Insects that have perished at my hand

Cockroaches, big bastards they are too. Poison, and the slipper.

Ants, suicidal ones that have perished in wood chucked in the mud oven, and squished by hand. Another bunch of them who had set up home in the oven yesterday shifted out very sharply when it got too hot. Several different varieties of ants have gone this way.

Termites, residing in rotten wood have also been incinerated.

Mosquitoes the most evil of all small insects, splatted, and poisoned.

Head lice have also been poisoned.

Correct method of making bread

I checked out why my loaves weren't doing so well. They were rather cakey and generally like bricks. So here's what you actually have to do. Using the same ingredients as noted below, the trick is in the kneading, and letting it rise twice. So first time knead the dough for about 10 minutes. Then let it rise. It should get big! Then what is then called the punch down after its risen lots, which means squishing it back down to its original size, and kneading again another five minutes. This pushes lots of air into the dough which is good for all sorts of reasons. After this, it goes on your baking tray, and rises for a second time. When its risen, pop it in the oven. I would show a picture of the bread that came out of the oven this time, but it was all eaten! Success!

Fan Assisted Mud Oven

It is also possible to cheat if necessary. Mixing the stone age with the industrial age here we can kick some life into a fire that was slow in starting and unresponsive.

Woooooof!

Mud Oven Gets Tin Roof

Yet more developments on the mud oven front. Here, I have nailed a tin roof on it. There's about six inches clearance between the oven and the roof itself, and everything was made out of crap I found in the garden.

Although by now the oven is as hard as stone, I fear a torrential downpour here, with the quantity and speed of the rain, may wash the oven away. It is recyclable anyway and sooner or later will return to the soil.

Loaf of Bread in a Mud Oven

This loaf was made from a loaf kit: called Bob's Red Mill or something, which you can find all they way in Shangri-La Mall in the organic shop. Looks rather smashing, but as with most home made loaves, a bit on the stodgy side. The flour was rather heavy. However, it went well with the roast chicken, and we learn every day.

I also learnt how not to make a loaf of bread, and that is to make the thing, and leave it to bake overnight in a heated mud oven. The end result I considered marketing as a new type of building material.

Roast Chicken in a Mud Oven

Inside the oven a chicken roasts. The seasoning I use is Spanish Paprika (available here - it has a slight smokey smell), garlic chopped and some salt and pepper. Give the chick a good rub with this seasoning, inside and out, then roast upside down. It keeps the chicken breast moist and tender rather than dry. This oven was rather hot, so I had to cover the pot with banana leaves, and baste the chicken quite a bit. But rather tasty and rather pleasant.

Philippines 1 Good Food 1: The Filipino Curry!

Trying to interest the uninterested in foodie type things can be a challenge, I have finally found a dish that is very nice, and apparently a Philippine dish. The Filipino Curry. I used the recipe from this page, which worked very well. Not too spicy, not too tasteless. Enjoyed by both the foreigner and by the native, and pretty easy to make. For those familiar with curries cooked in Chinese take-aways in the UK, its very close.

Ants in discussion

These ants live on the washing line and in the trees. Here, they are having a chat as they traverse from one side of the wire to the other. The subject is possibly that of a religious nature.

Beer in the Philippines

The local beer is rather strong here, and some bottles don't even have labeling to identify the alcohol content. One called Red Horse is notorious for knocking you out, and I've not found a drink under 5% ABV. It slips down rather well. In the heat, you drink it faster as well. Shortly its like you've been clubbed over the head, but still a few more sink down. The well-known "Stella moment" can be common which is either bursting into tears or flying into a blind fury about something daft. The following morning your head hurts, depression looms and the only cure is either time or more beer.

Reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe's poem about drinking (written shortly before the drink killed him)

Fill with mingled cream and amber
I shall drain that glass again
Such hilarious visions clambour
Through the chamber of my brain
The queerest thoughts and quaintest fancies
Come to light and fade away
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.

Splat!

This one was running around the floor in the dark when I came back from a local piss-pot bar. Certainly not fast enough to beat the slipper and got mashed. Funnily enough no ants moved in at all on this one and it was just lying there until aforementioned Bullet did the duties with the broom.

Ants co-operate in shifting dead insect

Garden ants co-operate shifting a dead insect for unknown purposes. 30 sec clip.

Philippines 1 Good Food Nil

I'm finding it hard to eat out here. Firstly the heat seems to quench your appetite. Filipinos put sugar in more or less everything: bread, sausages (yes, sausages), which actually makes it harder to stomach. Decent food appears to be imported, thus expensive, but not of top quality. Chicken Adobo, the national dish, is not bad but often the chicken is dry. There is disdain for normal spices, and mixes are used often which contain (surprise) sugar.

