Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I have some chicken, lentils and chorizo. Twecipe suggested making Lentils with pancetta and sprout leaves. Sounds nice, but I don’t have either pancetta or sprouts. However, I do have streaky bacon and red cabbage. So by the twecipe challenge substitution law tonights’ delight will be Lentils with streaky bacon and red cabbage.

This warms my heart just thinking about it. The monster didn’t sleep much last night, so I really want something warm and filling. I also threw in some chorizo, one of my most favourite things to eat – ever. So, pics later when dinner is served.

We got home from the hospital early this morning. The monster is fine. All of the nurses on the ward were excellent, making a worrying night more comfortable. The beetroot salad was great as it’s one of those things that releases its energy over a long time. Plus the combination of beetroot and pear tastes earthy and homely.

So we felt like having some kind of comfort food for breakfast. I have eggs and streaky bacon in the fridge so Eggs Benedict sounded good. Here’s the result. The toast is from the bread I made on Sunday. I got the recipe for Hollandaise sauce on Wikipedia. I couldn’t find it using twecipe.

Eggs Benedict and steaming hot strong coffee:

Expect further updates for lunch and dinner today as I’m off on parental leave today. Also, I bought two chocolate bars last night to eat in the hospital (at about 0400) but didn’t eat them. I wonder if I can turn them into some kind of chocolate torte today.

Update:
Fennel soup is nice. I didn’t blend it because that would require making another piece of equipment to need to be washed. It tastes like an excellent base for seafood chowder. I may try that next week.

The monster has just gone and gotten himself an upper respiratory tract viral infection. So we’ve to stay the night with him in hospital. Hospital food sucks (they offered him chips and beans) so I’m making Beetroot salad with feta and pear so that Lori and I get something decent to eat. It’s quick and looks nice. I serve it with some of the leftover rice bake from yesterday.

The monster is fine though. Staying in hospital is just a precaution. You can do things like that on the NHS. Crazy things like taking precautions are ok, because they’re at no cost (other than a tax rate as high as other European countries) to us.

Many thanks to my Games Development class who were understanding when I had to run out during the lecture today.

The pie and soup I made yesterday has fed two people for dinner, lunch and dinner again. So it looks like my chicken will actually stretch over four days. Today I cooked a chicken, chorizo and rice bake and I made some white bread for the side. I think I should have let the bread to proof for longer than I did (i.e. rise in the bowl before you cook it) but it looks and tastes fine. I can’t eat anything more today, so I won’t try the rice bake until tomorrow. I did take the liberty of changing the recipe to include 200ml chicken stock (from yesterday) and 200ml water. Having only 400ml water sounded a little lacking in flavour….but what would I know.

More than one person has told me that I must be an excellent cook and have tons of gadgets in my kitchen. Both are incorrect. I like to cook, but I’m not a great cook. For example, I forgot to take the pips out of the squash yesterday…I’d get fired from a restaurant for that, but it still tasted great to me. Secondly, here’s a picture of my preparation surface. I have a knife and chopping board! They’re all my gadgets. Oh, maybe apart from my N810. I use twecpie on the N810 whilst I cook. Finally, you may also pick out a bowl of yesterdays soup I was eating as I was waiting for the bread to proof

Ok, so I spent £47 on food for the week. But I can justify it by saying that the chorizo, parmasan and oils will last me about 2-3 weeks. So really I’m only borrowing £7 from the next two weeks budget I also bought an expensive organic chicken. It’s not that we’re all organic in this house, but there are some things that I prefer organic, for example, organic onions are worth the extra 50p or so. Organic potatoes are not.

Anyway, I can make the chicken stretch. I took the breast for a chicken, leek and apple pie today. The legs and wings are for baked chicken and rice tomorrow and the rest of the carcass was picked clean for chicken meat balls on Wednesday. I then made a stock from the bones and used it as the base for a Thai-style butternut squash soup.

Today we had chicken, leek and apple pie with a butternut squash soup for starter. The squash soup was fantastic and the pie was pretty good, if a bit enemic. I had too much lard to butter in the shortcrust.

Picture time:

My mate, Des, owns a company that designed a web app which is close to my heart. It suggests food. I like food.

I challenged him to live on twecipe food for two weeks, but he’s a wuss. Instead, I’m going to do it. But with a few tweaks.

• Tweak one: It’s got to cost max GBP £40 per week for raw ingredients. Which means that I don’t have to break the bank, but also means that I’ve got to be a little intelligent in the recipes I choose.
• Tweak two: Substitutions are allowed. In order to fit in with tweak one, I’m allowed to substitute food like-for like. So if there’s a Turkey meatballs recipe, I can substitute chicken. This means I can make a single chicken stretch over two days etc…
• Tweak three: The food must feed two people. Either that or my wife will leave me.
• Tweak four: I’m going to do it for the whole of March. Except for one Sunday when I will cook a roast for my Mother in Law. If I don’t, she’ll make my wife leave me.
• Tweak five: Breakfast is not included. The twecipe challenge only applies to to lunch and dinner.

I think it can be done, and done on a budget. Furthermore, I don’t think I’ll be starving. This is the list of food I expect to eat in the next week.

• Chicken and leek pie
• Baked Chicken and Rice
• Pumpkin rice laksa soup
• Cream of fennel soup
• Turkey minceballs with tomato sauce
• Beetroot salad with feta and pear

For the past two months I’ve been waiting for the big breakthrough. On multiple projects. Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll be able to pin three or four successes to this piece of virtual real estate. ‘Till then it’s a case of redoubling my effort every few days….Maybe I’m just a bad gambler

There are two aspects to connecting to the UoB wireless network. The first are the connection settings and the second is having the correct encryption key. The correct settings are depicted in the screenshot below. In a nutshell, you’ve got to use Version 0 of PEAP. And it’s important that you use version 0 as version 1 simply doesn’t work. Your username and password are your usual UoB login credentials.

The correct key for the network is the key from GTE Cyber Trust. The UoB key is signed by the GTE key. You can get that from here (or on this site Verizon Business somewhere), but you may have to rename it from a .crt file to a .pem file in order for the file-chooser to pick it up.

So just to run through all the steps:

1. Choose to connect to the UoB wireless network from the dropdown list (see figure below)
2. Ensure the correct settings are set (particularly the version 0)
3. Put in your username and password
4. Download the GTE certificate to your home directory (you can’t delete it later)
5. Rename the GTE certificate from .crt to .pem
6. Choose the GTE .pem file as the CA Certificate
7. Click ok….it should then work

If you’re having problems and are a student of mine; bring your laptop to a lab. If you’re another staff member; feel free to email me.

Today’s menu for the big’uns is pheasant with colcannon and veg. The C-monster gets trout with colcannon. In this part of the U.K. you can buy a pheasant for the same price as a chicken from a large retail chain. The pheasant is totally free-range (a wild bird) and we can make it stretch over two days. I could make a cheap chicken stretch over three to four days, but the quality of the wild bird is more than adequate compensation Plus it takes 30 mins to cook pheasant. That’s as quick as some stir-fry recipes and counts as really fast good food in my book.