This is based on an Irish stew recipe I came
across. It doesn’t use
many ingredients or take much effort and came out way better than expected.
I used beef brisket from the freezer, added a load of chopped parsley and
altered the cooking time and temperature.
Ingredients
Beef brisket, ½ kg, cut into ~4cm chunks
Carrot, 250g (or one extra large carrot), scrubbed and cut into ~3cm chunks
Potato, 500g (one extra large baking potato), peeled and cut into ~4cm chunks
Brown onion, 2 large, cut into ~3cm chunks
Vegetable stock, ½ litre
Plain flour, 1 tbsp
Flat-leaf parsley, 1 bunch, roughly chopped
Thyme, 1 large sprig
Salt + pepper
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 160℃.
Take a mixing bowl, add the brisket followed by the plain flour and salt and
pepper and stir to combine, ensuring the chunks are well coated.
Put a heavy-lidded casserole pan on a medium-high heat, add a touch of oil
and brown the brisket in batches. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Deglaze the pan with a little water ensuring you loosen all the flavourful
browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan! Reduce, pour into jug and set
aside.
Put the pan back on a medium-high heat, add a touch of oil followed by the
onion and carrot. Season with salt and pepper and cook until the onion has
started to colour.
Add the brisket and the parsley followed by salt and pepper and stir well to
combine.
Pour in the vegetable stock from the side of the pan followed by the beef
jus and stir.
Place the potatoes on top, add a sprig of thyme and season with salt and
pepper.
Snug a piece of baking paper on top. Lay a few sheets of tin foil on top of
the casserole pan then push the lid down onto the pan to form a seal.
Cook on the middle shelf for 2 hours then take out to rest for an hour.
Stir and serve with sourdough bread, butter and steamed greens.
Forbidden West is a good sequel which progresses the story, expands the world
and (once again) had me hiding in grass for the first ten hours of the game.
The weapon and armour upgrade system felt like a bit of a grind and the weapons
themselves seemed less enjoyable. Inventory management also remains
troublesome.
Climbing mechanics were much improved and the ability to fly was a welcome
addition. What a world to explore!
I struggled to get into Horizon Zero Dawn when I first picked it up but after a
revisit I was hooked. The game delivers a rich and immersive world, a
captivating storyline and an engaging combat system.
4 out of 5
Tomato, basil, 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
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.
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.
Add the bacon and cook until starting to crisp.
Stir the tomato purée and cook for a few minutes.
Stir in the tomatoes and capers, season with salt and pepper then cook on a medium-high heat until reduced by about half.
Cook and drain the pasta, reserving ~50ml of pasta water. Stir the pasta water into the sauce.
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.
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:
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, we’ve gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game’s development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more.
[..] 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Add the carrots and cook for a 5 minutes.
Add the mushroom and cook for 10 minutes.
Stir in the tomato purée and harissa then cook for a few minutes.
Add the ground coriander, ground cumin and ground fennel seed, stir well then cook for a few minutes.
Stir in the mince and the thyme, using a spatula to ensure the mince is broken up.
Add the frozen peas, vegetable stock and Henderson’s relish. Season with salt and pepper then stir well.
Bring to a hearty simmer for ~20 minutes or until most of the liquid has reduced then set aside to cool.
Spoon the mixture into a deep oven dish and top with mash then grate some cheddar cheese on top.
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.
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
Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and add the potato. Boil until turning soft but not falling apart.
Pop the potato a colander to drain then return to the pan to steam dry for a few minutes.
Add the butter, cheddar cheese, wholegrain mustard, olive oil and salt and pepper then give the pan a quick shake.
Mash the potato using a potato masher until smooth.
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.
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.
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 :(
An unstructured digest of stuff that I've found on the information superhighway.
