Close Encounter with an Olympic Flame

Yesterday afternoon we were allowed the opportunity to witness the passing Olympic flame.

I think this is the best I could get out of the limited opportunity, though I had initially thought I wouldn't go and wait and watch, but it occurred to me that this was the only chance I'd ever get to see the flame.

Cassoulet?

Cassoulet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassoulet
This is my second attempt at Cassoulet which I wanted to try again since my first attempt was pretty good and well received.
As is usually the case I have cooked far too much so I would expect to get 6-8 portions out of this.
I started on Friday night by soaking about 150g of dried Haricot Beans (White Beans, Navy Beans) in cold water. On Saturday Morning I drained the beans and put them in a pan with a quartered Onion, 2 cloves of Garlic and a teaspoon each of dried Thyme and Rosemary. This was brought to the boil and allowed to simmer on the lowest setting on the smallest (1kW) ring on my stove for about 90 minutes. The beans were then tipped into my French Casserole Dish along with the residual cooking liquor.

Cassoulet in my French Casserole Dish

To the casserole I then added 2 Sliced Onions, 4 Cloves of Garlic, 4 halved and quartered (⅛ths) Ripe Tomatoes and a teaspoon each of Rosemary and Thyme.

For the meat I would have preferred to get a piece of Smoked Streaky Bacon but since I've found nowhere in Bath that sells bacon sliced to order I had to get imaginative. I purchased a 750g Gammon joint. After removing all the packaging (including the paper like wrap holding it together) I placed in a large enough saucepan and brought it to the boil before simmering for 5 minutes to remove some of the salt. I then sliced it across the grain to give me a piece weighing just over 350g. This I cut into about 12 or so bite size pieces and placed in the casserole. The remainder I put back in the pan and continued to simmer until fully cooked ready to slice and eat later. Before putting the lidded casserole into the oven, preheated to Gas Mark 3 (325°F, 170°C), I gave the whole lot a good stir to mix it all up with a good slug (100ml) of White Wine and lots of freshly ground Black Pepper.

For the sausages I chose to use the traditional Toulouse Sausages with their course texture, Garlic, Red Wine and  Herbs. The ones I found at the Bath Farmers Market were produced by Castellanos. The previous sausage I used had been from the Bath Sausage Shop which use smoked bacon as well as raw pork. Bath Sausage Shop is further from home so to avoid more delay I bought Castellanos' instead. After browning the sausages in a frying pan I halved them and added these to the casserole after the first hour. At this point I noted that there was rather less bean than I'd hoped so I tipped in a regular can of Baked Beans just to bulk it up a bit. Next time I'll soak and cook 250g of dried beans.

After 2 hours the smell was delicious, I removed the lid gave it a good stir and covered the top with bread crumbs and dots of butter, then put it back in the oven for a further hour. Once the breadcrumb topping has browned the dish is ready.

Dinner was served with Garlic Bread baguettes and several glasses of Sainsbury's amazing Cabernet Sauvignon appropriately sourced from the Pay D'Oc. Oddly the wine is not listed on Sainsbury's own web site although the Merlot in the same packaging is.

Inevitably I ate far too much and this morning (Sunday) I am writing this with a remaining slight discomfort.

Now what am I going to do with the rest?

Ingredients

250g Dried Haricot Beans

3 Medium White Onions

6 Cloves Garlic

2 tsp Dried Rosemary

2 tsp Dried Thyme
3 Ripe Tomatoes

100ml White Wine

325g Smoked Pork (ideally unsliced smoked streaky)

4-6 Toulouse Sausages

Punch Taverns do it again

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=285716998187957&id=100002489788429

Another day and another great british pub gets written off.

Punch Taverns once again prove that they have absolutely no interest in running pubs.

To deprive the community of Southstock, Bath and the whole district of this wonderful pub is sheer bloody vandalism.

How can this be permitted under planning guidance, to turn an ancient public house into accommodation and offices.

Hey Punch you bastards, rip the heart out of our communities would you? I hope you all rot in hell. Don't your bond holders realise you're only in it for the short term? Take your weekly salaries and go home Friday's to your snug little homes while the destruction you leave is a testament to the triumph of capitalist immorality. F*** off  and leave us alone.

 Image shamelessly stolen from Bath Pubs and Bars

Wake up Britain - between H.M.G. and the pub owning property companies your heritage is being destroyed by narrow minded politics, greed and immoral capitalism.

Sign the e-Petitions and get your voice heard.

As yet a planning application has not been published on the B&NES planning site and H.M.G has amended guidance on change of use of pubs and community assets.

You'll have no one to blame when the only place to get beer and food will be a Mitchells and Butlers / Stonegate / Spirit style branded 'offering'. Nasty over priced precooked frozen and reheated crap served in a building with less character than my big toe.

Come on someone put a stop to this bollocks!!! Please!!

The Noisy Neighbour Problem

...or a classic legislative nonsense!! 

