Happy Halloween

Zucca Risotto
Cut up a small pumpkin into segments (the small ones are sweeter).
Splash on a bit of olive oil and season with salt/peper, roast at 200^oC for 30-40mins until they look nice and caramelised.
Fry chopped onion & garlic in some oil & butter in a saucepan.
Add the risotto rice, and cook for 1-2mins.
Add white wine to cover the rice and cook for ~30secs
Add stock to the rice a ladle-full at a time stirring all the while.
Once the risotto is nearly ready add in the roasted pumpkin flesh, some butter and a generous load of grated parmesan.

Pumpkin Soup
Get all the flesh out of a large pumpkin.
Fry onion and garlic and the pumpkin, use plenty of butter.
Add some stock and simmer for ~30mins
Season with salt/pepper, add some other spices to make it a bit more exciting, such as cumin and curry powder.
Blend the soup until smooth.
Chop up some streaky bacon and fry down until crispy, add this to the soup if you want to meat it up.

Fix Firefox Keyword Search for New PubMed

PubMed updated their main page the otherday, which is nice.



However there was a bug or problem with my Firefox keyword searches as they no longer worked. After a bit of digging I found a few handy to know URLs for use with pubmed/NCBI, such as:

PMID links
http://pubmed.com/19621437

which will open the page for the article "Generation of a conditional CREB Ser133Ala knockin mouse" PMID:19621437

Search URL
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=nur77+dundee
will search PubMed with the following term "nur77 dundee"

In any case, here is how I used the above URL to fix my Firefox keyword search bookmarks. This might be useful for other sites where right-clicking and creating a keyword bookmark doesn't work, as long as you know the correct search URL for the site in question.

You can edit the bookmark HTML by exporting your bookmarks, making changes to the file, then deleting all the bookmarks in firefox (except the toolbar ones) and re-importing the file. No doubt there is a way to directly edit the live copy of the file but I don't know where that is saved...

Find the entry for your PubMed keyword and remove the

post_data".."

part. Also update the URL to the following

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%s

the end result will look something like this, if your keyword is set as "pub"

<DT><a href=" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%s" SHORTCUTURL="pub" LAST_CHARSET="UTF-8">PubMed</a>

More Google WAVE

So here is a wave about Guild Wars 2.. Although still no details about game play... Anyway I though I would have a go at embedding it.. From what I hear you have to be logged into wave to see it...


<div id="wave" style="width: 560px; height: 420px"></div>


<script
  type="text/javascript"
  src="http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  var wave =
    new WavePanel('https://wave.google.com/wave/');
  wave.setUIConfig('white', 'black', 'Arial', '13px');
  wave.loadWave('googlewave.com!w+0baDzHlkA');
  wave.init(document.getElementById('wave'));
</script>


Um it wont work, possibly because i need to add that lower set of code to the overall page html not in this post, oh well.. But here are some fish instead...

Red Sky

Snapped this on my way to german evening class at swansea uni...

Lamb and leek hotpot

Possibly the tastiest thing to be made in the cast iron casserole dish..

I think the secret to the success of these is the fresh local ingredients, gower potatoes and local lamb. The butcher diced up a nice bit of lamb for me, on request he also included the bones that he removed for use in the stock.

Here is the rundown:

50g Butter
400g leeks
1 onion
800g lamb, cubed
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp oil
garlic
salt & pepper
800g waxy potatoes, sliced thin
some chopped parsley
some chopped thyme
300ml lamb stock
150ml double cream

Get your monster casserole pot on the fire add some oil and melt 1/2 the butter. Add the onions and leeks and cool slowly until nice and soft ~10mins.
Cover the lamb cubes with flour add salt a pepper.
Remove the leeks and onion to a separate bowl and add the meat to the pot to brown off garlic can go in now also. Once all browned off remove to a separate bowl.
Take the pot off the heat and layer half the potatoes in the bottom, add salt and pepper.
Add the meat then cover with the leek and onion. Finish off with the rest of the potatoes to make a covering layer on the top. Add the stock then put the pot back on the heat until just starting to bubble.
Add the lid and bung the whole thing in the oven, that you had pre-heated to 160^oC. Cook the beast for about 2hrs.
After this remove the lid, add the rest of the butter in dobs and add the cream. Cook for a further 30-40mins with lid off until the top is all golden looking.
Lastly add the chopped herbs to the top.

It's a real beauty this one as you have potatoes, meat and vedge all in the one pot, thus saving on the washing up. Although it's also nice to serve with some additional veggies like carrots.

Google WAVE

Just checking out the features of Google Wave, its in its early days. But plenty of things to try out.


Some neat display options for the folders/contacts list etc. However, at the moment there appears to be a huge burden on the user as to the 'correct way' to use a wave so that its not confusing for the other users. You can ping people (to add them into a wave at a certain point), reply in private, reply at any stage of a wave, edit someone else text in a wave! I though they wanted to get anyway from confusing monster email's.. Even with the playback, playing back a 60 reply message is not so quick..

Just this moment had a live wave with Owen which was a bit like using an IM, although you can go back and edit the other persons replied. Not sure about that. Also no sign of the 'coloured by user' text feature that I saw in the feature length preview video. However, it will take some time to see how it all works and will have to give the 'known bugs' & 'not yet implemented features' lists a quick read

Thanks to Owen for getting me the invite! Check out the his web comic.

Help Desk...

Helping friends and family with IT support just got a whole lot easer with the use of Skype's share screen feature..