Bill Farmer

Draught Hash Brown

Many years ago, in a hotel in Hollywood, we thought the breakfast was a bit overpriced. Someone suggested the Dunkin’ Donut across the road, so over we went. In there the guy was offering bacon, egg over easy, and hash brown for 99¢. I was intrigued with the hash brown, he just took a handful of grated potato from a plastic bag and chucked it on the griddle plate.

Ingredients

• Grated potato
• Vegetable cooking oil

Method

1. Put some cooking oil in a hot medium sized skillet
2. Grate your potatoes and put them in the pan
3. Cook until browned underneath and turn over
4. Serve when browned on the reverse side

Goes extremely well with bacon and eggs and the trimmings. If consolidated into a potato cake becomes a Swiss rosti.

Australian Meatball Wiggleoni

This is an adaptation of a recipe by our daughter’s Australian fiancee. His version was a way of getting vegetables into his kids by hiding them in meat sauce. This adaptation uses meatballs instead of mince.

Ingredients

• Meatballs
• Tomatoes, chopped
• Tomato paste
• Olive oil
• Oregano
• Onions, chopped
• Garlic, chopped
• Carrots, chopped
• Celery, chopped
• Cabbage, chopped
• Fusilli pasta

Method

• Fry or cook the meatballs in the oven, keeping them warm.
• Make a tomato and vegetable sauce with the olive oil, tomatoes, tomato paste, oregano and vegetables. Use either fresh tomatoes or a tin of tomatoes. Use any vegetables that take your fancy.
• Cook the pasta in accordance with the instructions on the packet.
• Either put the meatballs in the sauce or put them on top of the pasta in the serving bowls with the sauce on top.

Not Swedish Meatballs

Meatballs are sometimes on offer at our local supermarket, so what can you do with them apart from meatball curry or meatballs with spaghetti? What about swedish meatballs? Well we didn’t like the sound of the creamy gravy or sauce they are supposed to be served with and decided that Truly Evil Onion Gravy was the way to go.

Ingredients

• Meatballs
• Frozen or fresh peas
• Truly Evil Onion Gravy

Method

1. Start the gravy first as it takes a while to render the onions down.
2. Once the onions are well done, fry the meatballs gently in a skillet, turning them so as to brown all over.
3. Cook the peas in accordance with the instructions. When they are done, use the cooking water for the gravy, first pouring it into the skillet to get any burnt on bits.
4. Serve, pouring the gravy over the meatballs and peas.

Download playlist video

This has been superceded by youtube-dl, which seems to work on most video sites.

Since I wrote Download streamed video video web sites have upped their game to stop downloading. One of the techniques used is to use a M3U playlist and a complicated set of parameters. Other techniques are to use JavaScript to create a blob and play that, and to use a JavaScript browser app which goes into debug mode if you use the developer tools.

Resurrecting an Old Dos App

Back in the late 90’s I wrote an simulation app for an old telecontrol system that was being superceded. It was written in Turbo C to run on a DOS or Win95 PC.

The app used a conio library provided by the compiler to present colour character text and graphics on a monitor using a standard PC keyboard.

It used to run under 32 bit windows but wouldn’t run under 64 bit windows as there is no DOS emulation. So I decided to see if I could resurrect it using the windows API. There is a section in the windows docs about Console Applications which provides much the same functionality as the conio library.