Red Pesto Chicken Pasta
Tuesday, October 24, 2006 ~ 2 comments so far
I mentioned this dish on Monday and, as she asked so nicely, here is my recipe for Red Pesto Chicken Pasta. Although I’m sure you guessed that already…
First things first though, my brother-in-law made this for us a couple of weeks back, he’s a wonderful chef and I have completely and utterly stolen this dish from him. Sorry Paul!
What you need
2 chicken breasts
Penne pasta, enough for two
Red Pesto
Single cream
Parmesan (or any grana padano which is usually MUCH cheaper..)
Adjust portions for your own needs.
What you will use
1 pot – large enough to hold your pasta
1 frying pan – large enough to hold the chicken AND pasta combined, preferably a straight sided pan. A large cooking pot will suffice.
1 sharp knife, the sharper the better.
1 stirring implement… er… a wooden spoon or spatula.
How to make it
Firstly, get your pasta on to boil. You can just follow the instructions on the side of the pack, remembering to only add the salt once the water is boiling, and if you add a touch of oil along with the pasta it’ll help stop the pasta tubes from sticking to each other.
Now, slice up the chicken breasts into even sized pieces. I prefer smaller mouth-sized strips just a little bigger than the penne pasta, I think it helps give an even sauce coverage.
Aside: The topic of sauce coverage is of some debate in my house. I prefer to have a fine coating of sauce, lightly coating the pasta, and any other ingredients, so as to subtly slide over the palate. My wife takes the “sauce and some pasta” approach, casting the tubes of pasta adrift in a sea of passata at a moments notice (I shouldn’t be too nasty though as she makes dinner far more often than I do). Feel free to tweak this recipe to your own sauce preferences, but if you are of the latter persuasion don’t bother inviting me round!
Now, where was I? Ohh yes, you’ve got the pasta onto boil, so let’s cook the chicken.
In your frying pan, add a dash of oil, bring up to heat and add the chicken. Ideally you want a nice colour on both sides, but I’m sure you can all manage to fry some chicken. You can, of course, grill the chicken if you prefer. As long as it is cooked and there are no pink bits.
Depending on your timing skills, you may find that the chicken is ready before the pasta. Not to worry, just take it off the heat as we’ll be warming everything through before serving.
Check your pasta to see if it is ready. Some people like to throw bits of pasta at the wall to see if it sticks (although not sure what that tells them, other than that they should really clean their walls more often), but I generally prefer to actually bite into a bit to see if it’s to my liking. Al dente or whatever you prefer (although I’d suggest that ’soggy mush’ means you’ve overcooked the pasta).
Once it’s ready, drain the pasta, and add some red pesto.
This, again, is entirely to taste. I’d suggest that you don’t want much more than a couple of teaspoons, just enough to give a nice soft covering. You should NOT have a sauce, the pesto should just cling to and pasta.
Once you are happy with the amount of pesto in your pasta, empty the pan out into your frying pan and mix it with the chicken.
Now, swirl in a dash or three of single cream (I dunno, maybe a tablespoon?) again don’t add too much, we don’t want a runny sauce! You are just adding enough so that it softens the colour of the pesto without washing it all off the pasta.
Heat gently for a minute or so, then serve topped with parmesan shavings, and possibly a nice Chablis. Enjoy!
What else can you add?
The main flavour of the dish is chicken and basil, the tomato in the pesto is very subtle, so from that simple base you could add other ingredients to give it a little extra ‘zing’. Maybe some finely chopped onion or a little chilli to give it a bit more kick, or some toasted almonds or pine nuts? Or for a more tomato-ey flavour how about some sun-blushed tomatoes?
Taming Outlook 2003
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 ~ 1 comment so far
Matt over at Life Without Toast was moaning about Outlook 2003, in particular about the Favorite Folders area. As I use Outlook 2003 at work, and in particular couldn’t live without my favorite folders so I offered to write a post about how I’ve tamed them for my usage. This is that post.
