Last weekend, lovely Socks finally moulted. Mr S and I were lucky enough to be able to watch the whole thing; it’s a mind-boggling sort of process. I took quite a few pictures, none of which came out particularly well: Socks’ enclosure isn’t very well-lit (tarantulas are not fond of light, generally) and I didn’t want to disturb her by lifting the lid or using the flash. So most of my photos look like this:

That’s the real Socks on the right, with the old skin and legs on the left. This is quite far along — you can see the orange bits of her legs have started coming out of the moult.

She flipped onto her back around 7-ish in the evening, and started moulting between 10 and 10:15. By about 11 she was completely out of the moult:

And half an hour after that, she was back on her legs:

She looks amazing — post-moult colours really are much brighter. And she is much bigger now, too; I can’t really measure her without disturbing her, but I would say stretched out she’s easily 4.5 inches.

Here she is a couple of days post-moult:

And this is her moult now:

Yesterday I replaced the coconut hide she had with a piece of cork bark, and today she has made a little burrow under it. I’m glad she likes it, but I hope it doesn’t turn into a permanent arrangement!

Oh, and yes — she is definitely a she. When she finally stopped sitting on top of her moult I got to take it out and look for lady bits, and they were very clearly there. Hurrah! She should be with me for a long time!

Bonus pictures:

Mr Satu’s new Chilean rose (Grammostola rosea), Socks’ neighbour, wanting to see what was going on.

Pickle, my Mexican Redleg (Brachypelma emilia).

Puck, my Goliath Pinktoe (Avicularia braunshauseni). Same family as Merlin, but gets a bit bigger. And isn’t blue.

Toffee the Cat does not want her brainz eaten.

Hex the Cat is veeeery sleepy.

The last time I came back from a long break of not doing any mtb at all, the first couple of rides were terrible — I was really wobbly, slow and nervous as hell; so I wasn’t expecting this to be much fun, just the first step to get back into it.

Happily, I was wrong!

Yes, I was rather slow, but only on the uphills: my wonderful post-Lejog fitness has finally disappeared entirely, which was inevitable. The technical bits, however, were much more fun than I’d expected. I did the rocky bits, the stupid roots, and even the Werewolf Drop[1], which I definitely hadn’t planned on; that video shows what the drop really looks like — from the top it seems much steeper and more worrying.

Because Mr Satu had gear problems and I was wheezing up the hills, we decided to skip the Monkey Trail and just do one lap of the Dog; it was extremely muddy, so by the time we got back to the car park our bikes were crunching and we were freezing. But, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

The next step will be to get my stamina back. Mr S has joined a road riding club and has been going out with them almost every weekend; I don’t particularly like going out on Sundays, especially when it’s with a load of people I’ve never met before, so I haven’t been joining him. Yesterday, we went for my first road ride in ages — a variation of our usual 20 mile loop through the Clent Hills (the variation was to avoid the actual Clents with the long climb near the end); it was quite pleasant, though a bit chilly. My feet were frozen by the end, and I was tiiired. But that’s the first step done! A couple more shorter rides and I might be ready to go for a club ride if I can drag myself out of bed.

I’ll probably also try and get a set of pedals and a saddle for my proper road bike so I can start taking that out again. Dewey is in dire need of maintenance after a winter of commuting — there’s much squeaking from various parts.

So, I’m happy to report that I can still ride a bike, not just for commuting. I now have a couple of months to get ready for the Dyfi Forest Enduro, which I intend to finish this year!

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[1] Not my video, just googled it for illustration purposes.

Remember when I said that 11 spiders was quite enough and that we’d probably be sticking with that for a while? It totally wasn’t true. We are now up to 14 and may be going to the spider shop tomorrow for numbers 15 and 16.

In my defence only one of the three new ones is mine, and look at it:

It’s a spider with a heart on its bottom. Who could resist that?

That’s Thirteen, by the way; s/he is a Cyriocosmus sellatus (Peru Dwarf Tiger Rump), a dwarf tarantula, and that’s about as big as it’ll get. As for sex, all I know for sure is that it isn’t a mature male. I’m hoping it’s a girl, but we’ll see!

And here’s a bad picture of Basil, one of Mr Satu’s new ones, menacing a cricket:

Basil (the second of Mr Satu’s spiders to get an actual name) is a Chilobrachys fimbriatus, or Indian Violet tarantula.

