Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Meat Preservation

I've run out of space in the freezer. I wrote about my disaster a while ago when I accidentally switched the power off to one of the freezers and had to throw a couple of hundred pounds worth of food out. I've slowly built that up again over the last few months. I hardly notice it, if I buy a steak then I buy one for me and one for the freezer. If I make a lasagne or a meat-loaf then, no matter how good it is, the last piece gets frozen. It doesn't take long to build up a good reserve.

But it means I have to turn down bargains. My local supermarket has a really good butcher section. The meat is really good quality (it's not one of the national chains, it's a small, local chain that supports local producers) but it's pricey. But if you hit it at the right time (Friday evening is usually good) then there is always a fridge for high-quality produce for a couple of quid a portion.

Normally, I'd freeze it but I have no space. So, I'm experimenting with preserving it in other ways. Refrigeration is a recent development and we've got 10,000 years of history we can learn from.

I do a lot of pickling and preserving of vegetables but I've never tried doing it with meat. I've always been a bit wary because of the obvious safety issues with it. A bad tomato is a bad tomato. A bad piece of meat can easily sneak under the radar.

I've started with doing jerky and biltong. I love both of these as a snack but they are expensive. A tiny bag will easily cost £2 and it'll probably be loaded with preservatives and additives that I really don't want to consume. So using bargain meat as a base for making my own seems like a good idea.

Youtube has been my best resource for this. I've sat through a lot of meat drying videos. For biltong, my favourite so far has been a South African chef called Ben Kruger. Biltong is beef that has been soaked in vinegar, spiced, then air-dried over the course of a week.

You need a lump of very lean meat (fat spoils quickly). Slice it into 1.5cm pieces, coat with vinegar, let it sit and then apply biltong spice (a mix of salt, coriander and black pepper). After that you hang it in a biltong box (a box that creates the right air flow and environment for safe drying) for anything up to a week. Slice thinly then eat.

Ben's video is here and he has instructions on how to make a biltong box.

Jerky is different. It starts sliced very thin, maybe 3-4mm. There is no vinegaring but it can be soaked in a marinade and then spiced. Or not. South Africans are very specific about what gets called biltong. Jerky is a lot more vague. The drying process is different as well. It can be air-dried but most people seem to do it in the oven. You hang the pieces from a rack (or lay them flat), put the oven on as low as it will go, prop the door open an inch or two to create air flow and leave for about four hours.

A good video is from Kent Rollins here.

I've had a go at jerky. My first batch I did using a piece of cheap salmon and it was beautiful. I marinaded it in worcester sauce, soy sauce, a little honey and some vinegar. I added a BBQ rub then dried it in the oven for 4 hours. Turned out really nice.

My next batch was some scrap silverside beef. I think the oven was either too hot or the air flow was too low because I ended up cooking it rather than drying it. The result was OK but it was just pieces of over-cooked roast beef rather than jerky.

I've currently got a batch of biltong on the go. I used the other half of the silverside that I turned into jerky and made a small biltong box out of a couple of 1 litre yoghurt pots stacked on top of each other and a little fan to drive air through it. If it turns out OK then I might scale it up. I priced up parts for making Ben Kruger's biltong box on Ebay and it came to about 20 quid.

To be honest, I don't know if I am beating the price of shop-bought biltong or jerky but at least I know what is going into it.

I'm also salting some salmon. Salting is one of the oldest ways of preserving fish there is. I got a cheap piece of salmon that was reduced, lay it on a bed of coarse sea salt and then covered it with more. It's been in the fridge for about 12 hours and a ton of water has come out already. I've drained it and resalted. I'll see how it turns out.

The next project I want to do is making an Armenian dried beef called basturma or arpukht. This starts with salting a chunk of lean beef until it is hard, air drying it until it is really hard then applying a paste of fenugreek, pepper and paprike.

The recipe is here.

I don't know if this is a realistic way of saving money but it is just another way of using scrap meat that doesn't involve freezing it. Sometimes money saving is not everything, it is as much about not wasting produce.

Weekly Update 23rd June 2020

I've felt a growing sense of sadness over the last few days. The world, or the UK at least, is starting to come out of lockdown. Normal life is beginning and things are starting to open up again. Soon we will be able to travel, to go to pubs and cinemas, to see other people. In theory, this is great. It means that Covid-19 cases are dropping and society, especially the economy, can start up at last.

