dresese

How to win two salamis

Last weekend, San Mateo had it's Festa Italiana, a festival with music and Italian food, and a very small parade.

This took place about a block away from where I live. I could see a large section of it from my balcony, which was cool. I went down there and ate some good Italian food, includng an Italian dish called a "rollini", which is some rolled up pasta with tomato sauce and pancetta (from Bella Mangiata's booth). It was quite tasty.

There was a game where you paid a dollar, and got to try to hit some salami's hanging on the wall with a piece of potato. If you hit them, you get a salami. I watched people try this, and they always threw like they were throwing a baseball. They almost always missed. I got up there and paid my dollar. I thought I would like to win, so probably there is a better way to do this. It occured to me that the baseball throw was a throw designed for speed, not accuracy. So what I did was throw it as one would throw a dart. This technique worked quite well. Both my throws hit a salami, so now I have two salamis.

Now I have to figure out the best way to eat the salami's, a food item I don't normally eat. My coworker that recently spent some time in Italy informed me they eat it in slices, with cheese. That's it, very simple. Mmmmm, 50 cent salamis...

Kibo on Hope

When I heard that Bob Hope was dead, my first thought was wondering if Kibo's hopelessly outdated website would get updated (he previously had a Bob Hope life detector on the site). The answer: yes, it is updated. But not by much.

Tales of Culinary Disaster

The Straight Dope Message Board has a couple of threads on stories of culinary disasters. A great read. I didn't realize everyone else hated Miracle Whip as much as I do.

Chutney

For lunch today, my coworkers and I went to Chutney, a Pakistani / Indian place right across from Shalimar's in San Francisco's Tenderloin area.

Those that have eaten at Shalimar's probably are staring in disbelief at the preceding sentence. It amazes me too. But there is a reason that we went to the Tenderloin and didn't go to Shalimar's. We heard that Chutney was very good, and that was from people that have been to and appreciate Shalimar's. So we decided we should try it out.

When we arrived there, it had the same great smoky atmosphere that Shalimar's does. Some in our party thought it even smelled better then Shalimar's but I disagree. Their menu was almost identical to Shalimar's, and even had some of the same specials such as Nihari and Brain Masala. There was one interesting difference - a lamb curry with bitter melon (Kareyla Gosht, or something like that). We got that, some lamb tandoori, a Chicken Vindaloo (another thing they don't have at Shalimar's), egglplant (bhegan bharta), spinach and cheese (saag paneer) and some plain and onion naan.

The food was good, and full of flavor. Not as spicy as it should have been, though. The tandoori was especially nice, and had a great smokey taste. The Chicken Vindaloo was in fact spicy, but not too spicy. It's been a while since I've eaten that. The other dishes were similarly quite tasty, except for the somewhat plain saag paneer. That dish was just a puree, I could have taken some home to feed my babies.

The consensus was, it was good, but not as good as Shalimars. That probably will be the last time I go to the Tenderloin and not eat at Shalimars. I've learned my lesson.

True grit

And you thought the guy sawing off his own arm was extreme. An Indian man was apparently partially beheaded in a driving accident. He didn't lose his cool, though. He held his head in place with a thin towel, and drove himself to several doctors until he found one willing to treat him.

Wow.

(Found on Plastic.com)

Encyclopedia of Hindu Mythology

I came across this encyclopedia of Hindu mythology today while browsing. It's quite useful for looking up the various gods, deities, mythic figures, etc.

Dinner at Koi Palace

This past week I turned 30 years old. To celebrate, I went out for dinner with my wife and kids, and my wife's cousin Adriane and her family. We went to Koi Palace, a restaurant well known in the Bay Area for it's great dim sum. I've had their dim sum many times, and it really is good, although lately they've stopped pushing around dumplings on the carts - you have to order them all off the menu (or perhaps it's just because the last few times I've gone have been on weekday lunches). The dim sum is beyond popular - I've had to wait two hours in one case just to get seated. But I've never eaten a regular meal there, so I decided that this birthday I'd eat there.