His other new one is of the same genus, a Chilobrachys huahini. There are no pictures of it yet, but it’s a little monster beast. It lives in a plastic deli cup filled with a giant ball of webbing and dirt, and crickets are dispatched before you can even blink. This one will apparently get rather large. We’ll definitely have to move, or at least build an extension, when everyone starts to grow up.

Speaking of growing up: several of our babies have now moulted! (See Wikipedia for more details, but basically: tarantulas get bigger by growing a new exoskeleton inside their old one; when the time is right, they work their way out of the old skin and can then stretch the new one to the bigger size before it hardens.)

Here are some of their new suits:

Greenbottle blue before:

And after:

Mort before:

And after (not a great picture — he’s gone very shy):

Chaco Golden Knee before:

And after (still not coming out!):

And the one I’m most pleased about — my baby Merlin, before:

And after:

Isn’t that just the cutest spider in the world? (Just say yes.)

Mr Satu’s OBT and Skeletor also moulted at the same time as this lot, but they’re both too shy to have their picture taken (the OBT teases me by lounging out in the open, only to bolt as soon as I pick its jar up; Skeletor just hides). And just this morning, the Indian Violet did, too. It won’t be long before Socks’ moult now; her abdomen has turned very dark, which is basically the new skin getting ready under the old one. After that, it doesn’t usually take more than a week or two before the moult. It’ll be exciting to see such a big one doing it!

The final bit of news to report is that we’ve rehoused the P. miranda. Before, the spider looked like this:

Now, this is all we get to see:

We think it likes its new tank. It certainly seems to enjoy the crickets we throw in there, and is doing very interesting things with webbing and dirt. Sometimes we can just about see a fuzzy leg or two in the back of the cave. At least the spider is happy!

Edited to add: after I’d posted this last night, Mr Satu decided to actually check on this one — and it turns out it moulted, too. It’s still basically all legs, but longer:

On the far right you can just about see a bit of its cast-off moult. How we’re ever going to get that out, I don’t know.

And finally, an unidentified tarantula that we found in our bed:

It hasn’t shown any interest in crickets, and seems to be pretty happy just sleeping all day. It’s also very tame — it hasn’t tried biting or kicking hair once yet! I think we’ll keep it and call it … umm … Spidy!

Oh dear, this challenge has not gone well. Not only am I almost a week late, I have also only completed half of the challenge.

The sad part is that I was really looking forward to this one; I love tempura, and I love noodles. I don’t love deep-frying, however. This was my first attempt at it, and it did not go well, which is the reason I’m so late actually completing the challenge.

My first attempt was a couple of weeks ago; I thought I’d try various veggies — sweet potato in particular, which I adore. So, I spent a good hour preparing: chopping the veggies, blanching what needed blanching, mixing the batter and setting everything up. Then I realised how little oil we had. I had planned to use our big wok but ended up with the small saucepan instead, to get a decent depth of oil in there. I had my brand new cooking thermometer which unfortunately didn’t come with a good way of securing it to the pan, so it just sort of bobbed around in there.

It was all going okay until I actually put in the first bit of tempura, at which point I panicked. Bubbling oil! Eek! The thermometer was all over the place, getting in the way, and worse yet, the oil was still heating up. I got the first couple of bits out of the pan and then turned the heat off. It was just a bit too much. I ended up turning the veggies into stir-fry.

And I’m not sure at which point it happened, but when I took the thermometer off the dish rack I discovered that the glass had cracked at the base. Mr Satu thinks he might have broken it while washing it, but I really don’t know. Either way — I might try deep-frying again at some point, but I do not feel up to it at the moment.

So I did a baked tempura recipe instead (this one), and I didn’t get a chance to do that until today. The batter was almost the same; the only real difference apart from the baking was the bread crumbs — I didn’t really want to use them, but when I tried it without them I realised why they were there: the batter would just run off the broccoli otherwise.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with this recipe, I have to say. The breadcrumbs — lazy ones from the shop — were too crunchy and made the crust really hard; the broccoli itself didn’t taste of very much until I drowned it in soy sauce. They looked quite pretty, though:

The soba noodle part of the challenge was a total fail; I just didn’t get the chance to go to the Chinese supermarket and get the required bits — and our local supermarket doesn’t carry them at all.

Let’s hope this month’s challenge goes a little better!

It seems that something similar applies for spiders, too, except possibly on a larger scale. We bought our first spider exactly a month ago; now we have 11.

WARNING: There will be pictures and descriptions of these spiders below the jump. Please don’t click through if you don’t want to see them!