Most of my meals, with the occasional exception of breakfast, are being replaced with beer. This has the advantage of allowing you to get the illusion of filling your stomach and drowning your sorrows. The disadvantage means that wounds take longer to heal, and you start to feel rather weak after a few days.

This is totally inappropriate given some of the levels of poverty out here, but there you go.

Home Made Bread in a Mud Oven

The recipe: flour. Its hard to get decent flour here so its just local flour. Olive oil. Salt. Rosemary. Can actually get this. Mix. Put yeast in water with a little sugar till it fires up. Mix in to bread mix. Knead a little. Wait till it rises.

Fire up the fire, charcoal, wood, whatever. If bread has risen, then chuck in your loaf with a dusting of flour. About half way through, a splash of olive oil on the loaf and back in.

Then your done.

The results are not spectacular, but the stuff is edible and goes well with oil and garlic.

A note on Ants

There appear to be several distinct varieties of ants that live in the house. The first live in the kitchen and although small and black are capable of moving large amounts of meat around. They congregate around the kitchen sink and seem to shift large things in and out of holes in the wall. The second live in the dining area and tidy up around the table, where they will patiently wait for you to finish your meal before invading the table and move whatever debris they find. Then there's the small house ants, that, as noted previously, dismember the cockroach or spookily ate out his innards before being disturbed.

In the garden are several more varieties, including large red ants. The tricky ones however, are smaller and capable of climbing up a stick you are poking them with, wriggling onto your body and then choosing a choice spot to bite. This is inevitably suicidal, and hence these ants are obviously motivated by extreme territorial beliefs, and possibly some sort of religion. They all use some sort of community belief system which leads them to operate collectively. Have you seen a queen ant? Very possibly, it is a worm like thing that lives inside a stick; which, when said stick is pushed into a mud oven to make heat for baking bread, creates even greater suicidal vigour amongst the commune ants.

Incidentally, out here if you find ants in your pants, it means you are a diabetic.

Cockroach Conclusion

Seven hours later the house ants had not made much progress, the insect was still largely intact unless they were *shock* removing things from the inside. Picture shows unlucky beast shortly before being swept up by the housemaid, who's nickname is even more frighteningly Bullet.

House Ants Move In

Less than one hour later, unlucky cockroach is being recycled by an army of house ants. Lets hope a house lizard doesn't come first.

Philippine Cockroach Meets Early Death

I've seen bigger ones in Africa, and more spooky ones in the dark, but this one simply wasn't quick enough today and got the splat from the slipper.

I shall now await the house ants to move in and oxy-acetylene the beastie and take him away. Where and what they will use him for, I do not know. But I do know there are a billion of them and only one of me, so we shall not fight.

Long live house ants. Those other fuckers in the garden have a war on their hands.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #7 Heating and Cooking

So far I've cooked pizza, roast chicken and lamb. All rather satisfactory. I'm still learning how it works so here's how I am managing for now. Firstly the fuel: for now, mostly charcoal. Its available cheaply locally. Basically I light a number of small fires near the entrance, I spark up the charcoal and (occasionally) wood with kerosene. Once its good and going (i.e. charcoal has a grey ash over it) I sweep it inside the oven. Same if its wood. Normally about 3-4 of these fires is enough to heat it up. Occasionally an additional fire is needed later on.

1. When the insulation layer or main layer is still damp, the oven loses much of its heat to the water, which evaporates. Hence, early firings are not good for cooking.
2. The principle of the oven is to store heat in the 6 inches or more of sand and mud mix to radiate back down into the cavity to roast. So far, this has not worked for me. For my cooking, basically I sweep the coals and wood to the back and sides of the oven, and place the baking tray in the middle of this. Once its totally dry I might get a stored heat effect.
3. Using the door tends to limit oxygen into the oven, so can actually cool it rather than keep it hot with the air going in.
4. Do not light fires in the oven, especially if you are using kerosene! It will make the thing stink and stick to the inside of the oven. Includes: plastic or any other crap you may be thinking of burning. Light the fire outside, and sweep in.
5. Prep time: 2 hours for firing and getting your food in. Then sit by it and smell the smell of home mud roasting!