Warning: this is kinda long. If you don’t use Outlook just skip it.
Product Marketing
Wednesday, August 9, 2006 ~ No comments yet
So, what do you do, as a blogger with ethics, when a company write to you to promote their product? Well, first of all you check out the product.
Now, according to Sharon Dupont who contacted me, the product in question:
provide[s] a simple Web 2.0 service that allows bloggers to include syndication feeds, like news headlines, posts from other blogs or podcasts, into their blogs without any programming knowledge required. We hope that our take on the “problem” might be of use to both bloggers and web surfers.
All well and good (I’m not saying I’d USE the product myself but some might be interested).
Now, I’m not in the habit of plugging things on here without good reason, and so before I posted this I emailed Sharon to ask her a few questions, primarily about the company behind the product, and if whether they were deliberately targetting blogs as a form of marketing.
That was a several weeks ago. I’m still waiting for a response.
There are many companies, let’s call them “traditional” companies (with offices and products that come in boxes), who ‘get’ the internet. They realise that an online presence can help their business. Some of these companies also realise that blogs can be used to improve communication with their customers, and the really enlightened ones have worked it into they way the work.
Yet some companies still see blogs as a ‘free ride’, presuming we’ll hawk their goods for them. They seem oblivious to the possible downsides (this post is one), and whilst I don’t feel sorry for them it does annoy me. There is no good reason why a successful company can’t have a blog and make that blog work. Or at the very least there is no good reason why a successful company can’t at least UNDERSTAND how they could WORK WITH bloggers.
An example: at the recent BlogHer conference in the States, a car company turned up at one of the social events with a couple of soft-top cars. They allowed people to take them for a spin, didn’t try and sell and largely contributed to the whole ‘fun’ ethos of the event. They didn’t hand out marketing brochures, or push their product in any way. Yet they benefitted. How? Numerous mentions of the fun people had in their cars, photos galore in Flickr, and we all now that Google loves links and they got a barrowload of them (barrel? barrow? hmm that’s an odd one).
Obviously this is a form of marketing but, when conducted in such a fashion as to be unobtrusive and actually giving something BACK, then I think it works. Wouldn’t you love to take a spin in a convertible on a nice sunny day? Of course you would.
Now it’s all well and good for a large corporation to provide such freebies but I think blogging can help smaller companies as well. Putting aside the fact that ANY kind of web presence is no longer good enough (if I want to stay in your hotel, let me see the rooms, check availability and prices please) then the success stories will be the companies that realise that it’s not the size of the audience that visits your site, it’s that the RIGHT PEOPLE VISIT YOUR SITE.
[insert penis related "size doesn't matter" pun here]
If I run a business from my home, say a dog walking service, then it will benefit me more if my website is known to people that are in my area, have a dog, and would like their dog looked after during the day. Currently the best way to do that would be target dog shows, leaflet some houses in the area, or just get chatting to dog owners in the area.
Blogging may fit into that equation, but I’d see it as more of an add-on, a way of providing a human face to the business in an online context. For the moment, as blogging becomes increasingly popular it will continue to drive more and more ‘referrer business’ into all types of businesses. Those that are web-savvy now should be able to reap some benefits.
As for Ms. Dupont, I won’t mention the company/product name here as they don’t deserve the publicity (if you are really interested, google the quote), and here’s a tip for anyone with a business online. Be transparent. If you want me to invest my time and blog in your product, if you contact ME in an effort to market your product, presume I’ll do some research into the company behind the product and I’ll definitely want to be able to see the name of the person who contacted me listed somewhere on your site.
Blogging is huge, the numbers are startling, but until some businesses wise up it’s largely going to remain the remit of the hobbyists.
Voices in my head
Thursday, September 29, 2005 ~ No comments yet
How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers.” The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.
From Woody Allen, The Complete Prose
And so I sat there, chuckling to myself whilst my fellow commuters stared obstinately out of the train window. At least I hoped that’s what they were doing given that my involuntary giggles were at times quite loud and mostly sudden.
