2014-12-20: IT & Cooking

In the past when typing ł I have typed in Bialystok, selected the word, searched, copied the first result from Google (which has the ł) and switched back a tab and pasted.

A little cumbersome but I am pretty quick at it, maybe 10 seconds per time.

Traveling Advice: How to Type Polish Letters Faster

This is windows 8.1 but should work for pretty much all windows versions. should work for other languages with secret letters too I think.

1. In control panels / language / add / Polish
2. Press Windows Key + Space (auto switch to Polish Keyboard)
3. Press Right Alt + l (magic ł appears on screen)
4. Press Windows Key + Space (auto switch to English Keyboard)

I can now do this in about 1 second. This means I save about 9 seconds each time.

Figuring this out took me about half an hour.
30 x 60 / 9 = 200
So I need to type ł about 196 more times to make that exercise worthwhile. Not sure if the usage for this post counts though. Then I guess we have to add the time I have just spent bragging about how I found it as wasted time as well.

Rating: 3/10. 

I'd do it again just because I feel cool using a 6 key string for a letter. If windows was like Tekken I would be looking for words with all the secret letters so I could string them up and get a serious combo going.

którą, którą, mówiłem! Awesome Combo!
Incidentally I always get annoyed when they use w followed by ł because the ł is pronounced as w (in english) so I figure why the hell didn't they just use w as w and they could make ł sound like v. This frustrates and infuriates me!

I watched how to make the family soup today. I have held off on learning to make soup for many years. Mostly because I am recalcitrant bastard. Everyone is "oh you have to make stock if you want to cook well" and I am like "pfft I can buy it and plus you're not my supervisor!".
The same applies to many things, I still haven't seen "Saving Private Ryan" simply because my brother rated it so high and it pisses him off that I refuse to see it just because I know it pisses him off. In many ways I am hard to like.

For Ewa however I decided not to push my luck by refusing to learn to make soup.

How I make soup:

• Make too many chicken wings (I have an awesome recipe from an economics forum which you should follow if you want to have good chicken wings, the creators name is staringclown which just adds flavour). This is done on Fridays traditionally.
• Eat as many wings as you can. Half with a blue cheese sauce and half with a hot butter sauce.
• Thrown the bones in a big old pot of water.
• The next day throw any uneaten wings in the water (keep at least two for girlfriends that "couldn't face another wing ever again in their life" because by lunchtime they will be attractive as a snack, the wings that is. The girlfriend is always attractive)
• Boil the bejesus out of them.
• Turn heat off and put a lid on.
• Over the course of the next few days throw any vege / meat trimmings that seem faintly soup related in there.
• Bring it to a crazy arse boil at least once a day adding water as required.
• Remember to get a smoked hock, throw that in and boil some more. This is usually Tuesday.
• On Thursday strain all the bones, skin and random junk out. 
• Chuck in a tin of super sweet corn including the water in the tin.
• Boil mentally again if reducing is needed.

So many ways to say this. I like to go for a tribal chant style usually.

• In each serving bowl (I use those cheap big blue and white chinese bowls) 
• One bunch of good ramen noodles, the ones that come in 3 bunches per packet wrapped in that annoying little strip that you can never choose whether to cut it or unroll it (cooked obviously). I use hakubaku. Mostly because I like saying hakubaku.
• 3/4 fill bowl with baby spinach leaves
• two super soft boiled eggs sliced in half over the bowl so the yolk drippings aren't wasted
• Quarter a kilo of the thinnest sliced eye fillet (raw) you can be arsed doing. If you are drunk or lazy you'll have to put the meat in the soup pot for it to cook but that is nowhere near as good as super thin slices which you can separate and cook as you eat. To fit the meat you normally need to push down pretty hard on the spinach.
• A teaspoon of miso paste if you taste the soup and it isn't savoury enough
• Pour the soup over the meat, veges and noodles
• Throw some chopped spring onions over the top
• If you are a spicy fellow (like me) liberally pour chili oil into the soup.

I'm not saying your soup recipe is stupid but you obviously never had to feed children did?

Elapsed time is 6 days, effort is probably on the order of two hours, I like it enough to keep doing it. Ewa does ask me to make it so it can't be that bad.

How Ewa's Mum Makes Soup

• Two smallish pork ribs which looked pretty cleaned by the butcher, they weren't ribs for barbecue, raw, un-smoked.
• Chuck them in some water, about 4 litres
• Simmer and skim the gunge from the top, no boiling
• Add one chicken flavoured stock cube
• 3 small carrots
• 2 inches of Leek
• Small celeriac, about fist size

Parsley root is the white one

• 1 small pietruszka(parsley root, good luck finding that in most countries, parsnip is kind of sort of close)
• Chop into cubes about 5mm on a side and chuck into soup
• Simmer til about half cooked
• 2 small potatoes (about equal volume to carrots)
• 1/2 small cabbage (same volume again). The cabbage here is cool. The leaves are packed so tight I thought it was a root vegetable at first

Tight, white but well within sight

• Chop to cubes and add to simmering soup
• Bring towards a boil slowly
• Add chopped frozen cauliflower, about half the carrot volume, if it was fresh this might have to go in with the potato as we are aiming for all veges ready at the same time
• Simmer til all veges cooked
• Put 1 Tablespoon of flour in a cup and make a slurry with half a cup of water, pour into soup
• Put in bowl, add sour cream, eat.
• Don't put the sour cream in the soup pot as it reduces the time the soup will live in the fridge.
• Serve pork bones for gnawing

It would appear I am unlikely to get homesick. Aussie name checks are everywhere.

Elapsed time is 2 hours and effort is probably about 20 minutes. Ewa ate 3 bowls of it almost ignoring the schnitzel completely. I shall have to practice making this for when we are far from any home we have known and she needs a bowl of happiness.

Translation Humour: Polish, German & Japanese

Shiseido pronounced in Polish might be heard by a kiwi as Scheisse Do i.e. The Way Of Shit.

Rating: 7/10 (automatic +1 for poo jokes)