Fencing for Geeks

Since a few people have been asking recently… I am currently coaching at two clubs in the North-West: Manchester and Altrincham. Beginner geeks are welcome to turn up to either, and will be welcomed by a smile and a circuit board.

Manchester – Manchester Fencing Club
This club caters for all fencers from beginners to international.
I’m here every other week (other coaches are availible at other times). Ping for details.
West Hill School, Stalybridge, SK15 1LX
Thursday 1900-2130

Altrincham – Salle Kiss This club is a new club, currently catering to beginners. A good environment for beginners to feel comfortable.
Altrincham Grammar School For Boys, Altrincham, WA14 2RS
Wednesday 1900-2100

Fees vary from club to club. For your first session, stick a tenner in your pocket and you’ll get plenty of change (I don’t handle money and can rarely remember what fees are from one week to the next).

I’m horribly unfit!

Isn’t that the point? Seriously, we cater for all shapes, sizes and fitness. Turn up and give it a try. The sport is fun, addictive, painless (mostly) and we provide all the kit you need. Just bring yourself, a pair of trainers or squash shoes, tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt. You’ll want some water and a towel as well.

To make it a bit more fun (and to leave out those first week blues), why not organise a couple of you to turn up together?

Oh, and you’ll get to hit me in a large leather jacket repeatedly. What could be more fun?

Interested?

Drop me a quick e-mail or comment to let me know you’re coming. It’s also useful to know how big you are (chest size and height) so I know if I need to grab some larger jackets from elsewhere.

But I’m a Foreigner!

Not a problem – there are plenty of clubs out there. Have a look at the British Fencing Club directory, and contact the club secretary (using that old-tech thing called a phone). That’s why they’re listed.

The Garden Is Trying To Eat Me (So I’ll eat it)

Back in April, I discussed my epic plans for the garden in an attempt to put some genuine home-grown food on our plates. Well dear readers, the garden has somewhat flourished since that post, and we now appear to have a good run of crops in potatoes, shallots, and tomatoes. For a full list of what’s growing in the garden, click on the landscape garden image to view the notes on Flickr.

Has it been worth it? Yes. It’s been a fun exercise and we’ve learnt a lot of lessons about how much effort and time it takes to grow your own food and the restrictions of working in a terraced yard. If you do plan on doing this yourself there are a few things to bear in mind:

1. Get a greenhouse. Just a small £20 one. It helps to germinate the seeds quickly, and who knows how long it would have taken to get some of the plants going without it.
2. Get lots of cheap containers. The dirt the food grows in has to grow in something. Oddly, most people seem to overlook this when budgeting. It doesn’t have to be elaborate – the basic requirement is that it adequately holds dirt. We’ve got a range of containers, from wooden tubs which were on special offer at a tenner a piece, to garden rubbish buckets currently holding the potatoes. We made an extravagance on two galvanised steel containers which to be quite frank are rather rubbish. Keep them basic and large.
3. You will spend an extraordinary amount of money on dirt. By dirt I mean compost, but when you get down to it, it’s glorified dirt. If like us you live in a terraced house, your yard contains no natural dirt and you’ll have to import all of it. Vegetables on the whole are relatively unfussy things. They do not care if you use miracle grow or Uncle Pete’s wholesale budget compost at a tenth of the price. Save the cash for more containers.
4. You will spend most of your money on 2 and 3. The rest pales into insignificance by comparison.
5. Get a book that you can understand on the subject.

In your first year, you are not expecting to become a master gardener. Your aim is to put something in the ground and make it grow. As such, your first reference book needs to be something with bright colours, simple instructions and guidance you can understand. My recommended reference for the novice would be Plot, Pots or Growbags available from Amazon for under £7.

I don’t need to say much about this book, the reviews on the Amazon page tell it all. It’s such a straightforward and useful book, you really can’t fail with it. We bought most of our seeds from Suttons online shop and were surprised with how slick an operation it was.

Cat is currently cooking a chicken, mushroom, leek and shallot pie to celebrate some of the early harvest. Today we shall ignore the diet. Now, time to plan for Autumn planting…

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

My bike is dead. I was asked to sign its death warrant yesterday. It was in pretty poor shape. It was the best thing I could do for it.

I admit I’ve not cycled for over a year. The bike I had been using was donated to me by Cat’s dad. It was rather too large for me, but it was a touring frame and rode well. Unfortunately I don’t agree with non-indexed shifters located on the bike frame, and this cough may have cough caused a few cough slips. Nothing epic, just a few occasions where I may have been forced to cough stop, due to a lack of chain on gear.

Oddly though, I’ve not suffered a serious crash on it, which I can’t say for my beloved pearlescent-yellow Muddy Fox MTB, on which I was hit by an ASDA lorry, side-swiped by a car on an estate, knocked flying by a pair of yobs in a white Fiesta into a bramble bush and finally, hit an unseen grate and slid for 25m on my face. That particular bike was nicked from my parent’s back yard when I came back from university and I was absolutely devastated.

Now I’m needing a new bike. I’m looking for a second hand road/race bike, 50-54cm frame size, drop bars and shifters on the bar. The last point is rather important (see above). I’ve missed two bikes in the past week that fitted the bill on Ebay. I’ve got a budget of around £150, if you know anyone selling, or if you’re selling yourself, drop me an e-mail.

