Zeltus

My sister over at Wise Herb recently started up a recipe blog.

And it has finally induced me to dig out my recipes from long ago – one of the drawbacks of marrying someone who is a far better cook than me and enjoys it more is that I always seem to have better things to do with my time than be allowed to fiddle about in the kitchen.

Nevertheless, I do have one or two recipes I use reasonably regularly and this is one of them. I do have a problem getting rolled oats here in France tho’ – and the Golden Syrup come to that – thank goodness for visiting friends and Brit Shops that are now starting to pop up over here, now the Brit ex-pat population has reached some sort of critical mass.

So, onto Flapjacks -

Ingredients

Method

1. Melt the butter and margarine in a saucepan over a gentle heat.
2. Add the Golden Syrup and sugar.
3. Stir well.
4. Add the oats, a measure at a time, stirring until well-coated.
5. Add the salt, if required.
6. Add the raisins, chopped dates or whatever – amount depends on what you think looks like the right amount!
7. Spread over a non-stick baking tray – anything up to 1″ thick should do it.
8. Bake in a pre-heated 190^oC oven for 15-20 minutes. Do not over-cook, the result should be chewy, not crunchy.
9. Remove from oven, score into squares and leave until cool.

Time in total, including washing up – say 45 minutes.

Time to eat the whole lot in one glorious binge – maybe 10 minutes, if you don’t go at ‘em full speed. :-THUMB

Technorati Tags: cooking, flapjack, golden, oats, recipe, syrup

When I first created this blog, my un-optimized MySQL installation very quickly barfed and I had to re-compile and re-install it.

As it was brand-new, all that happened was that I lost my first few posts. I am now taking the time to re-write this particular one.

I really don’t get on with the WordPress Way of adding images to my posts. I’ve written a number of PHP functions that allow me to easily enter image data into my HTML with, for me, great ease. I therefore decided to create a similar function to allow me to insert images into my blog posts. And thus blotto was written. The clever-clever name is a sort of corruption of “blog-photo”.

This extremely simple function allowed me, thanks to the excellent Exec-PHP plug-in, to insert a pre-prepared thumbnail image of a photo and hook into Lightbox (another excellent plug-in) to display the full-size image. And to achieve this, all I needed to do was insert a single line of code in my post…

<?php blotto("Charlies_rear"); ?>

And hey presto! I get

It really didn’t take me very long to realise that I needed a number of variants of this function – and so I ended up with the following four routines.

• blotto – (blog-photo) Insert a lighbox’d photo in a post
• flickr – provide a link to a flickr set
• blink – (blog-link) Provide a graphical link to a web-page, internal or external
• baphic -(blog-graphic) Display a picture. That’s all

And so I re-wrote my blog_functions.php file to include these functions. And I also wrote a full set of documentation.

Technorati Tags: blotto, embed, exec-php, flickr, function, image, lightbox, LinkedIn, php, syntaxhighlighter, tag