Talking Turkey

Posted on December 27, 2009 by nige

Thai Turkey Salad

If like me you have had enough of turkey, cranberry and stuffing for another year why not try something different and fresh. This dish has a light and refreshing quality and is surely a great way to invigorate the system ready for the New Year. As always I recommend tracking down an Asian store if possible but if there are non in your area, most large supermarkets will have the ingredients.

Run out of Turkey? This dish is also fantastic with thinly sliced rare beef or shredded chicken. I even had it with some crumbled up pork and chestnut stuffing.

If you want to get the balance of your salad dressing right (for you) and to understand more how the balance of hot, sour, sweet and salty works in Thai cuisine I recommend the following exercise given by David Thompson, author of Thai Food: Get a bowl of fish sauce, a bowl of lime juice, a bowl of finely chopped chilli and a bowl of sugar. In a further bowl, add a tablespoon each of fish sauce and lime juice two teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of chilli. Stir and taste. Now add another tablespoon of fish sauce. Taste and see how the flavour has changed. It will be too salty for most tastes. Add another Tablespoon of lime and taste again. See how the salt has come back into balance but it is now too sour. Add another two teaspoons of sugar. Taste. Add a teaspoon of chilli taste. Keep on like this for a while, pulling the balance of flavours in different directions until you begin to understand its dynamics. Now go and make your salad.

Ingredients

For the salad

Left over turkey, chopped or shredded.

Bunch of coriander

Bunch of mint

Cucumber

For the dressing

A lime or two

A clove of garlic

Fish sauce (Nam Pla)

Sugar (palm sugar is traditional but don’t stress about it)

Hot fresh red or green chillies, Thai bird eye chillies for preference

A shallot thinly sliced lengthways

Garnish

Thinly sliced shallots fried gently with a pinch of salt until crispy. Tip onto kitchen paper to cool,

Coarsely chopped nuts. Whatever takes your fancy, I used dry roasted peanuts last night

Crispy fried thinly sliced chillies and ginger also go well.

Method

If you were able to purchase youe coriander from an Asian shop you may be lucky and have some roots on it. If so, scrape the skin off the roots, chop them off and put to one side.

Wash and dry the mint and coriander and pick the leaves into a bowl, discarding the stems.

Peel and de-seed the cucumber, slice thinly and add to the bowl.

Put the bowl in the fridge while you make the dressing

Chop the garlic, chillies (including seeds) and coriander root if using and if you have a mortar and pestle, pound them together along with the sugar until smooth. If you don’t have one simply continue chopping until they are as fine as you can get them then combine with the sugar. Add lime juice and fish sauce and taste. It should be hot, sour, sweet and salty.

Add the sliced shallots and let it stand for half an hour

To serve

Combine the salad and turkey and pour over the dressing. Mix well, tip into serving bowls and top with the garnish. Serve with plain boiled rice. To be really authentic you could have it with Thai glutinous rice.

Posted in South East Asian, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

How to become a Curry Master Part 4.

Posted on December 7, 2009 by nige

The Importance of Methi

Methi is the Indian name for the Fenugreek plant. It is found all over Asia and the Middle-East and has been used for culinary and medicinal purposes for thousands of years. It is an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine renowned for soothing kidney energy; but here we are more interested in its taste.  It is used in three different forms; fresh leaves, dried leaves and seeds.

The fresh herb is an innocuous looking plant with a delicate and gentle flavour. Just right in a summery, brightly flavoured curry, served with some lemon chutney or pickle. The fresh leaves are also very popular stuffed into various Indian breads such as Parathas.

The seeds don’t really look like seeds at all,  more like small cuboid mustard coloured beads. They are used in garam masalas or fried up with the whole spices in a curry. They are referred to as fenugreek seeds and when ground they have a smell that people often relate to as “the curry smell” and they are a common ingredient in commercial curry powders.

Finally and to my mind the best flavour comes from the dried leaf. In this form it is called Kasuri Methi  and is sold in boxes. It has a strangely pungent smell that goes well in all sorts of curries and can also be mixed into naan and chapati dough before cooking. Methi is also an essential ingredient in the Balti style of curry that came out of Birmingham in the nineteen seventies and eighties. I will be returning to the subject of Baltis in a future post.

