Vegan Katsu Curry 1st Try

Our household loves katsu curry, which is fine as im just a veggie, but you can’t get it in vegan form which makes sharing a happy curry a bit of a pain, so here is the first run at a full vegan version.

UPDATE: I keep changing the ingredients to make it taste better

We did the rice first, as we are lucky enough to have a Zojirushi rice cooker (which keeps the rice warm for 12 hours) and a sack of sushi rice, I would urge that you get some proper sushi rice.

Next onto the:
Sauce
1 tbsp vegan butter (we use ‘Pure’)
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 large onion, chopped
2 Red Apples, chopped
600ml water
1 banana, chopped
1 tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tbsp ground turmeric
1/2 tbsp hot curry powder
1 tbsp ketchup
250ml vegetable stock (see below)
1 tbsp cornflour
1/2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp ground black pepper

tbsp = table spoon (i forgot so i’ve put it here)

In a large saucepan, heat together the butter, garlic, onion and apple, mix together and fry briefly. Add in 350ml water, then the banana, maple syrup, turmeric, curry powder and ketchup. Bring to the boil. Add in the stock. Mix together the remaining water (250ml) with the cornflour and add to the curry with the salt and black pepper.

Let simmer for about 20-30 mins (with the lid off), your curry should have a nice gloppy consistency, if it looks a bit watery let it simmer for a while longer.

At this point we pummelled the curry with a potato masher to breakup up any of the apple and banana chunks left, but if you’re posh you can use a blender (when it’s a bit cooler) UPDATE: I really do recommend using the blender it makes it look much nicer.

Once you have a curry you like the look of, its onto the fried stuff:, if you have the option to get hold of pre fried or braised tofo you can do this alternative Vegan Katsu Curry 2nd Try

Fried Stuff
whatever flat “disk-like” veggies you want to cook, We used slices of aubergine (eggplant) but courgette (zuccini) or sweet potato is good as well

1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 cup vegan breadcrumbs
3/4 cup water
1 tbsp ground flaxseed combined with 3 tbsp water microwaved for 10-15 seconds at 900W (mimics an egg)
vegetable oil for frying

Heat the vegetable oil to 350 degrees.
Put the cup of water/flax mix in a bowl, the flour, salt and pepper into another bowl, and the vegan bread crumbs in a larger bowl or shallow dish. Wipe/spread/dip the veggies with water/flax mix, letting the excess run off, then dredge in the flour mixture and let dry for about 2 minutes. Wipe/spread/dip the veggies with water/flax mix once more then dredge in the breadcrumbs until the entire surface is covered. Fry the veggies in the vegetable oil until they are golden brown. Serve with the rice on the bottom covered with the curry and the veggies on top, it also tastes great with a bit of soy sauce

Vegetable Stock
We used what vegetables we had in the house (potatoes, leeks, the left over onion from the sauce, a chilli pepper and a garlic clove) put them in a pan with some vegan instant stock (marigold’s swiss vegetable Bouillon), brought them to the boil and simmered for about 20 mins.

(you could just use 2 cubes of oxo vegetable stock if you want it done quickly)

(this picture was before we had mashed the curry and rendered it down a bit more, this improved the visual side but it still tasted as good)

Old Comments

Mark Myers(03/01/2011 11:32:56 GMT)

@coatsie because its a Japanese curry dish

Coatsie(07/12/2010 18:54:15 GMT)

Just one question Mark – Why sushi rice and not basmati ?

en_GB location, Eclipse and the flash builder plug in

If you are UK resident you may have discovered Flash builder 4’s nasty little habit of bleating about the missing en_GB location, the reason for this is, as a Brit you have quite rightly set your eclipse for that location, but somewhere in the second beta of Flash builder 4 Adobe decided the green and pleasant land was unworthy of its own location and stripped it out of the build, just renaming the en_US location directory does not work as a fix, you have to right click on your flex project –> select properties, and set the compiler options to “-locale en_US” as per below

Sigh!, i never thought being a English man would be considered a minority group

HTML5 and CSS3

Here is the results of another skillsmatters free talk, this one on HTML5 and CC3 and was presented by www.brucelawson.co.uk (@brucel )

Bruce was an excellent speaker and gave an amazing 101 session using only notepad++ which was nice (I have personally been accused recently of missing out the basics so its good to see how it should be done), you have all heard so much on this subject before, that I’m just going to bullet point the bits i took away from the session,

