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gatenight — The Mansion is a virtual tour of an actual mansion.

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Cooking with an Italiennium: Pasta al forno con animale

Aside April 29, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

A recipe.

Why? Because my Nonna doesn’t cook anymore and my parents don’t understand the internet. So, I decided to take what I learned on Sundays and make it my own/bring it into the 21st (but pre-millennial) century.

The ingredients.

~1 can diced tomato
Favorite pasta sauce (store bought or home made)
~1 pound ricotta cheese
a few pounds of assorted cheeses (mozzarella, and similar)
as much hard cheese as you can afford (parmasean, reggiano, asiago, or similar – to taste)
a lot of ground animal meats (beef, veal, and similar)
(Spicy) Italian sausages
Cubed stewing meats (optional)
Eggs (optional)
1-2 pounds elicodali, rigatoni, pennoni, or other large cylindrical pasta
olives/sundried tomato (optional – to taste)
oil/spices to taste (black pepper, various “Italian” herbs)
onion/garlic/zucchini or similar vegetable (optional – to taste)

The scientific method (the recipe).

In a very large saucepan or stock pot, heat oil and lightly brown and spice onion/garlic/zucchini, ground meats, sausage, and cubed meats, optionally draining excess water/fats if not lean.
Add favorite pasta sauce and diced tomato (and optionally eggs, olives/sundried tomato), simmering for many hours uncovered until the cubed meat is tender and sauce is cooked down to optimal flavor and texture.
Remove sausages and cut into ~1 inch slices, adding back into sauce.
Preheat oven to ~400F and begin boiling water.
While waiting for the oven to preheat and water to boil, grate all but the hard cheese into a multi-cheese blend.
Lightly salt boiling water (or heavily if you are not using olives), adding chosen pasta.
Add ricotta cheese to the sauce mix and stir until the chunks are at a desired size, distributed evenly throughout, you may turn off the heat at this time.
Coat a very large/deep ‘metal oval oven roaster’ or casserole dish with some oil to prevent pasta from sticking to the sides.

IMPORTANT: Deliberately undercook pasta, draining before it has reached al dente, you will need to work quickly to perform the next step so that the pasta does not dry out/stick. Optionally, you could drain approximately 1/n of the pasta at a time (where n is equal to the number of layers of alternating pasta/cheese/sauce you choose dependent on how deep your oven container is) 2-4 is an acceptable range for n.

For each layer n:
Distribute 1/n pasta in container, covering with approximately 1/n of the sauce mixture, followed by approximately 1/(n+1) of the multi-cheese blend, then grate a small amount of hard cheeses for additional flavor. Ensure the pasta is fully covered with sauce. Repeat for the remaining layers.

Add the remaining ~1/n cheese so that there is approximately double the amount of cheese on the top compared to each of the layers, then grate some more of the remaining hard cheese before placing uncovered in the oven.

Bake for at least 20 minutes, until cheese begins to brown, optionally changing to broil during the last few minutes of cooking.

Remove from oven and use a metal serving utensil to cut through the layers without disturbing the baked cheese and serve. This dish can be very flavorful (see salty) so you may want to serve with only a small amount of fresh ground pepper and additional grated hard cheese.

Serves many meat lovers.

food meat pasta

Technology

Catching Googlebot

Aside October 12, 2012 Mike 1 Comment

It is always nice to see unique visitors to your site. For a blog that doesn’t get too many hits, it’s very nice.

Google Analytics is a great, robust way to analyze your visitors based on various parameters such as date visited, location, etc. It produces readable charts and graphs and datasets that can be exported via the web interface.

Anaytics is part of Google’s Webmaster Tools which in itself is very useful. You provide a site map and Googlebot will crawl your site and index it. Today, I caught Googlebot in the act. Continue reading Catching Googlebot →

crawler database google googlebot MySQL Perl script

Technology

Embedding Perl Script into WordPress Blog Posts

Aside October 7, 2012 Mike Leave a comment

In this example, I want to display the current time the page is viewed. A simple Perl script can do this:

#!/usr/bin/perl #helloworld.pl print "Content-type: text/html \n\n"; $time = localtime(); print "<p>Hello World! It is $time</p>\n";

Continue reading Embedding Perl Script into WordPress Blog Posts →

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Astronomy, Photography and Video

Once in a Blue Moon

Aside September 1, 2012 Mike Leave a comment

It kind of sucks that the blue moon isn’t actually blue. I am pretty sure I remember seeing a blue colored moon at least once in my life.

I recently purchased a new lens for my Canon 60D APS-C SLR, the Tamron SP 70-300mm f/4-5.6 VC USD (yes, its a full frame capable lens on a crop body), so I decided to take some test shots. Continue reading Once in a Blue Moon →

astrophotography canon moon SLR tamron

Lifestyle, Photography and Video, Technology

MHL USB OTG HDMI

Aside May 24, 2013 Mike Leave a comment

Well I succeeded in naming a blog post with only acronyms.

This fun little device allows HDMI output from your android phone (think screen sharing). I picked one up from Ebay for about 7 dollars including HDMI cable. Quite a cool concept, however, in practice – not so much. Continue reading MHL USB OTG HDMI →

HDMI MHL OTG USB

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