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recipe

Matthew's Best Turkey Ever

Posted Thu, 2009-11-26 20:49 by matthew

HAPPY AMERICAN THANKSGIVING!

This year we bought a fresh cage free turkey for American Thanksgiving. I chose to brine it and roast it wrapped in cheese cloth. It ended up being a ridiculously good bird - very moist and flavourful. It was so darn good, I thought I would write up the recipe I put together from several other recipes.

The Brine

BrineThe first step was to make a brine the morning before the day you plan on roasting the turkey. Brining a turkey is one of the best ways to produce and extraordinarily juicy and succulent meal.
  • 2 cups of kosher salt
  • 2 cups of sugar
  • 1 1/2 gallons of water
  • 1/2 gallon of orange juice
  • 4 bay leaves
  • 1 whole bulb of garlic
  • various herbs and spices
  • 2 teaspoons ground black pepper
  • 1 whole lemon

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Posted Sat, 2009-10-31 16:08 by matthew

Pumpkin CarvingEvery year I end up tossing the pumpkin seeds from our jack-o-lanterns. Elizabeth, at work took the seeds home from our company pumpkin carve-fest last Tuesday and toasted them up and brought them back to work for snacking. I had forgotten how yummy they can be. So, I dug up my own recipe from years ago.

In our case, we had four pumpkins to work with. This yielded 2.75 cups of seeds, so we'll have lots to snack on.

You need:
Pumpkin Seeds, Salt, Water, Olive oil

Preheat oven to 400°F.

"Using Drupal" by the Lullabots

Posted Sat, 2009-04-18 12:14 by matthew

pingVision hosts the Denver Boulder User Group meetups on the Second Wednesday of each month.  Over the last few meetups, Nate Haug has attended and on one occasion brought a few copies of Using Drupal which he distributed through a mini “name in hat” drawing.  I was one of the lucky winners.  I had been thumbing through one of the copies at work enough to know that I wanted a copy of my own – thanks Nate. 

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part VI, Finishing Up

Posted Thu, 2008-11-20 00:15 by matthew

Last but not least, we're going to look at:

  • Spam Control
  • XML Sitemap to help with search engine optimization
  • Setup Metatagging
  • Human Readable (and search engine readable) URLs
  • Fivestar rating on content
  • ServiceLinks to allow for social bookmarking

Spam Control

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part V, Buttoning things up

Posted Mon, 2008-11-17 23:49 by matthew

So far we have gathered our resources, blocked out the site, set up content types, and created some simple views to display that content. In this post, we'll look at:

  • Targetting a landing page
  • Basics of setting up a Google ad
  • Basic user permissions
  • Terms and Conditions

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part IV, A REALLY Basic Introduction to Views

Posted Tue, 2008-11-11 00:27 by matthew

After you have your content types set up, you can use Views to create custom pages and blocks.  In the case of TraumaAdoption.org we created a couple of pages and a few blocks with lists and pagers at the bottom.  This post won't cover more than just the basics of using Views.  Greg Knaddison did a great screencast on using Views.

The current version of Views has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you've learned the basics the amount of power to control outputs without being a developer is pretty significant.

views

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part III, Setting Up Content Types

Posted Wed, 2008-11-05 22:42 by matthew

The next step in setting up your site, is to create content types over and above any "out of the box" content types like blogs, pages, and forums. On TraumaAdoption we created:

  1. Book Reviews
  2. Offsite Resources
  3. Public Adoption Services

as custom content types using Content Construction Kit (CCK). The process is of creating a new content type is quite simple.

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part II, Blocking Your Site Out

Posted Mon, 2008-11-03 21:11 by matthew

Now that you have all your resources together and you have an instance of Drupal running, it is time to load up your your modules and your themes.

A) Set up your instance Go to your /sites/all directory. Create a modules and themes directory in /sites/all. Put the contrib modules into the modules folder and the themes that you downloaded into the themes folder.

A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part I, Gathering Your Resources

Posted Sun, 2008-11-02 20:01 by matthew

Trauma Adoption Screen Shot Building a Drupal site can be done very quickly and inexpensively under the right circumstances. You need no programming or CSS skills and limited skills using FTP as long as you are willing to make compromises. Yesterday, my wife and I launched Trauma Adoption after about a week of effort in the evenings. There is still more to do on the site, but it was very quick to put together. First, some assumptions.

  1. We will use a contributed Drupal theme
  2. We will use only contributed Drupal modules
  3. The extent of "custom" work will extend to using CCK and Views
  4. We will live with what Drupal outputs out of the box

The steps...