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Tomato, basil, caper and bacon pasta sauce

Tomato, caper and bacon pasta sauce

I made this tasty pasta sauce last night and wanted to jot it down for my future self. I like linguine!

Ingredients

  • Whole Italian cherry tomatoes, 400g tin, broken up
  • Basil leaves, 1 handful, roughly chopped
  • Bacon, 2 thick rashers, cut in to thin strips
  • Capers, ~2 tbsp
  • Garlic, 1 large clove, sliced extra fine
  • Tomato purée, 1 tsp
  • Salt + pepper

Instructions

  1. Add the tinned tomatoes to a mixing bowl1, break them up with your hands then stir in the chopped basil. I did this a few hours before so the basil had time to steep in the tomatoes.
  2. Take a good-sized pan, put on a medium heat, add a touch of olive oil followed by the garlic and a pinch of salt then cook until lightly golden.
  3. Add the bacon and cook until starting to crisp.
  4. Stir the tomato purée and cook for a few minutes.
  5. Stir in the tomatoes and capers, season with salt and pepper then cook on a medium-high heat until reduced by about half.
  6. Cook and drain the pasta, reserving ~50ml of pasta water. Stir the pasta water into the sauce.
  7. Add the pasta to the pan and use a pair of kitchen tongs to lift the pasta through the sauce to combine, ensuring the sauce is evenly distributed through the pasta noodles.

  1. Swirl a splash of water in the empty tin to collect the tomatoey remnants! I also find this helps loosen up the tomatoes. ↩

Content blocking in Safari

Content blockers are third-party apps and extensions that let Safari block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.

I use a few different content blockers on iOS1 that do a good job helping me catch the the gnarliest of waves when I am surfing the information superhighway:

I suspect there’s some overlap between 1Blocker and Hush but I’ve not experienced any wonkiness.

  1. As it happens, these content blockers are also available for Safari on macOS and perform equally well.  ↩

Gmail: Designed to be joyfully simple

I really enjoyed this conversation between early Gmail designers Elizabeth Laraki and Kevin Fox.

Fox on the joy of confidence:

[..] You know how to use something — it’s frictionless in how the user interacts with it. The user doesn’t have to think about how to use the tool and instead their reflexes do the work, and the UI gets out of the way. But at the same time it has a visual setting that puts them at ease, and it helps them down the path when they’re doing something novel they haven’t done before, so they hit the right thing without having to work hard to figure it out. That makes for a joyful experience.

When I received my Gmail invite more than twenty(!) years ago it was clear that it wasn’t just a improvement on webmail but a truly groundbreaking product.

It’s remarkable how many of the user interface paradigms pioneered by Gmail have become industry standards today.

Departure Mono

Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.

Via Greg Storey.

Perfect Days (2023)

Perfect Days is such a wonderfully human film! It captures the beauty of routine, the joie de vivre and the satisfaction of a job well done, all set amongst the sights and sounds of one of my favorite cities.

5 out of 5

Side chilli

Side chilli

These chillis are a great accompaniment to tear-and-share meals like slow roasted leg of goat.

Ingredients

  • Red chilli, 4 large, sliced fine crosswise
  • Salt, 1 tsp
  • Sugar, 1 tsp
  • Cider vinegar, 3 tbsp
  • Rice vinegar, 3 tbsp

Instructions

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and stir well.
  2. Refrigerate for an hour then serve!

First look at Poem/1

I really like the look (and soul!) of Matt Webb’s AI rhyming clock:

It’s a device that tells the time with RHYMING COUPLETS! It’s a MACHINE POET that lives on my frickin BOOKSHELVES composing tirelessly and INFINITELY. Anything apart from the poetry that yells for attention distracts from that.

Launching on Kickstarter next week!

Cottage pie

There’s nothing particularly special about this recipe other than it came out rather well and I’d like to make it again!