Why do I feel so sad about it? Part of it is that all the bullshit is also now starting over. My daughter is back at school from Monday and the barrage of emails and, now, Whatsapp messages has started up from my ex-wife. My daughter has one month of school left. One fucking month. Not a single piece of uniform fits and for one fucking month I have to buy a load of shit that she will never wear again.

School has said they can wear their own clothes but oh no, that's not good enough for the middle class mothers. Yep, every fucking single one of them has gone out and bought new uniform for 4 fucking weeks. So now I have to do the same for 4 fucking weeks.

For three months I'd forgotten how much I despise these people. In the six years my daughter has been at the school I could count on one hand the number of conversations I've had with the other parents. It's not for want of trying, I'm a fairly talkative, sociable guy. But I'm not one of them. The know I am a single parent and they know, urgh, that I live in the village over the hill. You know, the one where the poor people live.

I sound really bitter. And I guess I am. It's not what I'd expected my daughter's primary school years would be like. It was great that she got into such a nice little village school but that comes with all the snobbish, judgemental, materialistic, entitled arseholes that live there. Considering that half of them inherited their places there and didn't do a stroke of work to achieve is entirely lost.

So that was that. I'd forgotten how much I cannot be arsed with all this bullshit. But the other thing that got to me is how big a lost opportunity this was.

For three months "normal" life shut down. Almost from day one I started noticing things that were never there. The constant, distant hum of the motorway was gone. Birds were singing. Wildlife was returning and the land was recovering. The air was clear. There were no planes in the sky.

And people were nice to each other. I remember reading about how, post-9/11, in New York it happened there. Normality went on hold and people acted decently towards one another. That's fading now, you can see that negativity start to sneak in, that selfishness start bubbling to the top again.

I've loved these last three months where all the pressure was lifted. I don't mean work, that was maybe even worse than normal. I mean socially. In three months I did not give a single fuck that I had a shit social life and a small circle of friends. The loneliness that I normally felt vanished almost overnight because there was no pressure to have a social life and no opportunity to do it. For the first time in a long time I felt normal.

We're also being encouraged to buy our way out of this, too. Advertising seems to have ramped up and I'm already seeing people going back to buying shit again. You can bet that a ton of that shit is being bought on credit. People losing their minds over not being able to consume can now go out and get sucked into a retail orgy presided over by utter scumbags like Phillip Green.

I feel really sad it is over. Really sad. One of my favourite writers, Edward Abbey, once said "there's something wrong with a system that can only either expand or fail". He's right. Lockdown has shown just how unnatural and fragile the world we have created is. If we pause, even for a moment, it starts to crumble.

I've thought a lot about what it must be like to live a tribal life. In a hunter gatherer community it takes a major disaster to threaten the tribe. You can always eat, you can always have shelter. It takes a lot to fuck that up. But in our world? Our "civilised" world? Three months and we are looking at the worst economic depression in modern history.

I feel very disillusioned and alienated right now. As we come out of lockdown, I feel even more out of place here than I ever did. I think if I was younger and if I didn't have a child then I would not be here. I'd pack a bag, I'd sell everything I had of any value and I'd split. Where would I go? To play in the fields of the Lord. Now there's an 1980's reference to look up.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Update 10th June 2020

End of the month so I can actually take a bit of a better look at my financial status. Most weeks nothing happens but when I get paid then I've actually got something to talk about.

I've managed to save a bit of cash this month. Last month, if I remember right, I was hitting a bit of a wall. It surprised me but when I thought about it, there was a lot of expense in the previous month which impacted it. At the end of May I was probably about £2-300 ahead.

I do my shopping once a week and I've got a fairly regular shopping list that I now buy. This was generally coming in at around £50 a week for me and my daughter. It's probably more than I would like but that is allowing for a few treats, some better quality produce and a bit more discretionary spending. I have no other real financial demands at the minute so I can ease up a little on the frugality in the supermarket.

But one thing I've noticed is that prices are going up. I don't know if reduced supply is starting to feed through into the system but there is a noticeable increase. I the bulk of my shopping in Aldi and there are a few things I've seen creeping up. Some quite dramatically. I get through a lot of nuts and I buy a pack of cashews every week. They are 85p. They have been 85p for as long as I can remember. Last week they shot up to £1.45. I noticed it on a lot of things.

