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  • Brined Turkey

    The best way to cook a turkey is to brine it first; brining results in a more tender, juicy turkey and also adds spice flavours to the meat. Don’t worry about a salty taste, and be careful with cooking time; a brined turkey cooks a little faster than a plain one.

    Our recipe is sufficient to brine a 5.5kg (12lb) turkey. Smaller birds can be brined in the same solution, but for larger turkeys you will need to scale up the amount of water and salt.

    The most important step is to find a suitable container; it needs to be big enough to contain the turkey in the brine, and fit into your fridge. We use a plastic storage container from Ikea, but any clean strong plastic or stainless steel container is OK.

    Ingredients

    • 5.5kg Turkey, giblets removed
    • 6 litres of cold water
    • 150g salt (use ordinary table salt, not the more expensive sea salt)
    • 1 large orange
    • 1 large onion, quartered
    • 2 tbsp black pepper corns, cracked
    • 1 tbsp sichuan peppercorns
    • 2 sticks of cinnamon bark
    • 8 star aniseed
    • 4 dried bay leaves1 tbsp goji berries
    • 200g sugar
    • 4 tbsp honey
    • 4 tsp five spice powder
    • 4 cloves of garlic, crushed with the flat of a knife
    • 5cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
    • A handful of fresh parsley, including stalks, roughly chopped

    for the glaze:

    • 75g butter
    • 3 tablespoons honey

    Method

    Pour the water into your container, add the salt, sugar and honey and stir to dissolve. Stir in the five spice powder. Place the turkey into the brine. Halve and squeeze the orange into the brine, drop in the squeezed shell and the onion quarters. Drop the rest of the spices, garlic, ginger and parsley into the brine around the turkey.

    You may find it better to break up the cinnamon bark into smaller pieces. Make sure that the turkey is submerged in the brine. Top up with cold water if not. You may
    need to put an upturned plate on the top of the turkey to weigh it down in the brine.

    If your container has a cover, put this on. Put your container onto the bottom
    shelf of your fridge, being careful to not slop the brine everywhere! Brine your turkey for up to two days before cooking, or at least overnight. Take the
    turkey out of the brine 2 hours before you need to start cooking, and wipe it dry with kitchen paper. make sure you have tipped the brine out of the cavity. Throw the brine away, it cannot be reused.

    Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius / gas mark 6. Melt the butter and mix with the honey to make your marinade. Brush the turkey all over with the marinade, but remember you will need to brush more on during cooking. Cook for 2.5 hours for a 5.5kg (12lb) turkey. See the table below for other sizes. Note that the marinade will make the skin both dark and crispy.

    It is best to use a meat thermometer pushed into the thickest part of the meat; it should read a minimum of 75 degrees Celsius when the turkey is cooked. If you don’t have a thermometer, push a skewer or sharp knife into the thickest part of knee joint and make sure juices run clear; if not carry on cooking for another 20 minutes and try again. Cover with foil and rest the meat for up to one hour before
    carving.

    Cooking times:

    Weight of Turkey Cooking Time
    2.25kg/5lb 1 ½ hours
    4.5kg/10lb 2 hours
    5.5kg/12lb 2 ½ hours
    7.5kg/17lb 3 hours
    9kg/20lb 3 ½ hours

       

  • Error 500 applying upgrades in Magento Downloader

    Inspecting the error log, the 500 error embedded in the downloader console is the result of a php timeout:

    mod_fcgid: read data timeout in 45 seconds, referer: https://www.<omitted>
(110)Connection timed out: mod_fcgid: ap_pass_brigade failed in  handle_request_ipc function, referer: https://www.

    According to Plesk Article ID: 127621, FcgidIOTimeout should be the same as PHP’s max_execution_time unless the latter is set to 0.

    From Plesk 12.5 control panel for a domain use Apache & nginx Settings to add the following directive to both http and https, which increases the FcgidIOTimeout from 45 to 120 seconds :

    <IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    FcgidIOTimeout 120
</IfModule>

    Simply OK this and re-run the Magento Downloader again.

    Note: at the time of writing the Magneto Connect site is very slow, which may be the cause of this timeout.

  • What is consuming my inodes?

