Hard News: Slumpy Cashflow
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Maillard reaction: Here comes the chemistry. I have a book at home that gets into that kind of detail about baking.
Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
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Made 25 litres of cider
Ah. Now you may be talking Kyle. Got a foolproof recipe? It has to be foolproof, I've brewed wine before & all but alcohol poisoned all my friends on one occasion at least.
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If you were serious about "living off the land" in NZ then the only consistent way to get coffee is to trade some delicious speciality of your own for it, which will make it the rare treat it was for your great-greatparents.
If you're serious about living off the land, you should be making your 'coffee' out of dandelion root like a real hippy.
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Alison Holst Microwave Cookbook. Apricot jam. Yum.
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Sadly the cider turned out to be barely drinkable (but nicely alcoholic).
OK, looks like we're from the same school of brewing. I'll weigh in with my story of home made saki one day... our front room resembled a scene from 300 at one stage, there were so many bodies littered across it. Comatose fortunately, not dead.
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Comatose fortunately, not dead.
And I'm just appalled at the binge drinking culture of today's youth.
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Well that slowdown ain't here yet:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10500670
Best part of that is that it was driven by business plant investment -
I have two apple trees at my house
As I recall the bad news is you need two trees to get apples.
I only have ginger beer experience - my only guess would be to favour a 'quick' brew; that is, drink pretty much immediately. My thought being any imperfections in your sterility shouldn't have enough time to take hold. I'm guessing that's what made me really really ill that time. So on second thoughts, don't listen to me.
This plan would also make for something of a drunken autumn.
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Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
Nah, I do understand. Just giving my particular reasons why it isn't for me. The real main one is I don't eat much jam and I love fresh fruit. Everything else is just justifying that....
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Maillard reaction: Here comes the chemistry. I have a book at home that gets into that kind of detail about baking.
Ben, rather than take the space arguing I'm just going to assert that I find culinary, economic and lifestyle sense in occasional pickling. You don't understaaand!
I have a book like that, on the chemistry of cooking, by a guy called Harold McGee. Very useful.
I don't have a microwave - don't like the effect on most foods and they take up a lot of room. Now a toaster oven I would use if I could find a reliable one (they die). They are useful for toasting that small pan of croutons/pumpkin seeds/blue cheese rusks/bulbs of garlic/stringbeans & red peppers with olives, garlic and balsamic/almonds/pinenuts/sunflowerseeds/hazelnuts/brazilnuts and especially for heating up things like croissants and hot cross buns. They're great if you don't want to heat up the whole oven for one garnish, and usually it's a garnish or side dish that absolutely makes a meal. Like ovendried tomatoes - I don't want to put my whole oven on for 1.5 hours to dry some tomatoes for a dish, but it's worth it in an toaster oven, and they are so crucial to so many dishes.
Having said that I don't have/don't want a microwave, I can imagine they could produce a particularly good jam, as cooking time would be reduced and I think you lose a lot of flavour there, certainly the kitchen smells good. But like Kyle said, there's just something wrong about the whole thing, when applied to jam.
Jam making, yes I love jam making. Here I just make boring old whatever-berries-I-can-buy jam, or strawberry-rhubarb, (3/4:1/4 - the rhubarb freshens up the flavour of the berries, which tends to be drowned out by the amount of sugar you have to put in to make it set. Even when you reduce the sugar by 1/2 or 2/3 the jam is still plenty sweet, and much more berry tasting.
In Vancouver just out of the city the woods are full of the best jam making berries - salal berries, salmonberries, blackberries (not the muscular, sour things they sell here, but fat sweet ones) and my favourite, the bright orange-red huckleberries, almost too delicious to make it home with the others, but crucial to the ideal jam.
The salal berries are delicious but they have a kind of furry, slightly fibrous velvet centre which is not ideal to eat but which has the magical property of being a super-source of pectin and will set your jam without any having to add any. The fibres disappear into a gelatinous jam texture. The mixture only needs sugar and lemon juice, which activates the thickening properties of the pectin. It is possibly the best tasting jam in the world, and now I am dissatisfied with my boring strawberry rhubarb or raspberry (__expensive__ to make raspberrry) jams.
