Some sort of pepper sauce

My son grew a lot of jalapeños. We didn't know what to do with them all, so in a fit of desperation I made some type of pepper sauce.

I read that roasting peppers improves their flavor. I certainly wasn't going to roast them in the house. And I don't have a grill. But I do have this little George Foreman grill thing. It's great for sandwiches and so forth. I figured I had nothing to lose so I took it outside and got it warming.

I washed the peppers, sliced the stem parts off, sliced them down the middle, then pulled out and discarded the seeds and the other stuff in there.

The Geo Foreman grill is yer basic clamshell grill - there's a cooking surface on the top and the bottom. I put the pepper halves face to face in the grill so the outside would be exposed directly to the heat and the insides wouldn't be. I let them roast for ten minutes - when the skins start turning black you're getting close. In retrospect fifteen would have been better. I took the roasted peppers inside and started peeling the skin off. The skin comes off easily if the peppers are well-roasted.

I grilled and peeled a few batches of peppers. Then I pureed them with a handful of sesame seeds and enough balsamic and white vinegar, in equal portions, to make it blend well. And maybe 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Not too much. Puree like the wind!

I put the resulting mixture into a pot, brought it to a decent boil, then turned it down to simmer for about 15 minutes.

That's it.

I think it's going to go very well on chicken or pork.

So busy

School has started and the new programming job is ramping up fast. I haven't had much time to do anything interesting lately, much less write about it.

The wife and I did can 21 more quarts of tomatoes the other day. We're going to have good soup for the next 2 years!

The Ruby-on-Rails framework/language I ranted about previously is turning out to be pretty effective. So far it lets me do what i need to do, and easily, as long as I stay within some pretty reasonable boundaries. For example, it won't let me join two tables if there's no relationship between them. I think I can live with that.

Ruby on Rails, part 2 or 3

I've been working on an email delivery system. Today I added some safeguards that will prevent it from mailing the same content to a subscriber twice in one day. In addition to keeping the boss from screaming, it allows me to recover from delivery errors elegantly. It was easy enough to do. Then I added an admin facility that shows the status of the delivery run. Again, easy enough. To do this I made a new method in the controller. This was a one-liner to fetch the data. Then I looped over the data in the view, generating an HTML table as I did so.

My wife's and son's garden has produced

We had tomato overload. Fortunately the wife knows how to can. We also have a plethora of jalapeños and banana peppers. I have no idea what we're going to do with them all.

More Rails

I've been heads-down learning Ruby on Rails at the new job. So far, so good. I'm working on an email delivery system using PowerMTA as the back-end. I didn't have too many problems writing the daily delivery selection code. I did have to stray from the framework a little to deliver using different templates. Sometimes these sorts of deviations make frameworks really collapse. Fortunately, not this time. I also wrote code to track opens which was very easy.

I celebrated by getting all my code checked into SVN and leaving the office today (Friday) at 5:01.

My nephew graduated from Navy boot camp

Congrats to Zack for a job well done!