1 Messidor CCXIII (June 19, 2005)
Yom-yom-yooom, Ze Chocolad!
A couple of people requested this, so it's easier to put here than type it up and send it off to each person individually.
Spicy Tofu Triangles (from Better Homes and Gardens® Vegetarian Cooking):
- 1 12-ounce package extra-firm, tub-style tofu (fresh bean curd), chopped
- 1/2 cup finely chopped fresh shitake or button mushrooms
- 1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions
- 1/4 cup finely chopped canned water chestnuts
- 2 tablespoons bottled hoisin sauce
- 2 tablespoons Oriental chili sauce with garlic
- 1 teaspoon soy sauce
- 48 wonton wrappers
- Nonstick cooking spray
- Teriyaki sauce, and/or prepared Chinese-style hot mustard (optional)
For filling, in a large bowl combine tofu, mushrooms, green onions, water chestnuts, hoisin sauce, chili sauce, and soy sauce. Spoon about 1 tablespoon* of the filling into the center of each wonton wrapper. Brush the edges with water. Fold one corner of wrapper to opposite corner to forma triangle; press edges to seal.
Lightly coat baking sheets with cooking spray. Place the wonton triangles on prepared baking sheets. Lightly coat the triangles with cooking spray.
Bake in a 400° oven about 10 minutes or until triangles are crisp and golden brown. Drain on paper towels. If desired, serve the hot triangles with teriyaki sauce and/or mustard.
As a note: these aren't that spicy, but Greg believes that's largely due to the chili garlic sauce that I chose to use. They also look much nicer than my other contribution to Shan's birthday party snacks: beetroot hummus — which tasted fine, but had a scary bright pinkish-red colour.
* About 1/2 a tablespoon works better. You'll probably run out if you use a full one.
Update: Food pics follow:
I need a digital camera so I can take food pics. all of this presentation stuff goes to waste when it's just for me.
What you should do is make sketches of all your food. Then you can make it look as unrealistic as you like.
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The triangles look pretty good; I'll need to give them a try sometime. My roommate made squash ravioli out of wonton wrappers once; it turned out okay but the ravioli opened up a bit during cooking.
But dude, day-glo hummus just isn't where it's at. Although, it makes me wonder if they make glow-in-the-dark food coloring. I bet the stuff in glow sticks in non-toxic; glow-in-the-dark hummus would be an excellent addition to a Halloween party.
Posted by peterjm at 2 Messidor CCXIII 14:20 (2005/06/20)
I seem to recall hearing that the stuff in glow sticks is actually a carcinogen. Of course, what isn't... The closest you'll probably get to day-glo food colouring is the neon colouring I spotted at SuperStore whilst buying the ingredients for this.
I had actually ha trouble finding half a kilo of beetroot in order to make the stuff, and almost ended up with bright orange hummus, seeing as it suggests using carrots or pumpkin as an alternative vegetable.
Random sidenote: I hope I didn't mess up your feed reader. I know you use the various feeds to track websites, and I've been fiddling with my feeds: changing them from RSS 2.0 to Atom 0.3. (It should have been perfectly transparent to everyone but me, but you never know.)
You actually kind of did break my feed reader. For your last couple entries, it informed me of your new entries, but the text summary was kind of screwed up. When I get to my computer at home, I'll try re-adding your feed to the reader and give it a chance to auto-detect the switch from RSS to Atom.
Posted by peterjm at 2 Messidor CCXIII 17:49 (2005/06/20)
What are you using for a reader? I didn't have issues with the main feed and Sage, so I assumed that most other readers would probably deal with the switch properly. (The comments feed was an entirely different matter, but that was because my XML wasn't compliant with the 0.3 specification and, since the validator was down at the time, I wasn't sure what parts of it were wrong.)
I'm using Liferea (a GNOME app). At the moment I don't think there's a "standard" feed reader for GNOME, so I just picked that one because my roommate was using it. I think it probably decides what format the feed is in when I first subscribe, and then if it changes it doesn't really know how to parse it. Just a guess.
Anyway, the frequency with which feeds change their type divided by the effort it takes to resubscribe is pretty low, so I'm not too worried if I'm missing features. :)
Posted by peterjm at 2 Messidor CCXIII 19:01 (2005/06/20)
It turns out that after deleting and re-adding your feed, I'm still getting mangled text snippets. They're of the form "". Not sure if the cruft on the ends is on my end or your end; don't worry about it, and I'll try a new reader.
Posted by peterjm at 3 Messidor CCXIII 02:02 (2005/06/21)
Mangled text snippets, eh? I do believe I will have to install Liferea and see if I can figure out where they are coming from. It's in the Debian repository, so it's not that hard. (Uninstalling it is a bit of a problem though. The package pre-uninstall scripts require gconf2, but the last time I had it installed, it decided to uninstall gconf2 before trying to uninstall liferea.)
Since the comment didn't post properly, lets try that again. The mangled snippets are of the form:
<![CDATA[actual text snippet but without any newlines or wrapping]]>
I know CDATA is some XML thing, but it's been a while since I worked with XML so I'm not sure exactly what.
Posted by peterjm at 3 Messidor CCXIII 12:46 (2005/06/21)
Yeah, CDATA is an XML thing. It allows for characters that would otherwise fail to validate to be present in the text. Basically, the reader is supposed to take everything between <![CDATA[ and ]]> and treat it as text. Any potential elements such as <foo> found within the CDATA declaration are merely treated as a part of the text, rather than as a new element. I'll see what I can do about it, but I'm not sure I can do anything; this current entry fails to validate without it, as readers tend to choke and die on the ® section.
Anyways, what version of Liferea are you using? The version in the Debian repository (0.91) has no problems with CDATA blocks. If I look at my own feed I get the entry summary without them showing up.
(And this line is just here to test something: ®)
Ok, it might be fixed now. I removed the encode_xml flag on the MTEntryExcerpt tag (which was what was adding the CDATA blocks), and turned on encode_html, which encoded ® as &reg;. Hopefully that doesn't mess up your feed reader as well. (You should still see ® in the text for this particular feed entry.)
It works now, although it still strangly refuses to line-wrap anything, so I get the entire text in one big line that I have to horizontally scroll for.
Anyway, I'll officially declare this to be a problem on my end. Maybe I'll just switch RSS readers; there's a bunch out there and it's about time I give another one a try.
Posted by peterjm at 3 Messidor CCXIII 21:26 (2005/06/21)
I also think that the sauces that Andrew used were bland. You really need to use Lee Kum Kee hoisin sauce and Sambal Oelek for the chili garlic sauce. Trust me. It's not manhead.
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at 3 Messidor CCXIII 22:32 (2005/06/21)
Yeah, Peter, I think it's safe to say that it's an issue on your end; I've been completely unable to reproduce any of the issues you've had. How very very strange.
And Greg: there are still quite a few wonton wrappers left. Perhaps the next time someone holds a get together? (And hopefully I'll have a scale by then as well, so you can make your dip properly.)
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