Food For Meagre Times

There is a hipster grocery shop just around the corner from where I live. So instead of doing the usual groceries, we decided to get a box of seasonal organic vegetables for the week, just to mix things up a little.

On top of that, we went a local Eastern European supermarket for some butchered pork bones, something you typically can’t get your hands on from a regular super-market chain.

The goal was to make some slowed-cooked bone stew that’s reminscient of “Bah Kut Teh”, a pork-rib stew, but without the traditional spices.

Pork bone stew was meant to be food of tough times, a dish of my ancestral past where meat wasn’t easily accessible and scraps were all the early Hokkien settlers to Singapore could afford.

While not meant to be a luxurious meal, the result was something surprisingly mouth-watering, with just the most basic of ingredients - potatoes, carrots, kale, some salt and vegetable stock to season. After a day of cooking, the meat was tender and melting off the bones, the broth, gelatinous and savoury.

Mmmmmmmm!

That was some tasty treat. I’d consider this a success, even though it was a real spur-of-the-moment experiment. Both The Girlfriend and I finished the remainder of the soup in one sitting, even though the portions were probably sufficient to feed 3 people.

Done Bash Hacking

I’m finally finished with altering my bash configuration to my satisfaction.

After days of tinkering, I’m believing that .inputrc was probably an antiquated means of setting keybindings, and decided to hive off into a sub-configuration file of .bash_profile and unset a majority of the default key-bindings.

After making tweaks to ensure that Spotlight and Mission Control on MacOS doesn’t interfere with the Ctrl key-bindings, and remapping the things I want with Alt instead, I re-bound all sorts of command line text manipulation controls, shortcuts for fzf, fasd and fd. I was then able to navigate to folders, and open files faster than a using a file-manager - a sure-sign that these tweaks are done right.

From this point on, it’s actually quite possible to accomplish all my common activities without leaving the terminal prompt, and I’m rather pleased with that result.