alexist

I managed to bugger up my hard drive. Again.

It's physically fine (and yes, I've brought it to Apple... good thing the Brent Cross store is open now) - but somehow I screwed the directory structure. Disk Utility and DiskWarrior were both unable to fix it. I don't know what happened. FileSalvage has made it freeze recently, requiring a hard reboot (always happens during file recovery, it's definitely a bug) but this morning I wasn't running it. I HAD been last night. Still not salvaged the files in question as it slows the machine down so much and I keep forgetting to set it before I go to bed. (This was my own fault; I might have mentioned before that I did an overwrite by mistake.)

I've been advised to zero out the drive before reinstalling. Luckily, I do have backups. Bad news, they're a couple of weeks old. I was thinking last night, "I haven't backed up in a bit... meh, do it later". So naturally this is when I have a problem. A couple of weeks isn't too bad, but I think I might have a couple of songs on my iPod that I don't have on the backup, since the iPod was synched more recently. I'll have to check before syncing (hard drive is the master copy; if songs are on the iPod and not the drive, they get wiped from the iPod.)

Nothing crucial missing from the backups, I THINK; except my FileSalvage serial, which I should be able to get from them. And my recently being-played games, of course. (I had a good game of Civ going, too!)

It's all just a lot of hassle, really. :/ And of course, the current Olympic coverage is a bit dull. I don't like the snowboarding; I was hoping for Day 2 of the luge. The BBC's coverage is brilliant--as well as the usual poxy highlights show there's multiple live streams on BBC2 Interactive. You get to see the whole event, not just the bits the producers think people want to see! This means Neil is forced to play his Playstation in the bedroom since we don't have a digibox in there (Freeview died, not replaced it).

This time, I tried the food processor method--make the panade, put into FP, whiz, add eggs one at a time.

Good side: Paste was lovely and shiny, less work, rose nicely in oven. I suspect the eggs weren't beaten in properly last time--no idea why.

Bad side: Paste is now a little too soft to pipe neatly (though apparently, it should not hold a peak with a spoon) and it gets quite messy especially as it leaks out the tube as you're filling the piping bag! And the puffs flatten out before they go into the oven. Overall, I'm not getting a good yield, and I think they should still be rising a bit more--a puff piped 1.5" before baking should be 2.5" after.

I could try slightly stronger flour (I'm currently using American unbleached all purpose, as I don't have any strong flour in the house). And a smaller tube. I always used to use spoons instead of a bag, and decided to go to the bag method for neater puffs.

No idea why I'm having trouble now, except perhaps that I'm trying the Cooks Illustrated recipe instead of the standard one... (I've always used part water to make them lighter, but this uses part egg white and part whole eggs to make them crisper. I don't like the all-water versions as they don't brown as nicely as ones with a bit of milk in.)

(I need something to do while my hard drive is being zero'ed out...)

(ETA: Hmm! I'm making a 2nd batch as my 1st got such a low yield and these look great--huge and puffy. Still got yield problems but this is partly due to the amount of mess getting it in and out of a piping bag :P )