Month: November 2010

Roasted Cranberry Sauce

One of Oregon’s food exports is the cranberry, accounting for about 5% of the nationwide harvest. This year, we bought some local cranberries to make into cranberry sauce. My first time ever. Historically, it was Dad’s job (which he relished a lot) to make the cranberry sauce. His was usually ground up with oranges, sugar and nuts. I always tried some, but never LOVED it. But when I saw Nick post a Roasted Cranberry Sauce recipe, I had to try it. Since I don’t have any Triple Sec around, I modified it a bit, but it turned out great. I made it last night so it could mellow in the fridge overnight before the big day. And I daresay, this is the best cranberry sauce I have ever had. Sorry, Dad.

Roasted Cranberry Sauce with Candied Pecans (Adapted from Macheesmo, where it was pretty heavily adapted from a Bon Appétit recipe)
Makes about 3 Cups, easy to double or triple though.

Cranberries:

  • 1 pound fresh cranberries
  • 1 Cup sugar
  • 3 Tablespoons neutral oil
  • 1 Tablespoon fresh rosemary, minced
  • 1 Teaspoon fresh thyme, minced (or 1/4 t. dried)
  • 1 Teaspoon fresh sage, minced (or 1/8 t. sage powder)

Sauce:

  • 1/8 Teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/3 Cup orange juice
  • 1/4 Cup sugar
  • 1/2 Cup currants (you could sub raisins, but chop them roughly so they aren’t so big)
  • Pinch of salt

Pecans:

  • 1 Cup pecans, roughly chopped
  • 2 Tablespoons water
  • 1/4 Cup sugar

Instructions:

  1. Mix cranberries, oil, 1 C. sugar, and herbs together in a bowl. Roast at 425°F for 20 minutes, stirring after 10 minutes.
  2. While cranberries are roasting, mix sauce ingredients in a medium sauce pan and simmer for 10 minutes.
  3. Remove cranberries from oven and add to the sauce pan. Simmer for another 2-3 minutes.
  4. While simmering the sauce, mix the pecan ingredients and spread on a baking sheet and roast for 8-10 minutes at 425°F.
  5. Remove nuts from the oven and stir as they cool. Place cooled pecans in an airtight container.
  6. Chill sauce overnight in fridge. Serve heated or chilled, topped with pecans.

Tame your bash history

I am a packrat, but I do like a bit of order. This makes maintaining my bash history difficult. There are some commands that I use frequently that seem to fill up my history file making it hard to keep some of the lesser used, yet very important commands in the history. Finally sick of the problem, I poured over the manpage for bash and found the section on HISTCONTROL. From the description there, I found that this along with HISTIGNORE, I can almost eliminate my problem of my bash history getting too full of stupid common commands.

I added this to my ~/.bash_profile:


export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:[bf]g:disown:cd:cd[ ]-:exit:^[ t]*"
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace:erasedups
export HISTFILESIZE=2000

Here is the snippet from the bash manual that corresponds to these controls:

       HISTCONTROL

              A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the  history

              list.   If  the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space

              character are not saved in the history list.  A value of  ignoredups  causes  lines

              matching  the  previous  history  entry  to not be saved.  A value of ignoreboth is

              shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups.  A value of erasedups causes all previous

              lines  matching  the  current  line to be removed from the history list before that

              line is saved.  Any value not in the above list  is  ignored.   If  HISTCONTROL  is

              unset,  or  does  not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are

              saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE.  The second and sub-

              sequent lines of a multi-line compound command are not tested, and are added to the

              history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.

       HISTFILESIZE

              The maximum number of lines contained in the history file.  When this  variable  is

              assigned a value, the history file is truncated, if necessary, by removing the old-

              est entries, to contain no more than that number of lines.  The  default  value  is

              500.   The  history  file  is  also truncated to this size after writing it when an

              interactive shell exits.

       HISTIGNORE

              A colon-separated list of patterns used to decide which  command  lines  should  be

              saved  on  the history list.  Each pattern is anchored at the beginning of the line

              and must match the complete line (no implicit `*' is appended).   Each  pattern  is

              tested  against the line after the checks specified by HISTCONTROL are applied.  In

              addition to the normal shell pattern matching characters, `&' matches the  previous

              history  line.   `&'  may  be  escaped  using a backslash; the backslash is removed

              before attempting a match.  The second and subsequent lines of  a  multi-line  com-

              pound  command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value

              of HISTIGNORE.