Bit of a different post this time. I just bought myself a little oven so that I can return to another one of my off-and-on hobbies… Cooking! More specifically: Baking. Those who know me probably remember that I used to like making cakes and pies (as well as steamed suet puddings like Spotted Dick and Steak & Kidney Pudding). Last night, I made an apple pie… But this was a little different since I couldn’t easily find the right ingredients or equipment. Therefore, this would be ideal for students living in a dorm who don’t have access to any scales or measuring jugs but they do have a tablespoon, a bowl, a rolling pin (quite cheap) a metal dish, a fridge and an oven.

Equipment:
A tablespoon
A teaspoon
A mixing bowl
A knife
Aluminium foil
A pie dish or deep metal plate (not too deep!)

Ingredients:
Flour (220g / 8oz… But if you have no kitchen scales like me: 25 table spoons **)
Butter (110g / 4oz)
Sugar
Milk (just a little for brushing the pastry)
Apples (a couple of big ones or 3 - 4 medium sized ones)
Sultanas (if you like)
Cinnamon (if you want it… make sure it’s ground cinnamon)

** For measuring the flour, I put the spoon in and then levelled it off with the back of a knife… Don’t heap the spoon up!

Method:
Okay, here we go. I had a 227g bluck of butter… So first, I cut that in half which makes roughly 110g, right? It’s usually simple enough to buy a half-pound block (227g is half a pound) and cutting it in half is simple to do.

Now, cut the butter into small blocks. Not too small, though. Perhaps a couple of centimeters or an inch square, and then put them into your mixing bowl.

Measure the flour (either by using a scale or with my tablespoon method) and pour it on top of the butter in the bowl. Also, add a heaped tablespoon of sugar to make the crust a little sweeter. This is “sweetcrust” pastry. If you’re making a meat pie, don’t use the sugar and that’s “shortcrust” pastry.

Time to get messy! Rub the butter with the flour to mix it. Your hands need to be clean and dry at this point. If they’re not: Naughty you! Keep rubbing and mixing the flour and butter together until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. If you’re having trouble with clumps of butter, add another tablespoon of flour. Be careful! Too much flour and the pastry will be dry. Not enough and it won’t bind very well (clumpy dough).

Once you’ve got it looking like a pulverised loaf of bread, add 3 tablespoons of water and mix it with a knife for a few moments. Now GET YOUR HANDS IN THERE! Mix it together until the dough forms a ball and picks up all of the bits on the outside of the bowl. Make sure it’s not too soggy. If you find the dough is very wet and keeps sticking to the bowl and your hands, add another tablespoon of flour GRADUALLY! Just enough to make it stop sticking, not to dry it out.

Now loosely wrap the ball of dough in a bit of foil and stick it in the fridge. It needs to be there for 30 minutes, so give yourself a break for a moment… Maybe watch a bit of TV.

Okay, our TV programme has finished (unless yours is an hour long…) Time to roll out our pastry.

Divide the pasty ball up. You’ll want one third for the top of the pie and two thirds for the base.

Find a good place to roll your pastry and sprinkle flour all over it. Also, make sure you rub flour into your rolling pin and on your hands. It’s messy, but it stops things sticking.

Now put your pastry on the surface and roll backwards and forwards with a little bit of downward pressure on the pin and make sure that once you’ve done a few strokes in one direction, you pick up the pastry and flip it over as well as turning it 90 degress to stop you getting just a long piece of pastry. You’re kind of aiming for a circle…

Don’t roll the pastry too thin! I usually roll mine to about 3 or 4mm thick.

CAREFULLY pick up the pasty by lifting half of it onto the palm of your hand and then supporting the rest with your other hand and gently place it on top of your pie disk / metal plate. CAREFULLY make sure that the pastry touches the dish all the way around and all the way to the bottom. Once you’re happy with that, you can cut away any extra pastry from the edges. To do this, use the edge of the plate / dish as your guide and the BLUNT side of the knife to cut the pastry off. Don’t use the cutting side because it might tear the pastry and you’ll have to patch it. If you have any holes in your pastry at this point, use this extra pastry to patch them up by making your finger a little wet (use water, not your mouth!) and rubbing the edges of the hole and putting a little pastry in there.

Now we need to peel the apples… Simple enough. Cut them into quarters… Easy enough. Remove the core of the apple (just the bit with the pips or seeds or whatever they are)… Easy… Now you need to slice the quarters. You should be aiming for between 6-10 slices. The thicker the slices, the firmer the pie filling will be at the end. I usually vary the thickness and cut one apple quite thickly and the other apple not so thickly.

