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Chicken marinated in lemon, saffron & yogurt

Saturday, 19 January 2008

Sometimes it’s tricky to find a good chicken kebab. Sometimes too tough or dry. Sometimes bland. A recipe on Chowhound for jujeh kebab looked quite approachable and intriguing. Indeed, the long marination with lemon and yogurt results in a very tender dish. Here is a version with my usual mods and shifts, fit for chicken breast pieces. You can grill the chicken over gas or coals, or broil in the oven; I’ve had yummy results both ways. Alternatively, you can chop the chicken into small pieces, sauté, then serve over hummus.

This dish is great for parties and barbeques. Leftover chicken works well, too, especially when shredded for sandwiches or salads.

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Macworld Expo 2008

Thursday, 17 January 2008

It’s that time of the year for another Macworld convention in San Francisco. The Moscone South and West arrangement was confusing, though, with many visitors (such as ourselves) going between the two, trying to find registration and/or not realizing that both buildings contained exhibitors.

  • Played with the MacBook Air. Oh, my, it felt thinner than I was expecting! This is the slimmest, lightest computer I’ve held since Akkana’s Vaio. Its specifications aren’t enough for my own needs, but I think the MacBook Air would be perfect for MacBook-level users, or those who already have a primary desktop and need to travel frequently with a lighter secondary machine. The bevel (frame) around the display seems too wide (similar to the MacBook). I wonder what technical limitations prevented Apple from maximizing the monitor area?
  • The Time Capsule has a cute, low profile design. I’d prefer more than 1 Terabyte of storage; then again, my crazy storage philosophy is to obtain at least four to ten times capacity than I think I’ll need. >:-) It also seems expensive at $500, but I’m confident that capacity will inevitably increase, along with a price decrease. Er, make that hopeful. Wonder if one could backup non-Mac machines, like Linux and Windows? On a related note, Simon visited the Drobo booth, which has a similar networked storage system.
  • I acquired a collection of handbag brochures, mostly for friends who might be seeking a briefcase with laptop capacity (Kathleen? Sonya?). My attention to iPod accessories was at a minimum this year, as I’ve found that the iPod shuffle’s clip is the best way to have portable, less obtrusive music as I exercise.
  • Kensington had an Expert Mouse (trackball) hooked up to a MacBook Pro running Leopard. It behaved fine, except for weird pointer jumps due to other users playing with nearby wireless mice. I also noticed that they didn’t install (on purpose?) their own MouseWorks software on the computer. I asked the rep if there were plans to update that package for Leopard, and the response was (my paraphrasing), “Yes, sometime soon we’ll upload a new version to the site.” Sadly, I forgot to ask if there were plans to make a wireless version of the Expert Mouse.
  • Living-e AG, makers of MAMP, were not present. Not too surprising, as they’re based in Germany, and haven’t released any major upgrades. MAMP 1.7.1, though, was released back in December (or November, or…?), which I haven’t installed yet. The website and forum remain out of date (without RSS) and full of spam, respectively. 🙁
  • I wish I lingered longer at the MacSpeech booth, which was impressively bigger than in previous years. They have discontinued their speech recognition application iListen and replaced it with Dictate. I bought iListen a few years ago, but gave up because of its long training period, slow performance and just-enough-to-be-disruptive error rate. Dictate, which is based on Dragon Naturally Speaking, is currently in beta, but touts better accuracy and speed. I’d like to give MacSpeech’s product another try! Will need to dig around to see if I could participate in any beta testing. Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng wrote a good article describing the new Dictate project, which won Best of Show for Macworld 2008. (Odd for an application that isn’t released yet, hmm?)

Addendum (24-Jan-2008): I don’t mind the MacBook Air’s footprint, especially since I prefer a large display. (Rarely traveling with a laptop influences this opinion, of course.) Thin form and low weight are very important to me —seeing and holding the MacBook Air made me gasp with wonder. Certain features, namely the small hard drive, slower processor, Remote Disc limitations and lack of Firewire port, hold me from wanting one. (I’m usually a slow, late adopter of computing gadgetry, thus my less-than-two-year-old MacBook Pro suffices for now.) But I look forward to (i.e., hope for) future computers, especially in the professional series, that will use the MacBook Air as a model of space and power efficiency. A computer that can be rolled up like a towel: well, I can dream.

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Hello Zenphoto, Goodbye Gallery2

Sunday, 13 January 2008

After less than two years of using Gallery 2, I opted for change and have migrated my online photo gallery to Zenphoto. While powerful and feature-rich, Gallery became too cumbersome to maintain. Zenphoto, however, is easy to install, use and maintain. It looks and feels refreshingly streamlined. Whenever I work on or look at my galleries, I’m more likely to sigh with relief and (more) satisfaction, rather than roar and clench my fists.

