Not quite sure where to blog this, so it’s going here on our rather unloved personal/food blog (for a better loved blog you might want to have a look at the stuff Damyanti has been doing over on Overdue Books)

For a while now I’ve been wondering how I might introduce Bryn (now 4) to the concepts of computer programming. I’d looked at all the usual ‘programming for kids’ stuff, and had a look at Scratch, Hackety Hack and other languages aimed at children learning to programme, but felt this would all be difficult for a 3-4 year old to get to grips with – especially as he isn’t yet reading and has only recently started writing – although he can recognise letters and numbers.

I did find a couple of approaches that were fun for both of us which were the Lightbot game and a Constructa-Bot (a programmable ‘robot’ aimed at the primary school market) – both of which require you to plan a series of moves, and programming them into a robot (one virtual and one physical). Lightbot was fun, but got too hard too quickly. The Constructa-Bot works well, and I think will get more use in the future – partly this is about thinking up ‘games’ to play with the bot.

At the same time I’ve had it in mind for a while to get myself an Arduino kit to play with. Arduino is an “open-source electronics prototyping platform” – essentially allowing you to build electronics circuits – and write software to run on it. A really simple example of what you can do is wire up a circuit with an LED and make it blink on and off as detailed at http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Blink. To encourage me, Damyanti got me a book on programming Arduino for Christmas and so I ordered an introductory kit from oomlout.

While the Arduino was for me, and I hadn’t even thought of doing it with Bryn – I guess I assumed it would be fiddly and a bit difficult – it has already proved a great way of engaging Bryn with basic concepts of electronics, programming and just the basic idea that these are tools that can be used to create.

So far we’ve done two little ‘projects’:

Colour wheels

This was the first one we did together. Damyanti drew some circles on a piece of card, and Bryn decorated them with lines, squiggles, spots, spirals and stars. They did this while I worked out how to wire up a motor, and got a programme (or ‘sketch’ as they are called for arduinos – no idea why) written that would just spin the motor for a number of seconds.

Having got this working we attached the ‘wheels’ to the motors spindle and watched what happened to the colours and patterns as it span around. Bryn was immediately interested in the circuit and how the motor was controlled – and once I’d got the cursor in the right place in the programme he could type in numbers to set the length of time the motor would spin for each time, and then press the button to upload the sketch to the Arduino board.

Traffic Lights

After the colour wheel project both Bryn and I wanted to do something else. I asked for suggestions on Twitter and I think it was @bencc who suggested traffic lights – which immediately seemed like an ideal project. I had red and green LEDs, and Bryn has plenty of toy cars, and I knew that even my basic Arduino knowledge could manage a simple circuit and programme which would change the lights at set intervals.

This time Bryn was keen to help with the whole circuit – so we did this together, and this worked better than I thought. Although wiring stuff up (using a ‘breadboard’ to plug the components into) proved a bit fiddly, and some of the components I had to do, Bryn was able to plug the connecting wires in with only a very little help.

I’d got the (very simple) programme ready, and we uploaded it, and played around with the time between the lights changing – doing some very very short times to get a flickering affect, and longer times that might be more suitable for traffic lights.

The next stage of the project was to make a box for the Arduino to slot into to make the ‘traffic lights’ – Damyanti found a suitable box, cut some holes in the right places and got it ready for Bryn to decorate – we got out a road that Bryn and Damyanti had made a while ago and some toy cars – and you can see the results in the picture above.

Next…?

The challenge is to think of projects that are fun, engaging, and within my ability to carry out (as well as Bryn’s!) – any suggestions welcome . I love the way the two projects above combine fun, creativity and technical concepts.

Pre-heat the oven to around 220C.