Once you’ve cut the apples (don’t worry if they’re going brown already, it’s natural) put one layer of apples into your half-pie (make sure it covers the bottom) and then sprinkle a teaspoon or two of sugar over them (if the apples aren’t sweet at all, you might want to add more sugar). I also sprinkle a tablespoon of sultanas and a teaspoon of cinnamon on at this point. Do this again. And once more so that you now have three layers of apples. This should now come up to the edge of your pie… If not, your plate / dish is quite deep… Keep adding apples… Thinking about it… You might also run out of pastry…

Now you’ve got the apples in, time to roll out the top of your pie (same technique as before) but make it a little thicker than your base. Mine is usually 5 or 6 mm thick. Before you lift your crust onto your pie, brush a little water along the edge of the pie (the part with the apples in it). This helps the crust to stick. Now, carefully lift the top onto the top of your pie and gently press in the edges to seal the pie. Cut off the extra pastry and either bin it or wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge. Remember to use it within a couple of days, though.

Make sure the edge of that pie is closed! Now cut a couple of slits in the top to help the steam escape and to prevent your pie from breaking up.

Do you have foil? If so, cut long, thin strip of foil and cover just the edges of your pie. If not, you’ll end up with black crusts…

Brush a bit of milk over the top of the pie (this will give it a nice brown colour) and sprinkle a little sugar on top.

Put it in the middle of a pre-heated oven (220°C / 425°F / Gas Mark 7) and leave it there for about 10 minutes. After that, remove the foil (if you used it) and reduce the heat to 190°C / 375°F / Gas Mark 5 and cook it for another 40 minutes. Make sure you check it so it doesn’t burn! Especially if you have a fan-assisted oven!

When it’s finished, it’ll be VERY hot. Leave it to stand for about 15 minutes before serving and remember that it can still be quite hot up to an hour after cooking!

Serve your apple pie with some custard, cream or ice-cream… Or just scoff it… Your choice. Your pie.

If you can’t eat it all at once, cover it with foil and stick it in the fridge. It’ll keep for a couple of days.

Here’s one I prepared earlier:

Catch you later!

It’s been about 2 months or so since I last posted on my blog… Bit of a neglection there… Anyway, suppose I’d best bring you up-to-date on happenings.

As most of you know, I returned to the UK in June for my mother’s birthday. Sorry if we didn’t meet up. Things were hectic. Was planning to hook up with Kirk, but his schedule was packed. Hopefully we’ll get together next time for a Sesh ‘O’ Bash… That’d be cool.

During the trip, had a visit to London and Thorpe Park. I’ll upload some photos at some point today or over the weekend for y’all. Also managed to pick up a new camcorder (It’s a JOOVC camera, but not ready for de HUD /fonejacker). If I can figure out how to put video files on here, then I’ll post some crappy music videos I created using the footage of various days and Pinnacle Studio 12… Which, as it turns out, despite being ‘Vista Certified’ managed to destroy that particular OS on my desktop… XP runs fine with it, but for some reason giving it anything other than 128kbps MP3s causes it to ignore the audio… Stupid thing.

In terms of work, things are hella busy. We’ve got the summer session now and that means lots of classes. Also, I have to present a 2-hour long magic class with a 1-hour magic show as part of a “Harry Potter Week”… Eek. Perhaps I’ll try to make myself disappear…

Also, next term I’m moving to the north of the city to take a new position at EF4 (which is now the administrative headquarters for Xi’an) and also to teach 4 days a week at a local middle school. That involves 10 classes which are 40-45 minutes each and going from 9am to 5pm each day. It means one day off in the week, but it also means that, according to my contract, I should get one day off at the weekend… Hope it’s a Sunday… It’s been ages since I had a regular Sunday with no work… Apart from holidays that is…

In terms of my love life, I can’t remember if I put it up here that we’re engaged… But we are. We’ve had our wedding photos taken and are planning to get the certificate towards the end of this year, but the ceremony won’t be until May 2009 since that’s the only time my family can come out to China. We are still very much in love and she’s a wonderful person. I’ll upload our photos as well when I’ve got some spare time this weekend. She’s now working at Web International English as a course consultant. Apparently they’re quite short on teachers. I was considering going there, but something happened the other day that kind of put me off. One of their teachers is being unprofessional and teaching swear words to the students… The only reason I know is because two students were sitting in the reception area while I was waiting for my darling fiancee to finish work and they were talking to each other about their lessons and what they’d learned from their foreign teacher. One girl had learned “shit” and “bitch”… To me, as a person who takes my career quite seriously, that’s professional misconduct. Swear words are things that shouldn’t be taught in a class… Discuss.

