August 17th, 2010 | No Comments »
Serves 2
Ingredients
- 400g slow-cook beef in bite sized cubes
- 1 large potato cut to your preferred potato cube size (large is good)
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 tbsp minced ginger
- 1 tbsp minced garlic
- 1/4 cup madras paste (I used Pataks but am going to make my own next time, promise!)
- 1 beef stock cube (or 1 cup liquid) beef stock
- 160ml coconut milk
Method
On high heat, fry beef until brown and then add half of the madras paste and stir for a further minute. Place into the slow-cooker on low heat.
Fry onion, garlic and ginger in the pan until soft and lightly browned and then add the remainder of the madras paste and stir for one minute. Add the stock cube and 1 cup of water (or liquid stock instead) and then the coconut milk, stirring until bubbling.
Add the onion mixture to the slow-cooker with the beef and cook for 6 hours, stirring (and tasting) occasionally.
Serve with rice and pappadums or naan bread.
Categories: Recipes
August 13th, 2010 | No Comments »
Serves 4
Ingredients
- 500g beef mince
- 2 aubergines, sliced approx. 1cm thick
- 1 cup diced parsley
- 1 jar béchamel sauce
- 1 zucchini, diced into small cubes
- 1 handful of mushrooms, diced
- 1 tin diced tomatoes
- 1 sachet tomato paste
- 1 tbsp oregano
- 2 tbsp garlic
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tbsp cumin
- 1 tbsp tumeric
- 2 tbsp kecap manis (ABC sauce)
- 1 small onion, diced
- 2 cups finely grated cheese
- Tabasco
- chilli flakes
- olive oil
- salt & pepper to taste
Method
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Fry aubergines on high heat in the largest available pan you have, adding oil as required until they are soft and brown. Place to the side on absorbent paper towel to remove excess oil.
Fry onions, garlic, mince and zucchini until browned. Then add the tomatoes, parsley, mushrooms, tomato paste, kecap manis and spices. Add salt, pepper, Tabasco and chilli flakes to taste.
Place half the mince mixture into a large baking tray, and then layer half of the aubergines, followed by half of the béchamel sauce. Repeat once more.
Cover the top with grated cheese and cook until cheese is browned.
Enjoy!
Categories: Recipes
March 14th, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Serves 2
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup honey
- 1/2 cup tomato sauce
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 2 tbsp hoisin sauce
- 2 tbsp minced garlic
- 1 tbsp powdered ginger (fresh would be better, but this is all we had)
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- Something spicy, whatever quantity you like (I used a few shakes of “Louisiana Style Hot Sauce”)
- 2 racks of spare ribs (1 per person)
Method
Cut the spare ribs into separate pieces, being careful to leave an even amount of meat on each rib and place in a baking tray. Stir together all other ingredients to create a marinade and cover the ribs. Cover and place in the fridge until ready to be used. (Suggest at least one hour)
Place baking tray into a 180 degree oven for an hour, turning and basting the ribs regularly.
Once finished, if the sauce is too runny for your liking, pour into a saucepan and boil while stiring until it thickens. Add honey or tomato sauce to taste plus additional chili if desired.
All done, yum yum.
Categories: Recipes
March 7th, 2010 | No Comments »
Increase SEO by using your article name/product name/category name/whatever in your URLs instead of a non-descriptive database ID.
function slug($string) {
$string = trim($string);
$string = strtolower($string);
$string = str_replace('&', 'and', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9-]/', '-', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/-+/', "-", $string);
return $string;
}
Categories: Code Stuff
January 19th, 2010 | 1 Comment »
My latest personal project – a dating website!
Domains: purchased
Database structure: structured
Logo(s): designed
Lets just say I have some experience using various dating websites, and I think by now I know what works and what doesn’t. The plan is to build the ultimate gay dating website combining the best aspects of various other sites, as well as a few of my own ideas thrown in. At this stage the plan is to be a completely free website until the cost of maintaining it becomes too much and then I’ll look at my options.
Stay tuned for more!
Categories: Design, General
December 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
Just a simple one, I place this in a common file, and then call it at the top of each page that I require to be secured by SSL.
function force_ssl() {
if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'on') {
header("Location: https://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}");
exit();
}
}
Tags: PHP | Categories: Code Stuff
December 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
Simple function to prepare user inputted data for inserting into a MySQL database. It simply checks if stripslashes() should be called, and then escapes the string. Basic, but handy.
function mysql_escape($string) {
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc() == 1) {
$string = stripslashes($string);
}
$string = mysql_real_escape_string($string);
return $string;
}
Tags: MySQL, PHP | Categories: Code Stuff
December 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
This is the first thing I add to any PHP based project and I couldn’t live without it..
Most people will probably understand and appreciate what this does, but for those that don’t, it simply displays the contents of an array in a very human readable way by using the <pre> tag to preserve the spacing of the print_r() command.
// Debug Array
function da($array) {
echo "<pre>\n";
print_r($array);
echo "</pre>\n";
}
Enjoy!
Tags: PHP | Categories: Code Stuff
December 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
This simple Bash alias will search the contents of every file in the current directory (and sub-directories) and return the file names. Very handy when trying to work out which file generated which HTML in large PHP based applications or when trying to find every last instance of a particular string in a bunch of config files.
# Search In Files
sif() {
grep -EiIrl "$*" ./*
}
Either use the grep command by itself, replacing the $* with your search string for a one time use, or add this to your .bashrc file to be able to search by typing: sif search string
Tags: bash | Categories: Code Stuff
December 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
For those that are interested and for my own reference…
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: vim | Categories: Code Stuff
