Tim Cheung

Beef and Guiness pie!

There’s something therapeutic about cooking (when you’re not hungry.) This recipe takes time and a little patience.

Recipe:

Beef Guinness Filling

• 1kg Chuck/Casserole steak (cheap beef cut) cut into 2cm cubes
• 4 medium onions - cut into chunks
• 3 carrots - cut into chunks
• 2 sticks celery (optional) - cut into chunks
• Thyme
• 3 gloves garlic - crushed
• 2 cups of Guinness
• 2 cups of beef stock
• 2 tbsp of plain flour

1. In a hot large pot, brown the steak, add salt and pepper - get some good brown bits on it. Remove from pot to the side.
2. Cook the onions with olive oil over a medium/low heat for 30 mins or until brown and caramelised.
3. Add 4 sprigs of thyme, garlic.
4. Turn up the heat, and add the flour, stir for 3 minutes.
5. Add the carrots (and celery), cook until they sweat.
6. Add a cup of Guinness
7. Re-add the beef
8. Wait for it to boil
9. Add the rest of the Guinness and the beef stock.
10. Return to the boil, then turn down the heat to simmer.
11. Drink some Guinness and relax for 2-3 hours or until it looks like pie filling, stirring the pot every 30 minutes.
12. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
13. Remove from heat, allow to cool

Prepare pie cases

Pie cases:

• Shortcrust pastry (Frozen is ok)
• Puff pastry (Frozen is ok)
• 1 Egg
• bit of milk
• Spray oil
• Baking weights (rice/beans etc)

In your preferred tin, 4 x 3 large muffin tin works well (good pie/pastry ratio)

1. Preheat oven to 180C
2. Spray tin with oil
3. Cut and line tin with shortcrust pastry
4. Press the pastry into the moulds well
5. Prick the bases with fork
6. Trim the excess
7. Put baking paper over the pie cases and add baking weights
8. Blind bake for 10 mins
9. Remove baking weights and paper, bake for another 5mins
10. Remove from oven, add pie mixture
11. Cover with puff pastry
12. Brush with egg + milk wash mixture

13. Bake for 15-20minutes or until golden brown.

14. Enjoy the pie with your favourite sauce!

Puppetizing your SDE

In an effort to learn puppet from the ground up, I have started puppetizing my desktop.

Having worked in multiple development environments, many of the developers I’ve worked with love tearing down the SOE and installing their preferred unix flavour. After the base OS has been installed a bunch of standard tools need to be reinstalled from the SOE to allow developers to do their thing.

The great thing about puppet is it knows which distro you’re on, so it can easily install packages.

Since I’m on Ubuntu 12.04, here’s how I started

sudo apt-get install puppet
mkdir -p /etc/puppet/manifests
mkdir -p /etc/puppet/modules/

Create a file /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp containing the following - this is the entry point for puppet. 

import "nodes"

Create another file called /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes.pp containing:

node "<your hostname>.<your domain>" {
  include eclipse
}

Now create the module that will install eclipse in /etc/puppet/modules/eclipse/manifests/init.pp containing:

class eclipse {
  package { "eclipse":
    ensure => latest,
  }
}

This is just a really basic example, if you wanted to easily extend on this you can add more modules, create a roles.pp with a SOE class (where all the standard packages are included) then the only thing you need to add in your node.pp definition is

include soe

Add a line in your site.pp

import "roles"

The value is if you need standard packages across multiple nodes (desktops.)

You simply need to create a puppetmaster. Build a machine called puppet (recognizeable on the rest of the network.) On the puppetmaster install:

sudo apt-get install puppetmaster

Copy the manifests/modules onto the puppetmaster machine. In the nodes.pp

node default {
  include soe
}

Any node which isn’t explicitly defined gets picked up by default and any packages defined in the soe role are installed on it.

You now have an easy repeatable way to reinstall your SDE when you inadvertently blow it up.