05.10.07
Posted in equipment, food at 11:56 pm by wingerz
I spend a good amount of time in the kitchen, and there are certain tools that make me quite happy every time I get to use them. There are others, too, of course, but these are my favorites.
1. A sharp knife: Cuts through everything effortlessly with no slipping or struggling (or putting your fingers in imminent danger).
2. Heavy pans: Cooking with the cast iron pan or dutch oven makes the meal feel more substantial. And the heat retention makes for a great surface upon which to sear meat. I’ve made a lot of wonderful stews and braises in our dutch oven.
3. Kitchen scale: Takes a lot of the trouble out of measuring sugar (7 oz/cup) and flour (5 oz/cup) for baking. Without this, measuring flour can be especially tricky since its volume can change depending on how settled it is.
4. Bread maker: Who doesn’t love the smell of fresh bread? It still feels novel when we bake our own loaves, and there’s nothing like biting into a warm piece of bread. Garlic Parmesan, jalapeño cheddar, cinnamon swirl…
5. Garlic press: Minces garlic without making a fragrant mess of your knife, cutting board, and fingers.
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but this motivated me to finally do it.
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Posted in food, home cooking at 11:15 pm by wingerz
We’ve busted out the trusty grill twice so far this season. This grilled asparagus recipe was easy and turned out well – the asparagus was tender and flavorful, and everything looks better with grill marks.
Grilled Asparagus with Grilled Lemon Vinaigrette
From Cooks’ Illustrated’s Grilling book
Asparagus
1 1/2 pounds asparagus, tough ends snapped off
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and ground black pepper
Vinaigrette
1. Toss the asparagus with the oil in a medium bowl or on a rimmed baking sheet.
2. Grill the asparagus over a medium-hot fire, turning once, until tender and streaked with light grill marks, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer the grilled asparagus to a platter.
1 lemon, cut in half crosswise
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium shallot, minced
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh thyme leaves
Salt and ground black pepper
1. Place the lemon halves on the grill, cut-side down, and grill until tender and streaked with light grill marks, about 3 minutes. When the lemon is cool enough to handle, squeeze and strain the juice into a medium nonreactive bowl; you should have about 2 tablespoons. Whisk in the olive oil, shallot, and thyme. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
2. Arrange the grilled asparagus on a platter and drizzle with the dressing. Serve immediately.
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Posted in development, semantic web, technology at 12:34 am by wingerz
A few months ago I was working with Cathleen Finn (in IBM Corporate Community Relations), and she mentioned the pains she had to go through to get lists of employees working in New England states (for the purpose of sending recruitment emails). The process involves making a request to someone in another group and waiting for them to come back with a spreadsheet. Of course this is a process that has to be done every time and can take several days. It’s especially frustrating because we have all of the data (in a LDAP directory) but there isn’t any good way to get at it to solve this problem.
Lee, Elias, and I had mucked around with SquirrelRDF a while back, running it from the command line. Since I didn’t have access to that machine, I looked up our LDAP schema, wrote a mapping file, and wrote a SPARQL query to pull email addresses for everyone working at an office location in Massachusetts. It took a while to run the query, but in the end I got exactly the data I was looking for, no more and no less.
I played around with SquirrelRDF a bit more intending to set it up as a service to be used in some of our internal Semantic Web demos. I wrote up some of what I did in a recently published developerWorks article.
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