For this recipe I use pork leg, although the original used pork belly. Leg is much, much leaner, belly is much, much more tasty. You takes your choice, but belly should probably be cooked a bit more before hand, and you definitely won’t need to add any extra oil! I also used a homemade dashi – a unique Japanese stock made from seaweed and flaked fish. I’ve also made this from powdered dashi stock, but if dashi is too difficult to get hold of a combination of fish/vegetable stock could probably work as an alternative. Sake and mirin can’t really be substituted.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 tsp goundnut oil (or veggie oil)
• 900g diced pork leg (Waitrose sell 450g packs specifically for stewing)
• 100g ginger (peeled and roughly chopped)
• 500ml dashi stock (or half fish, half vegetable stock)
• 170ml sake
• 60ml mirin
• 125ml soy sauce
• 80g dark brown sugar
• 6 medium free range eggs
• corn flour or potato statch
• spring onions

Heat oil in a large sauce pan, and cook the diced pork for about 5 minutes. It probably won’t brown, but it shouldn’t be pink on the sides. Around half way through, throw in the chopped ginger. Add the liquids (stock, sake, mirin, soy) and sugar, bring to the boil, cover the pan and simmer on a low heat for 3 hours. The pan should never get dry – in fact, there should be ample liquid at the end of cooking in which to make sauce. So if a drought threatens the pan, then add a small amount of water.

While the pork is cooking, partially hard boil six eggs (add eggs to cold water, bring to boil and cook for 6 mins), carefully remove the shell and cool in cold running water.

When the pork is tender (the pieces should fall apart) remove the chunks from the liquid and put aside. Add the eggs to the liquid and cook for a further 10 minutes, so that the eggs take on a bit of the flavour of the gravy. There should be enough liquid to almost cover the eggs – add a touch more water if necessary. Remove the eggs, and place with the pork. Thicken the gravy with about a teaspoon of corn flour or potato starch (let down first with a few drops of warm water) until the sauce is a good consistency. Return the pork and eggs to the pan to reheat in the thickened sauce for a couple of minutes.

Serve immediately with freshly chopped spring onions sprinkled on top. This makes enough for six medium sized portions at around 355 calories each. A small helping of rice on the side goes down well, as does a small amount of chilli sesame carrots.

Chilli Sesame Carrots

Jullienne one medium-large carrot per person. Place in a bowl with a small amount of water, and microwave for 3 minutes until the carrots are cooked but still have bite. Drain any remaining water, and to the bowl add a small drizzle of sesame oil, a few drops of rice wine vinegar and small splash of dark soy sauce. Finally add a sprinkle of sesame seeds, a pinch of chilli powder (to taste) and combine. Serve topped with a small amount of freshly chopped spring onions.

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp groundnut oil (or vegetable oil or sunflower oil)
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 150g celery (approx 3 medium stalks) trimmed and finely chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed/finely chopped/whatever
• 30g ginger, peeled and finely chopped
• 4 tsp coriander seeds
• 4 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 2 tsp dried coriander leaf
• 200g split red lentils (the ‘no need to soak’ variety)
• 600ml vegetable stock (600ml water w/ 2 tsp bouillon powder)
• 400g can chopped tomatoes
• 1 tsp tomato puree
• 1-2 red chillis, seeds in, finely chopped (vary to taste!)
• 1 tsp sugar
• 250g spinach leaves (washed, but otherwise unprepared)
• pinch salt
• 1/2 tsp chilli powder / pinch of cayenne pepper (to taste)

Sweat off the onion and celery in oil heated in a medium-large saucepan for about 5-10minutes. Add the ginger and garlic about half way through. While the onion and celery is sweating, toast off the coriander seeds and cumin seeds in a dry frying pan for 1-2 minutes (until the seeds just start to smoke!) Grind the seeds and add to the pan, with the turmeric, garam masala, and coriander leaf and season with freshly ground black pepper. Add the lentils, stock, tomatoes, and stir in the tomato puree, chopped chilli and sugar. Allow the lentils to cook on a low heat for 20-30 minutes, keeping an eye on the water (if it gets too dry, add some more – but be careful not to add too much as there will be liquid to come out of the raw spinach). Add the spinach a bit at a time, so as to not swamp the pan, and a largish pinch of salt if needed. Taste the sauce, and if it’s too mild, add a small mix of chilli powder and cayenne pepper. Cook for a further 10 minutes or until the lentils have become soft and the spinach has wilted. Best served with rice or naan bread.

