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  • Fast Meat Curry (turkey/pork/chicken) 30mins end to end. #cookalongfriday

    I’m a father of 5, so cooking has to be something that can either be safely ignored for a while without worrying about something burning, something that can involve 1 or more of the smalls, or something that takes hardly any time and can be done while the kids are distracted by the big, rectangular, babysitter in the lounge.  Today’s recipe is one of the latter.  It’s the fastest damn curry I know how to make, and the trick’s in the preparation.

    This curry works well with any lean meat – your turkey, chicken or pork are the ones I’ve tried and they’re all lovely.

    So, here goes.  The shopping list.  Check your cupboards first, there’s probably a lot on here that you’ve already got

    Step 0 – The Shopping List

    Curry Paste:

    • A dozen cardamon pods
    • 6cm ginger
    • 3 cloves of garlic
    • 2tsp black peppercorns
    • 1 cinnamon stick
    • 1 onion
    • 1tsp each of ground cumin, ground coriander and garam masala

    The rest:

    • 3tbs oil
    • 1kg meat (pork fillet/turkey breast, thigh or leg/chicken leg/thigh/breast, etc.)
    • 2 tomatoes
    • 125ml chicken stock
    • 125ml coconut milk

    Step 1 – 10 minutes work whilst the kids are distracted.

    Get the seeds from the cardamon pods, roughly chop the ginger, peel the garlic and onion.  Roughly chop the onion (I normally hack it into quarters).  Then get all the ingredients for the curry paste, whack them in the food processor/blender (oh, yes – “Dad?  Why is a word processor called a word processor?”  “Well, son, you know what a food processor does to food?”) and blitz it until it’s fairly smooth.  Put it into a pot, stick that pot in the fridge, go and play with the kids some more.  If you’re really keen, multiply up the recipe and freeze it in suitable portions for use later, though it’s almost faster to make from scratch than it is to defrost.

    Step 2 – Later that day…

    Finely slice the meat – 5mm (1/4″) strips so it cooks quickly and evenly.  Chop the tomatoes.Get a nice, wide-bottomed pan on the gas, add 3/4 of the oil and fry off your meat in batches.  You’re not trying to cook it completely here, just seal it and start off the job.  Once it’s browned, set it to one side.  Once you’ve cooked off the meat, put in the rest of the oil and the curry paste and fry for about 5 minutes on a medium-high heat.  It should smell superb.

    Put in the stock, tomatoes, coconut milk, reduce the heat and simmer with a lid on for about 15 minutes.  If any oil floats up, skim it off.  That assumes you’re paying attention throughout the 15 minutes and haven’t just stuck the oven timer on in the hope that you’ll hear the beep over the kids.  Always worth getting a timer you can carry around and put somewhere that’s both nearby and out of the kids’ reach.Finally, remove the lid, add the meat you first thought of and simmer for 5-10 minutes, until the meat is cooked.  Season to taste.  Serve.  Or switch off the heat, put the lid back on and leave it until you need to heat it back up.

    Most of the naan/paratha/etc. breads work really well with this.  If you’re going for stuffed parathas, go for a vegetable filling as you don’t want the different meats fighting.  Poppadoms also work well and you can have a lot of fun showing kids how they cook either in the fryer or the microwave.  We tried prawn crackers in the microwave once.  Not an experiment I’ll be repeating!

    And there you go.  There’s no heat in this recipe so it’s good for the whole family.  It’s extremely tasty, takes half an hour or so from end to end and that includes time to play and keep the kids amused.  Or time to check Twitter, Facebook and the new releases on Esdevium Games.  Up to you.

    Enjoy this one, let me know how you got on and I’ll see you in seven for another cook-along Friday.

  • To reduce stress levels, just give up (gaming) #randomwednesday

    I gave up on a computer game last year.  Just stopped playing.  I don’t know whether my fingers are losing their responsiveness now that I’m getting old, but I just could not get past the first boss fight.  And this was only about 5 minutes in to the game.  Fortunately, it was one I had borrowed so I could return it from whence it came and not worry about it any more.  If I’d stumped up cash for the damn thing, I might’ve tried a little harder.

    Then I started playing Tomb Radier: Anniversary.  I’ve played the Tomb Raider games since the start, loved the thrill of exploration, the searching for secret areas, the wanton destruction of endangered species.  The series has had its high points – Tomb Raider itself, Tomb Raider 3 – and its low points – Tomb Raider 2 was too hard, the latest one too short on the PS2 – but I’ve stuck with it.  I’ve only missed out on playing one of the games, Angel of Darkness I think it was called, but I understand from reviews that I’ve not missed much.

    Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original game using the updated graphics of Tomb Raider: Legend.  Visually, it is a thing of beauty.  Puzzles that were simple “flick switches, run around and stomp pressure pads” became far more interesting.  And the environment?  Wow!  Gorgeous.  But they’d tweaked combat, introduced a bullet-time-esque special move that you could use to pull off a one-shot kill, and this is where my problems with the game started.  I could not, no matter what I tried, master this move.  Not an issue with the little beasties, the wolves and bears of the game, but when it came to the dinosaurs I started to find the combat a little tough even on the easiest difficulty.  I battled on, killed the dinos, progressed to the centaur mummy things with shields.

