Oh London, what have you done

Posted at 6:24pm on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

I’ve tried to steer clear of this one.  I don’t live in London, so why do I care?

I care because he is the physical manifestation of the angry suburbs.  I care because he is the physical manifestation of a massive rise in voter turnout.

And that means that he is also the physical manifestation of the death of the New Labour project.  We knew Tony didn’t want to hand over power.  Now we know why.

On a lighter note, apparently he’s also the physical manifestation of the storm botnet.

Buh!

Posted at 4:07pm on Thursday, May 1st, 2008

You may have already seen the Homer and George Bush in CSS demos. What you may not have seen is exactly how they’re put together… See how Homer is done, by the magic of jQuery.

Edit: well, that was short lived!

Squitch

Posted at 9:48am on Friday, April 25th, 2008

I’m looking forward my kids being old enough for me to “help” them make something like this….

CSS are planet-destroying war pigs…

Posted at 10:27am on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

…or…  How to quit a band in the most interesting way possible

There can be only one

Posted at 1:51pm on Monday, April 21st, 2008

This brings me unspeakable joy:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species.

Sad news indeed

Posted at 1:19pm on Monday, April 21st, 2008

Latest series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue canceled as Humph is taken into hospital. I didn’t realise he’d been doing it since 1972 (the year of my birth)!

What’s a word worth?

Posted at 10:32pm on Sunday, April 20th, 2008

I have a thought that’s been bugging me over the last few days…  Is the 10p rate of tax being abolished or doubled?  Seems to me that the BBC et al are being rather generous with their semantics.

Blogging from Forkd

Posted at 9:16am on Sunday, April 20th, 2008

We built blogging tools into Forkd pretty much right from the start. Jared, one of the two main brains behind the idea, is a heavy food blogger and he (quite rightly) didn’t want to have to type his recipes in twice. Indeed, the ultimate target was to provide a single central repository for your recipes from which you could publish to multiple places (a la Flickr for photos or Youtube for video).

Sadly very few people so far have used the facility. No great surprise, I guess, in that few of our users as yet are bloggers and that it takes quite an investment and some experimentation to get a nice layout. We’ve done our best to produce microformat-like HTML for the recipe that we post to the blog, but you’ve got to style it regardless.

Still, as one of the people that built it and as both a blogger and keen cook, I thought it about time to actually use the tools myself. I’ve got approximately 20 original recipes on there now; variations on recipes from a wide range of blogs and books. Here is my current favourite:

Chicken Vindaloo

Hot, sharp, genuinely interesting; this isn’t as hot as its British curry house counterpart. Instead this is based on more traditional recipes (primarily this one at Aayi’s recipes). Worth noting that, whatever we may have been led to believe, the aloo in vindaloo doesn’t mean potatoes. Instead it means garlic (explanation at Wikipedia). The use of caramelised onions in the marinade make this a truly unusual but extraordinarily tasty dish.

Preparation time
30m
Cooking time
20m
Difficulty
2
Serves
2

Served - see how dark it is?  That colour comes entirely from the caramelisation of the onions

Ingredients
  • 2 skinless chicken breasts
  • 1 medium onion
  • 3 tbsp groundnut oil
  • 1″ thumb ginger
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 tsp mustard seeds
  • ½ tsp coriander seeds
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1 tsp fenugreek seeds (optional)
  • ¾ tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 3 birds eye chillis
  • 1 tomato
  • 25g fresh coriander (small bunch)
  • 125 ml water
Preparation

Chop the chicken breasts into roughly 1 to 2″ cubes

Peel and roughly chop the onion. Get 2 tablespoons of the oil good and hot in a frying pan over a high heat and fry the onions until they go properly brown. They provide the unusual colour and flavour; you are looking to almost burn them they should be that brown. Once they are browned drain them of any excess oil and put them to one side.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger. Roughly chop the chillis (seeds and all) and the tomato. Put the caramelised onions, garlic, ginger, chillis, tomato, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds (you can leave these out if you can’t find them), salt and red wine vinegar in a blender and whizz them up until you have a thick but smooth paste.

Put the diced chicken in a non-metallic bowl and thoroughly coat it in the paste. Leave it for a minimum of 30 minutes (and upto 4 hours).

When you’re ready to cook get the remainder of the oil hot over a medium heat in a wide pan. Put the chicken and all the marinade in the pan and stir fry for a few minutes.

Add enough water to make a thick gravy and turn the heat right down. Leave to cook for approximately 15 minutes.

Finally, finely chop the fresh coriander and put it in the pan. Turn the heat up fiercely for another 1 or two minutes to drive off any excess liquid and wilt the coriander leaves and then serve.

forkd.com

Twitter

Posted at 2:54pm on Friday, April 18th, 2008

People are going on about twitter at the moment.  For a long time I couldn’t see any use in it at all, but, like Facebook, I have finally succumbed and am starting to get it (even though I can’t actually bring myself to tweet too often).  However.  I think I have found the perfect twitter application:

Sign up and follow ICHC - never be the last to LOL in your office again.

Yeasayer

Posted at 9:57pm on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Sometimes Jools Holland throws up some absolute stormers.  Welcome then my new favourite band (at least this week…)  2080 by Yeasayer.

Definitely from the Wolf Parade/Animal Collective/Panda Bear camp, but what makes them stand out for me is the quality of that bass.  I can’t help but think of Talking Heads; David Byrne flapping around stage as Tina Weymouth let rip the funk.