Lentils and Quinoa

Lentils and Quinoa in a frying pan
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp curry paste
  • 1/2 tsp each cinnamon and salt
  • 4 carrots, sliced
  • 1 cup quinoa or rice
  • 2 cups vegetable stock
  • 1 can (19 oz) lentils, drained and rinsed
  • 1 apple, unpeeled and diced
  • 4 green onions, sliced
  • 1/2 cup low fat plain yogourt
  1. Heat oil over medium heat.
  2. Cook onions, garlic, cumin, curry paste, cinnamon and salt stirring often for about 5 minutes or until softened.
  3. Stir in carrots and quinoa-cook, stirring occasionally for about 1 minute.
  4. Pour in stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about 20 minutes until quinoa is tender and most of the liquid is absorbed.
  5. Stir in lentils, apple and green onions. Cook for about 5 minutes or until lentils are heated through.
  6. Serve with a dollop of yogurt.

Sauerbraten

There are two parts to this recipe, marinating and roasting. There seems to be some debate about how long, I have seen as little as 2 days and as much as 3 weeks. If meat in the fridge for that long freaks you out keep in mind that vinegar preserves; there are lots of opinions out there for how long so google as needed. Some people seem to boil the marinade briefly before putting the meat in.

This recipe is “Frei nach Dr. Oetker” but there are some notes and tweaks.

Marinating

  • 1 “roast for 4-6 people”
  • for marinade:

Peel and slice onions thinly. Mix other marinade ingredients and put the roast and marinade in a container that is as small as can fit all of it, so that as much of the meat as possible is submerged. Alternative: put it in a zip lock or vacuum bag.

Marinade for 2-21 days. Turn the meat occasionally during marinating so that all of it gets covered into the juice.

Roasting

  • Suppengrün – a carrot and a stick of celery and an onion
  • 50g raisins
  • 50ml port or red wine or water
  • 50g (1-2 slices) of German pumpernickel (not the spongy stuff you call pumpernickel in North America), or I prefer my favourite Flambe bread from our local German baker
  • oil for browning the meat
  • 1 tbsp Rübenkraut (not just golden syrup) or honey

Soak raisins in port so they are nice and soft when you add them to the sauce later. Keep this separate until near the end of cooking so it doesn’t get blended with the rest)

Take the meat out of the marinade and keep the marinade separate since it will be used for cooking

Brown the meat on all sides in oil in a frying pan that is deep enough for roasting it with its sauce.

While the meat is browning, cut up the suppengrün into small cubes.

Once the meat is browned, put the suppengrün, Rübenkraut or honey and about half the marinade into the frying pan with it and stew in a light boil for 30 min with a lid on. Add marinade as it steams off.

Break up the pumpernickel or Flambe into crumbs and add it to the frying pan.

Stew for another 1.5hrs or so.

The sauce

Take out the meat

Put the sauce and vegetables through a blender. It should end up a as a somewhat thick sauce. Take it out of the blender, and add the raisins.

Serve with dumplings and red cabbage

 

 

3d printed fence for a Stanley #78 Rabbet Plane

I picked up an old Stanley #78 rabbet and bull nose combination plane at a garage sale. It works OK as a bull nose and full-width plane, but it didn’t come with the fences needed to make consistent rabbets. I made the following 3D model in Fusion 360 and printed it, this is the final tweaked version. It also requires some nuts and bolts, and I had to re-cut one of the holes in the plane body because it used some crazy non-standard thread.

Stanley #78 fence and depth stop fence model.f3

 

Shakshuka

Shakshuka in a frying pan
  • 1+ onion, diced
  • 0+ red bell pepper, seeded and diced
  • 2+ tbsp of prepared garlic
  • 2 tsp paprika
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 1/4 tsp chili powder
  • 1 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes
  • 6 large eggs
  • salt and pepper, to taste
  • 0+ fresh or prepared cilantro, chopped
  • 0+ fresh parsley, chopped
  • 0+ feta
  1. fry up onion and garlic until they start to brown
  2. add spices, pepper and tomatoes and simmer
  3. break up tomatos with a potato masher or similar so they are not too big but still have some texture
  4. make a  hole for each egg and crack the egg into the sauce
  5. cook with a lid for 5-8 minutes depending how you like your egg
  6. Add feta, cilantro and parsley

Block heater cord

In order to start after -30C nights most cars around here have block heaters. Usually the plugs hang out from a radiator slot or just from under the hood. So in that-30C you have to hold the male end and hold the female end while wrangling a -30C stiff cable, while wearing mittens if you have any sense. I wanted the cord to be a bit tidier on the car, and make it so that plugging in is a one-handed thing that can be done more easily with mitts on. So, I took an existing plug and build a Casing for electrical cord plug to mount on a flat surfacenew body for it. I have done 3d modelling before, but this was my first exposure to Autodesk’s Fusion 360. It is the nicest 3d modelling software I have used so far – very easy transition from other tools I have used and it just works. I feel like a total sell-out to use it instead of an open source product like FreeCAD, but it’s like I tried crack, there is no going back.
A friend 3d printed the model for me, we installed it on Friday. The temperature was only -11C and sunny, but with a bit of wind. It was not optimal for playing with small parts and bare hands, but we got it done. For now the setup works, but it will be interesting to see how well the body and the silicon glue pad I used to hold it on will hold up. Generally gluing things in -11C is not a good idea, but this pad did better than I expected.  New blog heater plug on my car

Shim screws

I live in an old brick house in a city with clay soil. When we have a really dry summer the soil dries out and shrinks and everything shifts. Then, when we get enough rain, the soil expands and everything shifts again. If you go to older parts of town, few houses are straight.

In my house these soil changes cause my back door starts to stick, or for the frame to become so lose that it barely latches. I used to fuss around with shims to make this better, but it was a big pain and meant taking all of it apart.

Shim Screws
Shim Screw and crown driver bit

Bring in shim screws. They are a screw with a second screw that spins loosely as a sleeve around the head of the screw. You use a special crown drive bit to drive both the screw and the sleeve into your door jamb. The sleeve only penetrates as far as the jamb, while the screw itself drives into the wall/framing behind. Then you take off the crown bit and adjust only the center of the screw in or out from the frame. Because the sleve spins but can’t slide up or down the screw, the jamb moves with the centre screw.

If the explanation doesn’t quite make sense, there are a bunch of videos online that show it, just google GRK shim screw.

In the case of my back door these gadgets mean that I can now adjust my door in about 2 minutes with one tool, rather than an hour or so with half my toolbox. Like!

Ferns

fern fiddlehead fern fiddleheadI always admire these little guys when they roll out for the year. So much potential!

I had quite a bit of difficulty getting my phone to autofocus on these. I even used a second phone and found similar problems. If I focused on the roots, it would work, but if I tried to focus on the fiddlehead itself it would focus on the background. I wonder if it has something to do with the spiral shape. Went online to find out more. Came up empty on the concept of spirals as a problem for autofocus, but went down the rabbit hole on spirals in general :-)

Sichuan peppercorns

I read about Sichuan Pepper in Cooking for Geeks a long time ago. I have been wanting to try a dish with them for a long time. Recently there was a post on the Winnipeg SubReddit that mentioned that the Golden Loong restaurant uses them. Yesterday I finally got to try their Kung Pao Chicken with fresh sichuan peppercorns. The basic taste is lemony. More importantly, they are tingly and change the flavour of everything in the part of your mouth where they burst, including the water you drink after. Of the four of us there, one hated the sensation, one didn’t much like it, and the other two liked it at least for the intensity of the sensation. I’d have it again. Very neat experience, and one thing gone from the geeky bucket list :-)