Smashing Pumpkin Soup

Here is my former Canadian neighbour’s recipe for Smashing Pumpkin Soup.

Ingredients

• 4 potatoes or 2 sweet potatoes (which are better for you)
• 1 onion
• 2 carrots
• some spinach
• 1 half or 1 quarter Japanese pumpkin
• 1 pack of tofu
• lots of fresh ginger
• 2 cloves of garlic
• chicken or vegetable bouillon
• milk (to be used at the blending stage)

Directions

Boil all ingredients in bouillon until they are soft enough to go in the blender, then scoop them up, blend them with the milk to make them soupy, and put them back in the soup. Keep boiling until the ginger taste permeates the mixture. If it’s not gingery enough, add more!

Makes A LOT of soup, so be sure to have a big pot handy, or decrease the portions of the ingredients. You can add or delete ingredients as you see fit. The resulting soup should be orange. If you skimp on the pumpkin or carrots, it may come out a rather unappealing green due to the spinach. But if you don’t mind the look of it, never mind about that.

 

Recommended Reading: Your Friends’ Blogs

I don’t have any books to recommend right now, but I do have a recommendation about an easy way to keep up with your friends’ blogs and websites.

If you use an online “site aggregator” like Google Reader, you can subscribe to your friends’ websites and blogs and be notified whenever new content is published. This saves you the time of having to go to each of your friends’ sites one-by-one and check if they have added anything new.

Google Reader uses RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep track of your favourite blogs. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, here is an excellent video to help you understand why RSS is your new best friend.

more about "Video: RSS in Plain English | Common …", posted with vodpod

Once you have signed up for a Google account, you can set yourself up with Google Reader and then every time you see an RSS logo (which looks like this) on a site that you like, you can click on it and add it to your Reader.

 

Broken Links in Email?

If you send a long link to someone by email, sometimes the receiver’s email client breaks the line after a certain number of characters, thereby breaking the link. If it looks like your link won’t fit on a single line, consider making a shorter link on the TinyURL site and sending that instead.

 

Someone Copied my Blog

Moments after I posted some articles about adding Picasa slideshows to websites, a rogue blogger stole my content and posted it VERBATIM to his own blog. I am certain that this was an automated attack and that it was nothing personal. (It was too fast to be otherwise.) I checked some of the other posts on his blog and they all originated from other people’s wordpress.com blogs.

I reported the site to the host and I am now waiting for their response.

If this kind of thing happens to you, have a look at this article: How to Deal with Online Plagiarism: When People Copy your Blog Articles Without Permission.

 

How to Embed Picasa Web Album Slideshows into WordPress.com Blogs

As an addendum to the post that I just wrote about adding a slideshow to your website, I would like to add some more information about adding a Picasa slideshow to a site that is hosted on http://www.wordpress.com.

It is not possible to embed Picasa slideshows into websites that are hosted on wordpress.com servers, but there is a workaround designed by VodPod. (Note that you can embed slideshows from other sources.)

See the VodPod Blog for instructions on how to get around this problem.