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Trejo salsa

When my friend Ben was in town, I had made a batch of "Trejo Salsa" for my friend Jay's barbecue. This is a great salsa recipe, it's definitely the best salsa I've had. It was told to me by my friend Trejo, who I met at the University of Illinois when he was a professor. He grew up in Mexico City, and lived in San Diego for a while, and I believe it was in San Diego he discovered this recipe.

There's certain recipes that you know are good just by knowing the ingredients, and this is certainly one of them. Not that the ingredients are surprising in any way, in fact they are not surprising, and that's one of the great things about it. Like beer, you can make this great salsa with the bare minimum of 4 ingredients. Here's what you need:

Tomatoes: In the late summer, use fresh ones from the farmers market. Otherwise, use canned tomatoes. Not canned roma tomatoes, but canned normal tomatoes. Definitely don't use anything with basil in it. For one batch, I usually need a little bit less then 2 24 oz cans of tomatoes.
Peppers: I usually just use six jalapenos, with one or two poblanos. If you want it hotter, use more jalapenos and less poblanos. For milder, more poblanos and less jalapenos. For really hot, throw in a habanero, or a few serranos.
Cilantro: One bunch will do.
Onion: One onion, in fact just a small part of an onion is enough.

First, roast the peppers either by putting them on a barbecue (best), or on top of a griddle, or in an oven set to broil. The point is, just more or less blacken the entire thing. You don't need 100% charred skin, but go for a majority of char at least. Next, do not peel the peppers, but just chop them up, throwing away the stem part. I use a cuisinart for this, but if you don't, just chop them very fine. Put them in a bowl.

Next, chop up your tomatoes, again throwing away the stem part of the tomatoes (there's usually no stem, but there's a hard bit where the stem once attached to). Try and get rid of as much juice as possible. What I do these days is to chop it into a bowl, then drain the bowl of all juice. If you are using a cuisinart-type food processor, just throw in big chunks, otherwise chop it finely, and put it in the bowl. You should do this with about 3/4 of your tomatoes, because you want to adjust the heat. The more tomatoes you add, the milder it will be, so put in less tomatoes at first, then add more and more tomatoes, tasting as you go, until you reach the spiciness level you like.

Next chop up about half a bunch of cilantro. Chop it finely, and put it in.

Chop an onion coarsely, but we only want about a tablespoon full of onion. Too much onion can overwhelm the salsa, we want a scattering of onion, so that not every bite will have onion in it.

Finally, add salt to taste. I find most salsas have too little salt, so don't be afraid to add enough salt so that it tastes good.

You now have what I call "Trejo salsa".

Interesting Java news

A few interesting things happened in the Java world today. First off, some of the technologies coming in Java 1.5 are available by preview.

Also, JBoss is preparing a new version that uses aspect-oriented programming. JBoss's offers an explanation of their new aspect-oriented programming system. However, if you are using a different classloader (such as with Tomcat and it's .war files), you are out of luck, since JBoss needs to control the classloader. I need to play around with this stuff to see what is possible.

At the Russian store

In San Mateo, there's a good Russian grocery called "BZ Bee Market". I went there after my friend Vladimir gave me one of the most delicious snacks I've ever had, a piece of bread slathered heavily with butter, with salmon caviar on top. Actually, I've since learned it wasn't salmon caviar, but a similar Russian fish. I asked him where he got the caviar, and he said he got it at this Russian grocery, which is around 24th Ave and El Camino Real.

A few weeks later, I went there to check it out for myself. It had lots of Russian products, from eggplant caviar, to strange looking vacuum-packed fish. It had this type of caviar in three different grades. Vladimir had told me that the best kind are all whole eggs, and you know it's good when you can burst each egg against your teeth to release the juices. So I had to get the best kind. The little tub of caviar had "24.99" written on it, so I assumed it was $25. Expensive, but it's worth a try once. And it was a lot of caviar. I went to the counter, and the owner of the store rang it up as something like $17.50. The following conversation ensued, (imagine a Russian accent on the part of the owner):

Me: Oh, is it on sale?

