It has been five years since I last attended a comic book convention. Last Sunday I broke that spell of inactivity, and attended WonderCon in San Francisco with Kathleen.
Rice cooked in chicken stock
Saturday, 24 February 2007
I usually cook rice with filtered water and a bit of salt. Maybe I toss in some random herbs or spices, or even a small dollop of olive oil or butter. This recipe is a more luxurious dish, for a special occaision, or simply to complement a strong flavored course or sauce (like the silky red wine one).
This produces enough for two large or three medium-small servings.
Silky red wine & shallots sauce
Saturday, 24 February 2007
I’ve wanted to make a red wine sauce for a long time, especially a sauce not requiring any butter, cream or milk, just to challenge myself. When Simon came home with fresh sturgeon from the farmer’s market, I became inspired.
Actually, the root of the inspiration was a sturgeon dish I had at Café Beaujolais in Mendocino. The fish had been pan fried and served with a mushroomy, truffle “emulsion,” which may or may not have had wine as an ingredient (but muy sabroso, nonetheless).
So I hit the Web and found a recipe for Striped Bass in Agrodolce Sauce (literally, “sour-sweet”) at Epicurious. Lacking white balsamic vinegar, I substituted regular ole Monari red balsamico. I used Estancia’s 2005 Monterey Pinot Noir, but I’m sure any dry red wine would do.
The result was a lovely, unctuous sauce, which went delightfully with the pan fried sturgeon that Simon cooked up. Both the sauce and fish go well with a side of rich rice cooked in chicken stock.
Since he didn’t make fish for eight people, we had plenty of leftover sauce. This recipe yielded approximately 1 3/4 cups. It’s quite thick, enough that I might purée part of it. Quite reminiscent of chutney, come to think of it! I imagine it would go quite well with chicken, or even on a cheese sandwich.
Early-ish travel photos
Saturday, 24 February 2007
I had uploaded these travel pictures some time ago, but only now remembered to “announce” them.
The trip to the Philippines in early 1997 marked my first overseas venture. I used my then-falling apart, now-defunct Ricoh SLR camera. I originally digitized the pictures with a flatbed scanner (thanks, Jed!), but I’d like to redo it sometime, if I can find a scanner that would handle 35mm film negatives. If anyone has pointers on such a tool, do let me know! (I could also clean out the annoying mirror crack that appears in most of the pictures; can crop only so much.)
In late spring of 2002, we took a trip to France, my first time on the European continent. Most of the time was spent in Paris and Provence. We started and ended the trip with brief stops in England.
France and a bit of the United Kingdom (2002)
A request directed at architecture / city history buffs: Name this building! Seriously, neither of us remember its name or location, other than being in Paris. At first I thought it was the Panthéon or Opéra, but I’m not so sure…
Which famous Parisian building is this?
Upgraded veryplaintxt theme for WordPress
Thursday, 22 February 2007
After over three weeks of tweaking and testing, I’ve upgraded the WordPress theme for this site. As mentioned earlier, the theme is a customized variant of Scott Wallick’s excellent veryplaintxt v3.0.
The theme hacking took up much of my time for the past few weeks, hence the infrequent posts. (Fortunately faster than the several months to get this site to the 2.0 stage! Although now I’m hankering a good merge tool. Smultron has a swell split-screen feature, but no diff tool. TextWrangler’s Find Differences feature works, in a pinch.) Let me know if you encounter any (new) issues while viewing or interacting with this blog.
Update (2pm-ish): The Filosofo Comments Preview plugin used for this blog causes the comment section, sidebar and footer to disappear, so I’ve turned it off for now. This might be due to Dreamhost’s ongoing PHP upgrade process, as I had experienced this before.
Update (11pm-ish): Turns out it’s actually a conflict with that WordPress plugin and the newer version of PHP. Many grateful thanks to Austin Matzko (author of Filosofo Comments Preview) for taking time to debug this, and providing workarounds to get this essential feature of my site running again!
