The Chronicles of Travelling Steve

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Nasty bank scam

Luckily I don't use Windows as this particular piece of malware looks like a very nasty way of harvesting all of those useful banking details that you try so hard to keep safe...

White paper on the new peeper

So this looks like it will be a good tool to keep around for those still stuck on a PC BHODemon

Yikes...

A Baker's Dozen

Ciabatta. Italian for slipper.

A wonderful thing to eat and also lots of fun to make. Ciabatta is the second bread that I have tried to produce from the wonderful and inspiring "The Bread Bakers Apprentice". The first was from-scratch sourdough, and after a week of preparation and feeding and nurturing of the yeasty little mound of dough I finally got two pretty solid loaves of not-too-bad bread out of it. Clearly I had picked the most difficult and time consuming bread in the entire book as my starting point, which just goes to show that sometimes it's the really tricky things that appeal the most and coincidentally provide the most enjoyment.


My first sourdough...

Ciabatta was a lot simpler, and my first bread using a poolish as a starter which I think I prefer because it feels like it's easier to mix in the extra flour and water to a poolish which is already pretty soft and elasticy to start with. I got small two ciabbatas cooked from half of the dough and still have the other two sitting in the fridge waiting for me to get some more free time to stoke up the oven again. So not quite the baker's dozen after all but a pretty good start. Hopefully by the end of the summer I'll have tried at least a few more recipes and have improved my technique and the resulting breads.

No matter what, there's nothing quite like the smell of freshly baked bread to bring a smile to your face.


One of the ciabatta...

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Watching Eskimos

So we went to see my first CFL game yeterday evening, the Eskimos playing at home to the B.C. Lions. Now the Eskimos won the CFL Grey Cup last year so they should be awesome, but it didn't quite turn out that way because they ended up going down to the Lions 41-34. The Eskies defence was pretty woeful but it meant we saw a high scoring game and there were moments of real tension when they were only down by a point or were 3rd and 2 with 2 minutes to go and only a touchdown behind. Sadly the Eskimos seemed to lose their minds at exactly the wrong times and ended up making what seemed like insane tactical decisions, leaving us the fans clutching our heads in dismay. Sport in Edmonton in the summer has got it all though, because it doesn't get dark until sometime around 10:30 or 11 and so there's plenty of sunshine. The game was at Commonwealth Stadium
which is a huge, old-school open air stadium that was built for the Commonwealth Games (funnily enough) in 1978.

Friday, June 25, 2004

First Post

First Post!