muffocaccia - a food innovation

Ok. So what’s wrong with Muffins? That’s right. Not enough garlic. The form factor is perfect. The flavours are just too sweet sometimes.

Less of an inventoid, more of a recipoid. Introducing - the muffocaccia. Half muffin. Half focaccia. This fits well with a vegiterranean diet.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler.

2 Lbs of Flour. Make this up from a mixture of Strong White Flour, Strong Wholemeal Flour, and Semolina / Semolina flour. Proportions depending on your taste. I prefer roughly equal parts, although you could remove any one of them I’d keep the semolina at least 25% for texture.

Just over a pint of warm water (more if you use a lot of wholemeal)

About a tablespoon of Salt

About a teaspoon of dried yeast

Combine these in a big bowl. Knead for 5 minutes. It should be soft and springy and look something like this:

Leave for a couple of hours in a cool room. The warm room to rise bread thing is a myth. A cool room lets the flavour improve for longer. Leave it until it looks like this:

Now bash it down and leave it to do that step again. You don’t have to do this step - but I find it makes the finished bread much softer and tastier.

Now find some herbs. Rosemary and Thyme were all my garden could offer. Plus a little basil from the window sill. Chop these. chop in some sundried tomato, leek, and garlic. Oh and some olives. You want to end up with a couple of handfuls of tasty ’stuff’. A bit of sea salt doesn’t hurt either - depending how salty your olives are.

Fry this lot up in a pan for 5 minutes - just to soften the herbs really. Use lots of olive oil. In some ways you’re just flavouring the oil anyway. Use too much olive oil. Then add some more. Then some more. Trust me. You need a lot of olive oil. No one said these were healthy!

Now smooth that into your dough. Get your hands dirty. Squish that dough. Work the oil into the dough and the ‘bits’ evenly throughout.

Warning. Depending on the warmth of your monitor the following pics will look tasty or horrendous. Trust me - they looked tasty in real life. Stupid Sigma lenses under artificial light!

Now scoop this into a couple of muffin trays. This is enough to fill your freezer with 24 of these things! Fill the cups to about 3/4 or 4/5 - we want these to look muffiny!

Perfect. Now leave them to rise for anything up to an hour - until they are doubled in size with nice muffin tops.

Now slap them in a 200′C oven for about 20 minutes. 25 minutes to be certain they’re cooked. They should look something like this. If you have any good olive oil, now is the time to drizzle a little over the top. Not too much, just wee glug.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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February 4, 2008 | Filed Under food, health

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dogometer

Fat dogs are everywhere. This is a pedometer that you hang on your dogs collar. It measures levels of doggy activity, and wi-fi reports to your PC how active your dog has been. Software knows the breed, age, weight etc… and gives advice on how long a walk to take pooch for this evening.

The function should be almost passive for the owner, they shouldn’t have to go looking for this information, it needs to land in their email, on their tv, or on the phone / sms. It needs to actively pursue the owner to take the dog out for a walk. People who already walk the dog enough don’t need this – unless they just like numbers (like I do).

There are a few products out there giving the basic pedometer distance and calorie counts for pets (notably petometer.com) but none that I can find that take things further.

Optional extra – it could send electric shocks through the dogs collar to make it dance, thereby burning calories!

Optional extra 2 – a locked food bowl which only opens when bowser has done his 20 minutes of exercise for the day.

Optional extra 3 – a pet operated add on ‘leash hook’. This is a wifi enabled hook you place on your wall, it holds the dogs walking leash. When the dog is under exercised the hook drops the leash, prompting the dog to pick up leash, run to owner, and request walkies. Pure fred bassett.

PC Interface options – it could have an icon on your desktop of a fat ugly crying dog when your dog is being too lazy, or a fit excited happy dancing dog if it was doing well. Actually, this could drive your screen saver – so that as you return to your pc you see your sad, lazy dog on the screen and think ‘I’ll take shep for a walk before I finish that report’. For more organised types it would use direct advice – like “dogometer recommends a 20-30 minute walk today”.

The key here is to use cheap wifi to hook into peoples wireless and send messages to a centralised account which monitors the dogs activity. Simple messages are then conveyed back to help promote dog health - taking away the need for the owner to think too much. People don’t seem to like thinking too much. The ongoing messages could even be sponsored, allowing the initial purchase to be the only direct expenditure.

Thanks for the pic of the dog to http://flickr.com/photos/charlesfred/1264976479/

[no sketch pic for this inventoid - until I find that notebook again]

Popularity: 11% [?]

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September 1, 2007 | Filed Under surveillance, health

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coffee auto plunger

Sometimes it’s okay to compromise while at work. I wouldn’t normally eat bad mayonaise drenched tuna between two slices of cheap white bread, but somehow it becomes acceptable at work.

