Ramble tagged 'Breakfast'

I love our Sunday breakfast fry up. Jon tells me that beans with breakfast doesn’t happen in the US, but it’s big back home. I like Bush’s Homestyle here. I’ll pick up Trader Joe’s beans next re-stock to compare. We get the hollandaise spot on every time now, and TJ’s has a bread (Delphina’s Italian Hearth) that toasts perfectly.

This is for Darren, and anyone else that tried the hollandaise sauce I mentioned back in April. If you haven’t tried it, you should, because hollandaise makes breakfast extra awesome.

So we started getting inconsistent results, randomly ending up with a watery unusable sauce. We screwed around with the butter temperature, thinking that was the only variable, but no; it seems that the key to hollandaise fluffiness is a slow slow pour of the butter.

Cousin Mike is raving about a new French butter he’s discovered. I haven’t found it in the US yet, but I imagine it would put this sauce over the top.

I’m not sure what particular fairy-tale Easter is supposed to be about, but I did find it to be a good excuse for a big ole breakfast fry-up and eating enough chocolate to cause break-out.

Since then I’ve been working on bringing various web sites up to scratch for Aarfie. It was wise for me, for the sake of having a true year off, to wait it out until this year before getting started on any business ventures. As soon as I got my teeth in this one, my usual obsessive behaviour kicked in; we’ve been working past midnight since and I’ve been waking up too early with thoughts of code, design and general ideas keeping me from falling back to sleep.

Most of the back end is in place now for Aarfie, with only the billing system to iron out. I expect I’ll just use Paypal. I’ve moved all of the sites I’ve been hosting for years over to the Aarfie domain. Taking control of domain registration and advanced domain name server tools has been easier than I thought it would be and all of the site transfers have been completed without a glitch.

When I contacted the guys back home, that were running with the Organic Group thing, I found that the organicgroup.org site was no longer used, allowing me to delete it. However, as it happened, my good green friend Justine had been tearing her hair out trying to get help with creating a presentable web site and online store for her organic clothing business, so she was over the moon when I got in touch with her.

This turned out to be a perfect place to start, as Justine’s case is a good example of the customer I’m aiming to serve. She’d already spent money on getting an unusable website developed and the people she had talked to since, regarding an improved site, had quoted a lot and talked too much about all the bullshit that means nothing to anyone outside of web site developers.

So Justine has become the first real life customer of Aarfie. She sent me her existing logo, a look-book and a bunch of product photos, and I’ve spent the last week creating a WordPress integrated site and Big Cartel store front for her at ecopeko.com. The WordPress and Big Cartel integration are a vital part of the Aarfie thing, as it has allowed her to take control of everything immediately and the development, support documentation and community is huge and ever-growing for these tools. She is so happy with the results that she has insisted on paying me twice what I asked. I love that girl. I needed her brand of positivity on the project (we had some other shitty stuff go down this week – I’ll talk about it later – that really knocked the wind out of me for a couple of days).

Bringing the Avid site up to scratch has been the focus for the last few days. I’ll be doing the same with the Bears site next as well as this one (the Music and Stuff page sit outside the WordPress admin – I don’t know what I’m doing with the Stuff page by the way, I guess I thought I would have made some “stuff” by now..), so I can use them all for examples. After that it will be customer templates and the actual Aarfie page, with a “this is why we’re unique” spiel and all of that barf. Then we should be ready to go.

Somewhere in all of that we found time to try a new method for resin casting, which has yielded positive results so far. I got lazy towards the end of one of the days in the workshop and left the gloves off during a pour. I spent the next two days picking resin off my hand. I couldn’t even tell it was on there until it started setting.

Jon screen-printed a shirt today to see if the old warped screen for the ice-cream bloke was still OK. It worked well and it got us thinking about our set up for screen printing and excited to get it all happening soon. We set up a clothes hanger in the workshop as a start and we’ve already got the gear picked out from this crowd.

I even managed to fit in a few sessions in the music room this week. I’m trying to do this more regularly.

All up, it has been a pretty productive and rewarding start to the new working life.

I still haven’t found a good hollandaise sauce here. The local Safeway stocks every other Maille product just to get my hopes up and have me searching all the shelves in their store.

The good news is that I found this kick-ass recipe that takes only minutes to complete; blender hollandaise sauce.

We’re gonna have a big ole Sunday breakfast fry up when Jon gets his ass out of bed.

Which reminds me, it was brought to my attention that I failed to give kudos to my brother-in-law in my last breakfast-related post. So a sincere thank you to Brad for showing me the way to a perfect poached egg.

Kudos is important in our family.

As is breakfast.