Christmas 2015 - 6

 

 

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The Manual on Home-based Fruit and Vegetable Processing - Free Online Information

This is probably the best technical information I have seen aimed at the training of small scale vegetable and fruit processors. The first book covers the principles of post-harvest handling, storage and processing of fruits and vegetables while the second provides recipes and guidance to put these principles into practice.

 click image for free acces to these books

The books We're developed for trainers working with household processors in Afghanistan, but the information is so comprehensive that it will be useful for a range of users including the new small scale food processing enterprise.

The first book of 85 pages covers the following in detail, using a clear and simple style supported by many photographs and drawings.

INTRODUCTION 

WHY DO WE NEED TO PROCESS FRUIT AND VEGETABLES? 

POST-HARVEST HANDLING AND STORAGE

PROCESSING: INTRODUCTION TO GENERAL PRINCIPLES 

• Principles of food preservation 
• Overview of fruit and vegetable processing techniques
• Summary of small-scale fruit and vegetable processing techniques
  
• Processing pre-treatments for fruit and vegetables 
• Description of processing methods for fruit and vegetables  

POST PROCESSING PACKAGING AND STORAGE

HYGIENE AND SAFETY

The second book of around 90 pages covers the detail of producing a whole range of products as listed below from the table of contents:

DRYING

• Processing outline for dried fruit and vegetable
  
• Dried tomato

   

• Dried tomato 
  
• Dried apricots
  
• Dried onions
  
• Dried apples
  

JAM-MAKING 

• Processing outline for Jam and Jelly 
  
• Fruit jam or jelly – process details and quality 
  
• Apricot jam
  
• Carrot and lemon jam
  
• Cherry jam
  
• Mulberry jam
  
• Apple jam
  
• Apple jelly
  

SAUCES AND CHUTNEYS

• Processing outline for sauce and chutney
  
• Sauce and chutney – process details and quality assurance
  
• Italian style tomato sauce
  
• Italian style tomato sauce
  
• Tomato paste
  
• Tomato sauce or ketchup
  
• Tomato puree or simple concentrate
  
• Tomato concentrate (non-cook method) 
  
• Coriander chutney (chatni gashnizeh)
  
• Vegetable chutney
  
• Tomato chutney (Chatni Badenjani Romi)
  
• Chili chutney (Chatni Morchi Sorkh/Sabz )
  

PICKLES

• Processing outline for lactic acid fermented pickles (atchar)
  
• Fermented pickles – process details and quality assurance
  
• Pickled cucumbers
  
• Mixed pickles
• Pumpkin pickle 

VINEGAR

• Process outline for fruit and vinegar
  
• Fruit vinegar – quality assurance and processing notes
  
• Tomato vinegar
  
• Mulberry vinegar

If you have any interest in processing vegetables and fruit, these books are really highly recommended.

APPETISING - Blogging about Cheese, Wine, Beer and Food.

This blog by the Formaggio Kitchen really does focus on these delicious foods.

from: Formaggio Kitchen
(click image for full story online)

Makes me wonder if its not a better idea than mine that focus on Food Technology and House in Burgundy? The kinks are there fermented foods and Burgundy as a centre of gastronomy, but....

AFRICANISED AGAIN - A Day Later Nigeria Delay The Elections Again!

It gets more and more laughable. After delaying the election for two days, they have now been delayed for a week just the day after the first delay.

click image to visit site

 


Not only that, apparently polls opened and voting started on Saterday, even after polling had been officially postponed!

Sounds like LAGOS CHAOS!

AFRICANISED - Nigerian Election Delayed

Its quite amazing how Africa seems to manage to AFRICANISE elections!

First a president is duly beaten in the polls, but says no I'm not going. Although everyone sees the feeble corruption attempt of the election authorities and calls on him to leave, months later he's still there and people a dying! AFRICA can't do anything! Imagine the world's sniggers - but at least Africa didn't tell the corrupt winners and the loosers to form a joint government a la Zimbabwe & Kenya!

