All posts by Yvan

Finland

Ylläs Ski Trip – Day 2 & 3

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

[[ Full write-up of our holiday now available: Ylläs Ski Holiday 2007. ]]

Day 2

More skiing, we’ve been handed over to a new chief instructor — it seems Ola’s job is to scare the first-timers. We start out on the same slope as the previous day. After tackling a longer and curvier one the day before it seemed rather casual! Maybe sticking to the slopes for the extra hours paid off. It’s also a beautifully clear and windless day, making things easier still. No falling off! The slopes are actually kind of icy today, it’s been a few days with no fresh snow and the snow machine snow, I gather, just isn’t quite the same. The instructors hope for fresh snow overnight (though to us the skies still look completely clear at 17:00).

We cover some new tricks. One is lifting the uphill ski, since it is more stable to keep your weight on the downhill one. The second is skiing (very carefully) backwards. The main lesson I need to learn is: lean forward! No! Forward!! shplaff See, if you lean back you fall!

The last thing we do for the lesson is move to a new slope, one right in front of the ski-hut. This is much steeper and is an easy grade rather than the very easy we’ve been dealing with so far. I’m out of control and sliding all over the place, the main problem being that my turns end up being spins and then I’m going backwards down the slope. Despite this I don’t actually fall over at any point during this morning’s lesson.

That changes after the lesson though, I take on the steep slope several more times and fall over like it’s going out of fashion! My favourite move being turning too tightly, going backwards, then falling forwards.

Since we’re back at the hotel so early we decide to head out for a walk, though it is rather cold (-7) and twilight is getting well into night. We walk first about 2km to the Poro (Reindeer) restaurant to make a reservation for Wednesday, we’re told that it is quiet and there’s no need to bother. It was a good walk anyway and we pop into a couple of local-craft/gift shops along the way. We hold back from picking up goodies to send home since we’re not familiar enough with Australian quarantine regulations to pick stuff that can be sent there, all we know is that most things not made of plastic need to be irradiated or fumigated. Next leg of the walk is to the ATM/Supermarket where we discover that there are actually more than two Finnish beers (which is what you’d believe if you thought what the Hotel stocked was any indicator!).

Day 3

Ski ski ski! A good day for skiing, but still no fresh snow. I’m doing much better now, though still far less controlled than Kat. The most important thing in today’s lesson was the part where they took away our ski poles. We were to ski down the slope and on turning reach forward to touch the side of the boot on the outside of the turn. This really highlighted correct weight distribution for turning, turning is much easier now!

We left early today so Kat’s sore shins could have a rest. Though we took a few extra runs after the lesson to take some photos, it was another very clear day — and we’re hoping they’ll get less clear, which isn’t so good for photos.

Our plan was to head to Poro for dinner at 16:00, and that we did. Rudolf tasted gooooood. The walk to the restaurant and back was pretty chilly though, the hotel thermometer said it was -21 Celsius outside! Then we just generally relaxed a bit before having second dinner at 19:00 (grabbing some small bits and pieces from the included buffet so we wouldn’t have to go 14 hours without eating). Then we did some postcards before going for a walk down onto the lake, just a little, although earlier we’d seen a reindeer out in the middle of it and there was clearly a cross-country ski track going right out onto it too. We were hoping to see some Northern Lights, but it was a no-show despite the clear starry sky (damn, probably no new snow gain). Apparently we missed a Northern Light display the previous night.

Finland

Ylläs Ski Trip – Day 1

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

[[ Full write-up of our holiday now available: Ylläs Ski Holiday 2007. ]]

[A few minutes of /net access today, but it is unusably slow! Tried accessing email, couldn’t.]

The previous day is all rather dull really, on Saturday we caught the train from Watford to Gatwick (A direct train! I’d never have thought there was such a thing if it wasn’t for the fact that the Metro Line was being “maintained” yet-again). We overnighted in the Gatwick “Best Western” hotel, I wouldn’t generally recommend the place but just fine if you’re only after somewhere to sleep for about 70 quid (plus 10 quid worth of “courtesy” coach fares by the end of it too). Our plane left at midday on Sunday, we probably wouldn’t have had a problem getting to it from Ricky on the same day but who needs the hassle of early morning rushes when a cheap hotel can keep everything at a leisurely pace? (Alternatively there’s always the crazy-backpacker “sleep in the Airport” trick, stuff that.)

We flew from Gatwick to Kitalia (3 hours), then took a bus from Kitalia to Akaslompolo (1 hour). In short order we were sorted out with a room, meal vouchers (didn’t expect dinner to be included, even mass-feed buffet), and lift passes. This is all arranged by a company called Inghams, since we’re doing this trip with the transport, hotel, and skiing as a package — seems the simplest way, arranging holidays is so time-consuming (I’ve put together some pretty complicated ones). There’s a lot of “families” here, which means piles of middle aged poms with the precious disgusting little offspring. I haven’t felt much of an urge to eradicate any yet, thankfully they’re mostly here to see reindeer (I’m here to eat them), huskies (can you eat them?), and, of course, some fat paedophile in a red suit (spit roast?). We chose to avoid all these “outings” and other “safaris” (which all cost quite a bit, though not much compared to skiing) to focus on learning to ski, the actual purpose of this trip for us.

There seem to be very few “young people” in the group, as far as I saw there’s just one other couple about our age and a couple of girls around 20. I guess most not-yet-breds have a preference for the trendier ski haunts, the “apres ski” here is renowned for being quiet (plus it is really early in the season).
So, Monday, which I think of as “Day 1”. Up at 07:30, buffet breakfast at Akashotelli — bread (good bread here), hard-boiled eggs (eggs are eggs), and salami (cold meats are the norm when it comes to breakfast in European hotels) with a cup of filter-coffee for me. Bus to slopes, there at 20 to 10, quickly fitted for boots and skis. Have a filter-coffee. Lesson starts at 10, it’s only just daylight. We’re in a group of about 10, all “first timers” (but I have a suspicion at least a couple of people were just along for a refresher and the cheap combined lift-pass and ski-hire deal you get out of taking the “absolute beginner” lessons). We had four instructors, the lead instructor, called Ola, is 6-foot-something and probably 300 pounds.

