Friday, May 4, 2012

Happy star wars day!

Nothing to do with how to s but since im a star wars fan i just had to say it
Happy Star Wars day!!! May the fourth be with you.

LOLLLL

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Quick Desperate Meal: Blended pasta

Okay so how do you make a really quick meal with that has a lot of stuff that you need and plenty of vegetables? My method was to make blended pasta. You just grab a handful of pasta, 3 cups of water, adding carrots celery broccoli and the secret weapon was the avocado. Once you put that in the blender and you press blend and wait and because of the avocado, it will become really smooth. Kinda tastes like a smoothie. Of course, you also need a great blender for that that will blend even rough mixes. And you need a big one.

The Ninja Kitchen System seems a good choice, but after trying it out, i found it had a conceptual fail: the square shape of the container. WTF. There's stuff that gets stuck unblended at the sides. And the container is plastic instead of glass... It is powerful though. I found more success using a traditional blender that has a round container.

This was my breakfast, lunch and dinner for a few months. It was the healthiest time of my life. Of course, I sometimes went to restaurants too because that diet wouldnt be sustainable. This diet was complemented by protein shakes.

Ingredients
One large avocado
One cup of pasta preferably macaroni because it blends easy
One celery stalk
One broccoli
3 cups of water

Blend on high until smooth


A variation of this Blended pasta is a pleasant sweet discovery which was when I cooked too much rice and I had yogurt in the fridge (Cherry flavored yogurt). So for this, use one cup of cooked rice and 2 cups of yogurt plus one cup of water then blend on high. The beauty of this is that it will be sweet so you eat it like a rice pudding that is cherry tasting. Enjoy.

Ingredients
2 cups of Yogurt
1 cup of cooked rice
1 cup of water

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

How to make an Espresso coffee?

Espresso coffee has become really popular in the last decade. I guess people were tired of getting coffee that had been sitting in a big jug for x hours (i know because I used to work at a closed down Dunkin' donuts, at night when there are barely any customers and they don't want to wait for their coffees if they want one, you just serve them a cup a good old coffee).

When you go to Starbucks, Blenz, Second Cup, or even Tim Hortons and McDonalds, you can now get an Espresso, which is an individually brewed coffee, right on the spot for you as you order it. This coffee is different from drip coffee for one big reason: it uses pressurized water!

As usual, I like to go step by step into showing you how its done. Watch the video, it should be more revealing.

1- Buy finely ground coffee from any store. I got some fine coffee from an italian market but the same bag was available at superstore for half the price. The bags come vacuum packed so to keep the coffee freshness. Or you can go and grind your own coffee but make sure you select the fine grind.


2- Open the Espresso maker by screwing off the top.

3- put filtered water in the bottom compartment. Make sure that when you put the filter part back on, no water is seen in the coffee compartment or else there's too much water and the coffee will overflow when ready.

4- fill the coffee compartment with ground coffee, you dont need to compress the coffee, just fill it up and level it pouring the rest of the coffee away.

5- screw the top back on

6- turn your stove to max (this is going to take a few minutes depending on the power of your stove and the quantity of water). Mine is a 2 show model, and my stove is one of those with the red light. It takes about 5 minutes to make a coffee.

but not to worry, you can warm up the milk and froth it in the meantime.

I use the microwave to warm up liquids. I've tried using the stove before and I found it to be a waste of time and energy (microwave was designed to heat up water!). A whole cup can get pretty comfortably hot in 1 minute.

8- fill up a cup leaving space for the coffee with milk or chocolate milk (i like to put chocolate milk so because the quantity of sugar is perfect for me)

9- heat in microwave for 1min

10- use a frother and beat that up (there are several grades of frother and my friend uses one that warms up the milk as it froths it but its way more expensive). Mine is a 8$ one from Home outfitters

- the coffee would be nearly done at this point, you can hear it migrate to the top compartment. then the sound of migration ends... this means there's no more water at the bottom. time to take it off the fire.

11- in the video, you'll see that i was lazy and poured the coffee into the frothed milk. This kills a bit of the froth. You should pour the coffee into a cup, and the milk and froth into it.

- and there you have it, a moka latte!

- you can melt in some dark chocolate chips and have a dark moka, or mint chocolate, or just plain water to make an Americano, of whatever you want!

And best thing about this, it costs about 40c to make this coffee, tops. The coffee itself is real cheap, about 20c, the milk would cost you roughly 20c (assuming 200ml from a 2L carton at 2$).

--> really nice to enjoy one on your own balcony watching traffic on a sunday morning. After all, you're paying for that mortgage/rent!


espresso ground coffee from superstore (5$)
Frother from Home outfitters (8$)


You can buy a traditional stovetop espresso maker for about 20$ here.

http://www.amazon.com/Bialetti-Express-3-Cup-Stovetop-Espresso/dp/B0000CF3Q6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335937194&sr=8-3
Espresso maker from an Italian store (20$)

How to display Hello World with C#

Well, this is where it begins, C#, a HelloWorld console and Windows form application.

Microsoft has made it super easy for anybody to start programming, but this is really just the beginning. You'll find tons of sweet additions in C#, my favorite is Intellisense, which accurately predicts what I'm going to be typing simply based on a few letters and history of what I've typed. Intellisense was present in Microsoft Visual C++ but really not to this extent, it was pretty much only useful when you had a class with functions or members.

Here's a video that should guide you through how to get started in C#. It gets more interesting later on but let's start by getting our feet wet.

I like to have a recipe for everything, that way its easier to tell where it went downhill. Watch the video to guide you through.

1- Start Microsoft Visual Studio (whichever version, it'll be the same for now). I'm using the Ultimate edition.
2- Click on New Project
3- Select Windows Console Application
4- Type in a name in the application name: I will type HelloWorldConsole
5- Type Console.WriteLine("Hello World!!!") in the main function
6- Press F5 to start debugging or Ctrl-F5 for start without debugging which will keep the screen on after the application exits.

And there you have it. Your own first program. Play around with what you can type in there as well as format just to confirm to yourself that you are in control of C#... for now.





Console applications are fun for beginners but if you want to do something commercial, it's just not awesome enough. I'd go to at least Windows form for something acceptable and make money or make someone happy. Here's a tutorial on how to do Hello World using Windows Form with C#. As you can see, its very simple and that's thanks to Microsoft (i'm a big fan).

And what's hot now are phone apps. Windows also has its own phone and the beauty of it is that the language used to program it is C#!!! Which means that all the stuff you learn from Windows Forms is reusable here, plus more. I've programmed iPhone-iPad apps before and I'll tell you, the submission procedure is so much simpler with Windows phone that I was considering switching over to Windows phone only.

Here's a hello world video on windows phone, hope you enjoy how simple it is and go from there!