Chunky Corn Chowder Recipe

• 1/2 pound bacon, diced
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 2 large yellow onions, diced
• 1 red pepper, seeded and diced
• 2 tsp thyme, ground
• 1 tsp cumin, ground
• 1/4 tsp turmeric, optional for color
• 2 pounds white potatoes, washed, skins on and cubed
• 6 cups chicken stock, homemade, chicken base with water, or 4–6 bouillon cubes with water to taste
• 6 Tbsp cornstarch
• 6 Tbsp cold water
• 2 cups heavy cream or half and half
• 4 cups corn kernels, fresh, frozen or canned and drained
• 1/2 tsp fresh black pepper, ground

Directions:

1. In large stockpot, fry bacon until cooked and crispy but not burned. Drain fat, reserving 2 Tbsp, and place bacon on paper towel to cool. Set aside.
2. Add butter to the reserved fat and cook onions, and peppers until crisp-tender.
3. Add the spices, potatoes and chicken stock. Cook on low until potatoes are almost cooked through.
4. In small glass, dissolve cornstarch in cold water.
5. Add mixture to hot soup a little at a time stirring constantly. This will thicken up very quickly. Keep stirring.
6. On low heat, add cream or half and half or milk to the chowder and stir. Simmer for 10–15 minutes until hot. Do not bring to a boil.
7. Add corn and black pepper, stir and remove from heat.

First off, I cut up four pounds of potatoes instead of the 2 that it tells me to. All that means is we have breakfast potatoes for tomorrow. Right now the potatoes are getting simmered until they’re almost cooked through. Although it says to cook on Low, I don’t think that’s right, cause the chicken stock was barely going.

I’m also not sure when i’m supposed to re-add the bacon in. I’m going to just do it when I add the corn. The fact that this recipe has bacon in it is just a coincidence. I saw “chunky” before I saw that it had bacon in it.

I think that Tara and I are going to just freeze this and then have it for lunches. I should probably be monitoring it more closely. I forgot to let the milk simmer for 15 min before adding the corn. But I ended up adding more corn than specified (it is corn chowder after all) so maybe that’ll make up for it. Although, the corn might get mushy.

Whatever. I’ll eat it.

And…. Done

Ingredients

• 1–2 lbs hamburger
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp group black pepper
• pinch red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp ground red pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 Tbsp chili powder
• 2 cans diced tomatoes with peppers and stuff (prefer hot!)
• 2 cans chili hot beans
• 1 can northern white beans (this is what makes the title!)

Instructions

1. Cook the hamburger and chop up the garlic and add it to the hamburger whenever.
2. In a crock-pot put in the cans of tomatoes and beans. You can drain the tomatoes or not, but don’t drain the beans, just dump them in. Save the chili hot beans cans for later.
3. When almost all the hamburger is browned, add the spices and cook for a while til the kitchen smells good.
4. Put the cooked hamburger and spices into the crock-pot, grease and all. Recipes that tell you to drain the grease are foolish (not based on fact).
5. If it’s not soupy enough, rinse the chili hot bean cans with a bit of water and dump it in for more juice.

Thanks to Tara for accidentally buying white northern beans instead of garbanzo beans. Without your purchase this chili would have been less beanie, less tasty, and less white.

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 3/4 cup granulated white sugar
• 3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup toffee chips

1. Cream the 1 cup (2 sticks) of butter with a mixer.
2. Add 3/4 cup white sugar and 3/4 cup brown sugar and get that all mixed.
3. Beat in 2 eggs one at a time.
4. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla.
5. In a separate bowl, mix 2 1/4 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt.
6. Collide the flour mixture and the butter mixture.
7. Mix in 1 cup chocolate chips and 1 cup toffee chips.
8. You have two options:
9. Put parchment paper on a cookie sheet.
10. Put mounds of cookie dough on the parchment paper.
11. 375 degrees for about 10–12 minutes.

This made a ton of cookies and I’m pretty sure all my sampling of cookie dough reduced the amount of cookies I madeby at least 2–3. The original recipe says 12–14 minutes and I think it was a little too long. My first batch charred a bit but also my oven sucks. It’s so small I cannot fit a normal sized cookie sheet in so I had to use a bunch of small ones. The parchment paper is a gift. Less cleanup and nothing sticks to it. So awesome.

Ingredients

The Crust

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• I teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 6 tablespoons shortening
• 6 to 8 tablespoons ice water

The Rest

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 6 apples - peeled, cored and sliced

Instructions**

The Crust

1. Put the 2 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, and 1 Tbsp sugar in a big mixing bowl.
2. Use a masher (potato or dough) and mix in the 6 Tbsp butter, 6 Tbsp shortening, and 6–7 Tbsp water.
3. Mash this up until it holds together but isn’t too goopy (7 Tbsp of water was good for me).
4. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 20 min.
5. Peel and cut the apples.
6. Tell someone how you wonder what your upstairs neighbour is doing.