Owner: Sale? What do you mean, sale?

Me: Well, it's not $24.99.

Owner (growing visibly annoyed): It is not on sale. What is this sale?

Eventually, the owner realized that the problem was I thought 24.99 was the prices, when it was actually the price per pound. I was happy and went away.

This weekend, I went back with my friend Ben and got some more stuff. This time I not only got caviar (the owner came up to me to point out that it was per pound, not the price written on it), but also a little "duck pate sausage", and a loaf of rye bread the owner recommended. I'm eating all that now for breakfast. The rye bread is very good. It's made from organic flour, and is dense without being heavy. The pate was not exactly a sausage except in shape. The caviar is wonderful as usual. I'm going to have to do this again.

Brian's Photolog

My friend Brian has just started a Photolog. He intends to put a picture up a day. I was initially very impressed. I thought that he must have a very interesting life to be able to take an interesting photo every day. I know if I tried that my pictures would be like "Here's me at home", "Here's me at home again", "Still home", "The balcony below me", "An interesting spot on the carpet", etc. But now I see the photo's can be from any time, he'll just post them at a rate of one per day. So how is it a log then?

But I find his pictures (so far, there are only two), to be interesting and well framed. I'll have to add it to my daily reading material. I'll also add it to the side frame sometime today.

Finished The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

I finally finished The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. It was quite good. What I really liked was the whole array of personalities to be found in the book: cabalists, mathematicians, knights, duchesses, pirates, and more. And besides the interesting stories, there was also a lot of interesting philisophical speculation. It's also quite a humorous book, although I hear that other translations then the one I read get that across better. One of the interesting parts is that one of the main stories is about the struggles of the Shiites to take control of the Baghdad Caliphate from the Sunnis. So in a sense, some of the tales are still taking place today.

After reading the whole thing, which is fairly long, I am even more impressed with the movie. It really is a great adaptation, which keeps the spirit, humor, and structure of the original, while throwing out about 75% of the stories, and in fact the purported explanation of why everything was happening. But the explanation wasn't the point, in fact, it really failed to explain a few things. Then again, so did the movie, so it's another evidence of how similar the two are besides the differences. The only problem with the movie is it made Busqueros a good guy, which is quite different from the book.

X-windows problem fixed

I fixed my X-windows problem by rebooting Linux. Yeah, I know that's not supposed to be necessary, but in my case it seemed to be. I'm guessing it was a hardware problem at some level, so I did a full, cold, reboot.

X-windows woes

I'm a bit miffed at Xfree86 lately. For some unknown reason, my work computer completely freezes every time I switch to a text terminal for x-windows. This is very annoying, especially since it's the kind of problem that's not easily solved. I could do it a week ago, so what changed? Perhaps it's just time for a complete computer shutdown and reboot.

A possible factor might be the desktop-switcher I have, that I use to switch between Windows and Linux. Sometimes the mouse gets completely messed up when switching back to Linux. This causes a bunch of annoyances, since the symptom of this is my mouse moving and clicking randomly, like some hyperactive two-year-old has taken control of your mouse. As you can imagine, that's a great way to screw up your desktop. The solution for this was for me to switch to text terminal (Ctrl-Alt-f1) and switch back to x-windows (Ctrl-Alt-f7). That reset the mouse nicely. Now I can't do that, so I'm really screwed.

Will Wright on Social Networks

Will Wright gave an interesting talk recently which touched on how advanced modeling and simulation techniques drives his work. He talks for a bit on social networks, which was my area of expertise at one point. Link via Valdis Krebs on the socnet mailing list. You can see the 9-11 hijackers social network on Valdis's website.

