Curry Recipes Online
Beginners Guide => Just Joined? Introduce Yourself => Topic started by: pr0tax on September 20, 2013, 07:17 PM
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Hello Everyone.
Good to see a forum I think I can slip right into. By day I'm a software/computer game developer. 28, divorced but with a new girl now (hindsight!) and I love Indian food.
*Cue Long and Probably Boring Intro*
It started when I was young (14?) every Wednesday I used to go to my asian friend's house for tea and his mum used to cook and by god it was beautiful. Ever since the days I started with the pubs/clubs we went to restaurants afterwards and got into curry even more.
Since the age of about 15, always had good curry from one main takeaway here (but always like to try new things) then I got bored of some tasting completely different so I stuck with my main one. We usually eat Curry/Biryani 5-6 days a week. So I started cooking Indian food myself 4 years ago. I was completely unaware of this forum at this point!
Initially I started with the usual paste from Asda etc. but in all honesty, it was terrible and it set me quite back thinking I wouldn't attempt it again. Until one day I thought sod it, I followed a recipe online for a Lamb Biryani and I bought all the spices and what not, awesome! It came out terrible, 2nd attempt was bang on, 3rd attempt was awful, 4th attempt - terrible. Biryani took me a good 12/13 attempts until I finally mastered my own recipe based off a collection of different recipe's I had found.
After this was curry, after the pub one night I went to my fave takeaway for a curry (as you do) and I saw this huge pot he was 'dipping into' and I often wondered how they whipped up curries so fast and I said to my pal, I wonder if it's like a 'base curry' or a 'standard set of ingredients pre-cooked'. So I shot home and Googled it and would you know it yes!
So, since then I have delved into many a recipe and I must say, this site is worth it's weight in Gold. I haven't tried any of the recipe's yet but I think I may post my Biryani one, I'm not fully up to scratch with Curries yet, my first attempt at Base/Madras last week was 95% there, tonight it was 35% so I'm a bit disappointed but I get the gist pretty quick.
I'll try get around to putting my own Lamb Biryani recipe up with instructions but aside of that, I'm looking forward to learning more. Just to put a smile on my face, I ditched the old pan set and purchased some new stainless steel pottery today from our local continental.
Apologies for the long and probably boring intro. Glad to be here :)
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Welcome to the forum, its a fantastic resource of information
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welcome from Scotland, we have members here from all over UK and beyond, some of whom are normal.
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Enjoy pr0tax, there's a good community of other like-minded professionals around here, including software developers. Given the pace at which they interact within the community and how they manage to make their own curries, it is safe to assume they don't work in the game industry.
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Retired IT professional here. Don't hold it against me.
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Welcome to the forum.
I would like to see the biriani recipe.
Enjoy
Stew
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Retired IT professional here. Don't hold it against me.
Also retired IT pro, but after five years' retirement I do more IT on a daily basis than I ever did when I was getting paid for it !
** Phil.
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Thanks for the greetings!
Great to see some IT folks around here too! I started VB and Pascal around the age of about 13 (~1998?) and it went from there, never attended College or Uni just started doing my own thing and have grown ever since. No better feeling than running your own business! Glad I found my strong point at such an early age, although I did miss out on the dot com boom (I put that down to lack of life experience) :o
I would like to see the biriani recipe.
Thanks Stew! I love contributing anything I can back, so I will certainly post my Biryani recipe and will welcome all types of criticism (although I must admit, I finally got it on-par with my fave takeaway) :D
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Welcome pr0tax - hope you find the forum as useful as I have.
And hey......with all these IT people on here, can we start a section where you can post PC problems?
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Great to see some IT folks around here too! I started VB and Pascal around the age of about 13 (~1998?) and it went from there, never attended College or Uni
Interesting similarities. I also started with pascal (no VB here though) and I hold no degree. I was 16 back in 98 though. I wish I had been more responsible to start my own business, something I still think of to this day.
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I wish I had been more responsible to start my own business, something I still think of to this day.
To be honest, with the least life experience ever and being very naive at that age I didn't take advantage of a lot of things, especially the dot com boom, it just seemed to sail by me. I was quite ignorant too, I never thought the internet would boom like it did, I just got myself into a comfortable corner and sat in it... work is still good though as I've built up a huge portfolio of work I've done since 1998!
Glad to see like minded people on here, Indian food is top of my list and I'm looking forward to trying new recipes especially BIR ones and I'm looking forward to contributing back what I can.
