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Despite oft being surrounded by vegetarians, I’m very much a carnivore – and one of the obsessions we’ve been developing at work is a real penchant for dried meat products.  It started with Beef Jerky, and now we’re on to Biltong.  A process that originates from Europe but was made widespread in South Africa when the new colonisers needed to be able to preserve food whilst they developed herds for a sustainable food source.

My fledgling Biltong in it's dryer awaiting nature to take its' course!

Anyway, I digress.  It’s yummy – so naturally we started looking at how one would go about making it (as you do), and it’s surprisingly easy – the only tricky we have is our climate is a little strange.  Drying meat doesn’t necessarily need heat, but it does need airflow and also a dry (ie, not humid) atmosphere – so for something effective in our climate I used some instructions I found on the internet to make a very basic ‘biltong box’ in which to hang my meat (wahey!).

Whilst out and about picking up suitable parts for my new toy I also picked up a topside steak from Morrisons to be my first experiment.  My first job was to assemble the loosely planned design I had in my head from a shelving unit that was on sale in B&Q, some bits of wood I had from some doomed project or other, and some electrical bits to add a light bulb to the lower compartment.

It went surprisingly well, so I also had time to prepare the meat this evening and try a number of different marinades – I have eight pieces of meat now hanging in the garage, three with a kind of spiced/salted herby ‘rub’ on them, two with a sweet chilli marinade, two with Reggae Reggae Sauce covering them and finally one small piece with no marinade (beyond the salting and vinegar process recommended in the instructions) just to see what it tastes like unadorned.

Obviously being the first attempt it’s tricky to know when it will be ‘done’ so I think I’ll leave it towards the longer side of the 3-5 days it should take to dry.  It seems weird you can just make raw meat edible by leaving it to dry, but then I suppose technically it’s edible raw anyway.  With a bit of luck it will be suitably dry by Thursday evening so that I can take some in to work on Friday to test out on the my fellow Biltong fans at work!

For those of you who may have had their interest piqued but don’t want to go so far as to making your own Biltong over a period of days – you can apparently use an electric fan-assisted oven set to 40-70 °C (100-160 °F), with the door open a fraction to let out moist air – this can apparently dry the meat in approximately 4 hours.  Failing that, I found (via Jonathan – thanks Jonathan! – this awesome website which sells a variety of Biltong made from different meats, I might just have to place an order irrespective of how mine turns out!

Today I also found a stash of unidentified homebrew in a kitchen cupboard, so a meat and ‘wine and mead we’re not sure specifically what it is made of, or when it was made’ evening might be on the cards!  Amongst that lot was also an Elderflower wine kit so I might get around to making that too, whilst I’m in some kind of foodcraft kind of a mood.  Alcohol and meat – awesome.

Being a dyed in the wool Nottinghamian, it was always highly probable that I’d make the effort to go to see Ridley Scott’s epic ‘Robin Hood‘ movie soon after release.  And so it was the case, lucky for me Rich played social secretary and duly arranged seats for us at Broadway Cinema last Sunday to take in the film.

Originally it was going to be called Nottingham – which would have piqued my interest more – but having seen it, clearly there was a considerable shift in direction which would have rendered the name inappropriate.  I think Russell Crowe was originally due to play the Sheriff in a role-reversing retelling – as it stood, Matthew Macfadyen had little more than a bit-part to play in that role (who could beat Alan Rickman‘s portrayal, anyway?)

I was intrigued by the film too because the movie poster (see above) appears to have had my head photoshopped onto the rearmost horseman (it’s actually Kevin Durand playing Little John, who looks nothing like me normally!).  All in all, there was some degree of excitement (aside from feeling like crap and having a headache) on squeezing into the less than accommodating seats in Broadway’s Screen One.

I must confess, I left disappointed.  This is very much ‘Robin Hood: The making of the outlaw‘ – a prequel of sorts.  There were some great action scenes, and I think beneath the slightly over-complicated scene-setting there might have been a decent story trying to work its’ way to the surface (in a nutshell: King John crowned after the death of King Richard in France, double-crossed by a supposed friend to support a French invasion which Robin Longstride (yet to become ‘Hood’) assists to unite the Northern Barons to quell, Robin is subsequently denounced as an outlaw and we end with him making a home in the Forest with Marion and a bunch of kids gone wild after their fathers buggered off to the Crusades).

