Ingredients:

• 5 chicken thighs bone in, chopped into smaller pieces (you can use whatever chicken meat you want, I like dark meat)
• 1 big onion
• 5 nugget potatoes
• 1 can of cream of chicken
• half a can of coconut milk
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1 tablespoon curry powder
• olive/vegetable oil
• cornstarch, soy sauce, sugar, salt, pepper

Cooking directions:

1. Chop your chicken into pieces. Put it into a bowl with some cornstarch, soy sauce and sugar (probably a tablespoon or so of each, or enough to coat). Put in a teaspoon of salt and a couple teaspoons of ground pepper. Mix with your hands until coated. Let sit and marinade for 20-30 minutes.
2. Chop your onion into small-ish pieces. Small enough to fit in your mouth but big enough to stab with a fork.
3. Chop your potatoes into similar sized pieces.
4. Heat some oil in a pan and toss in your onions and potatoes. Saute until the onions become translucent.
5. Add your chicken to the pan with the chicken broth. Cook until your chicken is basically cooked through (juices run clear). This should take about 10 minutes.
6. Pour this mixture into an oven safe dish.
7. Put about a tablespoon of oil back into the pan and put in your curry powder. When it becomes fragrant, add your cream of chicken and coconut milk. Stir thoroughly and bring to a boil. Add pepper to taste here.
8. Add your chicken/onion/potato mix back in. Bring to boil again.
9. Transfer back into your oven safe dish and stash in your oven. Turn your oven to broil and leave your dish in there until it bubbles on top.
10. Serve on top of rice or bread.

You can optionally chop up some parsley and sprinkle on top when serving for a little colour. This turned out to be one of my more successful experiments. Hope you enjoy. Happy eatings!

As a final note, you may want to light a candle because curry is quite pungent and will linger. Of course, if you like the smell, no worries, but the candle helps the smell dissipate a bit faster.

There were various things I had to consume in the name of good health. Most are boiled from different herbs and spices. One particularly foul tasting one that I don’t know the English name to came out blacker than coffee and had an extremely bitter and sour taste to it, and not the good bitter or sour either. Another one was made from boiling a flower and some spices. The resulting beverage supposedly kept away coughs and phlegm. Did they really work? Hard to say. I didn’t drink the stuff every day and my memory is fuzzy on when I got sick and when I was actually drinking it. At the time, I didn’t have the scientific wherewithal to organize a control group. There wasn’t any real reason to doubt my parents’ insistence that these things worked, and “but it doesn’t taste good” wasn’t a good enough reason not to consume the remedies. For note, “it doesn’t taste good” being a bad excuse wasn’t just limited to medicine; it’s probably one of the reasons why I’m not so fussy about vegetables today.

So when I came down with a rather nasty dry cough last week, my mother suggested a Chinese remedy recommended by my aunt. I was willing to try anything at that point as the cough kept me up at night so I didn’t sleep well and I was starting to sound like my voice box went through a trash compactor. Cough drops didn’t work, Vicks Vaporub didn’t work and Buckley’s provided only a brief respite, not near long enough for me to get to sleep before the next coughing fit came along. Instead, I was instructed to cut up a banana into pieces and put them with several pieces of raw unprocessed sugar into a bowl. This combination of banana and sugar was then to be steamed for 5-10 minutes, or until the sugar was dissolved into the banana. The mixture ends up how you think it looks like: mush. And like all Chinese remedies, it certainly did not taste very good. It wasn’t as bad as Buckley’s, but it still wasn’t like eating a banana split either. The texture was also mostly unpleasant, but I’m sure anyone without teeth would enjoy it (or the British).

Did it work? Maybe. I didn’t have any coughing fits after eating it for a couple of days, but it’s also possible that I was at the tail end of the virus anyway, so this could have been a placebo for all I know. I’ll have to keep this in mind and try it out nearer to the beginning of this kind of cough next time. Perhaps it will work for one of you, dear readers, but that depends on how willing you are to try something unconventional on the assurance from the people who say that drinking tiger bone wine will help your sexual performance. Not to say it’s all bunk; the putrid smelling medication my mother brews up every spring for her allergies does alleviate her symptoms very well and doesn’t seem to have the problems over the counter remedies have in not working after one season. It does make me glad I don’t have allergies though. *knocks on wood*

How does this guy still get elected? Boggles the freaking mind.

Given that hard drives have become ludicrously cheap (I think the sweet spot is like $100 for a terabyte these days), I should ask you readers out there what kind of setup you guys use or what you’d recommend. 2 drives in a RAID 1? Build another RAID 5? All-in-one NAS?

Ahem. In short, commercials suck. You may now return to your regular scheduled programming.

Ingredients:

• Half a pound of bok choy leaves, spinach or siu choy (you can ball park with a couple of handfuls)
• 1 pound of ground pork
• 2 green onions, minced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons of ginger, minced
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon white granulated sugar
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce (1 for meatballs, 2 for sauce)
• Black or white pepper, to taste
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch or flour
• 1 can of chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Process:

1. Wash and drain your vegetables
2. In a large bowl, mix your ground pork with green onions, ginger, salt, sugar, pepper, cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. Beat the egg in a separate bowl and add. Dive in with your hands.
3. Form the pork into 4-6 meatballs.
4. In a pan, heat the 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil. Brown the top and bottom of the meatballs, five minutes per side. You want a nice crust on them first.
5. Put the chicken broth and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce in a casserole dish (the kind that can go in the oven). Bring to boil.
6. Add meatballs to casserole dish. Cover and reduce heat to simmer for 10 minutes.
7. Add bok choy around and on top of meatballs. Cover and continue simmering for 15 minutes or until the meatballs are fully cooked through.

Here’s a picture of the final product with my customary attention to plating detail. Happy eatings, folks.

Can’t wait for the playoffs.

• Chicken from the McChickens and Chicken McNuggets come from egg laying hens who are past their egg laying prime. One of the Flash developers lived on a farm as a kid, and apparently the chickens get chucked into this thing that’s similar to a tree chipper. It pulls the feathers off of the birds while killing them and deposits them into the back of a waiting truck. Apparently this is the most humane and efficient way of doing it. 9 year old kids are paid to carry the chickens to their fate, two at a time. The dogs on the farm love rolling around under the machine because blood and guts sorta rain down while this process goes on. Oh, and some of these chickens also go to Purina. Yep, that’s right, your McChicken is also dog food grade chicken.
• Apparently the world would be a better place if everything was ActionScript 3. I happen to disagree.
• You can make a stun gun out of a disposable camera and some cheap wire. This can melt skin.
• A good cleanse involves drinking enough liquids to pee every 45 minutes.
• One of the most important things in life is to give a girl a big rock. I would love to introduce her to my buddy Jesse, who can rant for hours on African blood diamonds.
• The biggest KKK group in Canada is in Salmon Arm. I thought it was in Prince George, but that’s probably Hedy Fry’s fault.
• It is a bad idea to sniff the air near a woman and say, “Your scent is different today.” It is a really bad idea to attempt to explain that it is a joke afterwards. It is an even worse idea to say that your “joke” was a quote from a movie about a serial killer that kills women and makes perfume out of them. Fortunately, the girl in question was a pretty good sport about it and passed it off as the guy being a giant dork.
• You can captivate the patrons of Starbucks for an entire hour just by playing Stepmania on your laptop.
• It is probably a bad idea to date the part owner of your favourite restaurant and have a messy breakup. And keep going there for lunch. While she’s on shift.

I must say, it certainly hasn’t been boring, nor is the cast of characters that I interact with every day.