RokDok

That's observant @tony b If Only !!! The deal is I was allowed a KK provided Mrs RD gets her sofas.(3). So, after multiple visits to various showrooms-, it was settled that we were gong to get the "Duresta Coco" sofas - as in my avatar. I would have liked leather but was quickly put in my place. Loads of fabric samples were ordered. That seemed quite easy. After a while Mrs RD thought the arms were a bit big, and so then the decision was made to get the " Duresta Waldorf " models instead. Cue more fabric samples coming through the post. Then we went to visit Mrs RD's delightful 94 yr old mother, - and realised that her mum had the same model sofa (this one = 35 yrs old flock & tassels etc) I thought it looked familiar. Mrs RD was suddenly not too keen on the "Waldorf", as it looked a little dated, so she changed her mind back to the Coco. On Friday we had a 430 mile round trip to the Duresta factory and showroom. This was simply to finalise the fabric choice. Being a longish journey, made longer by the British love affair with traffic cones and the blocking off of multiple lanes of long stretches of motorway for no apparent reason, this journey was going to take eight or nine hours or so and therefore Mrs RD kindly offered to share the driving. Sanitized and face masked we had a vast showroom to ourselves. Mrs RD decided she didn't like the Coco after all. I didn't catch the reason - as I'd suddenly become light-headed, felt slightly sick and my ears were ringing. Fortunately there was no shortage of places to sit and rest. So, we are now apparently going to get the " Greenwich" model. And we are going to a local showroom tomorrow to see more fabrics - there's a choice of 600. I think we've got most of those as samples already and I'm seriously thinking it would be much better just to stitch the damn things together and throw them over our existing sofas. The offer to share the driving consisted of Mrs RD moving her car out of the way so I could get the bigger car out, and ten hours later moving it back again.

'Fraid so Basher - it'll be travelling light and cheap most of the time interspersed with the occasional bit of luxury - somehow it's always not me that organises that bit.

Ooh - I did feel your frustration - I checked where the boat was first thing this morning and saw that it had moved even further from Southampton and was hiding behind the Isle of Wight. Must have been like waking up on Xmas morning all excited. - only to be told that actually it's still Xmas Eve. The fruits are forbidden at the moment but that will only make them sweeter.

Stage One : An extra Xmas present for Mrs RD.

@tekobo, have only just caught up with this news - I didn't think that your KKs were going to be here so soon !! Super super super exciting. Can't wait for some pics !

My KK is in Singapore currently. There is a ship heading South - it's currently between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland and will be popping into Singapore to pick my grill and pop it round for me. Yay !!

It does seem as though love of travel and love of food go hand in hand. @Troble - your year of RTW sounds a great experience - what a brave thing to do to sell your house- fate was on your side though. Thanks so much for those itineraries - it is very helpful to get recommendations of where to go and what to see rather than having to rely on guide books. I've been looking up fights towards the end of next year already - that will have to wait until the mist clears. Your food pictures remind me of our honeymoon - a long time ago - I had a Morgan in those days and we basically spent two weeks eating our way around France - using the Michelin to find places to eat and the Logis guide for places to stay. @tekobo - Backpacking - maybe you should give it a try ? It's a great way to see and feel a country. A couple of years ago we spent 5 weeks in S. India. We had to pre-book the train journeys ( 12 I think ), but just had the first couple of night's accommodation booked and away we went took the occasional long distance taxi, but the busses were much more fun. Travel VERY light - we had a very small pack each - not much bigger than a day pack - rinse your things out overnight. The train arrived in Bangalore at dawn one morning - the botanical garden was open though and very beautiful so we walked round there until Muvali's opened for breakfast. As for the amazing food ..... @Braai-Q - Those trips will resume - the wait is going to make them more savoury, just hope that the resumption is sooner rather than later.

Do it! Just remember this is in Mexico 90 minutes south of San Diego. But there are 10-12 restaurants down there on this level. It is my source of cooking inspiration and my wife and I usually make the pilgrimage at least every fall and occasionally in spring to sample. when you get ready to plan I have a full on OCD itinerary I put together for my 40th birthday last year I’ll share with you A candle at the end of the tunnel ! Mrs RD & I spent a month backpacking around Ecuador at the beginning of the year - I've shared @Troble fabulous pictures with her. So, we've done an eco trio , maybe we can do a gastro trip. Now considering maybe backpacking in Mexico for a month or so and coming up to that corner as a finale. We'd naturally come up to San Diego - would need to try that beer that @tony b has recommended. We were in SD twelve years ago on a family trip - memorable seafood on the quay. Yes, looks a brighter day today....

I'm not sure what to drool over most - the food or that place !! Particularly as it's grey and rainy here. Beer looks decent too.

Thanks for sharing. Presentation is stunning, looks a fabulous experience. One for the bucket list.