    Back in the first few Tomb Raider games, before they started moving towards the unkillable monsters you just had to avoid, combat was simple:  Pump as many rounds of ammunition into the target as you could and it would die.  The bigger the bad, the more ammunition you needed.  You’d work your way through magnum, uze and shotgun rounds and end up running around whatever it was blasting away with your pistols – pistols that never, ever, needed reloading.  This bullet-time special move thing broke that.  I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a case of “pull off the special move and you’ll finish the combat much quicker”, but it wasn’t.  This move became required.  Somehow I managed to pull it off twice without dying and moved on to the aliens.  Then it was needed again and I’d lost my mojo.  Died many times in succession, got cross, nearly wrecked a controller.  And then I had a flashback to the previous year and just gave up.  I felt so much better.  I shelved the game, moved on to something far more fun, and haven’t gone back to it since.

    There’s talk of another Tomb Raider game at the moment.  I don’t know if I’ll bother or not.  You changed too much last time, guys.  And if the “old” gamers don’t buy a game, the young gamers won’t because they don’t have the cash.

    The take-home message from this post is this:  It’s your cash. You spent it on the game to have fun, not to raise your blood pressure and aim for that heart-attack. You could always trade it in for Lego Harry Potter.

  • Unplug the mouse, you don’t need it any more… #applicationoftheweek

    We’re tethered to our computers these days.  Tethered by the mouse.  That thing that hovers under our hand and slows us down as we hunt for just the right icon, the right location in the start menu for that programme that we’ve just installed.  Today’s application of the week takes away a lot of that hunting.  So, without further preamble, I’d like to introduce Launchy (www.launchy.net)

    One of the things I miss when moving from Linux (home) to Windows (work) is the ability to launch programmes with a few keystrokes.  In every Linux installation I’ve ever tried, the combination Alt-F2 brings up a little dialog box into which you can start typing the name of a programme or the path to a file and then hit enter to run/navigate/etc.  I’ve been caught trying to do this a few times on Windows and wondering why nothing was happening.

    Y’see the first computer I had was an Acorn Electron.  Aside from having to load stuff from cassette tape and find typos in the BASIC listings they’d print in magazine, one of it’s defining features was the distinct lack of a mouse.  Fast-forward a few years and I inherited an IBM 286 from my Dad when he upgraded the office computers.  It ran Windows 3.1 (slowly) and didn’t have a mouse (I think it was run over by a boom lift in my Dad’s warehouse).  So I learned keyboard shortcuts.  It’s stood me in good stead:  When they unveiled Office 2007 with the big shiny button instead of the File menu, I was  happy to find that Ctrl-O still opened files and Ctrl-S saved them.  Anything that I *could* find then was a bonus.
    But I digress.  Launchy.  Yes.  To quote Launchy’s website…

    “Launchy is a free cross-platform utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

    Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!”

    Launchy Screenshot

    It adds functionality that’s lost in Windows and adds a turbo-boost to the functionality that’s already there in Linux.

    First time you run Launchy, it searches your Start menu (on Windows) – and a few other locations, like the Desktop – for programmes to run and then you choose which to run by typing their name.  First time you run a given programme you might have to type pretty much the full name before it twigs which one you’re after.  Second time, unless you’ve got a couple of programmes with very similar names, you’re down to one or two letters.

    Testing requirements at work mean I’ve got Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 installed on my computer.  Swapping between them is a pain in the backside.  First time I used Launchy to run Word 2010 I had to type in pretty much all of “Microsoft Word 2010” so it got the right one.  Now it’s on the ball and I’ve just got to hit “w”.  Outlook is now “o”, Chrome is “c” and so on.  Simplicity itself.

    Instead of stopping what you’re doing, reaching for the mouse, clicking “Start” then “Programmes” and so on and so forth, all you have to do is press Alt-Space (the default shortcut for launching Launchy, this can be changed under Options) and type the first few letters of the software you need.  Much, much faster.

    The other thing it brings is some much-needed good looks to the process.  The best that can be said about the default Linux behaviour is that it’s “functional”.  Launchy is skinnable and there are currently lots of skins to change Launchy’s appearance (I stopped counting at 90).  So no matter what your OS theme, colours or wallpaper, there’s a skin that will suit.  The default’s pretty cool, too.

    Then there’s the plugins.  Not content with just making it easier for you to run programmes there’s all sorts of stuff that extend Launchy’s functionality.  Shutdown your computer with a few keystrokes, integration with the Todoist.com task manager, Python and .NET scriptability…  Fantastic.

    Launchy is a beautifully simple programme to work with, it runs in the background in a most unobtrusive way, only appearing when summoned to work it’s magic.  It doesn’t need admin rights to install, will happily sit in your Home directory, works on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

    This is one of those programmes that, once you’ve used it for a while, you don’t know how you lived without it.  I’m going to include it in our default build here at work

    Other keyboard-based control programmes are out there.  Next week I’ll take a look at one that’s aimed more toward developers…