It was quite clunkily delivered though – that said, Mark Strong makes a great villain in the form of the double-crossing Godfrey, William Hurt is decent as the reliable Marshall – but you’re left lacking any real character building for Robin himself, or indeed his ‘Merry Men’.  Alan A’Dayle, Little John and Will Scarlett all feature – as does Friar Tuck – but you don’t really ‘get to know them’ as much as you’d like.  Things just kinda happen too quickly, loosely tied in to a link between a message on a sword hilt and half-remembered moments from Robin’s childhood.

Plus you’re waiting for Friar Tuck to start telling you you’ll get double Clubcard points on your Mead.

Russell Crowe’s ability to carry an accent (or lack of ) has been subject to much comment and amusement in the media already.  It’s true his northern Irish/Manc/Yorkshire/Australian hybrid was probably not all that authentic, but then given the state of language and regional accents in the 12th Century of England, I doubt very much what we (we being locals – because none of you non-locals know it!) know as ‘Nottingham accent’ existed.  So it didn’t really matter to me, at least he made an effort, unlike Costner or Slater in ‘Prince of Thieves’.

All in all, probably worth seeing – and it might well set the scene for a less awkward and more engaging sequel, but it wasn’t the treat I’d hoped for.  In a way I’m glad that Nottingham as a modern day entity made a typically ham-fisted and understated way of riding the coat-tails of the cinematic release, because it doesn’t really do the place justice to be associated with a film which is probably just above-average at best.

A few weeks ago we unearthed some old school books belonging to my brother and myself.  They were from Primary School and we had a good chuckle reading through them (and lamenting that our handwriting was better then than it is now).  Amusingly it was clear that – despite having some degree of ability with language – I was very easily bored by tasks so often lapsed into putting very little effort in!

As a child I was also clearly quite a pompous little sod, and incredibly cheeky with some banter with my then teacher – Mr Collier – that might’ve got me in trouble had he been a less understanding character!  It ultimately left me disappointed as I was clearly holding back my talents – such as they were – whilst in Rich‘s books we were treated to expansive volumes of juvenile thought-trains which made very interesting reading!

Fast-forward a few weeks and I found some more writing I’d jotted as an almost-adult around the time I’d have been at University.  Not actual university work (aside from a short story I had to submit for a creative writing module), just ramblings.. and my gosh, it was quite a cringeworthy exercise too.  Isn’t it strange how you can change so much in your attitudes and outlooks in a relatively short space of time.

That said, we’re talking a decade or more in this instance.  Decades are often used as notional benchmarks for changes in fashion, attitudes and values – so perhaps it’s not unreasonable that as a person you undergo these kinds of changes on that kind of timescale.  At least I hope so, I guess that late-teen into early-twenties era is quite a life-defining period as you are bombarded with experiences.

There’s something a bit discomforting in reading through something you wrote yourself and thinking that you were actually a bit of an arse, though!  Hopefully that means I’ve grown up a bit now!  Perhaps it’s a blessing that older blog posts (I’ve been blogging fairly consistently for at least ten years or so) I have written are lost to the mists of time (unless you’re nifty at using Archive.org’s ‘way back when’ machine!).

And no, I’m not going to reproduce any of it online (the pic above is for illustrative purposes only, and not an excerpt of anything I produced, although the red-penned teacher feedback is very typical of the kind of comments we found within my work!).

In fairness to David ‘Camera-on’, his Tory tosspots aren’t the only party to follow this line of campaigning.  Our constituency is awash with billboards featuring Gordon Brown with outlandish claims as to what he may or may not have been responsible for.

Do you know what I’d be more interested in?  In how they plan to fix it.  British party politics is not a subject I’ve ever really engaged with – the fabrication of New Labour under Phoney Tony delivered us a wonderfully superficial personality-politics, and he won based on it against an opponent with no discernable personality.

So I fear David ‘call me Dave’ Cameron will press home an advantage in the forthcoming election, amongst a population disillusioned with politicians in general, and eager to scapegoat the charisma-less incumbent Prime Minister – and of course – buying into the media furore that somehow we’re all on the verge of poverty because of the ‘credit crunch.’

What’s most upsetting for me though, is where I live there really is only a choice of Tory or Labour.  Of course, there are other candidates – but they have zero chance of winning – do I vote with the party that actually approximates my values (read: ‘the least odious of the options, because none of them represent my values’), or do I place a tactical vote for Labour simply to stack against a Conservative vote?

Democracy my arse.