Well, I simply refused to take less than a whole vegetable each, and suddenly there was quite a lot. So better have a large pot ready! But the minestrone tastes damn good. What I put in:
- 1 bell pepper
- 1 zucchini
- 3 tomatoes
- 3 celery stalks
- 1 large carrot
- 3 small potatoes
- 100g streaky bacon
- Parmesan with rind
- 150g green beans
- 2 purple onions
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 bunch basil (fresh)
- 1 tablespoon tomato paste
- a handful of olives (black, pitted, natural)
- 1l vegetable broth
- 50g butter
- olive oil
- approx. 50g spaghetti (broken into pieces)
The preparation is really hard work and in the first phase there is not much peace. And it's best to group the vegetables as indicated below, because they go into the pot one after the other - everything is first fried. But otherwise it's actually quite simple:
- Dice the bacon and put it on a plate
- Dice the onions and garlic and put them in a small bowl
- Dice the potatoes, celery, and carrots and put them in a bowl
- Chop the beans and put them in a bowl
- Dice the bell pepper and zucchini and put them in a bowl
- Heat the pot with olive oil and the butter
- Fry the bacon for 2 minutes in it (stir vigorously!)
- Put the onions with garlic in the pot and fry for 2 minutes (stir vigorously!)
- Put the potatoes, celery, and carrots in the pot and fry for 2 minutes (stir vigorously!)
- Put the beans in the pot and fry for 2 minutes (stir vigorously!)
- Put the zucchini and bell pepper in the pot and fry for 2 minutes (stir vigorously! if your arm feels like it's about to fall off: that's normal, keep stirring!)
- Put the lid on, turn down the heat and let the vegetables simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally
- The arm can't rest unfortunately, because now the tomatoes are diced and if desired the olives are cut small (I always leave them whole in soups).
- Before the 15 minutes are up, throw in the olives (after about half the time)
- Chop the basil
- When the 15 minutes are up, put the vegetable broth in the pot, stir
- Put in the tomato paste, chopped tomatoes and basil, season with pepper and salt
- Throw in the parmesan rind (I tie it with kitchen string so it's easy to fish out again)
- Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and let it simmer gently for an hour (on my monster pot half a point on the electric stove is enough)
- Fish out the parmesan rind and throw it away
- Put in the spaghetti and cook for 10 minutes
I then eat the whole thing simply with bread. You can also put sour cream in the soup, or very Italian, grate parmesan on top. With a glass of wine.
Re: Factor: Google Charts - I really should use Factor more often. Every time I see how practical a visual REPL is (in Factor, graphical representations of objects can be embedded in the normal output, similar to old Lisp machines), it tempts me.
BBC News - Japan earthquake: Explosion at Fukushima nuclear plant. That was it with the hopes that maybe it would still turn out alright. And people are still running around claiming that something like this could never happen to us, because here everything is much safer. Funny enough, I do remember incidents in cooling systems that were only admitted long after they occurred - and the failure of the cooling system is the problem in Japan, the tsunami and the earthquake were just the triggers.
What I wonder, though, is how will the catastrophe in Japan change our perception of nuclear energy? With Chernobyl and before that Harrisburg, secrecy was relatively easy - but Japan is a country where all inhabitants are highly technologized. The joke about at least 5 cameras per Japanese might be exaggerated, but the number should be high enough to make secrecy more or less absurd. And the high integration into the internet leads to publication channels that were unthinkable in Harrisburg and only conceivable for utopians in Chernobyl.
Surely, energy companies and the government will now show solidarity and talk about how earthquakes and tsunamis in Europe are not a problem. And thus completely miss the actual problem, because as mentioned above, cooling systems can fail not only because of earthquakes and tsunamis. Therefore, such a problem is quite conceivable here as well, if the cooling system fails for other reasons. And why should we believe our energy companies (and the government), who are regularly caught lying, more than the Japanese energy company, which is also known for lying?
It will be difficult for politicians to lie convincingly about such things. And maybe, just maybe, people in Europe will wake up from their wishful thinking that nuclear energy is so safe.
consistency and ecosystem opportunities - Twitter API Announcements is an email where Twitter pretty much leaves all reality behind. Just to remind you: Twitter is this cute service where you can send 140-character messages - and I'm not saying that to make fun of it, it's often quite practical to search there when something is currently happening. But when I then read this bloated nonsense about "prevent diffusion of user experience" and other bullshit bingo in the email, I can only wonder what they're smoking. The real thing behind it is probably rather an attempt to close the platform to control and exploit it more - for example, the uproar about this absurd fat bar in Twitter has probably caused some panic at Twitter. Because if all users leave the official client, no one will look at the bought trends anymore ...