I’ll be redirecting gallery.iwaruna.com to zenphoto.iwaruna.com in the next day or three. If you have bookmarked pages in the former, you should recheck and update to their location on the new server. Subscription feed links have also changed; the main feed which grabs recent photos from all albums is now http://zenphoto.iwaruna.com/rss.php. I’ll also eventually add back the sidebar thumbnail here (prolly via Zenshow or ZENpressed).

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Chocolate frosting, with mocha & liquor options

Tuesday, 8 January 2008

I’ve often wondered why yellow cake with chocolate frosting is no longer as popular as it was in my childhood. I love the contrast between a simply flavored (vanilla) sponge and a rich frosting of chocolate or coffee. But when I’m at a bakery, grocery store or restaurant, what I usually see is chocolate cake in all its variations —as long as you like chocolate with chocolate, occasionally with a fruity accent. Chocolate sponges or dense chocolate tortes just don’t excite me: The lusciousness of Theobroma often becomes dull bitterness, or heavy dullness. Chocolate in a softer form such as a mousse, soufflé, drink, or a truffled delicacy holds my attention with more success. As does a good frosting.

cupcakes with mocha and chocolate frostingsMocha frosted on the left, with coffee bean; choco-frosted on the right.

My search was brief yet successful: Shuna Fish Lydon’s excellent yellow cake and chocolate frosting recipes became the impetus for me to finally make cupcakes topped with chocolate. (Here I applaud cooks and food writers like Lydon who list their ingredients by weight rather than volume, which greatly aids in measuring tricky powdery substances (flour, confectioner’s sugar) and lumpy items (butter). Now if everyone would just standardize and use metric consistently, including myself. :-|) I pretty much followed her cake recipe (which yielded two dozen happy cakelets), except that I substituted buttermilk for the whole milk. And for some reason my cupcakes took 25 to 27 minutes at 350F to bake, rather than 12 to 14 minutes. (Every oven, Lydon points out, has its quirks, of course.)

Lyndon’s frosting is more like a soft ganache in texture, somewhat firmer compared with buttercream frosting. However, you can make it softer by adding more cream after blending in the confectioner’s sugar. I fiddled a bit with the recipe, though, and also made a mocha version. This variation makes a generous amount for a dozen cupcakes, or a single layer (8 or 9 inch) of cake —about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups.

Update (12-March-2008). Added info below for using liquor flavorings. Great for lovers of Grand Marnier, Royal Chambord, rum, etc.

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Caramel sauce

Sunday, 6 January 2008

Childhood memories of jaw-achingly chewy, hard caramel bits forever stuck to my teeth persisted for a long time. It wasn’t until encountering softer, deep flavored examples did I feel that I properly entered the realm of delicious caramel.

I’ve wanted to make caramel sauce, but have been discouraged by my fear of burns. Too little time, and the rich flavor doesn’t have a chance to develop. Too much liquid (cream), and the flavor is diluted. Several recipes call for using a thermometer, but the sauce is never deep enough to submerge the bulb (okay, unless you make a huge batch, which I have yet to do).

The trick is to recognize the right color for the bubbling sugar mixture. For a long time (10 to 15 minutes) it’ll boringly remain a pale golden shade. But when it becomes a lovely ruddy-rusty color (similar to paprika!), it’s time to turn off the heat. Beware that the sauce will remain hotter than boiling water for a long time. But even though there’s a lot of bubbling, splattering almost never occurs if the butter and cream are at room temperature and warm (respectively), and are added to the sugar syrup gradually.

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Poke tweak prod tweak

Friday, 4 January 2008

Happy New Year! 2008 starts off with…more hackery. I’ve spent more time working on backend site stuff, rather than, well, content. (Obviously.)

I’ve found a WordPress plugin which has greatly eased the ongoing task of fixing broken links with redirects: Redirection, by John Godley of Urban Giraffe. If you’ve overhauled a website (such as my move from the manual, static old skool to shwizzy WordPress), broken links almost always crop up. In the past, I’ve had edit the .htaccess file. Yech. Now Redirection makes that process smoother, and more organized. I do like quickly viewing my 404 log and (again quickly) adding redirect rules. 😀

Update (6-Jan-2008): Thanks to mitcho’s Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), individual article pages now contain a list of related entries. This plugin, available at the WordPress plugin repository, compares the actual article content to rank other related articles. I can set the threshold of that ranking, too, wheee, more control! Most other related post plugins just compare the number of tags in common, which is a good start but not intelligent enough, since less relevant posts have a higher chance of being displayed. YARPP doesn’t take tags and categories into consideration, though, but it’s on mitcho’s list for a future release.

