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pork Sage sausage rolls

admin Food Blog

Ingredients

For the Sausage Rolls

  • 1 large onion, roughly chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 2 small carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
  • 1–2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 650 g (1.5 lb) pork mince (ground pork) (or a mix of pork and veal)
  • 6 sprigs of parsley
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt
  • 1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage or 1 teaspoon ground sage
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1 teaspoon Herbs de Provence (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs or Panko breadcrumbs
  • puff pastry (I use 2 rectangular sheets which are 25 x 42 cm/10 x 16 inch)
  • sesame seeds or poppy seeds (optional)

For the Egg Wash

  • 1 egg
  • dash of milk

To Serve

  • Cherry Tomato Relish
  • tomato sauce (ketchup)

Instructions

To make the sausage roll filling

  1. Place the onion, garlic and carrots into a large food processor.
  2. Blitz until everything is finely chopped.
  3. Heat some olive oil in a large pan over medium heat.
  4. Cook the onion mixture with a good pinch of salt for 3-5 minutes, or until the mixture starts to soften.
  5. Remove the onion mixture to a large mixing bowl and let it cool completely.
  6. Meanwhile, add the pork, parsley, salt, pepper, dried herbs and Worcestershire sauce to the food processor.
  7. Pulse for just a few seconds until the meat has an almost paste-like texture. You can skip this step if you prefer your sausage roll filling to have a chunkier texture.
  8. Remove the meat mixture to the mixing bowl with the onion mixture, and add the breadcrumbs.
  9. Use your hands to mix everything together until all of the ingredients are well combined.
  10. If you want to check the filling for seasoning, I recommend pinching off a small piece of the filling and roll it into a small patty or meatball. Fry the patty in a small pan with some oil, and taste for seasoning.

To form the sausage rolls

  1. For this recipe, I use 2 rectangular sheets of puff pastry which are 25 x 42 cm/10 x 16 inches in size.
  2. Cut the pastry in half lengthwise so that you have two narrow strips of pastry (12.5 cm/5 inches wide).
  3. Use your hands to place the filling in the middle of one strip of pastry. You want to form a long sausage which is roughly one-third of the width of the pastry.
  4. Make the egg wash by beating the egg and milk together in a small bowl.
  5. Brush one side of the pastry length with some egg wash.
  6. Carefully lift one side of the pastry over the sausage filling, and continue until the filling is fully encased in the pastry.
  7. Make sure the seam is on the bottom.
  8. Use a sharp knife to cut the sausage roll into whatever lengths you like. For entertaining, I suggest making the sausage rolls about 4 cm/1.5 inches long. Otherwise, I typically cut my sausage rolls about 8 cm/3 inches long.
  9. Cut a few slits in the pastry of each sausage roll.
  10. Repeat the above steps with the remaining filling and pastry.

To bake the sausage rolls

  1. If it is quite warm in your kitchen, I recommend putting the uncooked sausage rolls into the fridge for about 30 minutes before baking. This helps to prevent the pastry from shrinking upon baking.
  2. Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F (without fan).
  3. Place the sausage rolls onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper.
  4. Brush the sausage rolls with some egg wash.
  5. Sprinkle the sausage rolls with some sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or just some coarse sea salt and coarsely cracked black pepper.
  6. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until lightly golden. Depending on how big or small your sausage rolls are, you may need to adjust the time slightly.
  7. Serve hot or warm with some tomato sauce (ketchup) or Cherry Tomato Relish.

Kitchen Notes

FREEZING SAUSAGE ROLLS
* Follow the recipe above until just before baking the sausage rolls.
* Place the uncooked sausage rolls on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and place the whole tray into the freezer. Once the sausage rolls are frozen, place them into zip-lock freezer bags, and keep them in the freezer.
* Once you are ready to bake, brush the frozen sausage rolls with egg wash, and bake them from frozen. You will need to add another 5-10 minutes to the baking time.