Once upon a time there was a New Labour government. Now this government had already been in power for a while and was scratching around for ideas to turn into new laws. Governments do this when they've been in power too long and run out of ideas. They have to do something if only to justify their existence.
Some years ago it became apparent that with modern audio technology getting louder and more available people were beginning to have issues with their neighbours playing loud music at inordinately high levels and at anti-social times. In addition noise undisciplined behaviour and modern DIY tools could if occurring repeatedly and at anti-social times be included.
The answer was to bring in laws and guidance for local authorities to use to deal with issues that couldn't be resolved with mediation and sound proofing. Very often sound proofing in the 'victims' home was expensive and impractical and the perpetrator too may well have been unable or reluctant to install it.
The Environmental Protection Act 1990 (EPA) arrived and made local authority Environmental Health Officers (EHO) take "all reasonable steps" to investigate a noise complaint. Once the EHO has judged that a noise constitutes a 'statutory noise nuisance' by reason of it being "noise emitted from premises so as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance", the EHO has the duty to notify the perpetrator of the offence and advise on ways of reducing the nuisance. If this fails then the EHO issues a notice requiring the perpetrator to cease the nuisance activity. Failing to comply meant that fines and confiscation of the noise making equipment could be applied to the perpetrator.
This is all very laudable as it gives individuals a means of restoring a life free from the stress and often aggravation caused by noisy neighbours.
In 2003 the Anti-social Behaviour Act amended the Noise Act 1996 to specify the period between 23:00 and 07:00 for action against noise as Anti-social Behaviour with its associated penalties and restraints, where noise is emitted from dwellings and gardens. We're still talking about problem neighbours here. What has occurred since is that the term neighbour has been extended to include any premises and not just the house next door. Worse, the Noise Act was extended in 2008 to include noise from licensed premises.
None of the above takes into account a preexisting premises that have traditionally produced noise. These could be an engineering works, workshops and other light industry. Leisure and religious premises such as dance halls, churches as well as pubs and clubs.
We now have the ridiculous situation where a person moves into a house next door to a pub advertising live music 3 nights a week and can destroy the business and livelihood of numbers of people through repeated complaints culminating in the service of a Noise Abatement Notice by the EHO.
This absurdity has finally been crowned with the news this week that Wrington All Saints Church in Somerset has had a Noise Abatement Notice served on it, preventing the clock from chiming every quarter hour between 23:00 and 07:00. Unfortunately this isn't possible due to the fact that the computer driving the chimes isn't capable of the variation.
http://www.environmental-protection.org.uk/noise/neighbourhood-noise/nuisance/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-17838390

Update: Couple in Somerset withdraw church bell complaint

Regrettably  the couple who brought the action against the Wrington bells have withdrawn their complaint due to threats and abuse through the mail and social media. My use of the case as an example of poor legislation should not be used to condone personal attacks on those using this and other legislation for their protection.

The Daily(ish) Millbrook–is nodding off

Dear friend The Millbrooker is hanging up his blogging pen.

It was he that prompted me to start this little expression of me and my thoughts and I will continue to do so.

It would have been nice if his blog had metamorphosed into something else but I suspect The Millbrooker himself is undergoing some sort of metamorphosis.

Cheers Millbrooker for all the fun and stimulation you have given so many. Over 52000 hits is pretty damned good.

PS – Give my regards to Russell when you’re next in the D&C

The Daily(ish) Millbrook

BBPA Beer Barometer– Claiming that pub beer sales suffer under increased tax on beer

For those who haven't heard of it, the British Beer and Pubs Association (BBPA) is the organisation supported by the largest brewing and pub owning companies in the UK to lobby on their behalf. There sole interest is to ensure that local and national government bodies are ‘properly’ advised on actions that affect their membership. That membership produces 95% of the beer produced in the UK and owns half of the 51,000 (and falling) pubs in the UK.

Yesterday (20/04/12) the latest BBPA Beer Barometer was published. The piece opens with statement that “Pub sales down 6.0% on same quarter last year, with off-trade sales up 4.7%. Swing shows lasting damage of Beer Tax hikes”, BBPA’s Chief Executive - Brigid Simmonds. It seems they’ve shot themselves in the foot. It is their membership who own the pubs that are being bled dry by unrealistic rents and tied beer pricing. The tax ‘hike’ is levied at the brewery gate and the impact is the same for all retailers whether they are ‘on-sales’ in pubs or ‘off sales’ in supermarkets and shops. The fact that ‘off sales’ trade is up by 4.7% shows by a simple addition that beer sales have only fallen by 1.3%. This little bit of spin is devised purely to deflect public and official attention away from the continues stream of pubs closing and publicans being fleeced by the pub landlords, the BBPA’s paymasters.

Research from Begbies Traynor published recently shows that after football clubs, pubs are suffering the greatest amount of ‘business distress’ (going bust) compared with any other business area in the UK. In the case of pub businesses the figures show that up to 50 are folding every week. It’s a good bet that the majority of these businesses are individual tenants and lease holders in pub company properties who have been driven out of business by the long term attrition of unrealistic rents and tied beer pricing.

It is clear that the ‘elephant in the room’ that the government refuse to see is the BBPA’s paymasters who continue to butcher the great British pub industry with impunity. The total liabilities of Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns stand at £6.7bn and this debt has to be serviced month by month at the expense of their tenants and leaseholders, those people who are going to the wall at the rate of 50 per week. If their income from beer sales is falling at the rate of 6% per year you can be sure that the shortfall in their profits is being even more aggressively bled out of their struggling tenants and leaseholders.

As you walk down most streets it can be seen by all that the pubs that are doing well are selling their beer cheaper than the tied houses. This includes managed houses who are a separate case, but the independently owned properties without the outrageous levels of debt to service are able to compete and are a success.

End this farce now – force the indebted pub companies out of business and put their bondholders assets in the hands of the professionals who know how to run pubs successfully for the benefit of both landlord, tenants and leaseholders and of course the consumer.

Stop the beer duty escalator - e-petition

Soapbox time again. This a very simple thing but it could make a world of difference to pub freeholders, tenants and lessees everywhere.

For years now the government have been loading tax onto alcohol in an alleged attempt to curb excessive consumption. The result has been to drive more and more people away from safe and controlled ‘on-trade’ premises – your local pub - and in through the supermarket door where beer is less than a pound a pint and you can destroy your liver for less.

Nice one New Labour and now continued by the other lot who are in charge.

SIGN THE PETITION and get your voice heard.

Stop the beer duty escalator

Stop the beer duty escalator - e-petitions