  • He was at some pains to point out what HTML5 was and what it was not (ie its not another way of saying Web 3.0 or “just not flash”),
  • He was definite on the point that HTML5 WILL NOT KILL FLASH, but it will provide people with a choice for a lot of functions that currently you can only do with flash.
  • There was a lot of emphasis on coping with screen readers and making content easier for computers to parse intelligently and how HTML5 is better for that.
  • Quite a lot of the tags have been redefined e.g. small = “small print in a contract” rather than “little in size”
  • Most of HTML5 is JavaScript (50%+ of the spec)
  • HTML5 does not care about quotes (its in the spec not just lazy)
  • HTML5 does not care about case (its in the spec not just lazy)
  • HTML5 ignores stuff it does know (like CSS)
  • It has things like sliders and calendar pickers built in (its things like this that makes people look at it as an alternative to flash)
  • Validation is build in (fairly crude but very like a jquery validator and he did say it would get better)
  • The video element is really rather good (you can tab in and out and make it easily grow and shrink etc. which is hard to do on flash), but the much published codex problems are quite real, you have to currently encode 2 versions of your video: ogv and mp4 (this was caused by apple and nokia), webm could hopefully put a end to the problem. for old browsers you can use the current embed elementOn CSS3
  • CSS3 is Amazing!!! (transform and transition and webfonts)
  • On CSS3 currently you have to put a “display:block” for ALL HTML5 elements you are using, as no browser currently supports them.
  • The CSS5 media functions are really cool but I’m not going to talk about them as Ben Poole has just used them in anger and I’m hoping a bit of peer pressure will force him to write a proper bloody blog entry.
  • Layered background are amazing (with good png transparency)
  • Arrrrh!! where was background size when i wanted it for my client recently!!Code Snippit
    to make IE8 and below apply CSS to HTML5 you have to add the following:
    document.createElement(‘xxxxx’); for each html5 tag you use, e.g.

    document.createElement(‘header’);
    document.createElement(‘nav’);

    and you have to include a “body” element some where on the page

    Links

    Recommended validator: html5.validator.nu
    To see how well you code parses running it by: http://www.nvda-project.org/
    The Best place for free webfonts: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Future Mouse Review

My future mouse arrived last week from http://www.futuremouse.com/, and has spent this week being used as a travel mouse on trains and a replacement mouse for my tracker ball at work, on all counts it has passed with flying colours, if you treat is as a pen it feels natural to use and needs no learning curve, i did discover a slight cramping in my hand after using it all day, mind you I get that with a normal pen. it possesses it own rechargeable battery and its tiny usb transmitter that doubles as a magnetic dock and charging point ( 30secs charge = 1 hour use, 90mins charge = 2-4 weeks use). One of the most gratefully received features is the complete lack of software to install, advanced features such as reorientation of ‘up’ and setting the “only work when being held” are set via button combinations and watching the LEDS, for a Linux user who constantly misses out on the advanced features for consumer level products this is very very welcome. the mouse manages to squeeze in a full size and silent scroll wheel which is joy to use, it also comes with a stick on mouse pad for the bottom of you laptop but which seems mainly designed for the Mac or other laptops whos touch pads are not depressed, so I’m not using that, in a real life test i found I could share a GNER train table with another laptop user with no problems despite the laptops being only inches away, but for a travel mouse (and an expensive one at that), its strange it does not come with a little sleeve or draw bag to be carried in, (i ended up using the one that is supplied for the tips on the power money explorer).

Pro’s
-Tiny (and i mean really tiny)
-Light (its hard to believe there is a 4 week rechargeable battery in there
-Excellent build quality
-Works in very small spaces
-Truly OS agnostic

Cons
-No travel pouch
-The transmitter/receiver does not clip securely into the mouse (yes you can attach it to the charge point but it always comes off when banged round in my bag)
-Expensive (but good values for money)

Conclusion
I am very pleased with the mouse, and it really does everything it says on the tin, and even if it does not replace my logitech trackman as my main pointer, it beats the hell out of the track pad, and turns “Oh F**K I have forgotten my mouse” to “Oh i have the spare mouse in my pack”.

Mr Barton your challenge is accepted

I accept your challenge Mr Barton and throw down my own gauntlet (though mine has been maimed by sword, squash rackets and more recently by cat)

 

You are to produce a Proof of concept using Flex and the Google docs API for spreadsheets to provide a calculation engine, data entered into flex is to be transferred to the spreadsheet and trigger a recalculation of said spreadsheet, the results is to be presented back and displayed on flex. This is to use the 3.0 API via Java (web services or blaze its your choice, though web services would be easier to port over to domino) and flex 4

Mad cackle!!