As a reminder to myself (mostly) I’ll post two of my grandmother’s recipes here (translated for your convenience). They are for apple pie and what my Grandma calls “Farmer salad”. To further… I mean prevent confusion, I’ll prefix their names with “Unholde”. Both are perversely delicious and for some reason I have a hard time remembering them. Here we go:
Unholde Apple Pie
Ingredients for one “Backblech” (35×40 cm) or one jelly roll pan (12½x17½ ″):
For the dough:
- 500 g (~1.1 lb) wheat flour (white or wholemeal, I’ll leave that up you)
- 1 package active dry yeast
- 75 g (~2.5 oz) sugar
- 1 package of vanilla sugar (a typical continental European ingredient, can probably be replaced by a pinch of vanilla and a pinch of sugar)
- 1 pinch salt
- 75 g (~2.5 oz) melted butter
- 250 ml (~1 cup) lukewarm milk
- 1 egg
Additionally you’ll need:
- 2 kg (~4.4 lb) apples. Ideally boskoop. You can probably even fit another pound on the pan, so don’t be cheap.
- Some butter and sugar to finish the pie top.
Mix the dough, put it in a warm place (e.g. the oven at 50°C (~122°F)) until the dough has doubled it’s volume. Meanwhile peel and slice the apples. Now knead the dough for some time. Grease the pan and spread ¾ of the dough on it, make sure that the dough goes up the lip of the pan. Line it closely with apple slices. Roll the rest of the dough out thinly and use it to cover the pie.
Put the pie in the oven for ~30 minutes at 50°C (~122°F) then bake it at 175°C (~347°F). After about 20 minutes spread some flakes of butter and sprinkle some sugar on the pie. Bake for 5 more minutes and it’s done!
Unholde Farmer Salad
Ingredients for a big bowl of salad:
- 1 small head cabbage
- 1 big celeriac (celery root)
- 4 big green bell peppers
- 6 big carrots
- 1 small jar of pickled cucumbers
- 200g (~7 oz) light mayonnaise (Miracle Whip or similar)
Wash everything (excluding the pickles and mayonnaise, obviously), and shred it with a food processor. Add mayonnaise and mix it good. Put it in the fridge for the night and season to taste with a little vinegar (from the pickle-jar).
Bon appétit!
I hope nothing was lost in the translation, and I’d be delighted to hear from you on how you liked it and if you made any improvements on the recipes.
It’s been a long time since my last post, and this blog even had some downtime, sorry for that.
As the title suggests, the web is wide. Or big or vast or something. The point is, there are many fine websites. Two of those – two sites about video games I didn’t know about until a few weeks ago – I am going to recommend to you now.
FantasyAnime is a website about Animes and old JRPGs (which is short for Japanese RolePlaying Games, in case you didn’t know), and it also has some games of other genres. I am a big fan of JRPGs (and RPGs in general) and this site covers a lot of them, and it does so beautifully!
The best thing about the site is, you can download almost all of the games covered, often with the latest, fan-made patches and translations.
Obviously a lot of work and love was put into the website and I heavily recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in console RPGs.
Hardcore Gaming 101 is a really expansive website about old games. Hundreds of old games, with detailled descriptions, histories and lots of screenshots.
It’s treasure chest of overwhelming information for any gamer and probably even for non-gamers. Heavily recommended for absolutely everyone not too lazy to read long, well-written texts ;)
Looking for alternatives for my dismantled “radio” (well, it was more of a mixtape, really) I found 8tracks. It’s a website for publishing mp3-mixtapes. For that to be legal they need to put some limitations on it, so you won’t see the playlist, you won’t be able to jump to a certain song (though you can skip a limited number of songs), and when you want to listen to it twice the playlist will be shuffled. In short, they do everything to make it impossible for you to hear a given song.
But that’s okay, because it lets them, under US law, be recognized as a “webradio”, which means that it’s completely legal. So I present to you now a mixtape (not CC-licensed) of my favorite powerful metal songs (I won’t say powermetal, because it’s hard to define and the songs would break the definition anyway): http://8tracks.com/unhold/powerful-metal.
