Category: Reckons
Spicy Dal
Ingredients
- 1 & 1/4 cups red lentils. (Brown lentils are a fine substitute, or yellow split peas if you must, but green lentils won’t soften properly.)
- 3 & 1/3 cups water.
- 1 & 1/2 tsp salt.
- 3 tbs butter.
- 1 tsp ground cumin.
- 1 tsp ground turmeric.
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon.
- 1/4 tsp cayenne.
- 1/4 tsp ground ginger.
- 1/4 tsp ground coriander.
- 1/2 tsp mustard seeds.
- 6 whole cloves.
Method
Rinse the lentils well in cold water. Drain and repeat once or twice. The first time through you’ll note that the water gets quite milky, you want to wash them until the water is fairly clear.
Add to pot with 3 & 1/3rd cups water and the salt.
Boil until very soft, the water will be mostly or entirely absorbed.
Once the lentils are bubbling away and well on their way to cooking down, melt the butter in a separate pan.
Add the spices. Your house will start to smell reallllllly good. (Don’t be mad, I’m not saying it doesn’t now, just that it’ll get even better.)
Once the lentils are all cooked down (note how much the colour of the red lentils has changed), carefully add them to the spices & butter.
Mix the butter & spices well with the lentils.
Cook until very thick, stirring frequently.
Serve with rice (I suggest basmati) and a big dollop of yoghurt. This dal can be a bit hot for some people, the yoghurt goes a long way to defusing that – and it’s really delicious, so why wouldn’t you?
I find it a very warming, comforting dish. Particularly great on cold winter nights.
Most Delicious Cornbread
Ingredients
- 1 cup cornflour
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 cup oil (I use olive oil)
- 1 & 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbs baking powder
- 1 cup sour cream
- 2 cups grated cheese
- 1 cup (or so) capsicum, sliced (I use roasted red peppers)
- chillies (optional, to taste)
- 1 can of corn kernels, drained
Method
Preheat oven to 180°C.
Add eggs, oil, & sour cream to mixing bowl.
Blend until smooth.
Add corn flour, baking powder, & salt.
Add sliced capsicum (and optional chillies).
Add most of the grated cheese (save a little).
Add drained corn kernels.
Mix up well.
Add to cake tin or baking dish.
Sprinkle on remaining cheese.
Bake at 180°C until the top is golden brown and a skewer or sharp knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. In this dish it’s about 45 minutes, in a wider diameter & thin walled baking tin it’d be more like 30.
The corn bread will be very moist and flavourful.
Making another short…
For use as part of the 48hours Auckland finals. We shot 5 locations in about 4 hours – though depending on how you count, this could actually be as many as 9. We went totally guerilla with very quick setup, and much more of a shoot & scoot approach than we usually do with our regular 48hours production team (which suits me, I like to figure stuff out in advance, and shoot quickly – we didn’t do the sorting out, so we weren’t that quick, but still far quicker than the team’s normal approach).
Including shooting, with permission, in a city convenience store – for which I had to pay the steep price of $4. (It was either drop $4 for a can of V or the guy was going to kick us out, man really was not delighted when we turned up with a camera.)
Andrew wearing a snorricam rig on set – have only checked footage on the camera LCD, but it looks great so far.
So what’s the short about? Well, here’s a hint in the form of our Apee (our award for winning 48hours Auckland in 2008) at one of our locations.
Oh, and just by the way, I die horribly at the end of a sword.
It’s really stupid, and hopefully going to be a lot of fun for those few who are lucky enough to see it.
Trailer for our 48Hours short film competition entrant
[flv:https://morganavery.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/all_s_fair_trailer2.flv 640 360]
Don’t worry, there are no spoilers.
Update: Please note that – just as with the short itself -Â I did not edit this trailer. (If only!)
Townhall Lightshow
Surely everyone in Auckland has seen these – and half of them took their own photos – but I happened past the townhall lightshow before it was packed up, and here it is. Bit annoying that it takes a horrid corporate to bring this kind of thing to Auckland – I only wish that our city fathers had enough of a love of art (and good public things) to try things like this just because they make a place feel good. But Telecom it had to be.
Lollyshop townhall. Impossibly delicious, and definitely my favourite.
Townhall lighthouse. Nicely animated, with the waves visible at the base lapping and splashing against the columns, and bright pulsing light in the belvedere.
Most people in my group called it ‘the Matrix one’ – which is of course right. But for some reason I thought of it as the Wall Street one. It seemed so very financial – being all jumbled numbers in columns, unlike the Matrix animatic which was all undecipherable pictograms. Nice colours.