We had four dishes: A double-boiled pigeon soup, a scallion and ginger crab (from the tank), steamed chicken with ginger sauce, beef with enoki mushrooms, and "garlic flavored pea vines". The soup had a deep, complex flavor, while still being light. The crab had a delicious sauce, which was a trifle salty, and the crab was fresh and tasty. The beef with enoki mushrooms had a great beefy flavor, the meat was a perfect balance between tenderness and body, and the mushrooms were a nice textural contrast. The "pea vines", were quite tasty, perfectly seasoned, crunchy, and full of flavor.

The place was expensive, though. Each of those dishes cost more than $10. But I paid, and I was happy. It was a good meal. And I learned it gets almost as crowded for dinner as it does for lunch. If you want to go there, get there before 6:30 pm.

Raskin on IDEs

Jef Raskin has an interesting new article about the usability of IDEs. I think he has some excellent points. This is something I am concerned with, and I have no patience for IDEs that are painful to use.

I use emacs. I think emacs solves most of the problems he complains about. It's not at all mouse dependent - quite the opposite really. He mentions the difficulty of wrapping comments. With emacs, just press Ctrl-J when typing to go to a new line - if your current line is commented, your new line will be too. Or type out a long comment and press Meta-Q. Very, very easy. And navigation is a snap, as well.

I've been thinking of these issues recently, since I have been trying out eclipse, a good open source IDE for Java. I felt a little bit guilty about trying it, since I use and contribute to the JDEE project, which is the Java Development Environment for Emacs. However, I think I've learned a bit about what makes each one good.

Eclipse is good because first of all, I strongly prefer antialiased text, and emacs on X11 doesn't have it, and will likely never have it. Eclipse is written in Java, which on Linux uses antialiasing in it's GUI text (at least on my computer it is). Second, it can do great refactoring, making some difficult tasks easy. Third, it can instantly show you your mistakes, and it can usually correct them automatically. I find using eclipse is great if you are doing heavy modifications to the code. Also, the debugger is wonderful.

On the downside, eclipse is slow. It has to do a lot of stuff. Every change you make, every typing you do will cause a little mini-compile to happen so it knows if the code is in a broken state, and where any errors are. Emacs doesn't do it, so typing is fast. And because emacs is a great all-around editor, there's no way any tool like Eclipse can compete with the editing capabilities of emacs (not to mention the flexibility). Plus, and this is a big problem, navigating to different classes in Eclipse is painful. I don't know how to do it without using the mouse. In emacs I have several choices - I can open the file as normal (via the keyboard, which due to tab-completion of paths is very quick), or I can use tag navigation to quickly jump to a class. This is really crucial; jumping around to different files is something that we all do many times a day, every day.

The integration of so many tools into emacs is also a big win for it. I can quickly jump from a Java file to just about any other kind of file, and the right thing happens. I use emacs to read mail, so I can cut and paste code snippets without leaving my app. In X11 this is great, since cut and paste is generally unreliable.

So for the time being, I'm sticking with emacs. Perhaps for heavy code modifications, I might go back to Eclipse, but that's not something that happens every day. I may use Eclipse for debugging though. The JDEE debugger still needs some work. Hopefully I can make some contributions to that area in the near future.

Homegrown tomatoes

This summer I've pledged to grow some tomatoes on my balcony. I'm not really an experienced gardener, so I can't say I really know what I'm doing. So I initially bought a Sungold cherry tomato plant (supposed to be very good) and put it in a standard herb pot. I later learned this was a mistake, and I should have put it in a big pot with a lot of soil. But it did well. I was encouraged, and so bought an heirloom striped pineapple tomato plant, and put it in a huge pot. But this one didn't do so well. It grew, but not too fast. The problem was that the soil did not retain water very well, it seemed to just flow through the soil and wind up below the pot. I've heard I should mulch, but I haven't had time yet to buy some. A third tomato plant was given to us by our friend Monica, who has several more at home.

