Sweet n' Savory Crepes

Sweet n' Savory Crepes



Filling:
2 cups chicken, cooked & cubed
1 large sweet potato, cubed
1 pkg chicken gravy mix
1 Tbsp curry powder

Other:
Salt (for boiling water)
Brown sugar (topping)

Boiled the sweet potato in some salted water, and after it is tender strain it out, reserving the water. Add the cooked sweet potato, gravy mix, curry powder, and enough water to blender to make a good puree. Taste to make sure you have enough salt/curry.  Pour potato puree back into the pan you cooked the potato in, stir in the cooked chicken, and bring it to a quick boil, adding enough of the reserved water to keep the mixture at the right consistency for filling/topping, then remove from heat.

Make the crepes according to Alton's recipe ( http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/crepes-recipe/index.html ).

Lay out a crepe, top with a couple Tbsp of filling and roll it up (be gentle - crepes are fragile).  Repeat. After you have a few rolled crepes on the plate, put a few more Tbsp of the filling on top, sprinkle a Tbsp of brown sugar on top of that, and torch it to caramelize the sugar.  A broiler might work, but it could burn the crepes too so if you don't have a torch, I'd recommend just sprinkling the sugar on and just letting it melt.

Me, in the Crowd

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) maintains a pretty funny blog.  His post today got me thinking, so I'm including a link to his post "You in the Crowd."  For those who know me, I'd like you to leave me a comment (anonymous is ok) on here with your three short descriptors of me -- how would you describe me to someone who didn't know me if you were trying to help them locate me in a crowd? (physical & mental/attitude descriptions are ok)

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/you_in_the_crowd/

Chicken & Roasted Red Pepper Bruschetta Rounds

Chicken & Roasted Red Pepper Bruschetta Rounds

• 4 slices Texas-style toast
• 4 Ramekins (or something else round and bakeable)
• 1 red pepper
• 1 large (or 2 small) chicken breasts (3/4 lb)
• hard goat (or other flavorful) cheese (1 c, finely grated)
• 4 thin slices of tomato
• 1/4 cup basalmic vinegar
• basil leaves (~8-12)
• 1 egg
• 1 Tbsp flour
• seasoning (salt, pepper)

Roast red pepper (cut in half, deseed/vein, put cut side down on foil on baking pan, cook an hour at 350-400 or until skin blackens, wrap up in it's foil, set aside for 5 minutes or until cool, peel & discard skin)
While the pepper is roasting, marinate the tomatos with the basalmic (I used a small ziplock) -- turn occasionally.
Cook up the chicken.
Chop up the red pepper & chicken and mix in a bowl with some seasoning (you may want to use some olive oil to help it out) until it starts to want to stick together.
Mix in the egg and flour
Use ramekin (or other round) to cut out circles from the toast.
Separate chicken & pepper mixture equally into the ramekins.
Bake the ramekins and toast until the toast is as crispy as desired (but not too soft).

Plate up the bruchetta: put down the toast, top with the chicken & pepper "patty", a slice of marinated tomato, and 1/4 of the cheese. Broil or torch until the cheese is brown, top with basil leaves and serve.

Cranberry Sangria Jam

Cranberry Sangria Jam

• 2 (12 or 16oz) bags of cranberries
• 3 cups sugar
• 2 oranges (zest & juice)
• 1-2 limes (zest & juice)
• Red wine (make sure it's something you'd drink!)
• 1 pouch liquid pectin (optional)

Put the cranberries in a colander, give them a quick rinse and pick out any bad ones or stems.
In a large pot, put the cleaned cranberries.  Zest and juice the fruit into a large measuring device, and add enough wine to make around 2 1/2 cups total liquid.  Dump it into the pot.
Boil for about 6-8 minutes until a lot of the cranberries pop and are soft.  At this point, I decided I wanted more "jam" less whole berry, so I used my stick blender.
I've also been told that the cranberries have a lot of natural pectin and would probably thicken up on their own, but since I added the fruit juice and I wanted it definitely "jam" like, I added a pouch of liquid pectin (Certo) at the end and boiled it for one more minute before putting into jars.

Makes enough to fill seven 1/2 pint jars.

mod_rewrite Voodoo

Ok, so not quite so much voodoo yet... but I have other tweaks in mind for it, and they promise to be more fun.
Background:  I have a new short domain name (flw.bz) resolving to the same place my original domain does (flowbuzz.com).  I decided to keep my flw.bz files in a subfolder (/short).  Oh, and my domain/webserver is virtual (and I think shared). I'm using YOURLS at the moment to provide URL-shortening capability (yay!).
Problem: How to get requests for flw.bz/blahblah to resolve properly while maintaining functionality of Yourls, not ending up in a mod_rewrite endless loop, etc.?
Answer: I tweaked the code in the .htaccess file that came with Yourls to look like this:

RewriteEngine On
# this doesn't do anything for me due to way my server is set up, so I left it commented out
#RewriteBase /

# take anything that's coming in to flw.bz
# and if its not a real file or directory, map it to short/ subfolder
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^flw.bz$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ short/$1

# if I've put flw.bz/ in front of another URL, shorten it like a bookmarklet
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^flw.bz$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(http://|https://)(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ flwbz/admin/index.php?u=%1%2 [L]

# take anything that's coming in to flw.bz
# and now that it's mapped to short subfolder,
# if it *still* isn't a file or directory send it to YOURLS
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^flw.bz$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^short/([0-9A-Za-z]+)/?$ short/yourls-go.php?id=$1 [L]

I may continue to do some tweaks, and probably will write my own PHP catching page and just use the Yourls API page. But after many hours of glazed-eye fiddling with complex mod_rewrite rules, this turned out to work.
[edited to add http catching code]