That's a great site @Sir Bill, really like the look of the baking plate and the 15 inch bbq grid. I'm not going to get those past the approval committee at the moment. There have been Mapp torches & leaf blowers arriving in readiness for the KK. I've been busy cutting out and refashioning rotting soffits , re-painting , remortaring and am about to fix new metal guttering and downpipes. Of course you need the right tools for this - and hey-ho , look at the money we're saving by me doing that work ! Cue more packages arriving with various cordless appliances and boxes. The silent 100 kg charcoal delivery must have taken place at first light yesterday morning - the boxes were stacked 5 ft high right outside the front door to keep the rain off. Mrs RD was first downstairs : "What the (insert procreative expletive here) are those !!" I am just trying to slip unnoticed out of the Last Chance Saloon.

Thanks, ordered !

What a trauma for you - can't imagine it. Beautiful kitchen - wood floor looks fantastic !

Had a look at Rick Beato last night - good call

That would make light work of marshmallows.

This is a good point. I've got a pair of welder-type gloves which are suede. Great for the wood fired oven - need to use them even with the extra long tools that I have as you don't want to get hands too near the oven mouth when it really gets going. However, pick up a cast iron skillet off the grill and you've really got to put it down very quickly. A mid forearm pair, that you could pick up and hold ( for 1/2 a minute anyway) a hot skillet, in subdued non-80's disco colouration would be good. A bonus would be not having to get matching leather trousers and a whip.

@Braai-Q Nice looking amp - I've never seen so many buttons on a combo. Yes it's a shame that you can only track the shipping once it arrives in the UK. Enjoyed the Led Zeppelin anecdote - I read it to Mrs RD who is a life long fan. She's got a first edition Led Zeppelin 1 album - would be worth quite a lot of money, but as a teenager she listened to it non-stop so there is barely a groove left on it. She went to the last two UK concerts they ever did in Knebworth, we've seen Robert Plant and his band a couple of times recently. My oven is no in Singapore having shipped from Surabaya on the Bankok Bridge. It's waiting to hitch a ride on a boat heading for Southampton- from Tekebo's experience this could take quite a while. @tekobo - if your ovens and sofa do arrive on the same day - you'll be able to sit down in comfort and watch the ovens being unloaded - every cloud ... Hopefully by late Spring we'll have some sort of normality and we can sort out something then - the pub has six rooms and if anyone wants to come from further afield they would be welcome ...

Yes, it does do rooms, they are small but nicely appointed. And being next door - there's a good chance of finding your way back to the accommodation :-). OK- we'll wait for this lock down business to end - my imagination is getting into gear .... Pizza from the WFO with ciders for lunch whilst a slow cook is going on in the KK...?? And Brai plays an instrument .. Already looking forward to the sofa discussions...

You are looking through the window, the temptation to open the door of the sweet-shop and step inside will get harder and harder to resist.... I'm not a betting man but ....

That's my holiday destination for 2021 sorted then, a religious retreat with a twist .... or a spin (sorry). ' Wild ' yeasts - both of them. Also seek out "Gueze" - it's a blend of new (c. 1 yr ) and old (more than that). There are still fermentable sugars in the New Lambic - fermentation continues after they are mixed. The beer is put typically into champagne style bottles where the secondary fermentation provides the fizz. I think there is a bottle of it in the middle of the top shelf of beers in my photo. As no one has pressed my "off" switch and Mrs Rock Dock is knitting a Xmas jumper in front of the fire - I have a little story about Gueze. I started making cider and beer about 6 or 7 years ago. In the North of England there is a lab which acts as a kind of historic (and current) yeast library - you can get yeasts from many of the now sadly defunct British breweries, including current ones if you ask nicely . You get a test tube with a little agar slope with a few colonies of yeast on, from which it is fairly simple to propagate enough yeast to brew a batch of beer. So I made a large batch of generic beer, divided it into six fermentors and added a different yeast to five of them. I then took some wild yeast from cider that I'd made - i.e. those that were on the surface of the apples from which the cider was made. The difference in the flavours of the beers was astounding. When it came to the wild yeast beer - it tasted almost like cider, I thought it was off and tipped the whole fermentor full down the drain. Anybody still awake ?? Fast forward a few years and we are in a bar - The Little Bear in Brugges, Belgium. A bunch of us from the village had gone over for a few days break. My friend suggested that we should taste some Gueze - it was not cheap. One friend screwed up his face and couldn't drink it , I immediately had an overwhelming sense of deja taste - the wild beer that I had so naively tipped down the drain. Of course I liked it. Another experiment a couple of years later, making a totally locally sourced beer. Hang in there @tekobo, there's a bottle with your name on ! I got a sack of barley from a farmer in the village and malted it at home. You basically wet the barley, get lots of containers, spread it a few inches deep and keep turning it every few hours and after a few days it develops little rootlets and tiny shoots. This means that the grain has produced enzymes which have the potential to break down the starch stored in the grain (unfermentable) into fermentable sugars. At this point you have to rather sadly kill all these tiny seedlings to stop them growing further and you then have your malt from which you can make beer. You do this by kilning - or in my case putting it in the oven at a temperature which kills the plant but doesn't denature the enzyme. Having spent the day doing this I left the last batch to 'kiln' in the oven overnight. The next morning the oven was a complete mess and there was a dark sticky goo on the floor around the oven. At that point Mrs RD had difficulty understanding the science of malting. A big clean up followed during which I leant on the oven door and broke the spring loaded mechanism. The oven / range company had been taken over, production had stopped and there were no spares available. The range has two ovens and it was only the smaller oven that the door wouldn't close. I couldn't therefore see why Mrs RD was making such a fuss. Even when I got it to almost close with some Gaffa-tape and it looked pretty good to my eye, there was no let up. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I used this home made malt, water from the culvert flowing through the garden, hops from the garden and wild yeast from the apple trees to make this wild beer. It tastes a bit like Gueze, certainly inspires curiosity and best of all has an aroma of blue cheese. So, if you come down to clean out the garage @tekobo , there is something for you to drink.

