Work To Live

A few people have asked us how much our beer costs to make. In all honesty, we didn't know how to answer this question, so I took one of our recent beers and tried to work it out. Below you'll see the result of my calculations.  Now there are a couple of caveats here: Juice Wolf is a pretty boozy (8.3%), hoppy beer and given that a large proportion of the costs are the hops, many of our beers will come in a bit cheaper than this. But there will be others - La Push for example - that have even more hops and so will be more expensive. I've missed out a number of costs - water, labelling, consumables and electricity to name a few - partly because I think they're fairly negligible and partly because I'm lazy You'll notice that a significant proportion of the overall cost is in bottling, which is why we always appreciate it when you bring your empties back to us. I remember the days of homebrew kits claiming 50p-pints, and maybe that is still possible. But for us al...

I have recently been watching endless YouTube videos of talented artists using acrylic pouring paint to create wonderful abstract artworks. A couple of examples can be found here and here .  We bought some paints from Hobbycraft a while ago, but today I finally got round to trying them out. I did 4 in all, but only 2 were worth sharing. Here they are: I think you'll agree that, for a first attempt, they are not too bad!? We've bought some canvases to go either side of the window above the kitchen sink in our new kitchen, and I plan to paint them using this technique - once I've practiced a bit more, that is :) Lee

One good thing to come out of 2020 is that a combination of being at home more and not spending all our money on travelling, led to us finally, after 9 years, replace our kitchen! Our junk room  dining room is no more. We finally have a livable space in the kitchen with enough work surface and modern gadgets to accommodate a small restaurant.  TwoGuys looked after us from the outset when we met Heather who designed the space, Mags and Tony who coordinated the different trades and materials. And finally Bruce, the kitchen fitter who was.... well..... a little like Lee. For those who know Lee, know exactly what I meaningtons.  Shout out Jack the sparky, Brendan and Dave the plumbers and Nada our painter who were all amazing.  Here is the video of our journey to the new kitchen:

Nothing beats a pasta sauce made out of fresh tomatoes. We rarely buy tinned tomatoes (other than for Lee's chilli) and have not used a pre-made pasta sauce since our student days but buying / growing fresh tomatoes and cooking them up for a pasta sauce is time consuming. We normally choose to have pasta when we need something quick and filling, usually just before we're heading out to play Racketball or Badminton.  With a glut of tomatoes from the greenhouse this year, we decided to try making our pasta sauces and freezing them. When we need a sauce, we can take one out of the freezer and either microwave or heat it up on the hob whilst the pasta is cooking.   To make the sauces, we took a very large pan, filled it up with fresh tomatoes and let them boil down into a sauce. Seasoned with salt and pepper and then divided up into freezer pots with enough sauce for 2 portions. Normally I would have given the tomatoes a little blitz with the hand blender but it was packed so...

The blog has been quiet during the Covid-19 lockdown. Somehow we seem busier than ever with less to do! With summer over, the weather getting cooler and the nights drawing in, I am going to try to catch up on the writing. Some entries, such as this one, are going to look at activities we have done despite the restrictions. Other entries are going to look at back things we did before lock down which we are hoping will start up again in the new year. And lastly, I will be trying to catch up on some of the fantastic places we have been on holiday which I will reminisce over and ready ourselves to start planning for 2021 (or maybe 2022)! With our plans for 2 weeks off in September cancelled due to travel restrictions, we decided to take the time off anyway. We would spend the first week leisurely clearing out the kitchen and dining room and then spend the second week out and about avoiding the noise and dust as the whole kitchen was stripped out and walls knocked down. We did consider canc...

I try not to get Sam too involved in my obsession with astronomy, but tonight I was staying up until 2.30am and Sam, busy binge-watching Warrior Nun, inadvertently came along for the ride. Recent predictions of naked-eye comets - i.e. those you can see without even binoculars - had left backyard astronomers frustrated, as time after time they failed to deliver. It had been over 20 years since I last saw a naked-eye comet (Hale-Bopp in 1997), so I was naturally cautious about optimistic reports of C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) - or Comet Neowise . After a miserable run of weather, tonight was forecast to be clear. So, after a hard day measuring and cutting up sheets of polycarbonate roofing, I cracked open several beers and waited for the early hours. This would be when Neowise was just about high enough in the sky for me to glimpse, without being drowned out by the approaching daylight. WHOA!!!! Naked eye comet not half?!! Its nucleus and tail were clearly visible to the naked eye. Grab a pair o...

Brew Day! After literally months of waiting for our Grainfather brewing equipment to arrive, it is all finally here and it was time to do our first "proper" brew. We've dabbled with grain+extract brewing with mixed success, so it was inevitable that we graduated to all-grain brewing. We've committed pretty heavily to the Grainfather system, having forked out for: Grainfather Connect - this is the combined mash tun and boil kettle Grainfather Conical Fermenter - as its name suggests, the fermentation vessel (FV) Grainfather Sparge Water Heater - essentially a glorified tea urn Sam also bought me a very cool gadget that I had been drooling over for some time now - a Tilt Hydrometer . This is a small cylinder that you drop into your FV and it continually monitors both the specific gravity and the temperature of your fermenting brew, broadcasting the data via bluetooth. I will no doubt blog about this more in future! The plan was to install all the equipment in our Brewe...

