In memory still bright…

The following entry was written on the 2nd of July 2011. It’s `rambling’ hotpot of my thoughts and feelings at the time.
I decided to post this today, as it is now a year ago since he passed away.

That Thai Chicken Soup

A while ago, this was while both kethry and I were still suffering from an acute bronchitis, she suggested some Tom Yam Gai, which basically is spicy Thai chicken soup^[1]. We used a recipe from Nigel Slater^[2] but instead of the three small chillies that he suggested, I used three red and three green lomboks (Dutch chillies) and three bird’s eye chillies.

After all, nothing but a good soup that just makes you sweat like nobodies business to drive away that what ails you. Okay, so it didn’t quite work that way but still I thought the soup was absolutely gorgeous, even if some of us (I am not naming them), thought the broth was three steps short of weapon-grade spiciness.

However a couple of weeks later, while we were visiting the local Wagamama the idea came to both of us that we could do more with the soup and bulk it out a bit. Personally speaking I wanted to try and recreate Wagamama’s spice beef chilly ramen. We finally settled on using some kind of noodles, extra peppers and other vegetables. However as a concession (okay, and the fact we ran out of bird’s eye chillies as I used the last handful in the making of more sambal).

So when it came to making it again, (I think kethry has determined it is so good, it’ll be a stable of our diet from now on), and since it is rather healthy, really the only fat comes from the oil in which the bell peppers are cooked and I am wondering what the result is if I roast them instead.

The picture speaks for itself I think … The basic recipe can be seen on the Food Confessional Blog or in his book^[2], but below is my variation which I think is slightly better. ;-) I am nothing if not modest, right?

(recipe after the cut)…

Tesco and Laphroaig and other single malt whisky

While we were in Tesco’s yesterday, I decided to have a quick peek at their whisky section, to see if they sold anything else¹ then the standard Laphroaig 10 y.o. (Interestingly they didn’t, compare this to the Morrison’s in Manchester, that actually stocked both the 10 y.o. as well as the Laphroaig Quarter-cask).

To my absolute shock and horror, Tesco has taken to not only opening the the cardboard tubes (and I suspect in case of Laphroaig also removed the booklets that comes with the bottles (which can be redeemed and make you a Friend of Laphroaig)), they also jammed forcefully  their security down the the carton tubes. However, I was sad to discover that this was the case with most whisky being sold there, top of tubes removed and the box jarred or damaged because the tag otherwise wouldn’t fit in …..

Now I know whisky is all about the tasting but appreciation is just not only in the taste. Visual appreciation in every aspect is just as important. I was rather shocked and annoyed to see Tesco obviously caring that little about the goods they sell that they wilfully damage boxes of unsold whisky.

And please don’t get me wrong, I do understand about Tesco needing to secure their goods so people don’t run out of the store with a bottle of five of good proper single malt (and then proceed to mix it with coke or something .. the cretins). But surely there is a way to secure the bottles *without* having to damage the cartons??

I think in the future I will find an other place to order my whisky from and as far Laphroaig go, I might just order it straight from their website. When I ordered the Glencairn whisky glass from their website, delivery was prompt and the box was very well packaged and secured.

A bit fail on Tesco’s part if you ask me.

the mind boggles ….

[1] – I have my mind pretty much set on my next bottle of Laphroaig either to be a Triple Wood or a Cask Strength.

edit: (05/12/2011) – follow up:

Having posted this also to twitter I have had the following reactions:
Laphroaigwhisky (John Campbell): “@michielvwessem @UKTesco Thanks for letting us know. I will pass this on to our sales team and see if anything can be done“

UKTesco Tesco Customer Care: “@michielvwessem Hi Michiel, we will let the management at the store know your feedback, sorry for any problems.“

Making homemade sambal.

Since at least part of my family (the paternal side) comes from Indonesia, we’ve had a long time fascination with Indonesian food. I am not talking about the kind of thing you buy from your local take-away, but proper home cooked food, fresh and wonderful.