VARIATIONS
* Change the herbs to your liking.
* Substitute the thyme and sage for 1 teaspoon each of cumin seeds and coriander seeds, lightly toasted and then ground with a mortar and pestle.
* Omit the carrots for a more traditional sausage roll filling.
* Add fresh spinach (as much or as little as you like) to the onion mixture before blitzing in the food processor.
* Cook 200 g/7 ounces of chopped bacon with the onion mixture.

OVEN TEMPERATURES
All recipes on this website state temperatures for a regular oven (i.e. a conventional oven without fan). If you have a convection oven with a fan, please consult the manufacturer’s handbook on how to adjust the temperature and baking time accordingly.

Czech Lentil Soup Čočka

admin Food Blog

Čočková polévka (Chochka)

A hearty Czech stew full of savoury toothsome flavour – goes great with sou dough bread and optional fried egg on top

 

500g of lentil dry wash and soak   Fry 1 onion with oil  Add salt pepper and bunch of allspice ground (½ cup ) And 8 bayleaves (take out when cooked fully)  Ground to powder bayleaf optional

 

Shove soaked and washed lentils  Chopped 3 potato

Cover in water (double the height of the ingredients so lentils are floating in water – lentils will absorb water and thicken

Stir and boil on low or medium

If watery add corn flower dissolved and turn up heat and boil at 100% to thicken

Let cool a tiny bit and add ½ lemon juiced

For a massive pot double ingredients

Adobe Photoshop Welcome Screen is stuck/ frozen

admin Tech Blog

ERROR – Adobe Photoshop stuck on the home screen – welcome screen is frozen and you can’t see new documents you create or images you drop onto photoshop – scrollbars appear but you can’t see anything

If your photoshop welcome screen is stuck and you can’t see new files or images opened:

Disable your graphics card link to photoshop – it is no longer supported:

Settings -> performance – checkbox disable “use graphics processor”
Camera-raw -> Performance -> Use Graphics Processor “OFF”

Then update your graphics card drivers as they are released, and after every upgrade, try to switch these settings on again – if it doesn’t work, switch them off.

Irish Soda Bread

admin Food/ Lifestyle Blog

The world’s best No Yeast Bread – Irish Soda Bread! because it’s a 4 ingredient, 5 minute recipe made

▢ 300 g white flour (plain / all purpose)
▢ 265 g wholemeal flour (wholewheat, Note 1)
▢ 2 – 3 tbsp Extra Flour (either flour, for dusting)
▢ 1 1/2 tsp baking soda (bi-carb, Note 2)
▢ 1 1/2 tsp salt
▢ 500 ml buttermilk , fridge cold (Note 3)

Variations
Non dairy butter milk:
430 ml soy milk
1.5 tea spoon vinegar

1.5 Times Recipe
645 1.5
2.3 tea spoon
2.3 salt
450 g flour
397.5 g wholemeal

Instructions

Preheat oven to 220°C/430°F (200°C fan).
Line tray with baking paper.
Whisk both flours (not Extra Flour), baking soda and salt in a bowl.
Add buttermilk, stir until it’s too hard to stir anymore.
Sprinkle 2 tbsp Extra Flour onto work surface, scrape out dough, sprinkle with more flour.
Gently knead no more than 8 times, bring together into a ball. (Note 4)
Transfer to tray, pat into 2.5cm/1″ thick disc.
Cut cross on surface 1cm / 0.3″ deep using serrated knife.
Bake 20 minutes. Turn oven down to 200°C/390°F (180°C fan).
Bake further 20 minutes, or until the base sounds hollow when tapped in the middle.
Transfer to rack and cool for at least 30 minutes before slicing.

Recipe Notes:
1. Flour – wholemeal flour gives this bread a slightly nutty flavour which is lovely. Coarse or fine ground. Can be made with just plain/all purpose flour but flavour is more plain. Don’t bother using bread flour – it’s wasted on this no yeast bread.
2. Baking soda – also known as bicarbonate soda (bi-carb), 3x more powerful than baking powder. Stronger rise power required for this no-yeast bread.
3. Buttermilk substitute:

1.75 cups (435ml) + 1 tbsp of full fat milk
1 tbsp white vinegar or lemon juice (or other clear vinegar)
Mix the milk and lemon juice together, set aside for 15 minutes. It will congeal on surface. Then use in place of buttermilk in recipe.
Volume is just shy of 2 cups of buttermilk (per recipe) because this substitute is thinner so you need to use a touch less otherwise dough gets too wet.