However, sometimes it’s not okay to compromise. And those times usually involve Coffee.
A freshly brewed cup of Ethiopian or Vietnamese just makes the day better. A badly prepared mug of instant makes life slightly less worth living. So real coffee it has to be.

The one thing that lets me down is the timing of the plunge on my cafetiere. Leave it too long and you get that overly caffienated bitterness pulling you away from the fresh, lively joyous place you were aiming for. Not as bad as instant, but life diminishing none the less. Espresso makers are self regulating but less convenient for the office.
An over engineered solution is needed. Here we go.

The basics
The plunger in most if not all cafetieres is made of steel. Steel can be pulled by magnets.
The base of most cafetieres can be replaced without effecting the function of the vessel / plunger combination.
Replacement bases could contain electromagnets and timers. You see where I’m going?
A temperature sensor in the base triggers when it feels the boiling water hit the jug. This then triggers the plunge magnets after a set amount of time. A simple training mechanism, driven by a series of manual plunges when the coffee ‘looks right’ should replace an actual timer - timers are too rigid - this thing should feel organic to use.

Refinements
I always pre heat the cafetiere, so it should know the difference in temp profile between a ‘heat‘ and a ‘fill‘. This should be easy to achieve by plotting the temperature over time.
Two simple buttons, ‘too long‘ and ‘not long enough‘ allow for further life long training of the device. There may be an issue here where different coffees enjoy slightly different brewing times, this could be overcome with a squooshy override button - push it to the left for less time, to the right for more time. At the end of each brew it resets. Squooshy buttons also make the device look cool. Trust me, squooshy buttons are the future.

On the retail side, the two main options are to have an add on or a full cafetiere. I’d assume the full cafetiere would be the way to go. Add ons would have to accommodate different sizes, manufacturers etc… Economies of scale would likely make the all in one unit cheaper. It would also be easier to fine tune the magnetic force requirement.

Health benefits
The amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee is dependent on a number of factors. Among them the temperature of the brewing water / steam and the length of time the grounds are in contact with it. A long plunge is therefore bad for my health. This device could save my life. And it would add some technogeekery to the humble cafetiere, long lagging behind the espresso machine in this respect.

Someone make one. Please.

Popularity: 18% [?]

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August 29, 2007 | Filed Under health, coffee

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coffee intake automonitor

Sometimes I drink too much coffee. Not as often as I used to, but it still happens. I always kick off my day with a cup. Cafetiere (french press) coffee, freshly made. If I start my day too early, and say ‘yeah why not’ a couple of extra times during the morning I can easily hit 5 or 6 cups by noon. Bad news.

I need help to cut down. The basic idea is as follows:

Attach an RFID to your Cafetiere. Install a proximity reader in the kitchen. Every time the cafetiere comes into range PING! that’s another cup of coffee. The proximity reader sends a message to the ‘watchyourcaffiene.com‘ website - ran by the people who sold you the rfid kit.

Obviously the rfid reader would have to look cool, or be small enough to hide behind the kettle. A glowing coffee bean would be nice. With a tiny led growing deep inside its resiny shell. Or coffee makers could partner with watchyourcaffiene.com to sell units with built in monitors.

You can see your profile online, you can let other people see your profile online (sig. other for example). You can set alerts to hit your Phone / Twitter / Jaiku when you exceed your limit - or when the cafetiere enters the kitchen just as you are ABOUT to hit your limit. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, you can’t have another cup”.

Taking this a step further, an RFID in your cup would track your personal consumption if you shared a cafetiere. If you had two cups you could have a Coffee and a Green Tea cup. Try to keep them in balance! “turn it into a game” as Seymour would say. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, green tea this time”.

The company could milk the cash by offering smaller cups - which count less. If you were allowed 2 mugs a day, that could be 4 cups, or 6 minicups. They could sell you a mug, then when you drink more than 2 a day along with the “I’m sorry Dave…” message could suggest you buy a smaller cup.

Another revenue earner could be a SMS reply to the “Sorry Dave…” message saying “I’m having a decaff” or “I spilled it - honest” to lower your daily count. (btw did you know the caff from decaff goes into soft drinks - I never thought about where soft drink caffeine came from)

I like my current coffee cup though, so they would have to sell an add on monitor. This would actually look quite cool as a big tag for the handle - like when things in supermarkets are tagged with huge lumps of plastic to set off the alarms. A public symbol of your dependency. And they’d have to be dishwasher safe. A sophisticated mini sticker for underneath the cup would also work - more subtle.
And of course the league table of coffee drinkers could allow caffeine heads to show off their intake. “Dude I had like 3 mugs and 7 espresso cups this morning“. Blog chicklets to let you post your current daily and weekly count would promote the site.