Gathering the berries is very pleasant but good to take a dog as you don't want to surprise a bear with a cub while you're gathering fruit to make jam.
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Ah. Now you may be talking Kyle. Got a foolproof recipe? It has to be foolproof, I've brewed wine before & all but alcohol poisoned all my friends on one occasion at least.
No, my foolproof recipe involved asking my friend how he did it. The first time I tried it, we grated the apples (whole) and poured boiling water over them, left for a week, then got out the liquid. That was bad.
Second time (I asked the friend) I juiced the apples, added a small amount of yeast and sugar, left in a homebrew barrel, and then bottled. The ones I put in plastic were... well bad. The ones I put in glass bottles were drinkable, but not nice. Harsh, bitter taste.
But alcoholic, so at least I got one thing right.
As I recall the bad news is you need two trees to get apples.
I only have ginger beer experience - my only guess would be to favour a 'quick' brew; that is, drink pretty much immediately. My thought being any imperfections in your sterility shouldn't have enough time to take hold. I'm guessing that's what made me really really ill that time. So on second thoughts, don't listen to me.
This plan would also make for something of a drunken autumn.
No, surely apples don't require cross-... whatever the term is. I thought they were... do it yourself breeders (see, I'm very scientific with the language).
I do ginger beer as well - alison groftons ginger beer plant recipe that we found online. Good stuff.
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a belated response to the pickle of the unwise property investor:
I note in the Herald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10500398Investor 'Big Sam of Maketu' lost $532k he had *borrowed on his mortgage* his house had previously been unmortgaged and he doesn't now how he will afford to service his new mortgage.
Sorry, no sympathy, for private people to borrow to invest is just mad. Greed is not good.
well no greed is never good, but to be fair the hard sells around property were coming in thick and fast from every which direction even just a few short months ago...
by way of example someones-I-know of extremely fiscally prudent stripe, were literally hectored by their accountant because they were failing to leverage the on-paper equity gains in their home by taking down a loan and reinvesting -in property of course.
being very very prudent and turtle cautious, as already noted, they didnt do it. but the relentless well meaning advice and the hyperbole about massive capital gain other people were achieving was starting to wear down even that well developed caution and they were actually thinking about it.
if there's a character developing lesson here perhaps its not to give too much weight to the opinions of financial advisors like investment analysts, mortgage brokers, accountants and bankers?
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__If you were serious about "living off the land" in NZ then the only consistent way to get coffee is to trade some delicious speciality of your own for it, which will make it the rare treat it was for your great-greatparents.__
If you're serious about living off the land, you should be making your 'coffee' out of dandelion root like a real hippy.
Good point. Coffee grows up mountains in hot countries.
But the good news: food miles don't apply to coffee. It's a drink, silly.
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Sorry, no sympathy, for private people to borrow to invest is just mad. Greed is not good.
As others have noted already - you're being very harsh about a pensioner. But since not all pensioners are feeble minded it's also unfair to single them out as deserving of protection. There are plenty of low/mid income earners who were also seduced into buying 'investment' property.
The NZ economy is/was largely unregulated and that always encourages cowboys to enter the market and rob good decent folks. How can you blame people for 'investing' in residential property when the nightly news was full of stories about rising property values and spectacular gains made. So it did make sense for people to 'unlock the equity' in their own home and use that as a deposit to buy a second one. Presuming you had enough discretionary income to service the mortgage (which was often not the case, but figures were manipulated to show otherwise)
I'm sure everyone heard the 'let the tenants pay one off for you' type ads. Yes, it would have been good if people got better advice than simply attending a property investment seminar (where the people speaking all had vested interests) but [as has been already noted] the government was telling us all to invest for our own retirement and property was outperforming many other investments.
