Bill Farmer

Fabada Asturiana

A highly flavoured Asturian version of pork and beans. Enough for four or more.

Ingredients

• 375g or thereabouts packet of dried butter beans
• 4-500g belly pork with or without skin, cut into chunks
• Smoked gammon hock, or 4-500g cooking bacon. If lucky, it’s possible to find a packet of cooking bacon that is just one big chunk of unsliced bacon by rooting through the supermarket shelf.
• 100-125g picante chorizo, cut into chunks
• Crushed black peppercorns
• Heaped teaspoon paprika
• Heaped teaspoon turmeric
• 2 bay leaves
• 4-5 garlic cloves, chopped
• 3-4 onions, chopped
• Olive oil
• Water

Method

1. Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water.
2. Cover the bottom of a large pan with a few glugs of olive oil and place on a lowish heat.
3. Add the pork and gammon hock or bacon and the chorizo.
4. Add the garlic, onions, bay leaves, black pepper, paprika and turmeric, cover and allow to cook gently until the pork is looking cooked.
5. Drain the beans, rinse and pour into the pan.
6. Cover the beans with water and replace the lid.
7. When the pan comes to the boil, allow to boil for a few minutes, then turn the heat right down to a gentle simmer.
8. Allow to simmer for 2-3 hours. If using a gammon hock, take it out before it disintegrates , and remove the bones, chop up the meat and return it to the pan.

This goes well with green cabbage.

Vegetable Soup Plus

A vegetable soup with a bit of meat that’s full of flavour. Similar to leek and potato soup recipe. Make it into a meal with plenty of bread and butter. Enough for two, double the recipe for four.

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 small potato, cubed
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1/2 a fresh chilli, if desired
• 1/2 a vegetable stock cube
• Additional vegetables as available: grated carrot, leek, courgette, cabbage, etc
• a few slices of chorizo or other tasty sausage, chopped
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Milk

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large pan and add the vegetables, sausage and stock cube. Cook for 3-4 minutes until starting to soften.
2. Grind over some black pepper.
3. Add the milk and heat gently until it is about to boil. Simmer until the vegetables are tender.
4. Whizz with a hand blender or in a blender until most of the vegetables have been liquidised, but leave some lumps of vegetables and sausage for a more interesting texture.

Haskell

I read an article recently about how amazingly efficient functional programming, and Haskell in particular is. So I thought I’s give it a go and see how I got on.

You can try it out in your browser: http://tryhaskell.org

    λ let factorial n = product [1..n] in factorial 99
    9332621544394415268169923885626670049071596826438162146859
    2963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223
    7582511852109168640000000000000000000000
    :: (Enum a, Num a) => a
    λ  

Pretty impressive! So I thought I’d try a simple web application.

    import Network.CGI
    cgiMain :: CGI CGIResult
    cgiMain = do
        setHeader "Content-Type" "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
        output "Hello World!\n"
    main :: IO ()
    main = runCGI (handleErrors cgiMain)

This seemed to work, so I tried a graphical GTK app.

Mexican Breakfast

This is an adaptation of a recipe I saw recently in the Metro. Not Huevos Rancheros, but something else. The original recipe was most insistent that the black pepper be added to the pan, not the eggs, and the eggs should be stirred, not beaten.

Ingredients

• Small potato, chopped
• Small onion, chopped
• Chili pepper, sliced
• Chorizo, chopped
• Tomato, chopped
• Fresh ground black pepper
• 2 eggs
• Oil

Method

1. Put some oil in a medium sized skillet or frying pan and warm up.
2. Add the potatoes, chili, onion, and chorizo, put a lid on, and allow to cook gently until the potatoes and onion are cooked through.
3. Add the tomato, give a stir and shake to loosen up any stuck on potato, grind over some black pepper, and put the lid back on until the tomato is heated through.
4. Meanwhile, crack the eggs into a suitable container and stir until they are well mixed.
5. Pour the eggs over the mixture in the pan, and stir and shake to ensure the eggs have penetrated under the mixture.
6. Put the lid back on and cook gently until the egg is cooked through.
7. If you are a wizard with an extremely non-stick pan you might be able to get this on to a plate in one piece. Otherwise, just pile it on.

SlimStat

When I first set up this web site, I looked for a simple web analytics program so that I could see if anyone actually looked at it. After faffing about with a couple of well known open source packages, I decided that they were way over the top by several orders of magnitude. Then I found SlimStat. However it appears to be no longer actively maintained, which it why the previous link is via the Way Back Machine. But it works just fine. It’s also on Github and Google Code.