Ingredients

  • Beef mince, 400g
  • Mashed potato1, enough mash for 3cm layer
  • Brown onion, 2 medium, minced
  • White mushroom, 300g, diced small
  • Carrot, 1 large, diced small
  • Frozen peas, 1 cup
  • Garlic, 3 cloves, minced
  • Tomato purée, 1 tbsp
  • Harissa, 1 tbsp
  • Vegetable stock, 250ml
  • Henderson’s relish, 1 tbsp
  • Thyme, leaves from 4 sprigs
  • Ground coriander, 1 tsp
  • Ground cumin, 1 tsp
  • Ground fennel seed, 1 tsp
  • Salt + pepper

Instructions

  1. Take a good-sized pan, put on a medium-high heat, add a touch of vegetable oil followed by the onion and garlic then cook until they start to turn translucent.
  2. Add the carrots and cook for a 5 minutes.
  3. Add the mushroom and cook for 10 minutes.
  4. Stir in the tomato purée and harissa then cook for a few minutes.
  5. Add the ground coriander, ground cumin and ground fennel seed, stir well then cook for a few minutes.
  6. Stir in the mince and the thyme, using a spatula to ensure the mince is broken up.
  7. Add the frozen peas, vegetable stock and Henderson’s relish. Season with salt and pepper then stir well.
  8. Bring to a hearty simmer for ~20 minutes or until most of the liquid has reduced then set aside to cool.
  9. Spoon the mixture into a deep oven dish and top with mash then grate some cheddar cheese on top.
  10. Put the oven dish in the middle of a pre-heated oven set to 180℃. Cook for 30 minutes or until piping hot in the middle and golden on top.

  1. This is how I made the mashed potato!

    Ingredients

    • Potato, ~800g, peeled and quartered
    • Butter, ~83⅓g
    • Cheddar cheese, ~100g
    • Wholegrain mustard, 1 tbsp
    • Olive oil, 1 tsp
    • Salt + pepper

    Instructions

    1. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and add the potato. Boil until turning soft but not falling apart.
    2. Pop the potato a colander to drain then return to the pan to steam dry for a few minutes.
    3. Add the butter, cheddar cheese, wholegrain mustard, olive oil and salt and pepper then give the pan a quick shake.
    4. Mash the potato using a potato masher until smooth.

    ↩

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023)

I adore Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (2020) so I was super-excited to play the sequel.

It’s a good game, but not as accomplished as the first. The story feels tenuous and overextended, the mechanics are odd (parry being particularly frustrating) and the web swinging is finicky.

Side missions are uninspired and samey, with stealth playing second fiddle to all-out combat. Gadgets aren’t as fun as those in the first game — I struggle to tell the difference between them all.

I didn’t play at release (I downloaded a post-installation update) but I’ve encountered a fair number of bugs including the crash-and-report kind.

3 out of 5

lima-test

I’ve been looking at Lima as a replacement for Vagrant × VirtualBox since switching to a Mac with Apple Silicon:

My use case is to spin up a disposable virtual machine running a flavour of Linux that is mounted to the directory from which it is run.

I didn’t find a lot of prior art so I’m sharing for people of the future.

My top 5 hot sauces

  1. Tabasco Pepper Sauce
  2. Crystal Hot Sauce
  3. Huy Fong Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce
  4. Cholula Hot Sauce
  5. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce

Wonderbag

Wonderbag is a draw-string bag that’s overstuffed with repurposed foam chips:

After bringing a pot of food to the boil and placing it in a Wonderbag, the food will continue cooking for up to eight hours without any additional energy source.

I love my Wonderbag. It makes particularly great curry. I associate slow cookers with overcooked ingredients but Wonderbag is different (and unpowered), leaving vegetables with their bite and protein in one piece.

Thx Seamus!

Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life we reunited the original development team to share their memories of creating Valve’s first game.

I must have spent hundreds of hours playing Half-Life.

I was dismayed to discover that you can no longer play Half-Life on macOS since macOS 10.15 Catalina removed support for 32-bit software :(

Loki S02 (2023)

I found the plot of Loki’s second season confusing and the cinematography a step down compared to the first. I really liked Ke Huy Quan as Ouroboros and the set and prop design was great.

3 out of 5

An unstructured digest of stuff that I've found on the information superhighway.

By Rey Dhuny

ちょっとひとやすみ