4. Dough stickiness – use more flour as required. The trick is to use just enough flour to make the dough manageable because stickier dough = more moist bread.
5. Variations – This bread is terrific as is, it’s a classic traditional Irish Soda Bread. Some popular flavoured versions (stir in with dry ingredients):

Oats – brush surface with extra buttermilk and sprinkle with oats. Can also mix in oats (up to 1 cup), but reduce flour in dough by 1/2 cup;
Raisins! Stir in 1 cup
Seeds! Pumpkin, linseeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, poppyseed. Stir through and sprinkle on top, about 1/2 cup.

Misc Crap

Rustic flavour, great crust, keeps well for days. Slather with butter, mop your plate clean, dunk into soups – or Irish Beef and Guinness Stew!

“Irish Soda Bread takes just 5 minutes to get in the oven. So you can have fresh bread any night!”
What it tastes like

baking soda instead of yeast. more dense than your everyday white sandwich bread. Hearty and rustic – tastes kind of nutty from the wholemeal flour.

Linux Mint Cinamon 20.3 Brightness buttons NVIDIA on MacBook late 2008 aluminium unibody

admin Linux Nuxlin

I had a lot of trouble getting the MacBook screen brightness keys to work with the NVIDIA driver (which was needed, because if the open source one was selected – apps would freeze/crash a lot)

https://pushka.com/mint-mac-backlight/

I followed a few instructions, but the Keys are not F1 and F2, because that would need the function key – they are named:

“xbacklight -14”
XF86MonBrightnessDown
“xbacklight +14″
XF86MonBrightnessUp

(which is the settings file home ~/.xbindkeysrc )

Output all keys/mouse movements –
Run xev from a terminal. This will give you a new window.
Place your mouse pointer in this window, type some keys and watch for results in the terminal.

My grub settings are (I show a bunch of text on boot)
/etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=””
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”acpi_backlight=vendor”

Terminal – sudo update-grub

And follow these instructions:
(middle of the thread)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211006124501/https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=1965475

Nintendo 3DS corrupted SD card unreadable FIX

admin Tech Blog

I have taken out my 3DS SD Card and copied some files to my PC a few times (also using my Android phone a few times, which may have caused an issue)

The boot section (FAT formatting) for the SD card was broken, so it wouldn’t mount and the 3DS couldn’t read it (windows disc utility showed it as RAW, meaning no file system, just a bunch of raw data that no device can read)

TestDisk Download – CGSecurity – [ backup mirror hosted on this website file backed up 2023 ]

You can re-write the boot mount (you can “recover” or “backup” lost files, but all the programs are expensive – do not format the card if windows says “can’t read drive, would you like to format”

3DS message: sd card can’t be accessed

Unzip the app – click the EXE testdisk_win.exe – then start a log file, select your 30GB or whatever size of SD card from the list – do a quick scan, then do a deep scan, then scan the boot record entry. The type is Windows/Intel/PC for type, then scan and “write” the boot entry – if the scans are successful you can also “view” all the files in the SD card – it should show some folders ” DCIM Nintendo 3DS ”

Then quit X 4 – and your PC should refresh and mount the drive as normal (made a backup of the entire SD card just in case…

 

Errors –

issue with mass usb device sd card android

CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives. (If the drive can’t boot – it is RAW, meaning that there are no files, just a bunch of ones and zeros that the computer doesn’t know what to do with , raw data, but when you fix the file system from RAW to FAT-format with repaired boot sector, it’ll all work as normal.

Raw drives can be made to work again using the app above – don’t format !

