Saturday, February 13, 2010 3:08 PM | rahel luethy | 4 comment(s)
Three things are absolutely key to every homemade pizza: (1) your dough must be rollable to get a thin base and a crispy crust (instead of a lumpy, thick bread), (2) you should minimize the amount of topping (floating liquids = fail), and (3) you should maximize the amount of cheese — at the risk of promoting unhealthy eating habits: if you aim at catching up on veggies or saving on calories, skip pizza.
The dough
500 g wheat flour (I prefer Coop Naturaplan Halbweissmehl, a semi-whole-wheat flour — not because it's healthy, but because it goes so well with mushrooms)
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
20 g fresh yeast
1.5 dl milk
1.5 dl lukewarm water
0.5 dl native olive oil
Put the flour and salt in a bowl and form a well. Kick-start the yeast by mixing it with the sugar until liquid. Pour the mixed yeast and all other liquids into the well and start drawing circles with your middle & index fingers, mixing more and more flour towards the center, finally using both hands to form a dough. Depending on the type of flour, you may need more or less water — it's always better to start off from a dough that is too wet and add flour, rather than trying to make a dry lump more elastic. Knead the dough for at least 10 minutes, pushing and folding. It should be soft, elastic and filled with a gazillion of tiny air bubbles when cut in half. Put back into the bowl, cover with a wet towel, and leave to rest for at least an hour.
The pizza
I won't give exact quantities for the toppings — play around and remember: less tomato, more cheese:
tomato purée
canned pellati or thick tomato sauce (ideally left-overs from your spaghetti pomo)
dried porcini (mushrooms)
mozzarella
grated parmesan (parmiggiano reggiano)
garlic
Pre-heat your oven to maximum temperature (about 250 degrees celsius). Soak the dried porcini in lukewarm milk/water until very soft. Roll your dough to form a thin base, put it onto a waxed paper, and pierce it all over with a fork. Spread the tomato purée with your fingers. If you're using pellati: drain liquid from tomatoes, chop, and spread all over base. If you're using sauce: spread a thin layer of sauce all over base. Cut mozzarella into very thin slices and spread evenly. Add parmesan between the mozzarella slices. Finely chop the porcini and add on top. Season to taste with salt, pepper & freshly squashed garlic. Bake your pizza for about 10 minutes — this time can vary depending on your oven & temperature, but the base should be just about to get stiff and the cheese should be golden. Enjoy!
Thursday, February 11, 2010 1:52 PM | rahel luethy | 1 comment(s)
The concept of actions as a separation of the controller logic from the visual representation is a very useful one. In Swing, a lot of views use an action as a template for construction: components like JButton or JMenuItem initialize their name, tooltip, or enabling state based on a set of action properties. Such properties (values assigned to pre-defined keys) can be configured on an action instance via
myAction.putValue(Action.SHORT_DESCRIPTION, "Whatever");
and changes to a property value automatically update the state of all views that depend on it.
Up to Java 1.6, one of the biggest drawbacks was that actions didn't cover toggles, i.e. it wasn't possible to configure the selection state of a JToggleButton or JCheckboxMenuItem via an action property. Of course it was quite easy to come up with a workaround: deriving your own ToggleAction (with your custom property-firing) and complement it with view counterparts (like a ToggleAction-based JToggleButton extension) — possible, but cumbersome.
Luckily, all that clutter is no longer needed! As of 1.6, Swing supports a new Action.SELECTED_KEY. Changes to this property automatically update the selection state of JRadioButton, JCheckBox, and the like. More details (as well as a summary of all other javax.swing.Action-related changes) can be found here.
Thursday, February 04, 2010 3:15 PM | rahel luethy | 1 comment(s)
The blog you are looking at is maintained at Google Blogger and used to be published to my netzwerg.ch domain via FTP. Google recently announced the discontinuation of FTP publishing, and the only way to keep my domain name (read: my readers, page ranks, link validity, etc) was to switch to their "Custom Domain" program. A step-by-step guide explained how to set up the necessary DNS changes, but StartLogic, my ISP, doesn't support the configuration of any of them.
Long story short: I had to switch to a different DNS host — here's how to migrate your custom domain via Zone Edit, a free DNS provider:
Zone Edit Part
- Sign up and add a new Zone for your domain name, in my case www.netzwerg.ch
- Edit the "Aliases (CNAME)" section of your zone: www.netzwerg.ch is another name for ghs.google.com
- Edit the "IP addresses (A)" section of your zone: Add four aliases for your naked domain ("netzwerg.ch" without the "www" — confirm the not recommended "Yes" button for each of them)
The summary ("View") should now look like this:
Registrar Part
Since your domain is now routed via Zone Edit, you need to update the nameserver configuration at your registrar: the entries that previously pointed to your ISP (in my case ns1.startlogic.com and ns2.startlogic.com) now need to point to ns2.zoneedit.com and ns17.zoneedit.com. Note that these changes my need a while to take effect.
Blogger Part
The last step is to switch your blog from FTP publishing to Custom Domain. You need to make the following changes in your Blogger Dashboard:
Things should be settled now — fingers crossed!