The Pie

1. After 20 min, remove the pie crust from the fridge.
2. Take about 10–15% of the crust and set it aside.
3. Roll the big component of crust and put it in your pie thing.
4. Put all the apples on the pie crust. Mound them.
5. Take the 10–15% of pie crust you set aside and make it into long strings or flat slats that will go over the apples. Think old-school apple pie and how it looks when it has the Kris-Kross (daddy mack!) thing going on.

The Sauce

1. Melt the 1/2 cup butter
2. Add in the 3 Tbsp flour. Make it kinda a gel / goop.
3. Add 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1/4 cup water.
4. Get this boiling.
5. Pour it over the pie. Let it get good and covered.
6. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes.
7. Bake at 350 for 35–45 minutes. Use your eyes here.
8. Optional: sprinkle some cinnamon on top after you pull it out.

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups crushed Oreos

Directions

1. Oven to 375.
2. Mix 2 1/4 cups flour, 1tsp baking soda, 1tsp salt in a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl (optional), beat the hell out of 2 sticks of butter, 3/4cup of granulated sugar, 1tsp of vanilla extract, and 2 eggs.
4. Gradually beat in the flour mix.
5. Put in the Oreos and then make some balls on a cookie sheet and cook 9–12 minutes.

Notes

To be honest, this is the NESTLE TOLLHOUSE recipe for chocolate chip cookies. But these are Oreo Chip Cookies, so you don’t use chocolate chips. If you ever forget, it’s also 50 other places on the web. Also, they say to mix the flour and all that separate and slowly add but the first time I did this I just mixed everything in a bowl and it was fine.

If you’re not really an Oreo person, you could substitute something else but you’d be wrong in doing so. Oreo Chip is really the best choice. A friend of mine suggested Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and I would say that might be a close second. Even if you don’t like Oreos you should give these a try. You can’t really taste the Oreo factor. It’s the taste of excellence in engineering.

Future Work

I’d like to incorporate Bacon into this at some point.

This is the greatest biscuits and gravy gravy recipe ever… until i make it further better.

Ingredients

• 1lb sausage
• 1 stick of chorizo
• 2 eggs
• flour
• milk

Process

• Cook the sausage and chorizo.
• Leave the grease in the pan.
• Add four very rounded tablespoons of flour¹. Maybe more.
• Cook the meat and flour mixture a bit.
• Slowly add milk and mix until you get theconsistencyyou want.
• Mix in the two eggs and let that cook.

You’re on your own for biscuits. I would suggest something better than Grands, they always have a bad aftertaste to me. I admit, there’s not much too it but I’ve never seen biscuits and gravy with chorizo in it. I have tried just chorizo in the gravy but it’s just not as good. Here is a picture. Don’t let the lookdeceiveyou.

Most likely I will make this better by adding Bacon.

I am currently waiting patiently for Apple to release their new MacBook Pro line using a new i5 or i7 processor and then it’s my intent to snatch one up as my new permanent computer. Check.

Well, besides liking most Apple software and software created for OSX I have grown especially fond of iTunes, mainly because I want to sync my iPhone everynight and snatch the newest podcasts i’m subscribed to. OK, I could do this in Linux but if you’ve ever used any of that stuff, it’s reverse engineered and it’s not real reliable. Besides, iTunes is a pretty great music manager.

Regardless, I decided that until that time comes I want to see where Windows is at and how well I can adapt to it from my Linux lifestyle. For about the last 10+ years I’ve used Linux 99% of my time and it’s been great. Love command lines, love compilers, love the software (for the most part, I’m looking at you browsers and flash!). But it’s just not as refined…

Well, let me tell you something. Windows software (at least the free stuff) is not that refined either. It’s pretty good, and much better than what it was. I’m going to outline some major things that I need to do and how I’m handling it in Windows 7.

Terminal

Windows now includes “Power Shell” which is a glorified terminal. By default they did a good job of creating commands that relate to UNIX/Linux style commands (ls, cd, rm, etc.). The downfall of this is that they are aliases to .NET commands! Basically what PowerShell boils down to is a .NET command interface. Kinda like how you’d run python and get a Python shell. It works so far.

On a side-note. There are environment variables but they are a bit harder to define. You have to edit the environment variables for a user and when you start a new shell they will have updated. There are probably easier ways to do this (I know you can do setx) but using the GUI seems to work pretty easily and a little quicker than trying to type out the settings. If you screw it up there isn’t as easy of a way to correct it.

