Mille-Feuille

Another recipe where you can use puff pastry. For visualization, this video.

Pastry Cream Ingredients:

  • 500ml milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 4 yolks
  • 125g sugar
  • 75g plain flour
  • 50g butter
  • 1 ts vanilla paste
  • pinch of salt
  • glass sugar to cover the cream

Process:

  • In a pan, put the milk to boil. Add a bit of sugar and dont stir it!
  • In a bowl, mix eggs, yolks, sugar and vanilla. Then Add flour. Mix all well. Add a pinch of salt.
  • Just when the milk starts boiling, remove from the heat, and pour it bit a bit in the egg mix.
  • Return the mix to the pan, and dont stop stirring, this is the key for cooking the flour!
  • Keep stirring until the mix thickes up. You should see bubbles forming up.
  • Remove from the heat and add the butter. Mix until all combined.
  • Spread the cream in a clean tray, spread sugar on top so a crust doesnt form.
  • Cover with cling film and put into the fridge.

Baking pastry layers:

  • Pre-heat oven at 200C
  • Cut a baking paper with the shape of your baking tray.
  • In a lightly floured surface, roll out the puff pastry in a long rectangle like your tray using the paper mould.
  • Using the paper as a mould, trim the sides. Put the paper back in the tray and then put on top the pastry.
  • “Docker” the pastry with a fork.
  • Bake for 20 minutes or until golden.
  • Using another tray, place on top of the pastry and push it so the pastry keeps flat. Bake for another 15 minutes or so.
  • Remove from oven, remove top tray and check the pastry in golden brown and flat. Cool down in a rack before next step.
  • Using a paper mould (rectangle) cut three pieces from your pastry. Use a serrated knife and be careful.
  • Chop very finally left over pastry
  • Assembling time. Take the cream from the fridge, put it in a bowl and mix so takes a bit of room temperature. Using a piping bag, fill with one cup of cream. Using your hand on the bottom of the bag and dont put too much cream. Use the index finger to roll the bag in the nozzle before adding the cream.
  • Using one piece of pastry as the bottom layer, in the middle, make a line with the cream. Then two layer on top, and two bottom. Total 5 layers. Add another piece of pastry on top. Trim the sides of cream with a spatula or small knife, fill the pockets with cream.
  • Using the left over pastry crumbs, cover the cream sides with it.
  • Add the cream again in the middle pastry layer like in the bottom. One line in the middle, two top, two bottom. Add the final (be sure it is the best piece) pastry piece on top.
  • Again, trim the side of cream with a spatula or small knife, fill the pockets with cream.
  • With a shiver, spread glass sugar on top.

Ready to eat!

Doesnt look like in the video but it was tasty!

Sausage Roll / Eccles cake

Using the puff pastry recipe. We can do the following:

Sausage Roll ingredients:

  • 400g puff pastry
  • 450g sausage meat
  • salt, pepper, extra spices of your choice
  • 60g pickle, (Stilton cheese optional)
  • 1 egg beaten
  • sesame seeds

Process

  • pre-heat oven at 200C
  • mix meat, salt, pepper. Roll it a long shapped sausage.
  • Roll out pastry to the length of your sausage. And 3-4 times wider. Trim edges to make it neat.
  • Spread the sausage nearly in the middle of the pastry. Add the pickle lenghtway the sausage (and cheese). Roll the pastry on top the meat until enclosed, you will have some left over pastry. Leave only aprox 3cm, trim the rest (but dont throw it away!)
  • With a fork (and a bit of flour), flatten the edge so it is enclosed properly.
  • Eggwash the pastry, then score in diagonals (both directions).
  • Spread some sesame seeds on top. Cut in 4 pieces with a sharp knife.
  • Put the rolls in a tray with baking paper.
  • Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until golden-brown. If you have a thermometer, the meat should reach 165C to be cooked (I think).

This will make 4 big sausage rolls

Eccles cakes ingredients:

  • 15g butter
  • 75g dried currants
  • 1 tbs of mixed peel fruit
  • 25g demenara sugar
  • 1/2 ts mixed spice
  • 250g puff pastry
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tbs sugar

Process:

  • pre-heat oven at 220C
  • in a small sauce pan, over medium heat, melt butter. Add currant, mixed peel, demenara sugar and spice. Stir until sugar is disolved and fruit properly coated. Remove from heat.
  • Put a bit of flour in a work surface and roll out the pastry to 1/2cm thick. Using a circle mould (10-13cm diameter), cut as many pieces as you can.
  • Put the fruit mix in the middle of each circle. Wash with a bit of water the edges. Pull all edges together in the middle like a parcel. Pinch it so it doesnt open. Invent the parcel and flatten it with slap of your hand.
  • Brush each cake with eggwash and sprinkle with sugar.
  • Score each cake with 3 cuts. Put them in a tray with baking paper.
  • Bake for 15 minutes or until golden.