Ski! I’m a slow learner, inhibited by my own extreme lack of co-ordination. First we learn to “snow plough”, meaning to slide down-slope pigeon-toed so that the ski tips are close together in front of you (don’t cross the skis!) and far apart behind you. The further apart behind you they are the slower you go, unless you’re me and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I soon learn to shoot off the right side of the slope rather than the left, since there’s a road on the left and, after launching over a heap of snow, landing on rough ice is unpleasant. The instructor tells me that if I go on the road I’ll get ploughed. A valuable lesson, since shooting off the slope seems to be my favourite trick… it’s nice and soft on the right. I want to blame momentum, but the lead instructor (skiing backward half the time) puts the lie to that cop-out.

Next we learn about steering, though I suspect that the true purpose of the lesson is to make people realise that the ski poles are not for downhill use and you don’t need them. You hold your poles out in front of you with straight arms and “steer like a handlebar”. The idea here is that you turn your upper body and “the skis follow”, this doesn’t work so well for me. I’m told I turn too much of my body (from the knees) or not enough (just pointing my arms in the desired direction, futile, I crash into the soft snow to the left of the slope again.)

We’ve been up and down the slope a couple of times now. The ski-lift, which I think is known as a drag-lift, is something I manage without much trouble. Except for the first time, I let go too early on the final steep ascent then wonder why the end of the lift is suddenly getting further away. Ho ho! I dub this lift the “wang lift”, Kat prefers to just cackle and pretend she’s on a broomstick.

Our final trick for the day is “turn by putting weight on the leg opposite to the direction you want to go”, i.e. to ski left you press down on your right ski. This is, we’re told, “just like roller-blading”. A reassuring thought for me since I own a pair of roller-blades and Kat takes me out on them occasionally for a painful session of falling on my butt (and hands, knees, side, back, …). I have a little more success with this, though still manage to shoot off the slope half way down.

That’s our 1.5 hours for the day. We head back to the ski hut and they take our names. I’m asked if I’m on for the 3 day or the 5 day course. “The 5 day one, I think I need it!” Laughs, then in a serious tone, accent resonant to some Russian villain from a Bond film: “Yes, I agree.” I’m left feeling unsure as to whether he thinks it is good that I’ll be there for the full 5 days or he’s wishing he’d be rid of me sooner.

All in all I was probably the least able of the lot. Others fell over, shot off the slope, or came off the drag-lift. But none fell as hard as I, or shot off as fast, or as many times. My main problem, I think, is that I’m always concious of people in front of me, always worried there’s someone behind me, and just freak out if someone is next to me. My thought is “oh shit, I’m going to hit them, then they’ll break!”, next thing I shoot off the slope.

After a coffee and some water we head out to the slops again, sans instructors. I’m determined to, at least, be as bad as the next worst person in the group by tomorrow. Kat and I spend a couple more hours out there and I think I made a lot of progress, that final “weight on the opposite ski” trick was a major leap forward for me, I “got it” much better and by then I was also “snow ploughing” to a stop with more control (i.e. actually stopping). I still shot off the side from time to time though. It was starting to look kind of dark by now, yes, twilight setting in at 13:30. We popped back to the ski-hut and had something greasy for lunch (not really gourmet here), had some more coffee, some water, then headed back to the “very easy” slopes.

It was getting on to the properly dark side by now but everything is well lit by huge food-lights so this wasn’t much of a problem (the lifts close just before 17:00 at the moment). We tried out the next “very easy” slope over this time, “slope 3”. It was longer, narrower, and curved. But I managed to ski down it about 5 times and only fell over once (not counting the time I fell over at the top because my poles had got tied together going up the lift and provided a moments distraction after I set myself sliding down the initial steep slope, a moment is all it takes.

On the way back we went down the easiest slope one more time and I effected my fastest right-side-exit yet — knocking my mask off and face-planting right into the snow. Bloody cold. We headed back to the ski-hut to see the 16:00 bus leaving… so had to hang around and have a beer while waiting for the 17:00. Back to the Hotel, left my beanie on the bus (so much for Kat and I having matching beanies, gimp), change, eat, stuff — all feeling a bit of a zombie. Somehow it’s nearly 21:30, huh? Yawn

Finland

Finland! Finland!

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

From Saturday 8th through to Sunday 16th we’ll be “offline”. We’re off to northern Finland for a week. I’m not sure what to expect for mobile coverage and I’ll be deliberately avoiding email/web.

We’re going to be in Ylläs, comfortably above the Arctic Circle, where I’ll seek to take a chunk out of Rudolf (Rudolf the red-fleshed reindeer; Has a very jui-cy steak; And if you ev-er ate it; You would even say it flows. Flows? There must be something better than that. Hrm, with blooood.)

Ylläs Webcam
Ylläs Webcam
Uncategorized

Bot or Not?

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Stick a form on the web and within a few days it’s getting hammered. My recently added “comment” form started getting a few posts, all to the “Comments” entry (web-search anyone?). So I added email registration… could have saved myself time by just not adding the silly “comment” ability in the first place. The registration was just in time, a day later the flood started. Maybe not much of a flood by big-web standards, it must be scary to be a popular website! In the last 12 hours I’ve had just over 1000 POSTs of the comment form.

