CUTTING THROUGH THE HYPE

Dead-Easy Recipes for Lazy Cooks

If you ‘re looking for an easy way to cook mouth-watering meals, you’ve come to the right place. I love cooking but have no patience, and I’m bone lazy. That doesn’t mean I can’t cook, it means I cheat!

It all began at a dinner party, when my best mate and I made a bet with our women that we could cook just as well as they could. We worked our way through a cordon-bleu c ooking course, then a seafood and a pastry cooking course. The women were the winners in this deal, and I suspect they knew that from the beginning.

With Cordon-bleu, you create everything from scratch. You don’t buy pastry, you make it and bake it. For a dinner party, my best mate would make the fish stock from fish heads and carrots and celery and parsley and seasoning and boil the lot down very slowly all day long until there was almost nothing left. Then he’d start cooking.

That wasn’t for me. I’d buy my stock in packets and the marinara mix from the local shop, not from the fish markets. So I cheat, but who can tell the difference? My mate is a fabulous chef, and I love eating at his place, but let’s talk about how to cheat without anyone noticing.

DEAD-SIMPLE FISH STEW

The first time I had Bouillabaisse in a restaurant, it left me cold. Same thing the first time I cooked it. It looks so good, those muscle shells in that red-orange liquid.

 

(picture from http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/2775/seafood+bouillabaisse)

Looks are important in cooking but flavour more so. The original Bouillabaisse is actually a soup you eat with bread, which explains the lack of authority. Here’s how you turn into a stew that serves 3 - 4:

Solid ingredients

3/4 kilo of marinara mix – make sure it’s good quality and fresh

3 spring onions – use both the heads and the green bits chopped up

1 globe of fennel, cut into 8 wedges – fennel and seafood love each other

1 - 2 cloves garlic, chopped –suit yourself

1 – 2 zucchini, sliced – it’s more Mediterranean than carrots and celery

1 sweet chili pepper broad strips – the longish red kind

Liquid additions

2/3 tin of diced tomatoes

Medium packet of Campbell’s fish stock

Glass of white wine or two – yes, you can have one as well

Sacla capsicum/eggplant pasta sauce – the secret ingredient

Seasoning, herbs and spices

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

teaspoonful of dried fennel seeds
½ teaspoon of chilli flakes (Masterfoods)

Dried Dill

Fresh parsley, finely chopped

20 minute cooking:

1. Chop the onions, garlic, fennel and fry in olive oil in a big frypan or casserole dish. Add the zucchini and pepper once the onions are tamed (5-6 mins), and cook for a few more minutes. Don’t worry, time isn’t that critical here – just make sure you don’t burn anything, keep it just above medium heat, add oil when needed.

2. Turn the heat down to simmer, add tomatoes, fish stock and a little white wine (keep some for adding later to get the right amount of liquid). Add about half the little jar of past sauce. If you can’t get the capsicum/eggplant sauce, use standard green pesto (Not ideal but it’ll get you out of a jam). Easy on garlic and tomatoes – we don’t want either one to take over the dish!

3. You should be about 15 – 20 mins into it by the time you add the marinara mix, seasoning, herbs and spices. Hold the parsley – that goes in a couple of minutes from the end. We want that green colour to freshen up all that orange/red. Stir the marinara pieces into the mix and add more wine if needed. Suit yourself with the amount of liquid but it should not be too thick. Taste the stew.

4. If it doesn’t have enough flavour, add more seasoning (salt & pepper), maybe more chili but we only want a hint of heat. You can be more liberal adding pasta sauce – sometimes you need the whole jar. Then add the parsley when the fish is cooked (5 mins), stir it in but leave some on top for show.

There you go! It wasn’t hard, was it? less than half an hour. If you’ve ended up with too much liquid, don’t panic: take all the bits out with a slotted spoon and set aside in a bowl, Slowly reduce liquid on simmer and add solid bits back when you’re done.

What do you have with it?

Steamed beans or asparagus, if you fancy. I prefer Basmati rice or pasta. Basmati is a very fluffy rice if you cook it for 17 minutes on a fairly high boil, then give it a shot of cold water in a colander and drain it.

If you haven’t done much cooking, you can cook the rice first and just warm it up in a slow oven while you cook the stew.

