Head Gasket Replacement, a set on Flickr.
Just finished replacing the head gasket in my lovely (cough) '99 Jeep Wrangler. It took all weekend and two other hands worth of help and guidance, but we got her back together and according to the test runs she's doing ok.
I really just wanted to share some pictures.
This was a challenging photo selection, as I ended up cooking on my own yesterday. Unfortunately not a whole lot of photos, but quite a tasty dish regardless.
This stir-fry ended up being distinctly Asian--ginger notes and a splash of soy sauce--with a light zing given by the pineapple wedges, lemon juice, tomato slices and wasabi paste; a bean paste smoothed out the flavor giving it more body.
I began with two large leaves of bok choy and sliced them in a diagonal pattern and separated the thicker stems from the greener leaves. I added the greener leaves, tomato slices and pineapple wedges to a bowl and set them aside. Those ingredients were to be crisp and lightly cooked.
After heating up some peanut oil and minced ginger on my trusty blue pan, I tossed on the other ingredients that I didn't take any other pictures of. The above shows them, mid-cook, to be white mushrooms, halved, the bok choy stems and green onion slices.
While the hardier items were toasting in the oiled pan, I set to work on the sauce. Soy sauce, bean paste, rice vinegar, lemon juice, miso paste, and wasabi paste were mixed in a bowl (ingredients ordered from largest concentration to smallest). Following my father's footsteps in cooking, nothing was measured out. I recommend sampling the sauce after mixing it to ensure it is to a flavor of your liking.
To thicken the sauce a small glass of water (too much and you will 'water down' your sauce) with a teaspoon's worth of cornstarch mixed in was set aside.
By this time the hardier ingredients will have cooked and the lighter ones will need to be added in. Additionally, add the sauce you have created. Cook for about 1-2 minutes until the bok choy leaves just start to wilt, stiring the sauce around as well.
Add the small cup of water and corn starch to the pot. Make sure that the corn starch is mixed well with the water so you do not get clumps. The sauce should immediately begin to thicken. Heat for another 1-2 minutes and serve on white rice.
My roommate John and I have been experimenting with non-meat (not counting seafood) meals at home. We've cooked a variety of tofu and seiten based meat substitutes, but this is probably our first all vegetable meal.
Introducing... squash zucchini noodles!
Raw, freshly cut zucchini strips
I read about this recipe in my Google Reader a week or two ago and have been trying to find the time to make some ever since.
It's a simple enough recipe, granted Johnny and I never really follow recipes to the letter (we kind of just do the "close enough" method and substitute with similar ingredients or steps). You basically have a squash or zucchini (same family) and peel or slice thin strips of it (pictured above). We used three whole zucchinis for our version of it.
The next step is obviously to cook the squash 'noodles' either by lightly sautéing in a pan or boiling like you would noodles. Just be sure not to overcook them, you don't want to be eating squash mush. Johnny and I opted for boiling because we didn't have to supervise it as much.
Squash noodles boiling in cute pot
While that was cooking, we threw the ingredients we wanted to have in the sauce onto the frying pan in a little bit of olive oil.
Onions, yellow peppers, mushrooms and garlic sautéing
Pour the sauce in the pan once the tasty things are cooked to the desired firmness.
Softened, sauced and delicious smelling
Add whatever herby seasoning you like.
Adding in some Italian herbs and a little bit of extra garlic powder
Heat up and dish out! Hopefully you didn't overcook the 'noodles' in the meantime. Strain the 'noodles' if you boiled them, of course. Om nom nom nom nom!
This is definitely a meal that John and I will have again.
After my roommate extolling upon me the virtues of Django and how I should use it for my projects, I have finally caved. I spent a good segment of today installing and configuring the web framework on my pretentious OpenSUSE partition. However much time I spent on this was probably way more time than I should have had to.
Really, the simplest way of installing it was following their posted instructions. I went to their download page and was happily greeted by a download link and three commands to install. Best news ever.
tar xzvf Django-1.1.tar.gz
cd Django-1.1
sudo python setup.py install
It was supposed to be a 10min job including download time; which is why, of course, it did not work that way at all. Apparently I would have to try a different method because my Python install was angry (missing various files) and because simple installs like to hate me.
I was hoping to use the stable version, but I'm willing to try the 'latest & greatest' & unstable. I'm just learning Django & Python, so I tried install option number 2: Get the subversion repository and _____... Actually, yeah, what do I do after I have the svn repository? For some reason the download/install page was a little sparse on the details.
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/
Thats when I found it. The guide that took me through the necessary steps to finally get the magical Django beast fed and on my machine. Tada!
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-trunk
ln -s `pwd`/django-trunk/django SITE-PACKAGES-DIR/django
ln -s `pwd`/django-trunk/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin
Worked like a charm. I am happy to report that I have successfully tamed the Django of the wild forests in the internets and I am ready to start developing!
