Avocado Madrilène

Found this old Woman’s Weekly recipe card which called for canned Madrilène consommé, chances of finding this at Angle Vale supermarket on Saturday morning for diner that evening? Hmmm no! Well the picture looked so good, the green halved avocados filled with bright red consommé topped white sour cream was so appetising I decided to give it a try from scratch.

Neither my recipe books nor Google turned up anything that sounded like the picture so I took:

• 6 ripe tomatoes coarsely chopped
• 1 stick of celery
• 1 carrot
• 1 brown onion
• 500ml chicken stock
• 2 thick slices of beetroot to colour the consommé otherwise it will be nearly clear  (pinched that idea from Mr Oliver)
• Salt and pepper

Simmered for about 45mins until tomatoes had broken down then sieved through cheese clothe and set with 3 teaspoons of gelatine for 2 hours.

Onion cream:

• Sour cream
• Finely sliced spring onions (just the white)

To serve cut the avocados in half,remove stone and wipe with lime juice. Fill the cavity with the red jelly, top with onion cream, sprinkle with finely chopped chives, a few slivers of red chilli and a small wedge of lime.

It looked a treat and was quickly devoured. Made for a really nice light, refreshing entree.

Autumn Planting

Hope I haven’t left it too late in the season but finally got a day in the garden. Planted 7 beds including; brown onions, garlic, beetroot, rocket, climbing peas, sugar snap peas, lettuce, broccoli, spinach and bok choy. Also collected seed from the heritage Roma tomatoes, basil and chilli.

Must start work on a second asparagus bed for spring, the one we planted last spring is starting to look the goods.

Windows Media Centre: The good, the bad and the ugly

For a number of years now I’ve steadily networked the house, moving to a new one and dragging cable through out completed that process and yes I decided against a purely wireless setup. I tried streaming video over wifi and while viewing was mostly fine, fast forward was oh so slow.  On some occasions the wireless would be so bad that video and audio would get out of sync making tv unwatchable. Switching all media machines to wired gigabit connections has completely resolved those issues.

In this process all the tv’s in the house have either been replace by or connected to PC’s. The network now consists of 3 PC’s, an Xbox360, a Home Server and 2 wireless laptops. The 3 PC’s all boot straight into Media Centre. One is on 24×7 and has 2 usb dual tuner sticks, this one lives in the media room and drives the projector and does all our recording of free-to-air programs. The Xbox is connect to a large Sony Bravia LCD in the family room and runs as a Media Centre Extender. The remaining two PC’s are old hand-me-down with a 30” and 24” flat screen in the bedroom and the home gym with a single usb tuner that rarely gets used . The result is that recorded and live tv can be viewed throughout the house.

Having set the scene, how well does it work? Great! The interface is large and easily used. The Xbox extender boots quickly and is simple to use and has become our “main” tv. The PC in the media room just seems to quietly chug away, rarely requiring any attention. Hard drives are cheap and easy to add so we currently have 2tb of storage dedicated to media storage, which contains 100gb of music, 10,000+ photos and way more recorded tv than we are likely to watch.

The Good:

• All our media is available from a single interface. Unlike Tivo, a Video Recorder or IQ; Media Centre delivers an elegant solution for all our varied media requirements (well almost)
• The interface is large, easily used and a pleasure to use
• Up to 4 tuners can be installed
• Television recording is intuitive and easy to manage
• Recorded TV can be sorted in a number of ways and when sorted by title it nicely groups series episodes
• Series recording options allow for numerous archiving options
• Series recording handle changes of time and channel seamlessly
• Music CD’s can be automatically and quickly ripped to hard disk allowing you to store and access your audio collection
• The screensaver displays random home photos in a nice slide show turning the tv into a giant digit photo frame
• Set up and configuration is simple and straight forward
• Comes free with Vista and Windows 7 Home and Ultimate editions
• We now watch what we want, where we want

The Bad:

• No Blue Ray support out of the box. Downloadable add-ons are available
• TV Guide is limited to the information provided over the air by the stations. This isn’t really Media Centres problem but it appears in the US the guide information is publish over the web and hopefully contains better information that the meagre offerings the free to-air stations offer.
• No bulk edits or deletes so I can’t select an entire series and delete all episodes
• I’ve tried numerous standby and power saving modes with limited success and found that the only two options that work for me are on 24×7 for one machine doing the recording and all the others either do complete shutdowns or hibernate when not in use.
• Playlists can contain music and photos as a slide show but can’t include recorded tv, live tv or movies. It would be really nice to plan a complete evenings media offerings drawing from all possible media sources. Hmmm a bit jazz with dinner, replay the news that was recorded earlier and switch to that movie we just downloaded. Maybe next version
• Dragging the album art across the wire can be slow when you have a large collection
• iTunes’ Genius style playlists would be awesome
• Playlists can be burnt to a cd but not to a memory stick or card

The Ugly:

Not at all! Its pretty but if your going to get carried away with it you will need a geek to keep it all working. Updates, power failure and hardware changes all seem to conspire to upset the apple cart but don’t let that deter you. A single PC connected to a TV isn’t hard to get set up

Using LicenseModeUsage to determine DesignMode

According to Dot Net Facts

Within the System.ComponentModel namespace is a class called LicenseManager. Its purpose is to help developers to handle licensees for their own UserControls in both the run-time and design mode. For this, it has a handy static function called UsageMode. It returns an enumerated value from LicenseModeUsage with two options:

• Designtime
• Runtime

The problem with this class is that it seems to work fine only within constructors (for both Forms and UserControls classes)! If it is used inside an event handler it will return always Runtime!

DataGridView – Add ToolTips to Individual Cells get wrong tooltip

Microsoft MSDN suggests handling the CellFormatting event and setting the DataGridViewCell.ToolTipText property (full article)

In most cases this is fine but recently a user reported a grid where the tooltips where out of sync. The app was handling the grids CellDoubleClick and removing the clicked row from the grid. When the grid first displays all was good but when a row was double clicked and the remaining rows shuffled up to replace the removed row the tooltips were out of sync.

The solution was in the fine print at the bottom of the article which went on to suggest that for a data bound grid handling the CellToolTipTextNeed event and setting e.ToolTipText was more robust and had less performance penalties. Yes it also fixed my syncing issues

Around the house

How good has it been moving into a new house and kennels? In a word; Awesome!

We celebrated the move with friends, over dinner of rib-eye roast with onion marmalade, mashed potatoes and a brilliant 2005 Wilgha Shiraz we picked up from Hollicks in the Coonawarra on our way home from Easter dogs shows at Mt Gambia.

The granite beach top and the induction cook top are a delight to work on.  The Mille oven heats quickly and evenly, the plug in temperature probe turned out a perfect moist, pink roast beef with a crisp brown skin.

Having split the kitchen between the family room and the “Butler’s pantry” has had many advantages, not the least begin that the dirty dishes disappeared from sight as dinner finished but still leaves the cooking area in the family room where the action is. The 2.4m dividing wall between the kitchen and the pantry also gives us an extra wall for benches and cupboards on each side.

The Media room was starting to worry me as I looked more closely at projectors and I began to get the feeling that manufactures were beginning to get out of the the market in favour of large flat screen TV’s. Was I about to buy into out-dated technology? Persevering and put in an LG AF115-JS with a 1080p native resolution on a ceiling mounted .

Projecting onto an off-white wall, the results out of the box were stunning. Even in daylight with enough light coming through the newspaper covered windows to easily see (curtains are on the shopping list). Mounted about 3.6m from the screen, the display is 2.5m across the diagonal. When fully darken the picture quality and size provides a highly immersive viewing experience.  Even in daylight the viewing experience is far better then the large Sony Bravia which suffers from reflections and glare in the bright family room. So yeah I’d do it again and when time and money permits I’m going to try a paint-on screen. The cricket was just superb; if a little bigger than life sized.

A quick plug for the cable chick, a great on-line shop for all those pesky high-tech cables and mounts you need to really make those toys really fit into the house. I’ve used them a few times now and the experience has been quick and painless and the prices very sharp.