Kasuri Methi

Kasuri Methi

It can be purchased from all Asian supermarkets and will look something like this.

Unless you are cooking curries on a daily basis, a box will last a long time, but it does seem to keep forever without loosing its flavour. I had one that lasted me two years! I prepare it by crushing it between my palms and then picking out any woody stems. The resulting powder can then be added to a curry. I find it’s best added towards the end of cooking so that its aroma is retained. For this post I give two recipes, one for a hearty curry and another for a bread.

Methi Lamb – Serves four

Ingredients:

600gm shoulder of lamb, as much fat as possible trimmed off, cut into 1 inch peices

3 medium or 4small red onions sliced thinly lengthways

4 cloves of garlic crushed to a paste (or more if they are small)

2 tsp cumin

2 tsp fennel seeds

1 tbsp garam masala

8 tbsp  plain yoghurt

4 tbsp tomato purée

Chilli to taste, preferably de-seeded dried red chillies or fresh green chillies

4 desert spoons methi kasuri crushed and any woody stems removed

6 tbsp vegetable oil

Salt to taste

Method:

In a thick bottomed saucepan large enough to hold all the ingredients heat the oil and add the onions. Put the lid on, turn the heat down low and allow the onions to sweat and steam for about 10 minute until they are soft. Turn the heat up to medium, add the garlic and fry until the onions and garlic start to brown.

Add the spices including the chilli and continue to fry for two minutes

Add the meat and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt and cook for another 5 minutes

Add yoghurt and tomato purée and continue to fry for for another 3 minutes

Add just enough water to to cover, stir in the methi and simmer until the lamb is tender and a you have a thick gravy.

I like to eat this with plain chapatis and a few spoons of yoghurt and some chutney. Or if you are feeling adventurous, why not try them with the recipe below?

Methi Thepla (Gujarathi flat bread made with fresh Fenugreek Leaves)

This excellent recipe comes courtesy of Sia at MonsoonSpice.com

Prep Time: 15-20 mins

Cooking Time: 30 mins

Makes: 15 medium sized Theplas

Ingredients:

3 cups Wheat Flour/Atta (I used Pillsbury Chakki Atta)

½ cup Gram Flour

1 packed cup fresh Methi/Fenugreek Leaves (just the leaves, no steams)

1 tsp Turmeric Powder

1 tsp Jeera/Cumin Powder

2-3 Green Chillies, very finely chopped or minced

½ tbsp Garlic, very finely chopped or minced

½ tbsp Ginger, very finely chopped or minced

½ tsp Red Chilli Powder (Optional)

1 tbsp White Sesame Seeds

1 tbsp Oil

Salt to taste

Warm water as needed

Other Ingredients:

Wheat flour for dusting

Rolling Pin

Ghee/Oil for roasting

Method:

Pick just the leaves from a bunch of Methi and wash thoroughly.

Mix in all the ingredients listed above and form stiff dough by adding little water at a time. Keep it aside covered for about 20-30 minutes.

Knead the dough again for about one minute and make large lime sized balls.

Roll the balls on wheat flour covering it well and press it down with hand. With the help of a rolling pin, roll it into circle to form a roti with ½ cm thickness. Dust off the excess flour.

Mean while heat a griddle/tawa and place the thepla on it. Cook on both the sides at medium to low heat till both the sides are cooked well and few brown spots start to appear.

You can apply the ghee/oil if needed and serve these Methi Thepla hot with chilled Yogurt & Pickle or with a curry of your choice and enjoy.

