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Filipino Beef Kaldereta

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KalderetaKaldereta is a Filipino stew with flavors influenced by three centuries of Spanish colonization in the Philippines. Tomato-based and traditionally made with goat or beef, potatoes, green olives and peppers, it’s a filling, comforting dish.

The really ingenious ingredient in Kaldereta is puréed chicken liver.

Stirred in at the end, chicken livers give the stew a thick, creamy texture and super-meaty flavor. This technique can be used with any of your favorite stew, chili or curry recipes. There are more sneaky ways to work offal into your meals, but this is arguably one the easiest and tastiest methods.

Liver is a nutrient-dense food, so you don’t need to eat all that much to get a beneficial dose of vitamins A and B, folic acid, iron, copper and CoQ10. Make a batch of Kaldereta, freeze individual servings to defrost for lunches, and you’ll be getting a little liver in your diet every week.

Servings: 6 to 8

Time in the Kitchen: 3 hours

Ingredients:

ingredients 12
  • 2 pounds beef (stew chunks or short ribs) (900 g)
  • 1/2 pound chicken livers, trimmed of fat and membranes (230 g)
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 to 2 red bell peppers, finely chopped
  • 1 to 2 green bell peppers, finely chopped
  • 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional) (5 ml)
  • 1/2 pounds tomatoes, chopped (230 g)
  • 6 ounces tomato paste
  • 2 1/2 cups water or beef stock (475 ml)
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1/3 cup pitted green olives (50 g) (optional)

Instructions:

Season the meat generously with salt and pepper. Heat a thin layer of oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Brown the beef, in batches if necessary. Set aside.

Season the chicken livers with salt and pepper. Add them to the pan. Cook, stirring often, until they are just barely cooked through and still pink inside.

Step1 7

In a food processor, puree the chicken livers until very smooth. Set aside.

Step2 7

Add the onion, garlic and chopped bell peppers and red pepper flakes to the pan. Cook until the vegetables soften, 5 to 8 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Sauté a few minutes more then add the water/stock, about 2 1/2 cups or enough to just cover the meat. Add the bay leaves.

Step3 3

Bring to a boil. Lower the heat, cover and simmer for two hours or until the meat is fork tender. Stir occasionally during cooking. Add salt to taste.

Step4 1

Slowly stir the chicken liver purée into the Kaldereta until it blends in completely. Add the olives. Simmer 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

Kaldereta
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eternicode
3973 days ago
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Don't leave the chicken liver out. It takes the soup from tasting tomato-y to tasting beef-y. That's the only difference I noticed, definitely worth it.
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The GIGO buffer

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Computer wonks like to talk about garbage in/garbage out. A simple example: if there's a mistake in the way a blog post is encoded, many XML/RSS readers will choke on it, preventing all future posts from showing up.

The IT guys put up their hands and say, "well, if you hadn't had a lousy character, it wouldn't have broken... GIGO."

That's not resilient.

The work of the middleman is to inspect and recover. If your restaurant gets lousy fish from the boat, you don't get to serve it and proclaim garbage in garbage out. No, your job is to inspect what you get, and if necessary, change it.

If the school board gives the teacher lousy instructions, the teacher can easily put up his hands and say, "I'm just doing my job." The great teacher doesn't do that, of course. He provides a buffer between the administrators and the his real customers, the students.

There will always be garbage in. It's up to you as to whether or not there will be garbage out.

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eternicode
4074 days ago
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It saddens me that Seth chose to pick on "computer wonks" and RSS for his example -- I wonder what bad experience prompted this? RSS is hard[1], and I would venture that more "computer wonks" adhere to the Robustness Principle (conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept) than follow this GIGO concept.

Also, I'm one of those "computer wonks", and TBH, I've only ever heard about GIGO when the topic was psychology.

[1] http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks
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sumter_tisdale
4077 days ago
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Getting beyond the garbage in... excuse.
Maryville, TN

Free Fall

7 Comments and 15 Shares

Free Fall

What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it? What about using a squirrel suit?

