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This is a look at Fred the fish and some of our houseplants… Look at how excited Eliana is…

We’ve been on a row… this is one of many curry recipes that we’ve enjoyed – taken from fishinnards.com

Also, two other curry dishes we’ve been eating a lot of: Aloo Gobi – recipe taken from one of the extra videos from Bend it like Beckham… it’s a cauliflower and potato curry dish… and chickpeas and spinach curry… recipes coming soon.

Chicken Curry (fishinnards.com)

2 medium to large onions
½ cup of oil
½ tsp Black cumin seeds
2 Black cardamom pods
1″ stick of cinnamon
4 whole cloves
7 black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
4-6 chicken thighs
2″ piece of ginger (pealed)
7 cloves of garlic
1 tsp of turmeric
2 tsp (regular) cumin seeds
1 ½ Tbsp. coriander seeds
½ cup yoghurt (plain w/ no gelatin)
2 medium tomatoes
1 ½ tsp. hot pepper powder (more or less depending on you and your pepper)
2 tsp. salt (kosher)
¾ tsp. Garam masala

So here it goes: Take one onion and cut in half and then slice each halve into very fine half rings.

Heat the oil. Heat the oil in a wide nonstick pot or high sided pan that has a lid. So, heat the oil and add the sliced onion and sauté it over medium heat. When they reach a uniform light tan, turn off the heat. Put a sieve over a small bowl. Pour the onions into the sieve, allowing the oil to drain into the bowl. Pour the oil back into the pot.

Now, chop the other onion and the ginger and garlic. Put them in a blender with a little bit of water (1 Tbs. or so) and blend to a paste. Put the (regular) cumin and coriander seeds into a spice (coffee) grinder and grind to a powder. Wisk the yoghurt to remove and lumps and chop the tomatoes. Skin the chicken pieces and dry them.

Heat the onion flavored oil in the pot and when its really hot add the black cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, peppercorns, cloves, and bay leaves (this is the “whole garam masala”).

Put the chicken in the pan and brown it well on both sides so the pieces are golden brown. Take them out and put them in a bowl. Turn the heat to medium and add the blender paste. Stir the paste, add the turmeric, and stir, stir and keep cooking it for about 5 to 10 minutes. It may turn green and then brown, it looks cool and smells good.

Next add the ground cumin and coriander. Add the yoghurt a spoonful at a time quickly stirring and incorporating after each spoonful. All this stirring is called bhunno, that’s Hindi for sauté, but you add liquid to keep stuff from sticking, a little at a time so everything “caramelizes”.

Add the chopped tomatoes, salt and hot pepper and cook some more. Add the chicken and stir around a minute or two. Add 2 cups of water and bring to simmer. Lift the cover and add the fried onions and the (ground) garam masala. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes.

Serve with lots of rice (white, unsalted, properly cooked plain rice) or chapattis or Naan. Happy eating!

Baby in one of her giddy phases. She gets like this mostly at night around bed time

This is one of our favorite korean dishes… It’s a stir-fried rice cake in hot pepper paste. It’s an easy and delicious dish that you can find vendors selling on the streets of Korea.

Duk Boki

1/2 lb. Duk (Cylindrical rice cake)
1 tbsp Gochujang (hot pepper paste)
1/2 tbsp miso
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
1/2 tsp red pepper powder
1 stalk bok choy
1 scallion chopped
Sesame oil
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 tsp sugar
1/4 lb beef chuck
1 Carrot, sliced
Black pepper
1. Soak Duk in cold water for 10 minutes
2. Cut beef into 1/4 inch thick 1″ x 2″ slices.
3. Mix beef, black pepper, garlic and 1 tsp sesame oil in bowl
4. Brown beef in a frying pan
5. Add in carrots, scallions, bok choy and duk, mix and cover and steam for about 10 minutes or until vegetables are soft.
6. Mix the gochujang, hot pepper, miso, sugar and 2 tsps water in bowl until blended.
7. Add mixture to the pan and stir. Add broth as needed if sauce becomes too thick.
8. Ready to serve when the duk is soft!

This is a short video of baby playing at home. Oh the joy of childhood.

This was posted on our Facebook page, but for those of you who don’t care about FB, here is a video of one of baby’s first steps. She still walks like a drunk man, but slowly she’s getting the hang of things. I’m teaching her how to go up and down stairs, as well as getting off the bed and sofa without crashing on her head.

Randomly reading some articles on power engineering when I ran across this:

Fuel for the Future: Scientists believe deadly bacteria holds key to future energy source

“We have created a quintuple mutant… these five mutations have enhanced hydrogen production from formate 141-fold and have achieved the theoretical hydrogen yield (1 mol H2/mol formate).  In addition, we have created a septuple mutant that increased hydrogen yield fivefold from glucose and improved hydrogen yield twofold from .65 to 1.3 mol H2/mol glucose.”

With today’s technology, Wood said that filling a cabinet-sized unit full of bacteria and sugar could be used to produce 1 KWh of power, enough to run a home with an operating cost of $6,000.

E. coli and sugar.  What will they think of next? 

Hopefully the e. coli won’t mutate into some strange variant outbreak…

At the recommendation of a friend, we added the movie Serenity on our netflix queue.  It looked like a low budget sci-fi movie, but appearances can be deceiving.  It actually had a great story with likable characters and surprises abounded.  We later found out it was the conclusion of a series called Firefly that Fox canceled or more like ruined.  Some highlights include random chinese spoken the characters, a weird romantic story, and some great effects.

I recommend watching the series first, but not a prerequisite for the movie.  That can be done on this site which recently found as well: hulu.com

On a side note, Hulu has a full length movies and tv shows from the past… some old, some new… some include: A-team, Fantasy Island, the Tick, Airwolf, What’s Happening, What’s Happening Now!, Who’s the Boss, etc…