They’re not hitting the “Comments” entry much anymore either. The breakdown is:

      1 Food/Ristretto/The_Coffee_House_on_Watford_High_Street.html
      9 Technology/General/Comments.html
     46 Food/Cooking/Spinach_Pasta.html
     47 Random/Riverbank_Teahouse.html
     48 Food/Eating/England/London/Gourmet_Burger_Kitchen.html
     49 Technology/Code/awk_awk_awk_.html
     52 Technology/Code/Just_Like_Uni.html
     53 Technology/General/Flashy_Shite.html
     54 Food/Cooking/Lime_Poached_Chicken.html
     55 Food/Eating/England/London/The_Neal_Street_Restaurant.html
     59 Technology/General/EZRSSFeeds_and_other_WebSuckers.html
     59 Technology/General/Still_Doesn_t_Like_Kaspersky.html
     67 Random/Flip_Out_Like_A_Ninja.html
     69 Random/BAA_BAA_Whisky.html
     70 Random/Birdflu.html
     83 Health/Your_Back_Needs_Debugging.html
     84 Food/Ristretto/Caffe_Vergnano_1882_on_Charing_Cross_Road.html
     87 Health/Beerolies.html
     98 Technology/General/Collateral_Damage__An_Unintentional_Storm_Worm_DOS.html

Why these pages? Not quite sure, but they co-incide with pages that get the most Google hits, maybe that’s it. I’ve collected data on the form postings, the primary aim being to capture whether or not real people were behind the postings. Now, I thought this highly unlikely, looked like bot activity to me. But there is a lot of “they just get cheap people in China to fill in forms” going around that I thought I’d try something… I’ve added javascript to the page that records all keystrokes and mouse activity to a log that is sent to my web server when the form is submitted. This was fun, and neat, for an example have a look at keylog.html.

The end result of this little exercise is that I seem to have confirmed my opinion that there are no “real” people involved here. This isn’t representative of course, my site is tiny, unimportant, and doesn’t employ CAPTCHAs. If anything I’m a very unlikely target of such attention. Further, there are two ways to disable my logging:

  1. Cache the form and present from some “form filling” tool (unlikely).
  2. Have javascript disabled (duh).

I classify the first as highly improbable. I classify the second as not being the case for my forms since I’ve started getting submissions with spam data filled into hidden fields.

It would have been much more interesting to pick up some key logs! But the effort has revealed interesting data regardless.

  1. After changing the form the new fields didn’t show up in POSTs so that POSTer (a bot) responsible has cached the form (or form params at any rate).
  2. There was a delay of only one hour between the form change and the first new spam post with the new fields. Of 1000 POSTs in the next 12 hours only 10 were for the new form. Most current POSTs are still using the old form fields.
  3. Nine of the new-form hits were for the same page (Technology/General/Comments.html), so first hit from a new crawl of the form-snaffling bot I take it.
  4. Just one was for Food/Ristretto/The_Coffee_House_on_Watford_High_Street.html, and this is a very different POST from all the others (spammy random URL and random-letter “words”, while all others all have real “English” word secuences).
  5. Reflecting back on the access logs it looks like POSTs are usually preceded by GETs to the correct URLs and the GET has no referrer (related: in the same period there are 4 hits to the page by MSIE variants with no referrers and no other hits from the same IP, the spider maybe? Two of the IE UA strings are just broken looking.)
  6. The “url” field is always filled in with a “http://…” URL.
  7. Across all 1000+ posts only 33 URLs are used. These are not evenly distributed, with about 5 around the 100 mark, 27 below 25 (10 are a single occurrences), and 7 in the 25-80 range.
  8. A total of 148 IPs source the POSTS, many make only 1 or 2 POSTs, 22 make beteen 10 and 50, 5 between 50 and 100, and one makes 127 POSTS (submitting 15 URLs with very uneven distribution).
  9. Five URLs appear to be a typos with “hyml” rather than “html”, but I’m not giving them the satisfaction of a hit to find out for sure. It might just be an obfuscation attempt. Of these possible typos three are the three most submitted URLs.
  10. 40 “name”s are used and 35 “title”s, these usually are filled in with identical data, and usually related to the obvious subject of the URL.
  11. Most spamvertising is for drug names (I recognise “viagra” but the rest mean little to me: “levitra”, “ambien”, “xanax”, “cialis”), next most popular is gaming/casinos (including the most spammed URL), finally there’s porn (comparatively infrequent).
  12. The “comment” field is usually filled in with some supposedly complimentary text, and only contains URLs in two cases.

I’ll leave the observations at that, more interesting would be to draw relationships between the different field content, inspection doesn’t show any obvious patterns and I don’t have time to dig deeper. The frequency of comment content is:

      1 comment:[[URLS REMOVED]]
      1 comment:good post man [[URLS REMOVED]]
      1 comment:so many interesting [[URLS REMOVED]]
      1 comment:yujlh lzqfe heug xsjepcl dljfugw axiwrlbcm visf
      6 comment:Hello, nice site look this:
     44 comment:Good design!
     48 comment:Great work!
     49 comment:Pretty much nothing seems important.
     50 comment:Good site. Thank you.
     50 comment:I like your site very much indeed.
     51 comment:Great site! Beautiful craftsmanship!! Keep of the wonderful work!!
     52 comment:Nice site
     53 comment:Cool site. Thank you!
     53 comment:Hello, very nice site!
     53 comment:TARRIFIC SITE!
     53 comment:Thank you!
     55 comment:Hi, nice site
     56 comment:Well done!
     57 comment:very interesting fix links
     60 comment:Nice site. Thanks.
     61 comment:I feel like a bunch of nothing.
     61 comment:I just don't have anything to say.
     64 comment:Cool site. Thank you:-)
     64 comment:Excellent web site. I will visit it often.
     69 comment:Nice site. Thanks!

