Well, it’s what I made from the remains of the Sunday dinner duck, with the addition of some fancy mushrooms, home-made naruto and more.
There’s no helpful tip, or anything like that, with this post, so you really shouldn’t
Duck and Mushroom ramen.
Can you cook Whitebait in an air fryer?
Can you cook Whitebait in an air fryer?
I just asked Google for the answer to this, and was annoyed to find that not only did there not seem to be an online answer, but there were an irritatingly large number of websites that posed the question, and then answered an entirely different one.
I gave up looking, and instead carried out a scientific experiment…
Here are some frozen little fishes…
Basically, I just heated the air fryer to its maximum, nominally 200°C, and threw the fishes in.
Five minutes seemed like a good guess for a cooking time. They were a bit underdone.
I set the timer for another five minutes, but pulled the fish out after four minutes, as I could hear some of them popping!
Here are five of them, nice and crispy on the outside, just before I ate them with tartare sauce.
So, now you know…
You CAN cook whitebait in an air fryer.
Was this useful?
Greenhouse computer improvement
New sensor!
I was using an MHT22, hanging on wires outside the case, for temperature readings on my greenhouse computer. I wasn’t happy with it, as it isn’t really compatible with the connections on the Raspberry Pi, and it has a habit of giving occasional absurd readings for no obvious reason.
So, I got myself a Microdia TEMPer-2, from PiHut, which plugs into a USB port. It has a fancy button on it, which activates the sending of text messages or emails, which I shall never be using. It also has an external plug in sensor, which is waterproof, a handy thing in a greenhouse!
It comes with a software mini-disc, which may possibly be useful if you’re using it on a PC, whatever they are. (Kidding. I’m writing this on my PC.) There are several web sites that tell you how to program Python to read from it, and it didn’t take me long to install the appropriate library on the greenhouse computer, and run the test command, sudo temper-poll. That worked, but then I ran into one of those programming blockages that can send you crazy. None of the various pieces of example code would work, mostly due to my inability to get the necessary permissions set correctly. It didn’t matter, I realised, after a lot of head scratching. Instead, I just used Python’s subprocess library to run the command that worked…
import subprocess
rv = str(subprocess.check_output(“sudo temper-poll”, shell=True))
# Split the string, keep fourth block, chop last five characters, make float.
temperature = float(rv.split()[4][:-5])
I’m hoping I won’t need to write any more software for the greenhouse for a while. The Raspberry Pi now monitors the temperature, switching the fan heater on if the temperature is below 5°C, uses its fish-eye camera to take pictures at set times for a time-lapse series, and takes a picture if it spots movement. Eventual improvements under consideration are a soil moisture detection sensor, automated watering… Nothing’s ever really finished, is it?
Proper Bechamel Sauce.
We keep an index book of recipes that we like, and rely on. It has several entries for Bechamel sauce, but only one of them can be the best.
There’s one in “The DIY Cook”, by Tim Hayward, and he’s really, really good, and so is his sauce…
There’s another, in Rick Stein’s “Secret France”, and do you know what? He’s really good as well, and the photography in his recent books is at pure genius level…
There are several other recipes…
But my favourite recipe for Bechamel Sauce is in an oldie but goodie, “Mediterranean Cooking” by Hilaire Walden. Fans, you are in luck. It’s still available, on Amazon, and it’s really cheap. This is so good that I haven’t bothered to see if Nigella does a good one. I bet she does, though…
So…
- A pint of milk
- 1⁄4 of an onion
- A chopped up carrot
- A fair bit of parsley
- At least one bay leaf
- 50g of unsalted butter
- 25g of plain flour
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- Salt and pepper, if you like
Bung the milk in a pan, with the onion, carrot, parsley, and bay, bring it gently to a boil, cover it, and turn off the heat. Beat the eggs in a jug, or some container you prefer.
Let those sit for 15 minutes, while you do this in another pan. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and let it cook for about a minute. A lot of cookery books tell you to cook it until it smells “biscuity”. I’ve never detected that smell from butter and flour, but if you can, that’s your guideline. I can’t smell saffron, let alone biscuity, so I ignore that instruction, and stir it until it is smooth.
Next, strain the milk into it, and throw the stuff in the strainer away, unless you can think of some arcane use for it.
Simmer the mixture for about five minutes, then take it off the heat, stir it like fury, while pouring in the beaten eggs as slowly as you can, tip it on top of your already partly cooked moussaka, or whatever other dish you are improving, and finish cooking it…
A Foodie Book Review
The thing is…
…when I started blogging, ooh, ages ago, it was going to be a food blog. And about computers. But suddenly, politics got a bit too intrusive in our lives, and I ended up writing quite a lot about the dreadful crooks who were messing up everything for everyone.
Don’t panic! I am not going to stop lambasting the criminal gang who have hijacked our country, and dragged us unwillingly out of the EU. [Yes, I can justify that claim, and probably will quite soon.]
