Monthly Archives: August 2008

My version of chicken marsala

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The background behind this post is important I guess. I went on holidays with Tara and her family earlier this year (for her sisters wedding) to the USA. We booked various hotels in different areas for the 15 days or so that we were going for. Tara is my girlfriend whom I’m going out with now for over a year.

While in the US we visited some of her relatives and we spent quite a bit of time in her aunt Tereasa’ house. Now Taz had given her fair warning that I’m fairly picky when it comes to food (those of you that know me well, know how bad I am!!) so she was all set for meat and chips. However while there she made this absolutely stunning dish called “Chicken Marsala” and I had seriously never tasted chicken as good before.

So when we came back I kept thinking about this great meal I had while I was away (I had many other great meals in her house, but this one sticks out the most) so I had to go about trying to make it.

First off, my only issue was really finding Marsala Wine. Thankfully O’Briens in Carlow had it stocked, a bottle cost me 12.99 which to me was a bit steep. But I got it and off I went.

I’ve tried it 4 times now and I hadn’t been able to successfully “make it the right way”, that was until today. I’ve got the correct measures down (be they a bit unaccurate for sharing) and I had the most beautiful chicken marsala again tonight. Tara concurs that it was excellent (not just said so, she ate the lot!).

The following receipe was what makes an excellent chicken Marsala (for 2 or 3, depending on what you serve with it)

  1. 3-4 chicken breasts, thinly sliced.
  2. real butter (10gramms) and olive oil (smallest amount will do)
  3. flour
  4. mushrooms
  5. chicken stock cubes, knorr seem good
  6. half a cup of Marsala Wine *
  7. 1 cup of chicken stock *
  8. A wide deep frying pan (*) or skillet

The process:

  • Put 1.5 chicken stock cubes into a cup, fill with boiling water and stir, this is now your chicken stock.
  • Cover a baking tray with flour, add salt and pepper and then cover all the pieces of chicken in flour. Heat the pan, after putting some of the butter and olive oil in, to the point just before the butter starts smoking (this is crucial) and then put the chicken on to it for approx 2-3 mins either side
  • Take the chicken off and take the pan off of the heat for a minute. Put the chicken somewhere to keep it warm and where you can gather the juices from for later.
  • Put the pan back on the heat and place the mushrooms onto it (obviously you can chop them what ever way you prefer) and cook them for 5-6 minutes or until their own moisture/juice starts to show.
  • Immediately after the mushrooms own juices starting to show add the chicken stock. You’ll now cook the mushrooms for around 5 minutes on a medium heat in the stock.
  • After 5 or so minutes have elapsed turn the heat down and now put the chicken back in, let the whole lot simmer for around 2-3 minutes and then add in the half a cup of marsala wine.
  • Let this now simmer for 10 minutes on a low heat

* the measurements for the stock and wine I’ve used are because my frying pan is wide but the sides are not very high and it can’t support a lot of sauce/juices. Ideally use a pan with high sides and double up on these measurements so that you end up with quite a bit of the juices to place over your veg, potatoes or rice.

You can now serve the dinner to 2-3 people.

Enjoy this, I’d like to welcome comments on this post if anyone tries it out :)

Blacknight launch new shared hosting system

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Blacknight are going to launch their new shared hosting platform tomorrow August 7th 2008. We’ve been waiting to do this for close to 10 months now when we put development into overdrive.

What to expect?

  1. More of everything
  2. The basic package has 120 databases (30 Mysql4, 30 Mysql5, 30 Ms SQL 2005 and 30 Postgresql)
  3. You can use MS SQL 2005 on linux now, wow?
  4. The system is partially virtualised, we don’t need to install servers anymore. We simply tell our provisioning system to create a new VE (virtual environment) and apply a set of templates to it that match the shared hosting system.
  5. PHP 4 and PHP 5 are available on both linux and windows
  6. Complete DNS control, complete control over your domain and it’s name server settings
  7. Manage your own spam and antivirus settings
  8. Blacknight application vault with loads of apps you all have looked for :-)
  9. Single login gets you access to everything. i.e. once your in, you can manage your plesk vps, your shared hosting account, register domains, manage your payments, add a new credit card etc.
  10. You get access to our new site builder that comes with over 250 templates and 100s of new features.
  11. You can see the system defined mime types, you can also setup your own, awesome eh?
  12. CGI sub section of the control panel tells you the paths to perl, python and sendmail and also what permissions to set on your files.
  13. Theres a log manager where you can login and view your logs via ftp
  14. Manage multiple ftp users without issue
  15. @Mail webmail system
  16. Advanced backup system that lets the user manage their backups.

It’s a complete suite of tools that anyone who has used any other control panel will fall in love with immediately.Where is this new system, well to get a look at it you’ll need to head over to http://dev.blacknight.ie and purchase a domain or a hosting package.

Our entry level plan has 10GB of disk space and 100GB of bandwidth, thats more than our existing plans put together almost!

last but not last a bit of information on the technology. We’ve deployed clustered Qmail + LDAP for e-mail. In front of this we’ve got load balancers that’ll send you to the least busy mail server when you use pop or smtp. We’re fully support pops, smtps and imaps. Behind the mail servers we’re using Solaris nfs servers attached directly to an EMC Clarion CX300 SAN unit providing us with the ultimate in enterprise storage and performance. Each linux web server will be a VPS. The benifit of this is ease of deployment, we can move VPS servers to less busy hardware nodes seemlessly and with minimal downtime (soon with no downtime!!). The back end provisioning system is comprised of two Parallels products, one is POA and the other is PBA, Parallels Operations Automation and Parallels Business Automation. Thats a split 40/60 for provisioning and billing. The billing end manages domain provisioning and a few other things.