1. Peel and dice a large butternut squash, and put it in a roasting tin. We dice into relatively large chunks – it’s up to you, but the smaller you dice it, I guess the shorter you’ll want to roast it
2. Season with salt, pour some oil (we use a cheap rapeseed oil – basically anything that can cope with the high roasting temperature – which probably means not olive oil). You could put some woody herbs like thyme or rosemary in as well, although we haven’t
3. Put the squash in the oven to roast – 30 minutes will do it for a relatively large dice, but basically until it is cooked through and soft. Once the squash is done you’ll want to turn the oven down slightly – to around 180C
4. While the squash is roasting make a tomato sauce – we recommend making it with fresh tomatoes which keeps it lighter than the tinned. Basically chop an onion and fry gently to soften in plenty of olive oil (Damyanti says “lots of olive oil”), add some crushed garlic, some oregano. Blanch, skin and chop the tomatoes in the meantime, and then add them. Simmer it until it has reduced to a nice consistency – you don’t want too much liquid
5. Make a bechamel/white sauce (sorry, not going to go into this here – but plenty of places you can find out how to do this)
6. Now build the lasagne – first a layer of tomato sauce, then squash, then some fresh spinach leaves scattered over, then lasagne sheets (we use fresh and find you can just use it , but if you use dried you’ll want to put it in some boiling water first), repeat this pattern, and then top the final sheet of lasagne with the bechamel sauce.
7. Put the whole thing in the oven for about 20-30 minutes – until the top has gone nicely brown

That’s it – it sounds complicated but to be honest it doesn’t feel like a big hassle once the squash is in the oven – it gives you time to do everything else. We really like it, and recommend it!

A few weeks ago, I got this craving for Malt Loaf, and thought it would be a good thing to bake. I didn’t have a recipe at home, so I asked for a recommendation online, and Anna (after suggesting I could just go and buy some Soreen), came up with the following:
75ml (2 1/2 fl oz) hand-hot water
200g (7oz) brown flour or 100g (3 1/2 oz) wholemeal flour and 100g (3 1/2 oz) strong white flour
2.5ml spoon 1/2 tsp) salt
2 x 15ml spoons (2 tbsp) malt extract
2 x 15ml spoon (2 tbsp) black treacle
25g (1oz) margarine
30g (1oz) dark soft brown sugar
100g (3 1/2 oz) sultanas
Honey or golden syrup to glaze

Yeast:
2 x 5ml spoons (2 tsp) conventional dried yeast + 5ml spoon (1 tsp) sugar
or 15g (1/2 oz) fresh yeast
or 1 x 5ml spoon (1 tsp) fast action easy blend yeast

• Stir the dried yeast and sugar into the water and leave until frothy, or blend the fresh yeast with water, or mix the easy blend yeast with the flour.
• Place the flour and salt in a bowl, add the sultanas.
• Warm the malt, treacle, margarine and sugar until just melted and the sugar dissolved, and stir into the flour with the yeast liquid. (Note: if using instant yeast add to dry flour and warm the water with the malt mixture).
• Mix to a soft dough.
• Turn onto a floured surface and knead until no longer sticky (about four minutes), adding more flour if necessary.
• Shape and place the malt loaf in a greased 500g (1lb) loaf tin. Cover the dough and leave to prove in a warm place until doubled in size – about one and a quarter hours.
• Bake at 220°C, Gas Mark 7, for 30 minutes until browned and the malt loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
• Cool the Malt Loaf on a wire rack. Whilst the loaf is still hot brush the top with honey or syrup.

So Bryn and I set to making our first ever malt loaf. After mixing the dry and wet ingredients we weren’t left with a ‘soft dough’ but rather a pretty sloppy looking batter. Luckily Bryn was pretty good at adding liberal amounts of extra flour I’d guess maybe as much as another 50g (strong white bread flour). It was still pretty sticky, but with a liberal dusting of flour on my hands I was able to knead it a bit, and get it into a loaf shape.

It didn’t really seem to rise much, but we put it in the oven, and hoped for the best. The result was a dense, but rich flavoured bread, with a crunchy crust when it was fresh out of the oven. We ate it while it was still warm, with butter, but it was even better the next day (with butter again!). Soreen it isn’t, but it is very nice.

Slices of Malt Loaf

]]> http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue/2010/03/malt-loaf/feed/ 1 http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue/2010/02/trio-of-curries/ http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue/2010/02/trio-of-curries/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:01:27 +0000 ostephens http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue/?p=91 I felt like curry last Monday, with Owen going to be home late, I had an hour to myself to kill but hadn’t been shopping luckily we had lentils, potatoes and eggs so I made tarka dhal, egg curry and bombay potato curry.