    To find how many inodes are in use & available, you would issue the command:

    df -i

    but to find out the top ten directories consuming inodes issue the following from root:

    for i in `ls -1A | grep -v "\.\./" | grep -v "\./"`; do echo "`find $i | sort -u | wc -l` $i"; done | sort -rn | head -10

  • Fajita Spice Mix

    Ingredients

    • 1 tbsp cornflour
    • 1 tsp medium chilli powder
    • 2 tsp smoked paprika
    • 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
    • 1 tsp cumin powder
    • 1 tsp salt
    • 1 tsp sugar

    Method

    Mix all ingredients together, stir fry chicken & vegetables until part cooked, then sprinkle over spice mix and finish cooking.

  • After upgrade to Magento Downloader to 1.9.2 no upgrades are available

    Following an upgrade to Magento Downloader 1.9.2 I found that the Magento Connect (Downloader) “check for upgrades” returned nothing (quickly) and the mage upgrade community [package name] gave the following error:
    Error:
    upgrade: Package community/[package name] failed: Unknown cipher in list: TLSv1
    This is caused by the OpenSSL library being out of date, so either update it, or comment out line 377 in downloader/lib/Mage/HTTP/Client/Curl.php like so:
    //$this->curlOption(CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST, ‘TLSv1’)

    Adendum: for 1.9.3.2 and 1.9.3.3 the fix is different:

    in /downloader/lib/Mage/HTTP/Client/Curl.php line 371

    change:
    protected function makeRequest($method, $uri, $params = array(), $isAuthorizationRequired = false, $https = true)

    to:
    protected function makeRequest($method, $uri, $params = array(), $isAuthorizationRequired = false, $https = false)

    (Changing the connection method to HTTP in Magento Connect Manager does NOT work.)
    If the downloader is itself updated, this “fix” will need to be repeated.

  • Outlook Send/Receive error: 0x800CCC13 on Windows 10

    I got Send/Receive error: 0x800CCC13 on one IMAP mailbox when doing a Send & Receive on a fresh Windows 10 installation. The full error text is:
    Error message: ‘Robert – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13): ‘Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem’
    Which is a little odd, when other IMAP mailboxes are working OK as part of the same Send & Receive.
    The solution is a system file scan & repair; from the command prompt run
    sfc /scannow
    Which just takes a few minutes to complete and resolves the problem.

  • Can’t receive Gmail messages on Plesk domains

    Google’s response to the Poodle email vulnerability seems to be to send using TLS where the server is properly configured, but queue messages where it isn’t. So to enable email receipt we need to tell qmail SMTP which encryption to use, and provide it with a valid certificate.

    Plesk supports SSL certificates, obviously, but also has a self-certified certificate for use with the control panel. This can be used for SMTP.

    Either for qmail:
    cp /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem /var/qmail/control/servercert.pem
    or Postfix:
    cp /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem /etc/postfix/postfix_default.pem

    IMAP:
    cp /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem /usr/share/imapd.pem
    POP3:
    cp /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem /usr/share/pop3d.pem

    And to make sure the certificate is used, create the TLS cipher rule files:
    openssl ciphers > /var/qmail/control/tlsserverciphers
    openssl ciphers > /var/qmail/control/tlsclientciphers

    (servercert.pem tlsserverciphers and tlsclientciphers were all empty in my installation)

    It may also be worth checking the integrity of the qmail installation:
    /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mchk

  • Finding big files in Unix

    Assuming Perl is running on the server, this is quite neat:
    find / -mount -noleaf -type f -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lhSr | perl -ne '/(\S+\s+){4}(\S+)\s+(\S+\s+){3}(.*)/ and printf("%*s %s\n",7,$2.":",$4);'

  • Adding mcrypt to Plesk 12

    The php mcrypt module, required by Magento, wasn’t present on our Plesk VPS. Here’s how to add it from SSH:

    (1) Add the repository. For example, to add EPEL:
    rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

    (2) Install the php-mcrypt module:
    yum install php-mcrypt

  • Increasing the Plesk maximum message size

    Large attachments may prevent a Plesk mail server from receiving email; the default is 2-MB which is a little small for Office users exchanging documents.
    To change this:
    Login to Plesk
    Under Server Management, Click “Tools & Settings”
    Under Mail, Click “Mail Server Settings”
    Change the “Maximum message size” to a larger value, e.g. 25600 kilobytes.
    Click “OK”