Makes 4 decent sized portions, each weighing in at around 260 calories (not including the rice, naan, or whatever).

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp groundnut oil (or vegetable oil)
• 2 medium onions, roughly chopped
• 2cm piece of ginger, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed/finely chopped/whatever
• 4 small carrots, halfed lengthwise and finely sliced
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp dried coriander leaves
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 2 chillies (or just the one if you’re not wanting it too hot) finely sliced
• 75g Greek yoghurt
• 2 large (bonless and skinless) chicken thighs (approx 250g), chopped into small 2cm-ish chunks
• 800ml chicken stock
• 50g (uncooked) basmati rice
• cornflour to thicken (optional)

Start by heating the oil in a medium-large pan, and sweat off the onions for about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, ginger, carrot and half of the chilli, and cook for 2-3 more minutes. Transfer about 2/3-3/4 of the mixture to a small blender, and with a bit of water added, blend until you get a very smooth paste. Return the paste back to the pan, add all of the spices, and cook for a couple more minutes. Stir in the yoghurt (a small amount at a time, so that it doesn’t split), followed by the chicken and cook slowly until not-quite bubbling, before adding the rice and stock. Cook for ten minutes, or so, until the rice and chicken is cooked. If the sauce is too thin, add a couple of teaspoons of cornflour let down with a small amount of warm water, and stir into the soup.

Serves 4, and if you’re counting, each serving weighs in at a fairly lean 225 calories

Download:
1440 x 900

Skip to September, and with the end-of-month deadline nearing, I’m putting the finishing touches to the project report, now titled: ‘The Social Network in the Music Blogosphere’. It’s an exploration of the relationships between blogs and the artists that they write about, using network theory, with an analysis of some subject discovery and classification methods. There’s a chunk of Python code in the appendices (I used a lot of NetworkX), as well as some subject-based clusterings represented as dendrograms. If that sounds like your bag, you can get your copy of my project report here:

Download PDF: The Social Network in the Music Blogosphere (3.6MB)

The network dataset of blog-artist relationships is also available:

blog-artist_network.tar.gz (301K)
blog-artist_network.zip (299K)

It contains the following files:

artists.txt: id, and normalized and denormalized versions of all artist names

ARTIST_ID  ARTIST_NAME  DENORM_ARTIST_NAME

blogs.txt: id and name of each blog

BLOG_ID  BLOG_NAME

blog-artist.txt: the edges between a blog and an artist, and the weighting given to the relationship

BLOG_ID  ARTIST_ID  WEIGHT

I’ve got a number of bags that I like, but I wouldn’t want to chuck a camera in them without some sort of protection. Inside a bag, if not held in place, lens caps can come off and lenses can get scratched, and things get rearranged so that it becomes difficult to find what you’re looking for. And that’s not to mention all the casual bumps that a bag will inevitably get when worn and on the move.

Both Billingham and Domke make stand-alone inserts for their really rather lovely but sadly aspirationally priced bags, for around £30-40. There’s something in me that finds spending that amount on the padding alone a bit too much. Driven by this, and inspired by a number of DIY camera bag blog posts from people who have attempted a similar thing, I took a trip to the rather excellent Cass Art in Islington to see what I could find to help me. I left with a couple of 50cmx50cm neoprene foam sheets (£4 each) and a 2.5m pack of self-adhesive velcro (£7).