Methi Thepla (Gujarathi flat bread made with fresh Fenugreek Leaves)
Prep Time: 15-20 mins
Cooking Time: 30 mins
Makes: 15 medium sized Theplas
Ingredients:
3 cups Wheat Flour/Atta (I used Pillsbury Chakki Atta)
½ cup Gram Flour
1 packed cup fresh Methi/Fenugreek Leaves (just the leaves, no steams)
1 tsp Turmeric Powder
1 tsp Jeera/Cumin Powder
2-3 Green Chillies, very finely chopped or minced
½ tbsp Garlic, very finely chopped or minced
½ tbsp Ginger, very finely chopped or minced
½ tsp Red Chilli Powder (Optional)
1 tbsp White Sesame Seeds
1 tbsp Oil
Salt to taste
Warm water as needed
Other Ingredients:
Wheat flour for dusting
Rolling Pin
Ghee/Oil for roasting
Method:
Pick just the leaves from a bunch of methi/fenugreek leaves and wash thoroughly.
Mix in all the ingredients listed above and form stiff dough by adding little water at a time. Keep it aside covered for about 20-30 minutes.
Knead the dough again for about one minute and make large lime sized balls.
Roll the balls on wheat flour covering it well and press it down with hand. With the help of a rolling pin, roll it into circle to form a roti with ½ cm thickness. Dust off the excess flour.
Mean while heat a griddle/tawa and place the thepla on it. Cook on both the sides at medium to low heat till both the sides are cooked well and few brown spots start to appear.
You can apply the ghee/oil if needed and serve these Methi Thepla hot with chilled Yogurt & Pickle or with a curry of your choice and enjoy.

Posted in Food and Drink, Indian and Pakistani Curries | Tagged | Leave a comment

Installing The 64bit Adobe iFilter with WSS 3.0 SP1 or SP2.

Posted on November 6, 2009 by nige

I had a lot of trouble getting this to work as I couldn’t find a definitive article on installing it with WSS. Some people were linking to an article for installing version 6 (a 32 bit version) and the other instructions were for version 9 but with MOSS 2007 – close but no cigar. So here’s how I finally nailed it. Please email me with any comments, errors or omissions.

General Instructions:

These instructions assume you have SharePoint installed in the default location and that you install the iFilter to the default location. If not change drives and paths accordingly. The iFilter installation needs to be done on each index server in a farm. The changes to the docicon.xml file will need to be done on each front-end web server. If you have a single server installation just do all of it on your single server.

Stop the IIS Admin Service

Click Start

Point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.

Right-click IIS Admin Service, and then click Stop.

Download and Install Adobe iFilter

Go to http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025 and download the zip file and extract the msi to a suitable location

Run the PDFFilter64installer.msi setup program to install the filter on the servers running the WSS spsearch search service.

The install program should have registered the iFilter DLL but just to be certain register it manually:

Start a command window as an Administrator.

Type regsvr32.exe “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms\bin\PDFFilter.dll” and press ENTER

You should receive a message that states that the operation was successful, click OK.

Restart the SharePoint search service:

In the same command window as above:

Type net stop spsearch and press ENTER

Type net start spsearch and press ENTER

Leave the command window open because you will need it to re-start the search service shortly.

Add a New Registry Key For PDFs

Add the following entry and set the value to pdf:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\<GUID>\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList\38

Note: If you have previously added different file extensions and key 38 is taken, simply chose the next highest number for the key id.

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\GUID\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList

On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click String Value.

Type 38, and then press ENTER.

Right-click the registry entry that you created, and then click Modify.

In the Value data box, type pdf, and then click OK.

Check Existing Registry Settings Are Correct

Note These registry subkeys and the values that they contain are created when you installed the Adobe PDF IFilter on the server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

This registry subkey must contain the following registry entry:

Name: Default

Type: REG_MULTI_SZ
Data: {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf

This registry subkey must contain the following registry entries:

Name: Default
Type: REG_SZ
Data: (value not set)

Name: Extension
Type: REG_SZ
Data: pdf

Name: FileTypeBucket
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 0×00000001 (1)

Name: MimeTypes
Type: REG_SZ
Data: application/pdf

Make SharePoint display a suitable icon:

In order to have an appropriate icon displayed by your pdf’s in SharePoint do the following:

Copy the .gif file that you want to use for the icon to the following folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images

Edit the Docicon.xml file to include the .pdf extension.