Pizzas: 5 mins, chicken: an hour and a half, lamb shanks about 2 hours.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #7

Nearly there! After this yet another couple of firings. The door was made from local wood guesstimated at the right size for the hole. It too was insulated with half an inch of clay mud on the inside. The trick with this was, once the door was made, to bang nails about half way through the side facing the heat, leaving about half an inch of nail protuding. Press clay mix over this, and let it dry and the nails hold it on. It will fall off eventually but you get a good grip in the meantime. And in any case the material is recycleable so can be just pushed back on when its wet.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #6

The insulation mix: Coconut husks, sand, and mud. Takes forever to mix.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #5

So, after two firings, the oven needs another layer, which is the insulation layer. I read that this involves manure, straw and the same clay-sand mix we had before. Well, I wasn't about to be the only European walking around with sacks of poo, so I abandoned manure, and looked for ingredients that happened to be around. We had: lots of leaves and coconut husks. So, with the same mud-clay and sand mix made before I mixed in coconut husks (pulling them apart) and dried leaves again found in the yard. This makes a more difficult mix, but again with cement-mixing method and squidging by hand, it works. Coconut husks have to be pulled apart by hand to get the threads out, but make a good combination. Over a dry oven these get slapped on for another 2-3 inches of layer. The picture is about two thirds of the way up when I'd stopped for (yet another) San Miguel.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #4

After this I cut the door using a bread knife. It needs to be just under two thirds of the height of the dome. Get your hands in and scoop out the sand. There's lots of it! I had sand still clinging to the roof (some of which came out after firing), hence the plastic bag would have helped. Basically I had to cut it out with a machete and my fingernails (until I found mud), until it was gone. From what I read earlier, a slow drying out is neither here nor there, so I decided to fire it. Swept up again round the yard to get fuel and started to fire it. Basically this means lighting a fire on the front, waiting till its good and going, then sweeping it into the hole. This means for an oven this size, about three to four modest fires lit, then swept in.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #3

Then, finally the oven gets totally covered. After this stage I left it a day before cutting the door. You can just see the hollow block at the bottom which would determine the width of the door (i.e. big enough for a pizza). I read that you can cut the door earlier than a day, but some of my clay mix was a bit wet (i.e. prone to cracking on drying), and in any case its as humid as hell down here. So I gave it a day.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines #2

The (previous) picture includes a tile on top of the dome which I used simply to make the outer surface smooth. Other posts will tell you to put on newspaper on top of this dome, if I did it again I'd use a plastic bag, as its probably easier for pulling out the sand later on. Anyway, to the rest of it: I then dug out clay from garden. Here, its virtually all clay. How to tell: it doesn't break up. You can mold it if you wish. So a few sackfulls of clay with all the other crap that came with it. This then needs to be mixed with sand. The ratio I used varied considerably as frankly I wasn't very confident, but I think I was about 50% sand and 50% mud. I mixed it more or less as you would a cement, i.e. using a spade to chop, then turn, then mix into the middle, then chop then turn again. Water added to make it mix up, and make it malleable.

So lots lof mixing. But I didn't use the paddling or puddling technique described in the other sites, just normal cement mixing technique. However, when I handled it, I did give it a good squidge around with my hands. Then this goes round the whole structure, in a spiral, and aiming to push down against the floor rather than against the sand dome. So, up and up, until the whole thing is covered. I think the wall thickness at this point was roughly across my knuckles and then some, i.e. 3 to 4 inches.

A Mud Oven in the Philippines

Unlucky or lucky. I don't pay council tax any more, TV licence, or other crappy taxes that add up to a whole lot per month, but I am staying in a house near a town called Antipolo in the Philippines. Cooking here is done on a gas-fired range with two rings, which means that everything is either boiled or fried. Which makes for some tedious cooking. And the Philippines is not renowned for its cooking. When was the last time you went to a Filipino restaurant in the UK? Right. Indian, Italian, Greek, even Ethiopian cuisines are distinguished. The Philippines is not. Probably a result of colonisation by the Americans. And a gas oven available in a local store is really rather expensive, as it has to be imported. So. After digging the garden and discovering a rather clay soil, the solution was to turn the clock back a few centuries and create a wood or charcoal fired oven in order to make things like bread, pizzas, roast chicken, roast (imported) lamb, basically: a decent meal. Here's what I did.

Firstly, I checked out the available information. There are two good sites which provide advice on creating mud ovens. http://handyprojects.blogspot.com/2005/04/mud-oven-project-part-2.html is where I started and the basis for my design. Additional advice was found at http://clayoven.wordpress.com/ although this is a bit advanced. I.e. it includes innovations such as a chimney. But is rather helpful on materials and general encouragement.

I used stuff I found around the place. The only thing paid for was sand, and I needed more than I originally budgeted for. The base was made out of breeze blocks or hollow blocks they call them here, basically concrete I found around the yard. Found some fugly frogs using them as a home as well when I dug them up. There were about five of these, which provided a base. Some were broken.

On top of this, I built the sand dome. This was more or less shaped like the rough end of an egg, and took about 6-7 bags of sand to construct. The sand here is grey. Its builders (sharp) sand.