"Mexican food is easy to make! All you need is toast and quotation marks!" - Wendy McClure

Okay, this recipe doesn't much resemble chiles rellenos, which is a Mexican stuffed chile dish. It is, however, in vaguely the same spirit flavor-wise, and it's very easy to make. I developed it after experimenting with a chiles rellenos casserole (Betty ( Read more... )

Pumpernickel bread - 1 lb loaf ( Read more... )

More car stuff on the Mercedes:

• Changed the oil, filter, and oil filter stem O-rings.
• Changed the suspension fluid and filter. The self-leveling suspension on this car continues to work very well in spite of having been run dry by the previous owner.
• Took apart the instrument cluster to try to figure out why the odometer sometimes cuts out. Didn't ( Read more... )

Mercedes hydraulic suspension fluid: ~$30/quart at the dealer ( Read more... )

Swapped out the fuel tank strainer on the Mercedes, today. The car had been acting starved for fuel at odd moments, and since I once ran out of fuel with 5 gallons still in the tank, I suspected a partially clogged strainer. This isn't an uncommon problem; everything from dirt to dead fungus ends up settled on the bottom of diesel tanks ( Read more... )

Today's automotive job was replacing the fuel cut-off valve on the Mercedes diesel. Due to the slightly baroque design of these cars, this is actually a vacuum-operated device attached to the injector pump; it has a hook on it that engages the fuel control mechanism in the pump, and pulls it to the cut-off position when the key is turned off. On ( Read more... )

Seriously pondering whether it's worth renewing my LJ paid membership. It seems like the site's been down more than it's been up for me, lately.

Decided to change the oil cooler seal on the '88 Cabriolet. This was purely preventative, but I had one fail catastrophically on my '89, and it was extremely unpleasant. All the oil dumped out onto the road in, I'd estimate, less than two miles. Ruined my whole morning ( Read more... )

Verity Stob, whose very British IT humor writing should probably be better known, has a recent post that's a lampoon of Open University. Naturally this mostly goes over the heads of Americans like me, but...there's one incredibly pithy nugget in there that I think bears repeating:Brutally summarised, Lehman says: as you code, you weld into your ( Read more... )

As those of you who read my journal may remember, the cheap VW Cabriolet I bought a while back originally had a bad speedometer. I solved this by yanking the instrument cluster out of an old Mk.1 Jetta at the junkyard and swapping the speedometer head over. I was left with the analog clock from the Jetta cluster, which I turned into a desktop ( Read more... )