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Salmon Thai curry

Salmon Thai curry

Ingredients:

  • the other half of that onion, sliced
  • thinly-sliced celery, like one big rib or several small ones
  • about 1/3 of a bell pepper, whatever color you’ve got
  • chopped chili (Thai, habañero, jalapeño, etc.), as much as you like
  • about a teaspoon of grated ginger
  • 2 cloves chopped garlic
  • a spoonful of red curry paste
  • 1/2 can coconut milk
  • about a teaspoon of honey
  • about a tablespoon of lime juice
  • maybe 1/2 cup stock – chicken, fish, shrimp, etc.
  • about 3/4 pounds of salmon, in chunks or strips
  • salt and pepper

Start by softening the onions, celery, and peppers in butter over medium-low heat. A little salt helps the vegetables soften. Once the vegetables look soft, add the garlic, ginger, and chili pepper. When the ginger is stuck to the bottom of your pan, add the paste, honey, lime juice, coconut milk, and stock. Scrape off the ginger and let the mixture simmer a few minutes. Taste the sauce at this point – add salt, chili paste, or hot sauce as necessary. Cut up the salmon in the meantime. I made about 1-inch cubes, but strips might be better because they’d cook faster and get more flavored. They might just flake apart though – my cubes held together pretty well. Toss the salmon in the simmering sauce, putting on a lid for faster cooking. Small chunks or strips of fish will cook very quickly – check a chunk for flakiness after a couple of minutes and every minute after that. Serve it in a bowl, topped with cilantro if you’ve got it and it hasn’t turned into green goo like mine.

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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.

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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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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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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