I Love my Electric Bike!

I bought my Aseako electric bike a few months ago and absolutely love it. It is very solidly constructed and wasn’t particularly difficult to assemble and get ready to ride. The European model E-bikes were really tempting but started out at more then twice the price of the Aseako which was out of my price range.

The green tyres were not the standard ones that come with the bike. Two weeks after getting it I blew the rear tyre which really annoyed me as it had only been used for a short time and it had only been ridden on sealed roads. Changing the rear wheel on a heavy E-bike on the side of the road is difficult and unappealing and was a bit of an issue if I planned to use this as my second vehicle and main form of transport. I ordered some Tannus tubeless tyres and got them fitted at Giant Cycles in Rockhampton and am really happy with them. The tyres are a very tough polymer that are solid filled and are perfectly satisfactory for urban street use. If feels great to know I can go on a long ride and not have to worry about getting home after a blowout.

The bike is powered by a 200 watt motor connected to the peddle crank and the battery gives the bike enough power for around 20 km with a 90kg rider. The battery itself is quite light and can be unlocked and removed from the back frame for charging. The torque does tend to fall away as the battery gets closer to empty so I usually put it onto the charger at the end of each day.

The E-Bike laws have changed since I got this bike so they don’t sell a version with a manual throttle anymore. The Law now allows 250 watt motors to be used but not with throttle controls. Instead bikes must be fitted with a pedelec controller which applies the power in proportion the the speed that you peddle. I always turn the pedelec controller off when riding my bike as I consider it to be dangerous. I have found that you can often forget that you have it switched on and find that when starting from a stationary position it can kick in and give you unexpected forward momentum. I can just imaging getting thrown under a bus with this type of miscalculation so I stick to the throttle.

The council has been putting in a fantastic bike path that runs along the old railway line starting near the old railway station in Yeppoon and going past my place and up past the golf course. When it is finished it is going to make it really easy to commute into Yeppoon by bike.

Miscellaneous Projects

The Bok Choi plants have grown so much faster then the other greens and are getting to the point where they are ready to harvest. This is were I usually lose everything to cabbage moths but this time I have started spraying with DIPEL at the first sign on infestation.

I went out to check the plants this afternoon and there was a cloud of moths flapping around the greens but there was still only one plant showing signs of damage. This was the one I first found that told me it was time to bring out the spray.

 

 

 

You can see the web that forms in the heart of the plant which is the first sign you get that a massive infestation is about to break out. I will put some spray on the next few days to try and fend off the plague.

 

 

 

I have started up the incubator again and am going to begin hatching out chickens on a much larger scale then before. I am not allowed to have a rooster in my zoning but am lucky enough to have a friend who will sell the fertilized eggs to me for the same price as unfertilized ones. It took a fair bit of tweaking to get the incubator to the exact temperature but now that it is set correctly it seems fairly stable.

 

 

 

 

The incubator didn’t cost much but is a US model so I have plugged it into a 120 volt inverter which is running of a computer power supply. If you are using a PC’s power supply you just have to remember that the red wires are 5 volts, the Yellow wires are 12 volts and the green wire needs to be crossed with the black wire to turn it on.

I picked up a Swiss Brown mushroom kit as I want to work out how to culture my own mushrooms. There is some information on the Milkwood Permaculture site about doing this from scratch but you first need to get hold of fresh mushroom spawn so a mushroom kit seemed to be a good way to get started.

Judie and Greg are getting married!!

I am so happy to be able to announce that Judie and I were engaged on the 12th of July and are planning to have a December wedding. Judie has been such an inspiration to me and I am looking forward to spending my life with my beautiful, caring and kind hearted sweetheart!

We all scream for ice-cream

Honey’s friend was telling me how much she liked TM ice-cream. Thinking back to the recipe for “Ice-cream” on the sorbet page of the EDC book I secretly thought she was absolutely crazy (it was blended frozen milk with egg white and sugar) but politely told her it was not one of my favourite dishes.

While searching the web for TM custard recipes (yeah I can never find my EDC book) I made a startling discovery; most of the ice-cream recipes involve starting with a custard type mixture. Most involve egg yolks, cream, milk, sugar but one that I tried used whole eggs- great as I have an aversion to separating eggs and usually just make something else.

