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^ yeah I've heard about that too!

I'm still undecided on tomatos in the UK. My granddad grows them, he's from Naples and maintains that even in the UK's hottest summers we don't get the real searing blistering heat that tomatos need to ripen properly. We both think that the best tomato sauce is made from Napolina tinned toms.

Still, UK garden tomatos are quite delicious and a million times better than those absolutely disgusting, foul 'salad tomatos' from the supermarket. No wonder raw tomatos are unpopular when they have the taste and texture of gone-off watermelon.

If you know a leatherworker, they can probably make something like that Rollup out of leather, possibly for less than a Brooks saddle bag costs.

Some friends and I got a stationary exercise bike from a skip and locked it up on some bike racks in the city centre in York. It was there for well over a year.

Well, I found it funny anyway.

Oh my god. PoC

Proof of Concept?

Here's a good flourless chocolate desserty thing - chocolate marquise (or marquise au chocolat if you're being posh)

Melt 300g dark choc. Add the following in this order, mixing well after each;
70g icing sugar
185g unsalted butter
5 egg yolks and stir like mad
remove from heat, keep stirring until it's cool

beat 5 egg whites until stiff, add 30g icing sugar, beat a bit more
Slowly fold into the chocolate mixture

put into whatever mold you want, cover in clingfilm and leave in the fridge overnight. Goes well with a pistachio sauce (can't be bothered to type this one out as it's quite complicated. Basically mix pistachio sugar and egg whites, then mix this into milk, egg yolks and more sugar, made in the same fashion as a custard)

^ some of you guys stay up really bloody late.

^ yeah heart is good. There's no real difference between heart and regular meat, but people are squeamish I suppose. It's a very cheap way of getting good meat into your diet, much better than any processed 'advanced meat recovery' water-and-salt laden crap. I often buy it on my meagre student budget (who said students can't cook?)

Although when people say 'offal' I usually think of tripe, kidney, liver, brain etc. I suppose heart is tripe because it's an organ.

I like strips of tripe, floured and deep fried, on toast with some malt vinegar. But I'm weird like that.

Fegato alla Venezia is a good liver&onions type thing. Slice your onions, gently cook in some butter for about 45 mins, with the lid on, until they're going a bit brown. Have your liver in little squares sliced really thin (like postage stamps), turn the heat all the way up, scorch the onions a bit, throw in the liver and some red wine vinegar and parsley and cook for about 30 seconds. You need a gas hob for this, an electric one won't really get hot enough.

Chicken livers make a good addition to a bolognese sauce. Most people think bolognese is a quick, simple, cheap tomato sauce with a bit of mincemeat in there - it drives me insane. No. It is the opposite of that. It's a meat sauce with a small amount of tomato that takes all day to cook. It has about twenty ingredients. It is not cheap to make. It is not supposed to taste like dog food.

Er, what else...

Oooh! Grilled kidneys with anchovy butter. It's a good'un, quick and cheap too.
Anchovy butter - just puree anchovies, lemon juice, couple cloves of garlic, half a pack of butter, some rosemary and some black pepper. Roll up in tinfoil and leave in the fridge
Cut kidneys into 1 inch slices, lightly oil, grill on a very very very hot griddle pan for 45 seconds - 1 minute per side.
Put a slice of anchovy butter on each bit of kidney and serve with watercress and lemon wedges. Mash is good with this.

I like brain but I've never cooked it. I've eaten sauteed brains in France and it was delicious. And I've had a brain curry (at the excellent Akbar's in York). Brain tastes a bit like fishy creamy egg. It's apparently very unhealthy though, full of saturated fat or something. I'd like to try cooking it but I'm not sure if my girlfriend would eat it. More for me, I suppose.

Custard pancakes

For the pancakes - 100g melted butter, 500ml milk, 200g flour, bit of salt, orange rind, 2 eggs, 2 egg yolks. Combine and leave to rest for half an hour. You do know how to make pancakes, right?

For the custard - in a pan, put the whole rind of a lemon in with 400ml milk and 40g sugar. Scald milk then leave to infuse for half an hour. Remove rind
Meanwhile, in a thick-bottomed pan, mix 3 egg yolks, 60g sugar and 40g plain flour until homogenous. At this point I added some vanilla and almond essence.

Slowly pour in the milk over a low heat and stir continuously until it has thickened. When it's thick, cook for a couple minutes more, then leave to cool.

Now preheat oven to 230 c (450f).
Take a crepe, put a spoonful of custard into the middle, fold in half and then in half again, to make a quarter-circle. Do this to all the crepes and arrange nicely in a roasting tray. Sprinkle over some more caster sugar and put in the oven for 5-10 mins, until the very thinnest edges of the crepes are starting to burn

Remove from the oven, douse in Cointreau, and set light to it. Serve whilst still flaming for extra show-off points.

I served mine with an orange syrup (squeezed oranges, cheap rosé that I was drinking, loads of sugar - reduced then strained, then reduced again to the consistency of double cream) and whipped cream on the side. If I was being extra-posh it would have been creme chantilly.

Likes - Singleton's single malt
Dislikes - Dalwhinnie

Try soaking the crank arm overnight in penetrating oil (Duck Oil is by far the best, WD40 will do in a pinch though). They're really stuck on sometimes. Leave the bike on its side and fill up the taper hole completely with oil.

Or you could remove the crank bolt and ride around for a few hours to loosen it up. Might come off while you're riding though, which would be a Very Bad Thing.

You should try to pedal in circles rather than in strokes.

If you don't want to powdercoat, then car body filler. Roughen paint around dent, spread on filler, sand smooth, primer, paint, finished.

I used to be a bike mech at Halfords. I only had experience of working on my own bikes, and I wasn't particularly into bikes at the time either. They might have toughened up since then though, it was a few years ago.

I got along fine though. Within a month I was the best bike mechanic in the store. All I did was read the Haynes Bike Book and Sheldon Brown cover-to-cover. Not hard to stand out there.

Been there three times now. Goodbye Lenin in Krakow is the best hostel I've ever found. Something like £4 a night, free unlimited internet, free buffet breakfast, one of the staff rides fixed (lots of people do in Krakow I noticed this summer)

Salt mines are good.

Auschwitz is good. Well, not good, but yno. Definitely go to Birkenau. Don't bother with a guide to Birkenau, I've been twice and the second time with a guide wasn't worth it at all.

I don't have any cycling advice on any of those places, but I have been to all of them except Munich. You'll have a great time.

If you go to Split bus station (there's a big supermarket next to it which is useful) go to stand 16 (IIRC) and look on the walls for 'Split is Shit'. I wrote that. I wasn't happy at the time.

If you go to Zadar make sure you visit the Sea Organ, it's really cool.

In Croatia they do these big flattish round filo pastry things. Some are filled with delicious apple. Others are filled with some sour whey cheese sort of thing. My advice is to look up the word for 'apple', because you don't want to eat the cheese ones.

Let me guess, you don't work within the design industry... The point of such projects is NOT to make a fully commercially viable end-product. The PROCESS of LEARNING and creative problem solving is what counts. Jesusfucksake.

QFT. I'm doing a degree in vehicle design and it shits me right up when people say things like 'blah blah it doesn't work in the real world etc'. If you don't want to live in a world where people experiment with things that sometimes fail (or even experiment with things that will almost certainly fail) then you can go back and live in a cave and suck lichen off of rocks.

From the last time I made demi-glace....

Sweet. Have you got 'Roast Chicken and Other Stories' by Simon Hopkinson? He's got a good recipe for demiglace/meat glaze in there, also using veal knuckle bones.

My favourite sweet chilli sauce is Mae Ploy, it comes in big 1-litre glass bottles. Not as sweet as the Blue Dragon stuff but nicer IMO

My favourite hot garlic chilli sauce is Flying Goose Brand Sri Racha sauce. Amazing on cheese on toast.

Bum. And I thought I had come up with something smart...