Start Notepad, and then open the Docicon.xml file.

The Docicon.xml file is located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\Template\Xml

Add an entry for the .pdf extension. For example, add a line that is similar to the following to the Docicon.xml file, where NameofIconFile is the name of the .gif file:

<Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”NameofIconFile”>

On the File menu, click Save, and then quit Notepad.

Restart the IIS Admin Service

Click Start

Point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.

Right-click IIS Admin Service, and then click Start.

Force SharePoint to re-index everything:

In the command window:

Type CD C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN and press ENTER

Type stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart and press ENTER.

You should get the message Operation completed successfully.

Type EXIT, and then press ENTER to exit the command prompt.

Re-boot the server:

Do a test search and bingo – pdf’s are indexed!

Posted in Software Development | Tagged | 1 Comment

How to become a Curry Master. Part 3.

Posted on November 2, 2009 by nige

Chicken Korma

The last time I looked, Chicken Korma was still the most requested curry in UK Indian restaurants. As with much British interpretation of Indian food, the “korma” we know and love bears little resemblance to its roots. The korma is of Indian and Persian origin traceable back to the 16th century, spreading all over the Indian sub-continent as a favourite of Mughlai cuisine.  The modern word comes from the Urdu and Hindi words for “braise”, so really a korma is just a stew of braised meat or vegetables. True kormas include Indian Dopiazas and Kashmiri Rogan Josh.  Now that you know that we can get on with the serious business of our British Korma.

There is no definitive recipe for this restaurant favourite but there are a number of elements that are important. There is always yoghurt and sometimes cream and nuts are there too, either almonds or cashews. Ginger and garlic are always found, along with turmeric for colour. They can be mild or spicy but our native species is almost always served in its mild incarnation. It’s traditionally made with chicken breast but you can just as easily use a whole chicken jointed into 8 pieces (that’s drumsticks, thighs, and breasts cut in two). The benefit of cooking on the bone is you will get more flavour than just using breast meat on its own. And of course, if you are a vegetarian, you can simply replace the chicken with a selection of vegetables. I think a mixture of small aubergine, potato and cauliflower would probably give the required comfort food hit

To give you a flavour of them I’m going to give two recipes. The first is a generic recipe that I have formulated over the years and the second is taken from “Modern Chinese and foods of Thailand Vietnam Malaysia and Japan”, published by Australian Woman’s Weekly.

Recipe one (serves 4)

This will give a similar result to that which is served in curry houses.

Ingredients:

1.5kg chicken jointed (skin removed) or about 800gm chicken breast meat

1 tbsp finely grated ginger

3 or 4 cloves of garlic crushed to a paste with a little salt to yield 1 tbsp

150g thick plain yogurt

2 dried red chillies, de-seeded or ¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper (personally I use more than this)

400gm very finely chopped onions, almost to a puree

1 tbsp ghee or vegetable oil

1 tbsp ground coriander

¼ tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp Garam Masala

400gm tin coconut Milk

125ml double cream

30gm ground almonds

Juice of ½ lemon

Salt to taste

Coriander leaves to garnish

Method:

Cut the chicken breasts into bite sized chunks

Mix the chicken with the ginger, garlic and yogurt. Cover and marinade for a couple of hours.

Soak the chillies in a little warm water. Discard the liquid and chop them finely.

Heat the ghee/oil in a pan large enough to hold all the ingredients.

Add the chilli and onion and fry over a medium heat for about 10-minutes, stirring regularly to prevent sticking, until they are a nice golden colour.

Add the ground coriander, ground black pepper, turmeric and Garam Masala and continue to fry for a further minute.

Add the chicken and the marinade and continue to fry for a few minutes more.

Add the coconut milk and enough water to just cover the chicken and bring it quickly to the boil. Immediately turn down the heat, cover the pan and simmer until the chicken is cooked through – about half an hour.

Add the ground almonds and stir well and cook for another 3 minutes. Stir in the cream and allow to simmer for another two minutes.

Turn off the heat, stir in the lemon juice and add salt to taste.

