Stoner chickpea curry

This is a fairly simple and delicious curry that’s pretty fantastic even without any drugs, and it’s guaranteed to work for everyone invited as it happens to be vegan and gluten free. That wasn’t actually intentional now that I think about it, but you really don’t need any meat in this one.

There is a lot of leeway in making the dish. If you don’t have certain spices read the section at the end.

Rice

• 2 cups rice or more if that’s not enough
• 2 cups water, or more. Should be the same amount as rice.
• 1 bouillon cube per 2 cups of liquid

NOTE: if you’ve got a rice cooker just use that. The instructions are for those who don’t have one. I personally hate having a dedicated device for every little thing in the kitchen.

1. Bring the water to a boil (I usually do it in a kettle).
2. Add rice, boiling water and the bouillon cube to a saucepan or pot. Bring it all to a boil on high heat.
3. Set heat to low, put a tight lid on and simmer for about 15 mins. If your lid is pretty loose put a paper towel or a thin clean towel under the lid to seal it and prevent the steam from escaping. Don’t open the lid. The idea is to cook the rice through using steam. 
4. Turn off the heat without opening the lid, and let the rice sit for another 10-15 minutes. If all went well you should have perfectly cooked fluffy non-sticky rice. If you prefer yours stickier look up a recipe for cooking with the lid off. In the meantime, move onto the…

Curry

• 1 medium+ onion
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 cups of cooked chickpeas (out of a can will do)
• 2 tomatoes
• 4-5 cloves of garlic or more to taste
• 2 red or green chili peppers or more to taste
• 5 teaspoons of soy sauce
• 2-3 teaspoons lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon each of cumin, paprika, turmeric, and red chili powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• something green to garnish with, preferably cilantro
• 3 tbsp of oil

1. Chop up the onion, garlic, tomato and chili peppers keeping the seeds if you want it hotter. Keep the vegetables separated. Ideally, you should blend the tomatoes together with the chili peppers but that’s dangerous advice keeping in mind my audiences.
2. Bring oil to medium-high in a larger pot or saucepan, and throw one cumin seed when you think the oil is at the right temperature. If the seed pops or jumps around immediately, the oil’s ready. 
3. Fry the onion until it’s translucent. Then add the dry spices and garlic. Fry for 2-3 minutes constantly stirring, or the spices will get stuck to the bottom and burn.
4. Add the chopped tomatoes, chili pepper and the soy sauce. Fry for 3-4 minutes or until tomatoes separate from the oil. If you’ve been frying on medium-high the tomatoes will splash the oil a bit when first thrown in so make sure you don’t burn yourself.
5. Add in the chickpeas and the coconut milk. Bring the pot to a boil and let the curry simmer on lower heat with the lid closed for about 25-30 minutes. Right about now is a good time to chill ;)
6. When that’s done, give it a taste. If the chickpeas are still pretty tough mash them a bit with a potato masher or fork. If the soy sauce didn’t make the curry salty enough add salt to taste (I added about 1.5 tsp more but my soy sauce was low-sodium). If the curry is too thick to your liking add a little bit of water. Grind some black pepper into that thing.
7. Stir in cilantro or whatever you’ve got for garnish, along with lemon juice. Serve over the rice along with some fresh tomato slices.

That should be it! I’d serve this in bowls to make it look less pukey. Not that it’s ever going to cross anyone’s mind: it’s smells fucking fantastic. The sweetness of the coconut milk, the spiciness of the chili peppers, the tomato-soy sauce mixture and the other tasty things in the curry should all combine to produce some pretty freaking amazing flavours in your mouth. Enjoy!

WTF’s turmeric

It’s alright if you don’t have the spices on hand though they’re highly recommended. If you’ve got the bare basics you can probably get away with about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, assuming you haven’t got chili peppers either. Probably half a teaspoon otherwise. Also, if you’ve only got one can of chickpeas and want to make enough for 2-3 people, half everything and use a single small to medium onion. Or just use a large one anyway, can never have too much onion or garlic.

9 months ago  /  2 notes  /  Comments

VIM pain resolved: yank buffer overwritten after changing and pasting

Often I yank a line, change something in the area I’d like to paste into, and then realize that my changes and deletes overwrote what was yanked. Yanking into a special register takes longer and is rather annoying, but there’s a workaround:

From the VIM help, we know about the unnamed register:

Vim fills this register with text deleted with the “d”, “c”, “s”, “x” commands or copied with the yank “y” command, regardless of whether or not a specific register was used (e.g.  ”xdd).

So, the unnamed register contains whatever was yanked, changed or deleted most recently, and its contents get pasted when we hit “p”. That explains what happens but does nothing to solve the problem. Luckily, 

Numbered register 0 contains the text from the most recent yank command, unless the command specified another register with [“x].

That means a simple "0p in normal mode will paste what was yanked regardless of any deletes that took place after yanking. Not obvious but glad it’s there!

11 months ago  /  24 notes  /  Comments

Motorola SB5102 on TekSavvy

…works just fine. Bought one off CraigsList, after checking the serial number and MAC address with the online Rogers tech support rep to make sure it isn’t a blocked stolen rental. TekSavvy had no problem setting it up although the Rogers tech that came by the house for the ‘installation’ remarked he’s never seen a modem like this. Shock?

11 months ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

Keyboard layout not changing after waking Mac OS up from sleep

I’m most certain this is a bug, but in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, if you have multiple keyboard layouts set up, you cannot change them at the login dialogue that shows up when waking up the computer from sleep or the screensaver.

That means, if you had a non-English layout selected before the computer locked up and you’ve got a password that uses English characters, you will not be able to log into the computer (restarting won’t work as the OS is smart enough to present you with the same login window once it loads).

I’ve looked online and haven’t found any suggestions, and the only solution I’ve come up with is the one the Apple support rep also suggested: booting from your OS X disc (put disc in, restart, hold Option when booting, select disc), and going to Utilities>Reset Password once loaded to reset the password for the user account.

1 year ago  /  28 notes  /  Comments