We’ve all seen “Nice site. Thanks!” on blogs all over the ‘net. My favourite is “I feel like a bunch of nothing.”, makes me feel sorry for some poor depressed zombie machine somewhere. The fourth one, “yujlh…” is from the only POST that looks completely unlike all the others, a URL submitted but with all other fields meaningless character sequences.

My feeling is that this is the “new spam”, though maybe not so new just harder to measure. Why try to push to victims through email, which is rapidly loosing the peoples’ trust, when you can focus real effort to simultaneously getting the word spread all over the ‘net and push search-ranking juice to these pages? Does this really work? Seems unlikely, but I’ve never been able to get my head around the fact that spam is actually effective … it takes all kinds of stupid to make a society.

They say that email spam is declining (but people like to say that every few months, then there’s another surge) so maybe the resources are going into this instead. The next question is the source? I think it is probably clear that this is the work of a bot-net, do we think Storm? Who’s paying them? Maybe the URLs are actually

There’s been 100 new POSTs since I started writing this (one hour ago).

What can we do about this? The solution seems simple. Guard web forms appropriately! CAPTCHAs are popular, but requiring login/registration may be better. Mark all URLs as “nofollow” to kill any hopes of search-state inflation (or don’t allow URLs if they can be avoided). The simplicity is probably misleading though, this flood against my little site is unsophisticated and this is probably the case because this is all that’s needed to post to so many blog type sites. If bloggers raise the bar the bot herders will just jump higher. Depressing isn’t it? The continued lack of any real solutions against malware and spam often makes me “feel like a bunch of nothing”, to quote one of the bots.

Leftovers, some more stats:

User agents:

      1 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)
      1 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Xrqhgdfzi sipmvr zqboirha
      3 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
      6 HTTP_USER_AGENT:User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2)
     54 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://www.tropicdesigns.net)
     63 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
     75 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
    105 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
    116 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Maxthon)
    129 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1)
    147 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt; MRA 4.0 (build 00768))
    157 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)
    327 HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)

Intriguing list of vias and proxies:

      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 MCRDSC, 1.0 kiwi.khi.wol.net.pk:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE7)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 TTCache03 (Jaguar/3.0-59)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 barracuda.lcps.k12.nm.us:8080 (http_scan/1.1.2.5.10)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 fiorillinet:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE7)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 firewall.seduc.ro.gov.br:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE6)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 localhost.localdomain
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 localhost:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE14)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 mirage.certelnet.com.br:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE14)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 none:8080 (Topproxy-2.0/)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxy:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE11)
      1 HTTP_VIA:1.1 sexto.fmetsia.upm.es
      2 HTTP_PROXY_AGENT:Sun-Java-System-Web-Proxy-Server/4.0.3
      2 HTTP_VIA:1.0 allserver.all-milwaukee.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE16)
      2 HTTP_VIA:1.1 PERFECTION01
      2 HTTP_VIA:1.1 i187340:3128 (KEN!)
      2 HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxy-server1
      2 HTTP_VIA:1.1 server2.buffalowelding.com:3120 (squid/2.5.STABLE13)
      4 HTTP_VIA:1.1 FLASH:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE16-20071117)
      4 HTTP_VIA:1.1 MCRDSC, 1.0 cherry.khi.wol.net.pk:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE7)
      5 HTTP_VIA:1.1 MCRDSC, 1.0 mango.khi.wol.net.pk:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE7)
      5 HTTP_VIA:1.1 MCRDSC, 1.0 pear.khi.wol.net.pk:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE7)
      6 HTTP_VIA:1.0 HAVP
      7 HTTP_VIA:1.1 ISAFW
      8 HTTP_VIA:1.1 ppr-cache1 (NetCache NetApp/6.1.1D2)
     12 HTTP_VIA:1.1 FGMAIN2
     14 HTTP_VIA:1.1 ndb-bau02:3128 (KEN!)
     21 HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxy.net:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE13)
     24 HTTP_VIA:1.1 microcon-serv3:3128 (KEN!)
     39 HTTP_VIA:1.1 PRINTER
     65 HTTP_VIA:1.1 admin:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE9)
     97 HTTP_VIA:1.1 gtw1.ciberpoint.com.br:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE13)

(Interesting to note that some companies here are effectively giving out details about how their internal web clients are scanned at the gateway. Some of this could be enough to expose the existence of vulnerable infrastructure software or help whittle down the list of software you need to check your targeted malware with. Not good practice.)

Cooking

Duckflower Salad

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Prologue

Duckflower Salad
Quack!
All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!

Ducks’ tails, drakes’ tails,
Yellow feet a-quiver,
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!

Wind In the Willows, Ratty’s “Ducks’ Ditty”… Actually, it brings Tom Bombadil into the fore of my mind, there’s a parallel I’ve not considered before; Tom and Ratty… Hmm, very literary, very picturesque, now let’s shoot a few of the damn ducks and get on with the show.

In actual fact the duck I’ve used in this recipe is neither wild or shot. Duck isn’t all that uncommon and in the UK you can find it in many supermarkets, even Tesco, and most butchers. Duck farming is smaller business than chickens, but is big enough that there are intensive duck rearers — poor ducks that never see the sky, let alone any kind of pond. If you’re going to buy duck please try and stick to “free range”, especially if also “organic” (nothing more unappetising than a silicon duck!).

For this recipe I found a nice looking pair of breast fillets at a local butcher. Large, fatty, luxurious breasts. On first sight of a duck breast fillet the you’re likely to note that it looks like there’s more fat than meat, and by volume there sometimes is! Don’t worry though, the breasts will transform into meaty nuggets once cooked and the layer of fat all but vanish (into a puddle in the pan). Compare the photo of the raw breasts to the one of the cooked one and you’ll get the idea.