Enjoy!
Im sorry to announce that the radio has been closed down due to legal uncertainties, even though all songs were released under Creative Commons licenses.
That’s the world we live in, once you think it’s safe and turn your back to copyright, it bites you in the ass.
Something seems to have broken in the layout of my blog, I’ll work on it later, when I find the time.
Please forgive any inconveniences you might experience.
Update: Fixed. Thanks to the K2 Team.
I just watched SkyOne‘s The Colour of Magic a film based on the first two Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett (don’t make me link those!), and I must say I am delighted by the choice of cast. Especially Jeremy Irons as The Patrician. He is the perfect choice for that character. Whenever I read a Discworld novel (and I read a lot of them) and I need to visualize Lord Vetinari (that’s the Patrician’s name, for those who haven’t read those books. Shame on you!) I see Jeremy Irons. There really could not have been another actor for that role.
So, thanks SkyOne, thanks The Mob and praise be to Jeremy Irons, the lord of all movie-villains (he could play anything, though, even female roles, probably).
My MP3-Player (or rather Portable Media Player, as it plays not only MP3, but also videos, and more importantly FLAC and ogg vorbis) the Cowon D2 has had some problems with playing tracks in the right order.
It worked fine when opening the files via the file browser, but when browsing them via tags the playing order was… well, out of order. It wasn’t random though, on the iAudiophile forums I read something about it being a typically Korean bug, because the track numbers were read from right to left or something.
Anyways, the latest firmware update, 2.59, finally fixed that bug. Or so I thought. All my mp3s are now playing in the correct order, which is really great. The problem is: The FLACs are still playing out of order.
So now I’m converting all my FLACs to mp3s. With LAME and the -V0 setting, which schould produce really good quality mp3s. I probably won’t hear the difference, but it still makes me sad that Cowon didn’t manage to fix that bug once and for all.
So right now I cannot recommend buying a Cowon D2, though it is really an awesome device!
I’ll file this under “lesson learned”: Check the web for bug reports before you buy something.
I managed to bring one of my favourite games, Peggle, onto one of my favourite gadgets, the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). If you don’t know Peggle, do yourself a favour and download the demo, it is an awesome little game!
But, Peggle was never released for the PSP!
There will be a release for the Nintendo DS (NDS, another of my favourite gadgets) later this year, but not everybody has a NDS, and it isn’t out yet. There are also releases for Windows, Mac OS, iPod, and mobile phones.
So, how did I manage to run Peggle on my PSP?
Continue reading ‘Peggle on the PSP’
I just remembered that another of my favourite songs is Creative Commons licensed, so here is yet another update to my radio:
Re: Your Brains by the wonderful Jonathan Coulton.
I spent two nights sifting through CC-licensed music, and I uploaded two more songs to my radio. But I think I will stop this experiment here.
While there is indeed good, free (as in speech) music out there, I still can’t show you the music I really care about1, at least not legally. I could link to Youtube videos with horrible audio quality (and questionable legality), or I could post a playlist and send you to fetch it’s content at a certain Swedish bay.
But I don’t want this blog to be about music anyway; I just think it’s a great idea to let other people listen to a few samples of the music you like, so they might find something they like, discover new bands or even new genres for themselves. So I’d like to recommend a few songs and have people listen to them without any hassle. It’s what people have done with LPs, CDs, and MCs for decades. It’s the best advertisement any musician and their labels could hope for.
But not on the internet – not in the open. It’s too risky. They (the labels mostly, I guess) could sue me and they might even win. So this music sharing remains in a legal grey area; in the underground.
I’m afraid I can’t offer any insightful conclusion to this little rant. The situation is slowly changing – see Nine Inch Nails – but the big music labels will fight for their (hopefully) lost cause for a long time and do much harm to keep their obsolete business model alive. They not only harm their customers, but probably even more so the artists, who are exploited and chained to a merciless and greedy bureaucracy.
1: “Ode an die Freude”, the Presto from Beethoven’s Ninth, is actually one of my favourite pieces of music, ever. I was lucky to find a free recording of it.