But… but there are a lot of really good food blogs, mostly about restaurants I couldn’t afford to eat in, even if I wanted to eat their rather too fancy food. And how do you even begin to compete with Jay Rayner’s restaurant reviews, especially the magnificent ones where he really dislikes both the restaurant and the food?
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| Loaf Story A Love Letter to Bread |
And then, he only went and started writing about cookery books, a while before I had come up with the idea, and doing it really well, the monster. However, there’s this book that I chose as a birthday present for myself…
You know how some books are so good that you keep reading bits out to the significant other in the room? This book has so many bits like that, that the ordinary bits are hard to find.
It’s by Tim Hayward, whose “Food DIY” was the inspiration for a lot of my early blog posts about things like home made charcuterie. It’s a book with recipes, not a recipe book.
You might think that a book based on bread, with sections on toast, sandwiches, and various bread-based concoctions would be a bit ordinary. I took this to bed, to read myself to sleep. Bad mistake. I was laughing my head off for hours, fascinated also by the interesting footnotes. Yes, this book has footnotes. The author reveals his opinions about many food items that people have firm opinions on, like Marmite, salad cream – has to be Heinz, but he tells you how to make your own, baked beans – must be Heinz, and not the low fat, sugar, salt version. I suppose the fact that I agree with him on all these things explains in part why I think this is a truly great book.
Weird stuff in recipes, part 94.
Weird.
“After boiling for six to six and a half minutes, she cools them under cold water, peels, then fries in a pan filled a third of the way up with 160C sunflower oil (if you don’t have a thermometer, drop in a cube of bread and it should turn golden in 25-30 seconds).”
No. If you don’t have a thermometer, get a thermometer. They’re not expensive. Standing there, timing cubes of bread until one turns “golden” in the right time is silly.
Much improved Pi Assistant message reader.
The most important improvement is that this program now works… 😎
I just leave it running on the Pi Assistant, along with the Google provided assistant_library_with_button_demo.py program that I like to use, when I want to ask the Google Assistant something…
#!/usr/bin/python3
#
# Program to run on PiAssistant, to watch for newly arrived text files in
# /home/pi/Messages that it should speak, and delete them once it has.
import os
import paramiko
import time
path = “/home/pi/Messages/”
while True:
with os.scandir(path) as entries:
for entry in entries:
f = open(entry, “r”)
content = f.read()
f.close()
command = “python ~/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/voice/tts.py “” +
content + “” –lang en-GB –volume 10 –pitch 60 –speed 90″
os.system(command)
os.remove(path+entry.name)
# Now wait for tts.py to finish
command = “ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep “voice.tts” | wc -l”
while True:
ssh_stdin, ssh_stdout, ssh_stderr = ssh.exec_command(command)
answer = str(ssh_stdout.read())
if answer[2] == “0”:
break
time.sleep(0.5)
time.sleep(0.5)
And here is a program to run on a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers, as say_who.py, which will each send a message to the Pi Assistant, from each core of the processor. The assistant will read them out, separately. It does seem still to lose some messages, and if I work out why, I will let you know! I have been searching for simple example programs for Raspberry Pi clusters on the internet for ages, and have not found very many. Here’s my little gift…
#!/usr/bin/python3
from mpi4py import MPI
import os
import time
import subprocess as sp
# Attach to the cluster and find out who I am and what my rank is
comm = MPI.COMM_WORLD
my_rank = comm.Get_rank()
cluster_size = comm.Get_size()
my_host = os.popen(‘cat /etc/hostname’).read().strip()
# Make something for the assistant to say
speech = “Host is {} “.format(my_host)
speech = speech + “Rank {} “.format(my_rank)
# Make a unique filename and path
message = “/home/pi/” + my_host + str(my_rank)
+ time.strftime(“%H%M%S”) + “.txt”
# Put the speech in the file
fp = open(message,”x”)
fp.write(speech)
fp.close()
# Put a copy of the file on PiAssistant
cmd = “scp ” + message + ” pi@PiAssistant:/home/pi/Messages/”
sp.call(cmd,shell=True)
os.remove(message)
You would load that program on each of the Pi machines in your cluster, and then set it running using the command
mpiexec -n 16 -hostfile myhostfile python3 say_who.py
I’m assuming you have four Pi 3 machines in the cluster, hence the -n 16 parameter.
#RaspberryPi #Cluster #Python
A new program for Google Voice AIY
My earlier post, about a function that could send things to the Google AIY Raspberry Pi Assistant, and supposedly prevent more than one message being spoken at a time, was errmmm, wrong. That’s a technical term, that we programmers use.
I wrote a test program for my Pi cluster, whereby each of the sixteen cores would announce its hostname and rank. It’s not all that often you get the opportunity to use the word cacophony, but…
Basically, several processes could all think the Assistant was not busy, and they all sent messages in the time it took for the first message to start being spoken.