Ingredients

Duck

Salad Ingredients
Rabbit Food
  • 2 x 200g Duck Breast Fillets
  • 10g Chestnut Honey[1] (or other honey)
  • 10g good thick Balsamic Vinegar
  • 1tsp fresh ground Black Pepper
  • 2 cloves (6g) Garlic
  • 100ml dry Red Wine

Dressing

  • Reduced marinade (see below)
  • 10g (~1 tbsp) Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  • 10g (~1 tbsp) dry Red Wine

Salad

  • 2 small (~100g each) lettuce, like “baby Cos”
  • 100g Red Radishes
  • 100g Cherry Tomatoes

Method

Ducks are a-marinating
Ducks are a-marinating

We start by marinating the breasts, at least an hour before cooking by preference. In my case about 6 hours, longer shouldn’t hurt (for example: start them marinating before you go to work in the morning so you can cook as soon as you get back).

Crush the garlic cloves into a bowl big enough to hold the duck. Add the chestnut honey[1], vinegar, wine and pepper and ensure the marinade is well blended. Slice into the fat-side of the fillets, about 6 slashes stopping short of slicing into the meat. Plonk the duck breasts into the marinade fat-side-up, cover, and into the fridge with the lot. Ideally you should flip the breasts every 1.5 to 2 hours, but this can be skipped.

Later…

Remove breast fillets from the marinade and pat dry with paper towels. Set marinade aside for later.

Frying Duck Breasts
Quaaaaaacccck!

Pull out your heavy cast-iron pan, in my case a nice heavy square grill-pan, and very lightly oil the surface with a peanut or canola oil (for the high smoke-point). The oil is just to gauge the pan temperature, the duck will provide loads of fat of it’s own. Now put your pan on a high flame and heat until the oil just starts to smoke, at this point drop the temperature of the flame about 30%. In goes the duck! Quaaaaaacccck! Fat side-down for 5 minutes. Beware, it’ll hiss, spit, and smoke like anything. This is all normal, if it isn’t making a mess of your kitchen your pan isn’t hot enough.

While the duck gets it’s 5 minute sizzle you can separate the lettuce leaves. (If you need to wash your lettuce you should have done this earlier and washed the leaves so they can drain, soaking leaves make a mess of salad.) There’s no hurry though, the duck will need some resting and cooling time. Don’t rush yourself. Clean and slice the radishes, and quarter the baby tomatoes. The salad ingredient’s can be whatever you like. I think some avocado and blanched snow peas (mangetouts) would go very well with the duck.

Reduced Marinade
Reduced Marinade

With 5 minutes passed flip the duck over and give two minutes on the meaty side. Done! Set the fillets aside on a plate somewhere out of the way.

Turn off the heat and pour the fat off the pan (to be discarded), be careful. Give the pan a couple of minutes to cool then dump in the marinade. Hiss! Give the pan a good scrape and then put the liquid back on the heat bubbling vigorously until it’s reduced to about 10% of the original volume (see photo right). In my case I poured and scraped the liquid out of the pan into a small saucepan. Reducing a sauce in a grill-pan is a path to much difficulty.

Salad Arranged
Base Salad

Strain the reduced liquid into a small pouring jug, helping it through a fine strainer with the back of a spoon, this gets rid of lumps of garlic and any errant chunks of crispy duck skin. Add the extra dash of red wine and the EVOO and mix it up a bit.

Now lay out the lettuce, tomatoes, and radish in a couple of shallow bowls (see left). At this time the duck should have had about 10 minutes to rest since coming out of the pan, if not then pour yourself a bit of wine to make up the time. Notice that the fat layer has reduced to a thin and crispy veneer, you’ll have poured away the majority of it’s volume from the pan. Now, you might want to remove the skin layer at this point, it’ll pull away easily, but note that it’s beautifully tasty! Get your sharpest knife and cut each fillet, across the grain, into slices no more than 5mm thick.

Arrange the duck slices on top of each salad in a double-circle, forming the titular “flower”. Give the dressing a good stir and drizzle over the salads. Add a couple of grinds of pepper.

Quack! With some wine!

Nutrition

Using non-mainstream meats is always a bit of a conundrum when it comes to calculating the nutritional profile of a meal. Duck is isn’t too bad on this front but free-range ducks can vary a fair bit from one critter to another and tend to be much leaner than intensively reared quackers, wild ducks even more so. With this in mind note that the calculated nutritional information will be even more “approximate” than usual (OK, there aren’t typically grades of approximation, in truth I should say “less accurate”).

Cooked Breast
Almost Done
Thing Value
Energy 432 kcal
Carbohydrate 17.5g
Protein 42.1g
Fat 23.1g
  Saturated 5.4g
Dietry Fibre 3.5g

Epilogue

A very enjoyable meal, light and tasty. The duck was a little on the sinewey side but had excellent flavour. Next time I’ll try it with an Asian twist, some ginger, coriander, soy, and normal honey in the marinade. The salad would have worked better with some avocado, can’t go wrong with avo.

[1] Chestnut honey? I bought a jar of this a while back and the flavour is far too strong and bitter to use on porridge (our usual use for honey), you could even say the flavour is gamey. So this honey is only used for the occasional marinade where I think the flavour is going to work. In this case it worked really well I think! The recipe should be fine with normal honey though, but the flavour will certainly not be the same.

Cooking

Roast Wood Pigeon with Braised Vegetables

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Prologue

Roast Wood Pigeon with Braised Vegetables
Coo coo — bang!

I’ve decided to try cooking game with greater variance and frequency. My motivation stems from The River Cottage Meat Book and was recently reinforced by the surprising range of game available at a new local supermarket. To-date my game cooking experience has been rather limited, just venison and rabbit. The former possibly farmed, the latter certainly farmed (so the link to “game” is tenuous at best). If you’re unfamillar with game then the Hugh book is a great start, but game is just a small part of it’s coverage and I can recommend Clarissa Dickson Wright’s (one of the “Two Fat Ladies“) & Johnny Scott’s “The Game Cookbook” as an alternative starting point that is also a great read.