Quite tasty everything!

Puff Pastry

This is a good example for a visualization of the process:

Ingredients:

  • 250g plain flour
  • 5g salt
  • 135ml cold water + squeeze a bit of lemon
  • 200g cold butter

Process:

  • Mix flour and salt in a bowl
  • Gradually add water, mixing with one hand. Mix all together.
  • Put the dough in a work surface. And knead (bull method) with both hands, until smooth. Aprox 10-15 minutes depending on conditions.
  • Put the dough back in the bowl, cover and leave it rest.
  • We are going to make a parcel with the butter. Take a baking sheet paper and fold it in 3 parts horizontally, then do the same thing vertically. Once you unfold the paper, you will have 9 “squares”. Put the butter in the middle square, and fold again the paper until you have a parcel. With a rolling pin, flatten the butter until forms an uniform square thanks to the baking paper.
  • Take your dough, with a rolling pin and using the butter parcel as a reference, spread the though to make a rectangle 1cm wider in each side compared with the butter and in double in length (plus 1cm extra on top and bottom). The goal is to enclose the butter with the dough.
  • Once you have your dough spread out, put the butter (be sure is cold), in the top part, use the bottom part to cover the dough. Be sure the butter is covered by the four sides.
  • With a bit of flour in your rolling pin, start to press down the pastry to squash the butter gently.
  • Roll the pastry into rectangle lenthways.
  • Folding process. Take the top 1/3 of the dough and fold it down the center. Now take the remaining bottom half and fold it up. Turn the pastry 90 grades like you have a book (the seam on the left). Repeat the process, spread lengthways and fold as book. This is a double fold.
  • Rest 30 minutes in the fridge (wrap in cling film) (important the butter is firm and never melts!) and do another double fold.
  • Again 30 minutes rest and another double fold.

Now the dough is ready for action. You can keep in the fridge for at least one week before you use it. Always keep it wrapped properly in cling film.

Dune4: God Emperor of Dune

I had low expectations in this book after reading the third part. But I was surprised at the beginning about the new setup of the planet, Leto and new twists. The “philosophical” moment of Leto are a bit boring because I got to the point I dont know what he is talking about but I liked when he mentioned Torquemada when discussing about religions. The end of the book wasn’t really great but I enjoyed it overall. Looking forwards for the next chapter!

Squid Ink Pasta

I had squid ink leftover and while on holidays I saw in a restaurant a dish of squid ink past that looked very good so I decided to try. And this video looked like a good recipe.

Ingredients for pasta:

  • 100g 0.0 flour
  • 1 free range egg
  • 1 tbs squid ink for pasta

Process for pasta:

  • In a crystal bowl, make a heap with the flour and then a hole in the middle where you crack the egg and add the ink
  • With a fork start mixing the egg with the flour from inside the circle to the outside.
  • In a work surface, cover it if you can with baking paper, and knead the dough. Keep in mind this can stain your surface kitchen and/or your hands.
  • Knead until smooth. Dont add flour.
  • Cover the dough with film and let it rest for 30 minutes
  • Rolling the pasta manually is quite hard. Use a rolling spin and flour. Try to flat as much as you can the dough.
  • Once it is spread enough, with a shark knife try to make spaguetties.
  • With plenty of flour to avoid to dry out, leave the pasta in a tray.

Very thick pasta 🙁

Ingredients for sauce

  • 1 can of tomate sauce
  • 1 onion chopped
  • 1-2 gloves of garlic
  • drizzle of white wine
  • 2 tbs squid ink
  • 400g frozen squid

Process for sauce

  • In a hot pan with a gulp of olive oil, cook the onions
  • Add the minced garlic and cook with onions. Avoid burning them!
  • Add squid. Cook it through!
  • Add a splash of wine
  • Add the tomate sauce and stir
  • In a pan with boiling water, put the pasta for 90sec.
  • Add squid ink to the tomate sauce and mix
  • Add the pasta and a bit of pasta water in the tomate sauce
  • Mix all well.
  • Ready to serve!

To be honest, my pasta was too thick 🙁 but it was tasty enough. I dont cook homemade pasta too often so maybe it is one of the reasons. I dont want to buy another machine just for pasta though.

