One too many mornings

Last night I watched a documentary on school dinners, and how unhealthy they are. Last month I heard a guy describe a chicken farm. There is an ongoing food crisis

This has been bothering me for a wee while. Food. We’ve all gotta eat it. What are we eating? I don’t know what is in my dinner. Take last night, for instance I had a nice dinner of rice and sausage casserole. But the sausages come from a factory and the sauce comes from a packet. What cut of meat was used for the sausages? I don’t know. How old was that meat? I don’t know Did the packet sauce have Sudan1 in it. I don’t know.

At the risk of being a total fusspot I want to chuck out everything in the house that I don’t know where is came from. But this means everything! There has got to be a better way. The recipes I’ve got posted up here are all fairly natural. I’m not even bothered about organic farming. Organic processed food is just as shit as the non-organic processed food. I don’t even care about GM as long as I can get fresh food.

I think we are lucky in that we live in a an area of town with 2 great butchers, several greengrocers, a superb fishmonger and three delis.
Time to make better use of resources around me. I’m needing to do a decent shop so perhaps rather than go to the supermarket and get a large shop, lets see if I can just get stuff for the next few days.

Cheap, and delicious mussels are the ultimate fast food. This traditional way of serving them is a must to impress. Made it the first time at the weekend, before the Ireland - Scotland rugby match.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4lbs of fresh mussels
• 4fl oz double cream
• 3 tbps fresh chopped parsley
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2oz butter
• 1/4 pint dry white wine

1. Wash the mussels in cold water, discarding any open opens that don’t close when lightly squeezed
2. Pull out the fibrous beards and knock off any barnacles with a large knife, rinse to get rid of any bits of shell
3. In a large pot fry the onion and garlic along with the parsley stalks in the butter till soft
4. Add the wine and mussels and cover with a tight fitting lid, allow to steam for 3-4 minutes.
5. Add the cream and remove from the heat, spoon into 4 large bowls and serve with crusty bread

Having switched my work PC to ubuntu, I cannot run the Windows software we use to listen for channel announcements. Rather than starting up ethereal and sniffing for the announcements, I’ve decided to learn python by writing a small application that will listen for these announcements and display them on a list.

Glade, pyGTK, and python.

First up I wanted this application to run in a window as opposed to the command line. Using glade makes designing a user interface really easy. Just run glade and choose what kind of window you want. In this case a list view. However there is no such thing as a list view, however by reading further at (link to pyGTK) I realised that a list-View is a subset of a tree-view. There is even a sorted list subclass

Having saved your user interface, pyGTK allows you start the window and connect to user events, e.g. clicks, close, destroy etc. I had an extra problem my application was to be driven not by user but by the arrival of announcement packets. So this required me to open a network socket and tie the input of that to a window event. Once that is done every time a packet arrives the window calls my packet processing function.

It has taken me a couple of days to get the thing usable. It is a weird language to write in, it looks like psuedo-code. The integratation with the gnome gtk make drawing a gui a cinch. It will be much easier for me to whip up pretty professional looking apps in the future. Here’s my list of TODOs to improve announcelist

TODO

• allow a double click to open a stream
• have a maintenance list using snmp which opens the management interface on the devices.

Went to watch Meet the Fockers last night at the cinema. What a large queue there was! Wednesday is obviously date night here. The UCI at Fountian Bridge is a better cinema by far than the Vue at the top of Leith Walk. There are more staff, better trained, the screens and seat are of a higher quality. In every department Fountian Bridge. Meet the Fockers is as you’d expect two hours of slapstick. Robert de Niro, Barbara Striesand and Dustin Hoffmann were hilarious. They were all
playing off one another and were on another level than Ben
Stiller. It was so funny I almost pooped myself! One thing
though be sure to watch Meet the Parents first. It’s not as
funny but you’ll get some cracking in jokes. Enjoy. God that
was a great movie.

