BRETT-REID.COM

My girlfriend Jackie started WeddingSA just over 4 years ago. The site is a wedding directory focussing on the Western Cape. WeddingSA also allows couples to sign up and create their own custom webpages. The site has seen a lot of growth over the past 2 years and Jackie decided to expand to other provinces due to demand.

The code behind WeddingSA has been through 2 rewrites and is about to go through it’s 3rd. It’s currently sitting on a hybrid version of the Active Ice framework (PHP4). I have started rebuilding the site on the Zend Framework (PHP5). The upgrade to include provinces took about 2 hours in total with deployment done in 2 mins. I like to think with ZF it could have been even quicker. Jackie is now able to add provinces and then link vendors to provinces. The menu rebuilds itself based on vendors and only shows categories with vendors. If there are no vendors in Gauteng it will no longer show up in the dropdown. Vendors can be linked to multiple provinces so it can scale quite nicely.

I am looking forward to the rewrite and will post once I’m done with that (in 5 months hehe)

I was thinking about things I could cook for dinner and Lamb Shanks came to mind. My dads friend Gilby Samassa used to make a killer lamb shank. He used to grill them in a pizza oven which, unfortunately, I didn’t own So I checked some recipes online. I couldn’t find one I liked but I got the general idea of what’s involved in the cooking process: Create bed of flavour, add liquid, simmer for 2-3 hours. Everything else is just a variation on that framework.

Mine is: Lamb Shanks in port/red wine with rosemary/thyme served on a bed of mash.

First job is to get some nice fat lamb shanks from your local supermarket or butcher. It’s usually 1 shank per person but if you’re a big eater go for 2. Have the size of your biggest pot in mind though Ingredients you’ll need are: