My last blog1 and the silence since may have given the impression that life
wasn't going well with me, but that's not true. I have been keeping well and
working many hours on migrating the OP's management ERP system to Delphi 12,
and as the OP said to me yesterday, "I should be thankful for the war" as it
has allowed me the time to work on this project. Naturally, my day job has
been very slow: I barely worked on Sunday and Monday and although the pace
picked up slightly during the week, I also had time to program. And
unfortunately I also had time for migraines: one woke me in the middle of
the night a few days ago (this is the first time that I have ever awoken
with a migraine) and one took out a few hours of Thursday.
As with the
Prolog interpreter project2, I don't want to fill this blog with daily updates of how the
conversion process is going. I've identified some key points that I have to
be aware of when migrating although almost every day has me coming across a
new problem. I spent all day yesterday debugging the 'DoDockets' form that
for the users is probably the most used form of all. There is still one
problem to be solved, but I'm fairly sure that I know what the solution is.
Once this is out of the way, I hope to get the rest of the input-receiving
forms finished today and tomorrow, leaving all the report forms. Whilst
there are many such forms, most are basically the same, so migrating these
should be fast and problem free.
This is the blog entry that I intended to write a week ago before real life
intervened. The title, pollo cacciatore, is Italian for "Hunter's
chicken" and is basically a dish that mixes chicken with a multitude of
vegetables. I came across it in the
Kate Benedict book series; I thought that I remembered a discussion of this dish but couldn't find
one when I looked for it. The cooking has got absolutely nothing to do with
the stories themselves but add a certain amount of verisimilitude. Maybe
I'll write about them at a later date.
Anyway, when the world was still young and innocent, i.e. last Friday, I
made this dish as an experiment. The
recipe that I used included browning the chicken pieces in a wide pot; this step
has never seemed to have contributed anything to the final taste. I
discovered that the pot wasn't big enough to include four chicken thighs and
four drumsticks so I had to remove one of each. In order, the vegetables
cooked were onion, carrots, celery, mushrooms, bell pepper and parsley.
After cooking them for about 15 minutes along with shallots, I added a glass
of red wine (this is, after all, an Italian recipe) and then a can of
crushed tomatoes (ditto). This stayed on the gas ring for another hour. The
result was quite tasty but the chicken did not fall off the bone as it
normally does in my cooking.
I considered how the dish could be improved, both in terms of cooking time
and the number of portions. It didn't take long for the answer to come:
instead of cooking in a pot on the gas, cook in the usual oven tray that can
hold 16-18 portions. So yesterday evening, I didn't bother with browning the
chicken; I made the vegetable sauce in the same way as the week before,
albeit with larger quantities. When the sauce was bubbling away merrily, I
placed the chicken pieces in the tray, then poured the sauce on top (with an
extra glass of water, just to be sure that there is enough liquid), covered
the tray with baking paper then aluminium foil, then into the oven for 2½
hours at 175°C.
I thought that the chicken came out very well, but it didn't seem to absorb
much taste from the vegetables and tomato source. The general appraisal was
that the results didn't justify all the extra work, so next time it's back
to chicken pieces with (uncooked) onions, shallots and mushrooms, along with
fig sauce and onion soup. As this food is supposed to feed my wife and I
during the coming week, there was plenty left over, and it may be that the
taste will improve the longer the chicken is in the sauce.
Internal links
[1] 2085
[2] 2063
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