Butter Chicken~ish
Oct 31, 2006 Noticias
Butter Chicken is a good place to start your introduction to Indian food - for the novice there’s just enough spice to make it interesting without being intimidating. There’s a wonderful creaminess and a combination of flavours that will soon have you wanting more.
I’m not going to pretend that this is an authentic version of Butter chicken, it’s adapted from the Australian Women’s Weekly but it hits the right bells when you’re eating it. It’s very simple and quick to make.
Butter Chicken
[Serves 2]
4 skinless & boned chicken thighs, cut into chunks
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 teaspoons garam masala
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
½ teaspoon chilli powder
½ cup sheep’s milk yoghurt (or plain yoghurt)
1 medium potato, diced
1 onion, sliced finely
½ cup peas
1 tablespoon oil
20 grams butter, diced
1 tablespoons red vinegar
1 tablespoons tomato paste
250ml tomato puree
100ml chicken stock
4 cardamom pods, bruised
1 cinnamon stick
100ml cream
fresh coriander leaves, to garnish
In a bowl place the crushed garlic, garam masala, ground coriander, ground cumin, chilli powder, sweet paprika and yoghurt - stir well to combine before adding the chicken pieces. Make sure they are well coated in the mix before covering with plastic wrap and placing in the fridge for 3 hours.
In a small bowl add the vinegar, tomato paste, tomato puree, chicken stock, cardamom and cinnamon - stir to combine.
Place the oil and butter in a deep pan over a medium heat. When the butter is melted add the onions and sauté until softened and starting to colour.
Remove the onions and set aside.
In the same pan, cook the marinated chicken in batches until browned.
Return the onions to the pan and add the diced potato. Cook for 2 minutes before adding the vinegar mixture.
Bring to the boil before turning down to a simmer.
Cook, uncovered for about 20 minutes before adding the peas. Continue cooking for another 10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through.
Stir in the cream until heated but do not let it boil.
Fold in the coriander leaves and place the mixture into a serving bowl before sprinkling over with some more fresh coriander leaves.
Serve with Jasmine rice and naan.
This curry scores from 1-10:
Tagged with Savoury Food
Google data APIs: Now with PHP
Oct 31, 2006 Noticias
Per an announcement today at Zend Conference 2006, GData support is now available in the Zend Framework:
The Google Data APIs provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web. With the Google data APIs, developers can mash up services like Google Base, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch.Zend Google Data Client Library provides a PHP 5 component to execute queries and commands against Google Data APIs from your PHP applications.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
A Tale of Two Eggs
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
Now, you just might be wondering if there’s something wrong with that egg on the left. Rest assured it’s perfectly normal.
Perfectly normal for a duck egg. You can certainly see where the term duck egg blue evolved from.
I am always excited to see duck eggs - especially ones as fresh as these free range wonders.
What excites me is that they are a bakers dream. With these you can produce cakes to die for.
It’s their differences that really set them apart and make them special. They are higher in fat, the yolks are a rich golden colour and the whites are extremely gelatinous. When used in baking you’ll find the items will have an intense yellow colour and also be more sturdy and resilient. You’ll also find that there’s an increased richness to the taste - it’s slightly decadent.
While duck eggs are perfect for use in pasta, custards and cakes, they are unsuitable for meringues and soufflés. This is due to the absence of globulin, a necessary protein in the formation of foam.
One other thing I should note is that duck egg shells are thicker than chicken eggs. Cracking them takes a little more effort and it’s useful to use the blunt side of the knife to help break through the shell - a few raps to the shell should create a tidy crack.
If you’ve never tried duck eggs I can’t help but urge you to seek them out - the proof of their quality is in the pudding, or in this case the sponge!
Sponge Cake
[Makes 2 x 20cm/8inch diameter cakes]
6 duck eggs
¾ cup caster sugar
1¼ cups plain flour
60 grams melted butter, cooled
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.
Butter and flour two 20cm/8 inch shallow cake tins (about 5cm/2inch in height) - line the bases with baking paper cut to size - this will make removal easier.
Break the duck eggs into the bowl of a stand mixer - add the sugar and beat until thick and fluffy and tripled in volume. Since this is made using duck eggs, you’ll notice the mixture won’t be pale, it will retain a deep yellow colouring. The beating will take around 10 minutes.
