Bill Farmer

Turkey Cabbage Wraps

Our neighbour has been giving us large kale–like leaves from his purple sprouting broccoli plants, which are quite tasty. I decided to look up what could be done with large cabbage leaves and decided on wraps with a tomato sauce over the top.

Ingredients

• 250g minced turkey thigh
• An onion, finely chopped
• A garlic clove, crushed
• A carrot, grated
• 50g porridge oats
• Small stick of celery, chopped
• A mushroom, chopped finely
• An egg
• Black pepper
• Olive oil
• Enough cabbage leaves for six wraps
• A jar of pasta sauce or tin of chopped tomatoes
• Grated cheese for topping

Method

1. Cut the tough stems out of the leaves and cook them gently in just enough water until limp enough to wrap around the ingredients.
2. Put some olive oil, the onions, garlic, carrot, celery and mushrooms in a medium skillet and cook gently, covered, until looking done, then add the oats and cook a bit more.
3. In a large bowl crack the egg, grate over some black pepper, and whip until combined.
4. Add the turkey, wait for the veg mixture to cool down, then add it to the bowl.
5. Mix it all up until well combined.
6. Lay out each leaf on a chopping board or similar, put a large heaped tablespoon of turkey mixture on each one, and roll it up. If the leaves are wide enough, tuck the sides in before rolling. You may need two leaves for each wrap if they are long narrow ones. You should end up with six wraps.
7. Place the wraps in a suitable casserole dish and cover with sauce or chopped tomatoes. Grate some cheese over the top.
8. Cook in a medium oven for about 40 minutes until the sauce is bubbling and the cheese is melted and browning.

Create a Word Grid

A popular online puzzle game involves solving a five character word grid in the least number of moves. There are probably several ways of algorithmically generating word grids, Donald Knuth’s Dancing Links paper mentions generating a word grid. I decided to use brute force and a randomised word list.

This uses a large number of lists and iterators and can generate a large number of word grids. This algorithm is used in my Gridle android app.

Read Paywalled Newspaper Articles

Most mainstream newspapers show a teaser front page on their web site, but hide most of their content behind a paywall. As with most things you can think of, there is a browser extension for this – Bypass Paywalls.

However this does not work for all newspapers, the extension appears to have dropped support for The Times, for example. It is still possible to read some articles by making use of a search engine to find another source for the text of the item. To do this:

Risotto Milanese

This is not authentic Risotto Milanese, that requires beef marrow and saffron. I refuse to pay the exotic prices demanded for saffron in the UK, and I don’t have any beef marrow.

Lunch for two.

Ingredients

• Olive oil
• Butter, small knob
• 3/4 cup arborio rice
• Medium onion, chopped finely
• Mushrooms, chopped, if liked
• Chicken stock pot
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• Boiling water, about 1 1/4 cups
• Cheddar cheese, grated

Method

1. Add the knob of butter to a medium heavy bottomed pan, add a good glug of olive oil and place on a low heat.
2. Add the chopped onion and allow to cook until soft.
3. Add the mushrooms, if using, rice, turmeric and stir to coat the rice.
4. Add the stock pot and water, stirring to ensure the stock pot has melted and well stirred in.
5. Cover and allow to cook until the rice is done and the water is nearly all absorbed.
6. Stir in the grated cheese and leave to steam, covered, for a few minutes.

I added mushrooms because they were there, waiting to be used, and the cheese was a small lump left in the packet.

Android Flutter

Google have made a big thing of their flutter development platform, so I thought I ought to give it a try. It’s easy to install, just download the sdk, unzip it in a suitable place and add the bin folder to your path.

Update

I decided to have another look as it appears to be liked by developers on Reddit. The old version wouldn’t update, so I downloaded the latest (Flutter 3.16.5) and replaced it. This time it found everything it wanted. This time I build a simplistic app that just displays an image.