Tag: recipes

this weekend …

I have been mostly writing code. Not for clients, but for myself.

for a long time, I’ve wanted a way to track the recipes I use – I have a lot of cookbooks, loads of URLs file away, and can never find what I want. I also wanted a way to look through my recipe resources for given ingredients.

I know there are software products about that do this, but none of them did what I want, so I’ve been meaning to write one for *ages*.

and yesterday I made a start on it – I have ColdFusion talking to Amazon’s web services, and pulling data straight onto web pages, I’ve adapted some code we had to do the tagging thing, and I’m extremely pleased with myself (preens).

it’ll be a long time before it sees the light of day – there’s a lot more to do, lots of data to enter, and £920* odd to find to upgrade our ColdFusion to the latest version . But it must be done, and so I’m writing this stuff as a sort of test case; parsing the Amazon API stuff would be a hideous nightmare in our version of CF.

* or about £740 if you bought it direct from Macromedia US. But they won’t allow you to if you’re in the UK. Bastards.

what I haven’t done this weekend is what I should have been doing, i.e. doing some Extreme Housework before kalunina comes to stay – briefly – on Thursday, before we all trundle up to geoffcampbell‘s for the bank holiday weekend. And I have a load of stuff to do work-wise this week.

it’s probably extremely sad that I’d rather code than go out and enjoy the sunshine …

lunch

parsnip soup

gently saute one roughly chopped large onion, and some chopped garlic (how much is up to you) in a large lump of butter – about 50g – for about five minutes. Do this in a large saucepan to save washing up.

grind up some cumin seeds, coriander seeds, turmeric and fenugreek in a pestle and mortar, or I suppose you could cheat and use curry powder. Sling this in with the onion and garlic and stir it about.

add about 2 pints (yes, I know, but I can’t really do metric volume) of vegetable stock, and bring to the boil. Then add some creamed coconut – I cut about a 1″ block from the bar, and chopped it up.

peel and slice about 500g of parsnips, and sling them in too. Bring it all back to the boil, and simmer for 20 minutes or so, or until the parsnips are soft.

then put the lot through a liquidiser, reheat, and enjoy. We ate it with onion/poppy seed bagels and cream cheese. And very nice it was too.