yonkeltron

I’m very lucky that my girlfriend, Sarah, likes my cooking. So, it’s no surprise that we like to cook together and explore new foods. There is something very satisfying about preparing a meal with someone you love in order to serve it to people you care about. In addition, those meals provide an excellent captive audience with whom to try out new recipes.

Given how much we like to explore new foods, Sarah sent me a link to this great food blog called 101 Cookbooks which features some really awesome recipes. I made this rockin’ quinoa recipe for my mother and can’t wait to try these banana cookies with Sarah. Furthermore, the blog has numerous categories and even features a whole section on gluten-free dishes! Also of note, the garam masala tofu scramble and skinny omelletes.

This past Shabbos, it was just my mother and I as the rest of the family was away. Seeing as how my mother and I are really the only ones who can appreciate the finest nuances of certain eastern spices we like to be more adventurous with our culinary exploration when given the opportunity. So, I whipped up a lamb stew with all of our favorite flavors.

While I have tried to be precise, please excuse my informal approximations for certain items. I figure if fancy cookbooks can say “a pinch of salt”, I can abstract this convention to suit my own needs. This recipe is highly scalable and may be doubled so long as proportions are preserved. That being said, discriminating and/or experienced cooks will most likely tweak according to taste.

Ingredients:

• 4 shoulder cuts of lamb with bones. Cut most of the meat off of the bone and trim the fat. I advise removing as much of the fat as possible and cutting the lamb into thumb sized pieces.
• 1 large onion - coarsely chopped
• 5 cloves of garlic - diced
• 1 large carrot - diced
• 2 stalks of celery - loosely chopped
• 1 medium tomato - cubed
• 2 bell peppers - chopped (yellow and red will look best)
• 1 can of chickpeas
• 2.5 cups of broth (you should have enough to cover the other ingredients. I used chicken broth)
• 3 tbsp tamari or extra dark soy sauce
• 2 tsp cilantro (coriander leaves in the UK)
• 2.5 tsp of curry powder
• 1 tsp of chili oil
• 10 cumin seeds
• 1 tsp of ground coriander
• 1 tsp salt (sea salt recommended)
• 1 handful of fresh basil
• 1.5 tsp of ground black pepper
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast

Saute the onion and garlic in the bottom of a pot with some olive oil. When it begins to become translucent, add 2 tsp of the curry powder (keeping 0.5 tsp in reserve) and stir constantly for another minute. Add the carrot, celery and lamb pouring the tamari sauce over the ingredients and stirring to coat with the mixture. Season with the salt, black pepper, coriander and basil before adding enough chicken broth to cover everything. Increase heat to maximum, bring to a boil and add the cilantro, the tomato and cumin seeds. Stir and let simmer on low for 30 minutes stirring every 10 minutes. After 30 minutes, drain and add chickpeas with the remaining 0.5 tsp of curry powder and chili oil. Stir to combine and continue steeping for another 30-45 minutes before slowly stirring in the nutritional yeast to help thicken the mixture and improve the consistency of the broth. After another 5-10 minutes of simmering, remove from heat and serve over a darker starch like brown rice or quinoa. This is great with a cold, dark beer.

Over the past 8 months, I have been trying to eat healthy and be more active. Between rekindling my love for vegetables, subduing my desire for pastry and doing my nightly routine of old-man floor exercises, I’ve lost over 10 kilos. Since getting home, I’m walking to synagogue every morning (someday, I hope to be accepted by the Minyanaires) and bringing my book to the track near my house so that I can read and walk at the same time. While not fanatical, I am certainly pleased with the level of activity in my new routine and it’s my hope that such efforts will please my physician. Though I was never a hulking behemoth of a man, I have certainly noticed the improvement in my body muscle and reduction in my waistline. In fact, I need to find some new clothes…Anyway, though I will never be a body builder and my large frame will always retain some heft, I do feel noticeably better both physically and mentally.

Having said that, imagine my shock when Wired Magazine’s most recent Jargon Watch featured the term “Fatosphere”. I was caught off guard by the number of pro-fat blogs and websites which seem to be part of a developing fat acceptance movement. In addition to the links on the NAAFA website (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), blogs like Fatosphere, Fat Fu and Big Fat Blog offer a fascinating glimpse into America’s underbelly as activists seek to combat what is perceived to be fat discrimination.

Does my shrinking paunch make me un-trendy?

This one comes from my beloved brother, Ari, who always likes to remind me that I don’t have a life and miss all the good stuff.

Imagine being an iguana living in a Tokyo pet store when Godzilla attacked. You’d probably feel something like an ordinary kitchen appliance who’s just seen the Blendtec Total Blender. Basically, it’s this professional strength blender than seems able to reduce just about anything to slurry, powder and mush.