Anyway, it was nice to try!

Granola Bar

I was looking for a homemade snack bar and this video with a good one.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup of nuts, chopped (any type)
  • 2 cups of oats
  • 1 cup of tahini
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 1 tbs of vanilla paste
  • 1/2 cup of coconut shreds
  • 1/4 cup of cranberries or peel fruit (optional)

Process:

  • Prepare a small tray with baking paper
  • Mix tahini, maple and vanilla in a bowl
  • Add oats, nuts, coconut and cranberries. Mix all well
  • Pour mix in tray, spread it evenly.
  • Chill in fridge for 1-2h (better freezer)

To be honest my first attempt was quite bad as I didnt have enough tahini.

The second one was a bit better but doesnt look very “solid” like in the video. I think I need to try the freezer.

Tastes good and is not very sweet. Doesn’t feel like chewing sugar.

Essentialism

This is a book about “simplifying” your life, removing what is not necessary and focus in the important. These are nice words but actually very difficult to accomplish nowadays. I have read several book that are quite related to this subject, like “indistractable”, “drive”,”deep work”, “flow”, “atomic habits”, etc. Focus in “less is better”. If you dont put a limit, somebody will do it for you

For me, I am struggling in the “Tech” side. I want to learn so many things that at the end of the day/week/months/years I notice I haven’t reached anywhere. I have hundreds of tabs open in my browser with things I want to read “soon”. Something similar happens with recipes, I have so many pieces of magazines, videos and pics in my phone, that I feel overwhelmed. At least I am focus in my climbing (getting fitter), baking (bread!)/cooking and reading.

The author explains the process to become an Essentialist as three phases:

Explore:

  • Create space. It is good to be bored. Read old books. Meaning.
  • Play: Sir Ken Robinson
  • Sleep: Protect the most important asset, you!
  • Select: Hell yeah or no. Trade-offs. Good to Great (book).

Eliminate

  • clarify: cleanup the wardrobe
  • dare: say “no”
  • uncommit: sunk cost, endowment effect, fear of missing out
  • edit: options, condense
  • limit: you can pay a price for setting boundaries BUT boundaries are freedom!

Execute:

  • Buffer: add 50% in your planning. extreme preparation
  • Substract
  • Progress: repeat, repeat
  • flow: create routines

This is the typical book that I put in my stack of good reads, to read again at some point so I can refresh concepts because I forget things. Even after finishing it a couple of days ago, I got the feeling that I have forgotten most of it. And in this case, I gave away the book so I am even struggling to get my notes/thoughts here 🙂

Pandas

This is something I have heard about in the past but never used. So this week, as finally decided to write a script to help me to find the peers of flapping ports, learned about pandas from first time. I used another script as “inspiration” and after seeing it was using pandas, I decided to read a bit about it and give it a go.

The main type is the DataFrame. In my head, pandas is just a library to deal with CSV, spreadsheets, etc like when you use a program like libreoffice. And this page, gave me the hints for creating the query I wanted to make.

So at the end I have my very basic script but saves me time logging to each device and find the peer port.

Of course, there are different ways to tackle this problem, but in my environment, the source of truth for links is in a file. You could have that info in the port description too, or in a database, etc.

$ python3 flapping-peer.py -f flapping-list.txt

Result:
SW1 Ethernet1/1 SW2 Ethernet1/1
SW1 Ethernet1/4 SW2 Ethernet1/4

$  
$ cat flapping-list.txt 
SW1,Ethernet1/1
SW2,Ethernet1/4
$
$ cat patching-file.csv 
Site,Source Device,Source Interface,Destination Device,Destination Interface,Media
A,SW1,Ethernet1/1,SW2,Ethernet1/1,SMF
A,SW1,Ethernet1/2,SW2,Ethernet1/2,SMF
A,SW1,Ethernet1/3,SW2,Ethernet1/3,SMF
A,SW1,Ethernet1/4,SW2,Ethernet1/4,SMF
A,SW1,Ethernet1/5,SW2,Ethernet1/5,SMF
$

TCP Asymmetric

I got escalated an issue recently that had caused several outages and needed an urgent fix.

For different reasons, we had asymmetric routing in SITE-A. The normal flow is the green arrow. During the asymmetric routing, the flow is the red line. Routing wise, things should work. BUT, we have firewalls in the path. The firewalls were configured to allow asymmetric connections (I was told). As far as I could see in the config and logs, nothing was dropped in the firewalls during the issue.