Mac OS X 3rd party applications to investigate
Thursday, 8 February 2007
There are several helpful Mac OS X applications which I don’t use frequently. Sometimes I end up not needing to use them often, or I haven’t found the time to play with them much.
Why bother mentioning these applications at all? Because they have potential to become essential tools on the Mac. (Well, on my Mac, at least.) I had thought this “interesting but seldom used” category would be huge. But interestingly enough, the list is shorter than my favorites, yet longer than the disappointments.
Upgrading to WordPress 2.1, etc.
Sunday, 28 January 2007
WordPress has recently been upgraded to 2.1. I’ve been testing it on my local setup (thanks to MAMP) for the past few weeks, and found that upgrading from 2.0.x is rather easy. I found hitches with only a couple of my plugins, Antileech and Link Library. Even the theme used, a somewhat modified version of veryplaintxt v2.3, works fine. The main project on the horizon, which is fortunately independent of upgrading the WordPress core files, would be deciding how to approach veryplaintxt v3.
Update: I had been experiencing some comment moderation weirdness, which turns out to be a bug in wp-cache v2.0.22 when using WordPress 2.1.
Being the lists fan that I am, here’s my current plan of action:
- Upgrade this site to WordPress 2.1. Disable wp-cache plugin for the time being; remember to comment out the WP-CACHE directive in
wp-config.php. Update (29 January): Went smoothly! - Upgrade wp-cache once the comment caching bug is fixed.
- Modify Antileech options so that a broken icon no longer appears for the badge when accessing article via the feed. Also keep an eye out for plugin updates. Update (29 January): Oddly not a problem, so didn’t have to change the option. Likely a weird issue with my local test environment.
- Tweak Link Library so that my Resources page displays just so. Update (29 January): Done. My gratitude to Yannick Lefebvre for updating his plugin to be WP 2.1-savvy!
- After veryplaintxt v3 is released, upgrade and/or merge my theme customizations.
I imagine that the phase concerning the theme modification will take a while to complete. After all, theme hacking was the most time consuming part of my site revision from 1.0 to 2.0. (Other than the data migration from flat static files to database articles —which is mostly done, though a few bits still remain.)
Delicious orange cake
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
Today I tried out the Gâteau Piège recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini. The result was delicious: a tender, orange flavored cake which reminded me of a slightly crumbly pound cake. Baking it also made the house pleasantly sweet-smelling. Thanks, Clotilde!
Modifications: I used only 1/3 cup of orange juice, which came from one and half navel oranges (the cold weather likely affected their juiciness). And I added the zest of one orange to the sugar and butter, then creamed those ingredients in the mixer at high speed. Since I used unsalted butter, I added a rounded 1/4 teaspoon of sea salt to the batter. Because our oven always seems a bit on the cool side, I ended up baking the cake for 40 minutes, using a 9 inch round pan. A dollop of whipped cream (with a touch of sugar and Grand Marnier) is a lovely garnish, but certainly not necessary.
Even though this turned out to be quite tasty, I’ll try the following next time:
- Line the pan with parchment paper, in addition to the butter and sugar. The cake’s sides pulled away nicely, but its bottom stubbornly remained sugar-glued until I cut it in half and scraped out both halves with a thin spatula. I had let it cool for 10 minutes beforehand. However, this did allow me to taste test the cake with impunity. (Adding parchment paper helped a lot! I had melted butter, brushed that on, placed the paper on the bottom, brushed the paper with butter, then coated with sugar.)
- Beat the eggs in a jug and slowly add them to the creamed mixture, so that they’re more smoothly incorporated into the batter. (Made a small improvement.)
- Maybe use an 8 inch round pan for a somewhat taller cake. Would need to increase the baking time accordingly. (Oddly enough, the cake didn’t seem much taller. Baking time with the smaller pan was 45 minutes.)