There are more recipe sites on the web than I’ve had hot dinners. Here’s one site that’s different: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/08/coq-au-vin/

I suspect Ree Drummond is more marketing guru than country girl but who cares? She’s a great photographer as well so her recipes are step by step, picture by clear picture tutorials ideal for folks learning to cook.

 

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG?

Most blogs are traffic jams clogging the internet highway, started for the wrong reasons, and lacking key ingredients or substance. Most are badly written by people who don’t know or care – and it shows. These charges apply to corporate blogs too, only more so. So, before you rush in, take this quick sanity check:

DON’T START A BLOG

§    Because your competitors do

§    Because your PR agency thinks you should

§    To promote your company

§    Just to share your thoughts

§    Unless you have material of value or interest

§    Unless you can sustain it long term

§    Unless you’re clear about why, what and how to.

EXCEPTIONS

1. Ignore these points if you’re a celebrity

People will always read celebrity blogs e.g. Richard Branson http://entrepreneur.virgin.com/ or Mark Shuttleworth, the father of Ubuntu Linux and first private space traveller http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/date/2008/11 . If Bill Gates had a blog, he’d be sure to be read widely too.

2. Ignore these points if you're Apple or Google

If you’re hot, high-tech and your fans demand it, write a blog or they will do it for you e.g. 'Secret Diary of Steve Jobs'. But you must deliver what they expect, or you’ll lose the most faithful in a click.

TIPS

1. Accept that it’ll probably be tougher

If you’re not famous and your company isn’t hot with a celebrity figurehead, you’ll have to work harder to attract and keep readers. Worse, your readers will suspect your blog is just another way to promote your company.

2. Don’t Blog about your company, products or services

Blog about the challenges your industry or customers face or insights they can use. Good blogs are useful and inspire, entertain or educate readers; they’re not ads or infomercials.

3. Don’t Blog unless you can share

Don’t worry about giving away your secrets - successful entrepreneurs don’t. They know there's really nothing new and that success doesn’t come from knowledge, but how it’s applied.

4. A Blog is not a new advertsising channel

Blogs are about communities and sharing and receiving freely, not about building email lists and collecting opt-ins. The more useful info you share - about your industry, challenges, trends and lessons learnt – the more popular your blog will be and the more it will be shared.

5. Understand what Blogs can and can’t do

Your corporate blog is just one communication line with your customers and market. You can use it to get frank feedback or as an immediate way to get useful news out. A corporate blog with the right form and content can do wonders – and the reverse is true too.

6. Pick the right author for the blog

Just because you are CEO, CTO or CMO, doesn’t make you a great blogger. You may have valuable insights, but do you tell an interesting story, use the right phrase or add the right amount of humour? Find the person in your company who can - and support him or her – or you’ll lose the audience in another click.

7. Know what your audience wants

If you’re close to clients and business partners, to your sales reps and support people, you’ll know the buzz - or you can use your website hits as a guide to hot topics. A prime example: In 2008 we wrote a user piece called ‘How to make Vista Fly’

http://www.technoledge.com.au/resources.htm , gaining a whopping 300,000 downloads. This showed just how hot the sluggishness of Microsoft’s OS was at the time.

8. Start a conversation with your readers

Allow visitors to comment on your blog and publish the raw feedback (after filtering it for SPAM etc of course). You’ll need real, blunt and honest feedback if want to fine-tune your blog. You also want open dialogue between your readers.

A FEW EXAMPLES

Here are some corporate blogs—some good, some not so good. Judge for yourself.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/  - a great blog, very successful, lots of stuff about a favourite subject – User Interface design – and very little about the company.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ - the exact opposite. Google clearly thinks it’s a celebrity; the blog is about Google and nothing but Google.

http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/ - multiple bloggers and lots of photos.

http://storageeffect.com/  - blog by hard drive maker Seagate; a crashing bore of a topic? Actually, no- this is a great model.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/ - inside broadcasting, with multiple editors contributing; interesting idea.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/ - of course!

 

 

Once there was True Wit in our Politics

A few weeks ago, our media reported that Kevin Rudd had used very colourful language to read the riot act to his ALP faction leaders. Colour? Our Kevin? Hard to believe. It turned out that he’d used the F word quite a lot, that was the best he could do for colour.