So first thing, I fixed the asymmetric routing so it didnt happen again. I took me a while to come up with the solution (and it was quite simple) as I had to understand properly the routing before and during the issue. The diagram is quite simplified at the end of the day.

So during the maintenance window when I applied the fix for the asymmetric routing, I managed to take some traces in the firewalls, as I was trying to understand where the traffic was dropped/lost during the asymmetric scenario. As well, I was not very familiar with several parts of the network and the monitoring, I didnt know which links where already tapped or not. Once I was happy with the routing fix, I tried to take a look at the traces. At high level, I could see the return traffic leaving FW1 and leaving DC1-SW1. Based on that, I started to think that the firewalls were fine…..

In another maintenance, I tried to take more logs in different part of the network and I could see clearly the traffic reaching A-SW1. As I ran of time and missed to tap some links, I couldnt carry on.

So based on the second maintenance, the issue had to be inside SITE-A. Somehow it didnt make sense. I checked I didnt have uRPF enabled. The rest was pure L2 so it couldnt see the L3…

So in the third maintenance, I got all my debugging tools to verify that any network kit was dropping the traffic in SITE-A…. and it was useless. I realized that I could do a tcpdump in the client IP1 i was using for testing and I could see some return traffic!!!!

So, I was just socked. I didnt get it. It didnt make sense.

Somehow, I reviewed the tcp captures I was doing in each interface of both firewalls. I was trying to get to basics.

I was assuming the TCP handshake was completed properly. After paying a bit of attention to the client logs… I could see the TCP handshake completed. And I could see the HTTP GET getting to and leaving DC2-FW…. so why the server IP2 was not answering!!!!???

So back to the tcp handshake and firewall captures, I was comparing step by step. Somehow, I missed that the TCP ACK from client IP2 was reaching DC2-FW…. but it was not leaving DC2-FW!!!! even worse, the HTTP GET it was actually crossing the DC2-FW !!!

SLAP IN THE FACE!!!

This is the TCP handshake. This is networking 101…..

The TCP state-machine in client and server during the asymmetric scenario

So I was asumming that because the client was sending HTTP get, the tcp handshake was completed in both ends!!!!

It didnt make sense why I was seeing TCP SYN-ACK retransmissions from the server IP1…. BECAUSE the TCP ACK from client IP2 never reached.

For that reason server IP2 never answered the HTTP GET, because from its end the tcp hanshake was not completed.

I banged my head several times on the table. I “saw” this during the first maintenance window when I took the tcpdump in the firewalls BUT I didnt pay attention to the basic details.

I trusted too much to see a wireshark trace because it is more visual and shows more info but the clues were all the time in the tcpdump from the firewalls that I didnt bother to pay full attention.

At least, I found out where and why the connections failed during the asymmetric routing scenario. A firewall upgrade did the job.

So all fixed.

Lessons learned:

  • without proper foundation, you can’t build knowledge (tcp handshake state in client and server)
  • when things dont make sense, get back to basics (tcp handshake)
  • get the most of the tools at hand (tcpdump – PSH packets were the HTTP GET !!!!)

Sourdough Focaccia (II)

I tried some time ago sourdough focaccia but I wasnt really happy with the result and somehow found this video and decided to try again.

Ingredients:

  • 320g water
  • 100g sourdough starter
  • 400g strong white flour
  • 15g olive oil
  • 8g salt
  • 15g oil + 15g water
  • toppings: sliced onion, cherry tomatoes and slice green/black olives
  • salt, pepper, herbs

Process

  • Add the active starter to the water, mix well
  • Add flour and oil, mix a bit.
  • Add salt and mix well.
  • Cover it and let it rest for 30 minutes.
  • Make 1 fold
  • Cover and let it rest again for 30 minutes
  • Make 1 fold
  • Cover and let it rest for 2-3h.
  • Make a “coil” fold
  • Cover and let it rest in the fridge overnight (12-14h)
  • Take the dough out of the fridge. On a lightly dusted table top, shape the dough, trying to keep as much air inside (most difficult part for me)
  • Oil a pan and put the dough on it. Let is rise for 3h
  • Pre-heat oven at 230C
  • Mix oil + water. Pour on the dough and with clean hands, make pockets with your fingers.
  • Fill the pockets with your toppings (onion, tomatoes and olives)
  • Add some salt, pepper and herbs of your choice (oregano, basil, rosemary, etc)
  • Bake for 25 minutes or till the top is crispy at 230C.
  • Remove from oven and let it cool down

This is the result!

whole foccacia

sliced foccacia

It was very tasty, spongy and moist. Not as much open crumb like the video but really happy with the result!