On other things; me and a couple of friends have started a business to recruit new English teachers to work here in China (1-year contracts mainly… perfect for gap-year students;-) ). Our new company is called RAY English (RAY stands for Red & Yellow… The colours of the Chinese flag). If you or anyone you know is interested in teaching a year in China (they’ll need a TESOL quaification) then tell them to contact me or visit www.RAYEnglish.com.

Well, that’s almost everything I can think of… Oh, have some animals… Two hamsters (Tic & Tac) and a little puppy (Charlie… He’s a chihuahua). Not too much gaming recently. My 360 has been neglected for quite sometime (although I had a quick go of Grid this morning) and the PSP is gathering dust.

Finally, I’ve asked for August 1st as a day off due to the fact that the next total solar eclipse is passing within 100 miles of Xi’an and I can get up there to see it quite easily on a bus, so that’ll be good. That makes two total eclipses I’ve seen! I thought I’d only ever see the one in England.

Now that really is all I can think of… Please posty some comments. If you have any questions, pop them there and I’ll answer as soon as I can. Until the next time: Catch you later!

It never sodding stops, does it? My XBox died on me. So I had to take that back. Got a replacement today, so hopefully be able to play some games in the next couple of days or so. Also, had a little party around mine last night with the Chinese staff from work and moved my desktop into the dining room so that people could dance (since the dining room is bigger than the study and it’s practically empty), yet when I moved it back to the study it wouldn’t power on… What the f**k?

I spent over an hour this morning trying to figure out what the problem was. I stripped it piece by piece and kept trying to power on, but nothing. I ended up with nothing in there but the CPU and motherboard… Still nothing. Took the CPU out and nothing from the motherboard. For those who know about these things, the motherboard should provide some diagnostic beeps when there’snothing plugged into it. But it was silent.

There was only one more removable component left on that board… The battery for the BIOS clock… So I thought I’d remove it… Life! It was working! Popped the battery back in… It still booted into the BIOS. Put everything back piece by piece (keyboard and mouse was the last to go in) and it’s all working agian. Phew.

Finding that quitea bit of software I used to use before my laptop crashed is sorely missed. Having to redownload SUPER after an embarrasing accident in one of my classes where I couldn’t play MP4 files on the school’s computer and had to hold my laptop up and walk it around the class like an electronic flashcard… So I need something to convert them easily into other formats. I found that SUPER was one of the best for that.

Also, I need to re-download ConvertXToDVD to burn off DVDs of TV shows I’ve downloaded and TMGEnc for some strange reason that I can’t remember right now… Also having to download everything off the webserver as well since the laptop crash destroyed all of my data and that’s the only place where I have my websites. Arse.

Still, everything else is going okay. I have 3 classes finishing this weekend, so I’m happy about that and then another 2 finishing the week after, which’ll be marvellous. Perhaps the stress level will start to come down. Got to start applying for a visa so that Spring can come to England with me for a holiday. Got the application form and just have to see if I can apply by post, or if we’ve got to go to Beijing to get it done… Hope it happens quickly. I’ll keep you all posted on that.

That’s all I can think of for now. Until next time: Catch you later!

There seems to be a few things that just p*ss me off recently…. Certain people at work when they p*ss and moan about things, people who are computer illiterate f*ckwits, people who don’t know that when you want to insert something into a document then you need to click on “insert”… It seems that people are just getting dumber.

And yes, I’m still using Windows for stuff. Not that I like or advocate using Windows. When Adobe CS3 works properly in Linux, then I’m switching.

Today is Saturday… It’s somewhere between 11:35 and 12:00… depending on how long it takes me to write this post. Which means that I’m about 2 hours into the 26 hour weekend… 24 working hours to go. Sucks donkey balls.

I have another 2 classes today and 4 classes tomorrow, but I have to be at school from 8:30a.m. to 9:15p.m. on both days. Next week I have about 5 of my classes finishing, another two finishing the week after and then it’ll be another 6 weeks or so before any more finish. Hopefully when this sh*tload of classes drop off, I’ll have a slightly easier time and won’t have the double split shift. At least, that’s the theory. Everything works in theory… Even communism….

I need to tidy my desk… Just a random thought. It’s a sodding mess here at work… Test papers, homework and everything everywhere… Perhaps I’ll work on that in this little break. I also have to give one of my lesson plans to the boss today… For some reason they’re taking one a week from each teacher. Seems a little suspicious… Almost as if the school isn’t trusting us to plan lessons… Hmm…

There’s one big deciding factor about if I’m going to stay until next year or leave this year… Our senior teacher is leaving in a couple of months. The only people who have been here the longest are me, Gareth and Beth… If one of us don’t get the senior teacher position, then we’ve agreed that we will be quitting. Just need to see what’s going to happen on that one.

It’s good to be writing on the blog again. Two posts and they both got comments! Woo hoo!