Serve garnished with chopped coriander leaves and a nice pile of steamed rice and/or naans

Recipe two (Serves 8 )

This recipe is more complex in its use of spices and will give a deeper and more complex flavour. The original recipe calls for adding the whole spices to the sauce. Personally I really dislike biting into a whole green cardamom or clove so I prefer to dry roast them and put them into a small muslin bag, adding this to the sauce like an Indian bouquet garni. To do this dry fry the bay leaves, cinnamon stick, cardamoms and cloves in a small pan until they are fragrant. Tie them up in a small square of muslin to make a spicy “tea bag”. If you choose this method, omit the frying of the whole spices in oil described below and add the bag at the same time as the chopped tomatoes.

To my mind this refines the curry further and leads to an improved eating experience.

Ingredients

1.5 Kg skinless, boneless chicken thighs cut into thick slices

70gm thick yoghurt

60gm desiccated coconut

50gm raw cashews

1 tbsp vegetable oil

3 bay leaves

1 cinnamon stick

10 green cardamom pods

10 whole cloves

2 medium red onions thinly sliced

4cm piece of fresh ginger, grated finely

3 cloves of garlic crushed to a paste

1 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp ground cumin

2 tsp ground coriander

In summer: 3 medium fresh tomatoes (about 450gm), chopped. In winter: 1 tin chopped tomatoes

Optional – fresh curry leaves

Method

Rub the chicken with the yoghurt. Cover and refrigerate for an hour.

Place the coconut in a heatproof bowl and cover with about 125ml of boiling water. Stir; stand for 1 hour and drain. Blend the coconut with the cashews to a fine paste

Heat the oil in a pan large enough to hold all the ingredients. Fry the bay leaves, cinnamon stick, cardamoms and cloves until fragrant. Add the onions and cook until lightly browned.

Add the garlic, ginger and powdered spices and continue frying for a few minutes, stirring continuously. Add the chopped tomatoes and cook for a further five minutes until the tomatoes start to break down. Add the coconut and cashew mix and a little water. Simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes.

Add the chicken mixture and simmer for a further 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. Add more water if it gets too dry

Serve garnished with fried fresh curry leaves if desired.

Posted in Indian and Pakistani Curries | 5 Comments

How to become a Curry Master. Part 2.

Posted on October 28, 2009 by nige

Keema Peas

Since my article on Kormas is taking me longer than expected I thought I’d publish this article on one of the all time comfort foods – Keema Peas.

So what is Keema Peas? Well basically it’s minced lamb (the keema) with peas; but onions, spices and tomatoes turn it into the most moreish of comfort foods that has a distinct danger of indigestion caused by eating too much of it. It also has the added benefit of being really quick and easy to prepare and like all curries, it tastes even better re-heated the following day.

Serves 3 or four depending how hungry/greedy you are.

Ingredients:

400gm Minced Lamb (preferably from a good butcher rather than the supermarket)

300gm Finely chopped onions

3 Garlic cloves finely chopped or minced to a paste

1 Tin of chopped tomatoes

400ml chicken stock or, a stock cube dissolved in 400ml water (or just water at a pinch).

1 1/2 tbsp Garam Masala

2 tsp Coriander

2 tsp Cumin

1/2 tsp Turmeric

2 De-seeded green chillies finely chopped or 1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper (or more to taste)

Method

Fry the lamb in a thick bottomed pan large enough to hold all the ingredients until all the liquid thrown of has evaporated and the lamb is browning well and sizzling. You don’t need any fat for this as the lamb will supply its own.

Add the onions and garlic and continue frying on a medium heat for about ten minutes, stirring pretty constantly. Don’t leave it unattended at this stage or your onions will burn. You have been warned.

Add the spices and green chillies and stir for about two minutes.

Add the tomatoes and stock or water and stir well to combine. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 45 minutes.

About ten minutes from the end stir in the peas.

Serve with Chapatis or Naan breads and some slices of fried aubergine and yoghurt and listen to your family or friends telling you how good this stuff is.