Here they are, then, in order of acquisition:

It all started with this little dude:

Mr Satu’s greenbottle blue (Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens), who still doesn’t have a name other than Spidy. Here it is in a temporary container while Mr S tidied its home up.

Then came Mort, my very own little spider:

He has moved house twice since then and now seems quite happy where he is. I say “he”, but I’m still not sure.

Then, Mr Satu picked up two more:

This is his Grammostola pulchripes (Chaco golden knee), which chose this moment to start burrowing to hide from the camera. Guess what it’s called?

And this is an Orange baboon tarantula (Pterinochilus murinus), also known as the Orange Bitey Thing, or OBT for short. They have something of a reputation, hence the nickname. This one has been pretty chilled out so far; actually it wasn’t terribly happy when we first got it — it just sat in one corner of the enclosure and wouldn’t eat anything. We eventually realised it was probably a bit cold for the spiders, even with their jars inside a fish tank with a heat mat on the back, so we bought a big vivarium with sliding doors and a big heat mat to stick into it.

Here’s my second tarantula:

This is Socks. The picture is not wonderful, but it’s the best one I have so far that shows off her colours.[1] She’s a Brachypelma boehmei (Mexican fire leg), and she’s about 3 1/2 inches big (she’ll get to about 6). I thought a slightly bigger spider would be interesting to watch while waiting for my little dude to grow up. Again I’m not actually sure about her sex yet, but I’ll call her a “she” in hope!

Mr Satu couldn’t resist getting this one at the same time as mine:

A salmon pink birdeater (Lasiodora parahybana) which is really quite tiny at the moment but will grow up to be about 8 inches big.

The only one I haven’t got a picture of at the moment is Skeletor, Mr Satu’s Ephebopus uatuman — their common name is Emerald skeleton, hence the name! It’s also very small and tends to burrow if you take its jar out, which is why there aren’t any pictures.

Last weekend, I finally got the spider I’d been looking for ever since I first saw pictures of it:

This is Merlin, my Avicularia versicolor. Right now it’s bright blue, but when it’s grown up it’ll have an iridescent green carapace, red abdomen and fuzzy, purplish legs. It’s the only one of my spiders I’ve actually handled so far; when I rehoused it on Saturday evening it decided to scamper across my hands for a bit before going in its new tub. I’m in love!

At the same time I picked up my tiniest spider yet — even smaller than Mr S’s little one:

This is Binky, a Nhandu chromatus (Brazilian red and white). When grown up, it’ll have red and black stripy legs and a fuzzy red abdomen. Why yes, I like interestingly coloured tarantulas!

This is the last of Mr Satu’s little babies, a Heteroscodra maculata (Ornamental baboon, or Togo starburst baboon).

Finally, this is our Poecilotheria miranda (Bengal spotted ornamental):

They’re not very keen on light, so it’s huddled into a little ball in the bottom right — you can just about see its stripy legs. These are zippy little things (and not so little, actually, though this one is mostly legs), so we have to be careful when opening the box — and rehousing it will be interesting. But it is a very pretty spider!

So those are our new babies, and I think we’re both agreed that 11 is enough for now. I’m happy now I have my little Merlin, and Mr S has some spiders to name. Suggestions on a postcard, please!

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[1] I have added more substrate since then; even a short fall can kill a tarantula, and terrestrial ones are not very good at climbing — but they do anyway.

Phew, this was a tough one! I learned a lot from this challenge, not least that I should probably never become a pastry chef.

Let’s just say that I had some Drama with this cake. I spent a lot of time thinking about fillings, and probably not enough about the design of the sponge. As you can see from exhibit A:

Squiggles are harder than they look.

So I had squiggles, spirals, dots and a few lines, but not enough of any of them to go around the entire cake. In the end, it got a bit of everything.

The second problem I had was that the — very cheap — silicone mat I bought turned out to be warped when I laid it out:

That's right, bright green. The only other option was bright pink.

So I went with baking parchment instead, which ended up wrinkling in the oven — so my sponge layer came out all uneven:

Also, the food colouring didn’t come out quite as I’d imagined — I’d been hoping for a delicate light minty green, but this basically looked like mould.

