Chris Carline: Personal Website

It's accidentally on purpose I update there a lot more often than I do here.

There's an awful lot of stuff and things that are going on in my life at the moment. And this, whilst sometimes giving me a feeling of overwhelm-ment, is undoubtedly a good thing: it keeps me busy, pushes me hard and keeps me on my toes.

And those toes are going to be a-twitchin' even more than usual come the wee small hours of Tuesday morn.

I generally don't talk about Things Involving Work, but I really am quite excited about what'll be happening then; it's a big deal, and in it's own small (very small) way, it represents the culmination of something I've been working on for almost two and a half years (actually longer, but that's another story). Baby steps, for the most part, but ramping up exponentially these past few months.

We have the technology, and it's the allegorical equivalent of taking the Richter scale all the way to eleven.

Thus it's almost certainly doomed to obscurity and will be completely ignored. Which is fine. Sometimes being proud about something is enough -- even when the rest of the world remains resolutely unlit. Maybe one day I'll be able to talk about it. :-)

Anyway. Yesterday I was actually SNOWED IN, and had to work from home. This has never happened to me before, but rest assured it's a situation I'm in no hurry to repeat. I did manage to get the car to the edge of the village, but given the level of grip (or rather lack thereof) and general sense of impending doom, I elected to turn back. Which turned out to be a rather more edge-of-the-seat manoeuvre than I'd hitherto been accustomed.

Maybe one day I'll be able to talk about it.

Today, after two months of carefully watching my diet, eating healthily and generally not stuffing my gullet with cakes, snacks and two dinners, washed down with 6 pints of lager, I've just tried on a pair of my old 32" waist jeans (from less porky days)... and they fit!

As in, I can do them up. And sit down in them. And put things in the pockets! Truly marvellous!

Whilst I still have a few lbs to go before I'm genuinely back to my "fighting weight" (I'd be lying if I didn't say there is a little overspill, but I had far worse on my old, 'generous' 34" jeans before I started.

The goal is truly in sight now. Hurrah!

This blog post is brought to you by the Boots Meal Deal King Prawn Noodle Salad, Cheese and Onion Snack-a-Jacks and Diet Red Bull.

Oh, and about 400 pints* of Tesco Own-Brand Low Calorie American Ginger Ale, my beer-substitute.

_{*I just worked this out to be about right. Scary}

Recently, I've been bitten by the "baking bug", and have been experimenting by making various bread-based delicacies (mainly loaves, it has to be said) with varying degrees of success.

Last week, I decided to try my hand at making bagels. This was moderately successful, but they came out a little chewy for my liking, and probably not as scrummy as they ought to be.

One thing I've noticed (since starting with my own bread making) is that there are literally hundreds of variations and conflicting advice when it comes to baking bread. And bagels are no exception. But as it turns out, they're actually pretty easy to make -- and when you get the mix just right -- absolutely delicious.

So I thought I'd try again this week, throwing caution to the wind and basically working out my own variation on the recipes I'd been using as reference.

So here's what I did (for my benefit as much as anyone else's):

Chris's Bagel Recipe -- makes 12

Ingredients:

• Strong White Flour 650g-ish
• 350ml (ish) of warm water
• 1.5 tblsp salt
• 4 tblsp granular sugar
• 1 tblsp dry active yeast
• 1 egg white (for the egg wash -- optional)

Into the warm water, dissolve 3 tablespoons of sugar and stir in the yeast -- which should start to foam after a minute or two. Add the salt, and pour the resulting mixture into a large bowl containing about 500g of the flour. When you first add the water, the mixture gets very very sticky, so I cheat and do the first part of the mixing by stirring with a wooden spoon (which comes in handy later to make the holes).

Once the worst is out of the way, get stuck in with your hands -- kneading the dough, and gradually adding more flour until the stickiness has subsided enough for you to take it out of the bowl and start working with it directly. Keep working with the dough, over and over, still adding more flour if need be until you end up with a slightly tacky ball of dough.

Clean and dry the bowl you did the initial mixing in (or a different large bowl, if you're feeling particularly lazy) pop the dough into it, cover it with cling film and let it rise in a warmish place for about 45 minutes to an hour or so. You'll want to put a large pan of water (I used 2.5 litres in a 5 litre pan) on to boil shortly before the end of this 'resting' period, so to be ready to boil the bagels when the time comes. Add the rest of the sugar and salt into this water.

I prepared some egg wash at this point -- the white of an egg mixed with a similar amount of water. This is to add some gloss to the bagel after cooking, and is optional. (If I'd been better prepared, I'd have remembered to buy poppy seeds for topping, but I forgot once again).

At this point of the process I thought, "I know, I've not blogged anything for a while" and started taking photographs.

So here's my dough just after I finished it. I set my oven to very very low (40 degrees C) and left it to rise.

When I took it out, it looked like this:

Turn the oven up to 180C whilst you remember. Take the dough out of the bowl, and divide it into quarters, as so:

(The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that there are only three pieces in this photograph, but rest assured, there was a fourth piece I'd already processed).

Each quarter makes three bagels. Split each quarter into three equal-ish ball-like lumps each:

Now the fun begins! Using your trusty wooden spoon, poke into the dough...

And spin!

Which yields...

Woohoo! And finally...

Into your pan of boiling water, carefully drop three hoops of bagel dough (they grow significantly in size during the boil). Hopefully they'll float, which makes them easy to flip when the time comes.

The longer you boil, the chewier they will be. Some recipes recommend no more than a minute total. Others recommend 7 minutes each side. I boiled mine for 2 minutes per-side last week, and whilst quite nice, they were a little on the chewy side. So this time, I boiled them for 45-60 seconds each side, for a total time of something in the region of 1m30s-1m45s.

Here are some bagels boiling away:

Fish them out and let them dry a little. Sprinkle with the topping of your choice/brush on a little egg wash, and put them on a lightly greased baking tray (preferably non-stick).

Pop them into the oven for 10-15 minutes or so (you remembered to turn up the oven to 180C didn't you?), and see how they're getting on. Chances are they'll need another 5-10 minutes, but take the opportunity to make sure they've not stuck to the baking sheet (move them around a little and unstick if need be).

When they're done, they'll sound hollow when you tap them on the underside. Top tip! Also applies to loaves of bread!

Take them out and leave them to cool on a wire rack. Enjoy!

I wrote an incredibly gushing piece about the Indelicates the other day having listened to their music for the grand total of a couple of hours, at best.

Now that I've lived with the album for a few days, my opinions have had a chance to develop and solidify, and as we all know, initial impressions can be deeply misleading.

So. What to make of this album?

It gets better with every listen. In the order of 50% each time.

I'll report back when this equation no longer holds true.

Don't hold your breath.