Addenda, 8 April 2007: Meyer lemon is an excellent substitute for orange! I used the zest of 2 lemons, plus 1/3 cup of lemon juice. The age of your baking powder really makes a difference, too: Using a fresh new container, it rose half again higher than previous attempts, and I only needed to bake an 8 inch round cake for 38 minutes. Another observation from an earlier experiment: While blood orange taste good here, the lovely red pigment reacts with the baking powder to yield a greenish-bluish-greyish cake. Not very attractive!
JavaScript books
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
I’ve had earlier editions Flanagan’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) sitting on my bookshelf for years. But I rarely cracked it open. When I did, I often became frustrated with not being able to find succinct or coherent information. Not too surprisingly, I rarely used JavaScript.
Then came Jeremy Keith’s book on DOM scripting, and I felt that, finally, another useful world has opened up for me. More and more books chock full of best practices as well as excellent composition continue to come out. I still don’t do a lot of JavaScript hacking, but with these I feel more confident with the code (and maybe even enjoy it ;-).
Unlike the Definitive Guide, these books aren’t comprehensive references for the language. However, they do comprise an excellent foundation for client-side JavaScript, perfect for a wide audience.
Farewell: Restaurants closed in 2006
Monday, 22 January 2007
Last year witnessed the closure of some wonderful restaurants. From this group, Brigitte’s will be sorely missed. 🙁
Brigitte’s: French Mediterranean, Gourmet and Healthy Cuisine. Santa Clara, CA. This became our favorite French restaurant in the Bay Area. Fresh ingredients, often locally produced or organic. Innovative menu which changed daily to fit the seasons and market. Some favorites: leek soup that used the entire plant, amazing seafood in delightful sauces, chestnut paste in French fromage blanc, deadly moelleux au chocolat, tarte Tatin… I learned to not fear wines here, with their easy going, flexible system that offered many drinks by the glass or half-glass. All of this at a reasonable cost: moderate, but far below other high quality, but extremely expensive French eateries like Chez TJ. Apparently they were forced to close due to issues with the landlord. I hope they decide to open another restaurant in the area!
Citronelle Modern Vietnamese Cuisine. San José, CA. This was one of the first Vietnamese fusion restaurants in the South Bay to catch my attention —and retain it. 🙂 Delicious bánh xèo (savory Saigon crêpe), chicken with gingko(!) nuts, cha ca thanh long (sizzling catfish with dill and turmeric)…Drool. Citronelle had a very mellow, quiet atmosphere, too. Like Brigitte’s, they were forced to close due to landlord issues. (What is it with excellent Santa Clara Valley restaurants being treated poorly by land owners?)
Paradise. Mountain View, CA. They used to specialize in Persian cuisine, but in recent years had expanded their menu to include some Afghani dishes. Favorites I’ll miss: kashk bademjon (my “gateway” eggplant dish; before then I had never liked that vegetable) and fesenjon (tender chicken in a ground walnut-pomegranate sauce). They had mint and sour cherry sharbats, very refreshing sodas; and unforgettable mint-cardamom tea. Update (22-March-2007): Thanks to a helpful tip at Chow.com, I found out that they moved to Sunnyvale under a new name, Persian Afghan Kabob.
Sahari. Sunnyvale, CA. Located in a very common looking strip mall in a city which has a surplus of strip malls. The chicken shwarma was tender and well marinated. Nicely topped off with baklava and Turkish coffee. They advertised having vegetarian food, but if memory serves, the choices were rather limited.
Saigon, Saigon. Mission district, San Francisco, CA. This used to be one of my favorite restaurants in the city. I hadn’t been for several years, but from other reports, it had been going sadly downhill. This was the first Vietnamese fusion eatery I experienced, well before Slanted Door. Many delightful appetizers (softshell crab, swordfish kebab with ginger sauce, shrimp with sweet potato, coconut soup) and of course many delightful main dishes (coconut chicken, excellent catfish and trout dishes). I usually don’t go nuts over restaurant décor, but the combination of white linens, simple art displays (old style radios) on the walls, and gorgeous floral display, impressed me.