The quest for the perfect froth continues

I still am attempting to make perfect cappuccino froth. I try every day at work. It's difficult. We have Jura x90 machine, which only comes with an automatic frother. I refuse to automatically froth the milk, I think there's almost no way it can create the "microfoam" described here before. We, however, have a manual frother attachment, with a Pannarello wand. I didn't know that. I spend a few weeks trying to get good froth and failed miserably. The CTO of my company, a very smart guy (as CTO's tend to be), pointed out that this wand had holes on the sides as well as a large one on the bottom, and that this was designed to mix the milk and air in the wand (instead of in the cup). As I thought about it, he was right. It will probably make a lot of froth, but it won't make "perfect" froth, and by that I mean the microfoam you can see in the best cappuccinos.

So I pondered what to do, and realized I could take off the outer sleeve and it would turn into what is more or less an ordinary frother. This has been tried by several people, as I soon found out. Many people have complained about this accessory, some saying you can remove the sleeve to get good results, and other saying the inner part is useless.

I tried using the inner part and did not get good results. These days I usually start with a metal frothing pitcher half full of cold 2% milk. But I never could get a "whirlpool" effect, as is mentioned in the articles on how to create microfoam. My cappuccino's, I must say, blew. This morning I got a decent foam going by using about 1/3 or 1/4 of a pitcher, and letting the steam run a bit before stopping and starting again (the theory being that I need more pressure). I never got a whirlpool, but I sort of whirlpooled it myself.

But, that's not enough for me. I need to do it right. And even today's success is not close to the perfection I'm after. So I'm still investigating. Supposedly, people say, you need a larger quantity of milk to work with, but this seemed to work OK. But I still have hope. Some people have gotten great results in home machines, but I have yet to duplicate that and it's unclear whether they can even duplicate it. My quest continues.

Zelda

I finished Mario Sunshine this weekend. The ending was not all that difficult, although it did take me about 6 or 7 tries before I succeeded. I still have a lot of the game to finish, but much of it is very difficult. I'll return to it someday, but for now I have now purchased Zelda and have started playing it. I like it a lot. The graphics (which look like cell-shaded cartoons) are just incredible. It actually feels like you are playing a cartoon, like the old Dragon's Lair game. The cartoony graphics are a good move, since you can actually get much better graphics with this look, rather then meticulously trying to imitate reality. Right now I've just entered the Forbidden Fortress. But I think I'll go to sleep now.

Modern food

The Guardian newspaper has a special 3-part story on modern food. Part 1 is on the web now, and deals with the changing diet. While it clearly is slowly getting better from the 50's, which must be the low point in all forms of human culture, problems such as obesity and children getting adult-onset diabetes are on the rise. As they point out, healthy eating is only affordable for the wealthy. This is a great series, and although I pretty much knew most of this before, it really is a great summary and reminder, especially now that I have two baby daughters, whose future health I am of course concerned about.

Note that the site layout is a bit confusing. Reading all the parts in the Food section is the correct way to read this special.

Angel Eyes and the Elder Zoto

I have been reading Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I had previously seen the wonderful movie in the Castro theatre with my friend Greg. Recently I was reading Neil Gaiman's blog, and he mentioned the book. I figured a book which both Jerry Garcia and Neil Gaiman love has got to be pretty good, so I got it from the library.

I am certainly not dissapointed. The book is incredible, both humorous, witty, sexy, and intellectual. What surprised me is the elder Zoto's story, part of which bears a remarkable resemblence to the first two scenes with Angel Eyes in Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Whether Leone was aware of this work I don't know, but the similarities are quite striking.

I wrote up a post on the Sergio Leone forums observing this, and quoting the passage of interest. I'm curious is anyone else has noticed this.

Pictures from Shalimars

I love Shalimars. It's a well known Pakistani restuarant in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco. It's a wonderful hole-in-the-wall type restuarant, with an open kitchen and tandoori smoke ambiance. I've been there before many times, and have taken my parents there. In fact, a picture I have on the web for that gets a few hits a day from people that have searched for "pakistani food pictures". But it's not a good picture to show Pakistani food. I feel bad that people are not finding what they want at my site. So I decided to go back to Shalimars and take some good ones. Here they are: a dish of saag and paneer (I forget the actual name of the dish), mixed vegetables, bhegan bharta (eggplant), bhuna gosht (Shalimar's amazingly good lamb curry), and brain masala. Click on the pictures to enlarge.

