Month: October 2007

I knocked this up last night and think it was rather yummy (even if I do say so myself!). Dead easy too.

Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes (walk away and forget)

Ingredients

1 packet (frozen) Ingham Chicken Breast Steaks
1 tube tomato paste (I used an onion and garlic flavoured one, there are lots of different types so choose one that sounds nice to you)
100gms (or so) of shaved champagne ham
150gms (or so) of tasty cheese (or some other type of cheese that you like)

So you do this….

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius or so.

Place chicken steaks on an oven tray layered with baking paper (helps save washing up effort later). Spread each one liberally with tomato paste, then layer ham on top of that. Slice (or grate) cheese (I sliced) and layer it liberally on top of the ham.

Bung it in the preheated oven for 30 mins or so – the cheese will melt and go nice and brown and crispy. Serve steaming hot.. mmmmm, delicious!!

We eat food from Pasta Resistance pretty regularly, and they make a dish called Gnocchi Matriciana, which is a lovely gnocchi in a creamy tomato and bacon sauce with a hint of chilli. We’ve had a few goes at replicating it at home (from packets) and tonight we came about as close as we’ll get I reckon! We also gave it our own special sundried tomato twist… yummy yummy….

The best bit is, it’s fairly cheap (cost us about $12 for 2 huge meals. With a larger packet of gnocchi it could serve 4 quite easily). It’s also dead easy to cook even for allergic-to-kitchen types, it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes to knock up, and all you need is 2 saucepans. So here goes…

Ingredients

1 x (500gm) packet of fresh gnocchi. This makes 2 BIG meals – Coles also sells 375gm and 650gm packets, so adjust this to suit
1 x tub of “Italian Tomato and Garlic” Latina pasta sauce
150gm diced bacon
A few tablespoons of sundried tomatoes
A few tablespoons of fresh cream
Chilli powder to taste

Method

Pretty simple really….

Putt a saucepan to the onto high heat – size not particularly important, so long as it’s more than big enough to fit all the gnocchi in.

Get another saucepan on the heat – brown the bacon for a couple of minutes, then put in the pasta sauce and stir well. Let it simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally. Cut up your sundried tomatoes a bit and add them to the mix too – keep simmering and stirring.

When the saucepan of water is boiling, chuck in your gnocchi and watch carefully – after a few minutes the gnocchi will start rising to the surface – once it’s all come to the top (by this stage the water should be boiling again), your gnocchi is cooked – take it off the heat.

Now add your cream (a few tablespoons is about right, just enough to make it a bit creamy) and chilli powder to taste, let it simmer for a minute or two to mix in. Then serve up your gnocchi, and pour sauce over the top. All done!

Serve with garlic bread – yummo! I’m still full… .wish I’d taken photos…. Cold vanilla ice cream and chocolate pudding also makes a great follow up!

Hooray….

I’m at work at the moment. Currently, I’ve been on hold to Telstra for…. ~35 minutes.

Thank goodness I don’t have a customer here waiting.

What’s worse, I’ve just been told that there’s morning tea (iced donuts!) in the staffroom. Hurry up and deactivate this bloody service so that I can go munch out!! 😀

Been reading the Discworld books lately – up to “Sourcery”.

Has anyone ever compared him to Douglas Adams? Such an absolutely BRILLIANT turn of phrase. I frequently laugh out loud (much to the distraction of Clare since I usually read in bed… where she’s either trying to read herself, or trying to sleep!)….

Bit more info on the author here – I highly recommend them.

Well, I am completely frustrated.

I got a Treo 750 a few months ago as my work mobile – it’s an absolutely awesome phone in most ways, and I’m pretty grateful to my work for letting me have one!

My problems started when I decided I needed a bluetooth car kit for it. First I bought a Parrot C3000 Evolution to fit in the Excel. I blew it up.. but that’s another story.

I then ended up changing cars and now I’ve got a nice 04 model Holden Combo. Nothing flash, but it’s the perfect vehicle for running around town with my day job as well as carting computers and parts etc for the side business. But, I need handsfree – I’m sick of pulling over to the side of the road to answer calls!

So, I bought a JVC head unit (a KD-BT1 with onboard Bluetooth, thinking that would save me some hassle, and I needed a new head unit to replace the factory one anyway.

Well I’m blowed if the damn thing will pair…. it sees the car kit, but the car kit can’t connect to the phone. Palm can’t help me (“it’s not on our list of compatible devices”) and JVC can’t help me (“make sure your device has Bluetooth version 2.1”) so I’m stuck.

The only way I can get it to pair is by installing a third party Bluetooth stack from Broadcomm… which doesn’t exist, officially. I did find one (which someone had actually ported to the HTC Universal) on XDA-Developers which will run on my device, and it pairs with the head unit fine, but no sound comes out when I make a call.

So I’m back to square one, with no car kit… argh!!!!

Now’s the time for me to have a little rant then… I thought Bluetooth was supposed to be a standardised technology for crying out loud? Why does Palm have to have their own proprietary bloody Bluetooth stack which only works with certain things? It’s just making things difficult for your customers!

Anyway…. I am without a handsfree… still… guess I’ll have to keep pulling over.

Side note… I’ve updated WordPress to the latest version… updated Coppermine too…. new host is fantastic, so far…

Thanks for listening!

Well, I’ve changed hosts – the old one was driving me nuts. This one is much faster (and hosted in Australia) and costs around the same! Big props to Jumba 🙂

Got lots of things to say – none of them probably very interesting. Although I do feel a real need to muse on politics, what with the election coming up and all. And photography. And X-boxes with XBMC. And why hasn’t there been a Windows Mobile 6 update for the Palm Treo 750 on Telstra yet? Vodafone and 3 have got theirs… the rest of us are just using hacked ROMs 🙂

Must update WordPress to the latest version tomorrow too. Methinks it’s well overdue.