While you are waiting, triple sift the flour. Also try to incorporate as much as air as possible while sifting, so sift from a good height above the bowl. Triple sifting is a fairly standard procedure when making sponge - the whole purpose in each step is to maximise the aeration.
When the eggs are ready it’s time to add the flour - sift the flour over the bowl. Begin folding this through using a metal spoon and the figure eight cutting motion. When it’s almost totally incorporated, drizzle in the cooled melted butter and continue to fold until just mixed.
Divide the mixture evenly into the two cake tins and bake for approximately 25 minutes or until golden and the cakes are still springy to the touch.
Cool slightly in the tins before turning out onto wire racks to cool.
To make this filled sponge:
I used Gippsland Organic Pure Cream (40% fat) and my Rhubarb, Apple & Vanilla Jam - naturally enough, you can fill this with your favourite cream and jam.
I’ve whipped the cream until firm - pure cream is my preference as it doesn’t contain any other ingredients other than the jersey cream itself, there’s no gums or thickening agents. It takes slightly longer to whip but you’ll find that it actually has a better hold. Taste-wise, it can’t be beat and if you’ve gone to the trouble to find the duck eggs, why take a short cut on the cream.
Tagged with Cake
FLOSS Usability Sprint
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
Last weekend, Google hosted the third FLOSS Usability Sprint, an event designed to bring together User Experience professionals and open source developers to collaborate and improve OS projects. The two facilitators, Allen “Gunner” Gunn and Eugene Eric Kim, quickly made all the participants feel welcomed and engaged. Allen and Eugene then paired developers with the UX practitioners in attendance and we were off and running, pausing only for reports back to the group on our progress and, of course, lunch!
The team from SocialtextOpen found that their new, simplified interface left their more advanced users feeling information withdrawl. They spent their weekend concentrating on building a user interface for their immersive wiki users while simultaneously putting the finishing touches on their next product release. Another team worked on enhancing the usability of HyperScope, a project laying the groundwork for Douglas Engelbart’s vision of an Open Hyperdocument System. The Social Source Commons group focused on removing extraneous elements from their website to make the site more navigable and useful for those doing IT support for non-profits. The Sustainable Civil Society project, a wiki-like project to create a map of organizations devoted to sustainability, wowed us with an excercise in creating affinity diagrams and left the sprint under a new moniker, Wiser Earth.
I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend with four developers from the Drupal project, reviewing the results of their user survey and creating the framework for a report on improving usability in Drupal. The report will be published to the entire Drupal community, and in the interim Kieran Lal of CivicSpace has posted a write up of our activities this weekend. Thanks to Kieran, Neil Drumm, Matt Cheney and Zack Rosen for the deeper introduction to the wonderful world of Drupal.
Eugene has posted a Sprint write up and you can also check out a group photo of all the particpants wearing our best scary Hallowe’en faces.
Last but not least, the open source world needs UX experts! If you’re interested in helping, you can find more information on the FLOSS Usability project’s site.
Cambiar el color de Fondo del Blog
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
Primero deben ubicar el siguiente código en el css, lo principal es el body (estilo de la plantilla)
Lo importante de este código es background: #2F2F2F (y background:#000; para la plantilla minima black), este número corresponde al color que tenemos en el fondo del blog.
Aquí les dejo una página para que prueben números y vean ¿que color es?:
Draac, y esta otra es una paleta de colores de wikipedia.
Este otro servicio es super util, sobre todo a la hora de ver la combinacion entre los colores, se llama
Synthaxis:
Hay 4 cuadros, al pinchar cada uno de los cuadros, aparece el numero que corresponde al color:
Entonces, pinchan sobre el numero y escriben el de ustedes.
Como ven super facil de utilizar.
Este otro servicio es quizas mas util que el anterior para los que no tenemos idea de combinar colores….jajaja, ya que uno escribe el color base, y entrega 8 colores mas que combinan con el dado. El servicio se llama
COLORTOY 2.0
Ahora, si te gustan los colores de una web, y no sabes como extraerlos de su plantilla, esta pagina I Like Your Colors te permite ver los colores que utiliza.
Solo debes escribir la direccion del blog al final de la pagina, donde dice:
Type the URI of a page below and submit it to see what colors it uses:
En mi caso es http://agregafotos.blogspot.com
y pinchar el boton. Entonces la pagina se recarga con la imagen de arriba y sus codigos
Y finalmente este pagina te entrega colores con respecto a una imagen
Color Palette Generator, lo unico que debes hacer es escribir la url de donde esta alojada la imagen
Espero que les sirva.