In an exceptionally entertaining example of viral marketing, Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec, opened this fantastic website called Will It Blend? which showcases videos of the Total Blender deconstructing various objects. There is some seriously Mr. Wizard-stlye feel good flavor to the videos as Tom conducts each demonstration with a vanilla charm and matching lab coat inside the Blendtec test kitchen. Appropriately enough, Tom has a genuinely-amused smile on his face as he destroys everything from whole cans of Coke to garden hoses and glow sticks.

Though the overwhelming majority of videos are in the “Don’t Try This @ Home” category, you can still find some neat (and safer) demos in the “Try This @ Home” category. The coolest part? You can even submit ideas and suggestions for what sort of things they should try blending in the future.

I’ve recently begun to really enjoying fresh oranges. Specifically, I have been devouring ripe, Navel oranges which are sold for cheap by my local supermarket. While I’ve gradually developed my orange-peeling skills over the past few weeks, I am still occasionally plagued by bits of orange rind being stuck to the surface of the underlying flesh. It often toughens the texture of the fruit thus making it harder to chew, and picking it off is rather tedious.

A quick bit of searching yields a few results including a two different howto documents (eHow and wikiHow), an article in the Hitchhiker’s Guide and an instructable indicating how to get the skin off in one piece.

In my own experiments, I have noticed that the faster I remove the skin, the less pith sticks to the fruit. I believe that a swifter separation minimizes the undesirable adhesion. Is such a theory logical? Has anyone tinkered with this? Might there be some tips out there?

For reasons unknown to me at this time, many people seem to think poorly of sardines. This humble fish is not only tasty, but it appears to be rather healthy! I can’t wrap my head around why something so delicious and nutritious is loathed by about 90% of the people I have encountered (more specifically, those with whom I actually discussed sardines).

However, it does seem logical that some of the negative connotation associated with sardines might in turn come from negative images like  “packed in like sardines” and other such idiom. Another reason may be that people are unfamiliar with sardines or confuse them with other small and (generally) canned fish such as the anchovy. Sardines are far less salty and often have a lighter and flakier presence on the palette.
Those who venture to try this shockingly satisfying fish may very well
find that the dark flesh and savory texture reminds one of the ever-popular herring.

While I prefer them in a sauce of mustard and dill, I would advise some other preparations for those who are interested…

• Seared in a pan with olive oil. Feel free to add black pepper, kosher salt, cumin, tarragon and basil)
• In salads of baby spinach and other leafy, green substance. Sardines packed in an oil can be drained and added to provide a good addition to a more acidic vinaigrette!
• On top of noodles like Soba or Korean-style tofu noodles.
• Plainly eaten with some crackers (cheese of your choice is optional but not always recommended)

Regardless of the reason, I would encourage people to give sardines a try. Besides, as a student, sardines are a cost-effective and seriously tasty way to enhance a dish or even just snack! Give it a shot. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise…

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At long last, my waiting is over and I have successfully downloaded and installed (according to directions) KDE 4.0! Hooray. I have a wide range of opinions on this release but overall, I am very pleased. I would share screenshots of me going about my normal day-to-day life but there are already so many screenshot tours (the best collection is on the KDE site) that it seems redundant.

At first glance, KDE 4 is visually gorgeous. The all-new Icon theme is called Oxygen and the matching window decorations only make it prettier. While the default theming is a mite dark compared to the brighter default look packaged in past KDE releases, the icon sets and window decorations still look sharp and crisp. Clean lines, an excellent default wallpaper and delightful SVG graphics on the desktop increase the aesthetic appeal even further.

Plasma, the new desktop and presentation layer, also packages a much-needed improvement to the aging SuperKaramba widget system. The new dashboard functionality allows for rich applets (affectionately called “Plasmoids”) to be added to the desktop layer. It’s an excellent start but many plasmoids are broken on their own or induce other display. I’ve had several of them completely crash Plasma and require a hard restart of graphics in order to get a usable desktop again. Even so, the future of Plasma looks bright with fun stuff on the horizon like a widget packaging system (Plasmagik) and multi-language scripting.

The visuals are not the only KDE4 features still developing. Under the hood, the 4.0 release is not yet the super-framework once promised. Fortunately, there is a whole lot of functionality there and the new hardware-management system called Solid is a perfect example. Opening up the Solid control panel shows a unified and intuitive way to control things like networking and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Solid deals with USB devices and other bits of your system in a straightforward fashion.

