Sunday 10 April 2011

And about time too!

For a long time, I've been threatening to establish a new blog for my recipes and other foodie musings - leaving this as more of a rant-space and techie post blog.

If you're more interested in the food than anything else, you may want to trot along to: A Cottage Kitchen. See you there!

Thursday 17 March 2011

PHP: Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by .. on line 1

Just a quickie which may save you a bit of time - certainly buggered me up for a few minutes.

If you're doing something in PHP which requires starting a session, writing a cookie, etc and you get the dreaded "headers already sent" error, e.g: "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by xxx.php;1" - and the error line indicated after the semi colon is the first line, what do you do?

It's normally because you've got content above the header output - which means it can't be sent, but if it's line 1 at fault, theres normally no content.

Easy - at least in my case - check your file is saved on the server in UTF8 format - NOT ANSI. I was using Beyond Compare to upload/edit a file and it had changed the format without telling me - quick tweak - and everyone is happy again!

Friday 11 March 2011

Tinned Mince and Moving House

Hmm. Possibly my wierdest blog title ever. Well, probably not, but hey it's still a little odd.

The recent lack of activity here (I really should stop apologising for not blogging often) is because we're in the process of buying a new house (well, cottage), and frankly it's eaten what little spare time is normally left after work.

Packing is in progress now and further updates will follow assuming all goes to plan.

In unrelated news, if you're into food, as I am (and thats why/how you found me here, perhaps), you should check out a relatively new foodie forum: Tinned Mince. It's much better than /actual/ tinned mince, which I suspect is probably not very nice.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

More Yoghurt..!

OK, so after some experimentation, it seems the best Jersey Dairy milk to use is the "green one" (referring to the colour of the carton, not the milk itself, thankfully) - which is "Fat Reduced"; one "lardiness grade" above semi-skimmed.

This, with no milk powder, produces a slightly-too-runny-yoghurt which needs to be left in the flask a little bit longer - and then chilled overnight, but is then just about the right consistency for breakfast. Hurrah!

In related news, a few tweaks to blog layout have taken place (mainly removing references to Mattched IT, as this is my *personal* blog) and hopefully you will now see these posts appear in my FB profile feed, rather than as silly "notes" - I didn't really want Facebook to import the whole contents, so that had to change!

Thursday 20 January 2011

Homemade "Jersey" Greek Yoghurt!

An odd title, I admit - and perhaps odder still, not a grumpy post! You may have noticed my mention on facebook of some experimental cookery last night - this was in-fact, my first attempt at making yoghurt.

I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe in "River Cottage Everyday" (link below - it's a great book), as I'm still trying out things from my Christmas/Reyes presents.

It's a simple process and calls for a half litre of milk, 25g of milk powder to thicken and 3 tablespoons of live yoghurt to start the culture off (in the future you can use your own yoghurt for subsequent batches).

Mix the milk and milk powder, heat to 46 degrees, pour into a bowl, add the yoghurt, seal in a thermos and leave overnight. Simple.

I was worried it wouldn't work, as if anything, homemade yoghurts tend to be a bit runny, however, given that I used full fat Jersey Milk (which contains more fat and is richer than 'average' milk), it thickened to virtually the consistency of Greek Yoghurt!

Lovely, but I think we'll try a batch with no milk powder and see what that produces (keep it natural) - and if it's still very thick, may step down to semi-skimmed and see what happens.. will keep you all posted!

PS. Played with advert config a bit to get rid of some really pants ones. No more weight loss ads on this blog - and more posts about lard, methinks!

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Northern Rock fail again!

It's probably no great surprise to read the title of this post, but still. I'm annoyed. And grumpy. So I'm going to rant.

I called NRK this morning (or technically NRAM as they seem to have split the company into two, renamed bits and generally made it as confusing as possible). i wanted a Certificate of Interest - or a statement - for last year (calendar) so I can do my tax return.

Simples. Or not. Firstly, the frigging automated "Say the first line of your address now", clearly stood no chance with a Jersey address and failed to understand me. It still had a good few goes, just incase, though. Same with the reference number - I'm not sure what the value in having a speech recognition system that can't even recognise the numbers 0-9 is?

After several frustrating minutes, it gave up and put me through to a human - who in his defence, was as helpful as possible. Until one of the security questions was "what is the approximate balance on your account?". I don't know. I don't carry my latest statement around with me - besides.. IM CALLING YOU TO GET A STATEMENT!

Sadly asking a different question isn't an option - so you have to take a guess. And fail the check. Please call back. Nooooooo! That means wrestling the IVR again... argggh!

Monday 17 January 2011

Make sure you give your customers the right information..

.. especially if you're a restaurant, your customer is liable to be a bit grumpy and is also hungry!

For instance, do NOT put up a big chalk-board outside with "Dinner 6pm - 9:30pm (Sunday)", but then tell people who amble in to enquire about a table that Dinner is from 7pm in the winter.

Grr.