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  • Cook-Along Friday #1 – Red Lentil Dhall

    Work-life balance.  It’s the Holy Grail of parents.  Enough time with the kids to appreciate them, enough time at the office to appreciate coming home, enough time to yourself to remember that you’re actually a human being who does stuff other than work and look after kids.

    I’m lucky enough to have Fridays to look after the youngest of my kids.  In the morning we’ve got Toddler Group at the village hall (and believe me, Michael McIntyre’s right when he talks about being the only man there!  Though, to be fair, there’s usually two or three of us blokes now).  In the afternoon, while the youngsters sleep, I cook.  Mostly I cook curry.

    Long story short.  I used to be scared of curry recipes.  The long list of spices confused me and, like most people confronted by something like that, I avoided them.  The opportunity arose to do a night class in Indian Cookery and I jumped at it.  That was a couple of years ago.  It taught me many, many useful things.  Chief amongst those things are (1) the skill of looking at one of these complicated recipes and knowing what the recipe will taste like and (2) being able to modify the heat of a curry without changing the taste dramatically.  Y’see, I’m cooking for a family of 7 here.  What one of us eats, we all eat.  So I’ve got to be able to cut the heat of a curry dramatically (and then top it back up again at table with a damn fine chilli sauce).

    Without further ado, I present the first recipe I cooked when I took that night class.  It’s one that I’ve used as a benchmark to judge curry recipe books since.

    Red Lentil Dhall

    Ingredients

    • 1 mug of red lentils
    • 1tsp salt
    • 1tsp red chilli powder (substitute with paprika if you’re cooking for the youngsters as well or you don’t want the burn)
    • 1tsp turmeric
    • 4 large tomatoes
    • Chopped green chillies, to taste (I omit these entirely for the low-heat version but put 5 or 6 in for the full-heat)
    • 1 cinnamon stick
    • 2 black cardamon pods
    • 1 ladle of ghee
    • 4 sliced cloves of garlic
    • 1 tbs cumin seeds
    • Big bunch of coriander

    Method

    1. Wash and soak the lentils in cold water.  This takes about half an hour, so have a cup of tea and read a book.  I’m reading Writing Therapy by Tim Atkinson at the moment.  It’s very good indeed.
    2. In a large pan bring 3 mugs of water to the boil (same mug size you measured the lentils with).  Add salt, chilli powder, turmeric, chopped tomatoes, drained lentils, cinnamon stick, black cardamon and the chillies if you’re using them.  Stir it, leave it to simmer without the lid for half an hour, stirring every 10 minutes.  If it starts to stick, add a little water to loosen it up.
    3. When the lentils have cooked, they’ll be fairly mushy and the mixture will be nice and thick.  Gloopy is how my kids describe it.
    4. When you’re into the last 10 minutes, get a small pan and heat up the ghee.  Use a medium-low heat for this.  Add the cumin seeds and garlic, fry gently for a couple of minutes..  While it’s frying, chop the coriander.
    5. Add the ghee/garlic/cumin mixture to the lentils, mix thoroughly and stir in the copped coriander.
    6. Serve with chapatis or naan bread. Pakoras work well, so do poppadoms.

    Enjoy!  I know my family do.

    I use this particular recipe as a benchmark for curry recipe books.

    I’d be interested in your variations on this recipe – comment and let me know.

  • Welcome to Random Wednesdays

    Right.  I hope you’re all paying attention today because I’m going to have a few words with you about discipline.  750 of them, in fact.

    I’m trying to write a book.  Have been for a while now.  Occasionally – last November during National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org), for example – I manage to sit down and blast through a few thousand words but then it just sits there.  I promise myself I shall spend time working on it and then stuff just seems to happen.  If I didn’t know better, I’d believe that the Little Grey Men from Michael Ende’s “Momo” were stealing all of my spare time and smoking it.  Maybe they are and I’ve just not noticed.

    So the key to writing is, apparently, to just do it.  Make the time, sit down, and just get on with it.  And that’s why I’ve started using a website called 750words.com.  You sit down, you write 750 words (more if you like) and it keeps a track of when you’ve written.  Across the top of the page is a tracker showing you how many times you’ve managed the 750 in a month.  You score points for days, points for streaks of continuous days, and it nags you if you’ve not written in a day.  But in a nice way.  I don’t know what happens if you manage to write for a complete month, I’ve not been using it long enough.For writing, it’s a beautiful, uncluttered workspace.  It looks like this:

    750words.com screenshot
    Just a blank space with a cursor and a word-counter in the bottom corner.  Nice, plain, simple, very conducive to getting your ideas down on the page.When you’ve completed your words, it does some analysis and tells you a bit about your writing.  How was the language? What you were feeling, are you in an “Us and Them” mood, a mostly “Us” mood, a “very negative and thinking mostly about the past and yourself” mood?  And it tells you not only how long you took to do your writing but charts up your words-per-minute.  I’ve thought about cheating on this one, typing everything into Notepad first and then pasting it into 750words, but that defeats the purpose and I’d only be depriving myself of the statistics.

    One thing that does come out of using the site is the realisation that (a) 750 words is actually quite a few and (b) some days are better than others, Section Leader.

    And it tracks breaks and distractions.  If you spend more than 3 minutes not writing, then you’ve taken a break.  And it will tell you at the end.  So this makes it all the more important to those vital writing statistics that you don’t take a break and get it done quickly.
    As a first-draft, rough ideas, tool it’s superb.  I don’t have to worry about not having the file with me, about finding a computer with yWriter (www.spacejock.com – just wait for next Monday’s Application-of-the-Week post) or about whether the portable version of yWriter will work.  It’s all there on-line, safely protected behind the security of my username and password.