Your comments smack of rabid socialism.by way of example someones-I-know of extremely fiscally prudent stripe, were literally hectored by their accountant
Ah yes, accountants. Some of whom are as dodgy as a $3 coin. One f#ct my feeble minded father royally (and yet Dad still thinks 'it was all just bad luck').
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As a general comment:
I'm always amazed by the way people will believe anything. There seems to be a presumption that some sort of government agency is out there stopping dodgy businesses from taking our money. As if Acme Gilt Edge Securities couldn't advertise and take people's money if they weren't legitimate.
I've always thought that even with my rudimentary knowledge of company law I could screw a large fortune out of gullible investors. If I was so inclined, which I'm not.
In a parallel universe out there somewhere RB is running the long con. One day all his PAS readers on bizarro world will wake up and find he's cleaned out their online bank accounts. Who knew his site had trojan worms burrowing into our hard drives?
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Clearly a fool and his/her money are soon parted - here's another vid (for those who chuckle at others stupidity). Watch out for the chap who really does hand over his car keys because someone flashes a badge and says it's a Police emergency!
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Apropos apples: you can get trees that have two or three varieties grafted on to one stock, which means you can have a succession of apples off just two trees.
Apropos cider: I understand that there are special cider apple varieties which together with the sheep carcase and the rusty bicycle frame will give you the scrumptious flavour you seek. Dessert apples don't have the right balance, I hear.
Also, the malic acid ferments to produce something specific to cider which contributes to the fearful scrumpy hangover. Before I went to the UK I thought cider was a girls' drink; after a few unexpected episodes drinking cider in Black Country pubs I understood why only the hard men drink cider all night.
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Maillard reaction
Try the Mallard reaction instead. No caramelisation so not very sweet .... but I hear it packs a real punch!
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Someone asked earlier on what the projected cost of the tens of thousands of LAQC's would be costing us in terms of the tax write offs.
I don't know. But, the tax benefits are no different than if the property was owned by individuals. The real benefit of LAQC's is not that the tax losses can be attributed against personal income (it would be in identical amounts in individual ownership), rather that a company gives creditor protection and also that the shares can be sold to a family trust once the property starts making profits. This means the property is not sold so depreciation clawbacks are not paid (the shares are sold instead).
The focus on LAQC's is somewhat of a red herring in terms of tax.
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The focus on LAQC's is somewhat of a red herring in terms of tax.
yup. don gave my dogmatism a reality check over a beer yesterday (thanks for that don, btw).
that said, setting up an laqc for the sole purposes of rental property speculation is an unintended consequence of the law. if you can believe the policy wonk who set up the law (who told me as much).
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Okay, you have three weeks to front up. After that, harvest is over.
I'v got two flounder, how about the feijoas, are they in the bag?
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Gathered, bagged and ready for pickup. There's some real beauties too.
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I thought about this wild quinine thread today when I found buckets of mushroom's today. No the one's that can lead to your completing that PHD in astrophysics, but the pink and white eating ones. There in the paddocks a few km's north of Taihape.
On a little bit of a different energy/economics observation report, I noticed some the big central pine plantations are being converted to dairy, large chunks. I'm guessing there is a hefty geared fossil fuel energy, to produce animal fat ratio going on there. But the bit I found noteworthy was the franchised look about it. there are so-many identical dairy farm-lets. Every house the same. miles of them. the farmers are going to get confused, not to mention the cattle.
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Update, I ate the mushrooms. They are safe, they seem to have improved my spelling, they're yummy, there's plenty more, dig in.
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I had perfectly good looking mushrooms popping up in my vege garden this summer. several dozen at a time, looking like standard portobello mushrooms I'd buy from the supermarket. Probably 2 or 3 hundred over a few weeks.
Every web page I could find on identifying mushrooms basically said in large letters "don't try and do this yourself unless you have some knowledge in [what's the word?, mycology?]. The safe ones look almost exactly like the incredibly dangerous ones."
So I threw them all away. I might have been less cautious if I liked mushrooms more.
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