Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve felt the urge of eating a good congee (porridge) for a while now. Ever since the amazing fish congee I had at Low Yat Plaza a couple of weeks back, I figured I must attempt to make my own.

I don’t know what a cup refers to in recipes, so I’ve just used a mug. All I used was 1 large pot, 2 cups of long grain rice (I’ve bought my first 2kg bag of rice, in what must be over 3 years), and 9 cups of water. Set it to boil, and the moment it starts doing that, drop the heat to medium low. The lid is then popped back onto the pot, but tilted (or the nozzle opened) to allow steam to escape.

This goes on for about 45 minutes or so, till I decide its now time to chuck the ingredients in. 200g of prawns (peeled, tails removed - about $4 at Coles), a handful of scallops (a whole bag is about $10), about six crab sticks (can’t remember how much these cost, but there’s more in the container), and a fish fillet (estimated to be about $2.50) cut into bite sizes. Let this simmer again for another 15 minutes or so.

Voila! I now have congee. Of course, the amount I’ve made, I’ll probably be eating this for a few days to come (got about 1.5 containers filled with this in the fridge now). Condiments to add include fried anchovies (ikan bilis), something I’ve not been able to get the crispy texture right with, and also a bit of a scrambled egg (just break an egg into the pan, and scramble away). I vaguely recollect there being more pickled bits that Chinese restaurants serve, but I didn’t muster up the courage to visit the Asian Grocer today. Oh, sesame oil - add some once ready to serve.

References: about.com, gourmet traveller

Technorati Tags: cooking, recipe, congee, seafood congee, rice porridge

Today I cooked. 2nd time in the week - chilli con carne when I arrived back on Monday, and marinara wine-o mix pasta.

Chilli con carne was easy to prepare: 500g shredded beef, 1 can tomatoes, 1 can kidney beans, a couple of onions (chopped), and add the Maggi chill con carne mix ;-) Goes well with garlic bread, wholemeal bread, and so forth.

Marina wine-o mix pasta is a lot more interesting. Chopped onions and garlic, wine, assorted marinara mix (i.e. go get crabsticks, prawns, squid, mussels, etc.) all in a pot. Add more wine (white) liberally. Make sure the flame is at medium. Toss in some lemon rinds and lemon juice. Add a dash of parsley and basil. Cook pasta separately, and when al dente, toss into the big wok containing marinara wine-o mix. Stir properly. Add a little more wine. Stir.

Tastes delicious. YP, my housemate, decided to try some sauce because she dislikes seafood in general. “Tastes like wine,” she said. Oops. Minor problem is that with ~750g of pasta, and ~1kg of marinara mix, I’ve got two large container loads of this stuff.

Yes, I’m cooking to de-stress. And to sure as heck consider it payback for the horrendous amounts of hotel food I ate while in the US of A.

• I tried to bake a chocolate banana cake on Sunday. Twice. Both were failures. First was mush, second was hard as a rock. Butter related failures, I think. Todays two durian cakes turned out okay, with the tops being a little burnt.
• 10 weeks of Alpha is over, and I graduated from that, quite gladly. In my little testimonial, I mentioned how crazy the last ten weeks of life have been, but how I’m still having an inkling to not lose faith, which is surprising seeing the crap that’s landed on me. I wished everyone else attending the next session to hopefully, have a better time.
• Sent mom off yesterday. End of the month of parents being around. I actually feel sad. Oh well, departure halls tend to do that to you, maybe.
• mpackage.org has been setup. Now all we need is a team. Pix has done all the legwork of sorting out the web/mail/lists. Dexter Ang is the hero that registered the domain. It seems to be sensible that we have: build system, svn/cvs (some form of revision control) and less repositories, so talking to Anvil (okay, Dams) and it’d seem that we should have an “mpackage team”, but still get heavy lifting distributed. mock looks like what we need to use for a distributed build system. I’ve started asking folk at #mono if anyone’s into Fedora packaging, next to target the mono lists… Want to make it clear this is all for Fedora first - I’m hoping for more contributors, etc. to crop up for RHEL/Centos/etc… if possible. Seems a time/contributor issue is what keeps livna only building for Fedora as well.
• Fedora Marketing next. Its not low hanging fruit anymore. Its happening, and its real. Now to define it a lot further. Ideas appreciated, and we do have a list - fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com. We really ought to work hard for the next 6 days, as Debian and Fedora get released on the same day. Whoote!
• MyOSS Magazine Edition 2 is out. I’m really pleased with how Ow has taken on the task, pretty much by himself, to make this a great mag. So go read it. mag.my-opensource.org
• Rawhide’s kernel from today still hates the Mac mini framebuffer. And parted still doesn’t like my disk on the iBook G3. For future reference, ./pdisk -l /dev/hda will give you useful output. FWIW, I think we need to package pdisk (as fdisk on ppc is not of any use).

Melbourne leg of the Red Hat World Tour, in the APAC region. Their Partner Development Manager, from America decided to spread some Fedora FUD (bad, bad):

• “Fedora have nightly builds, and things can break on a nightly basis with the introduction of new undocumented features”
• “We do our testing on the Fedora Project”

Some dude in the crowd, with a Microsoft Most Valued Professional tag, asked why there’s a lack of binary RHEL builds. The usual, if we do that, people sell it and imply there’s support for the product. I thought to myself, that’s okay, they’ll just pirate ya’all.

Haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere, but RH are launching what they call the Red Hat Driver Programme. Critical for business drivers are in that list, and its rumored that Nvidia, Broadcom, and more are there. No idea of what they’re doing with the binary driver list, but time will tell (timeframe from next week to two months).

All in all, they ran the machine that presented the entire thing not on the Red Hat Desktop, but on Fedora Core! “This is a preview release of Red Hat Desktop,” Mike said. Pfft. Chris has a little report of what happened in Kuala Lumpur.

Hung out with Russell for most of the tour, didn’t stay for lunch, since she got back from the weekend holidays. I cooked prawn mee (with huge tiger prawns!), which was a wee bit too spicy for us.

Durian cake got baked

And I got a wand!