Guess who spent the night?
Category: uncategorized
[recipe] Mediterranean quinoa salad
For the salad:
250g cups quinoa
700ml water
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 large English cucumber
340g roasted red peppers
1/2 small red onion
1 cup pitted olives
15g coarsely chopped fresh parsley leaves
115g feta cheese
For the dressing:
3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp kosher salt, plus more as needed
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Place quinoa in a fine-mesh strainer and rinse well. Place the quinoa, water, and 1/2 tsp kosher salt in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the quinoa is tender and all the liquid is absorbed, about 15 minutes. Uncover and fluff with a fork. Transfer the quinoa to a rimmed baking sheet, spread into an even layer, and refrigerate until cooled completely, 10 to 15 minutes.
Place all the dressing ingredients in a small bowl and whisk to combine.
Chop 1 large English cucumber into rough 1/2-inch pieces, drain and coarsely chop roasted red peppers, coarsely chop 1 cup pitted olives, finely dice the red onion. Add everything to the bowl.
Add the cooled quinoa and toss to combine and evenly coat in the dressing.
Coarsely chop parsley leaves and add to the bowl. Crumble feta cheese into the salad and toss again gently to combine. Serve at room temperature or chilled.
When good times lasted for ever
Cat trap
Getting off the sofa was difficult last night because Pavel was comfortable and was not keep on moving AT ALL.
Lego fail
Dear LEGO Architecture development team, WTF did you do to the lions at the base of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square???
[recipe] Cornbread
50g butter, plus extra for greasing
225g fine cornmeal
140g plain flour
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1.5 tsp salt
560ml buttermilk (or same quantity semi-skimmed milk with a squeeze of lemon juice)
2 eggs
Heat oven to 210C. Smear some butter all over a 23cm cake tin or ovenproof frying pan. Melt the butter in a separate pan.
Meanwhile tip all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Beat together the buttermilk and eggs in a separate bowl, then stir in the melted butter. Pour over the dry ingredients and mix together until just combined and you have a batter.
Pour the batter into the cake tin or frying pan and smooth the top with a knife. Bake for 25 mins until golden and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 mins, then turn out, cut into wedges and serve. You can make up to 2 days ahead and store in an airtight container, or freeze for up to 1 month.
Bring your Bean to work day
The Journée Oser tous les Métiers (JOM) has always been a very special day in the canton of Vaud, all the children of the 7P to the 9S are invited to discover the professional world of their parents. The goal of this day is to break down the barriers that exist between typically male and female trades; and to encourage children to imagine their future professional life outside traditional patterns.
Bean has finally achieved his goal to set food inside the NRC, where the security rules are more stringent than they were at the lakeside offices. As part of the JOM workshops, he’s done cell culture, electrophoresis on extracted milk powder proteins, made slime and had fun making density layers, extracted DNA from bananas and done chromatography. Compared to this, sitting at my computer and looking at the latest and greatest powerpoint slide I was making seems dull (in my eyes, at least! I sometimes miss bench work, even though I sucked at it).
One things Katy and I agree on – we didn’t do this in high school :)
[gallery] Ben’s 11th birthday
Yesterday was the 11th year we haven’t killed the Bean yet, accidentally or otherwise. Bear in mind that Katy’s only been out of the hospital one week to the day, she’s done a superb, masterful, exceptional job of getting all the logistics organized. We invited a bunch of Ben’s friends to an indoor trampoline park where they could jump around for an hour, then have cake and drinks. It was like herding cats at times, but she got there in the end and every one seemed to have a good time.
The actual number of people that showed up was still unclear up to the last possible moment. We’d booked for 10 officially, but Ju,mppark said that it would be ok to get one or two more people in. Ben sent 12 invitations, but some people couldn’t because of prior commitments, so he sent out more invitations. We had 12 kids in total. Then two kids had gym/athletics accidents on the day before and the actual day of the party… so yeah, fun. We swapped cars with Roko to borrow his 7-seater (which was amusing because Katy’d never driven an automatic before) and we had two other moms helping out with the transportation. The cake got lots of praise, with several people asking where we’d bough it (nowhere, it’s homemade, bitches, booyah!).
We were completely frazzled when we got home after dropping off a couple of kids, but the child was happy and had had a good time, so I guess all the effort was worth it – even if he doesn’t realize just how much work was involved in all of it.
Well, that was exciting!
Something changed in the wordpress plugin that I use to create my cookbook ebook from the recipes on my blog. This change exacerbated a known issue, and in the process, completely borked my wordpress installation to the point where the only workable option (besides manually deleting 4910 duplicated, broken media library entries) was to restore from a backup.
The good news is that I keep a rolling month of daily backups. The bad news is that I’d never tested the restore procedure (I know, I know).
Happiness is a working restored backup.
[recipe] Classic cheesecake
Ingredients
CRUST:
1 1/2 cups/125g graham cracker crumbs
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/3 cup/75g unsalted butter or margarine, melted
FILLING:
900g cream cheese, softened
1 1/4/250g cups sugar
1/2 cup/125ml sour cream
2 tsp vanilla extract
5 large eggs
TOPPING:
1/2 cup/125ml sour cream
2 tsp sugar
Preheat oven to 325F/160C. Place a large pan filled with 1/2 inch water in oven.
Mix graham cracker crumbs and cinnamon; add butter or margarine. Press crust onto bottom and 2/3 of the way up a 9-inch springform pan lined with parchment. Double-wrap a large piece of foil around bottom of pan. Freeze until filling is prepared.
Use an electric mixer to mix cream cheese, sugar, sour cream and vanilla. Blend until smooth and creamy. Scrape down sides of bowl. Whisk eggs in a bowl; add to cream cheese mixture. Blend just until eggs are incorporated.
Remove crust from freezer and pour in filling. Carefully place cheesecake into preheated water bath. Bake in the preheated oven for one hour and 15 minutes. Try not to open the door to the oven. At the 60 minute mark check on the cheesecake if its done. A small area in the center should wobble slightly and the edges should be puffed and light golden brown.
Turn oven off and prop open oven door and leave the cheesecake to cool in oven for one hour.
Combine sour cream and sugar; spread over cake. Cover and refrigerate at least 4 hours.