The third bit of drama came when I prepared the rest of the sponge to use as the cake’s bottom layer. I’d spread the rest of the joconde paste and drawn a few lines through it (I made half the stated recipe and still ended up with lots left over), then poured the uncoloured batter over it. At the very bottom of the bowl I discovered several strange lumps:

I still don’t know where the hell these came from — the only explanation I have is that somehow some of the flour and almond meal clumped together to form these; but I’m sure they weren’t there when I mixed it. Oh well! By this point I’d spent all morning in the kitchen and wasn’t about to throw out all my work and start over; the sponge was just going to have to be what it was.

I enjoyed making the fillings quite a bit more!

My bottom layer was lime curd. I basically used this recipe, same as when I made the lemon meringue pie last year, except with lime instead of lemon. For some reason I’d expected it to be bright green — lime coloured! — until I put the egg yolks in and realised that that’s where the colour comes from. Duh!

For the second layer, I chose mango geleé. And because I’d found a packet of lychees at the supermarket, I threw those in as well. Some furious googling turned up this nice simple recipe. I used tinned (well, jarred) mangoes rather than fresh, because the slices came in transparent plastic cups that would be perfect for the spider baby I’m lusting after (WARNING: contains spiders).

To top it all off I made a fresh mint cream; this was a recipe of my own invention, which is why it doesn’t have proper quantities. I threw maybe a dozen mint leaves into a tub (250ml, I think) of cream and let it infuse for a few hours. Then I zapped it in the food processor, added some sugar (a tablespoon or two) and whipped it. At the end, I folded in some Greek yogurt.

Then the whole thing went into the fridge to set, and I went to bed to do very little for the rest of the evening.

The next morning came the moment of truth. It didn’t look anywhere near as professional as some of the other Bakers’ efforts, but I was pretty pleased nevertheless…

… especially when I cut it:

It tasted pretty good — if very much of lime rather than anything else. Mr Satu was suitably impressed; I think he liked it more than I did and actually took half of it to work, where it was apparently well received, too.

I don’t think I’m ever going to make this again! It felt rather more like a crafts project than a recipe, and I’m not that crafty. I liked the layering business and putting the different flavours together, though. And if I ever desperately need to put a pattern on a cake, now I know how!

This will be my last Daring Bakers challenge, at least for now. At the moment two challenges a month seems like a lot, especially if, like this one, they take an entire day.[1] Right now, I want to spend most of my weekends doing nothing. And because neither of us are actually big cake eaters, it makes more sense to drop the Bakers than the Cooks.

I’m sure I will be back at some point. I’ve learned a lot even in the short time I’ve been a member, and it’s given me the confidence to try things I wouldn’t have dreamed of a year ago. Thanks to all the Daring Bakers out there for being a friendly, supportive community, especially those who come up with such brilliant challenges.

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[1] I should note that this is in no way a criticism of this particular challenge, which was, in my opinion, perfect, and exactly what the Daring Kitchen should be about.

I admit, I was skeptical about this one.

I’d never heard of cassoulet before; I was vaguely aware of confit, but didn’t know exactly what it involved. Mr Satu looked at the various things I was buying and was really dubious. So much fat!

Even while I was preparing the whole thing, I wasn’t sure we’d actually like the end result. Nothing seemed to look quite right — certainly not like the pictures I’d seen — and whenever I tasted it along the way something was a little off.

I halved the recipe and made several substitutions, which was probably part of why I was so worried. For the confit, I used chicken thighs and goose fat: duck anything seemed to be impossible to get at our supermarket. Neither of us are big pork eaters (except BACON!), so I used stew beef instead of pork belly, and bacon instead of pork rind. And I used tinned beans rather than dried, and probably not quite as much as I should have.

So, I worried! After all this preparation, I didn’t really want to end up with something neither of us wanted to eat. And because I was worried, Mr Satu became really worried. But I thought we should at least try it — we could always get a take-away if it turned out to be inedible.

But then!

When I took the stew out of the oven it still didn’t look like any of the pictures, but it smelled absolutely lovely. So I had a little taste, and it was, in fact, really good.

Mr S was still not convinced until he took his first bite. I only wish he hadn’t sounded quite so surprised when he said: “This is really nice!”[1] And then had second helpings. And third.

I served it with potatoes because I couldn’t help myself. The second night we had it with pasta, and the rest we finished off with potato wedges. Mmm.

This was quite a lot of work, but absolutely worth making again. The full recipe next time, I think!

So, I’m not posting a picture every day, but I am trying to take at least one a day, and stick my favourites on Flickr when the mood strikes me.

So far, this has involved a lot of pictures of my cats.