I fear that the supermarket-with-game situation will be short lived due to a lack of demand, will enough locals buy game? Anyway, Waitrose is not the be-all-and-end-all of game, far from it! While the High Street butcher showed little promise on the game front (admittedly I’ve only tried asking for rabbit, in which case all they had to offer was farmed rabbit from China!) I recently found out about a different butcher nearby that ticks all the right boxes, I picked up some tasty duck breast there on Thursday and went back today for a couple of wild rabbits. Wabbit stoo tomorrow!

So, on Tuesday I decided to give a bird, or two, a whirl. I trundled over the tracks to the supermarket intending to get a couple of partridges. Alas, there were none! Luckily there was Wood Pigeon, the other birds available were far too large for one each (pheasant, mallard, goose!). Don’t fear, Wood Pigeons are not the same thing as the greasy rats-of-the-sky very familiar in Sydney (and London). I think that city-pigeons might be Rock Dove’s (Columba livia) or maybe just some sort of mongrel, Wood Pigeons (Columba palumbus) are related though.

Let us get on with the recipe.

Ingredients

Main Ingredients
Coo coo — bang!
  • 2 Wood Pigeons (~280g each, marked on packet as 250g)
  • 6 rashers of Streaky Bacon (120g)
  • 1 small Zucchini (90g after tidying & chopping)
  • 1 medium Onion (200g after tidying & chopping)
  • 12 White Mushrooms (410g after tidying & chopping)
  • 1 tbsp Maple Syrup (10g)
  • 150ml Dry Red Wine
  • 2 cloves of Garlic
  • 6 Juniper Berries
  • 1 heaped tsp of dried Oregano
  • 2 tsp fresh ground Black Pepper
  • 2 tbsp Spiced Mead, or Port, or Sherry
  • Salt

Method

Chopped Vegetables
Chopped Vegetables

Determining the right baking parameters for the birdies was a little difficult. The packaging recommended 40 minutes at 160 degrees, while Hugh’s Meat Book suggests up to 25 minutes at 230 degrees. I stuck to the latter, since the Meat Book is well on it’s way to becoming my preferred deity. If anything I think that critters of this size could have done better with 20 minutes rather than 25 (25 was the upper threshold for a “large” pigeon, but I don’t know what “large” is for a pigeon!). So, first step, preheat oven to 230 degrees.

Next heat the spiced mead, just bung it in a teacup and microwave it. Crush and halve the garlic cloves, crush the juniper berries, and throw both into the heated mead along with a teaspoon of pepper and a couple of grinds of salt.

Now prepare the vegetables. Trim mushroom stems, if necessary, and slice. Top and tail zucchini, halve lengthwise, and slice. Halve, top, and tail the onion and slice. (Photo right.)

Pigeons ready to bake
Oven Ready

Rub the birds with some olive oil, not dripping with oil, just glistening. Now place them breast-up in a roasting pan and get out the bacon. The bacon is to be wrapped over the breast of the bird, the idea is to provide a steady stream of fat to reduce moisture loss, this is known as barding. No special technique is required, the image on the left shows the barded birds. With this done spoon the mead mixture, which should have been sitting for at least 5 minutes, into the cavities of the bird sharing out the garlic and berries evenly. Whack it in the oven! Make a note of the time, they’ll be ready in 25 minutes.

Use a large heavy based pan to deal with the veggies. Add a tablespoon of light olive oil and get it nice and hot, the oil should shimmer and run like water but not be smoking. Toss in the veggies! Keep tossing them around and let them brown a little. After about 5 minutes of this push the temperature right down and add the wine, maple syrup, remaining pepper, and about 50ml of water (or stock if you have some handy). Put a lid on the pan and let it lightly sizzle for about 10 minutes, stirring on occasion. Turn off the heat and have a quick peek at your birds to make sure nothing untoward has happened.

If there’s some time remaining for the birds pour some wine and marinate the
cook.

Braised Vegetables
Braised Vegetables

Remove birds from the oven, turn it off and place a couple of plates in it to warm. Get a medium flame going under the vegetables again, and then continue self-marination for 5 minutes. Remove birds to a temporary holding dish (probably best to have warmed this in the oven too) and pour juices from the pan into the vegetable pan, add about 50ml of water to the pan scrape, swirl, and tip into vegetables. Now push the vegetables to high heat and boil away liquid until vegetable mix resembles that shown in the photo to the right, there should be very little liquid remaining. Grab the hot pates from the oven (careful!) and divide vegetable mixture between them. Place birds on top of vegetables, add a couple of grinds of pepper, serve! Simple!

Nutrition

This is a hard sort of meal to deal with on the Nutrition front, mostly thanks to the pigeon. The Waitrose nutritional information was for “when prepared as directed”, but this would involve weighing the beasts after baking them and didn’t specify whether the weight should include bones or not! I took a punt at it by calculating the raw consumed weight as the raw weight minus the leftover carcass parts after eating (approximating a total of 200g). I had little luck finding nutritional stats for raw wood pigeon so I used stats for “Pheasant, raw, meat and skin” from the USDA database.

So, clearly the information here must be regarded as little more than a rough approximation! Here’s goes:

Served
Game’s Up!
Thing Value
Energy 672 kcal
Carbohydrate 19.4g
Protein 61.0g
Fat 38.5g
  Saturated 5.5g
Dietry Fibre 3.7g

Epilogue

We found the pigeons to be mild in flavour and maybe a little dry, but the wet vegetable mixture covered for any dryness in the meat. Next time I’d probably give them 5 minutes less time in the oven. That said, the sky-rats are certainly to be repeated!

