Pork Satay with Cucumbers and Peanut Sauce

Ingredients

1 Lb boneless pork loin roast
2 cloves garlic
1 C coconut milk
2 Tbs brown sugar
2 Tbs of your favorite curry powder
1 Tbs fish sauce

Preparation

Mince garlic and mix together with everything except pork. Thinly slice pork and marinade in coconut mixture for at least 2 hours and as long as overnight. Skewer meat and broil or cook on barbeque until done.

Serve with peanutbutter sauce and cucumber relish; recipes follow.

Peanutbutter Sauce

Heat together 6 Tbs of peanut butter, 1 C water, 1 clove minced garlic, 2 Tbs soy sauce, 2 tsp brown sugar (palm sugar if available), 1/2 tsp shrimp paste and lemon juice to taste. Add more water if it gets too thick.

Cucumber Relish

Mix together sugar and vinegar; 2 parts sugar for 1 part vinegar. For 2 cucumbers this is about 1 C sugar and 1/2 C vinegar. Add thinly sliced jalapeno pepper and a small amount of onion. Add peeled, deseeded (optional) sliced and quartered cucumbers to mixture. Add water to cover, then chill. Best made at least two hours before serving.

Happy Holidays! Season’s Greetings! Those 2 are still safe, right? I’m pretty sure they are. At least things haven’t gotten as bad as forseen in this humorous posting to the Interesting People list:

I wanted to send out some sort of holiday greeting to my friends, but it is
so difficult in today’s world to know exactly what to say without offending
someone. So I met with my attorney today, and on his advice (and after $299
in attorneys fees) I wish to say the following:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an
environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, nonaddictive
gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within
the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or
secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular
persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice
religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically
uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar
year 2004, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other
cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great (not
to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is
the only “AMERICA” in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the
race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual
preference of the wishes.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is
subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no
alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to
actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void
where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the
wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual
application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance
of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is
limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole
discretion of the wisher…

Using a slick Movabletype plugin, I’ve implemented a current weather conditions report, visible on the side navigation of this site. The weather for any number of sites may be listed and I’ve chosen 3 sites: home in San Jose; family in Salina, KS and Bristol, UK, where I’ve got colleagues and friends.

I’m still playing around with the formatting, and will probably move the display from the left side over to the right (where most dynamic content resides), but wanted to share once I had it up and running reliably. By that I mean that it’s now automatically updated, once an hour, using the system’s cron(1) capabilities and a little script I threw together.

I found an excellent tip describing how one can use the (free with recent Macs) GraphicConverter program as very good thumbnail image explorer. I’ve been using PhotoExplorer, from Ulead, both on the PC and the Mac, and while it has all the features I want from such a program, including:

* resizable thumbnails
* variety of sort options
* easy slide show setup

it also suffers from a few problems. mainly in the area of performance. Still, I used it every time I had new images to deal with. (For what it’s worth, the photoshop image browser is useful to me when I know roughly what folder an image is in. For browsing and exploring larger sets of images PhotoExplorer or GraphicConverter work much better.)

GraphicConverter provides a fast, intuitive, explorer like interface (using the fairly new OS X file browsing interface) that displays folders, thumbnails within a selected folder and finally, the selected image.

While it’s a great tool for browsing around your images, sorting and viewing them and so on, GraphicConverter doesn’t serve well as a tool for managing and keeping track of a large number of images. I’ve spent some time looking at Extensis Portfolio and iView Media Pro, both highly regarded image management programs. My initial conclusion is that Media Pro has a much easier to use, more fully featured interface than Portfolio, has better data exporting capabilities and simply put, is a joy to work with!

While I’m not a big fan of year-end best of lists, the top 10 astro photos of 2003 web site is worth a visit. I don’t agree with all of their choices, but found many of the images to be stunning.

Two of my favorites are the photo of earth from mars

and the unexplained phenomena that looks like an explosion, but isn’t.

Thanks to Teal Sunglasses for the tip.