Vista wierdness...

A PowerPoint file on an external drive that checks out clean as a whistle, and which opens without complaint on webster, my XT machine, will not allow itself to be copied from said drive onto hammer, my new machine that runs, unavoidably, Vista. Nor will Vista allow the copy operation to be terminated without leaving something(s) undone, nor will Vista thereupon allow the task manager to be run, nor will the keyboard respond after attempting to run the task manager.

Isn't it grand that Vista machines come with a physical switch that will shut down the operating system by cutting power to the hardware? I'm finding this switch to be an indispensable part of the Vista experience.

Cheers...

Cooking progress...

Galina and I were talking on the phone the other day and she was noting how hungry she was and how there wasn't anything to eat in the house, which touches on a pet theory of mine, to wit:

Whenever I've been of the opinion that "there's nothing to eat," a little low-level observation will uncover enough chow to feed a division of Chinese infantry. (Okay, a very small division of said infantry.) Invariably, though, it'll be food that requires effort to cook (rice, beans) and a little imagination to integrate (hearts of palm, smoked oysters).

In the course of my conversation with Galina, she mentioned that - among other things - yes, she had found the package of palak paneer (an Indian dish of creamed spinach and cheese), but that it was not to her liking.

So how, exactly, I managed to stumble across a recipe for paneer (the cheese) isn't exactly clear to me, but it was so utterly simple that I gave it a try last night.

The basic idea is to take whole milk and cause the curds to separate from the whey, and then rinse, squeeze, and compress the curds. I did this with a little more than a liter of whole milk yesterday, and am now the proud owner of a block of paneer that I intend to mix with some cooked spinach later with dinner (regrettably, I haven't either the fenugreek leaves or garam masala powder that the full-on recipe calls for, so I'll have to make do).

More news after the official taste test.

Cheers...