Before making a curry it’s best to make up some masala – a mixture of chilies, garlic and ginger all finely chopped and mixed with a ratio of 2 chilies to 1 garlic clove and small knob of ginger.

Scrambled Egg Curry – this is one of my favourite my curries and only takes 10 mins to make

• Sliced Onions
• Eggs x 2
• Masala
• Turmeric (pinch)
• Cumin powder (pinch)
• Coriander powder (pinch)
• Coriander Leaves

Fry the onions slowly, once they are translucent and browning add the chopped chilli, garlic and ginger and the dried spices. Fry for a minute or two while stirring, then break in 2 eggs and scramble until the eggs are cooked well. Once cooked stir in some fresh coriander leaves.

Bombay Potato – another of my favourites

• Potato x 3
• Oil – 1 tablespoon
• Mustard seeds – pinch
• Masala
• Chili powder – pinch
• Turmeric – 1/2 teaspoon
• Cumin powder – 1/2 teaspoon
• Coriander powder – 1/2 teaspoon
• salt – pinch
• Coriander leaves

Quater the potato and then finely slice, each piece about 1cm thick, its best to try and get all the slices to be the same size and thickness so they cook evenly, rinse in cold water.
Add the oil to a frying pan then the mustard seeds. Once they start popping add in the sliced potato and stir (be careful as the oil will spit). Add the masala, spices and salt and stir. Leave to cook on a low heat till the potatoes are soft, if they start to stick to the pan add a little more oil. When the potatoes are nearly cooked add some coriander leaves.

Tarka Dal – I use a recipe from ‘Easy Indian’ by Das Sreedharan. Serves 4-6. This a good curry to make as you just add all the ingredients to the pan and leave, its also a good curry to freeze.

• Red lentils – 200g
• Yellow split peas – 50g
• Sliced Onions x 2
• Diced tomatoes x 2
• Garlic cloves chopped x 2
• Green chili sliced x 2
• Chili powder 1.2 tsp
• Turmeric 1 tsp
• To finish – 4 cloves of garlic sliced & 1/2 tsp of cumin seeds

Add all the ingredients to a big pan and then add about 2 pints of water and bring to the boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat and leave to simmer with lid on for about 20 mins or till the lentils begin to soften. I find the red lentils cook quicker than the yellow. Leave uncovered for 5 mins. If very watery then I tend to pour some of the liquid out as I prefer my dhal to be thick. Before serving, fry a little oil in a small frying pan and add some cumin seeds and the sliced garlic, once the garlic starts browning pour into the dhal.

• 500g Strong White flour
• 20g Coarse Semolina
• 10g Salt
• 15g Yeast (fresh if possible)
• 50g Extra virgin Olive oil
• 320g water

Make up the dough and knead it well (it will be quite sticky at first, but should get firmer as you knead). Rest the dough for an hour in a covered bowl. Oil a baking sheet, and turn the rested dough out onto the sheet. Spread out the dough on the sheet by pushing it with your fingers (don’t roll it out or stretch it). Drizzle some olive oil over the top and spread it across the dough (easiest to do this just with your hands)

Cover the dough to rest for 45 minutes. I find that putting it in a plastic bag is the easiest thing, and doesn’t stick (the first time I made it, I used a tea towel, and ended up scraping half the dough off the towel). After it has rested use your finger tips to make dimples across the whole dough – just push your fingers into the dough. Then cover again and leave for a further 30 minutes.

Finally sprinkle some good quality sea salt (e.g Maldon Sea Salt) over the top (you want salt flakes, rather than granules), and bake in the over at 220 degrees C for 25-30 minutes. The original recipe adds rosemary at the same time as the salt, but we’ve been out of rosemary every time I’ve baked it so we haven’t tried it yet.

After it comes out of the oven, but while it is still warm, brush with more olive oil.

We absolutely love this bread – probably a bit too much. Delicious dipped in more olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

We’ve tried the same recipe as a pizza base – 500g flour made 3 medium sized bases when stretch out more thinly. They were still pretty thick, but good flavour.

