Offmessage

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

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrCb_fNmSTA]

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

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.

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)!

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:

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

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.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOdtcUHLpyk]

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.

Forkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog.  And a stumping great picture of me.  Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).

Sperm cube.  That is all.