Wulf's Web-Den

For a long time I had been looking for a hand-powered coffee grinder. Previously my only way to prepare coffee beans was a blade-based attachment for a food-processor: awkward to set up, giving less than brilliant results (blades produce a mixture of fine dust and over-sized chunks) and using electricity. Recently I popped into a branch of Whittards and found a small, hand-cranked grinder using a burr mechanism - and on sale, too.

The grinder was deficient in the area of instructions but it was relatively simple to figure out how to adjust the height of the grinding head. Initially it produced espresso-fine grounds and took a lot of effort but I have now reset it to turn out grounds similar in size to those I am using to buying in packets. A couple of small teaspoons of beans and about fifty turns of the crank (along with some shaking along the way to keep the grinding area topped up) produces enough for a cup of fresh-ground coffee.

It isn't a huge contribution to fighting global warming and rampant energy use but using beans and this simple bit of machinery slightly reduces my overall impact - and produces an excellent beverage!

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Just a short entry tonight - this morning I was putting on a goulash (Hungarian beef stew with lots of paprika) and this evening we were enjoying it with a friend of ours.

I am looking forward to finishing what was left tomorrow. In my experience, most stew type dishes taste even richer when reheated the next day. I think it must be the result of the extra time the ingredients have to marinate in each other's flavours.

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Following yesterday's video, here is a follow-up showing that the planned trip to the park went successfully:

This one has an original soundtrack lifted from a performance of Summertime by The Pico Brown Five. I'm not sure if the basic tune is still in copyright but I picked the solo section (no lyrics) and the chords are extensively reharmonised so I think it is a fairly safe choice. If I keep up the film making, I will have to do more investigation of songs licenced under Creative Commons arrangements so that I know everything is completely above board (and get round to recording more original material of my own.

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I wrote earlier this month about my experiments with video; yesterday I published the first fruits of that work, a short promo piece for the event Hither Green Baptist Church are hosting in Mountsfield Park this morning:

Looking out of my window, I can even see some hints of blue sky through the clouds, so things are looking hopeful.

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For this week's self portrait, number fifty in my fiftytwo series, I held the the camera at arms length. The resulting image looked down on me a little which made me think of surveillance cameras, so I worked on the photograph to push the colours and add scanlines.

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I really enjoyed last night's gig by Aradhna at London City Mission's Departure Arts Cafe. I picked up a couple of CDs and look forward to giving them a listen today; hopefully they will capture the richly interwoven textures of voices, sitar, guitar, violin and tabla as well as adding in the bass part (their bassist was not available last night).

Information about the remaining dates on their UK tour can be found on the tours page of their website and any comments can be added on the Last.fm event page I created yesterday morning (top marks to Last.fm by the way for quickly sorting out the typo in inadvertently added by copying and pasting the venue name from an email I had been sent!).

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Jane and I are heading up to London City Mission's Departure Arts Cafe on Commercial Road (near Limehouse DLR) tonight for a gig by Aradhna, a Christian group who draw on Indian musical traditions for their music. The time I would have spent blogging instead got turned to posting details of the concert on Last.FM but at least I can link you to the event page there.

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