I wish I were as happy as this dog getting a head massage!
Month: October 2014
Making hot sauce is really pretty easy
See, hot sauce is pretty forgiving. Use fresh, spicy chiles and enough vinegar, and you’ll create a condiment that will set your mouth aflame in just the way you like. You’ve got four elements: chiles, acid, aromatics (carrots, onions, etc.), and salt. Get roughly the right proportions of each, and you’ll wind up with something downright edible, and maybe even quite tasty.
I set out to create one sauce that would follow simple principles: fresh ingredients you actually want to taste (carrots, onions, and two kinds of chiles, one hot, the other not so), simmered in a bath of white vinegar, puréed into a crimson slurry. Oh, and no added sugar.
When you make a hot sauce this way, the most tedious part is prepping the ingredients. I shredded two fat carrots before getting bored and deciding to simply put everything else—i.e., two sliced red onions, kosher salt and a pound of red jalapeños (the kind used for Sriracha) and red habaneros—in a pot with a quart of white vinegar and turning the heat to medium-high. Once that had simmered for a little while, I poked in my stick blender and blitzed everything into a liquid. Done! Well, not quite. The liquid was, you know, liquidy—not so much a sauce as a drizzle. Of course, it was bubbling in a pot on the stove, so I just left it there to slowly reduce, knowing that the cooking process would also temper the heat of the chiles.
[Note: article edited from a Bon Appetit article]
[recipe] Homemade Curry Powder Blend
4 parts ground coriander
2 parts ground turmeric
2 parts ground yellow mustard powder
2 parts chile powder*
1 parts cayenne powder
1 parts ground cumin
1/2 parts ground cardamom
* The chili powder that I use is literally that — ground up chili peppers. It does not have any cumin, oregano, or other spices that are typically in chili powders. I realize that this ingredient could be confusing, since what I use as chili powder may not be what others use. You can always skip the chili powder and add in extra cayenne or another form of dried pepper. Or, add in the chili powder you have on hand.
Where’s the Bean?
So, I go in and check on the Bean and this is what I see:
Then, even after diggimg him out of the top layer, we still had to dig a bit to find him:
That boy…
This is so me
But in my defence, Katy worries if I stop perving on her boobs for too long.
Aline in Switzerland
Hard to believe it’s October
We all went for a walk by the lakeside yesterday. It was a gloriously warm, sunny day. Hard to believe it’s halfway through October.
Some days feel like this
The sad part is that I’ve had pre-meeting meetings to plan meetings….
Hard Reset
*gigglesnort*
The Tories are going to isolate the UK, and that’s a bad thing.
José Manuel Barroso, the most anglophile commission president of the last 30 years, will give vent to deep frustration at British tactics when he takes the highly unusual step of venturing into internal UK affairs by warning that the Tories should learn from the Scottish referendum and not wait until the final days to make a positive case. In a speech at Chatham House on Monday, Barroso will sweep aside his usual diplomatic language to say: “My experience is that you can never win a debate from the defensive. We saw in Scotland that you actually need to go out and make the positive case. In the same way, if you support continued membership of the EU you need to say what Europe stands for and why it is in the British interest to be part of it.
“And you need to start making that positive case well in advance, because if people read only negative and often false portrayals in their newspapers from Monday to Saturday, you cannot expect them to nail the European flag on their front door on Sunday just because the political establishment tells them it is the right thing to do.”
The intervention by Barroso, a month before he stands down after a decade as president of the commission, comes amid deep frustration among EU leaders about the way in which Cameron is hardening his approach to the EU in response to Ukip. The prime minister is embarking on a fresh change of heart as he plans to impose restrictions on the free movement of citizens from EU member states. The prime minister is planning to cap the number of national insurance numbers issued to EU immigrants with low skills. This would hit the 11 eastern European states that have joined since 2004. National insurance numbers could be issued for a limited period to ensure the prime minister delivers on his pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
Barroso said that Cameron’s proposal would fall foul of EU law which guarantees the free movement of people. The Lisbon treaty of 2007 echoed the EEC’s founding 1957 treaty of Rome as it said “the free movement of persons is ensured”.