We laughed at that saying repeatedly when in Hungary. The Hungarians I swear put Paprika in everything. If you go to the Great Market Hall near the Elizabeth bridge you will be overwhelmed by the shear numbers of Paprika sellers. Most of the lower floor of this giant market is full of dried peppers and the sellers of such. Not to mention these people don't buy little 3 oz bottles of McCormick from the grocery but by the pound. You also have a choice of sweet or hot paprika, a freedom we don't always have.

One of the famous Hungarian dishes is Chicken Paprikash which has of course chicken and lots of Paprika. Natalya made this last night and it was decent. I'm not a huge fan of Chicken Paprikash but it was as good as any.

The first time I went to Mexico it was a bit of a shock. It was hot, sunny and for the most part dirty. I'd been all over Europe but most of Europe is like our own country without the dillution of culture. Mexico was different, it felt foreign. As much as I thought I'd had Mexican food at home I learned soon enough that I didn't know the first thing about Mexican food. We paid a taxi for a whole day to just drive us around Cozomel island, show us ruins and then drop us off at a restaurant of his choice for dinner. He let us out at a largely open air restaurant that only had Mexicans in it (rare in Cozomel). One of the things they brought us was tortilla soup and boy was I surprised. It had flavor, depth and the tortillas were crisp. I've not had decent tortilla soup since then. It usually tastes like taco seasoning with soggy unleaven bread in it. Natalya decided to fix Tortilla soup last night and it was quite good. I think with some more seasoning and perfecting the technique of keeping the tortillas crisp she'd be on to something.

And another surprise was the empanadas. We fell in love with the Chilean Empanada at Julia's Empanadas in the Adams Morgan district of Washington D.C. and have been chasing the dream ever since.

I miss Mexico.

This is a tribute to Natalya who fixed me dinner for a week. I was not allowed to know what was for dinner or help. My first site of the food was when I sat down to the table. She deserves all the credit. The first night I sat down to Doro Wat. If you don't eat Ethiopian you should try it. Just go to a restaurant (Queen Sheba on Capital hill in Seattle is decent) and order the meat combo if you're into dead animals - if not order the veggie combo. Don't do this alone because there's just too much food on it. One combo ($20 at Queen Sheba or $13 at the places on MLK jr BLVD) will feed 2-4 people. My family eats one combo and usually has a few leftovers. Anyway there will be a giant plate layered with a spongy crepe looking thing called Injera. You don't get silverwear because you use the Injera to pick up the food by hand. On top of the Injera will be various "stews" with meat, lamb and chicken in them. It's all a bit spicy and can be VERY spicy so be warned. The menu usually tells you the spice level if you look under the individual items. If you get lucky and are eating Ethiopian in D.C. you will probably get to eat around a Mesob (tiny table resembling a drum) which is a great experience. In Seattle they give us regular tables (boring!).

My favorite Ethiopian dishes are Beef Tibbs and Doro Wat. A Wat is a stew and chicken is Doro in Ethiopian so you can guess what's in Doro Wat. Anyway Natalya surprised me with Doro Wat and Injera. It wasn't too bad but some spice were missing and the Injera needed more bubbles. I think it has soda water in it and the recipe didn't call for it. I'm sure we'll revisit Ethiopian dishes later in our culinary journey.

Oh and we ate it sitting on the floor on pillows on sheesham wood tables. Not authentic Ethiopian but it sufficed since we don't have a Mesob...

I ran across this FXcuisine who stole it from New Food of Life by Najmeih Batmanglij. I didn't have all of the ingredients so I'm posting what I did have. I shamelessly posted the recipe straight from their site in my recipe book but I'll get around to changing it to reflect what I've been making in a day or two.

Persian Jeweled Rice Javaher Polow
For 6 as a royal side dish
1.5 cups Basmati rice
1 organic oranges
1/2 large carrot
1 cup dried berry mix from Trader Joes (Golden raisens, cranberries, blueberries)
1/2 onion
1/2 cup blanched whole almonds or almonds and pistachios
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1 1/2 tbsp green cardamom pods
pinch of saffron diluted in 1 glass water
150 gr butter
2 tbsp yoghurt

The recipe called for barberries which I have no access too. I then decided to substitute pomegranite seeds which too are out of season. I switched to the berry mix at Trader Joes because they had one with pomegranite seeds but because of my current financial system I chose the mix without them and it turned out wonderful. You soak the berries, blanch the nuts, soak the rice and candy the orange peel and carrot. This rice is the most flavorful rice I've ever had. It really is a dish fit for royalty.

I've paired it with Korhesht-e fesanjan and homemade wheat pita. This fits into the "exclaimation foods" category that I like so much.

I saw this in someone's sig and thought it was funny.