I don’t know what this represents, but feel like it must have something to do with Christchurch, the messed up perspective bit on the clocktower makes me think of the square in the art centre. Don’t ask why. I couldn’t tell you. It’ll turn out to be something incredibly bleeding obvious. (Feel free to tell me what I missed.)
Electricity generation & demand site.
You’ve got to check out this brilliant website for Energy Market at em6live.co.nz, it shows the current usage & capacity of various energy sources around New Zealand as well as graphs of recent & current network load in different regions, even the current energy flow between islands.
Really fascinating stuff, and so well presented.
Love it.
Can’t help but wonder why so much gas is being burned when the hydro capacity appears to be so far underused, though. Hopefully it’s just that the lakes are being topped up and will be tapped more when winter heating drives more load in the coming months, or something along those lines.
(Or possibly it’s that running the hydro at full capacity the lakes would look like the plug had been pulled out, but I’m not sure if it means “capacity while maintaining current/safe lake levels” or if it means “maximum possible generation”.)
Would be great to see something similar for internet bandwidth. Beautiful graphs of which protocols generate most usage at varying times of day, and who is using what around the country, as well as an overall international flow.
Pear & Vanilla Crumble
Ingredients
- 3 tins of quartered pears in juice. (You can use fresh pears if you wish, but you’re giving yourself a lot more work for little reward.)
- 250g raw sugar.
- 225g self raising flour.
- 175g butter.
- ~6-8 teaspoons vanilla extract. (This might seem a lot, but it’s quite a large dish.)
Method
Preheat oven to 180°c.
While the oven warms up, take a large caserole dish…
… Add drained quartered pears – save the juice. (You can slice them further if you wish, these pears were fairly small though.)
Add about 1 cup of the juice back over the pears. (This might seem round about, but if you used all the juice you’d end up with a terribly soggy mess.)
Spoon about 150g of the raw sugar over the mixture.
Drizzle vanilla extract over the pears – the specks you can see here are vanilla seeds.Â
LET’S GET READY TO CRUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMBBBBBLLLLEEEEEEEEE.
Add the flour into a large mixing bowl.
Make a divot in the flour, then add the soft (microwave softened if you’re lazy like me) butter.
Add the remainder of the sugar.
Crumble the mixture. It’s fun to do it with your hands – and I think you end up with a better, slightly more dense, crumble – but it’s also possible to do it with a spoon if you don’t feel like getting your hands coated in this delicious mixture.
Carefully distribute the crumble over the top of the pear mixture.
Until it’s nicely covered. You can press it down a little, but it should be a fairly loose covering. It will be quite a thick layer.
Bake until the crumble is golden brown, and some of the juice has bubbled up around the edges and caramelised. This will take at least 45 minutes. But the longer you can leave it beyond that – just as long as the crumble doesn’t burn – the better the result will be, this one was cooked for about 60 minutes, and I only took it out of the oven because I had to take it to dinner with friends.
The crumble will end up tasting something like shortbread, and the fruit, juice, & sugar will cook together into a wonderful peary caramel.
It’s that delicious fruity caramel that requires the longer cooking time, it takes quite a while for the mixture to heat up and start to cook through – the longer you give the sugars in the fruit & juice the more they’ll change into caramel. The best result I’ve had was after about 80 minutes of baking, and I assure you that it was worth the wait – unfortunately there’s seldom time to cook for that long.
It’s optional, but preferable, to serve it with custard – and perhaps even a little scoop of nice French vanilla ice cream as well.
Serves 10 lovely people, who will happily gobble it all up.
Enjoy.
Another ‘laptop hunter’ advert has dropped from the MS tree
Microsoft have dropped another of their laptop hunter adverts – upping the budget on the laptop, and replacing the bubbly Lauren with the dashing Giampolo. He drools over the sexiness of a MacBook, but ends up being turned off by the coolness tax. (Sensing a trend?)
[flv:https://morganavery.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/giampolo-laptop-hunter.flv 640 360]
All of the adverts I’ve seen since the initial “churro” positioning adverts with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, have been bang on target. So it’s quite hilarious to watch the scurrying little macophiles scrabbling around trying to find purchase to criticise the adverts “it doesn’t mean anything,” “they’re not even talking about Windows.”
No shit.
Just like Apple sell MacBooks, not OSX – and talk up the experience, and build an emotional attachment towards their brand. This is exactly the same thing Microsoft have been doing lately – and with the most recent couple of adverts, they’ve started talking about price.
