refried.org

We had a nice Easter. We went to a neighbor's house for dinner and had some great food. I love to bake, but have not attempted bread much. I think I've made bread from scratch less than a dozen times - ever, and never Yeast bread. When I was growing up, my mom made wonderful bread and so I'm familiar with how much work goes into it. I was searching my favorite website for cooking www.allrecipes.com a few weeks before Easter looking for something new to try. I found a great looking bread that I wanted to try, but it was a yeast bread, and I was afraid it wouldn't come out well. So, I made a 'practice' loaf on Thursday and it came out well. So, I made another one on Sunday to take for Easter dinner. Here is a picture of it.

On Saturday, St. Patrick's Day, we had Mark and Ilene over for dinner. We made the traditional corned beef and cabbage, with one addition. I also made green potato pancakes. That's right, green potato pancakes and no, I didn't use food coloring. That would be cheating.

Green Potato Pancakes

• A few large potatoes
• One Egg
• 1-2 tablespoons flour
• 3 scallions
• Salt to taste

I've been using our smoothie maker to mix up the batter. I don't use the spout, but the stick is a must. Peel, wash, and dice the potatoes into 1/2 inch chunks. Add the potatoes, egg, and flour to the blender. Blend on low until the chunks are gone. Chop the scallions into inch long bits and add to the blender until they're well blended.

Fry in a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Grease the pan with some butter then pour in about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake. Cook until golden brown on the bottom then flip and brown the other side.

Yesterday I attended a TCZPUG meeting. That's the Twin Cities Zope and Python Users Group for those who don't recognize the acronym [*]. It's a small group that hasn't met very frequently. It's also very Zope centric. Most people in the group use Zope and Plone. I get the feeling that few people in the group actually dig into Python all that much.

This meeting was just an excuse to meet up with other members and work on our pet projects. While I was there I dug a little into the newforms-admin branch of Django. I have some ideas about how I would like to make the admin more extendable. I'd like to make applications the focus more than models. To do that I want to make it really easy to hook in new admin views that are more workflow centric than model centric.

I also gave an ad-hoc presentation on Django. It certainly wasn't a professional or practiced presentation. I highlighted models, urlconf, views and templates. But as I talked about Django I got the sense that I was the only person there that really likes to write Python code. Zope and Plone are really through-the-web platforms where Django forces you to write Python code.