Gardening for Geeks

Here at Tentacle Towers we have the typical urban gardening facility – a yard. Your typical yard does not really lend itself to being transformed into a urban garden paradise of self-sustenance, but we’re giving it a jolly good shot.

Growing vegetables tends to throw up images of hours of back-breaking work, pitch forks, west country accents and the sounds of the Archers. Oddly, non of the above it required, except possibly the Archers (or at least a radio tuned to Radio 4). What it does require is time, a bit of money to initially invest, and dirt. Ideally some compost.

Veg tends to broadly fall into three categories: 1. Straight to pot – the easy one. Take a large container of dirt, add some seeds, water and harvest in a few months. Straightforward enough. 2. Incubate and destroy – a little harder. Requires small potting things, and somewhere warm to germinate and grow. When your seedlings are large enough to eat a small human, transfer into the obligatory large container of dirt later. 3. Herbs – easy, but … odd. Can be kicked off in the open, or in the greenhouse. We already have a few containers of herbs, but are starting off this year’s seedlings in the greenhouse.

Important bits: * Greenhouse – this doesn’t have to be the epic huge glass house that your Aunty Mabel grows her begonias in. The Range and B&Q both sell a small greenhouse which is essentially nothing more than a series of shelves with a plastic cover. The only real difference between that one and Aunty Mabels is Aunty Mabel’s is significantly larger. * Containers – if you let them, containers can be expensive. The most we’ve paid (so far) for a container is £25 for a container to hold our Jerusalem Artichokes. The best containers are often the most novel ones. Our potatoes are in garden refuse buckets and one of the herb pots is an old barbecue.

And to prove it works, broccoli making a bid for world domination.

Beef Casserole with Dumplings

What to do with a large quanitity of root vegetables? Well, the only logical answers are to stew it or casserole it. Here’s my basic recipe.

Ingredients

• 500g Shin Beef, Diced
• 2 Carrots
• 1 Parsnip
• 2 Onions
• Fresh Rosemary
• Bay Leaf
• Beef Stock Liquid

Directions

1. In a frying pan, heat a little oil, fry off the beef and onion with a little rosemary. Add to a casserole dish.
2. Scrub/peel carrots and parsnip. Add to casserole dish.
3. Add rosemary and bay leaf.
4. Add enough made up stock from liquid to cover meat to cover contents.
5. Cook at 200oC for 1 hour, then drop to 80oC continue cooking for 1.5 hours.
6. Mix 1/3 suet to 2/3 self raising flour for as many dumplings as you want. Add a little salt, and rosemary if you wish.
7. Add water to the dumpling mix until a sticky, moist mixture is reached.
8. Spoon mixture into casserole dish. Either leave of surface or push under surface.
9. Turn oven back to 200oC and return casserole dish to oven for 30 minutes.

Just before adding the stock and committing to the oven:

Fresh rosemary – no garden or kitchen should be without it:

Abel and Cain (Surely Cole? – ed)

It’s a well regarded fact that geeks often live off a combination of pizza, Coke (Dew for our Merkian and enlightened home bretheren) and foodstuffs that generally come with an immediacy. Quite a few of us are also food-geeks, but our planning faculties tend to let us down in having raw materials to hand to put dishes together. Despite the fact that I live around the corner from the major supermarket (and I really do mean around the corner), I am particularly pants at getting, and then using fruit and vegetables everyday. Until the garden proper kicks off, we decided to start getting our vegetation in from Abel and Cole. The idea is working on the time honoured principal that if someone thrusts it in our face, we’re going to eat it.

There’s also the benefit that Abel and Cole boxes are organically sourced, and all UK produce, zeroing the air miles as well. Ignoring the fact that a little man comes and delivers it to the door, it’s significantly better for the environment, see?

So, for a first time out we decided to order a mixed medium box, some mushrooms and a loaf. Pretty standard fare, except that we were told “order over £20, get a mixed box free”. Which meant that when the box arrived, we were greeted with this:

Oh holy, moly. That’s a lot of food.

For the inventory, there are potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, rocket, radishes, broccoli, apples, plums and oranges plus the mushrooms and bread we bought extra. The potatoes are smaller than those you’d be expecting from your supermarket, as are the onions, but there is a significant difference in taste.

Out of this fine assortment, there’s a (broccoli) bit that Cat (rocket) can’t (radishes) or won’t eat. Abel and Cole have a preferences system so you can adjust what they will and won’t send to you. We clearly need to do a little more tweaking on ours, but for a first effort, not bad at all.

So what to do with a mountain of good quality food? Well, best cook it. See the next post for my basic, but nommish beef casserole recipe.

Welcome to the LifeTrack

Welcome to the LifeTrack, feel free to ignore it

This is a new category for the blog that’ll be dealing with me getting life, funnily enough, back on track. It’s going to be about food, gardening, exercise and most likely have little or nothing to do with code, photography, bob. Since graduating in 2003, I’ve wrestled with my work/life balance, usually falling far too far on the wrong side of work. This year I didn’t just decide that enough was enough, I decided to actually act on it. Also, in a world of economic recession, being sensible and looking after my primary business asset (me) as also in my best interests.

Over the course of the year, there’ll be updates to the state of the garden as we attempt to grow our own fruit and vegetables, possibly the occasional recipe and tips for attempting to keep your life in a roughly working order.