Further frothing articles

My quest for the perfect froth continues. I'm now able to get OK froth, but I still need to improve to be satisfied. David Schomer, of Espresso Vivace in Seattle, has a page on espresso and cappuccino tips. Among other things, there is a good article on milk texturing for cappuccino, which is a good summary of the 20+ page article I linked to previously in this blog. If I was opening up a cafe, this would be my bible.

50 Best Restaurants

The 50 best restaurants in the world, via Sauté Wednesday. I've eaten at two of them, the French Laundry (which is, according to this list, the best restaurant in the world), and Chez Panisse (#12). I gotta say, that's pretty good for a fairly regular guy who is not rich and does not travel. I've eaten at the French Laundry twice now, and it truly is wonderful. So is Chez Panisse, but the larger portions there mean you don't get the wonderful variety you get at the French Laundry. I gotta go back.

In other restaurant news, a few folks from work and I went to Portrero Hill today and ate at Baraka, a fairly new restaurant. It was a French-Moroccan cuisine. The food was excellent, I had a rabbit tagine that was truly delicious. It was one of those dishes that has enormous taste and wonderful harmonious flavors.

X2

To watch movies these days requires that I leave the apartment after the kids are sleeping and see at around 9:30. This means I'll probably get back a bit an hour or later my normal bedtime, which means that I only want to watch movies I'm sure I'll like.

Although I used to read many comics, including a few issues of X-Men, and many issues of Wolverine (which I liked much better), I was never really into the X-Men. It was a bit typical action-comic stuff, nothing very interesting to me. But the review of this movie have been fairly positive. I especially like Ebert's review on Ebert & Roeper, where he observed that the powers of the characters vary wildly. One has the power to kill everyone on the planet, while another has X-Acto knives coming out of his knuckles. Another good quote from his online review: "What would happen if Pyro and Iceman went head to head? I visualize the two of them in a pool of hot water."

So I was in the mood for a fun action movie, so I went yesterday to go see it. I won't go into a long review here, but it was quite entertaining. Like everyone has been saying, it is indeed better than the first one. But you have to have seen the first one, or else you'll probably be completely lost. There's one scene I find a bit puzzling. Near the very end, Magneto flies up around Cerebrus 2, and rearranges all the panels on the wall with the power of his mind. Um, why did he do that?

Bay Area escargot

It turns out the snails we have in the SF Bay Area are the same variety as the one so prized by the French. SF Gate's Urban Animal column has details on how to cleanse their systems, cook, and eat them. Yum! I would definitely like to try this, but my wife won't let me.

Garlic fries

My company had an event on Wednesday where we went to Pacific Bell Park to see the Giants play the Chicago Cubs. It was a good time, and it was the second time I've been to Pac Bell Park, which is quite nice. I took the opportunity to sample some of the Gilroy Garlic Fries I heard so much about. There was a huge line, which is always a good sign. It took me one and half innings to get these things. But I didn't think they were all that good. They were soggy, and the garlic was raw. It was so strong it made my beer taste bitter after I ate it. I think I still smell of garlic. So now you know. Stay away from the garlic fries.

Bush comes to Silicon Valley

President Bush visited Silicon Valley today. I find it amusing that of all the places he could have visited, he chose a defense contractor, United Defense Industries. One of the few places he could find a warm reception. If he went to a more typical Silicon Valley haunt, like SGI, or Sun, he would be shunned. I'd like to think he'd get booed out of the theatre, but geeks tend not be so vocal about their political beliefs.

Of course, it's ironic that he said that he knows how Silicon Valley is hurting to United Defense Industries, who undoubtedly is doing quite well thanks to Bush's policies. He knows how Silicon Valley is hurting, but he doesn't go to anyplace that is actually hurt. Well, I guess the smiling faces and loud cheers are more important to him then facing the realities of the valley.

Protesters were present outside, of course. The pictures aren't up, but I'm sure that by tomorrow basetree.com will have them, since I know Eric went down there this morning.