Last night, we had some lentils, some mushrooms, and a rapidly ageing squash in the cupboard. And we wanted dinner, and I fancied cooking, and so we decided to make the best of those limited ingredients.

I tried some of those recipe suggestion sites, but they all basically gave up at “lentils”, let alone “butternut squash”, so I decided to throw things together and just hope for the best. Thus, my disclaimer below will be even more relevant than usual…

Lentil and Garlic Bread

This bread is surprisingly tasty, and very filling. Try not to overdo the lentils, or it will be very heavy.

• Small onion
• At least a hundred cloves of garlic (or maybe just 1-2)
• 70g red lentils
• 250mls vegetable stock
• 300g white bread flour
• 1 packet instant dried yeast
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1 Tbsp salt
• Beaten egg

1. Fry a bucketload of garlic, with a small onion, very thinly sliced.
2. Add the lentils and the vegetable stock, and cook for 10 minutes, until the lentils are soft and cooked, and the vegetable stock has mostly evaporated.
3. In a big mixing bowl, add the yeast, salt, sugar and flour. Mix ‘em together, then add the lentil-garlic mix, and knead together with hands.
4. Keep kneading until you have one big lumpy ball of dough, no longer sticky. You may need to add more flour.
5. Chuck it on the worktop with plenty of flour, and knead it and fold it into itself for about 5 minutes – this is to get air into the dough.
6. Leave it in the bowl somewhere warm for an hour, with a damp teatowel over the top.
7. Start making the Butternut, below. Then you can have a cup of tea, and come back to 8…
8. Take it out of the bowl – it should have doubled in size – and knead it a little bit more, rolling it into rolls or small loaves. As you can see in the picture, I made some braided rolls. Leave the rolls to rise for half an hour.
9. Whilst this is happening, you can sort out the stuffing for the butternut below…
10. Using a pastry brush, paint egg all over the rolls, to give a nice crispy brown shell, and pop the rolls in the oven with the butternut. When the rolls are brown, everything is ready.

Stuffed Butternut Squash

• A butternut squash, obviously
• Olive oil
• Salt & pepper
• Vegetables for the stuffing
• Roughly 4 tbsp sugar
• Two slices of bread
• Beaten egg
• A small pile of grated cheese

1. Take a butternut (trying not to notice how phallic it is) and cut it in half along its length. Scoop out the seeds and stuff in the hole, then sprinkle it with a little oil, and season like crazy with salt and pepper. Score the top with a big knife in a cross cross pattern – this helps it cook faster, and looks professional too! Chuck it in the oven for about an hour at 190°C (fan oven).
2. Whilst that’s cooking, don’t forget to skip up and roll out the bread. Then you can come back here and do step 3…
3. Take some mushrooms, onions and peppers (or whatever veg you want – no meat, you murderers). I used about 8 mushrooms, 2 small onions and a pepper – but it can be more depending how big the hole in your squash is. Chop them all into small strips, and fry them with some herbs. Once they are cooked through, add the sugar, and mix until the sugar makes everything go nicely brown (caramelised).
4. Gently toast some bread a couple of times, until its rock solid (but not burnt). Crumble the toast up in your hands until its mostly breadcrumbs, and mix it with the egg and grated cheese.
5. Take out the slightly browned butternut halves, gloop all the caramelised vegetables into the holes, and cover them with a thick layer of the eggy, bready, cheesey mix. Pop it in the oven for 15-20 mins and Bob’s your caramelised, stuffed and breadcrumbed uncle.
6. Don’t forget to finish the rolls above now…

I’ve spent many years playing with pizza recipes – my wife and I even created our own “How to make Pizza” recipe poster on our honeymoon. 

So when Now Then magazine put out a call for vegan recipes,  it seemed a good opportunity to provide my Calzone recipe. Here it is, in all its glory: enjoy!

Ingredients

• About 200g of strong bread flour (around 12% protein is best).
• Warm water.
• Few spoons of salt.
• Few spoons of sugar.
• Dried instant yeast (assuming you aren’t a brand of vegan that cares about fungi. If you do, miss out the yeast, it’ll still work, but the bread won’t be as tasty).
• Tomato passata (the own brand stuff from Co-op works fine).
• Veg.
• Herbs/spices.
• Vegan mozzarella style cheese.
• Soya milk.