Also, there is an idea of a .bashrc (shell startup file) but it’s not very convenient. I don’t remember the link offhand and you have to enable script running for unsigned scripts.

SSH

Thank you Putty. I installed Pageant, Putty, and Plink. Plink lets me ssh in the PowerShell but that doesn’t work too well because PowerShell doesn’t handle the color escapes from bash. But it works well enough. Pageant handles my private key authentication. I have it run at startup (simple shortcut in the startup folder) and mainly use Putty to connect remotely and forward my SSH key. Works very solid. Somewhat is annoying to have to use another program for this, and not be able to do it from the command line.

Editor (VIM)

I used vim in Linux and there is a nice build for Windows. Installs nicely. Overall it works good. I was able to get all my settings ported over quickly (after figuring out where they go: $HOME/_vimrc). One nice thing is you can update the shell environment variables and then vim and gvim can be used from the powershell just like in Linux and all seems fairly kosher.

Version Control

GIT has a windows client that has been working for me. It’s command line only and It seems a janky as it wouldn’t let me use putty as the ssh backend but it has a compiled version of OpenSSH client that it falls back on. I believe it might have something to do with my using a color terminal on the host that has my git repositories.

Subversion has always had a program that integrates with Explorer nicely called TortoiseSVN that works great. I am tempted to move away from GIT. I believe that even Mecurial and Bazaar have Windows clients, not sure though.

Python

Python was a bit trickier. I downloaded the 64-bit version and it worked pretty well except that some libraries (numpy) require some compilation. The problem is that by default Windows 7 doesn’t come with a compiler. There are two solutions.

1. Download Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition and Microsoft SDK for Windows.
2. Download third-party pre-compiled versions of the libraries.

I did (1) initially and found out that by default VS Express Edition doesn’t include a 64-bit compiler, you have to download the Windows SDK to get that. Well, I eventually just decided on downloading the third-party compilations from here thanks to Christoph Gohlke. He did the heavy lifting of building these packages.

As a side note, there does seem to be a package for distutils which allows you to use ‘easy_install’ to install Python packages. The package includes the 64-bit build but uses a 32-bit installer which looks at a bad registry entry to find the location of Python. I fixed this by duplicating one registry entry (I’ll have to update this later to say where) and it installed and runs fine.

MySQL

Install is easy, but default table type is InnoDB which is different from Linux which was defaulting to MyISAM. I ended up having to run a PowerShell as an administrator and then editing the my.ini file which lives in the MySQL install directory (somewhere under C:\Program Files\). This just caused some problems with Django because I imported some old tables and then built some new ones and the constraints didn’t want to work because of differences in table types.

Django

There is a package which I didn’t use called “Instant Django” so you may wanna check that out. For this one I actually used distutils and just ran

python C:\\python26\\Scripts\\easy_install.py install django

and that took care of everything. If you’ve setup Django on Linux before it can be tricky but it’s not any trickier on Windows.

That’s about all I’ve run into right now. Seems are working and I’m fairly happy. Not because I think Linux is bad or Windows is good. It’s just different and a decently exciting experience. Web browsing seems faster and a bit more stable. So far so good.

The only real problem is on Snow Leopard the default bash is 3.2.48(1). So something like {1..10} will expand properly to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, but the incremental and 0 padding options won’t, i.e., {1..10..2} and {001..10} won’t work. They should expand to 1 3 5 7 9 and 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 respectively.

One solution is to upgrade bash on Snow Leopard. I am a believer in homebrew. It’s such a clean way to manage things in OSX (meaning its easy to remove packages and get back to base OSX if you ever want to, although Python seems like a pain and 2.6 is good enough for me so I don’t mess with that).

Anyways, here is what I did to upgrade my Bash on Snow Leopard.

1. brew install bash
   • (optional) brew install bash-completion
2. sudo vim /etc/shells
   • add /usr/local/bin/bash to the list
3. Update your account,
   1. Goto Accounts Preference Pane
   2. Unlock so you can make changes (by clicking the lock in the bottom left and entering your password assuming you’re an admin)
   3. Control-Click your name and select Advanced Options...
   4. Under Login Shell: select /usr/local/bin/bash from the dropdown, or if it’s not there just type it in. It’ll be fine. Trust me I’m a doctor.
   5. Hit the OK (figuratively hit it, and by hit I mean click)

Now everything relating to brace expansion should work.

cdssh () {
    if [ -n ${1} ]; then
        CWD=$(pwd|sed "s#$HOME#~#")
        ssh -t $1 -- "cd ${CWD} ; bash -l"
    fi
}

the reason for the cwd is to handle where the home directory on the remote system is in a different directory than the localhost. some systems (osx) use /users/<username/ as the home which doesn’t play nicely with many other system.