Como redireccionar el blog a otra pagina
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
Si abrieron un blog, y no estan conformes con la direccion que eligieron, o contrataron un host pagado como yo, para mudar sus blogs, existen varias maneras para redireccionar el blog, hacia su pagina nueva. De esta manera no perderan las visitas que ya tenian.
Este es el siguiente codigo que deben dejar en su plantilla antigua, una vez que ya tengan listo el lanzamiento del blog nuevo:
Solo deben cambiar la direccion http://ayudaparatublog.com/animeblog/ por la del nuevo blog de ustedes.
Si alguien tiene un mejor metodo, que lo deje por aca..
Food Destinations #3
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
Emily from Chocolate in Context is hosting this month’s Food Destinations and has settled on the most appropriate theme of My Favourite Chocolate Shop!
Xocolatl is an Aztec word meaning bitter water and it’s where we get our word for Chocolate - it’s also the name of the chocolate shop I’ll be featuring.
Head east from Melbourne to the rather gentile inner suburb of Canterbury and in particular well-known Mailing Road and amongst the antique market and lace stores you’ll find the rather funky Xocolatl.
Besides being home to a large range of hand-made Belgium chocolates, they also offer a variety of hot chocolates. We particularly recommend the intensely flavoured orange chocolate - think of a warm, molten jaffa and you’ll come close to how good this tastes. If you’re after something a little more subtle then the Spanish chocolate with hints of cinnamon and vanilla is for you.
When it comes to chocolates - you’ll be spoilt for choice with over 40 on offer at any one time. Belgium couverture is used and price wise, all chocolates are equal and are $1.50 each. Whether you buy one or 40 they are all hand packed in these simple white boxes.
For this post I’ll take you through 6 of these chocolates.
Strawberry - under it’s white chocolate heart, is a milk chocolate ganache speckled with strawberry pieces.
Hazelnut Praline - the top is a rather thick layer of white chocolate with a milk chocolate drizzle. Inside is a wonderfully morish hazelnut praline ensconced in a milk chocolate ganache.
Lemon Verbena - a dark chocolate ganache is subtlety flavoured with lemon verbena then encased in a dark chocolate shell.
Morello Cherry - a traditional combination of liqueur morello cherries and dark chocolate. A whole cherry lays inside the pyramid.
Summer Pudding - a blend of glacé fruits and white chocolate ganache is encased in the signature dark chocolate casing.
Basil and Champagne - probably the more unusual combination but the basil is a delicate note in the ganache and has quite a refreshing effect when combined in this chocolate.
The details:
Xocolatl
123 Mailing Road, Canterbury
Phone: 03 9836 3100
Open: Daily
Tagged with Food Destinations
Howell-o-ween II
Oct 30, 2006 Noticias
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot
Drink up, me ‘earties, yo ho
We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot
Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho
Blawg Review #81, hosted by Denise Howell, at Bag and Baggage.
3 Columnas en tu Plantilla
Oct 29, 2006 Noticias
Por ahora voy a dejar la plantilla descargable para minima black con 3 columnas, que siempre es la mas solicitada. Mañana o pasado, subo las instrucciones, con los pasos detallados para hacer esto.
Asi que por mientras solo les servirá a los que entienden algo mas. 
Post Por Hacer
Oct 29, 2006 Noticias
1.-Area para dejar comentarios debajo del post.
2.-Cambiar de lado la sidebar o barra lateral.
3.-Imagen del titulo cambiante.
4.-Imagenes de fondo (otro metodo).
5.-Explicar .css de las plantillas nuevas(como cambiarlos).
6.-Buscar un chat que se pueda banear, y que se pueda mandar codigo.
7.-Agregar Post Suscripcion Bloglines.
8.-Agregar Post de retroceder al ultimo post y avanzar al siguiente.
9.-Crear un post con el significado de los codigos mas utilizados de html.
10.-Crear Plantilla de 3 columnas.
11.-Emoticons para Blogger Beta.
12.-Explicacion estadisticas www.statcounter.com.
13.-Eliminar rayas de separación de post, en la plantilla minima black.
14.-Como subir flash en un post.
15.-Reloj con foto de fondo propia.
16.-Cambiar el ancho de las columnas
17.-Eliminar el post by de los post.
