January, 10, 2005 archives

• one cup bread flour
• large pinch kosher salt
• two tbsp. shortening
• half cup warm water

combine the flour, salt, and shortening. mix thoroughly. add water, and form into slightly sticky dough. divide into four parts and roll into balls. cover and let rest for at least fifteen minutes. roll out each ball until less than ¼" thick. heat on a warm griddle or skillet until it has puffed up and lightly browned on bottom, and then flip and lightly brown on the other side. cover with a towel, and serve as soon as possible. makes four tortillas. recipe can be doubled or tripled for more tortillas.

• olive oil
• small onion, chopped
• garlic, finely chopped (two cloves or to taste)
• jalapeno pepper, finely chopped (or large pinch red pepper flakes)
• one cup long-grained white rice
• salt and pepper (to taste)
• 2½ cups cold water
• 2 cups drained black beans (or one 14.5 oz. can)

heat olive oil over medium-low heat. add onion, garlic, and jalapeno or pepper flakes, and cook until onions are translucent, stirring frequently. add rice, salt, and pepper, and stir to coat rice with oil. add cold water and turn up heat to bring to boil. turn heat back down, add black beans, and cover. simmer until rice is done and water is absorbed (about twenty minutes). remove from heat and let sit for a few minutes before serving.

today was another of those one-bug days (but i also spent a fair amount of time on web-related tasks). that one bug took a long time to solve because it only showed up on qnx, and i had to do battle with our qnx build machine to get it to build at all for me. i eventually tracked it down to a shell issue where libtool would have one of its variables get corrupted with the default shell (ksh). i’m not sure why our regular builds on that platform don’t encounter the same problem.

but dealing with the bug did remind that i should probably ask for an okay to purchase vmware for my new box (arrives tomorrow!), so i can run multiple operating systems on it without having to reboot all the time. that would let me run platforms like qnx and solaris locally, which would probably be handy.