    There are, of course, alternatives.  You could do this yourself with a personal wiki, a notepad file or take the retro approach and use a genuine pen and paper!  Actually, if I’m not typing I *do* use fountain pen and a lovely hand-crafted leather notebook I bought up here on Shetland and I’ve usually got at least one Moleskine notebook about my person if I’m properly dressed.  Somehow the connection to the paper is so much better, so much more *personal*.  I can’t imagine writing character notes on screen, for instance.  It’s just not done.

    If 750 words is a little too much, then there’s the twice-Twitter site 280daily.com.  As any Twitter user will know, you’ve got 140 characters to express yourself in.  280daily lets you double that but it’s a personal log, not a public timeline, and you only need to do it once a day.  It, too, nags you but you don’t get any of the nice statistics.

    Using these sites is a matter of discipline.  A matter of setting aside the time to let the words flow freely and without interruption.  During this post I’ve had to field queries about Excel references, the fact that a SharePoint site has been moved and that the new colours are a little eye-watering, and that yes, Internet Explorer 9 has been released and no you can’t have it as it doesn’t work on XP.

    So there you go.  750 words, give or take, about writing 750 words a day.  Definitely worth a try.

    In case you’re interested, the 750words.com statistics for this post were:

    • Weather while writing: Partly cloudy, 9C (No, definitely dreach and a lot colder)
    • Rating: PG with some violence.  (I managed a PG-13 the other day.  I think that might’ve been down to the swearing)
    • Feeling mostly… Upset (hmm, not sure)
    • Concerned mostly about… Success (yeah, I can see where that might have come from)
    • Mindset while writing…  Introvert / Positive / Uncertain / Thinking (Okay, yep)
    • Time orientation: The Present
    • Primary sense: Sight
    • Us and them: You
  • It’s all about Browser Choice.

    Today’s application, and the one to start the ball rolling, is one most people will spend the most time using.  I’m talking about the window to the world wide web: Your web browser.

    Over the past few years, I’ve used all of the main web browsers plus a few more minor ones. When you’re asked to choose, this might help…

    Opera. This browser is a real hotbed of development and interesting ideas.  It might not get as much publicity as Firefox or Chrome but an awful lot of very good ideas started out in this closed-source browser.  Tabs for browsing? Yup, they did it first.  The shrunken menu-come-file-button Firefox are using in 4? Opera did that first as well.  Widgets and plugins? First in Opera.  It has integrated mail and bit-torrent clients and an active developer community for add-ons.  Fast to load, a very informative and useful status bar and a load of nifty things built in.  Want to disable images? Click there.  Stop Javascript on a page? Just there.  Reload a page every few seconds (invaluable in the last few seconds of an eBay auction)? All on the right-click.

    Downsides?  Well, none that I can think of for day-to-day use.  The torrent client doesn’t work behind my works proxy but apart from that nothing.  Why don’t I use it then?  Not sure.  Might have to spend a month with it to the exclusion of all others.

    Firefox Possibly the biggest threat to Internet Explorer the world has ever seen.  Well, it’s certainly dented Microsoft’s browser share here in the UK and it’s the one I picked as the browser of choice for the systems I administer.  It’s not as rich in features as Opera straight out of the box but the sheer wealth of extensions available is amazing.  With the right extensions you never need to leave the browser.  We install a standard suite of extensions to make our users understand why we changed to Firefox – Ad Block to remove all those unsightly adverts on websites, Fast Dial to give them a range of big shiny buttons to press, Colourful Tabs to make it all look pretty.  Oh, and IE Tab to make sure everything they’re expecting to work (*cough*Sharepoint*cough*) works properly.  And then we set them loose in the add-ons area to search for stuff they might find interesting.I used Firefox exclusively from its initial release right up until I spent some time using Chrome.  Now I dive in for tearing websites apart using the fantastic developer extensions.

    Downsides?  Rebooting the browser every time you install or update an extension.

    But my browser of choice (at the moment) is…

    Chrome I’m typing this post from my WordPress dashboard in Chrome.  My browser here at home synchronises with my Gmail account – history, passwords, extensions, themes, the lot.  I know Firefox can do this but Chrome’s synch always seemed to work so much better.   Chrome’s extensions started out slowly, it took a while for some of the important ones (Ad Block, for instance) to get there but I now have some 30 extensions installed, most of which do something useful.     It’s faster to load than Firefox, has a marginally more useful start page straight out of the box and you don’t have to reboot every time you install or update an extension.  The thing that really raises it head and shoulders above the others at the moment is the App Store.

    I know, everyone has to have an App Store nowadays.  Apple started it, but Chrome took it to the browser.  There are some shining gems of applications – Tweetdeck for Chrome is a genuine beauty – and there are some shining, polished, turds – applications that are nothing more than links to websites.

    All of the big 4 browsers support the new HTML5 specifications with differing degrees of success but that’s improving all the time and there’s a lot of fun stuff coming up.

    Most websites will work with any browser you choose.  If you’ve got to use a particular browser to view a site, then that’s the sign of some dodgy programming – the SQA website uses a bit of code that only works in Internet Explorer because IE uses a particularly daft interpretation of one of the date functions and all the other browsers do it right.  Huge chunks of SharePoint only work in IE because it’s so strongly tied in to the operating system. I can forgive SharePoint, though, as it’s more like an extension of Office and everything I’ve tried works in IETab so far.

    Anyway.  Long story short.  Pick a different browser, install it and give it a go.  http://www.multibrowsers.com/ has them all, as far as I can see.  I’m going for http://www.flock.com/ for April, see how it goes.#

    Thanks for reading, see you Wednesday for  Doctor Who!  Castles & Crusades! Carcassonne! Running!  And other random stuff…