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Vegetarian Christmas Raised Pie

I wanted to use a hot water crust pastry to make a Christmas main course. Given that we don’t eat meat, raised pork pies weren’t going to work. I’ve made a Christmas pie before that used butter beans, cheese, garlic and herbs so I decided to work from that and a raised pork pie and create a new recipe.

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Kayaking in Florida

We’ve been on Florida on holiday (vacation?) with Em’s dad and his wife. We visited the theme parks, they were OK. Disney is much more mellow than Universal; there are some great rides at both but Owen and I (the ride fans) like roller coaster rich environments best really. We also went to the Kennedy Space Center. It’s been thirty something years since I was last there and I was a bit bemused to find it has become theme parked.
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How much yeast?

I always forget how much of each different type of yeast to use. An aide memoire…

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Sourdough Muffins

This makes about 20-24 muffins. They are best when you eat them absolutely fresh. Just make sure they are cooked enough. They aren’t like the one you buy in the supermarket - they’re a bit more dense. You can cook them until they start to brown.

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Sourdough Pancakes

This always feels like cheating because there’s baking soda and powder as well as sourdough but it makes really tasty pancakes.

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Chocolate Pecan Chunk Cookies

This recipe is so easy. I think I originally got it from a cookbook that I ordered from Carnation. The condensed milk makes the cookies softer. You can use almost any nuts. I’ve used pecans, hazelnuts, almonds and walnuts in the past.
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Setting up zsh

Note to self Setting up zsh consistently. Assuming zsh is installed… Install oh-my-zsh sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)" Install zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting cd ~/oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git Configure delete the block setting EDITOR and replace with export EDITOR=vim set the plugins list to (zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighing vi-mode git redis-cli)
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Pavlova

I love pavlova. There seem to be so many different recipe variations for the meringue. I’ve tried loads but I always come back to this one. My mum gave this one to me about twenty years ago. This recipe has never let me down. I’ve tried ones from cookbooks and the meringue just hasn’t worked as well. This works. The raspberry and passion fruit is our addition; you can use any fruit you like.
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Programming

I’ve been thinking about the things that I use to do my job. There’s the obvious things like a web browser (I like Safari but I use Chrome). A lot has changed since because I’ve gone from a job where writing code was most of my job at MarkLogic to a job where writing code is something that I might do in order to get something in my job done (at Redis).
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Battersea Brown

A long time ago in a city not so far away (Battersea), there was the Lighthouse Bakery. We bought bread there. In particular we loved their Battersea Brown wholemeal bread. We moved to Sussex and there was sadness because we couldn’t buy the bread anymore. I mentioned this to the lovely people who ran the bakery. Clearly, we weren’t the first because they had a printed copy of the recipe and method ready to hand over.