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Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

thoughts on wordpress, latex, cooking et alia
January 13th, 2010

A year of new recipes

Working towards 52 new recipes in 2009

Working towards 52 new recipes in 2009

My resolution for 2009 was to make 52 new recipes throughout the year, or roughly one per week. I tracked my progress using kibotzer.com. I didn’t quite reach my goal, but I ended up making 45 new recipes, and I am pretty satisfied with that. Most of the recipes were from cookbooks I already own or from the internet, but some were my own inspirations. For most of the recipes, I also blogged a little about them, so that I would remember how I made them. In 2010, I am looking forward to revisiting many of these recipes, and continuing to improve upon them to fit my taste.

I tried this goal once several years ago, and enjoyed it, but by June the goal had definitely slipped my mind. Kibotzer helped me keep working towards my goal through gentle reminders every month or so, plus having my goal public also gave me a little extra incentive.

Here is a little slideshow of most of the recipes I tried.

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January 9th, 2010

Rigatoni with seitan puttanesca sauce

Rigatoni with seitan puttanesca sauce

Rigatoni with seitan puttanesca sauce

This was my last new recipe for 2009, and it was fairly improvised. I had recently looked up puttanesca in wikipedia, discovering that it is a “pantry dish”, meaning that most of the ingredients are staples in an Italian pantry, and mine too. I did alter it a bit. Normally it has anchovies, which I omitted, and normally it does not have onions which I added. And I also added in some seitan for protein. The result was quite tasty.

Here is what I used:

  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 2 pasilla (poblano) peppers
  • 1 large onion
  • 1 can mock pork (seitan)
  • 20 green olives, chopped
  • 2 cans petite diced tomatoes
  • 1 can tomato paste
  • 2 tsp capers
  • 1 cup white wine
  • Italian seasonings

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January 2nd, 2010

Wordpress 2.9 image changes

Wordpress 2.9 has several new image enhancements. One of the biggest features is some basic image editing functionality. Another one is that you can now specify different alt text from the “caption” field. The “caption” field places a caption under the image. The “alt” text is used to describe the picture to non-seeing users (including search engines). This is a nice addition. However, I usually like my caption, alt text, and title text to be all the same, and I don’t like to have to enter it all manually or copy and paste. By default, wordpress will use an IPTC caption as its “description” field, which shows up in the title attribute of the image. This is nice, since I can add a caption in my image editing program of choice (Picasa) and then I don’t have to enter it again. Except for those pesky alt and caption fields, which are blank by default.

This is particularly important if I am uploading many pictures. So I wrote a little sql which will set the “caption” and “alt text” fields to be the same as the description. I already had this working for the “caption” field for quite some time, but getting it to work for the different alt text handling in 2.9 was a bit tricky, since I discovered that the alt text is not stored in wp_posts like the other fields. Instead it is stored in the wp_postmeta table, which is new in 2.9. Although it took me awhile to figure this out, the new table is a welcome addition. Now for each image you upload, wordpress stores meta information in this table, including the width and height, different sized versions of the file, the IPTC caption, some EXIF info and a few other goodies. This means that if you like to include EXIF info about your pictures, that doing so requires only a simple database lookup, instead of having to read the headers from the image, which should be considerably faster I would imagine.

Now for my little SQL which sets the “caption” and “alt text” to be the same as the description. I run this on my server after uploading pictures. It would be even better if I could figure out how to do this as a wordpress plugin.

-- First we set the image caption (post_excerpt) to be the same as the
-- description (post_content)
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_excerpt=post_content WHERE post_type='attachment' AND
date(post_date)=curdate();

-- Next we set the alternative text to be the same as the post_excerpt
INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (wp_postmeta.post_id, wp_postmeta.meta_value) SELECT
DISTINCT wp_posts.ID, wp_posts.post_excerpt FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE
wp_posts.ID=wp_postmeta.post_id AND post_type='attachment' AND
date(post_date)=curdate();

-- This line sets the correct meta_key for the previous line, which doesn't
-- seem possible otherwise
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_key='_wp_attachment_image_alt' WHERE meta_key IS
NULL;

Posted in sql, wiki/cms, wordpress | No Comments »

December 18th, 2009

Penne with butternut squash sauce

Penne with butternut squash sauce

Penne with butternut squash sauce

We are leaving for vacation tomorrow, so I have been trying to use up what is in the house. One thing I had on hand was a butternut squash. One of our favorite recipes is corn, bean, and squash soup, but we have had that several times recently, so I decided to try something different. I thought it might make a good sauce for pasta, so I went with that. I mostly stuck to this recipe from the nourishing gourmet, but I added some cannellini beans and some whole milk at the end, since I also needed to use that up. The result was ok. Adding more salt helped a lot, but I think that it was too thick, too squashy, and too much sauce for the amount of pasta. So next time I would probably use either more millk and pasta, or less squash (and more salt). It was a nice way to use my new immersion blender though, and I have been looking for tomato-less pasta sauces recently, since I keep hearing how canned tomatoes are bad for me.

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December 15th, 2009

Mjadra sandwich

Mjadra sandwich

Mjadra sandwich

While we were in Michigan over Thanksgiving we stopped at our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant in Ann Arbor, Jerusalem Garden, for a tasty mjadra sandwich. Mjadra is basically just lentils, caramelized onions, and either rice or bulgar. I haven’t been able to find it at restaurants in Colorado, so I decided to try to make it myself. I found quite a few recipes online, some with rice, and some with bulgar. Some had almost no spices, and some had many. I decided to use a cup each of brown lentils and brown rice, 2 large onions, a little cinnamon and some cumin. I also added about a half cup of bulgar at the end to soak up the remaining water. It was pretty good, though I think next time I will cook it a little longer, use less cinnamon, and add garlic.

I put the mjadra in a pita, along with some baba ghanoush, lettuce, a pickle, feta cheese crumbles, and a little Red Hot.

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