—Dhash Shrivathsa

The largest purely vertical drop on Earth is the face of Canada's Mount Thor, which is shaped like this:

To make things a little less gruesome, let's put a pit at the bottom of the cliff filled with something fluffy, like cotton candy, to safely break your fall. (Would this work? Hmm ...)

A human falling with arms and legs outstretched has a terminal velocity in the neighborhood of 55 meters per second. It takes a few hundred meters to get up to speed, so it would take you a little over 26 seconds to fall the full distance.

How long is that?

It's long enough to finish the first level of the original Super Mario.[1]

Sprint's ring cycle—the time the phone rings before going to voicemail—is 23 seconds.[2] (For those keeping score, Wagner's is 2,350 times longer.)

This means that if someone called your phone, and it started ringing the moment you jumped, it would go to voicemail three seconds before you reached the bottom.

On the other hand, if you jumped off Ireland's 210-meter Cliffs of Moher, you would only be able to fall for about eight seconds—nine, if you jumped upward.

That's not very long, but according to River Tam, it would be enough time to drain all the blood from your body given adequate vacuuming systems. (So much for making things less gruesome.)

But you don't have to drop vertically.

Even without any special equipment, a skilled skydiver—once they get up to full speed—can glide at almost a 45-degree angle.[3] By gliding away from the base of the cliff, you could conceivably extend your fall substantially.

It's hard to say exactly how far; it all depends on your clothes. As a comment on a BASE jumping records wiki puts it,

The record for longest [fall time] without a wingsuit is hard to find since the line between jeans and wingsuits has blurred since the introduction of more advanced tracking apparel.

Which brings us to wingsuits.

Wingsuits are what you get when you take the average of parachute pants and parachutes.

One wingsuit operator posted tracking data from a series of jumps.[4] It shows that in a glide, a wingsuit can lose altitude as slowly as 18 meters per second.

Even ignoring horizontal travel, that would stretch out our fall to over a minute. That's long enough for a chess game. It's also long enough to sing the first verse of—appropriately enough—REM's It's the End of the World as We Know It followed by—less appropriately—the rap breakdown from the end of the Spice Girls' Wannabe.

When we include horizontal glides, the times get even longer.

There are a lot of mountains that could probably support very long wingsuit flights. For example, Nanga Parbat, a mountain in Pakistan, has a drop of more than three kilometers at a fairly steep angle.[5] (Surprisingly, a wingsuit still works fine at those altitudes,[6] though the jumper needs oxygen and glides a little faster than normal.)

So far, the record for longest wingsuit BASE jump is held by Dean Potter, who jumped from the Eiger—a mountain in Switzerland—and flew for three minutes and twenty seconds.[7]

Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi are the world's top competitive eaters.

If we can find a way for them to operate wingsuits while eating at full speed, and they jumped from the Eiger, they could—in theory—finish as many as 45 hot dogs between them before reaching the ground ...

... making them the joint holders of what just might be the strangest world record of all time.

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eternicode
4163 days ago
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I'm a leaf on the wind... watch how I soar...
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6 public comments
seanth
4158 days ago
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test
danielna
4165 days ago
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Mount Thor is super badass, both in name and appearance: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Mount_Thor_Peak_1997-08-07.jpg/1024px-Mount_Thor_Peak_1997-08-07.jpg
NYC
Michdevilish
4165 days ago
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great
Canada
Skotte
4165 days ago
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While fFalling, you could play a game of fFalling, the real-time card game. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/75/falling fFalling: The LARP!
Rochester, Earth
rclatterbuck
4166 days ago
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Most hotdogs eaten by paired wingsuit BASE jump partners. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Guinness.
ksteimle
4166 days ago
Once I realized that the mini-comics in these posts ALSO had alt-text, my What-If-reading life got immeasurably better.
rgsunico
4166 days ago
OMG more alt-text!
samuel
4165 days ago
Dear lord there's alt text.
2fic
4164 days ago
omg, the alt-text... so much more...
esran
4166 days ago
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Probably reading already, but this seems pertinent to recent character discussions :)
Bristol, UK

CodeSOD: The Truth of the Matter

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When Ben found this block of code, he had some questions: who wrote it, and what was it supposed to do?

if (showOptionsButton == true)
   showOptionsButton = false;
if (showOptionsButton == false)
   showOptionsButton = true;

The genius responsible was Jim, one of the senior developers. On paper, Jim was Ben’s mentor. What was the code supposed to do?

