Monday, November 22, 2010

Sometimes, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do...

I encountered this outburst of testosterone fuelled experimentation a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned it to Karen -- who immediately said that this was something that had to be done. So, yesterday I actually made some of the

Manliest Bread EVARR!!!!!111elebenty!!!!!!1 *

Bacon. Jalapeno. Cheesy. Beer. Bread. The sheer awesomeness of the concept forced that punctuation, I swear.

And it was a great success.

The recipe (for a bread making machine)

Bread chassis:

  • 1 tsp yeast
  • 1.25 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp sugar
  • 350g strong white flour
  • 150g strong wholemeal flour

And in the main mix

In the candied fruit hopper:

  • 4 rashers of thick-cut bacon, dry-fried (pouring off any oozing water as required) until stiff, rinds removed and chopped into ~1cm bits
  • As many jalapeno pepper slices as will fit.

Cook on standard raisin bread program. Cool for an hour, then enjoy!

It was wonderfully savoury warm with butter, and made a fine accompaniment to a chilli powered by the fruits of our greenhouse (to the extent of 2/3 of the loaf). Though I couldn't help feeling that there had to be some way to work some garlic into the mix without spoiling the awesome.

* OK, some pedants will point out that this recipe is just loaded with phytoestrogens. But it's the concept that counts.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Anime — Strike Witches 2

As hinted by the ending of the previous series, further adventures of half-dressed alternate- WWII aces; despite not being quite popular enough to stop the original studio going under, the franchise was considered worth taking up.

Unfortunately, much of the charm of the first series -- the copious period references, and character driven episodes -- was lost in favour of even more bath scenes and tacky comedy. When, finally, an attempt at plot and drama wobbled into sight in the last couple of episodes, it didn't have any foundation to rest upon.

Overall, rather disappointing for being pretty much what the premise would lead you to expect, and no more. Will I watch the inevitable third season? Probably.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Links for 8-Nov

Asynchronous programming in .net

Also from the PDC -- what next for Silverlight?

Rx Design Guidelines.

SSL/TLS isn't computationally expensive.

NuGet -- gems for .net has a new name.

The Should Assertion Library.

Sandcastle MSBuild integration.