A lovely Saturday

Yesterday was a fun day :-)

Martin and I had our first go at bottling mussels.

2kg mussels ready to go

Things that go bang

Yesterday we were quietly resting when we heard a funny noise - a loud bang, like something falling over.

We couldn't find the source, but later Martin noticed some water on the floor near the hot water cupboard.  When he opened the hot water cupboard he found this:

Over the winter, I've been putting my kefir bottles in the hot water cupboard overnight to get good and fizzy.  This bottle had only been there maybe 4-5 hours and had got fizzy enough to break open at the bottom, shoot up in the hot water cupboard and knock down one of the slats that form the shelves!

I guess the weather's warm enough for them to get fizzy on the bench again now :-)

Microwave hotspots

Inspired by this post my brother spotted, the other day I found out where the hotspots are in our microwave.

I started with four poppadoms:

After about 15 seconds there was ring of cooked poppadom a bit shy of the outer edge of the rotating plate:

At 30 seconds the poppadoms were mostly cooked, but there were three curious dolphin-shaped uncooked patches, one of which included the centre of the rotating plate:

How did that happen??  It must be something to do with the intersection of the rotating speed of the plate and the peaks of the microwave waves as they bounce around the inside of the oven, but who knows what.

After a full minute all four poppadoms were beautifully cripsy, with only a few tiny spots retaining their uncooked plastickyness:

On the whole, it looks like our microwave cooks a whole lot more evenly than any of the four in the original post, but I'm interested to know that the strongest heat is to be found just shy of the edge of the rotating plate.  I'll bear that in mind next time I want to melt something small (e.g. a few spoonfuls of butter for baking): putting it near the edge should make it melt noticeably quicker!

Plus, it was fun to act like a scientist again :-)