2023 – I just used this method to recover a spare laptop HDD I had inside my desktop PC – it stopped appearing / loading / being accessible – and I thought that maybe I’d be able to read the contents while booting up linux – but it was a raw drive / not bootable loadable info available, so I ran this app with Intel settings / quick scan / write – and it became open-able again <3

 

“Today you…. tomorrow me.”

admin General Blog

rhoner – 2011

Just about every time I see someone I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn’t too stoked on the practice. Then some shit happened to me that changed me and I am back to offering rides habitually. If you would indulge me, it is long story and has almost nothing to do with hitch hiking other than happening on a road.

This past year I have had 3 instances of car trouble. A blow out on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out of gas situation. All of them were while driving other people’s cars which, for some reason, makes it worse on an emotional level. It makes it worse on a practical level as well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my car, and know enough not to park, facing downhill, on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.

Anyway, each of these times this shit happened I was DISGUSTED with how people would not bother to help me. I spent hours on the side of the freeway waiting, watching roadside assistance vehicles blow past me, for AAA to show. The 4 gas stations I asked for a gas can at told me that they couldn’t loan them out “for my safety” but I could buy a really shitty 1-gallon one with no cap for $15. It was enough, each time, to make you say shit like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket.”

But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke a lick of the language. But one of those dudes had a profound affect on me.

He was the guy that stopped to help me with a blow out with his whole family of 6 in tow. I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice. Right as I am about to give up and just hitch out there a van pulls over and dude bounds out. He sizes the situation up and calls for his youngest daughter who speaks english. He conveys through her that he has a jack but it is too small for the Jeep so we will need to brace it. He produces a saw from the van and cuts a log out of a downed tree on the side of the road. We rolled it over, put his jack on top, and bam, in business. I start taking the wheel off and, if you can believe it, I broke his tire iron. It was one of those collapsible ones and I wasn’t careful and I snapped the head I needed clean off. Fuck.

No worries, he runs to the van, gives it to his wife and she is gone in a flash, down the road to buy a tire iron. She is back in 15 minutes, we finish the job with a little sweat and cussing (stupid log was starting to give), and I am a very happy man. We are both filthy and sweaty. The wife produces a large water jug for us to wash our hands in. I tried to put a 20 in the man’s hand but he wouldn’t take it so I instead gave it to his wife as quietly as I could. I thanked them up one side and down the other. I asked the little girl where they lived, thinking maybe I could send them a gift for being so awesome. She says they live in Mexico. They are here so mommy and daddy can pick peaches for the next few weeks. After that they are going to pick cherries then go back home. She asks if I have had lunch and when I told her no she gave me a tamale from their cooler, the best fucking tamale I have ever had.

So, to clarify, a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…

But we aren’t done yet. I thank them again and walk back to my car and open the foil on the tamale cause I am starving at this point and what do I find inside? My fucking $20 bill! I whirl around and run up to the van and the guy rolls his window down. He sees the $20 in my hand and just shaking his head no like he won’t take it. All I can think to say is “Por Favor, Por Favor, Por Favor” with my hands out. Dude just smiles, shakes his head and, with what looked like great concentration, tried his hardest to speak to me in English:

“Today you…. tomorrow me.”

Rolled up his window, drove away, his daughter waving to me in the rear view. I sat in my car eating the best fucking tamale of all time and I just cried. Like a little girl. It has been a rough year and nothing has broke my way. This was so out of left field I just couldn’t deal.

In the 5 months since I have changed a couple of tires, given a few rides to gas stations and, once, went 50 miles out of my way to get a girl to an airport. I won’t accept money. Every time I tell them the same thing when we are through:

“Today you…. tomorrow me.”

tl;dr: long rambling story about how the kindness of strangers, particularly folks from south of the border, forced me to be more helpful on the road and in life in general. I am sure it won’t be as meaningful to anyone else but it was seriously the highlight of my 2010.

**edit: To the OP, sorry to jack your thread, this has nothing to do with Hitch Hiking. I sort of thought I could just get this off my chest, enjoy the catharsis and watch the story languish at the bottom of the page. Glad people like hearing the tale and I hope it moves you to be more helpful in your day to day. **

Horror music playlists for board games

admin General Blog

Playing a horror RPG game like warewolf, blood on the clocktower, mysterium, pandemic – copy/clone some of these horror mood playlists: