tenbergen.ca

Cardamon Cake

Picture of Cardamon Cake, but it's really the smell that sets this one apart

Summary

Preparation: 20 min (+10 min for the cardamon pods)
Cooking: 60 min
Total: 80 min

Ingredients

300 g (1⅓ cups) softened butter (keep wrapper to grease Bundt)
4 eggs
320 g (2½ cups) plain flour
380 g (1 ⅔ cups) caster (superfine) sugar
3 tsp baking powder
80 pods (2 generous tablespoons of pods) of freshly ground cardamon
200 ml (1 cup) milk

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 175°C /350F
Cream butter with moderate speed electric mixer for 3 min
Add eggs, stir for 1 min
In a separate bowl, mix the flour, sugar,
baking powder and cardamon
Grease a 2¼ litre (10 cup) Bundt with butter and then sprinkle the inside with the dry portion of the dough to coat it, then pour rest back in with dry portion
Stir dry portion into the egg/butter mixture.
Stir in the milk
Carefully pour into the prepared Bundt. Avoid creating air pockets. Tap the pan to remove any air bubbles and then tilt the pan gently, so that the batter runs up the sides.
Bake for about an hour until it is golden brown, just beginning to pull away from the side of the Bundt and a skewer poked into the cake comes out clean.
Let the cake cool in the Bundt for 10 minutes and then turn out on to a wire rack to cool completely.
When cold, transfer to a serving plate or board.

Leftovers?

Are you kidding?

Rübenkrautkuchen

750g flour
2 pckg Backpulver (German baking powder)
250g Rübenkraut
250g sugar
1tsp aniseed
2 eggs “if you have them” to quote my grandma
some milk

Combine flour, sugar, backpulver and aniseed
Add Rübenkraut and eggs
Add enough milk so the dough is just about “not patschig” – gotta like these Oma descriptions, I think she meant it’s not runny
Grease a bundt cake form (or a loaf or other form) and add the dough
bake for at least an hour at “medium heat” (~350F)

Mango Salsa

1-2 Mangos
1-2 Red Onions
1 or more Jalapenos (or other hot peppers)
Lotsa Cilantro (fresh or paste)
As much Lime juice as you like
Salt and pepper if you want

Cut mix, and let sit for a few hours. Serve with tortilla chips. Maybe next time I make this I will finally remember to add a picture.

I was happy to find out that I can turn off the sound on my microwave. Without taking it apart to cut out the speaker, as I did on my UPS. The instructions vary for different microwaves, but for my Panasonic NN-ST663S the instructions are:

Plug it in, “88:88” displays
Press Start button to see the top or bottom bar of the last letter blink next to the kg or lb label; press [Timer/Clock] to choose between them if you want
Press [Start] again to display “Beep” The oven has both Beep On and Beep Off mode. Default is on.
Press [Timer/Clock] to change to “Beep Off”
Press [Stop/Reset] to exit.

Lentils and Quinoa

1 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp curry paste
1/2 tsp each cinnamon and salt
4 carrots, sliced
1 cup quinoa or rice
2 cups vegetable stock
1 can (19 oz) lentils, drained and rinsed
1 apple, unpeeled and diced
4 green onions, sliced
1/2 cup low fat plain yogourt

Heat oil over medium heat.
Cook onions, garlic, cumin, curry paste, cinnamon and salt stirring often for about 5 minutes or until softened.
Stir in carrots and quinoa-cook, stirring occasionally for about 1 minute.
Pour in stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about 20 minutes until quinoa is tender and most of the liquid is absorbed.
Stir in lentils, apple and green onions. Cook for about 5 minutes or until lentils are heated through.
Serve with a dollop of yogurt.

Gurkensalat

Ingredients

There is a 30 min – 3hr sitting time in this recipe

3 Cucumbers
salt
sugar/honey (6 tbsp)
dill (2 tbsbp)
vinegar (6 tbsp)
salt
pepper
onion (1 small, 1/4 of our usual)
cream or sour cream or milk (125ml or so)

Instructions

peel and slice 3 cucumbers
add a fair bit of salt to let them drain out water
wait for 30 min – 3hrs; slightly push water out of the cucumbers and discard the water
mix sauce and onions and add

Sauerbraten

There are two parts to this recipe, marinating and roasting. There seems to be some debate about how long, I have seen as little as 2 days and as much as 3 weeks. If meat in the fridge for that long freaks you out keep in mind that vinegar preserves; there are lots of opinions out there for how long so google as needed. Some people seem to boil the marinade briefly before putting the meat in.

This recipe is “Frei nach Dr. Oetker” but there are some notes and tweaks.