One of the greatest regrets I have before leaving the Netherlands, is that I never took the time to really get into this side. Well neither cooking I suppose, which is something I get more slightly passionate about the last couple of years rather than the “must have something to eat when I get home from work” type when I was still living there.

However living in England seems to come with a big problem that there is neither a good supply of Indonesian shops for the various herbs and overall a “shocking” lack of Sambal.

Luckily, one of the things I do have is a copy (my second one, since I left my first one behind in the Netherlands, while moving *duh*, of Beb Vuyk’s – Groot Indonesisch Kookboek. ^[1]

The basic recipe for Sambal Oelek, is basically as follows:

20 Dutch Chilli peppers (or Lomboks)
2 Teaspoons of salt

Originally this calls for the chillies and salt to be rubbed together with a mortar and pestle, but good quality mortars are somewhat expensive. For a quick solution a decent but small kitchen blender will do the job just as effective.

Depending on how hot you like your sambal, either de-seed the chillies before hand, chop them up roughly and add them and the salt to the blender and whiz it until it’s a smooth paste, taste, and add seasoning as you wish. There are many variations, a lot depending on taste and desired level of pedis^[2].

The first batch I made, had an added Shallot as well as a quarter of a tomato and some palm sugar to bulk it out and bring flavour to the front. A word of warning if you decide to use tomatoes; cut away the wet seed parts and use only the flesh of the tomatoes, lest your sambal gets too watery.

The second batch (just finished) is altogether different. After all it’s still experimenting with what works. Four normal chillies, about 10-15 bird’s eye chilli’s, 4 stalks of spring onion, 1 clove of garlic and cherry tomatoes. As seasoning I added a 1.5 teaspoons of salt, 1 teaspoon of brown palm sugar and  a dash of ketchup.

The biggest problem so far is that my sambal is still way to liquid for my own taste. Perhaps straining it through some muslin might be an idea to get rid of the excess amount of fluids. One thing is for sure, the second batch is definitely more spicy. Achievement: unlocked!

Enjoy!.

[1] – Interesting that still after all these years there is enough demand for it, to warrant a reprint that comes out mid to late December 2011.
[2] – pedis: Indonesian, adjective; hot (of taste), spicy.

Time for a change

For the infrequent visitor of this blog (since I have hardly written in the past year and a half to warrant any frequent visitors here, you may have noticed that the blog is currently undergoing a bit of an overhaul. Basically there are various reasons for this which I am not going to rehash or explain here at current.

Suffice to say that I have removed various pages or with draw information, because 1) either the information has been old, or 2) out of date and the usefulness of keeping it up to date is not really worth my time and effort. The pages with regards to OpenOffice (OOo) are a good example of this. Some of the pages (twirssi) have been removed because I no longer use the software, nor am maintaining the imperial ****-load of perl modules to make it work.

We all move on…

So at the moment, I am deciding mostly the direction I want this to take in. This probably will include a new blog theme (perhaps the current one, or not), and some different articles and perhaps a change in blog name (although we still will be at our old address).

Irssi, freenode, nickname temporarily unavailable

Well everyone will have noticed [1] by now that Freenode has moved over from their old hyperion irc daemon to ircd-seven. Of course no migration go without their teething problem. One of the problems that seem to return is the following and I have seen many reports of this over the last couple of day. Not to mention having to struggle myself with this. I found the solution after a bit of googling this morning:If you have problems connect to any of Freenode’s servers and get the following message:

“Nickname is temporarily unavailable”

Even if you are disconnecting afterwards and reconnection, it won’t let you use your nickname, even when it appears to not be on-line.  The situation can be fixed by the following four commands:

1) Connect as normal with your irc-client

2) Identify to your nick:

/quote NickServ identify $nick $password

3) Turn off the old nick enforcer

/quote NickServ set enforce OFF

4) You might need to release your nick from being held by services:

/quote NickServ release $nick $password

After this you should be able to reconnect, re-nick or reconnect. After you have sucsessfully reconnected to Freenode, you should be able to turn the nick enforce feature back on.