Now I’d warrant that you, dear reader, have heard Mr. Allen speak. You’ve heard the tones and inflections he imparts on his words, the stresses and strains he places on the punctuation, and the stuttering pause ridden asides that you realise are faked as soon as he starts to eloquently pontificate on whatever it is that currently irks – and here I’m thinking specifically of the Marshal McLuhan scene in Annie Hall, you know the one, where he breaks away from the cinema queue to berate the amateur film critic and people like him.
Must watch that movie again, it’s wonderful and probably has had more impact on modern cinema than a lot of people realise. I’m not a die-hard Woody Allen fan, he has produced a few duds in his time, and these days he is in severe danger of becoming a parody of himself, which in turn is probably a sign of his success and fame (and notoriety?).
I digress.
As mike noted a few weeks back, the written word can take on a whole new realm if you are aware of how the author uses phrasing and rhythm. The word patterns and movement that are created when speaking aloud offer a much deeper understanding of the words as they leap off the page and through your eardrums.
The spoken word goes back a long way, yes even before blogs or *gasp* the internet was invented (honestly, there was a time when there weren’t even computers, how did we manage?!), and it’s little wonder that it still carries the most impact. However I wonder if, given the rise in “personal publishing” in the past few years, there isn’t a requirement for a separate set of Writing Style Guidelines aimed solely at personal writing, where the writer is free to punctuate in a way that enforces the pauses and inflections they naturally use?
And no, I’m not talking about any free-form punctuation nonsense, but surely within the strict rules of grammar to which we all *coughs* adhere there is a little wiggle room for some artistic expression?
Or am I… you know… talking rubbish again?
Onto deeper matters then, why doesn’t Woody (Allen to his friends) have a blog? The one thing that hits me whilst reading his Complete Prose is how suited it would be to a blog format. Most of the pieces are short and punchy, and only really suit a compiled print publication. Ohhh sure he could write for a magazine, granted the bulk of the pieces in the book featured in New Yorker, but admit it, you’d LOVE a Woody Allen blog. Admittedly the fact rumour that he doesn’t own a compuer and still uses the manual typewriter on which he wrote his first screenplay might put the kibosh on that idea.
Mind you, thinking about it, a Woody Allen podcast would be much better.
God* Bless America
Sunday, September 11, 2005 ~ No comments yet
America has been on the receiving end of some harsh criticism recently, and a lot of it has been warranted. But who are we to criticise? What do we really know about America?
For a lot of us, the occasional trip to a big city or a holiday resort, for others you only know what you see or read, filtered through news networks or blogs. What do we REALLY know about America?
How many people live in poverty? What’s the rate of child deaths? How many people die of starvation? Will Brad and Jen get back together?
Then there are the calls for charity, for donations to help the sick and starving in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images still fresh in the mind, the looting, the violence, the death, are interrupted by another appeal, this time for the starving people in Niger. Drought and locusts killed off last years crops, and the people have no food. They are not in a rich country, they do not have neighbours who can take them in, they have not looted and violated. Who deserves?
The culture in America has created a “winner takes all” society, and the richest country in the world is asking for help. Billions of dollars are required to rebuild houses and lives, and Americans are pitching in, doing their bit, helping their neighbours. But why do they need my help? My charity? Where will my money make a difference? Africa or America?
There is no right or wrong answer of course. Yet the internal conflict remains and I struggle to balance my own thoughts on the matter. America has been treated harshly, yes. Their government has failed to act appropriately, yes. They have the resources they need to solve this themselves, yes. Have they helped out other countries when similar has happened? Yes. The good and bad sides of America are at war, and the country seems to be stretching itself, slowly awaking from its slumber with the realisation that only whilst it is sleeping is it truely the land of dreams.
* Insert deity of choice
Top 100
Thursday, August 18, 2005 ~ No comments yet
There seems to be a bit of a brew-haha gathering on blogland. Well sort of, but unless you read certain sites you’d never know so let me summarise for you.
