When I’m at a Korean restaurant I try to get roasted corn (oksusu cha) or roasted barley (bori cha) tea. Both have a refreshing earthy flavor, without any caffeine. Even though it’s no longer summer over here, the teas are great chilled for the hot Californian days.
My version combines both corn and barley. The corn lends a sweetness that takes the edge off of the burnt taste of the roasted barley. (The barley’s aroma reminds me of Postum, a coffee substitute my grandmother used to drink.)
Homemade moussaka always seems to be a prolonged, multi-step process. But, oh so tasty. Especially since you can choose what goes in it! Some people love adding carrots and zucchini, but as much as I love those, I prefer to keep the texture simple with the eggplant and potatoes as the vegetable layers.
This year I’ve been watching the progress of TCHO, a new San Franciscan chocolate maker. We’re lucky there are four chocolate producers within the Bay Area: Ghiradelli, Scharffen Berger, Guittard, and now TCHO.
Ghiradelli isn’t bad, but their flavored varieties are somewhat uninspired and feel waxy-plasticy in the mouth. Scharffen Berger’s chocolate I find too burnt and acrid on its own, although it goes well in cooking, and their milk chocolate is deep and creamy (yum). Guittard has been a longtime favorite since childhood, for both eating out of hand and cooking. It’s no wonder that some of the best confectioners, such as Recchiuti, use Guittard in their truffles and treats!
Returning to TCHO, I ordered a sampler of their first three flavors: “Nutty,” “Fruity,” and “Chocolatey.” Wow, was it fun to taste-test these! The experience makes me look forward to their future batches and flavors, not to mention bigger production, at hopefully lower prices without lowering their standards. (It cost $15 for three 2-ounce samples.)
I’ve decided to limit this article to note and checklist (to-do) applications for the iPhone that are free. I might cover similar non-free productivity apps in a later entry, such as SplashShopper, or Yojimbo if BareBones release an iPhone app.
My list below might seem short, considering there are a multitude of to-do list apps. Since I need access to data previously stored on my Treo, I’ve ruled out apps which allow data entry on only the iPhone. The bulk of such apps are like that, with no way to import, at least when I went through the iTunes store in mid-August.
The three apps I reviewed depend on web services (i.e., network access via wifi or Edge/3G) to view data on the iPhone. I thought this odd until I realized that until mid-July, third-party apps could be only web apps. (Duh, unless jailbroken.) Because the network dependency, all of these require online registration and login.
Update (7 Nov 2008): Here’s a good article at Wired on the currently inadequate quality of note-taking apps.
Details follow after the jump.
We have a scrawny fig tree that bears fruit annually, but we rarely get more than a taste. I’ve often suspected birds as the culprits.
WENK. Wenk wenk wenk!
Now I have proof: young Western Scrub Jay bossing over backyard fig tree! Okay, only indirect proof, since none of the pictures actually showed the bird’s beak snorfing in the fruit. Though I certainly do see a lot of that. When looking through the lens I must’ve had the anthropomorphic desire (bad habit?) for the bird to look at me, rather than stuff its face. ;-P
Things of course get louder when a mockingbird comes over to eye the figs. Along with another adult jay (with an acorn in its mouth), yelling at the young one. “Hey! Stop with the fruit fast food, and help out with the food storage chores!”
Since I’m not huge fig fan, this fruit loss doesn’t disappoint me much. I view it more as end of summer avian entertainment. 😉
While making room in the freezer for this year’s batch of tomato sauce, I came upon several containers of same from previous years. What to do? Make soup!
It wasn’t until Simon made the homemade variety that I ever dared to touch tomato soup —after a childhood (and adulthood) of making wrinkled faces at the canned stuff. It is really much different. And in the spirit of being different, I wanted to try salmorejo, a very interesting type of gazpacho from Córdoba in Andalucía. It’s very creamy, without any milk products. The magic comes from leftover bread and copious amounts of olive oil.
The Search for iPhone applications Has Begun! First up is replacing the Palm Memos (notes) and checklist tools. While these are usually labeled as productivity apps, I really don’t need full-blown project management, like with a Getting Things Done (GTD) app. Nor do I need to-do lists that’ll sync up with Mail.app, because I’d rather keep them separate from mail (for the same reasons I view RSS feeds in a separate app: easier task management).
For notes, I want something like Stickies, but with a bit more oomph, i.e., the ability to categorize notes, at the least. For checklists, I’ve been a longtime user of HandyShopper (HS wiki). HS categorizes lists and allows marks like a to-do list. But due to lack of cycles and interest, the HandyShopper developer won’t make an iPhone version.
In my usual late-adopter fashion, I only recently made the move to an iPhone 3G from a Palm Treo 650. (The change was precipitated by worry over more frequent Treo crashes, chronic dissatisfaction with syncing, and a growing annoyance with Verizon’s website —rather than from Shiny Gadget Curiosity. Obviously, such Curiosity is now amply present!) Updating went well, as did a very fast sync.
Since I keep all too many calendar entries (a habit developed with my old Palm V in the late 1990s), I checked the entries in iCal. They had transferred over, after some brief redundancy, removal and restoration dances (i.e., import recent calendar-name.ics as a New Calendar, verify data, then remove older version of calendar). But, I confess I hadn’t bothered to check the entry details like time, repetition and notes.
Well, well, well. Those entry notes. If I had written a note, it was there. But whether or not I did, nearly all calendar entries had nonsensical strings inserted into the note field.
~Oh, joy~. Who was to blame? Palm? DateBk5? Or Missing Sync? Garden gnomes?
But there was a definite pattern: some variation of DESCRIPTION:##@@X@@@@@@@@@@@@@@, where X is a letter, followed by a carriage return. This covered the vast majority of those superfluous strings. An excellent candidate for cleanup with regular expressions!
The tomatoes came later than usual this year(1), with the peak happening starting last week, and probably not lasting for much longer. Less heat this season, I think, especially since the beefsteak-type Big Rainbows(2) have yet to get beyond the green stage.
Nonetheless, we still have plenty of tomatoes to keep us company. Making sauce comes to mind, of course, but unlike last year’s Sun Golds, the Stupice and Early Girls(3) have much thicker skins. So, the Lazy Method would not be advisable. I finally gave in and got a food mill, much to my annoyance of single-task(4) tools. However, it does the job rather nicely (no coring needed, whew), keeping in mind that the disk with the smallest holes is the one which manages to keep out the seeds.
A bunch of WordPress plugins I use have been recently updated. For the most part, updating went smoothly and the newer versions remain shiny and useful.
Alas, confusion cropped up with a few of ’em: CyStats, Filosofo Comments Preview (vs. WP-OpenID), Redirection, Search Everything, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP).
