Cooking, Snowing, Coding

Today, I feel like I'm in the story of the programmer who died washing his hair: the shampoo bottle read "Lather, Rinse, Repeat," and since there was no conditional to get out of the loop...

It's amazing what you can put together with a properly stocked pantry, even if you feel like you have absolutely nothing in the house. The main goal was to get rid of more of the leftover ham without making it seem like we were forcing ham down everyone's throat. The solution presented itself in google: leftover ham recipe. I took a look at a few hits and came to a conclusion: one cup of cubed ham, four cups of various veggies, and two cans of beans-- soup. The veggies were easy: we had some potatoes that needed using, and we always seem to have carrots, celery, and onions on hand. A few cubes of vegetable soup boullion completed the mix.

In a deep saucepan heat two tbsp. olive oil until smoking, brown the ham for three minutes, then add chopped carrots and onions and saute for five minutes, add garlic and celery for one minute, then toss in four cups broth or stock (cut with water is okay if you think it's too salty), potatoes, salt, pepper, and other spices to taste (I added some oregano), and two cans of beans (rinsed-- it's the thick liquid on the outside that gives people gas). Even the kids ate it. Which of course led Kouryou-chan into dessert, and the consequences thereof. ( Kouryou-chan gets into her dessert. )

The same was true the day before. We had some frozen chicken and some apples that a relative had sent to us that had not (yet) gone bad. What the heck do you do with that?

The answer was in the pantry: couscous. Cut the chicken into narrow strips and saute' in a deep pan until no pink shows on the outside. Remove. Add butter or oil to the pan and add 1 1/2 cups couscous, stirring until the couscous is coated. (Between these two steps, if you have them, you can add 1/2 cup pine nuts, saute'd for 5 minutes-- I did) Add 2 1/4 cups water or chicken broth, return the chicken, 2 cups chopped apple and 1 cup raisins. Cook for eight minutes.

It's actually a bit of a shame that I had to concoct the ham soup recipe yesterday; Omaha and I had really wanted to go out to eat. But at six last night it had been too snowy to drive anywhere. I hope tonight that we can make a break for our favorite slow-food fish place, down by the marina. I'm kinda glad that I didn't go last night: I was not in the mood for greasy food, and the fish place can be that.

Sadly, the snow was mostly gone by this morning. A shame because I think the girls would really have liked more sledding. But it looks like we're mostly in for rain-- cold, freezing rain-- for the rest of the week, according to the weather service.

Oh, and I discovered that Python has a new timedelta library set. It's now possible to write "Add one week to this date" without having to convert both to seconds, do the math, and then try and recalculate a valid date from the result. This made processing the massive log files Omaha had lying around much easier. I still had to write "subtract one day from this date until you reach monday," but at least I was able to write in those terms rather than "subtract 86400 seconds from..." and then rejigger. The old library routines were time-zone dependent, which can be a nightmare when we are in Washington, the servers are in Texas (two hours difference), and some of the routines assumed you were always on Greenwish Mean Time. The new library is faster, too.

I watched the first episode of Kanon. Kawaii! I like it. I think I'll watch more of it. I also regret not getting into Big O the first time through; it's actually quite stylish and thoughtful and much more deserving of my time than Blue Gender. And the music is amazing-- real jazz and symphonic pieces.

For New Year's Eve, Omaha and I went to the Wetspot. 'Nuff said.