Recipe

Dough

1. Prewarm the oven to 70°C (If you want to get the dough ready quickly. It’ll be tastier if you leave it to rise over 4 hours without extra warmth, but it’ll take 4 hours.)
2. Mix the salt, sugar and yeast in a bowl.
3. Stir in the flour, so it’s all nicely mixed.
4. Carefully add water, mixing by hand, until you have one non-sticky ball of dough.
5. Knead it on a floured surface for about 5 minutes, until your hands ache.
6. Turn off the oven, chuck the dough back in the bowl, cover the bowl with a teatowel, and put the bowl in the oven.
7. Leave to rise for an hour.
8. Take it out, knead it some more, and roll it into flat round pizza bases.

1. Fry a load of onions, peppers, mushrooms, garlic, chilli, spinach, soya mince – whatever you want in your calzone.
2. Mix in some herbs & spices – I usually use mixed herbs, paprika and mild chilli powder (but loads of it, so you get the taste of the chilli coming through).
3. Put a few dollops of passata in with the veg.
4. Heat the rest of the passata in a pan/microwave.

1. Preheat oven to 230°C – the higher the better.
2. Pop a pizza base on an oven tray.
3. Dollop veg in to the middle.
4. Cover the veg in cheese – you can use soft cheese, or nothing, if you prefer.
5. Using a pastry brush, make the edges of the base wet with milk.
6. Fold it over, and squidge the edges together to seal it.
7. Paint the whole top with milk, to make it go extra brown in the oven.
8. Cook for 10ish minutes, until brown.
9. Serve with hot passata on top

Then eat all yours, then eat what your wife couldn’t manage, then look longingly at the one saved for tomorrow… Man, do I love pizza…

In keeping with my post about hiding simple changes to a site in php, I thought I would share my method for hiding bigger changes using .htaccess.

My other method is great if you are just changing one file, but tonight I am upgrading the MediaWiki installation over at MedRevise, so I want to hide the whole site until I’m done.

I didn’t just want a blank space, so I sent my visitors to the MedRevise blog, where I put a “Sorry, I’m updating!” message, whilst keeping it so that I could still access the site myself.

How did I manage this magic? I simply changed .htaccess file to the following:

I’ll take you through it:

1. First off, RewriteEngine On turns on the Rewriting system in Apache.
2. Then RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123$ tells Apache “For all ip addresses except 123.123.123.123, do the next line“.
3. Finally  RewriteRule 302 [^/]*$ /blog/ sets up a temporary rewrite of any files from root to the blog directory. The 302 redirect tells search engines that this is just a temporary redirect.

Perfection.

Image by Ian Britton. Thanks!

Ever wanted to make changes to a live site without disrupting it for visitors? Use isset() as a cloak of mystery…

As ever, I’ve been making some changes to my site WhenWillIBeSober.com (roadmap here), and I’ve been wanting to fiddle with things without disrupting the live site.

Normally you have two options on testing:

1. Set up a duplicate install, make changes on that, then ship them over.
2. Don’t do that, and hope that no one uses the site in moment when its broken.

Option 1 can be a lot of hassle, and Option 2 can cause your users a lot of hassle, so I implemented a very simple method: Option 3…

Simple add an isset($_GET["test"]) statement to your code, and put all your changes inside it. This way, people visiting the page won’t see your changes, but you can check them out by adding ?test=1 onto the url.

So, the code I’ve used today is:

And my site changes are only visible to anyone who visits the url with the test variables – as you can see in the screenshot below. Happy testing people!

Image by Richard Anthony Morris. Thanks!

I was asked to talk about search engine optimisation at this month’s SYWP. It went down fairly well, so I’ve included the talk below:

I like eating Indian food. I especially enjoy crispy onion bhajis, ideally covered in mango chutney. Last night, we were eating curry, and I decided to work out a bhaji recipe.