A Summer Harvest

In September 2010 we finally moved to our new house and kennels on 2.5acre, 30 minutes north of Adelaide. We set all our dog yards back 10 meters to reduce unwanted interactions with our various neighbours dogs and sheep. This has left us with a wonderful 10 meter wide strip of dog free land right around the perimeter, the ideal place for an orchard and veggie garden. In our second summer now and the deep, rich flood plain clay soil is producing masses of tasty treats. So far we have harvested

• Apricots – enough to make about 4k of lovely jam. The set was a little runny, I need more lemon juice to up the acidity and help the pectin set the sugar. The induction cook top was brilliant for cooking jam, the heat was absolutely even across the base of the pot and I easily reached setting temp (104°C) without a hint of burning. Tried turning the late pick into pie filling, they were a little over-ripe. The result of lightly poaching them with a little sugar was a bit sloppy but tasty. The extra jars I tried keeping went off, they seemed to have created a vacuum seal but a month later the looked like they’d started to ferment.
• Peaches – just starting to ripen, lovely yellow free stones
• Strawberries – about a punt a week from about 6 plants and then the warm weather hit and in one evening we picked 250gm of hulled and cleaned berries. Wonderfully sweet, tart delightfully flavoursome berries that I added and equal amount of sugar to and turned into a lovely bright jar of jam. I was hoping to get them off the heat before setting pointed and end up with Strawberry syrup to go with ice-cream but I was too slow and had to settle for jam.
• Rhubarb – made a great apple and rhubarb
• Tomatoes – Absolutely awesome, 6 varieties two plants of each started producing before Christmas and are giving us more than enough. Rig a shelter of white 50% shade clothe when the sun started getting fierce in January.
  

  Grosse Lisse	Big and vigorous but nothing special. Big chucky fruits, good for cooking. Getting a lot of brown dying older leaves, new growth still looks healthy and still producing good fruits
  Early Money	Lovely eating, heavy crop and the first to start producing
  Roma	Late producer, very bushy habit. I found this one difficult. Mid season Blossom End Rot hit them hard. The tips turned brown and mushy as soon as they started to ripen. A water soluble, high phosphorous tomato fertiliser fixed the problem in days. Still not sold on them, firm flesh is good for cooking but they were the least tastiest of the crop
  Cherry	Lovely intense flavour, great for salads
  ‘Heritage’	Not sure what the name was but a wonderfully flavoured small pear shaped fruit. I’ll try collecting seed
  Tommy Toe	This was my favourite. Nice bite sized fruits with great colour and taste. Good heavy crop and no real problems

• Chilli’s – masses of hot red ones with bags of flavour
• Capsicums – Red and yellow, great flavour but not great producers. Also started to suffer from the Blossom End Rot, treating the same as the tomatoes.
• Rudy Chard– What a find! A relative of Silver Beet and Beetroot, it has a flavour of both. Sweat an onion in a little olive oil, add a chopped tomato and then coarsely chopped kale and cover until it softened then crumble in some fetta. Yum!
• Potatoes – 12 plants in a 3x3meter plot and we started dig them about a month ago and are getting about 2kgm per plant. Well worth the effort. I put in seed Kipfler potatoes purchased from the local nursery and love the way they mash, not so good for roasting. I’ve tried planting left over suds that have started to sprout and had disappointing results, I’m delighted with the the results from certified seed potatoes.
• Golden Globe Pumpkins – These small orange skinned gourds look great and are just the right size for the two of us. The first two I’ve picked weren’t fully ripe and the flesh was somewhat pasty and flavourless. By mid January their skins darkened and the flavour and texture improved out of sight. I want to try baking them whole and turning them into individual pumpkin soup served in a pumpkin .
• Cucumbers – Four plants, soooooo much cucumber, I see why they end up in pickles. Will have to try that in coming seasons. Finding that cucumber goes into all sorts of dishes, using 3 or 4 cucumbers a week in sandwiches, salads, dips, stir fries, curries and stews.
• Asparagus – A row went in at the end of spring. I was concerned  that I’d left it too late as they’d already sprouted and had quite long shoots. It was worth persevering as they have all established well and we look forward harvesting in future seasons
• Beetroot – have been easy to grow and a great addition. Boiled then heat on the bbq with balsamic vinegar, grated raw in a salad or boiled and stored in a jar of pickling solution in the fridge. They are well worth the effort.
• Carrots – I must thin the rows more often, I ended up with a lot of twisted, deformed roots that were hard to use in the kitchen
• Herbs – Mint, oregano and basil have been great. Thyme and rosemary got grubbed out by the dogs. Rosemary didn’t seem to like the heavy soil. First crop of garlic were small but intensely flavoured.