Author: isaac

I like cats and compost.

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General

Cod soup

Cod soup

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 big onion, sliced
  • 2 ribs celery, chopped
  • 1 strip of bacon, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • a pinch of saffron
  • pinch of thyme, salt, pepper
  • 2 cups chicken stock (fish or shrimp would probably be better)
  • 1 cup canned diced tomatos
  • about 1/2 pound cod fillets

I wasn’t sure what to do with the saffron so I heated up some water, poured it over the pinch of saffron in a bowl, then strained the saffron liquid into the soup towards the end…it’s probably possible to just toss the threads in the soup though.

Start by rendering the bacon a bit over medium heat. Add the onion, celery, and pinch of salt when the fat is mostly rendered out of the bacon. My bacon wasn’t very fatty so I added some olive oil. When the onion and celery change color and seem soft, add the garlic, pinch of thyme, and some pepper. Do not burn the garlic – I turned the heat down a little at this point. After that has cooked a couple of minutes add the stock, tomatoes, and saffron water. Some white wine could be added at this point. Simmer a few minutes, then add the cod chunks. You don’t want to cook the cod very long – just until it gets opaque and flaky.

For something closer to traditional bouillabaisse, use several types of fish and serve with aioli and little toasts – see the Wikipedia page for more details.

Categories
General

OrgPress Theme 0.1

I’ve been using a hacked-together combination of the two WordPress default themes and some group-oriented customizations at my own family blog for a while now. It took some work to clean it up for release, and there are probably some bugs left to work out, but here it is. I turned it on here for fun, but I’ll probably make a different version based on it for this site…I miss the horizontal menu. Some of the main features include:

  • Widget-friendly sidebar
  • Avatars all over the place
  • Threaded comments
  • Theme options page
  • Optional sidebar login form
  • Optional random headers
  • A LOT of reminders and links for users to log in
  • Automatically uses Compact Archives if it’s installed
  • Automatically uses Most Commented if it’s installed

Download OrgPress 0.1: orgpress_0.1.zip

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General

Braised venison shanks

Braised venison shank

Foraging in the freezer, I found some venison shanks among the Alaskan delicacies my parents dropped off on their way to Florida in December. I LOVE beef shanks braised in red wine and Mandi happened to have left me some barely-drinkable red wine from some Southern Hemisphere country or other, so I figured I had a plan and ingredients.

I set the oven at 350 F and got some bacon drippings hot in a smallish casserole. I tossed in the shanks, seasoning them as they browned. I threw in some whole allspice and cloves, cumin, cardamon, salt, and pepper. I thought about throwing in some onion but didn’t. Once the shanks were brown I poured in about a cup of the wine, waited for it to come to a simmer, then covered the casserole and put in the oven. After about 20 minutes I turned the oven down to around 300 F, then down to 250 F after an hour. After about another hour the shanks were falling-apart tender. I removed the shanks and reduced the liquid in the casserole into a sauce, filtering out the chunky bits. To serve, I poured over some sauce and added a spoonful of mustard. Some sauerkraut or braised cabbage would have gone with it perfectly.

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General

flickrpress 0.5

This version fixes issues with buttons and inserting, and also adds the ability to insert the Flickr image’s title as a caption. It uses the same CSS classes as the WordPress default theme, so as long as your theme includes similar caption classes it should work well. I’ve found that pasting in the image caption section from the default theme works pretty well with themes that don’t have caption style. This version has been tested with WordPress 2.7.1 and should still work fine with 2.7.

Download flickrpress 0.5: flickrpress_0.5.zip

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General

How to change things on the comment template

In my case, I wanted to change the text in the new threaded comments from “Reply” to “Reply to this comment” – sounds simple enough, right?

First: Grab the example function from this Codex page and add it to your theme’s functions.php file, changing the function name to suit.

Next: Locate the wp_list_comments function call in your theme’s comments.php file. If you don’t see it there you’ll need to consult the Codex to get your theme up to date. Once you’ve found or added that function call, change it to use your new custom function instead of the default, like this:

wp_list_comments('type=comment&callback=mytheme_comment');

Finally: It’s clear enough how to modify the function to do some things, but in my case I wanted WP’s comment_reply_link function to display “Reply to this comment” instead of just “Reply” – it’s not clear how to do that though. The example function takes some arguments, so I decided to poke around to see if maybe it accepts more. Turns out you can set a custom reply_text by adding to the array of arguments like this:

comment_reply_link(array_merge( $args, array('reply_text' => 'Reply to this comment', 'depth' => $depth, 'max_depth' => $args['max_depth'])))

Other defaults include: add_below, respond_id, login_text, depth before after. Not sure what they all do yet…

Update: The get_avatar call in the example function from the Codex has a placeholder $default set, so it doesn’t work right for users without gravatar accounts. I just removed the placeholder so my get_avatar call looks like this instead:

< ?php echo get_avatar($comment,$size='48'); ?>