That was all a month or two ago. Now the Sungold plant is doing well, but I now realize that there's no way I can use those for a recipe, since only one or two cherry tomatoes are ripe at any particular time. So they are pretty much just for tasting. I did taste one ripe one, and it was very delicious. Very sweet. If I had to do it again, I probably would buy four or five of those plants. My tomato plant that Monica gave us is doing well, with about 8 or so tomatoes on it, but nothing is ripe yet. My Striped Pineapple tomato plant is doing OK. There's no tomatoes yet, but there are some flowers that should yield a few tomatoes. All I ask for is a few.

Further investigations into frothing

I still have not been able to make a good cappuccino at work. A coworker who used to be a barrista was back in the office this week after six months in Italy. I asked him to see what he can do with the office espresso maker, a Jura x90. He put on the steam, and noticed immediately a few things. He said first of all, there was not as much steam as in the professional espresso machines. Also, the steam was not hot. He said that the steam should be so hot as to instantly burn you. Steam burns evidently come with learning the art of frothing milk. But the steam here was warm, not hot. Also, he said the steam didn't seem to have as much power as in the professional espresso machines. He tried to make some froth, and only could make what he described as "barely adequate" froth. It seems the machine just might not be adequate to manually froth up some milk.

I had previously tried the automatic frothing attachment. It does actually produce some OK froth. Not quite "microfoam", but not as bad as I get in many cafes. I think that with the right equipment, a manual froth could be much better.

In day to day work, I'm drinking espresso rather than cappuccino there days. The Jura x90 does produce some nice espresso. I put about half a teaspoon of sugar, and with the small amount of espresso it produces (it does a half shot by default) I get a nice sweet gulp of coffee. I think I've given up on cappuccino.

Guido comes to San Mateo

Guido von Rossum of Python fame is coming to San Mateo! I'm not sure if he'll be living here, but according to his announcement he'll be working at a company called Elemental located here. I dream that one day, I'll take him out to lunch...

Update on dried limes, cast iron seasoning

As I have previously written about, I've been on a quest to make Persian-style dried limes. It's a sort of silly quest: I've only eaten a dish with these dried limes in it a few times. I don't really even remember what they look like. But it's something interesting to do. Anyway, my dried limes I have now, according to my friend Farhang, are probably not quite correct. He says they should be "rock hard, light weight and dark brown colored." Mine are soft and pliable, like a raisin, not all that light, and very light colored. So it seems it was not a success. But I'm not going to throw away the limes, they probably are useful for something. And perhaps all I need to do is further dry it out, perhaps in the oven, for it to be like a Persian dried lime. What I need to do is to go to a Persian store and ask them how to do this thing.

On a more successful note, as I mentioned in another blog entry, I have discovered that seasoning cast-iron on a grill works very well. I had previously said I couldn't season my large pot, since it was too large for my grill. However, I discovered that I could remove the grating, and place it either right side up, or upside down on the coals, and have it pretty much covered, with just the handle sticking out. This has worked very well, and I just coat it with Crisco and leave it there until my grill cools down. I now have a completely black pot, perfectly seasoned. I did this again the next time I barbecued, since it can only help the seasoning, and doesn't waste the heat that the charcoal is giving out. I recommend it.

Dried lime outcome

I previously detailed my experiments in preserving lemons and drying limes. I have further news on the dried lime front. I had said that they all went bad, but that was not quite true. Two of them seemed to dry out and not rot. I supplemented that with some Mexican limes I got from the local carniceria, and they dried out fairly quickly when I put them on my balcony in the sun. One Mexican lime I left behind became hardened. I wonder if that is another form a drying. At any rate, here's a picture of what I have right now. I'm going to contact my friend Farhang to see if these limes look like the dried limes he knows. Or perhaps they need to further dry somehow, although I'm not sure if that is possible.