Posted in Food and Drink, Indian and Pakistani Curries | Tagged | 1 Comment

Sloe Gin

Posted on October 18, 2009 by nige

Ripe Sloes

Ripe Sloes

I first made Sloe Gin about ten years ago and it has become a bit of an autumn ritual for me, the acceptance that Christmas is indeed on its way, because that is when it is going to be ready to drink. It’s a good excuse to go for a walk in the autumn sunshine, or it was today, I remember last years expedition being altogether murkier. So off I went to a small back lane in the South Nottinghamshire Wolds. The same place I have been for the last two years. Sloes can be tedious to pick – they are small and you need about a Kilo to go with a couple of bottles of Gin. The first bush I tried had a few but wasn’t going to fill my bag. The next one though was loaded!  I expected a good 40 minutes picking to get my Kilo but I was done in 15. You can find sloes all over the country lanes at this time of year, but don’t wait much longer as they will be gone in a few more weeks.

Sloe Gin

1Kg ripe sloes

1 Kg granulated sugar

2 bottles of gin (cheap stuff, you won’t be able to taste the nuances of good stuff)

A large empty sweet jar or similar vessel that will hold all of the above

Wash the sloes and get rid of any leaves and twigs. Put some music on because this is going to take a while – but it will be worth it, trust me.

Using a sharp paring knife or similar, slit each sloe and then pop it in the jar. Once you have a thin layer of sloes, add a layer of sugar. Repeat until all the sloes have been slit and added to the jar and layered with sugar. Expect this to take an hour. Pour over the gin. Save the bottles to put the finished liquor in. Put them all in a cool place, the garage or the pantry if you have such a thing. Each week give them a gentle turn. Each week the liquor will become a more intense purple. After two months – or more, this stuff only really gets better – carefully filter it through a muslin sieve back into the bottles.

Enjoy it slowly. You can sip it neat or drink it with soda over ice or add it to white wine in the same way the French do with Creme de Cassis. If you are feeling adventurous, you could even try making a sorbet with it.

Posted in Food and Drink | Leave a comment

How to become a Curry Master. Part 1.

Posted on October 10, 2009 by nige

I often talk to people about making curries and the most common response seems to be “how do you make it”. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that not everyone in the world knows how to cook this delicious food but I always am. So I thought I would write a blog post or two that I could point people at to save me from having to try and describe something they will have forgotten by the time they back from the pub.

In this post I offer a couple of thoughts on making curry and a basic first recipe with a couple of optional variations.

Shopping for spices:

To make the most authentic Asian curries, I recommend you shop for your ingredients at Asian stores. You will get a wider range of choice, in many cases better quality ingredients, and they will almost always be better value than in the mainstream supermarkets. Plus they are much more fun and exciting to shop in.

If you are one of my Nottingham friends then I recommend the excellent Pak Foods halfway up Sneinton Dale which does great Halal mutton and lamb as well as a dazzling array of fruit, vegetables and spices. There are also some good ones at Hyson Green at the junction of Radford Road and Gregory Boulevard. That said, the basic curry in this article can be made with ingredients which can all be found in major supermarket chains.

Cooking and Preparation Techniques:

For cooking it is important to use a thick based pan otherwise you are likely to burn the onions while frying or the sauce while simmering.

Possibly the most important thing about making a really good curry is to chop the onions very finely and to fry them gently and slowly for at least 20 minutes. To do this you need a good quality, well sharpened knife. Or you can cheat and pulse them in a blender until they achieve a finely chopped texture but be careful not to turn them to a paste, unless the recipe calls for it. The reason you must do this is to completely break down the onion, more than just softening it, removing almost all moisture and to caramelise it slightly. It is exactly the same principle used in French cookery to make French Onion Soup.

Doing this gives the finished sauce that unctuous curry gravy texture that we have come to love. So to start with here is my basic recipe with a couple of optional variations thrown in.