I spent a while looking at how to program mutual exclusivity for a resource, and was impressed by how complex such an apparently simple thing can get.
I decided that what was needed was a simple program, running on the Assistant, that would watch a directory, notice when a file to be spoken arrived, and speak the text in that file. Python makes it easy to deal with more than one file in the directory. Here’s what I wrote…
#!/usr/bin/python3
#
# Program to run on PiAssistant, to watch for newly arrived text files in
# /home/pi/Messages that it should speak, and delete them once it has.
import os
import time
path = “/home/pi/Messages/”
while True:
with os.scandir(path) as entries:
for entry in entries:
f = open(entry, “r”)
content = f.read()
f.close()
command = “python ~/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/voice/tts.py “” +
content + “” –lang en-GB –volume 10 –pitch 60 –speed 90″
os.system(command)
time.sleep(0.5)
os.remove(path+entry.name)
time.sleep(0.5)
When it spots one of more files in the Messages directory, it reads the text, and sends it out to be spoken. It can supposedly only do one file at a time, but… Still the cacophony!
#RaspberryPi #GoogleAIY #Python
How not to make a Twitter poll.
A Question of Saffron
Something or other reminded me recently that I can’t seem to detect the smell or taste of saffron. A lot of people love it, and write passionately about it. They’ve smelled it being brought to them even before the waiter came through the kitchen door. They say they’ve had it explode in their mouth. And I have missed out…
I wondered whether it was just me, or a fairly common thing, to be unable to smell and taste saffron, so I made a Twitter poll.
It was worded very poorly. To be fair to myself, at the time, I didn’t think about it at all carefully. The result was that it didn’t work the way I had expected.
A lot of people thought this was a question about whether saffron is wonderful, whether it is over-priced, or any of several possible interpretations. What I should have actually asked was “Can you smell and taste saffron”. Like this…
Of course, this isn’t good enough, either, as it discriminates against people who want to say that they can’t afford saffron, or have never heard of it. But the worst thing is, all we can tell from the result of the original poll is that about half the people who saw the poll, and answered it,
- like the smell of saffron
and about half of them
- think it is too expensive.
which actually tells us nothing at all about how many people can detect the taste and smell of saffron, and how many cannot.
Conclusion
Polls. We see lots of them quoted, and they are mostly about politics, and are supposed to let us know how people think about things that matter rather a lot more than whether one can detect saffron.
And a lot of those polls are even less well designed than mine. Some are even designed to make people draw the wrong conclusion, and it’s not easy to tell which ones those are, is it?
Using Google AIY voice.
Using Google AIY voice, part 94.
I wrote a useful function, so that any of my Raspberry Pi machines could send a string to the Google Assistant as a message to be spoken aloud, and it worked very well. Here it is…
# A function to send a string to PiAssistant for output as speech
import paramiko
ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.load_host_keys(filename=’/home/pi/.ssh/known_hosts’)
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
server, username, password = (‘PiAssistant’, ‘pi’, ‘your_password-goes_here’)
def say_this_with_assistant(say):
ssh.connect(server, username=username, password=password)
command = “python ~/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/voice/tts.py “” + say + “” –lang en-GB –volume 10 –pitch 60″
ssh.exec_command(command)
ssh.close()
return
print(“Starting…n”)
say_this_with_assistant(“Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. “)
print(“Finished.n”)
The snag occurs when two, or more, machines want to say something at the same time. The PiAssistant calmly multitasks, and says the strings at the same time, which sounds interesting, but tends to be incomprehensible. I hoped that voice/tts.py would have some way of letting other programs know whether it was busy, but it doesn’t. However, the low level Linux ps command can tell when voice/tts.py is running, so I added a check for that as a Paramiko command, like this…
# A function to send a string to PiAssistant for output as speech when it’s free
import paramiko
import time
ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.load_host_keys(filename=’/home/pi/.ssh/known_hosts’)
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
def say_when_free(say):
server, username, password = (‘PiAssistant’, ‘pi’, ‘your_password-goes_here‘)
ssh.connect(server, username=username, password=password)
command = “ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep “voice.tts” | wc -l”
while True:
ssh_stdin, ssh_stdout, ssh_stderr = ssh.exec_command(command)
answer = str(ssh_stdout.read())
if answer[2] == “0”:
break
command = “python ~/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/voice/tts.py “” + say + “” –lang en-GB –volume 10 –pitch 60″
ssh.exec_command(command)
ssh.close()
return
print(“Starting…n”)
say_when_free(“I waited until I was allowed to say this. “)
print(“Finished.n”)
I’m not going to claim any of this as properly written Python, the best way to do what is required, or even particularly original, but it does currently seem to be the only description of how to do this that’s on the internet.