Back home, I got a small-ish bag – at least big enough for a digital SLR an a lens, but not much more. A nice sized man bag, effectively. My aim was to create an adaptable design for an insert that would create enough room for my SLR with a standard zoom lens attached, and whatever extra room I could make. After measuring approximate sizes, I made a rough template for an open-ended boxed rectangle, and cut out panels from the neopreme foam. I then attached them to each other with duck tape (I already had this) and used extra to create flaps to which I attached two lengths of velcro (comb-side). Two strips of the fuzzy side of velcro were added to the other panel, so I ended up with something looking a bit like this:

I’ve intentionally not mentioned any measurements here, since it’s very much dependant on the bag, although I found that a depth of around 10cm would be enough for an SLR. Dividers can be made in a similar way. A velcro-flanked square of foam can be strengthed with wire-reinforced cardboard strips. I inserted thickish garden wire into the cardboard’s corrogated ‘pipes’ before attaching the strips to the foam with more duct tape. This provides more vertical strength to the divider to support the weight of an SLR with a lens attached.

The following is the end result, shown from the top:

And from the front…:

I managed an insert and divider from a single sheet of foam, about 60cm of velcro tape, and a bit of duck tape, so total the cost is about £7. I’m now thinking that my Freitag bag will be getting a similar treatment shortly.

I’d been thinking about making a DIY laptop stand for a few weeks, but a glut of reasonably strong cardboard from a recent trip to IKEA spurred me on to make it for real. In addition to cardboard, I also used double-sided tape, and brown packing tape.

It’s a really really simple design. Here’s the template:

I created two of everything here, and stuck them together with double-sided tape, so that each piece was twice-thickness (I guess 5-6mm thick in total). I also re-enforced the cardboard with packing tape – just wrapping it around and trimming it. This gave me two side panels, a front panel and a slightly thicker back panel.

Cuts were made where the dotted lines are shown on the template; about 1.5cm from the front and 2cm from the back on the side panels. (N.B. the ‘front’ is the lowest part on the side panel). All cuts were 2cm deep and wide enough for the thickness of the panels to slot together without a squeeze. On the front panel (the slightly thinner of the two 32cm long pieces, the cuts are made about 1cm from each end, and about 2cm from each end on the back panel. When assembled, this creates a slight tapering towards the back panel, rather than a more flimsy square.

This was designed for a 15″ Macbook Pro with room for an Apple bluetooth keyboard to nuzzle in underneath. I guess it could be prettier, but it does the job and disammembles and reassembles easily for going in and out of storage.

This assumes a simple webapp, living on a server on the local machine, sitting under the context called ‘context’, responding to the URL:

http://localhost:8080/context/hello/world?foo=bar

-Dsun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout=<CONNECT_TIMEOUT>
-Dsun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout=<READ_TIMEOUT>

In future, I’d be more inclined to use something like the Apache HttpCommons Client which provides a full-featured HTTP client.

• a pack of lardons
• two leeks, sliced into small rings
• an onion, roughly chopped
• 1/2 swede, peeled and roughly cubed
• a pack of about six good sized skinless, boneless chicken thighs, chopped into bite-sized pieces
• three cloves garlic, sliced
• handful of parsley, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• a bottle of white wine
• couple of handfuls of frozen peas
• couple of cups of chicken stock
• salt and pepper to taste
• 6-8 dumplings made from packet mix

Brown off the lardons in a hot stock pot, before adding the leeks, onion, garlic and swede. You don’t need extra oil, just let them cook in the tasty bacon fat until they’ve softened up a bit, for about 5 minutes or so. Add the chicken, cayenne pepper, ground ginger, and turmeric, and stir about in the mix before adding in the bottle of white wine and frozen peas. Top up with the chicken stock until it looks like there will be enough liquid for about half an hour’s cooking, and sit the doughy dumplings made from the mix on the top.

Cook for half an hour and when almost done, throw in the chopped parsley and season. This can be served on it’s own in a bowl, or with a generous serving of mashed potatos should make enough for four people.