I have this thing in my life. It's called a Sam. I think other versions are available, but I've got the original version and it's most certainly the best. The reason I say this is because one of the multitude of the things my Sam does is to hunt out small UK breweries. She would have done this anyway, for sure, but the whole Covid-19 gubbins that is still going on makes us both want to hunt out microbreweries that are probably more reliant on internet sales from new customers. One such find was Firebrand Brewing Company . She forwarded me a link and I was immediately interested. Discarding the couple of lagers and the stout on offer, this was a brewery with a massive US IPA focus and I couldn't wait to get an order in. A couple of their beers were out of stock, but I still managed to bag Patchwork Rocket, Citra Simcoe, Simcoe Mosaic, Thundercloud and the West Coast Session IPA. Cornish breweries conjour up images of traditional Cornish ales and English IPAs, and of cour...

One of my favourite veggies to grow in the garden is kale but we often end up with so much left overs,  we struggle to know what to do with it. After an afternoon of frantic searching, I came across the idea of making Kale Pesto. It follows a similar recipe to normal pesto but also includes kale and lots of it!  It ended up being really easy to make, tasted great with pasta and was freezable so we could enjoy our kale later on in the year when the garden wasn't being so generous.  Here is the recipe we used: 100g Kale  100g Nuts (we used walnuts but I think you could use any nuts)  100g Grated Parmesan Cheese 4 Cloves of Garlic  Olive Oil  Lemon Juice  Salt and Pepper Put everything in a food processor and combine to a paste. Add olive oil and lemon juice until you get the right consistency and taste. Season with salt and pepper.  We mixed the pesto with some pasta and ham hock and served with a little more grated Parmesan.  This recipe ...

As a household, we hate food waste and whenever we can, we try to minimise throwing out food. This typically means making sure we have used stuff before it goes out of date, being quite open to using stuff beyond its Best Before, and freezing any leftovers we have - yep, this includes kebabs! Some waste is unavoidable, though. Whether it's the bits we trim off the fruit and veg we use, or the fact that the greens in our trug decide to hit turbo boost all at the same time, we do need to throw stuff out. This infuriates us! Being keen gardeners too - ok, so Sam holds most of the green fingers here - we would love to compost our food scraps and use them on the stuff we grow. You know, Circle of Life and all that? Traditional composting is messy if you have an urban garden, and we've never been that successful at it when we've tried. The mice liked to nest under the compost bin, which gave Mitzy endless fun, but apart from that we didn't have much joy. About a year ago, Sam...

If there is one lesson the recent Covid-19 situation has taught me, it is that people really care about toilet paper.  Never would I have predicted that in a world-wide crisis, the first thing all human beings would think is "do I have enough toilet roll to see me through the next 4 years?". If anything, it actually makes me feel a little more positive that should we ever be in that end-of-the-world situation, we will all have nice clean bums.  Another positive to come out of the toilet roll saga is that the local drug dealers have found a new venture. Toilet rolls, even those a little worn and used around the edges, is raking in more money right now that any illegal drugs. And assuming social distancing rules are maintained, there is no worry of getting in trouble with the law..... unless the rolls are stolen, which I expect most of them are, given you can't buy them in the stops!  Going back to the purpose of this post.....  Lee and I were completely unaffected by ...

We've only been skiing in Austria twice but it is quickly becoming one of our favourite countries to head to in search of good snow, epic parties and warm hospitality. With two other ski holidays already booked this year, we couldn't quite squeeze in a third week so had to settle for a long weekend, travelling Thursday lunchtime to Monday night.  We chose the resort of Mayrhofen as it is close to Innsbruck airport (just under an hour by car), has a good sized ski area with plenty of intermediate runs and, a well known après-ski scene. Nothing beats a cold beer and some 'singalong' Austrian ski hits to finish a good day's skiing! The holiday was booked through SunWeb, an online travel company specialising in ski holidays. Our holiday included the flights, transfer, ski passes and 4 nights half board in the  Hotel Zillertalerhof . We found SunWeb to be professional and responsive online, providing us with everything we needed to make the whole trip go very smoothly p...

On a mid-September morning, we started our 5-day trip to visit my family in France by getting the early ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. We had a fantastic time eating Mum's home-cooked food, creating balloon animals (poor Ruby wasn't a fan when they went bang), staring at the stars without any light pollution (although Lee was annoyed with the full moon) and playing with our nieces Sophia and Ruby. The weather was variable. When the sun was out, it was like a summer's day but when the clouds turned up, it turned a little cold and we needed to put jumpers on. Mum's tomato crop was a big one this year and even though it was close to the end of the season, there were still hundreds of big, fat, juicy tomatoes to be picked, washed, chopped (apparently I wasn't very good at this according to Lee and Mum) and cooked up into sauce to be frozen. It put my measly 6 plants to shame! Lee and I are always on the hunt for craft beer and Mum and Dad found a little diamond in...

Well hello there! Lee and Sam here, and a warm welcome to our blog. Inspired by the blog  we created for our epic road trip of the US, and driven by mainly Lee's apathy towards other social networking platforms, we have decided to create another catalogue of our various travels and recreational experiences. We hope you find some of this interesting or entertaining. If you do, or just want to say "hi", feel free to leave a comment.