I’ve been a Netflix customer for over six years. I had been pleased with their service, until a couple years ago when I noticed that they stopped Saturday shipments, as well as began throttling the delivery of the DVDs.
Needless to say, the newer, slower service disappointed me.
I heard about GreenCine last year. They’re located in the Bay Area, and their collection overlaps more with my own video preferences: independent and international films, animé, documentaries. I recently started a subscription there, so will be comparing their service with Netflix’s (both at the 2-disc at a time level) over the next several months.
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Cute apricot fruitlets have been sighted, about three weeks after the peak of blossoming. The additional foliage has caused an increase in approval ratings from neighborhood birds, including the resident Chestnut-backed Chickadees and Scrub-jays. 😀
There are a few more apricot images in the plant album.
Already a new feature! I added a random thumbnail image from my gallery to the sidebar in this site. This might seem odd, considering my preference for design that emphasizes text. But I’m aiming for a little bit of imagery, to occasionally but not disruptively vary the appearance.
You would see the image if you visited Iwaruna.com with a web browser, such as Camino, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer. However (AFAIK), you would not see it if you viewed only syndicated content —for example, via an RSS client like Vienna or NetNewsWire.
Let me know if you have problems viewing this sidebar image over the web. Thanks!
Hacking background:
- I use the WordPress Gallery 2 embedded plugin (WPG2) to connect my gallery (which runs the eponymous Gallery) site to this one. The sneaky way to avoid literally embedding the gallery here (which looked dreadful with my particular theme), and thereby linking directly (standalone), is to simply point there. That is, change the default location (which points to a WPG2 PHP file on the WordPress site) to the gallery URL instead. Heh!
- Do not use a version earlier than Gallery 2.2.x, so that URL Rewrite behaves properly. Gallery’s URL Rewrite plugin generates “pretty” addresses, which are more readable by both humans and search engines. Otherwise, the links are incorrectly generated as relative, thus broken, never accessing my gallery site. Absolute URLs need to be generated, which was busted in the previous 2.1.x version of Gallery.
- To allow hotlinks between my own domains, yet continue blocking any other hotlinks, I had to fiddle with my gallery’s
.htaccess file. I found tips at htaccess Tools very useful for this task.
Several years ago during a blistering Summer, I had this drink at a Vietnamese restaurant. Soda chanh tuoi (a.k.a., soda chanh duong, or simply soda chanh), or soda lemonade as it’s often listed on menus, is usually made with limes, but it also tastes good with lemons. This drink is Most Revitalizing on hot days, when one’s energy is sapped.
It’s a shame our Bearss lime bears fruit during the Winter. But the limes have a decent shelf life, so usage can be stretched through early Spring. Fortunately the Meyer lemon produces year round. The same goes for the spearmint in the backyard which is ever spreading, never dying. ;-P
I wonder what other mint family leaves would go well in this drink? Perhaps Thai basil, peppermint, or even shisho (perilla)?
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Hot chocolate is great for dessert, or as comfort on a cold evening. One of my favorite chocolate drink experiences was at Ladurée in Paris: Just barely sweet and thick, slowly and happily relished. My opinion of hot chocolate mixes here in the United States has ranged from kinda interested to very disappointed. It can be expensive but not perfect, like Vosges’ Aztec Elixir, which has a nice spicy flavor, but the never-dissolving cornmeal granules weird me out. Often the mixes are disappointing due to the overuse of sugar, or (my main chocolate pet peeve) using coconut oil as the enriching agent. Why don’t these makers realize that coconut adds such a strong flavor? (Sure, it’s for cost-effectiveness, but still.) Unless they’re specifically aiming for a South Asian or South East Asian style, that additive destroys so many desserts and drinks.
Okay, so much for my rant. The point of this article is to explain how I correct such drink bugs. 🙂 My experiments aren’t quite perfect, but they’re often tasty. I haven’t tried thickening agents like cornstarch or eggs, yet, but perhaps I’ll test that later on.
What follows are more guidelines than strict procedure. Have a hot chocolate recipe you love? Submit a link or description in the comments!
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It sure doesn’t look like the first day of Spring. With the rain today, I worry that the apricot tree won’t set fruit this year. The vast majority of the blossoms are over, and most of the leaves have come out. That was fast; but then again, the blooming and fruiting periods of Blenheims are brief. In a few weeks I’ll be looking for evidence of fruit development (fingers crossed).
Since apricots and Spring are on my mind, I thought I’d post our apricot chutney recipe. Last year around this time, we gave a copy of this (along with a jar of the product 8-)) to our friends Samuel and Elizabeth, in celebration of their marriage. Today they’re having their annual Spring Ding party, which I’m sad to miss. So to them I raise a long distance toast —or, rather, a toast topped with cheese and chutney!
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Last week I attended Cinequest, the 17th annual San José Film Festival. None of the seven shows I watched were amazing, but I enjoy having so many international movies to chose from.
Overall, the best ones were Batad and The Owl and the Sparrow, which while not outstanding, were still very good.
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Vanilla sugar has a deeper flavor than vanilla extracts or essences, somehow more fruity and spicy to my tastebuds, more interesting. Sure, you can buy vanilla sugar. But making it at home is easy, and costs a lot less. The results can last for months by the clever continual addition of sugar. 🙂 You’ll have a generous supply to use in drinks and desserts, like hot chocolate and blancmange.
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One of the biggest attractions of our garden is the old apricot tree in the backyard. Our neighborhood used to be part of one the (formerly) many apricot orchards in the Santa Clara Valley. This thirty-plus (forty-plus?) year old tree is one the few sad, beautiful reminders of that era.
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For me chocolate pots de crème is just another variation on chocolate pudding. Okay, a velvety, chocolatey egg custard pudding, to be exact!
I had never made this dessert before, until my friends Sonya and Robert (pots de crème pro’s) suggested I try a no-bake method from Cook’s Illustrated. The trick: cook the cream-milk-egg yolk (custard) mixture on the stovetop until properly thickened. This avoids the potentially messy water bath in the oven.
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