Technorati are trying to establish themselves as THE auditors of the web, amongst other things they maintain a “Top 100 blogs” list which lists all the top linked sites. It’s currently questionable that this “A list” is reliable and accurate, with others spring up in competition – Feedster’s Top 500 for example (500 does seem a little OTT mind you).
BlogHer, the conference (movement?) aimed at increasing the standing of women in blogging, and featured the following debate topic: “The BlogHer Debate question for 2005 is this: Women bloggers, how do you want the world to learn about what you’re creating — if at all? Do you want to play by today’s rules or change the game? … Does the current link-based power structure matter to you?”
The link will take you to a more detailed discussion of how we got to this point.
The general idea, and something I’ve discussed here before, is that the current way of ranking the A-list gives the older blogs more prominence than may be accurate and discounts the inputs from new blogs – the female angle at BlogHer stems from the early adoptance of the internet by male dominated establishments I.M.O. – and is gathering momentum.
People have started de-linking A-list sites (I have some in my blogroll on the right) and while it’s easy to think of all this as yet another storm in a teacup and nothing that is of real importance, and while it gives more credence to the “navel-gazing” charge given to a lot of blogs by the mainstream media, I think we may be at a fundamental point in blogging’s evolution. I’m not unique in this thought, far from it, but I’m not sure the ground swell of reaction is focussed in the right direction.
Instead of discounting the A-list shouldn’t we be challenging them? Saying to them “come on, you are in a position of influence, use it wisely”? The people who are linked to the most wield a lot of “link-power” and yet few (any?) use that to promote new or upcoming blogs. Part of the problem may be a question of recognising which blogs to link to, but as has been demonstrated elsewhere, if someone has a mind to it, and with a bit of self-promotion, you can place yourself on their radar quite easily.
There is a lot of talk surrounding this and other similar issues at the moment – top 100/500 lists, ranking stats, and so on. I think they are being given undue focus though, it’s almost as though some people forget what blogging is about. Distilled to it’s core, blogging is about content. Those with good content will prosper, those without will not. It really shouldn’t be any more difficult than that.
Should it?
Thinking
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 ~ No comments yet
“What shall I write about today?” I pondered to no-one in particular. “It’s a thought ain’t it” I replied to myself.
Sometimes inspiration hits, sometimes it’s just a bag slung over a shoulder on the train, either way the jolt is the same and the kick start is enough to get your brain moving.
Except mine appears to be stuck. Don’t get me wrong, I can find plenty of topics to waffle on about, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but that key ingredient, that essential release is missing.
I don’t post about work, I don’t really do much during the week, and weekends are typically spent on the mundane aspects of life, gardening, shopping, and so on. There is only so much I can say about my family without scaring everyone away (although with my Mum becoming a more frequent commenter I fear my blog days are numbered as it is, she’s getting a new kitchen don’t ya know), and only so much I can say about my life because I’m all too aware of who reads this nonsense (see previous brackets).
Maybe I should start up an anonymous blog?
Yes, I’m suffering blog depre… no I’m not using THAT word. Let’s call it blog malaise.
But then I look at other blogs and see that they don’t really talk about much either. “I need to develop some characters” I say to myself, my mum would be a prime candidate for this, and this would be the perfect place to catalogue all her little “foibles” (or should I say “turning into her mother”-isms?). She’s not quite on a league with my Gran yet mind you – who once referred to some pears as “runky” (spelling unconfirmed) – and has a way to go to catch up with the, now infamous, comment from another Granny (not mine) who, sometime in the mid-80s, pondered what the fascination was with these “pubic cubes”…
Mind you, maybe I don’t need to go to the lengths of embarassing my mother (if that’s even possible, she’ll pop along soon and deny it is, just you watch) as I’m fairly well practised at waffling myself out of these slumps, next thing you know I’ll be posting three or four times a day. Maybe that’s the “blogger secret”, the key, the solution. Just keep blogging.
God, that sounds trite.