It's a lot to just be price gouging. The jumps might be small on most things, 10p here, 5p there, but it's still significant. I suspect this is the reality of food shortages. At the start of the lockdown when people were panic buying, it seemed to be that they were expecting some sort of biblical famine. What was more likely, and what seems to be happening, is that there is still stuff available but just not as much as there was. The end result of that is increased prices. Makes you wonder which is more damaging, an interruption in supply when we're all living off tins and what's in the freezer or a situation where we are paying 25% more for what we'd normally buy. Either way, you can bet supermarkets, who have done extremely well out of the pandemic, are not going to miss an opportunity to take a profit. As much as Tesco and Asda and Morrisons want to shout about their charity work, they are not charities.

A positive is that my little pot of investment funds has started to recover. At one point it had lost about a quarter of its value. Considering it was only about three grand to start with (and that was hard won) that's quite a hit. When I checked yesterday, it was only down 2%. Not great (as it was about 13% up before the panic) but a hell of a lot better than 25% down.

Another savings issue that I've had is with Chip. For starters, it has not saved a penny for me in about six weeks. Nothing has changed in my spending or earning habits but it has pretty much died on its arse. It was a nice little app when I first started using it, squirreling away a couple of quid every few days until it had built a nice pot up. Now, nothing. And as it is adding in a monthly charge (in certain circumstances) it makes me question whether or not it is worth using. It has always niggled me that a. they get the benefit of holding my cash and b. they get the benefit of knowing my spending habits which can be turned into a commodity that can be sold on to third parties.

A second issue I've found with Chip is accessibility. My phone died a couple of weeks ago and I had to revert to an ancient phone I still had lying around which I could not install Chip on. But there is no other way to access your Chip account. There is no online access and you need a device with a phone number (so I couldn't install it on my tablet). That really pissed me off. Luckily I didn't need the money this month but if I did I would have been screwed. They say I can email the helpdesk but is that really the best option in this day and age? How hard is it to set up a web page to allow access? I think my love affair with Chip is at an end and I might be closing my account if it doesn't improve its performance this month.

I can't remember if I mentioned this previously, I've started using my credit card to pay more bills that will allow it. I've always preferred manually paying bills because it makes me feel like I have better awareness of what is going on. Anywhere that gives a direct debit discount I have been leaving alone. But places that don't, like my council tax, I've been using my credit card. I never thought about it until I heard someone mention it on a podcast: I get cashback on my credit card spending so why not use that for bills? Regular things like council tax I transfer the cash into my account and then pay it. It all adds to my pot. Now, as I've said before, it gets paid in Waitrose/John Lewis vouchers and those aren't places I would shop regularly. But it does mean that I get to give myself a bit of a treat now and again on something I wouldn't generally consider buying.

I think my main news is that I was finally furloughed on Monday. This has actually worked out really well because on the same day I was finally offered the job that I was interviewed for a couple of weeks ago. Same salary, same commute and a year's worth of work in the pipeline. I am putting my notice in today. So now I can happily sit on my arse for the next month. Taking a 20% hit is going to hurt but it is only temporary and then things go back to normal.

The way I look at it, if you are first to be furloughed then you are first to be made redundant. The scheme ends in October but what I didn't realise was that if you are not on it by today (10th of June) then you are fucked. The regs say you need to have been furloughed for at least three weeks before the 30th of June. I only found this out recently which is why I've been a bit anxious to get on it sooner rather than later. After today, you're facing the boot with no safety net if you haven't been furloughed already.

Getting the job offer could not have come at a better time. The government is increasing the amount employers have to contribute and I know for certain that the people I work for are going to start the cull the moment it costs them a penny. It won't hurt them, when things pick up they know they can get anyone they need and on a lower rate because it will be a buyer's market. So I am going on my own terms.

The choice is whether or not to start the new job sooner. According to the rules I can work for someone else whilst on furlough. It would almost double my salary for a month, that's a couple of grand I could just drop straight in the bank. I don't know if this is the right decision but I don't want to. I've been so stressed of late that I'm happy to pay 20% for a month's leave. Mentally, I'm really burnt out with everything that has happened and having this time to chill and just catch up has been great even after just two days.

I think it is time that I just sit down, relax and let my mental health come first. I've got plenty to fill my time. I will not be bored. For once, I am taking a fucking reward that I actually deserve. That's at the expense of the tax-payer (which I am one of) and maybe my current employer but I do not give a flying fuck about that.