First world problems
Jan. 7th, 2013 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurchThing One: For dinner tonight, I decided to try this recipe for Spicy chicken meatballs with creamy cauliflower and potato that I got from the Australian Weight Watchers website. Now, let me just state up front that the resulting dish was actually quite tasty even if it didn't turn out quite right... and there were definitely some problems with the recipe. The biggest one came after I'd strained the cooked potatoes and cauliflower... and read a little further down where it tells me to add the "reserved cauliflower water" to a saucepan to use as the base of a sauce. I went back up in the recipe and scoured it... nope. No mention anywhere of reserving water from the cooked cauliflower (I've since glanced at the one review to see that it also mentions this problem). *headdesk*
It just so happened that I had some water in the freezer left over from a time when I'd boiled some potatoes, turnips, carrots and onions for another dish (hey, you never know when you might need this sort of thing. Obviously!) I grabbed that and used it to deglaze the pan after I cooked and removed the meatballs and then set about trying to make the cheese sauce. It never thickened... and I suspect I had way more liquid than they had intended. Plus the cheeses I used didn't ever melt out into the sauce completely (I was using some goat and sheep milk cheeses). But as I mentioned, it was actually really tasty! And I think next time, I'll use less liquid and maybe find a more meltable sheep or goat substitute for gruyere.
But here's the other thing! I got partway through the recipe to the part where it mentioned heating up the grill to finish off the dish and went "What?!?!" I was a bit annoyed, because it hadn't mentioned anywhere else that this was cooked on a grill. So I started thinking how I could do this in the oven and what temperature I should use... when it hit me, I've had this discussion! In the UK (and, apparently, Australia) "broiling" is called "grilling" and the "broiler" is the "grill." So I want to thankcuriouswombat for the conversation we had last year about that very topic or I never would have figured it out!!
Thing Two: For the past few weeks, I've been quite vexed because the "Your most popular sites" list that comes up when I launch a new tab in IE hasn't been working. It would display links for Bing and for my portal page, but that was it... the links there are populated by IE and you can't arrange them for yourself (something that's always bugged me a little bit), so there was obviously a setting somewhere that had gone wrong. I did a bit of research and after several things failed to pan out, earlier this week I tried resetting IE back to default settings. Which did nothing.
So, this morning it hit me that it might be worth deleting my browser history. I mean, I'd tried everything else with no luck... and, at first, I got a bit excited because when I opened a new tab, the links there were all blank. Yay! Something different! Except after I went out to Livejournal and Facebook a few dozen times, I checked back... and the only things displaying were Bing and my portal page. *headdesk*
Yeah, so after a few more hours of it only displaying those two sites, I decided I'd had enough. If it wasn't going to give me my easily clickable most visited sites... then I was going to get rid of that page altogether (there's an option to just have it display a blank page on a new tab and I figured that would be better than constantly seeing the page that frustrated me). So, I opened a new tab again... and just about jumped out of my skin. It actually startled me, but there they all were! All of my "most popular sites"!! Halle-freakin'-lujah! Apparently, all it took was having decided to take the nuclear option of getting rid of the page altogether (okay, I know, I know... it was more likely that it just took awhile for IE to collect the data it needed to display the right sites). But really... you have no idea how happy I was to finally have it working right again!
Crossposted from my Livejournal
It just so happened that I had some water in the freezer left over from a time when I'd boiled some potatoes, turnips, carrots and onions for another dish (hey, you never know when you might need this sort of thing. Obviously!) I grabbed that and used it to deglaze the pan after I cooked and removed the meatballs and then set about trying to make the cheese sauce. It never thickened... and I suspect I had way more liquid than they had intended. Plus the cheeses I used didn't ever melt out into the sauce completely (I was using some goat and sheep milk cheeses). But as I mentioned, it was actually really tasty! And I think next time, I'll use less liquid and maybe find a more meltable sheep or goat substitute for gruyere.
But here's the other thing! I got partway through the recipe to the part where it mentioned heating up the grill to finish off the dish and went "What?!?!" I was a bit annoyed, because it hadn't mentioned anywhere else that this was cooked on a grill. So I started thinking how I could do this in the oven and what temperature I should use... when it hit me, I've had this discussion! In the UK (and, apparently, Australia) "broiling" is called "grilling" and the "broiler" is the "grill." So I want to thank
curiouswombat for the conversation we had last year about that very topic or I never would have figured it out!!Thing Two: For the past few weeks, I've been quite vexed because the "Your most popular sites" list that comes up when I launch a new tab in IE hasn't been working. It would display links for Bing and for my portal page, but that was it... the links there are populated by IE and you can't arrange them for yourself (something that's always bugged me a little bit), so there was obviously a setting somewhere that had gone wrong. I did a bit of research and after several things failed to pan out, earlier this week I tried resetting IE back to default settings. Which did nothing.
So, this morning it hit me that it might be worth deleting my browser history. I mean, I'd tried everything else with no luck... and, at first, I got a bit excited because when I opened a new tab, the links there were all blank. Yay! Something different! Except after I went out to Livejournal and Facebook a few dozen times, I checked back... and the only things displaying were Bing and my portal page. *headdesk*
Yeah, so after a few more hours of it only displaying those two sites, I decided I'd had enough. If it wasn't going to give me my easily clickable most visited sites... then I was going to get rid of that page altogether (there's an option to just have it display a blank page on a new tab and I figured that would be better than constantly seeing the page that frustrated me). So, I opened a new tab again... and just about jumped out of my skin. It actually startled me, but there they all were! All of my "most popular sites"!! Halle-freakin'-lujah! Apparently, all it took was having decided to take the nuclear option of getting rid of the page altogether (okay, I know, I know... it was more likely that it just took awhile for IE to collect the data it needed to display the right sites). But really... you have no idea how happy I was to finally have it working right again!
Crossposted from my Livejournal