Uncategorized

Blueprint Café

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Grouse grouse mate! Who remembers “grouse”? When I was growing up in a south-west WA surfie town in the 80s the word was nearing the end of its life. Gone the way of many recycled words, back into the compost. To say something was grouse was to say it was knarley, cool, or these days, way mad. Well, I think, but these things change from year to year and place to place, and I’m getting a bit long in the tooth to keep up. Fully sick mate, says Kat, bloody Westies. There’s a word that needs some context: Westie. I’m talking Sydney’s western suburbs, but from a geographical perspective I’m far more westie than anyone from, say, Penrith. And what can all this mean to someone in London anyway! Let alone any other part of the world.

On with the topic! On Saturday we were hunting game, unfortunately this was with a web-browser rather than a shot-gun. You got game? The game restaurant in London appears to be Rules, but when I tried to book the response was that I was about a month too late to book at this time of year. So we hunted… Eventually finding ourselves with a reservation at Blueprint Café. Some note has to be made regarding the process of booking here. It was all done via a web-site called D&D London, which handles several other popular London restaurants as well. How very modern and convenient. But I don’t really like it, I tried booking over the phone first but got a message saying to try the website (this was at 11AM). This web lark takes some of the fun out of booking a table at a decent restaurant.

So at 18:00 we rock up. The game on offer was not extensive, less prevalent than on the online menu (but game supply is unpredictable). We caught a couple of game dishes, a mallard entrée and, the pièce de résistance, grouse.

Kat didn’t order an entrée, as it transpired this was a wise decision. I, on the other hand, couldn’t resist the Salt Mallard served with raspberry conserve, quince paste, and watercress. The mallard was exquisite, cold medallions of deep red breast flesh. Maybe the raspberry and quince flavours (and sweetness) were a bit much for it, but since they were “on the side” this was a small concern. I mopped up remains with some bread, no worries!

For main course I had the Welsh Blackface Mutton. The mutton was perfect, baked to succulent tenderness, but the “parsley and mustard crust” was far, far too mustardy. As if they were trying to hide the fact that the mutton tasted like mutton!

Kat’s main course was grouse. A baked bird served with handmade crisps, salad leaves, raspberry sauce, and traditional giblets-on-toast (grouse on top). Alongside was a bowl of “bread sauce” which I can best describe as a lumpy and sweet béchamel, this complemented the grouse well. Grouse is described, by Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall, as having “a unique, herby, heathery flavour”. I’m not familiar with heather, but “herby” is spot on, this was one tasty bird. Tender, pink-red, and a real pain in the butt to eat! Kat made a great effort then I took over and did what I could with the carcass, it’s a complicated meal but well worth the effort. I even found a piece of lead shot in one of the legs! (Do you think they deliberately leave it in, or insert one just in case even?). I wasn’t keen on the crisps (maybe if they were parsnip I’d be happier) and the pile of what seemed like fried bread-crumbs. But really, everything in addition to the bird is just fluff. It was good.

A warning that the grouse would take three times as long to eat as the mutton would have been appreciated.

We were advised to order sides with our mains, in my case this was warranted as all I had with my mutton was a few leaves. Kat certainly had no need of a side, her meal already came with plenty of cress. She ordered a mixed leaf salad, which was fine. I ordered Purple Broccoli Spears, which were a bit too mushy for my tastes.

Dessert? We had to. I had a Quince and Apple Shortcake, it was too sweet and not quincey enough. More quince and normal cream instead of the sweet muck and it would have been much better. Kat had Orange Polenta Cake with Vanilla Bean Icecream and Poached Pear, hard to go wrong with this one, perhaps on the sweet side again. On sweetness I must note that we both very rarely eat sweet foods, so we may be over-sensitive to sweetness.

We had some wine too, “Primitivo” from Puglia at 5 quid per glass. Good eating wine.

In the end the meal cost us 90 quid, including 15 quid for three glasses (175ml) of wine and 10 quid for “12.5% discretionary service charge”. (The service was good, though maybe a little thin on the ground.) This is quite reasonable for London eating, I expect to pay over 100 quid for a night out at a London restaurant. Kat didn’t have an entrée, though she did have the most expensive main course on the menu, 22 quid, this is around what you’d expect for grouse.

My regrets are dessert, mushy broccoli, and the mustardy crust. But the evening overall was a success thanks to the duck and the grouse. There’s something to be said for the location too. Above the Design Museum (though that doesn’t excite me much) and right next to the Thames. If you’re near the glass frontage, we were right against it, you have a view of the dark glittering expanse of the Thames (which would be a view of the green murky and debris covered expanse of the river if it were daytime). Downriver the Canary Wharf skyline dominates as the river curves down to Isle of Dogs. Upriver the nearby Tower Bridge steals the show. If you can get a seat by the window Blueprint Café is a perfect restaurant for the sight seer.

Produce

Waitrose

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Waitrose, a supermarket, yes, most exciting. Why? Well a Waitrose just moved to Rickmansworth and is now our closest supermarket. Previously Ricky had the choice of just a medium sized Tesco and a small sized Marks & Spencer (and “Iceland”, if you count a frozen-goods store as a supermarket). We became Tesco shoppers, since the local M&S’s stock range is too limited to be of much use. M&S became the useful “cold meat and cheese stop” as it is only about 3 minutes away, while Tesco, a 10 minute walk, did for our weekly shopping.

Here in the UK supermarkets seem to have a class structure. Tesco is pretty much right in the middle, while M&S and Sainsbury’s position themselves as pretty classy. At the bottom of the class ladder are Morrisons and Aldi, while, at the top, Waitrose seems to lord it over the rest. So now Ricky has a high-class supermarket, if such a thing can exist (real class is not having to care about the shopping, let alone how or where it is done). This is all rather different from the situation back home in Australia where, generally, a supermarket is a supermarket with either Coles and Woolies being it, though there is a light sprinkling of “budget” chains like BiLo mostly to be found in less metropolitan areas (all owned by Coles or Woolies anyway).