Basic Curry Recipe:

Ingredients:

350gm finely chopped onion give or take 50gms

2 or more cloves of garlic crushed to a paste or finely chopped. (tip – use a pinch of salt and grind them to a paste on a chopping board using the flat of a knife blade)

1 tin chopped tomatoes

2 tsp Coriander

2 tsp Cumin

1 tsp Garam Masala

½ tsp Turmeric

½ tsp Salt or more to taste

Meat and/or vegetables of choice

2 tbsp Vegetable oil or better still Ghee (Indian clarified butter)

Optional: Fresh coriander, yoghurt, coconut milk, whole spices

Method:

Heat the oil or Ghee on a high heat in a thick based saucepan or sauté pan large enough to hold all the ingredients.

When hot but not smoking add the onions. Fry for three minutes while stirring constantly.

Turn down the heat and fry gently for 15 minutes stirring occasionally and making sure the onions brown but do not burn.

Add the garlic and continue to fry for a further 5 minutes.

Turn up the heat to high and add the spices. Stir briskly for one minute.

Add the tomatoes – be careful, they may splash a bit when they hit the hot pan – and stir everything together thoroughly.

Turn down the heat and simmer until the mixture has a jammy consistency.

Add your meat and or vegetables along with about 400ml of water and simmer for about 40 minutes or until cooked.

Serve with basmati rice, naan breads or chapattis

Options:

Coriander:

Chop coriander stems and leaves finely and add them with the spices.

Throw a handful of chopped coriander leaves over the finished curry to garnish. A good handful, don’t be mean.

Yoghurt and Coconut Milk:

Add about 200ml of yoghurt or coconut milk about 10 minutes before serving. Yoghurt is a northern Indian and Pakistani thing while coconut milk gives more of a Southern Indian feel.

Whole Spices:

You can buy bags of mixed whole spices from Indian and Pakistani shops, usually labelled as Garam Masala mixture. Take a handful and dry fry them (just put them in a hot frying pan with no oil for a few minutes) to release their aroma. Then cut yourself a square of cheese cloth, pop the spices in and secure with string. You then have a bag of spices that you can put in your curry at the start of the simmering phase to add extra flavour. Doing this means you will not be picking chunks of whole spice out of your mouth while trying to enjoy your curry. I recommend this as it really adds an extra dimension of flavour.

If you have a coffee grinder, after you have roasted your whole spices, you can grind them to a fine powder and use them as your own home made Garam Masala in curries. It will taste much better than shop bought ready ground ones.

Posted in Food and Drink, Indian and Pakistani Curries | Leave a comment

The Duct Tape Debate Rumbles On

Posted on October 9, 2009 by nige

It seems Joel Spolsky has put the cat among the pigeons with his recent blog on Duct Tape Programming. A lot of the community seem to have cast him as a heretic and I suspect that, just as many religious zealots do, many have done so without actually reading the article. CodeZest.com accuses him (in the style of a 15 year old posting on 4Chan to boot) of advocating Code & Run and Rob Conery over at WekeRoad seeme to have taken particular exception to a comment in the same vein that Joel posted on Stack Overflow – albeit with a more helpful attitude and a useful article on IoC.

But back to Joels blog. Most of the critics don’t seem to have noticed that:

a) It’s a book review not an article on how to design and code

b) In any case it does NOT say “write crap badly architected code in order to ship”

How many of you have seen projects where the design team go round in circles for 3 months arguing about what framework to use, what a customer is and so on and no code is written and no solution is provided to the business. By the time they get going either the problem has changed or the business has lost confidence and done a real duct tape job with Access while no-one was looking. So sometimes compromises should be made in order to ship something or you will end up missing the boat. I suspect that at Fog Creek Software they are containered up to their eyeballs and have people who write abstract factories in their lunchtimes like some people do sudoku. But in BigCo and MediumCo there may not be so much talent so some compromise may be needed.