I had a look online, had a chat with my mum (an awesome cook), and muddled something together, that tasted pretty awesome. Try it out for yourself below (and try my Sweet Potato and Parsnip soup too…)

I warn you, I am a non technical cook. I firmly believe a happy cook just throws stuff in a pan, rather than measuring 18g of this and 3.5 medium egg yolks of that. I suspect that if you ignore everything I’ve written below except the bits in bold, it’ll still work.

Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 4 medium onions
• Spices: turmeric, coriander, cumin, ginger
• Flour
• Water
• Garlic paste
• Tomato puree

Recipe

1. Chop the onions into mediumish slices. Don’t dice them, have loads of nice long strips. Throw them in a pan with plenty of oil, and fry them until they are stinging your eyes something rotten.
2. Chuck in loads of the spices above. Add a dash of chilli powder too. Keep stirring until it smells good enough to eat.
3. While that’s cooking, get a big baking dish, put a good splash of oil in it, and pop it in the oven at roughly 180°C.
4. Take a biggish mixing bowl, and pour in some flour. I used about 1/4 of a bag (250g), but whatever looks right to you, you can always add more. ‘Proper’ recipes use buckwheat flour. Good luck finding that in your local supermarket, and normal flour tasted fine.
5. Add more spices to the flour, especially the turmeric.
6. Pour the spiced onions into the flour bowl. Mix them with a big wooden spoon, until all the onion is coated in flour.
7. Squirt a nice amount of garlic and tomatoe into a small glass, top it up with water, and give it a good stir. Mix it all together until you have a gooey paste. I used about 1/2 a glass of water (150ml) total.
8. Spoon out lumps onto the baking tray, and cook until brown.

Many, many years ago, I had my first true encounter with the refreshing, hydrating glory of the “cuppa”. I won’t pretend to remember exactly when it was, although I suspect it was in my early teens, and I may have been spending too much time with my friend (and intrepid international explorer) Jon.

It happened something like this:
Jon: Fancy a cup of tea?
Me: Actually, yes I do.
[5 minutes pass, then, after taking the first sip]
Me: Ahh… That’s better!

And, indeed, better it was. The beverage that won us an empire – surely no cigarette to a dying man ever achieved so much, no heroin addict ever gained so much release from a hit as I do every single time from the day’s first cup of hot stewed leaves.

Following on since that brewful day, there have been so many moments of timeless memory, stapled into my grey matter with the cold steel of an “Ahh…”

The result of this is that when coffee was first mentioned to me, I responded like a 16th century Anti-Reformationist when asked “fancy some moveable type?”. In that I was rather unimpressed, stopping however, just slightly short of strangling and burning the coffee offerer (or cofferer).

And I felt my reaction was right; because how could it ever replace tea?! What I now realise (obvious as it sounds, and stupid as it makes me look) is that it doesn’t have to.

Coffee (and indeed, hot chocolate, bovril and battery acid) are just other options. And if, as I believe, tea is the king, then surely it needs some contemporaries to reign over. So to any one I’ve ever ranted about coffee (or battery acid) too – I apologise. Not only is coffee not evil, it can actually be quite nice too. (Although you won’t ever persuade me that a £17 coffee in Starbucks even comes close to the humble power of a 50p cup of well brewed tea in a builder’s cafe).

Below are some shots of me brewing and drinking some tasty coffee with the help of a traditional stovetop expresso maker – also known as a macchinetta (meaning “small machine“), or a moka express.

Using a Macchinetta

(Click on pictures for hi res versions)

Step 1 – Get a stovetop coffee maker, clean it, buy some coffee, and find yourself a kitchen.	Step 2 – Top up the bottom chamber with water, then fill the basket with coffee. The more you put in, the stronger the resulting brew.
Step 3 – Screw it together, and chuck it on the hob until the top chamber is full. Keep the lid on, or it sprays everywhere!	Step 4 – Pour into a mug, add milk, and (lots) of sugar, then drink. This photo was taken just as I realised the milk was off.

Might have taken me a while to get round to writing this post, but I got there in the end. In my defence, I actually wrote this on the flight home, it’s just taken me 4 days to getting round to downloading photos.

x Chris