I also got my name printed in the monthly journal of the International Brotherhood of Magicians for starting a discussion on a magic routine. Maybe not world famous, but it’s nice to see your name in print when you know it goes all over the world. Also learning an effect called the Hummingbird Card (basically you take a playing card and it floats and spins around you) and a few other neat effects.

My memory is also getting quite bad… I can’t remember what bolax I spouted in yesterday’s post, so I don’t know if I’m repeating myself…

Having a little party at my place for all the Chinese staff this week. Should be quite interesting. Have to break out the 128kbps MP3 collection! Kirk would love that… He did last time. lul

Right… That’s all I can write for now… Two reasons: 1) I’m hungry and 2) I need a p*ss… Catch you later!

Well, now things are running smoothly again… Time to let you all know more about what I’ve been up to recently…

My computers seem to have been infected by some stupid virus that likes to propagate itself through USB storage devices… As a result, I’ve had information from two USB sticks wiped before finding out how to remove and stop them spreading. First, it was Ravmon that I seemed to pick up and then it was some strange Chinese thing…

 Some advice to people: If you find that your USB drives start failing to open, right click it and look at the command at the top of the menu… If it’s garbled information or Chinese writing, then you’re infected… You need to open a command prompt (Start -> Run… -> cmd [Enter]) and do the following (don’t forget to remove quotation marks), oh and this is Windows…:
Type “X:” and press enter. Where X is the letter of your drive.
Type “dir/w/p/ah” and press enter.
Look at the files, there should be one called “autorun.inf” and some hidden .exe file.
If not, you’re clean and the problem for you is elsewhere… If so, then:
Type “attrib -r -s -h -a autorun.inf” and press enter.
Type “del autorun.inf” and press enter.
Type “attrib -r -s -h -a BASHBASH.exe” and press enter. Replace BASHBASH with the correct filename of the .exe you saw before. If it’s a Chinese name, just press [tab] instead of typing the name until it appears.
Now type “del” then a space and the name of the .exe, or press [tab] until it appears.
Finally, type “md autorun.inf” and press enter.

For some reason, these things can’t delete a folder, but they can delete a file… If you already have autorun.inf as a folder, it prevents the virus from creating a file with the same name… and if it can’t create the file, for some reason it doesn’t copy the exe… Odd. Also, you may want to check your Windows directory for a .exe of the same name. Sometimes it’s a different name. Ones I’ve had were RavMon.exe and ms_windows5.exe. Delete these and the .pf files that go with them, then scan your registry and delete any instances of them. You *should* be clean. Keep the autorun.inf folder just incase you use it on an infected computer. It stops the spread.

Anyways, back to life. Aside from the viruses, my laptop’s hard drive and DVD drive both decided to die at the same time… So now I’m using my photo drive as a main hard drive and have had to put all of the photos on the main desktop for the moment.

Most of my weekend classes are coming to an end in the next week or two. Which is nice. Hopefully I’ll get a little respite for a week or two before the new classes start again. At least this time we have enough teachers to cover them all.

I’ve been pratting around with a program called MixMeister to “mash up” some music… Pretty good beat mixing software and there’s a few nifty features on it that are quite good. Planning to give it a test run next week when Spring invites some of the Chinese staff over for a little party. Should be interesting to see what happens in a live setting…

Haven’t had much time to work on Java Productions recently. Once work dies down a little, I’ll put more effort into the business plan… Er… Which was on that USB stick that got destroyed… F***. Oh well… I’ll have to do it all again. Bugger.

I’m actually a little surprised at my level of Chinese… Considering that I’ve not had any lessons and have picked up everything I know from listening and working it out, I can have a mini converstaion (my speaking is crap) but I can understand most things most people say to me… But I’m lazy and tend to rely too much on Spring to translate.

For those of you wondering who this “Spring” is, she is my lovely girlfriend that I kept mentioning. It’s all out in the open now, so it’s safe to shout it out from the rooftops. There are photos of her in the galleries. :-)  Everything is going well and we are still very much in love. We’re planning to return to the UK next year, so y’all can expect sessions of bash at that time…

Listening to more and more Korean and Chinese pop music now. Seems I’ve got out-of-touch with the Japanese pop music… Any ideas what’s big in Japan now? I’m guessing the Eurobeat era is long over… Shame.

If you’re interested, I’m actually listening to some old music at the moment… I say old… It’s “Dreaming” by “Ruff Drivers & Arrola”. Just a random track picked from my hard drive…

Jeez… I still spout a lot of bolax… I’ll have to try and get back on IRC and Skype sometime soon. Haven’t set those up on my lappy again yet (hardly use the desktop for anything except downloading huge torrents over several days)… I’ll do that in the next day or two. Well, that’s all for now. Catch you later!