If you try to build a perception of warmth and friendliness (see: churro ads) about the company people say you’re not even talking about computers.
If you show a whole bunch of Windows users from all walks of life, with hugely varying computing needs (see: I’m a PC ads), they scream about how badly Deepak Chopra comes across. Talk about missing the point!
If you talk about how much people like Vista until they’re told it’s Vista, i.e. that they just buy the spin that it’s bad (see: Mojave Experiment ads) – people, well they just rail against Vista some more. It’s easy if you’ve never used it.
If you talk about computers – people moan that you’re not talking specifically about your OSÂ Â – never mind that the OS has to run on a computer, Microsoft don’t sell computers, and the way the vast majority of Windows users get Windows is when they buy a new computer. (Or that they’ve spoken about the OS before.)
There’s only 30 seconds in a normal TV advert, so you have to pick what you say. Taken as a whole the advertising Microsoft have been running answer all of these complaints. Take just one advert, and you only get part of the message – so it’s no surprise that critics find it convenient to pretend each advert exists in a vaccuum.
It’s really too bad Microsoft didn’t have their shit as together for the Vista release. The Vista bashing trope continues to confound me – as a daily Vista user (it’s the main OS I use at home) all of the criticisms I hear bandied about seem completely alien to me. The experience claimed is entirely unlike the reality of my day-to-day experience, which continues to be: rock solid stability, great performance, and superb compatibility.
I suspect the major critics of Vista have never really used it. Which isn’t really such a  surprise, given how dominant Apple use is in the blogosphere. In fact, outside of  university campuses, it’s about the only place they really seem to be growing their marketshare significantly. Unfortunately for we poor little Windows users (yeah, it’s just so hard being part of the overwhelming 90% majority, I’m sure you sympathise) this is a very vocal group. And uninformed, but never mind.
It is perhaps a little disappointing to see another HP be the chosen laptop – HP are probably partnering with MS on the ads. But it sure would be nice to express how diverse the Windows/PC ecosystem really is. Hint: super diverse – Dell aren’t like Asus aren’t like Fujitsu aren’t like Toshiba aren’t like Lenovo. And of course they do this to some extent, as Lauren & Gianpolo browse through many many different notebooks in their search. It’s just a bit of a bummer that it’s only been HPs that they’ve purchased.
Maybe they could even drop a netbook in there somewhere – though they may be waiting until Windows 7 is available before doing that, given how well it runs on the low spec hardware used in most netbooks. Of course HP make really good netbooks*, so even there it might be hard not to have a hypothetical future laptop hunter choose yet another HP.
With their advertising agency producing such effective material, and the generally positive opinion amongst the digerati towards Windows 7, it’ll be interesting to see what happens – particularly vis-à -vis Apple’s marketing in response – once Windows 7 finally starts to ship, whenever that is.
I’ll give you even odds that they’ll quickly resort to similar attack advertisements as they used when Vista was first released. But will real people – as opposed to the loud-mouthed crybaby macophile blogosphere that eats anything Apple deign to serve – fall for it again?
I hope not, it gets tiring really fast.
Only vaguely related to this, but my hunch is that if Jobs doesn’t come back Apple will continue on a ballistic upwards trajectory for another 18 months to 2 years, but then start to lose their way again. Apple is Steve Jobs. If you don’t believe me look at the 1990s. They’re in a much better position now than when Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, but does anyone else in a position to take over the reigns have anything like the same strongheadedness? I just don’t know.
It would be a damn shame if they do lose their way again though – Apple, with all of the great ideas they steal from the open source community, are a great driving force for the PC industry. Competition is always good.
* I’ve been looking at netbooks a lot lately, as my now aging Asus Eee is due for replacement, and HP are definitely on the list of possibles. I’m looking at 720p or better in a 10-12″ screen, great keyboard, and long battery life. Which are completely reasonable specs for the latest generation of netbooks, the only one of which that is still a little elusive is the screen resolution, as most are still restricted to 1024×600, which doesn’t make for an entirely satisfying experience, with too much scrolling – in both directions – to really enjoy using some websites.
Perfect Boy
Sung into the worst microphone in the world for the robertsongsmith.com project. Produced using Microsoft Research’s Songsmith, with a touch of uneccessary fuzz and sparkle just to prove that I’m really really bad at following rules.
[flv:https://morganavery.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/the-remix.mp3 400 0]
Download the MP3 here. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!