 

We had so much colour once, but John Winston Howard put an end to that. Howard surrounded himself with dour MPs like Phillip Ruddock and Alexander Downer, with only Costello breaking the mould on occasion. Howard made even Mark Latham look colourful. He called the Liberals ‘a conga line of suck-holes.’ Subtlety wasn’t Mark’s thing, nor was wit.

 

We had so much Colour once, and Wit in abundance

We have to go back many years to find WIT in full employment in our parliament, to the days of Fred Daly and Jim Killen. Killen once said that Gough Whitlam was the only person he knew whose Achilles heel was in his mouth. When Billy McMahon deplored in parliament that at times he was his own worst enemy, Jim Killen’s dead-pan response was: ‘Not as long as I’m alive.’

 

Gough Whitlam was in a class of his own when it came to the quick putdown – he was giving a speech in public and a heckler kept interjecting, demanding Gough declare his position on abortion. Gough ignored him the first few times, then raised himself to his full height, fixed him with a firm eye and said: ‘Let me make quite clear that I am for abortion and, in your case Sir, we should make it retrospective!’

 

 
Mungo McCallum called Gough a sizist, by which he meant Gough wouldn’t talk to anyone under 6 foot tall. Gough treated his intellectual inferiors with similar disdain, as Tom Uren found when he asked Gough one Monday morning what he’d been up to on the weekend. Gough answered: ‘I went to an opera you wouldn’t understand, written by a composer whose name you couldn’t pronounce.’

 

Robert Menzies, John Howard’s role model, was good on his feet as well. During the 1950s, someone in the front row of a noisy meeting of coalminers in Wonthaggi yelled: ‘Tell us all you know, Bob — it won't take long!’ Menzies looked the man in the eye and replied: ‘I will tell you everything we both know, and it won't take any longer.’

 

In a class of his own

I’m talking about Paul Keating, who else? He used colour, wit and imagery to deadly effect. To a question from Andrew Peacock, he replied, ‘This is the first time the Honourable member has got out from under the sunlamp.’ And he likened an attack from John Hewson to being ‘flogged with a warm lettuce’.

 

Keating coined that classic line when Peacock had another tilt at the party leadership, ‘A soufflé never rises twice.’ And he called Ian Sinclair, then leader of the National Party, ‘a political carcass with a coat and tie on.’

 

Keating could be blunt. He once said to Richard Carleton: ‘You had an important place in Australian society on the ABC and you gave it up to be a pop star … for a big cheque - and now you’re on to this sort of stuff. That shows what a 24 carat pissant you are.’ Putting words like 24 carat and pissant next to each other is sheer genius, especially in regard to a man who took bottles of Bollinger and cans of paté de fois gras on his field trips.

 

Keating’s insults were legend, so much so that smart journalists still call him for comments on current affairs. When Peter Costello had yet again told the media that John Howard wouldn’t make way for him, Keating said: ‘The thing about poor old Costello, he's all tip and no iceberg.’

 

Too smart for his own good

Keating didn’t just get up the noses of his enemies, he rubbed up plenty of Labour members as well. Diamond Jim McClelland was one of those. Jim had a wonderful facility with words and a great sense of humour but perhaps resented Keating’s smartly dressed knee-in-the groin approach. In his regular SMH column, Diamond Jim wrote about treasurer Keating: ‘The shallowness of his learning does not entitle him to the certitude that he pronounces and to the contempt he expressed for those who do not share them … his performance to date leaves a big question mark over his capacity to be anything more than clever.’

 

Keating immediately got on the blower. ‘That you, Jim? Paul Keating here. Just because you swallowed a f---ing dictionary when you were about 15 doesn't give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us.’ Yes, Keating did use the four-letter word but, as we’ve seen, he went on to set new standards for repartee, wit and colour in the Australian parliament. Somehow I fear we won’t see Kevin 07 rising to the same level.

 

To see Keating in full flight, check this short replay of him demolishing Costello with three quick jabs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnwn4q_ZE9c

How Microsoft Came to Rule the World

Have you ever wondered how that happened? Did you know that Apple was the biggest force in microcomputers in the beginning? How did Apple allow Bill gates to run away with the race? What did Apple do that almost destroyed the iconic company? What happened to all the other contenders who ceded power to Microsoft, the makers of the world's most cursed software?

 
 
For a light-hearted romp through more than three decades of computing, check out this entertaining account in two installments, both free and easy - History of Silicon - but please don't believe every word of it http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/history_silicon1.pdf