Category: blog

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the return of the curry paste

Back in the kitchen again today, got a rush of blood to the head and decided on a curry. For curry, you need curry paste (which I’ve blogged about before) but this time I toasted the seeds before crushing them and fiddled with the proportions a little too.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup coriander seed
4 tbsp cumin seed
2 tbsp fennel seed
2 tbsp fenugreek seed
4 dried red chillies
5 curry leaves
1 tbsp chilli powder
1 tbsp turmeric
2/3 cup wine vinegar
1 cup vegetable oil

Method:

Toast the whole seeds gently for five minutes or so to release their aroma, making sure not to burn them. The kitchen will be filled with an amazing assault on your nose, although my youngest kid finds it a bit overpowering. It’s an indication of what’s to come though, because this paste imparts a great flavour and is something which develops with age.

Grind the whole spices to a powder in a spice mill, or grinder. Transfer to a bowl and add the remaining spices. Add the wine vinegar and mix into a paste. Add about 5 tbsp water to the mixture to loosen it a bit. Heat the oil in a heavy frying pan, and stir fry the paste for about 10 minutes. Allow to cool a bit before putting it into airtight jars and then refrigerating. It should last three to four weeks in an airtight jar.

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Winter trek.

So today, a subset of the Kili group went up the mountains for a pre-Christmas jaunt on the second shortest day of the year, tomorrow being the Winter Solstice. We gathered at about 9,30 up at the Glenmacnas Waterfall car park to haul ourselves up Tonelagee. The temperature was about -1C, so cool enough and off we started in good spirits. Off we hiked over about 10cm of snow, great to be out, great to be alive.

When we started up the hill, it became apparent that the cloud cover was pretty low and the visibility started to draw in, but with compasses and maps, we were pretty confident we were headed in the right direction. When we were about level with the lake, Lough Ouler, we couldn’t see it at all because the mist/snow/flurries were pretty thick and you couldn’t see more than about 50m. Onwards and upwards, and soon we were at the cwm just below the final slope to the top of the hill.

It was amazing to be up here in the snow. Normally I’d be up there in fine weather, when the views out across the lake and valley are really beautiful, but this new snowy environment is so different, very beautiful and serene if it weren’t for the wind. Cold for sure but completely manageable. So after about another half hour of trudging upwards, we reached what seemed to be the top. I know this mountain reasonably well, so I reckoned we were there, although it doesn’t have a defined summit as it were, just a slightly open windswept area which was really cold today. It was seriously gorgeous up there, icicles hanging from the peat hags.

We stopped for lunch up there, hot drinks and sandwiches and then decided to head back the same route we came up. That route took us reasonably close to a drop down to the lake, so far safety’s sake we skirted away from it and down the mountain. What we didn’t realise though was that we’d skirted a lot further than planned and we came down into a valley a bit west of where we’d planned.

This required a bit of a detour, but sure enough we found ourselves back where we ought to be, and onwards home. Beautiful.

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misc: Piratebay blocked by Eircon

Picture 2

Just read that eircon have blocked www.thepiratebay.com to its subscribers, so naturally I tried visiting it. You can see the result above. You can read more about the issue here. Interestingly, eircon continue by saying:

Eircom would like to reassure customers that as part of the block Eircom will not monitor customers’ activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block .

Nice apostrophe placement, at least somebody in eircon know’s what they’re doing.

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crashola: OS X Mail

crshola

All of a sudden and for no apparent reason last week, I started getting repeated crashes on OS X Mail with the polite but unhelpful message above. Nothing much out of the ordinary had preceded this sequence of crashes other than the odd force-quit out of Mail, having failed to quit gracefully by itself. Anyhow, it was completely unusable and a pain in the neck. A trip to crash reporter left me none the wiser: I don’t understand any of that stuff. I did all the other usual stuff like Repair Permissions and running Onxy etc, but non of it made any difference, I should also point out that I’ve a reasonably good backup habit.

I experimented by opening the Guest Account and using MobileMe’s Sync pane to import the four accounts I use on a regular basis (all IMAP) and seeing if that was OK. It was, it didn’t crash, it was stable & all the stuff loitering in my inboxes was still there thankfully! The fact that Mail worked fine in the Guest Account suggested to me that the problem I was having was not at a System level but at a User level.

Moving back over to my main User Account, I started reading round the web and I found an entry on neildixon.com suggesting that he’d had a few problems with corrupt mailboxes. I deleted ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and try relaunching Mail and once it did, I then deleted almost all the smart mailboxes and rebuilt the four IMAP accounts.

So far this has been successful for me although it’s a pain that I have to remake the smart mailbox rules. Oh well!

In conclusion, in Mail starts unexpectedly quitting on you, you could try the following:

1. Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
2. Relaunch Mail and delete the smart mailboxes
3. Reimport or rebuild your accounts

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salsa caliente

DSC_2442

I really don’t know the first thing about Spanish or Mexico or salsa, all I know is I like eating it and here’s a variation of my own invention, hot off the press in that I’ve just come up with it now and haven’t eaten it yet. We’re about to have it with a ground beef curry and rice, hope it works …

Ingredients:
about twenty cherry tomatoes, halved
about half a cucumber, thinly sliced diagonally
two satsumas or equivalent, sectioned and squeezed a little
two cloves of garlic, extra thinly sliced like Paulie
quarter of a preserved lemon, also extremely thinly sliced
a small red chilli, de-seeded sliced as thin as you can
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp rice vinegar
pepper

Method:
combine and leave to infuse for a little while.

Eat.