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And I had the great fortune to start with Algol-68, which I firmly believe is still the finest programming language ever invented. (I regard "C" as the work of the Devil, despite having been quite keen on BCPL (one of C's ancestors) at one point ...). Unfortunately Algol-68 seemed to be regarded as "too difficult, too complex, too theoretical" by hoi polloi and fell by the wayside, a fact I will never cease to regret.
** Phil.
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Digging our heels in deep here Phil ;D
I did have an office 2007-2009 but the overhead (~?500) a month was ridiculous. I just work from home since 2009 and I'm saving, plus I can claim back on expenses such as rent and what not. It's awesome being able to talk/see the kids whatever time of day and just creep back to my desk whenever I please. I do have a strict routine of 12-14 hours a day Mon-Friday, sometimes weekends included if it's a big job.
Being self-employed is such a roller coaster, one minute you're way up, the next it's rock bottom and the entire journey you never know how much/when/where from pillar to pillar. That's part of the excitement though.
At the top of this year, I found a new platform for online education and I started teaching kids and adults alike how to develop computer games with no programming at all. I've had the privilege of working closely with a global company (I won't namedrop) but they develop awesome software for all ages to develop games and applications in with no programming, I'm quite close to the company itself (although not part of it) and it's a fantastic community with huge potential laying before it.
Do you still do any programming at all?
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Digging our heels in deep here Phil ;D
My former boss didn't call me a dinosaur and a Luddite for nothing :)
Do you still do any programming at all?
Many many hours a day (far too many, my garden and my cycling suffer). Currently working on typesetting a catalogue of early Greek MSS (source is in Excel, imported into oXygen and exported as XML, which is then processed by an XML parser/layout engine written in TeX) [1]. Previous project was an interactive electronic edition of a 16th-century Greek MS [2].
** Phil.
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[1] http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/lpl/greek-mss/ms-1214/demo.pdf (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/lpl/greek-mss/ms-1214/demo.pdf)
[2] http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/etheridge/ (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/hellenic-institute/research/etheridge/)
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Blasphemer Phil.... I have not had a chance to play with C's ancestors, but I use C on a regular basis, along with python, which is my favorite prototyping tool. So elegant and simple! I'm an embedded software engineer (read: hacker) at a telecom company that produces secure network communication equipment used by the 3 letter agencies and U.S military army. Nothing really amusing from a technological standpoint, just your average hardware gadget.
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Blasphemer Phil....
I can't be -- George did not moderate my message :)
I'm an embedded software engineer (read: hacker) at a telecom company that produces secure network communication equipment used by the 3 letter agencies and U.S military army. Nothing really amusing from a technological standpoint, just your average hardware gadget.
You can seriously sit there and write "C" and "secure" in the same sentence ? No language that allows arbitrary casts, pointer arithmetic and all of the other low-level horrors that C exposes can possibly be used to generate secure systems.
But, to be slightly more serious, that was one of the great stengths of Algol 68; it simply disallowed all low-level hackery, enforced array-bounds checking, had incredibly strict typing and so on. But it was also such a joy in which to program -- a language invented /by/ computer scientists, /for/ computer scientists, and one that ticked every possible box for me. Just as did, some years later, the VAX/VMS operating system; how it lost out and Un*x won I shall never understand.
** Phil.
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C is indeed a language that requires careful handling and thought. I have a background in computer security and a particular interest in safe programming. I am quite a defensive programmer in general, regardless of the language I use. Security is not just about whether your language offers you a few primitives to safe-guard your memory use. C is mostly used where performance and direct system control is required. Outside that, we use very little C. Of course, C is extensively used as a lot of what we do is hardware drivers. I agree with your point, but according to that logic C is as unsafe as is a santoku knife.
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OK, I fear we've hijacked Pr0tax's thread more than enough -- 73's, OM, over and out (here, at least).
** Phil.
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I've done a lot of C programming in my early career, and I have fixed so many memory leaks I can't begin to estimate. Very efficient but very dangerous in the hands of a slack programmer. 15-20 years ago, processing power was at a premium, as was memory, so languages like C had a very important place.
My first programming experience was with BASIC on a BBC Micro Model A (8k RAM if I remember correctly, only about half of that was usable. A later BBC BASIC experience was while at university developing a profit/loss account system on a model B (less than 16k) available.
Nowadays I don't get out of bed for under 4 Gigabytes.
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haha, that's fine Phil, I'm enjoying reading this tbh. It was before my time and I do hear the calls of the 'old skool' coders when I attend conventions and such with nostalgic conversation formed into obscure debates within the blink of an eye!
Does anybody happen to remember AMOS and/or STOS?
edit: oh and Goncalo, I can't help but agree with you on that one!