Build the rear wheel with a double-sided hub. Get two cranksets and put them on both sides of your BB, so that you have a chainring on both sides. Get two freewheels (you'll have to buy the best you can afford so there's no backlash in the system) and put them both on your rear wheel. Have the ratios like 70" for going forwards (RH side) and 30" for going backwards (LH side). Put chains on both sides. Now you've got a high gear for going forwards but a really low gear for super-easy fixieskidding.

Obviously, it'll be much lighter, cheaper, prettier and quieter (no freewheel constantly ticking) just to get a front brake. But not as unique.

Panetone is great for making bread and butter pudding with.

I always laugh when I see it for sale in posh delis for £8. They're £2 each down the market.

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I like making quick microwaved chocolate puddings:
3 spoons flour
3 spoons sugar
3 spoons butter/oil
3 spoons milk
2 spoons cocoa
1 egg white
chocolate chips or a broken up chocolate bar or whatever you have

Mix it all up in a cup or small bowl until it's homogenous, then microwave on full power for 1 min - 1 1/2 mins, or until it's at the desired texture (I like them quite gooey). Obviously it's not a 'proper' dessert, just something tasty when you've got a sweet tooth coming on. I think they're better than those crappy chocolate pudding desserts you buy for £3 at the supermarket, and cost almost nothing.

It ain't a bicycle honey, it's a Raleigh Chopper.

Looks like a good design to me. Shouldn't there be some sort of mesh in the front though, to stop small stuff from falling out? I mean, you could line it with a bag, but what if you don't have a bag with you? Does it have inbuilt lights?

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There was someone in my school called Willy Leeks, and another called Ryan Maiden. One of the foreign students was called Gbemmi Obamai which soon became Gbendy Obumgay. One of the teachers was Mr. Hadcock, who also had a son at the school.

What degree did you do?

I quite like the typeface. It does look a bit like it says dick though. Some people might find it funny, some won't find it funny, some will think you designed the font badly. I'd get rid of it.

Maybe as a navigation system you could have a section pop up when the cursor moves over each letter of your name. It'd be more interesting and neater than the clunky list you have at the moment.

If you do this, I'd move your name into the middle of the page, too. When the cursor goes over the letter, a little dialog box could pop up next to the letter. Even if you don't do this, the website needs some sort of 'intro' page - this could just be your name in that font in the middle of the page, and you click it to get to the 'home' page. As it is now, the 'main' section of your site is totally redundant.

When you go on the portfolio pages it says 'about' at the top. This just seems a little unprofessional to me - the images should be enough explanation. I think you need more stuff on there, too, it's a bit empty and doesn't show much variation. And I can't download your CV either.

I think in general it just needs to look a bit more polished and professional. It looks like a hastily thrown together webpage, which isn't what you want, especially you are a designer and this is essentially the first stage of any job interview.

The idea of patterned laser cut chainrings is cool...

But the bike looks like someone typed in 'fixie parts' into ebay and bought all of them.

What frame is it going into? Are the BB shell threads straight, spotlessly clean and well greased?

^ Well when I got it, the crank extractor threads stripped so I cut the axle apart with an angle grinder. Didn't have a spare axle so I bought a cartridge BB. I just stuffed the old cranks back on because I needed it to get to work the next day.

They gave me a Shimmy UN54 BB (off the top of my head)... which didn't go in exactly straight, NDS is about 2mm lower than it should be and didn't rotate freely for a few miles (presumably the axle rubbing on the plastic shell). It's never bothered me because it's just a cheap hack - I always assumed that I had just cross-threaded it, but actually your suggestion makes sense.

Anyway, the BB is still slightly stiff (although probably wouldn't notice it when pedalling) and the enormous chainring is a bit of a sod (have torn two pairs of trousers on it). If I do get around to replacing it, and if it is 26tpi, then I'll probably get a YST threadless BB and whack on any cheap old singlespeed crankset. YSTs aren't the smoothest BBs, but it's a hack, so I'm not spending money on it.

I might re-frame it if I find a suitable and suitably cheap frame, it's a tad small for me.