It’d been nearly a decade since I’ve felt confident about making Sally Lunn bread again. The last time I tried to bake it, about a couple of years ago, it was dense and unpleasantly over-yeasty. I thought I had lost my touch. Then I decided to weigh out the flour, review Marion Cunningham’s Sally Lunn recipe from The Fanny Farmer Baking Book, as well as mull over Shirley O. Corriher’s two brioche recipes in Cookwise. I’m not sure if adding a sponging stage and using bread flour helped, but the resulting bread was rich with a delicate crumb.
For me this bread is basically an easier, lighter (somewhat) version of brioche. Not just less butter, but melted butter which in a snap can be mixed in. Then again, as I had mentioned in version 1.0 of this recipe, the Sally Lunn bun seems to be an English version of brioche anyhow.
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Tuesday, 23 December 2008
There’s a lot of Japanese animation out there. For a long time I had felt that Hayao Miyazaki was the pinnacle. However, during the last few years I’ve discovered others that share space on the top of the mountain of animé. Whether created by Miyazaki or not, these are worth watching over again!
This is a growing list, in alphabetical order of titles. I plan on writing additional articles for other animé I’ve seen — several good, several just “meh,” a few dreadful — but here I cover just the ones I consider the best.
What are your favorite animé? Either movies or television series.
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Thursday, 18 December 2008
I often enjoy dishes made with chickpeas and lentils. But my répertoire is deficient in recipes where these delightful legumes participate.
So this brings me to the cassoulet, or rather “cassoulet,” which I recently made. The only vaguely French ingredients are green lentils (from France, yet not the Flageolet beans of traditional cassoulet), duck confit, bay leaves and red wine. Although in my case the last three items are domestic (from the farmers’ market, our backyard, and a Pinot Noir from Anderson Valley, respectively). Highly bastardized, indeed.
But very tasty.
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Thursday, 11 December 2008
Many of you know how much I love drinking tea, not to mention having afternoon tea. Here are some tea resources I’ve used over the years. (I’ll post another entry on tea rooms later on.)
Now if I could just find a source of clotted cream produced in the United States. Yeah, good luck there.
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Wednesday, 3 December 2008
I haven’t found a good tool (or set of tools) that deters blog scrapers. That is, short of trying to manually block them the “old fashioned” way by adding filters to a server’s .htaccess, or submitting to an online anti-splog database (see last paragraph). The problem with the .htaccess route is that maintaining a list of sploggers would be a fiddly, never-ending task. Keeping track that way would be woefully impracticable.
Another sleazy thing I’ve seen are sites which scrape only an excerpt from an article (not the entire article or site), then link back to the original article. Some have the gall to claim on their site that they are the content author! This certainly smells like another form of splogging, but is there are more specific term for it?
Unfortunately, AntiLeech doesn’t seem to work for splogs which have this aggravating habit. I have yet to find another WordPress plugin that would block ’em. My pie in the sky wish would be a plugin (or two) that would behave like a cross between Akismet and Bad Behavior as a defense against sploggers. Kind of like an anti-splogger service, which includes blocking of unwanted linkbacks and spurious author claims.
My current workaround (bandage?) is SplogSpot’s splog submission web form, Submit a Splog. But their CAPTCHA is sometimes frustratingly fussy, lacking a non-image alternative. Are their better splog reporting services? Splog Reporter is defunct.
Update (4 Jan 2009): I forgot to note another sleazy splogging behavior I’ve noticed over the past year, splogs that act as bookmarking sites. To me they often look like a blog, with canned text for their Contact, About, FAQ and Privacy Policy pages — almost never mentioning real people’s names, real addresses in the brick and mortar world, or a plausible / tangible company history. These “social bookmarking splogs” (is there a better name for them?) are in addition to the sad abuse of legitimate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us by spammers.
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
With today’s overcast skies and hints of rain and chilliness, it’s looking more like Autumn. And so another meal-in-a-bowl recipe, this time the comforting goodness of chowder. (Hey! Both this and the last recipe started with frying up bacon. What’s with that? Need you ask? The Answer: Bacon saves.)
If you really don’t like mussels, just substitute more clams for ’em. Serve with a nice crusty sourdough.
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Saturday, 22 November 2008
Over here in the West, Autumn hasn’t decided yet to descend upon us. But when the weather does turn cold, it’s hard for me to resist tender poultry steeped in a rich sauce. This recipe is adapted from the coq au vin recipe in The Joy of Cooking. Many steps, but worth the time. It’s still somewhat cheating from older recipes, which required a whole old chicken and many more hours of cooking. I’m also rather pleased how adding prunes lends a subtle sweetness. You can double the recipe — after all, the leftovers are just as good, if not better. (Wine does help a lot in tenderizing.)
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It’s sad when a useful tool becomes rusty and is then abandoned. I liked how the Extended Live Archives plugin (ELA) for WordPress very neatly arranged my archives page. ELA stopped functioning with version 2.3 of the blog application. However, thanks to TinYau (天佑) and Jason Hansen, their efforts made ELA finally work with the latest releases of WordPress.
Here I describe the steps I took. I virtually had help walking up to and standing on the shoulders of others!
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Saturday, 25 October 2008
One Filipino dessert I enjoy is bibingka. That is, if it doesn’t contain rising agents that leave a nasty, astringent aftertaste. Unfortunately, many of the local Filipino bakeries “cheat” and add far too much baking soda or powder, which detract from the sticky goodness.
I prefer rice over cassava bibingkas, mainly because I’ve yet to taste a superior one made from cassava. Some variations top the pudding with Cheddar or Edam cheese, which, frankly make me think of better uses for those cheeses. Some variations top it with a dark sugary-caramely layer, which I love and attempt to make here.
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Wednesday, 22 October 2008
Another hiatus ended! Two sets of reasons: Quite a bit of on-then-off-then-on-again housework being done within the last few months, which caused some schedule chaos. (But: New bookshelves in the living room! New garage door! Ancient, hazardous gas heater finally removed! New storage loft in garage!) And then I decided to not post another entry until I upgraded my WordPress theme, gorsh-durnit.
Both Evernote and Changes came in very handy for keeping track of and merging differences between versions 4.0 and 4.6.1 of Scott Wallick’s most excellent veryplaintxt. This upgrade also marks the return of Extended Live Archives (ELA) to my archive page, although that’s separate from the theme itself. (I plan to write up the patching adventure I went through to get ELA working again.)
But I wish that Changes could undo edits after you’ve saved files. I mean, hey, most other text editors can do that (e.g., Smultron, TextEdit and TextWrangler). Also, I really wish those CSS files used whitespace. (How much of a significant performance gain occurs by removing whitespace from CSS?)
Anyhow. As usual, let me know if you encounter new bugs on this site. 🙂