a short period of time?

This is the path to eugenics by another name.

Cooking For One Or More - Peppered Chicken Breasts

Cut a red bell pepper into slices and spread them on the base of an oven proof dish.

Skin and slice some shallots and spread them amongst the peppers to cover the base of the dish. Grind some szechuan pepper corns and mustard seeds liberally.

Slather with several teaspoons of chopped garlic.

Smooth some greek yoghurt over the base ingredients.

Finally place some mini chicken breast fillets on top of the yoghurt and cover with a steak or chicken seasoning.

Cover with tin foil and place in the oven at gas mark 6 for at least 30 minutes. 40-45 if the mini chicken breasts are frozen.

Nom

Cooking For One Or More - Peppered Meatballs

Take a long sweet pepper and cut it into four pieces. Lay them over the bottom of an oven proof dish.

Add some frozen meatballs, some shallots, and grind some szechuan peppercorns and mustard seeds.

Squirt half a tube of tomato puree and mix in some chopped garlic and greek yoghurt (or sour cream) and a dash of olive oil. Sprinkle some ground salt, ground coriander and anything else that takes your fancy.

Cover with foil and place in the oven at gas mark 5 for 50 minutes. Uncover for the last ten minutes or so.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 2

I got a new charge controller yesterday so I rewired the solar array to use it and changed the fuse box for one that had a common positive and built a new negative rail.

I'd also picked up some 6 metre 900 amp jump leads from eBay for £16 and I intended to use them to enable me to move the fuse box into the kitchen and reduce the losses over the multiple cables that were currently feeding various 12v toys in the kitchen.

The jumper cables were perfectly designed for what I have in mind so I didn't have to try and find some crimp terminals suitable to fit the rather large cables. I just needed to unbolt the existing crimp terminals from the clamps, which involved the use of a lump hammer.

It did however mean I needed to make some terminal blocks to hook the load lines of the charge controller up to the cables and then also to terminate them in the kitchen.

A bit of bolt and washer hunting later I managed to put together some very suitable terminals. I just need some way of safely mounting them. This was achieved with a small bit of MDF and various drill bits and we end up with a pretty neat terminal block with wing nuts.

And on the underside we have the counter sunk heads.

These were easily mounted on to the existing board and a couple of crimped cables later the battery end of things was nicely wired up.

Then I had to build a new board for holding the fuse box in the kitchen and mount it on to a hollow wall. A little hunting turned up a couple of suitable medium weight hollow wall fixtures. The new board was drilled in the same way as the cable mount board and I made a couple more terminals to be mounted directly on it.

Now all that was needed was to wire in the fuse box, negative rail and test.

The voltage drop across the new cables is now not measurable with any meter I have and once I sort out the battery connection cables it will now be possible to wire up the 300w inverter in the kitchen directly to the solar array.

This also means I'll be able to run a 12v feed up to my bedroom and to the hallway without significant losses being incurred.

Now I just need the finance to afford a bunch more solar panels and some proper batteries. This setup is pretty close to being capable of safely supplying 360 watts. Almost 10 times more than the power of my solar panels at full blast and 30 times more than they typically provide.

The batteries I have (assuming they were in good condition) could only supply 360 watts for a couple of hours but this still makes it a nice little backup power supply for when the power occasionally dies (like the time a quadcopter accidentally flew into the local power distribution center and took out one of the large transformers).

Realistically I can get many hours of light and a couple or so hours of laptop usage out of it as it stands.

Why I Try To Buy Repairable Things

My oscillating fan stopped working a while ago. Today's heat made me investigate what the cause might be.

It turns out that at some point the two bolts that held the speed controller in place had vibrated free and I hadn't noticed.

This of course leaves the problem of where do I get two suitable bolts at 1am. Luckily I have a stack of various fixings and bits of hardware that I've salvaged from other things. Looking at the two nuts that I found rattling around inside the fan I had a feeling that I quite possibly had some bolts that may have the right screw thread and indeed I did.

I also recently bought a small vice that can attach to my kitchen table (A.K.A "The Workshop") and I've somehow collected a number of hacksaws over the years so finding one wasn't hard.

A short while later and a bit of "by eye" measuring I had two shorter bolts suitable for my needs.

A little bit of filing rough edges and screwing and the speed controller is firmly locked in place again. 

And the oscillating fan is operational once more.

I'm pretty sure the guest dog is going to appreciate this tomorrow when the heat will be slightly more intense than it was today.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 1

I moved my 20 watt 12 volt solar panels (x2) and the charge controller downstairs yesterday.

This enabled me to hook up the old car battery I salvaged from my MR2; before it sadly went to the breakers.

This let me release one of the two Ultramax batteries. Which means I can now use one for when I'm building other projects and testing them and just cycle the two batteries when one gets a little low. :)

While I was fiddling with the solar setup I noticed that in the new position when the sun really shines down and there's no haze they get up to their full 17 volt output and the charge controller doesn't like this and stops charging the batteries. So I've added one of the two DC-DC converters I got off of eBay a while back. This restricts the voltage quite nicely to a maximum of 14 volts, but also means that the normal output has dropped to just over 12 volt.

I may have to come up with a better way of clamping the output from the solar panels without having to sacrifice 3 volts on the DC-DC converter. I'd prefer a solution that didn't kick in until the output from the panels went over 14 volts. I shall have to do some investigation. I'm sure once my copy of The Art of Electronics turns up I shall have some example circuits I can build to do the job nicely. :)

This still seems to be charging the batteries fine and if I'm reading this meter right I seem to have gathered 42 watt hours of power today. I also want to change this so it's inline with the batteries (rather than recording the raw output from the panels) and has bypass diodes to cover the batteries going back to the charge controller.

Happy the solar charger was working well enough, I dug out the other DC-DC converter to investigate why it wasn't working and it seems to be fine now. I'm guessing it must have been something to do with how it was hooked up to the solar system that was causing the problem and we had a loose connection somewhere.

It's now working fine to charge my phone off of the spare 14Ah ultramax battery.

And while I was monitoring the charging and because the soldering iron was already on I decided to hook up a couple of the little solar toy panels and see if I could power a small motor from them. By the time I'd finished the sun had disappeared behind the cottages behind me. So I'll have to wait till tomorrow (assuming it's sunny) to try it out and see if I need to hook more panels up.

Cooking For One Or More - Pizza

Take a pizza base.

Splodge on some tomato puree.

Spread it evenly over the base.

Add some grated cheese. Mozzarella or cheddar are good choices.

Now add some toppings and spread evenly. Personally I'm a fan of some mixed peppers...

...Ham...

... And chicken.

Top off with some more cheese and spread the toppings to the edge of the pizza.

Place the pizza in the middle of a preheated oven, preferably on a pizza stone.

Cook at gas mark 6 for about 14 minutes or until the cheese is well melted and the crust is starting to brown.

Slice and serve.