“Well,” said Jim, “I want to toggle the state of showOptionsButton. If it’s true, it should be false, if it’s false, it should be true.”

“Except,” Ben said, “this will just always set the value to true.”

“No it won’t.”

“Yes, it will,” Ben said.

“No it won’t.”

They executed that loop a few times before Ben attempted to break out. “It will. You need an else clause.”

“If I use an else, it’ll run both clauses. I only want it to run one.”

Ben gave up on trying to correct Jim’s logic. "You could just do, showOptionsButton = !showOptionsButton.

“I’m trying to change the value,” Jim said, “not compare them. I’d love to explain the basics to you, but I really need to get this feature finished.”

Ben let his mentor get back to work.

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eternicode
4202 days ago
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"They executed that loop a few times before Ben attempted to break out."

Oh, the pain of inefficient debate loops. This is how it should have gone:

"This will just always set the value to true" (matter-of-factly stated, with a touch of disbelief)

"No it won't"

"Yes it will" (an inefficient iteration due to shock)

"No it won't"

At which point you find a workstation, write a quick 6-line program encapsulating the offending code exactly as-is, and provide actual proof of how things work.

"Oh."

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Cheaters Never Prosper

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"That's quite an impressive resume, Fred," Avi said. The phone interview had gone well so far; among the several hundred applicants for Senior Developer at BigBoxCo, Fred's qualifications put him among the top five Avi had spoken to. Fred himself was amiable, if slightly over-confident.

"Thanks, Avi," Fred replied. "I hope I have what you're looking for."

"Regarding your last position at IniTech," Avi said, "which ended about six months ago, why did you decide to leave? It looks like you'd be taking a step down working for us, since you were the project lead on their flagship software."

"Well, management didn't care for my coding style," Fred said. "I write fast, test faster, and iterate often. More agile than Agile, you might say."

"I might." Avi decided to see what Fred's "coding style" looked like. "Okay, I'm going to establish a guest session on our collaborative IDE. Just type in the URL I give you, followed with the session token."

"URL?" Fred sounded affronted.

"Yes, the address to access the session."

"I, um. . . well, okay."

Avi spelled out the URL and session token, but Fred couldn't seem to figure it out. Finally, Avi just emailed the URL to Fred's address. "Oh, got it now," Fred said.

Avi sighed. "Okay, I'd like you to write a function that merges two integer arrays of arbitrary length. Don't worry about performance for now."

Immediately, a piece of code flashed into the IDE. "Okay, done," Fred said.

The jig was up. "Fred, where did you copy this from?" Fred wasn't getting that Senior Developer position, but Avi wanted a confession before the interview was over, if just to satisfy some need for justice.

But Fred wasn't forthcoming. "I just typed it all right now. Look, you can run it if you'd like--"

"Fine, Fred," Avi interrupted. "Then how would you change this to avoid duplicate entries?"

"Oh, just change that one there to a negative one." Fred's voice faltered.

"What one, there's no--" Avi said, before he spotted a lowercase l, which looked like a 1 in the IDE, twelve lines down. "Okay, we're done, Fred," Avi said, hanging up before Fred could sputter another word.

Although he wouldn't get a confession from Fred, Avi wanted to see where the code came from. He ran a simple search with the idiosyncratic method signature. The first result was a Stack Overflow question. Typical, Avi thought, just before he opened the page and saw the truth: the code came from the question itself, not one of the answers. The code would never have compiled, much less run.

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eternicode
4214 days ago
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TRWTF is the IDE. "a lowercase i, which looked like a 1 in the IDE" -- seriously?
jhojgaard
4212 days ago
Hopefully not. Otherwise "Hello World" could turn into a math problem :)
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