Marinating

1 “roast for 4-6 people”
for marinade:
- 2 onions
- 5 Wacholderbeeren (juniper berries)
- 15 pepper corns
- 5 allspice berries (Pimentkörner)
- 2 cloves
- 1 bay leaf
- 250ml red wine or white wine vinegar or other vinegar
- 375ml of water or red wine

Peel and slice onions thinly. Mix other marinade ingredients and put the roast and marinade in a container that is as small as can fit all of it, so that as much of the meat as possible is submerged. Alternative: put it in a zip lock or vacuum bag.

Marinade for 2-21 days. Turn the meat occasionally during marinating so that all of it gets covered into the juice.

Roasting

Suppengrün – a carrot and a stick of celery and an onion
50g raisins
50ml port or red wine or water
50g (1-2 slices) of German pumpernickel (not the spongy stuff you call pumpernickel in North America), or I prefer my favourite Flambe bread from our local German baker
oil for browning the meat
1 tbsp Rübenkraut (not just golden syrup) or honey

Soak raisins in port so they are nice and soft when you add them to the sauce later. Keep this separate until near the end of cooking so it doesn’t get blended with the rest)

Take the meat out of the marinade and keep the marinade separate since it will be used for cooking

Brown the meat on all sides in oil in a frying pan that is deep enough for roasting it with its sauce.

While the meat is browning, cut up the suppengrün into small cubes.

Once the meat is browned, put the suppengrün, Rübenkraut or honey and about half the marinade into the frying pan with it and stew in a light boil for 30 min with a lid on. Add marinade as it steams off.

Break up the pumpernickel or Flambe into crumbs and add it to the frying pan.

Stew for another 1.5hrs or so.

The sauce

Take out the meat

Put the sauce and vegetables through a blender. It should end up a as a somewhat thick sauce. Take it out of the blender, and add the raisins.

Serve with dumplings and red cabbage

Two computers, one set of speakers

We have two windows computers in our kitchen. For a while now they have been set up so that you have to plug the one you want working right now into the external speakers. Today I finally looked into a better way. Turns out there is a free one, or free as long as you already have a male-to-male audio cable.
Plug one PC’s audio out into the second PC’s audio in. On the second PC (Windows 10), go into control panel, Change sound card settings, recording, pick the plug you used, and click properties. Click the “listen” tab and check “listen to this device”. I had to set the levels way down to 5/100 to not get any distortion and just get a full volume output from the first PC.
No more plugging around!

Belt buckle experiment with 3d printing in metal

Rowing seat belt buckle 3d printed in steel

Here are two belt buckles I designed and then had 3d printed in steel. The first is a rowing seat, and the second the head of a modern rowing oar.

Modern rowing oar belt buckle 3d printed in steel

I like how the seat turned out, the layering artifacts of the 3d printing process give it almost a wood grain look, which is similar to the original item, which used to be made out of wood.
I find the layering on the

Back of the rowing oar belt buckle 3d printed in steel

oar kind of distracting; if I get another one printed I might see if they take requests on how the item is oriented when it’s printed. Or I could add a bit of a compound curve to the piece so the lines don’t end up straight.

Greasemonkey script to click “Show more” buttons on web pages

A lot of web sites have “show more” buttons. I am not sure if they are just used for tracking purposes or if some people really thinks that they improve the usability of a page, but I just find them annoying. It is possible to click these buttons automatically when the page is loaded using the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. Here is some scripts that do this.

Kanopy (change the winnipeg.kanopy.com to your library’s URL):

// ==UserScript==
// @name Kanopy more clicker
// @include https://winnipeg.kanopy.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

// wait for page to finish loading
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
    console.log(document.getElementsByClassName("more")[0].click());
}, false);

Kijiji:

// ==UserScript==
// @name kijiji more clicker
// @include https://www.kijiji.ca/*
// ==/UserScript==

// wait for page to finish loading
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
    console.log(document.getElementsByClassName("showMoreButton-4078245409")[0].click());
}, false);

Overdrive (again, change it to your library’s URL):

// ==UserScript==
// @name Overdrive AutoExpander
// @version 1.0
// @include https://winnipeg.overdrive.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

window.addEventListener('load', function() {
console.log(document.getElementsByClassName("TitleDetailsDescription-descriptionArrow js-description-arrow is-unexpanded")[0].click());
}, false);

Goodreads uses a link instead, so an additional library is needed:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Goodreads more clicker
// @description click the "more" button on goodreads pages
// @include https://www.goodreads.com/*
// @require http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js
// ==/UserScript==

//--- find "...more" link; the contains() text is case-sensitive.
var TargetLink = $("a:contains('...more')")

if (TargetLink.length) {
console.log('clicking "more..." button')
TargetLink.click()
}