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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