Picture of a loaf of focaccia

Bryn waves (large ~9Mb)
Bryn waves (small ~1.1Mb)

I wasn’t very well today – first time I’ve been off work for ages. I slept until 1 o’clock – but I’m still feeling a bit tired now.

We spent last weekend in Bristol. We had a really nice time – we went to see The Incredibles on Saturday – which I’d really recommend – and then ended up in a pub called The Old Duke, which has live jazz every night. We saw a singer called Beth Rowley and her band. The keyboard player was really good, as was the singer. Some really good stuff, including a jazz interpretation George Formby’s "I’m leaning on a lampost" – which sounds strange, but was really good.

On Sunday, we saw the ‘Earth From the Air‘ exhibition, and also went up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, before meeting some friends for a drink, then heading home.

Unfortunately we forgot our camera, so no pictures of our weekend.

This week we’ve had a couple of pictures framed – one that Damyanti took, and one of an Indian print on fabric. This second one is quite large – don’t know where we are going to put that – perhaps somewhere in the corridor.

We’ve hopefully got a quiet weekend coming up. We’ve got some Christmas shopping to do. We did buy one Christmas present last weekend – which is probably the earliest I’ve ever bought a Christmas present – but still quite a few to go, and less than a month before we go to India!

We are also meeting some friends tomorrow in Richmond, so hopefully we should have a nice afternoon.

We had started talking about the kitchen even before we moved in, and we actually started some serious thinking, and sketching out designs around Easter – so in some ways it seems to have taken us a while to get to this point. However, it all seems to have happened really quickly. We looked in three places seriously – Moben, MFi and Homebase.

It was quickly obvious that Homebase were simply not offering the same service as the other two – and really going to this ‘consultation’ was a waste of time. The MFI offering looked pretty good, but we decided that the Moben kitchen was what we wanted.

The style is Shaker Maple, with a Butler sink, and a solid beech block work top. At the moment the kitchen is completely bare, as we had it plastered last week. We now need to paint, so we thought we’d take a ‘before’ picture to remind us.

For Damyanti’s birthday we went to the Cotswolds for the weekend. We stayed in the lovely Three Ways House, home of the ‘Pudding Club’. The hotel was small and friendly, and the food (especially the syrup sponge and custard) was delicious.

On the house front, we had an offer on our flat in early January, and we are in the process of doing the paperwork now. The buyer’s solicitor is being extremely thorough, which created a long list of questions for us and our solicitor. However, we think we’ve answered all those now, and yesterday our solicitor (Emma) sent a large package back to the buyer’s solicitor. I’ve got a few loose ends to follow up (I need to make sure we are paid up to date with both our ground rent, and service charges), and hopefully then we can start talking dates!

Damyanti says ‘yeah’

Work is going pretty well. It was pretty difficult to get back into it after such a long break at Christmas, but I think I’m back into the swing now. (Damyanti says ‘boo’ as I’ve started doing work at the weekends again). We’ve got some interesting stuff coming up – the whole e-learning area is moving slowly forward, and I’m also involved in the college ‘Portal’ project, and ‘Content Management’ solution. The college is in the process of buying a new Student registry system, and although I won’t be involved directly in that implementation, it looks like some other software we are getting as part of the deal will touch on all three of the areas I’ve just mentioned.

Damyanti has started to look at her ‘chartership’ stuff. Apparently it’s horrible. In order to become a chartered librarian, she needs to record her professional development over the current year, and the first thing is to write a ‘training plan’ which lays out what she is going to do in 6 specific areas of her work. The odd thing is that when she submits her final report, she can only include experience from the current year. So, although one of the work areas is related to the use/implementation of electronic resources, she can’t write about the 2 years worth of experience during which she wrote and implemented an e-journals database, and also was part of an implementation team for MetaLib – our e-resource management system and federated search engine. It’s this kind of stupidity which reminds me why I get so irritated by CILIP.

Anyway, by the wonders of wireless, I’m writing this from the comfort of bed, which probably means it’s time to get up (although when we were in the hotel, we got a taste for breakfast in bed)