Now even more comical

click image to visit site

 


Yes its true - Nigeria wasn't able to get the ballot papers delivered on time, so the election was put off for two days.

And these same people ask to be taken seriously! It would be hilarious if nobody was effected, but people die because of this nonsense.

IGNORING The Solid White LIne - Ferrari Homepage

This was online on the Ferrari Homepage on 26 March 2011 at 11:30 CAT.

click image to visit site

 

A PETITION - Lets Stop The Wastefulness at Zuma's Pretoria House

R 200 000 000 is just too expensive! and includes R 62 million for a private hospital, while Chris Hani Baragwanath (Africa's biggest hospital) is without a CAT scanner.

ADMITTING - Zuma Admits The Need to Improve Government Capacity

In responding to numerous complaints about his government not having the capacity, to implement the plans the ANC lead government is trying to get formalised and agreed, Zuma said:

"A number of honourable members questioned the capacity of the state of carry out the undertakings we have made. We would like to assure this house that we have been putting systems in place to improve the performance of the state.

Mail & Gaurdian Online"

photograph by Wikimedia Commons

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

 


An admission that they don't have the capacity and are now, decades after taking power, putting in place systems to "improve" not even solving the shortcoming!

A real no commitment statement which reflects how this government operates! As it grinds on planning, facilitating, compromising and talking!

APPETISING - UNESCO's Addition To Its Cultural Heritage System

Here it is "The gastronomic meal of the French"

click image to visit site

 


Its not intangible at all, every time you participate your senses are rewarded. I guess it means that there is not one you can go and see!

A PHEASANT or 35 million of them!

This really opened my eyes when I heard it on the BBc Farming Programme!

What would the answer be to the question, how many pheasant are there in the wild in England?

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

 

The answer is around 10 million just before the start of the hunting season and around 45 million at the start of the hunting season.

This is because 35 million pheasant are bred just to lift the numbers to accommodate all those who wish to hunt pheasant. It is agreed that about 60% of the pheasants released avoid the hunters and therefore become "wild" last a year. According to British Association for Shooting and Conservation these are birds "without life skills" which won't survive in competition with the real wild pheasants. Conservationists have noted these pheasants competing for easy food with other birds and providing easy victims for raptors and foxes all of which they claim is effecting wildlife in the UK.

So not only do the UK hunt canned pheasant but they also condemn tens of millions of pheasants a year to an untimely death in the wild.

APPLETASTIC - Apple Mac App Store - South Africa?

I wasn't sure how this would be launched in South Africa, after all we are still waiting for the iPad and have no music or games in iTunes!

click image to visit site

So on the 6th I periodically looked to see what, if anything, was happening. Eventually I picked up the availability of Mac OS X 10.6.6 through Software Update and started trying to download it. With South Africa's poor broadband capacity, this was promising me downloads in eight hours. Downloads terminated frequently loosing whatever data had been downloaded, making the chance of downloading the complete programme slim. So I went to the Apple website and found the update there - this I was able to download and launch without problems in a few hours and I had it installed!

Since then I have bought iPhoto and downloaded several free programmes including Twitter. I have found the process really simple and think this is another Apple winner!

Thats not to say all is great! - my reviews and ratings don't seem to get published, a game I downloaded (on another country store) was really useless, iPhoto 11 has some inexplicable changes that take much getting used to after iPhoto 8 and it was not possible to register iPhoto, only iLife.

Today, I have effortlessly updated the Twitter app after seeing an update was available. This is surely one of the things that is going to make the app store popular. I have also noticed that some of the applications I bought before the App Store show up as installed, so I suppose I will be able to update them here!

Seems like Apple have done it again!

INACCURATE / INEPT - So Which of These Four Government Bodies Would You Follow

Seeing that this is where you end following the link on the Department of Transport's homepage,

click image to visit site

 


But each of the Government Bodies seem to have different information!

click image to visit site

 

click image to visit site

 

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So who should we believe? and WHY can't the SA Government simply get their information right!

