Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Gareth,
Gareth will, certainly.
Bah! Sorry Gareth. As I was driving home I was trying to think whether I had written Gavin or Gareth ... sigh.
As for truffle butter mmmmm sounds delicious.
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Man - you go to conferences for two weeks and Russell posts a food thread!
We have lots of hacks but having not read the thread yet (man the e-mails pile up while you're behind the great firewall) I'll post a couple for now and more as I read along the thread.
Roast potatoes
I kinda like the roasting from raw but if you are short of time you can par boil them and then finish them off in the roasting dish in the oven which has been heating up while you boil the spuds. You need to dry them after boiling but they steam off pretty quick. The plus about par boiling them is you can fluff them up a bit before roasting which leads to more crispy bits and creates more surface area for flavour to be added.
Flavour come from two favourite options
One) salt and oil then roast and then just after taking them out of the oven drizzle a little truffle oil over them. Gavin will probably point out that most truffle oil has never seen any truffles but it still tastes good.
Two) salt and oil and smoked paprika (LOTS). We now exclusively use La chinata also available from New World. We usually use the sweet variety but the hot is nice sometimes too. The paprika is not cheap but it makes food amazing. And of course you can drizzle truffle oil over those potatoes too :)Mashed potatoes
We throw two or three cloves of garlic in with the potatoes as they boil. Then mash as normal.Pretty much always use Agria potatoes now and always boil from cold water with salt.
Hungry now - must go home and eat.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Full-on First Person, in reply to Hebe,
I find it disturbing that it is seen as being sexually provocative.
The only behaviour deserving of criticism here is that of those seeing her as provocative.
She's young, talented and I really hope she can build on her success. And if she can't that's cool too, I've really enjoyed her music thus far, as have many others, and that's enough.
As for the video, it's impressive. Much cleverer than the average pop star. Much like Lorde's lyrics.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thank you
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Erin Edwards,
“throwing like a girl”
I always take that as a compliment given one of NZ's most successful athletes is a girl who throws.
Although I did have to teach a number of the players in our social softball team how to throw - for some reason they hadn't spent many hours a day as a child throwing stones at lamp posts??? I mean really didn't everyone?
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Jackie Clark,
not sensitive flowers but decent human beings
Can I be both :)
And well said!
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Chucking people out for loudly expressing opinions you find distasteful?
You seem to presenting their behaviour as if it was merely expressing a distastefull opinion and then arguing that it should be OK.
For example I would find it distasteful if the folks behind me at the cricket were discussing what a wonderfully honest and honourable politician John Banks was.
I that case I would have no right to expect them to be forced to STFU or be ejected.
But these guys were shouting homophobic slurs (hate speech) and then stepped it up to bullying (verbally and physically) the woman who complained. Either of those things should override any rights to free speech.
You are quite right to expect free speech to be protected, even to the point where some people would find the speech unpleasant or distasteful. But you are wrong to argue that this is what was occuring in this specific case.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Tom Semmens,
then I can’t see how anyone can do – or should do – much about a couple of dudes yelling bad taste and offensive insults at the teams on the field
The mistake you are making is assuming Eden Park is a public space, it is not. The management of Eden Park can specify the behaviours that are acceptable in the stadium.
Second mistake is assuming free speech allows you to say anything you like, even in a public space. Hate speech (eg homophobic slurs) are restricted already.
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Actually it doesn't matter what the majority of the crowd think. If 99% of the crowd think it's OK to shout abuse based on sexual orientation, that simply means 99% of the crowd is wrong.
It's really simple, sometimes crowds are wrong.
Eden park management should know that. They should have standards in place and when people breach those standards they should be ejected - regardless of what anyone in the crowd thinks.
And that is precisely what Eden Park does over things like beach balls at the cricket.
The assent (tacit or otherwise) of the crowd is utterly irrelevent.
However, if Eden Park managment think abuse based on sexual orientation is just fine and dandy then they should say so ...
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Sacha,
Agreed. Lack of respectful relationships with other agencies seems a bigger barrier in cases like Boston and 9/11 than lack of data.
Again by analogy to the science I work in - it is when groups collaborate that progress is made. Research groups working in isolation rarely make breakthroughs. That collaboration is becoming something we take for granted, very few biologists work now without access to a team of bioinformaticists to help.
That need for collaboration is not intuitive and has taken time to learn.