Basher - I think it would be ungentlemanly of me to pick up that gauntlet. It would be rather difficult to clean the garage out - although it would be great fun trying. The ciders here are from the couple of ancient trees in the garden some with a bit of pear juice from the recently planted Perry espaliers. I don't use any sanitising chemicals and don't add any yeast - just juice the apples stick in a sealed bucket for a few months over winter, prime with a bit of sugar and bottle. Some are 5 years old and the taste changes over time. They are quite dry and don't taste like commercial ciders. Together with the beers of various styles and ages there is nigh on 500 bottles here. Plus a couple of hundred bottles of Bronze Trippel and this years cider/perry in the house in the warm getting a second fermentation to provide a bit of fizz and the still fermenting Big Bad Matt Black Stout ...... I'm getting carried away here but if @Braai-Q, @sovsroc, @Sir Bill want to come down and anyone else for that matter and give it a try I'm up for it !! Bring meat. @tekobo - I've taken on board what you've said about beer..... but I have something special for you... I've spent the day rubbing down soffits and rafters ready to repaint and fit new guttering, and I'm a bit cream crackered need to eat and do my duo lingo, so it'll be a bit later..... Cheers RD

@Basher I will take that advice- the beer is really to have something special to toast the arrival of the KK - I'll have to make something a little bit more sensible in strength for those long & slows - although 18 hours is a long time, and I'd have to practise. I've just had some very exciting news that my KK has now left Surabaya and is heading towards Singapore on the first stage of its journey !! It would be amazing if it got here for Xmas. Mrs RD is equally happy - the quid pro quo of this deal is that we get new sofas and we have a trip to the manufacturers booked for next week. @tony b Tony, was a big batch of beer - I bottled 70 bottles or so for a couple of friends who helped brew, and another couple of friends took away a 30l fermenter each. So I brew big batches but it is a very social occasion and in reality I only drink a small fraction of what I brew. There will come a time in the future when I won't be able to manage to safely lift and manage that amount of kit though - but it is nice having a well stocked garage with various beer of various vintages - the beer changes as the months and years go by. You're smaller batch brewing has got me thinking though..... maybe one of those Speidel Braumeister all in one kits ??? Cheers RD

They look absolutely perfect ! Really juicy too!

I'm in new territory with these strong celebratory beers. I've just bottled my share of the Bronze Triple - it fermented to a Specific Gravity of 1003 and - friends' batches are down to 1000. It's going to be 9.2 %. There was about 75 litres in this fermentor and it took the best part of a day to clean the bottles, bottle and clean up. When brewing and bottling the only time I use a chemical sanitiser is to squirt a bit into the nozzle of the fermentor before connecting the hose. Everything else is done with heat. Mrs RD is very patient - there are hundreds of bottles that go into the oven to sterilise them. ( The day before I bottled my apple and pear cider ). As it's one of two beers to celebrate the arrival of my KK ( It was due to leave Surabaya for Singapore a few weeks ago but I think it may still be in Indonesia), I used champagne bottles for some of the batch. Not worried about any delay - it gives more time for the beer to condition. The Big Bad Matt Black Stout is still fermenting.....

We are pretty lucky here and can get meat that's born and bred within a few miles from where we live. One of the butchers we use frequently and also does nationwide delivery is : https://www.braceofbutchers.co.uk A lot of their beef comes from a farm just a mile or two away, various breeds of cattle, although we avoid Charolais etc. No doubt they'd provide you with a well hung full packer if you asked.