This recipe can be concluded with an ice-cream maker or by wizzing frozen custard mixture. As it made slightly more custard than my ICM could handle at one time I went with half in the ICM and half in the TM. On the web there was people complaining about the TM being used as an ice-cream maker and I can tell you my expectations of number 2 were not high. But I popped the remainder of the custard in the freezer, I was surprised the next day when I thought I would need to par-thaw it to wiz it (I had fallen asleep waiting the night before) it was frozen and firm but not rock hard. I cubed it and wizzed it.

My first batch of ice-cream was vanilla flavoured and Honey and I loved it. The TM version was quite nice but the ice particles were slightly bigger. Tested on my nephew and his niece and nephew- they loved it. I tested the ICM version on my niece and she loved it too.

This time I made a caramel version by omitting the Vanilla extract and changing the raw sugar to brown sugar. I put the second lot of custard in the ICM straight after the first lot. It did not go quite as thick but popped it in the same container in the freezer and stirred them about every 20 mins till it was the desired consistency. This made for small ice crystals and Honey and our independent taster also gave it a score of delicious. Tonight I crushed a crunchie and popped it on top. Yum it was like being at Cold Rock.

Judie

The taming of the Kogan - Beef Stroganoff

Beef Stroganoff

Davo has a middle name… Tyson, he keeps biting me. Tonight I made beef stroganoff Kogan style. The end result was pretty delicious. Says not just Honey but also an independent taste-tester. Recipe here

MyCook instructions

1. Place EVOO into jar and set 120c, 1 min, sauté. (If using butter cook on 100c)
2. Place the quartered onion into the jar. Set timer 120c, 5 min, sauté (if using butter 100c 4 mins)
3. Place remaining ingredients, except parsley into TM bowl and cook 120c, 15 min, sauté
4. Garnish with parsley and serve with fettuccine (Recipe here) for DF and mashed potatoes for EF option.

Other Thermo-machine instructions

1. If using GSM machine, pop in blunt blades. Place the onion into the jug and chop for 5 seconds, speed 7.
2. Add butter and cook for 2 minutes, 100°C, speed 1.
3. Place remaining ingredients, except parsley into jug and cook for 20 minutes, 100°C, Speed 1 or 2
4. Garnish with parsley and serve with fettuccine (Recipe Here) for DF and mashed potatoes for EF option.

Mashed Potatoes

Honey is not a fan of TM mashed potatoes... I know right - grounds for divorce. So we end up doing them the old fashioned way. I even had to go buy a potato masher. So as penance he is the resident potato-masher. 

So in my attempts to get him to "like" TM mash I tried the Skinnymixers steamed mash (but do you think I could find it) when I am adding to this blog post?

Basically... peel and cube your potato (use one species of potato as they cook at different rates). Pop them on the Steaming trays with enough room to allow the steam through.

Add water to your machine's jug and steam for 15 minutes till soft.

Remove potatoes from steaming trays and pop the water into a cup.

Add potatoes to jug with some home-made mayo or a Dairy Free butter, salt and pepper to taste and wizz till smooth. Speed 5 to 7 is good.

Results for Kogan's performance...

So I tried making the “One bowl” style that I usually make which is weighing the mushrooms in the jug first (unless I forget then I put them in the steam basket on the TM lid) they weighed fine but stuck when I needed to remove the mushrooms to sauté the onions. The blade did not want to release his fungi prisoners and bit me during my attempts to help them to escape.

There are two possible styles of cooking for compensating for the lack of a reverse in the knock offs. One is to use the butterfly on the slowest setting and the other is to just put the setting on slow. If I had a Bellini we could switch out the blade for a blunt blade and continue cooking (now I have a Bellini, I know you can do the whole thing with the blunt blade) and I doubt "not using a blade cover on the Kogan" method will work for another family favourite of Riostto. It is tricky to attach and I have read that someone had theirs come off and the blades chopped it up and it was expensive to replace. So I was going to go with the slow speed forward tonight. Result very tasty Beef Stroganoff some of the mushrooms were chopped in half by the blade which made for a slightly lesser mark in presentation. Biting me made for a lower mark in ease of operation. Overall exceeds expectations +.

Burn marks again on the Kogan tonight when it was finished cooking, I have the dishwasher sorting that out as we speak. I have since found that heating water for about 10 minutes with bicarb soda in the Kogan jug is the most effective way to remove bun marks. They just wipe off.

Judie