Bearnaise Variations

Bearnaise sauce is great, but it really does have to be freshly made even though it's a bit awkward. Stuff from jars/packets etc. is a long way from reality, the amount of chemicals/additional ingredients required to stabilise the sauce for storage is quite scary.

Anyway, I like intense flavours so here is a variation with a little more "poke" that goes well with fish, rare steak and asparagus. It's also a deep orange colour that is visually quite striking.

• 2 tsp crushed red chillies - or two whole chillies, bruised (dried or fresh)
  
• 10 bruised peppercorns
• 2 tbsp finely chopped shallots
• 4 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 8 tbsp red wine
• 3 egg yolks
• 8oz (225g) butter in small cubes (salted is OK, or you can use unsalted and adjust later)
• Salt
• Lemon juice

1. Place chillies, peppercorns, shallots, vinegar and red wine in a pan
2. Bring to boil and reduce to approx one third volume
3. Start to heat the water in a double boiler until just below boiling - do not allow the water to boil in the double boiler or the sauce will curdle
4. Strain through a fine mesh into the top pan of a double boiler but DO NOT put the pan in the double boiler yet, the reduction must cool off a bit first
   
5. With a wire whisk, whip the egg yolks into the reduction until fluffy (the colour will lighten as this happens)
6. Now place the pan into the double boiler and add the cubes of butter gradually continuing to whisk them in as they melt. The sauce will thicken and become velvety as the butter emulsifies
7. Adjust to taste with salt and lemon juice
8. The sauce can be kept warm for serving with a little melted butter on to to stop it skinning - mix the butter in just before serving

The sauce is fine as it is but you can add some finely chopped chives or a little smoked paprika as variations.

Drop Scones

Basically, these are like scotch pancakes but are technically scones because the butter is rubbed into the flour to begin with - though I use a lazy method. This recipe I inherited from my mum with some minor variations. There is also an obvious geekiness to the recipe (at least in imperial units)...

• 4 oz self raising flour
• 2 oz sugar
• 1 egg
• ½ oz butter
• ¼ cup milk
• 1/8 cup water
• splash of vanilla or lemon zest

1. Melt butter in microwave (10 secs on max. ought to do it)
2. Stir in flour till it resembles fine breadcrumbs
3. Stir in sugar
4. Add egg and water and stir to a stiff paste (doing this properly gets the lumps out quite effectively)
5. Add milk and vanilla/lemon zest and blend to a smooth batter
6. Drop dessertspoonfuls (2 tsp) onto a hot lightly greased pan/griddle preheated on medium heat
   
7. Flip after a couple of minutes when the bubbles begin to appear on the surface
8. These are sweet enough to eat as is - otherwise butter and/or syrup is OK too.
9. Recipe makes 12-14 scones, but it's easy to double :-)
   

Use dark brown sugar for a more treacly finish (better with vanilla than lemon).

Kingspec SSD and back to OpenSuSE 11.0

OK, I can report that the Kingspec works just fine in the U810 although it does drain a lot more power than the CF card - more like the old Toshiba Mk4009GAL drive. However, it is a LOT faster than the CF and the Tosh - to the extent that most of the stuff I am doing seems to be CPU- rather than I/O-bound. More to the point, suspend-to-disk takes 14 seconds and resume takes 16, of which 6 is the BIOS check. Boot to kdm login prompt is 28s.

So now I'm back to OpenSuSE 11.0 since too many things were bust in 11.1. I do actually use the U810 for work and I need certain things like Bluetooth and external monitors - I know there are fixes but they are liable to be blown away by a kernel update which is not what I want when I need to give a presentation.

However, times have moved on so here is the revised, SSD-friendly install process:

1. Install OpenSuSE, include kernel dev packages and removing all "beagle" related packages
   
2. Set up a 1GB tmpfs at /tmp with /var/tmp and /usr/tmp soft-linked to /tmp
3. Disable CUPS, sshd, postfix, portmap, auditd, java_binfmt in YAST
   
4. Add "pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off" to get wired ethernet working
5. Do a full update - can now set display to 1024x600 in SaX properly, screen size of 12-inches gives a good font size
   
6. Add MadWifi repository and install madwifi to get wireless working, add ath_pci to /etc/pm/config.d/config SUSPEND_MODULES
   
7. Add OpenOffice repository and upgrade to OO 3.1
8. Add Webcam drivers repository and install r5u870 drivers and firmware (image is upside down, problem for later), add r5u870 and uvcvideo to /etc/pm/config.d/config SUSPEND_MODULES
9. Disable Firefox disk and offline caches (in about:config look for browser.cache.xxx.enable and change to false)
10. Enable compiz but go into Workarounds and disable Legacy Fullscreen (stops Firefox and YAST losing window decorations when fullscreen).
    
11. Add S2RAM_OPTS="-f" to /etc/pm/config.d/config so that Suspend to RAM works

...there are some more things to do, which I'll add in due course

Kingspec ZIF SSD

Just ordered a 64GB Kingspec ZIF SSD - we shall see how it performs. I am tempted to go back to OpenSuSE 11.0 when I get it - having discovered that Bluetooth and the external monitor handling are not working in 11.1.

With the SSD in I'll use the 32GB CF card in the slot as additional backup store. I used to use it for mounting CF cards from my camera but in-camera formatted cards don't mount properly (it's a Fuji S9500 with the mysterious V1.3 firmware) so I'm using a USB cable instead. As the CF slot on the U810 is so slow, it's arguably quicker downloading this way anyway.

Poppadoms

Ordinary poppadoms can be cooked in a microwave quite successfully. Just brush either side sparingly with a little vegetable oil and pop them in for 20-30 seconds on maximum power.