July 3, 2009 • No Comments
This recipe is for preparing "Somsa", which is also known as "Sambusa" in some parts of the world.
Like any other Uzbek family we like somsa a lot. While there is a way of making special flaky dough for somsa at home, lately I started using ready puff pastry. For someone with 2 kids, I do not have a luxury of time to take it the long way, which is to make layered dough myself. So from time to time, I do opt for easier solutions. By the way, some people might think that it is cheating to buy ready dough than to make it yourself. I personally think that if you can get your hands on quality pastry dough, there is nothing wrong with using it, especially if it saves you a lot of time. Sometime this week I will post a recipe of home made puff pastry dough, which is very easy to make.
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When I lived in Pittsburgh, I used to go to a Lebanese eatery called “Aladdin's”. I loved the place very much! The atmosphere, the food and the CAKES were amazing. Every time I went there, I would order Chicken Mishwi. But I never bothered asking them how they actually cooked this chicken to be so tender and absolutely delicious. Knowing the name of the dish, I searched for it for a long time. There wasn’t much about it except for one little recipe in Yahoo Q/A. I really had to strain my taste buds to exactly pin point what it is I ate at “Aladdin’s”. Now we eat this chicken every other week.
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July 2, 2009 • No Comments
I have about 6 thousand pictures to go through after my last trip. Haven't had much time this week to work on them, but hopefully I will be posting some great images this weekend and next week, so stay tuned!
July 1, 2009 • 3 Comments
Do you have seasonal foods, desserts and salads you like? A lot of my friends do. But it seems like I do not really have that kind of division. I can eat herring during the hottest summer day or I can make Kuksi and Go'ja in the middle of the stormy winter.
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June 29, 2009 • 2 Comments
Last night I spent about three hours working on my PC. The replacement drive from Western Digital finally arrived, but I'm definitely not happy about two things:
- The replacement drive is a "refurbished" drive and I expected WD to send a new one
- The drive was reported as "failed" and the RAID volume was degraded after about an hour of use
Why the heck did WD send me a refurbished drive, which is older than my dead drive and has a really old firmware, I don't know. Worst of all, if this refurbished drive is dead, I'm pretty much screwed, because the warranty on the refurbished drive expires much earlier. So much for the five year warranty…
After I created the RAID volume, partitioned the drive and installed 64 bit Windows Vista, I started having some strange performance issues. The system would freeze every once in a while and the hard drive light would stay on for 5-10 seconds, preventing me from being able to work on the PC. The mouse cursor would move, but everything else was not responding. I have never experienced such a weird "lag" before and I knew something was wrong. After installing SP1 and SP2 on Vista, I downloaded the Intel Matrix Storage driver and it immediately reported that the new drive was bad. I think the lag was happening because of a bad RAID controller driver, but I'm not 100% sure. I then deleted the RAID volume and recreated it, repartitioned the drive and reinstalled Windows again. This time, I installed the RAID drivers along with the chipset drivers first and things were working much smoother. I did not get any reports on drive failure and everything seems normal. I will do some heavy file writing later today and see if the new drive fails. I hope it does so that I could call WD and have them send me a new drive instead…god knows how these refurbished drives perform.
Obviously this time, I reconfigured RAID for RAID 1 (mirroring). Although I lost half of the space, I'm just not comfortable losing any kind of data anymore. And the downtime I had with my PC is also unacceptable. With RAID 1, if one of the drives fail, I can continue to work on the PC and replace the drive whenenever I get a replacement. The system will automatically copy everything into the new drive for redundancy, once a new drive is connected. I'm also planning to schedule routine backups and have a mirrorred external volume for my photography needs.