If YARPP also used tag and category information, it could become one of the key tools in linking and listing related content on a WordPress-powered site. However, in order to properly summarize and support the content, careful tag and category selection will remain important.

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Dustiness: Theme and taxonomy upgrades, oh my!

Sunday, 23 December 2007

I’ve hunkered down and merged my WordPress theme changes with the latest version of veryplaintxt (now v4.0). It took me only about week of work, yet I’m still left with my strong wish for The Ultimate Merge Tool. I still use TextWrangler’s Find Differences tool (note to self: remember to ignore whitespace). The bottom line is that I really do need both color and contrast to help me to perceive changes (better, more easily) in plain text. (I’m pretty impressed by screenshots of meld, but haven’t bothered to fiddle with its Darwin Port. I much rather not deal with X11; not because of difficulty, but rather due to my miserly attitude towards disk space usage, along with my otherwise complete lack of X11 usage.)

Anyhow, the appearance is still more or less the same, but you’ll see tags now. Yes, I still like this minimalist theme. 🙂

Speaking of tags, I’m now in the process of reducing the insane number of categories and adding a bunch o’ tags. As I upgrade the taxonomy for the articles on this site, you might notice the dust swarms busily swirling —most noticeably in the sidebar and archival pages. A few days at minimum, a couple weeks at most. Thanks for your patience. Again, if you notice breakage (except for ongoing taxonomy changes), do let me know!

Update (5-January-2008): The Simple Tags plugin helped the initial, big taxonomy reorganization take only a day. Schweet.

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Orange chocolate chip cookies

Sunday, 2 December 2007

Making chocolate chip cookies is easy, and many recipes exist for this Ultimate of Snacks. Mine is a bit more “adult,” especially if you’re able to find similar ingredients. Darker, more molasses-y brown sugar offers a more deep, almost anise-like flavor (without being too much like licorice, though). Try to nab bittersweet chocolate chips, or a chocolate with a high cocoa content, but less sugar than semi-sweet chocolate. Alternatively, you can chop up your own chips from your favorite bars —although that could yield a lot of unevenly sized bits, which might be an issue if you’re texture-picky. 😉 I also added orange zest and orange juice, for citrusy aromatic goodness.

orange chocolate chip cookies, up close

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Upgrade to Leopard

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Last week I upgraded my laptop from Tiger to Leopard. The process went quite smoothly.

  1. Backed up to an external firewire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.
  2. Restarted with Leopard disk, and selected Archive and Install.
  3. Customized the installation by deselecting X11, most of the languages, and all but the Canon and Lexmark printer drivers. (Sheez, the driver crap took more than 800 megabytes.)
  4. Allowed machine to think for less than an hour. Somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes; I didn’t use a stopwatch. 😉
  5. Restarted, prompted to install 10.5.1, restarted, et voilà! Happy laptop!

More details…

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Dustiness: WordPress upgraded to 2.3.1

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

So. I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.3.1, finally. A few dust flurries remain:

  • No longer have the fanschy-schmancy archive Ajaxy thingie. Poor Extended Live Archives (ELA), its development has ground to a halt. (Hey, if anyone decides to work on it again, drop me a line. I might be keen to test it. I say “might” because another plugin might exist which does what I want, or because I might create some other archive layout, or or or.) For now we have simple lists by month and category.
  • OpenID (for comments) might not work if your provider uses secure (https) URLs. My hosting service needs to update a thingie on their end to get it to work here. (libcurl CA cert something thingie: Or, ahem, I’m not a security maven.) Most use vanilla http, like LiveJournal, so you’re unlikely to encounter this.
  • Haven’t made use of the new taxonomy (tags vs. categories). At present I use only categories, but I plan on migrating many to tags. But this will be a later/ongoing step. (Potentially more dust.)
  • Random image in the sidebar thingie: It might disappear, reappear, appear odd, and go back and forth as I do the usual gymnastics with Gallery 2 and its WordPress plugin WPG2. But hey! I’ve been playing with ZenPhoto 1.1.2, and am seriously considering moving my gallery to that. Another, later dusty thingie.

So, several minor thingies exist at the mo’, but Things Overall should still work fine. O:-) If you have problems subscribing to or reading articles, making comments, or viewing the site, please let me know.

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