And because I haven’t posted about them in ages, and as a sort of antidote to the spiders, I thought I’d put some of my favourite shots up here.[2]

Here’s Toffee looking cute and sleepy; that bit of wood is the top of the banister, which we’ll eventually paint and fill the gaps in around.

She’s very good at looking cute and sleepy. Here she is doing it in Mr Satu’s lap.

Hex, meanwhile, prefers a different warm spot.

Enjoying the Christmas presents from Mr S’s parents:

And there’s never enough belly rubs in the world!

Toffee is watching you…

… and so is Hex. A bit.

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[1] Well, a few months — I never made it through a whole year.
[2] If you’re following my Flickr stream, you might be familiar with them already!

Please stop using the phrase “ride like a girl” to mean “ride like crap”. Not only is it wildly inaccurate, it’s also really fucking insulting. I understand it’s supposed to be a joke; unfortunately it isn’t funny, especially not after the 100th time you hear it.

Because what you’re saying is that, by virtue of being female, I can’t possibly be a good mountain biker. What you’re also saying is that being comparing someone to me is a good way of insulting them. Whether you mean it like that or not isn’t really the point: that’s what it sounds like.

So please, stop equating my gender with lack of riding ability. I’m getting really sick of it.

Also, this.

Love,
Satu (frequently rides like a girl)

Warning: this post contains pictures and descriptions of (baby) tarantulas, so please don’t click through if you don’t want to see them!

Whenever Mr Satu and I go to visit his parents near Bath, we go to a nearby garden centre that has, amongst other things, an exotic pet section. Every time we’re there, we spend a long time looking at the tarantulas, and for about a year now we’ve talked about actually getting one.

Mr Satu wanted to get the rest of the upstairs rooms in our house done first[1], so this summer all we bought was a book. When we went to the garden centre again over Christmas, they didn’t have any spiders, and we decided to look for some shops more local to us. We tracked down one that sells a huge variety of spiders, reptiles and other things, and three days ago we went there — just to have a look!

Well, we came back with the little dude in the photo above.

We looked at quite a few different spiders — the shop had lots of little baby ones of various species, and also some interesting bigger ones. When we saw just how little room the little ones take up, we realised we could get one then and there, and it wouldn’t be in the way or make things awkward while doing the house up.[3]

Mr Satu chose this one so he gets to name it — which means that at the moment it’s mostly known as Spidy (just like all spiders everywhere). It’s a baby Venezuelan greenbottle blue tarantula (Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens) and will grow up to look something like this. Right now it’s less than an inch big.

The shop didn’t have any suitably sized crickets to feed it when we were there, so we went back again the next day. Amongst the spiders we’d looked at the day before, my favourite had been a beautiful jet black one, the Brazilian black tarantula (Grammostola pulchra). While adults cost quite a lot of money, the little spiderlings don’t — and they grow very slowly, so wouldn’t need a big tank for a while yet. And so we got another new addition:

This is Mort. The name is short for either Morticia or Mortimer, depending on what sex it turns out to be[4]. It’s currently slightly over an inch big but can grow up to be 6-8, and it’s eventually going to be a beautiful glossy black.

They’ve so far munched on a cricket each (Spidy still has to have them killed for it, but Mort takes live ones) and seem to be happy enough in their new home. The cats have not so far shown any interest in the spiders themselves — they don’t really move around enough to attract attention, and they’re in a corner of our bedroom that the cats seldom go in. Toffee did notice the crickets scuttling around and hopped up to investigate, but we’ve hidden them so they can’t see them any more, and so far that’s working.

I’m not terribly fond of house spiders — Mr Satu has to rescue them from the bathtub if I find one there — but strangely I don’t mind these two at all. I’m careful around them because I don’t want to scare them so they run off, not because I think they’re going to chew my face off. We haven’t tried handling either of them, and I won’t unless they decide they want to explore; it’s best not to, simply because it’s so easy to hurt the spiders.

We’re not going to get any more for now — honest! The woman in the pet shop did warn us that it becomes addictive, but I think two will do us just fine. Spidy grows much faster than Mort, so we’ll soon be able to see those pretty colours coming through. No doubt there will be Many Photos to come!

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[1] We’ve been DIY’ing off and on[2] pretty much since we moved in. Please send help.
[2] Okay, mostly off.
[3] Actually Mr S accuses me of persuading him “just like when we got the cats”, where he thought we were just going to look while I had already decided to get them. But that’s not what happened here!
[4] The easiest way to find out is to wait until they moult, and then examine the discarded skin. It might take a while before Mort does.