ATTRACTING- Improving Digital Images With HDR & Tone Mapping

I was recently underwhelmed by the standard photographs I was able to produce on a hiking trip to Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. The difficulty is the haze, the contrast and the need to take wide angle photos to capture the majesty and size of the mountains.

I find this process very interesting and take a lot of HDRs because I'm not yet sure what's possible.

Some might not like the effect in the last photograph as they could feel its not real like the second one is. In that case you should focus on the HDR and use only touches of tone mapping.

You might be interested to know a bit more about High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography and tone mapping - I would suggest you just google it or visit the www.stuckincommons.com site of Trey Ratcliff who is acknowledged by many pros as one of the more knowledgeable people on HDR.

ANTISOCIAL - Spam on Social Networks, The Storage of Worthless Data

Looking for some information about relaxation music from tweets I searched on #relaxation and was confronted by a pile of repeated tweets linking to an ebay seller, naturesoundcds.

clipped on 07/12/2010 by digivuza

This user has 9,371 tweets with nothing to suggest any are different to those I looked at, ie all are linked to the same URL that links to naturesoundcds on ebay which sells CDs.

Others twitterers including

soundsofocean with 7,772 tweets and http://tiny.ly/55Ql linking to naturalsoundscds

calmingnature with 384 tweets and http://tiny.ly/Xsgz linking to naturalsoundscds

naturecdstore with 10,718 tweets and http://tiny.ly/rj4k linking to naturalsoundscds

naturesoundscds with 24,580 tweets and http://tiny.ly/Rs0j, http://tiny.ly/o9Nt, http://tiny.ly/YqbO, http://tiny.ly/o9Nt all linking to naturalsoundscds

appear to be set up solely to promote sales of these CDs.


Searching the previous 10 hour's posts (up tp around 09:00 on 7/12/2010) for #relaxation, yielded 257 tweets linking to naturalsoundscds and only 52 other tweets.

To me this is completely unacceptable and reduces the value of twitter and is therefore an antisocial activity.

However, and more worrying is that it just adds to my conviction that the INTERNET is probably the most wasteful emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world. All this (and plenty more junk like it) useless and never to be looked at again data is stored with backup on server farms around the world emitting CO2 without benefitting anyone or anything!

AMAZING - Keeping This Up For Ten Years - Time Lapse of Child

ARTISTIC - Wikimedia Commons Photographs Available For Use By Everyone!

This beautiful photograph of a Sikh pilgrim at the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar, is available online (click the image to link) for anyone to use

from: Wikimedia Commons
(click image for full story online)

photo by Paulrudd
(Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

ASTONISHING - Biotech Hackers?

This is really astonishing, if one draws a parallel between the Mainframe Computer Industry of the 70s and hackers Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, then these guys are about to bring biotech to the people!

from: NATURE
(click image for full story online)

I remember CAPEX meeting at our Biosciences unit, where Food Technologists and Engineers goggled at the vast costs of the complex machinery the Biotechnologists convinced us where non negotiable. While I dig into this a bit futher why not help me with your comments and inputs - email me here.

ANNOYING - What Bugs Me is The Lack of Attention to Detail and Quality

Coming back from overseas, from stepping off the plane to getting half way back to Pretoria, I saw two serious issues that indicate a lack of attention!

The first:

photo by Digivu
(Creative Commons Some Limitations License)

I suspect this reflects the absence of FIFA, to keep civil servants on their toes - they revert to not worrying. Alongside the very good posters for South Africa's UNESCO Heritage Sites we use valuable advertising space to misinform tourists!

photo by Engineering News

Then on the beautiful already completed 4 lane freeway (down to barriers, road markings, cat's eyes and street lights) the 80km/h signs are left standing on the 11 km from Pomona Road - no one has thought to take them down and give the hassled motorists some relief!