To be sure, the 4.0 release is not what I’ll be using as my primary desktop (for that, I have 3.5) but it does make one reconsider the ways in which we interact with our computers. While others agree that this release is buggy, I haven’t done much effort to determine if the issues I am having are a result of my particular configuration…

While the complaints of others had previously deterred me from trying it, I took a chance this trip and tried the delicious beverage known as סחלב (”sakhlab”). Outside of Israel, this is known as salep and it is made from the dried and pulverized root of the common orchid. Here, it is consumed with coconut, cinnamon and pulverized nuts of various types. It has a warm and deliciously creamy texture which plays very well with the seasonings and is perfect for breakfast and even better for late at night.

I am a poor student living with other poor students in the dorms on campus. Like many, we pool our resources  and buy basic ingredients in bulk to save some cash. One of the things that we bought was a a ridiculously large container of pre-peeled garlic that happened to be on sale. After about 5 days of having it sit in the fridge, we realized that there was no way we could use all of it before it spoiled. We mulled our options (including a mass-cooking of some sort) and realized that what we really needed was a way to preserve the garlic.

Jonah mentioned that he had read online about how freezing your garlic in olive oil prevents it from being damaged. A quick googlehunt revealed that it may or may not be true. We thought about the science behind such a technique and decided that it was worth a try. We prepared an experiment and began by putting 10 garlic cloves in two half-size, zip-top bags and 10 in one of those small and disposable GladWare containers. One bag was frozen as is (the control), the container was filled with olive oil to cover the garlic and the other bag also had the garlic/oil combo.

Three days later (the oil took a big to solidify), we checked on the experiment and found that all three test cases had frozen completely.

We began by first moving the control from the freezer to the refrigerator and letting it thaw out slowly. It seemed only natural that the control should go first so we could check for any damage and be able to determine if the oil methods yielded any improvements. The control thawed relatively well though the garlic had obviously undergone a change in consistency as they were now slightly spongy and transluscent.

The oil container was next. The thaw yielded garlic cloves which appeared exactly like the control. However, there was one crucial difference which became apparent when we tried to cook them. The ones in the oil did not suffer nearly as much damage to the outer surface as the control and cooked much better! The second bag yielded garlic that was identical to the container which is significant because the bag model requires much less olive oil.

The other major perk of having garlic suspended in frozen oil is that you can break off a chunk, throw it in a hot pan or pot and get a perfect amount of olive oil and garlic to start a dish with!

Make your own by filling a gallon freezer bag half way with peeled garlic cloves. Then, put in just enough to get them 2/3 covered with oil. Seal the bag and spread the bag out on a flat surface. Determine how well covered the cloves are as you might need to add more oil. Throw the whole bag into the freezer but make sure it freezes on a flat surface! It’ll be much easier to store that way. Once frozen, it should look something like this:

Notice how the olive oil has turned completely opaque. This is a great way to preserve garlic and a wonderful trick to help start your cooking.

When living with other human beings, it can become very difficult to make sure everyone takes care of their respective dishes. In fact, while everyone may agree on a strategy and plan, the agreement are generally forgotten or ignored within a few weeks.

At college, I live in a flat with three other geeks. We have all agreed not to let dishes go unwashed for more than 24 hours. With a few minor exceptions, this keeps our kitchen fairly tidy. In fact, it may even be that the messier bits of our kitchen are caused by the food-preparation processes and their byproducts. Still, having visited the kitchens of others, we are constantly reminded of how nice it is to have a clean space.

In fact, our success was pointed out by our friend Fred who came over last week to play some StarCraft. As some of us went to grab our dishes to eat some of the veggie stir fry we had just prepared, Fred pointed out the reason for our continued cleanliness: One man, one bowl.

The inner workings of the system are profound yet elementary. Every person, being a poor college student, has a severley-limited selection of dishes. Therefore, we may assume they will most likely default to using the most versatile dish, which is none other than the common bowl, the most often. As such, there is one bowl per person.

While this may seem insignificant at first, consider the implications. First, everyone is responsible for one piece of dish ware which makes keeping one’s implements clean a much more manageable task. Second, because people need to eat multiple times a day, the dish must be used multiple times a day. In order to use the dish again, it must be washed.

This heuristic is still dependent on personal initiative. The time, T, a dish spends in a non-clean state can be defined by the summation

where n is the number of meals per day, m is the duration of the meal, b is the time between the end of the meal and the beginning of the cleaning phase while c is time between the beginning and the beginning of the next meal. This means that if a person puts off washing the bowl until it is needed for the next meal, then the bowl will spend most of it’s time in a non-clean state.

However, even with everyone leaving bowls unwashed until required next, the largest amount of dishes waiting to be washed never exceeds the number of people eating in a 24-hour period.

Shockingly simple, yet startlingly effective.