Breaded Mushrooms

Apart from freezing Jerusalem Artichokes yesterday - while waiting for access token to expire (got that working... auto-refresh of SalesForce oauth credentials when there's been no activity for 3 hours and a request has been made!) I decided to use up the mushrooms we had in the fridge. I'm a bit odd when it comes to mushrooms as I can't stand the texture when they've been cooked in some ways so I did a wee search on Google and found this recipe: Breaded Mushrooms (the trial).

I baked a crust that we had in the freezer and crushed the resulting toast-like bread with some grated and dried parmigiana. Then I washed the mushroom, patted them dry, dipped them in self-raising flour (the only flour I could find in the cupboard), rolled them in beaten egg and then covered them all over in the breadcrumb stuff. About 10 minutes in the air-fryer with a shake half way through and they were done... and very nice too!

I won! I won! I won!

I've not won anything for ages, not since I won a tin of Mushy Peas at a pensioners raffle which I went to with my Nan when I were wee!

You can get your very own copy from Amazon: The Decapaphiliac: or love in the time of cappuccinos and read all about the author on Goodreads.

It's a brilliant read and I think I've bought it in every format so far... still, it's nice to win something!

In fact:

The Decapaphiliac by Alex Weinle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not since I discovered an old collection of Tales of the Unexpected stories on my Grandad's bedside table have I enjoyed a short story collection as much as this one. Most especially as this collection didn't leave me feeling slightly seedy, steeped in the 1970's and full of ennui. Mr Weinle has a fine turn of phrase and a delicacy of style that left me feeling uplifted by all of his stories... even the slightly disturbing title story - which promised to be seedy but ended up leaving me feeling refreshed and hopeful - I think I'm slightly disappointed by not being more disgusted in all honesty.

I think The Disassociate was wonderful, especially as it held so very many resonances with my previous career as a psychiatric nurse and I'm pretty sure that I've met some of the management types in it. I thought that leaving my previous career would mean that I'd spend less time with psychopaths, not more!

The Glasses Adjuster is lovely too, a proper feeling of fairytale going on there and it left me feeling all warm of snuggly.

All of the stories were brilliant but these three stood out for me, and for this price you can't go wrong... after all Mr Weinle has to make enough to keep on feeding his cottage bulbs of unusual wattage.

View all my reviews

Frozen Jerusalem Artichokes

We were given some lovely Jerusalem Artichokes by Daniela so this morning, while waiting for a SalesForce access token to expire, I decided to prepare them according to the instructions here. Above you can see the result... now I just need to figure out what to do with them. They're pretty all the same and the process reminded me of freezing freshly picked fruit when I was a sprog with my Ma.

Instead of following the instructions to the letter - when I'd peeled, blanched and cooled them - I laid them individually out on a tray for freezing so that they wouldn't all stick together in a mass, but would be frozen separately so we'd not have to use them all up at once. That way we can take out only what we need.

Any ideas for recipes?

Parsing a node.js log file in Windows (or anywhere with a browser!)

I'm getting to play with node at work and I love it! I love it a lot and can't think of anything finer TBH. But the log files are a bugger to read on windows. I'm guessing it's because they use lovely BASH escape characters in order to colour the text as it's getting spat out onto the terminal. I've taken to using forever to make sure my server keeps up and running while I'm developing but I still need to check the logs now and again. I can SSH into the AWS box where it is and copy the file across to my desktop but even Boxer hates the escape characters... Sublime Text doesn't mind them as much but it still isn't overly keen... so I thought I'd write this in order to parse the log files and spit them out as pre formatted html.