[1] – Well those using IRC and Freenode anyway ;)

Somehow this becomes win.

From the department of being incredibly amused:

Sitting around and watching some videos off various Hummers with Mattracks, I was wondering what happened if one of the videos would be put to music. So I decided to try this out. The result of course is somewhat of a win. :)

• Start up Firefox and load the following video in a tab and immediately pause it, and kill the sound through the Youtube flash support controls:
  • Video 1

• Load a new tab and load the following video, and again immediatly pause it: But make sure the sound is actually on.
  • Video 2

• Switch back to the first tab. Press play. Switch immediatly to the
  second tab and press play as well, so both videos are playing.

• Switch back to the first tab and sit back to watch…

Now, is it me, or has that video just be elevated to the levels of win.

Sometimes, I really think I am  too easily amused. :)

My new bike…

Last Saturday, after deliberating and procrastinating today on the issue of going versus not-going, I finally got sorted and decided to mooch off into town to the Bicycle Doctor in Rusholme. Much on the positive recommendations of @diffrentcolours.

After much explaining what kind of bike I wanted against what budget, I was offered a test ride on a Trek T30. While it is a nice enough bike, I found that it felt like the distance between the saddle and the handlebars was too short for comfort.

The second bike they offered me for a spin, was a Trek 7.2 FX. By that time the weather had changed to a merrily good old fashioned downpour. However this in no way took away from my enjoyment. The Trek 7.2 drove fantastically. After having a bit of a chat, and talking to kethry, I headed homewards to having a quick think about what was really a no-brainer.

Anyway, to make a long story short, having decided I really wanted it, and since today was a beautiful day (cold, but blue skies). I decided after all to head into town instead of waiting until later.

So to make a long story short, I am now the proud owner of a wonderful new bike, a Trek 7.2 FX with added various bits and bobs (mainly mudguards, lights and lock).

I also managed to drive it home tonight and the ride is even more brilliant than I thought it already was. The more upright position makes for a very comfortable ride and the bike feels like its hungry for speed, and handling smoothly and superbly.

All in all I am very happy and can’t wait till take it out more. And a big thanks to kethry for making this a possibility.

Slackware{,64}-13.0 Released

After a long wait … it’s finally here … the much anticipated Slackware-13.0 release:

From the announcement:

Yes it’s that time again!  After many months of development and careful testing, we are proud to announce the release of Slackware version 13.0!

We are sure you’ll agree that the improvements made in this release more than warrant the major version bump up from the 12.x series. We’ve done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect.  Slackware is well known for it’s simplicity and the fact that we try to bring software to you in the condition that the authors intended.

Probably the biggest change is the addition of an official 64-bit port. While the 32-bit (x86) version continues to be developed, this release brings to you a complete port to 64-bit (x86_64).  We know that many of you have been waiting eagerly for this, and once you try it you’ll see it was well worth the wait.

I am not going rehash everything, except a big thanks to Patrick and the team for another great release.

And of course as a shameless plug, SlackBuilds.org have updated their repository to be ready and working with this latest release as well. :)

new script: tgz2txz

Well, as most have noticed this week, there are some changes in the slackware-current tree. The most notable of this of course is the change of packet format from the standard TGZ “tarballs” to the TXZ format. XZ is an algorithm based on LZMA.

The most effective way of updating your -current tree (if you haven’t done so already), is running my tgz2txz script before running rsync(1). Basically the script unzips the Tarball and repackages it again with the XZ utils.

However this does require you to have the XZ tools installed. The most simple way is just downloading the source and SlackBuild file from a mirror (slackware-current/source/a/xz/*) and run the SlackBuild.

The script is originally based of rpm2tgz, written for Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding, but thanks a lot to Robby Workman for making many improvements to the script.

You can get the most recent copy from my Git repository:
$ git clone git://github.com/michielvw/tgz2txz.git

or download the script  from here:
http://buhkit.net/~michiel/slackware/tgz2txz/

Anyway, hope this little bit helps.