Q: If you're rolling along the ocean on a jet ski and the wheels fall off, do you still have enough pancakes to cover a doghouse?

A: Purple, because ice cream has no bones.

I ended up recreating this entire site from scratch. The database was so convoluted that I just couldn't do anything with it. After spending 4 hrs dropping tables, cutting records and cleaning it had gone from 172 database tables to 167 and decided to just start over. I saved out all the tables I wanted (ie, users, menus, categories etc...) and rebuilt Joomla from the beginning and added only the stuff I wanted, inported the tables I neeeded and the rest I did manually. The result was I went from 172 database tables to 97, a huge improvement! The muck in the database came from doing 15 updates during the Joomla 1.0 days, migrating that database to Joomla 1.5 and then proceding to update it another 11 times. Over the course of a couple of years I've also installed countless components, modules and plugins in an attempt to add the functionality that I needed. Most of these I've eventually uninstalled. For the record I've purchased over $200 in software for Joomla and I'm currently using $7 worth. So much for looking to the commercial Joomla developer for great software.

I was having weird issues with my recipe book not showing up and then it migrated to my Food blog. The result was that I'd get an error 404 whenever I tried to access it. Fearing muck in my database I started cleaning house and removed massive amounts of tables and records left there by components and modules that I no longer use. I also fixed a bunch of bugs associated with more than on category having the same link. You may have noticed it when you clicked on Photography Blog and got something completely different (or Food Blog). Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. All of that is fixed now and the database is much leaner.

However, I've introduced something new that I don't understand. Guests can view the Food Blog just fine but if you're logged in you'll get an error 404. This makes no sense whatsoever. I'll try to track it down later. Also the food blog refuses to order articles by date. Sometimes I think I need to install Joomla from scratch and start over but I have way too much stuff here to do that.

We haven't had Moussaka for quite a while and we had a decent Cab Sauv in the fridge going to waste (along with lamb in the freezer) so Natalya made Moussaka tonight. We usually use my Côtes du Rhône blend in the Moussaka but always welcome a change. I'd planned on making pita bread for dinner but picked up some packaged pita at Zam Zam the local Indian/Pakistan/everythingstan market for $1.19 which is pretty cheap. Even though I still planned on making Pita sometimes I get home and just don't have the motivation to spend two hrs making bread so eating the packaged pita was the fallback plan.

As usual dinner is a family event with Piper making the Bechamel sauce, I made the Pita bread and Natalya made the bulk of the Moussaka. Jade provided cleanup duty. The recipe is getting pretty good so it will be going up on this site soon. I also liked the Pita a lot. I used 1/3 wheat flower and 2/3 white flour for a nice mix. I cooked them on the pizza stone at 500 degrees F under the broiler and all puffed up in about 1 minute flat. Prep time for the Pita bread was about 2 hrs because you have to let it rise. Total cost for 8 Pita was 42 cents (not including electricity) plus the price of a TBS of farm honey which I don't know the price of. I'd estimate that I paid half to make Pita over buying them at the cheapest place in town. Compare the 42 cents to $1.19 and they're a good deal but compare them to $2.99-$3.99 at the grocery and they become a great deal.

Natalya and Jade wasn't so hot on the idea of having 1/3 wheat bread but I'm still playing with that. Ingredients for the Pita were White flour, wheat flour, honey, olive oil, yeast and salt. I however thought they were excellent and I ate two dipped in tzatziki sauce. The Tzatziki needs work as it came out too cucumberish and not yogurtish. We've made this a bunch of times but always forget to write down the recipe that we like the best.

So stayed tuned, the Moussaka will be going into the online recipebook here at grantmcwilliams.com and the Pita recipe will go up after the next time I make them. I'd like a white pita too for my wonderbread kids. Oh, and from the photo to the right you can tell that something is dripping from the Pita, that's Ghee! When I pulled them from the oven I brushed Ghee on them since it wouldn't be overpowering like Olive Oil.

I've been in the mood to work on the site in the last week because I got SuperBlogger. While looking at that pluging I discovered K2 by the same team which looks like it will "finish" Joomla. What I mean by that is it will provide Joomla with all the core functionality that Joomla should have to start with. Anyway while watching a video about tips and tricks to do with Joomla I got in the mood to edit my error 404 page to make it nicer looking.

You can try it out by just typing in a page that doesn't exist. Or you can try this link to see if you like it - Error 404

I've installed the Superblogger plugin for my site and things look promising but there are issues. This is a general plea for patience from you my faithful viewers.

Over the course of the next week I will as I get time be tweaking the operations of the blogging plugin. I've noticed that formatting on articles has gone screwy which I'll fix later today (I hope). Also as an experiment comments will be handled by Disqus (pronounced discuss).