It seems that Waitrose is now going to be our supermarket of choice, we’re just so bloody classy. Not only is it just across the train tracks from us (a one minute stroll aided by an overpass) but it also has brilliant variety! Though smaller than the Tesco-extra in Watford, which we had to stop shopping at when we dumped the car, it still seems to kill it on variety. One prime example is game meats, today we tallied up farmed venison, duck, and goose; plus game birds of pheasant, partridge, wood pigeon, and mallard! At a supermarket. They have a good range of “fresh” seafood, some good beers (including some of the St Peter’s range, though not any of our favourites), and more “foreign muck” than you can point a stick at. The only department they fail in a little is wholefoods, but they’re at least as good at the local Tesco on that front.

The vegies and general meats look decent too but I’ll stick to the little high street Chris Blake Butchers (chain) and Mark’s Fruits for these needs. So long as they can provide what I want I prefer to stick to the small guys, I’ll leave Waitrose for the occasional exotic ingredient.

The sudden existence of this new supermarket has me pondering local retail economics. How will this affect the Tesco and M&S? I assume the Tesco will suffer a decent drop in revenue as it was formerly the only resonable general supermarket in town. At the same time, I don’t think it’ll be as much as one might expect. While Waitrose was packed last Sunday this Sunday it was really rather quiet, I think a lot of people looked around and saw the same old stuff they get at Tesco and a whole load of stuff they don’t care about. Waitrose prices tend to be a little higher than Tesco prices, though I think the goods are a bit better in many cases, and people set a lot of importance in differences even as low as 5 quid per week. I think Waitrose is in a convenient position, but I live right in the middle of town and don’t have a car, anyone who drives isn’t going to care either way. The M&S could suffer quite a lot, I think it previously only really had any point due to it’s central location. Having a new “classy” supermarket nearby that is 5 times the size might be bad for it. I’d expect to find that many of the customers attracted to Waitrose will actually come from a local pool of people who drive to Watford for their groceries (as we did when we had a car), thus not having so great an impact on the local stores.

I do fear for the small High Street veggie shop and butcher though. Waitrose easily outdoes them on range, maybe on price. Like I said, I’ll stick to the little shops (everything’s a one minute walk away) but for many the convenience of the supermarket may overrule.

As for Waitrose, my fear is that very few locals will be interested in the items they stock that excite me. If nobody buys game birds they’ll stop stocking them and stock more bacon or something instead. Yay. Time will tell, I think Waitrose stock variety will be an interesting observational study (what kind of nerd am I?).

Enough of this dullardry! It’s just a bloody supermarket. (With game birds!)

Produce

Regulated Up The Backside And Back Again

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I come from a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, where unpasteurised cheeses and charcuterie (salamis, etc) were made illegal to “protect people”. Want to move to Australia? Remember to say your fond farewell’s to the likes of Roquefort! Australian Camembert is to a good French unpasteurised version as chewing a candle is to a bite of good vintage cheddar.

In essence, moving to the UK has been a real experience when it comes to unpasteurised meat and dairy products! If I was to move back to “The Antipodes”, as some Poms inaccurately label my homeland, I’d have to a) first learn charcuterie and cheese making, and b) move to a farm. (Actually, this sounds like my dream life! The problem with dreams is always the practicalities.)

This is all a digression leading up to the main point: tonight I found this article.

A sad story of proposed EU guidelines that may make life very difficult for some, requiring restaurants to place detailed ingredient lists on their menus (frankly, beyond the important bits, I just don’t need to know) and probably mostly kill random preserves at markets. It just isn’t necessary, if you’re allergic to something stay away from unlabelled foods. It’s like some the fabled idiot with an acute sesame allergy who goes to a thai restaurant and dies. Don’t punish the restaurant, this is natural selection at work! How it is that governments form these nanny-state rules that most individuals would think are ridiculous?

I hope the current exemptions hold. I hope, dearly, not to see the UK or EU adopt rules that subtract a little joy from the lives of many for the sake of a very small minority. If anything is to be done I’d propose sticking great big warning labels to food with slogans like: “Unpasteurised Food May Harm You”, “This Cheese Could KILL YOUR BABY”, “Unlabelled Food May Be POISION”. It’s how they handle the cigarettes. Seriously, if buying cigarettes and alcohol can be legal then why not a bloody unpasteurised cheese?

C’mon EU, what the bloody hell are ya?

Random

British Uselesscom

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

BT, oh BT! I called them today, after three redirects to the “right department” the fourth person was able to tell me they have no record me trying to cancel two accounts a month ago. I have arranged cancellation again, effective from today. They said final bills will be in the mail shortly.

We’ll see…

Every time I try to get something done with these morons it’s the same damn story. They have no record of previous attempts, the reference numbers I have are meaningless, let’s try it again. Another near-hour of my life consumed by BT!

An attempt to have the lines redirected early in the year was aborted after five calls, several “reference numbers” (one of which I was assured couldn’t possibly be a BT reference number), and almost a full day’s worth of hours. I think I ranted about that at the time.

I don’t understand how a company can be so completely incompetent? It is beyond belief. The individuals I speak to on the phone all seem very friendly and helpful (and often apologetic), I’m always assured that it has been looked after and given one or more reference numbers. Then, it is as if it never happened. Thi is their business service.

Alas, my BT shenanigans are not over for the day. Now I have another account to try and track down, this time Openzone, who’re sending wireless roaming bills to who-knows-where while charging me late fees and not accepting calls. What’s more, the support number listed on their website is a toll-number! Utter bastards! (Yay for SayNoTo0870.com.)