Containers, Inversion of Control, Bridges and other fairly complex object structures/patterns are all very useful and definately have their place. I’ve used them to produce a lot of good code that I am very proud of. But as a developer  with 25 years experience as both a programmer  and a manager I will say this. Using these structures just because they are there is a hazard. It’s always cool to use new ideas but (yes I know they’ve been around for years but they’re still new to a lot of people) never forget that 80% of the effort in most applications will be in maintenance. Who will do the maintenance? One thing’s for sure, it will not be superstar programmers who can grok a container, its interfaces and its implementations just by reading it – they will be working on the next big thing. It will be ordinary but competent programmers who will have to do this and they will find it hard and it will increase and not decrease maintenance times. Or worse still, they will get out the duct tape and wrap it all around your beautiful engineering, probably completely strangling some of your carefully crafted work along the way. I say this from experience, not speculation. Yes, by all means use these patterns, but don’t use them for the sake of it and make sure that when they are used they’re well documented (as in clearly explained in both intent and usage) so that some guy who has to do the maintenance who maybe isn’t as smart as you doesn’t have to spend 3 days running the code through the debugger just to work out what it does.

It’s not hard to make something simple complicated, the challenge is in making complicated things as simple as possible. And that applies to both the way it is used by your customers and to the code internals.

Posted in Code, Software Development | Leave a comment

Office 2010 – A First Peek

Posted on August 15, 2009 by nige

Last week the first technical preview of Microsoft’s upcoming new Office suite, Office 2010, was released to selected partners ( that’s me )

All Office 2010 products have been given the Ribbon treatment and Word and PowerPoint also get in-place photo and video editing so you can make PowerPoint presentations even more tedious by including your holiday videos and snaps.

A change that will undoubtedly annoy some people to start with is the “Office Button”. Instead of the current drop down menu with all the print, save and so on options a whole new screen is brought to the front, where you can perform all document level actions such as print, save, share  and setting general options. The one in Outlook seems particularly impressive as a one stop control centre for account settings, out of office replies adding new accounts and so on.

Outlook also gets a great new facility called Quick Steps.

The Quick Steps Pad

The Quick Steps Pad

This customisable pad of common actions to help you to deal with emails and tasks as efficiently as possible. For instance Quick Step lets you mark an email as read and move it to a specified folder with a single click. Perfect for those of you who like to organise you mail into folders. You can set up a single click Quick Step to perform any sequence of actions that can be completed in Outlook, effectively allowing you to create your own simple workflows.

The re-vamped Small Business Contact Manager 2010 provides a brilliant Sales Management solution for smaller businesses that can’t justify the cost of Microsoft Dynamics or similar solutions and makes some fine improvements on the already excellent version in Office 2007

The Business Contact Manager Ribbon

The Business Contact Manager Ribbon

BCM features all the functionality you need to take a business opportunity all the way through to the end, won or lost, and provides a host of charts and reports to see where your sales are coming from. A completely new feature is the adding of leads as a lightweight contact. Leads can be ranked so that you staff know which ones to focus on.

Windows SharePoint Services integration continues apace as Office Groove disappears, only to magically reappear as SharePoint Workspace 2010. Look to see tighter integration with SharePoint 2010 and the SQL Server Business Intelligence suites via Visual Studio 2010 as we move into next year.

The push continues towards 64‑bit computing to leverage the increased memory capabilities and harness them for analysis and manipulation of very large data sets and documents. Microsoft claim to be able to handle millions of rows in Excel worksheets using the native 64-bit version, and if you are looking to upgrade to Windows 7 and you have 64 -bit capable hardware or if you already have Vista 64 then this is the way to go.

So far I’ve done the latest issue of my business email newsletter to 500 prospects using Publisher 2010 which worked a treat with no program crashes, hangs or other glitches and I’ll be using a lot more over the coming weeks. I’ve been trialling it on an ageing Acer laptop with a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion processor, 2 GB of RAM and Windows 7 RC1. So far the programs have been snappy and rock solid running the 32-bit version. When I get my hands on a release copy of Windows 7 next week, I’m going to check out the 64 bit version and I’ll probably do another post then.

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Redemption

Posted on July 20, 2009 by nige

Are we but a chance convention

Asking for some curcumvention, of a fate

That waits our rude presumption.

Or do we truly seek redemption,

Certain that our souls’ deception

Was but a slip, and aberation.

Posted in Poetry | Leave a comment