I’m runnning Hoary now at work, and hosting all my builds on it. It is working great, I can do almost everything apart from view MS Project files grrr. But the fact I’m using unix makes up for that. So no more hogging the compiler farm with make -j

Since it was Shrove Tuesday yesterday, we had pancakes. We also had a row as this seems very compilicated to make. And after a hard day at the office it seems a bit much. But believe me it is worth it. The recipe is off the BBC’s cookery site, and although I’d never amde the sauce before this worked pretty well. Just cut up the ingredients first and you’ll not have a panic on like me.

Ingredients

For the pancakes

• 2-3oz plain flour
• pinch of salt
• half pint milk
• 1oz unsalted butter

For the bechamel sauce

• 1oz unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp plain flour
• half pint milk
• pinch of grated nutmeg
• 1 egg

For the filling

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 7oz spinach
• half glass white wine
• 3oz cheddar cheese, grated
• half onion, finely chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7.
2. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl and, stirring all the time, add enough milk to give a smooth batter, the consistency of double cream.
3. Gently melt the butter in a non-stick frying pan and ladle the batter into the pan, swirling evenly to spread. Gently fry for 1-2 minutes each side, tossing to turn.
4. Repeat with the remaining batter to make four pancakes.
5. To make the bechamel sauce, gently melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the flour then pour in the milk, nutmeg and egg, whisking continuously. Heat gently for a few minutes.
6. Heat the oil in a saute pan and add the spinach and wine, cooking to wilt for 1-2 minutes.
7. Drain the spinach and squeeze out the excess moisture.
8. Remove the bechamel sauce from the heat and reserve half.
9. Stir the cheese into the other half of the sauce until melted. Add the wilted spinach and onion to the sauce, stirring to combine.
10. Spoon the mixture into the pancakes then fold them in three.
11. Place the pancakes in an ovenproof dish and pour the remaining bechamel sauce in the dish.
12. Bake the stuffed pancakes in the oven for 6-8 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve at once.

Two days after the exhaust was replaced the rear near side bearing collapsed destroying the rear disc and damaging the stub axle. While the car was up on jacks I got the other rear disc and pads and the water pump replaced at a total cost of almost &pound400. And the car tax is up next month too! Glad I replaced it as I was taking the car back home to Ireland for Chrimbo.

Work has started on exterity’s new TV gateway product. 1U high it will stream 6 dvb multiplexes over IP. Currently our 8U high solution is subject to availabilty of components, as it based on a standard PC. This new setup will be cheaper, leaner and more robust than the current version. The boards aren’t laid-out yet, but we are making progress on the coding front using demo boards and PCI cards. I’m using the bleeding edge kernels for this development as there has been lots of testing done on them. Al of it by other people

This rich apple tart is great for when friends are feeling down. I fed it to Michelle’s sister when she had the flu, it only took 2 minutes to work it’s magic and she was feeling much better.

• 4 large dessert apples peeled, core and segmented into eights
• 50g butter
• 50g sugar, brown or white whatever takes your fancy or you have at hand.
• 1/2 bar for ready-made puff pastry, because life is too short to make puff pastry.
• 1 tsp of cinnamon, I fresh ground stuff I don’t know if it tastes better, but boy does it smell good
• As much Calvados as you dare, I got a huge bottle of it at Split Airport for next to nothing so I can afford to the generous

Preheat oven to 220C or gas mark 7.

Fry the apples in the butter, adding the sugar and cinnamon all the while. If you have a tartin pan use that. Otherwise any frying pan will do, you’ll just need to transfer the apples to a cake tin. Arrange the apple slices nicely at the bottom of the pan or tin.

Roll out the pastry, place over the apples and trim to slighty larger than the diameter of the pan. Put in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Turn out and leave for five minutes. (I never can do that part, it smells too good).

Serve with ice cream or creme fraiche

Not really into zoos on the whole. The history of removal of wild animals from their natural habitats. Most of the animals look fairly happy at Edinburgh. They have a good breeding record for penguins and gnus!
The monkeys looked bored as hell though.

(View the images.)