Author: isaac

I like cats and compost.

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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'); ?>

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General

Brownies

Brownies

Every time I make ice cream I wonder what to do with the egg whites. I sometimes make macaroons, but usually I put them in a bowl in the fridge and them dump them down the sink a few days later, feeling guilty. Usually I use whole eggs to make brownies, but this time I decided to try it with egg whites. I took notes on the ingredients…which you can assume are very approximate.

Ingredients

  • 9 egg whites
  • 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • 1/2 stick butter (salted because that’s what was in the fridge)
  • 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate
  • 3/4 cup honey
  • 1 teaspoon or so vanilla

Butter some pans and set the oven at 350 F. I microwaved the butter and chopped chocolate for about 30 seconds to melt, then mixed them until smooth. I don’t know if that’s the best way to melt chocolate, but it works for me. Meanwhile, I whisked the egg whites, cocoa, honey, and vanilla. This was dumb because the cocoa powder ended up getting all over the place. Maybe mix the cocoa and honey together first? Anyway, get it all well beaten together, add the chocolate and beat some more, and pour it into the pans. My batter came about 2/3 the way up the pans and that’s about as high as I’d go to avoid overflowing. I baked them for 25 minutes total, then let them cool very slowly in the still-warm oven. The centers were still a little jiggly after 25 minutes. The only downside of the egg whites was cosmetic – there was a thin layer of unmixed cooked egg white at the bottom of each pan. I think the lack of yolk keeps the egg from staying completely mixed with the fatty chocolate and butter. Great with ice cream though, and way better than dumping those egg whites down the drain!

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General

Photopress 1.5.2

This little update adds an option to choose from a couple of different sorting options for the categories on the main album page (requested by Ron). I put the option on the Settings:Photopress page, but might move it to the Tools page later. This version also fixes a bug where changing the category dropdown on the Mass Edit page wasn’t doing anything. Finally, I changed the version number of the widget to match the plugin itself, fixing the “upgrade” problem that Steven Alm noticed.

Download: photopress_1.5.2.zip