geek + red sox + cooking = peter ryan

I was getting ready to watch the Patriots / Colts game yesterday. I was planning on watching the game at home and felt like some chicken wings. If I had been out at a bar I would have had no issues ordering some from the friendly wait staff. In years past if I was home and felt like wings I would order 10 or so medium wings from Yakzies. I was always a fan of that place unfortunately the original location (near me) went out of business and I was out of options at home.

Anyway I was in the grocery story (Whole Foods as it were) earlier that day picking up a few things for dinner when I felt inspired to do it myself. At the Whole Foods counter they already had drumettes (already split and tipped) for sale. I thought to myself “how hard could it be” and after deciding to go BBQ at home (as I didn’t feel like experimenting with hot sauces) I ordered 8 wings and went home for the game.

I made the wings before the game started - it was a 3:15 start so it would be a late lunch anyway and I didn’t want to get hung up in the kitchen during the game. Truthfully I think I paused the beginning of the game as I was wrapping up and probably started watching the game 5-10 minutes after kickoff. It was a bit confusing as the local Chicago CBS clipped the first two minutes of the game and came in on the Colts with the ball with 13:57 left in the first quarter. Annoying.

Anyway the wings I made were fantastic. They were easy to make and I would definitely do it again!

Ingredients

• Chicken wings. If you get whole wings split them and cut the tips of the wings off.
• Vegetable oil (enough to fill whatever pan you are going to use 3-4 inches deep).
• Flour
• BBQ Sauce. I used about 3-4 tbsp to mix the wings with.

Recipe

In a medium saucepan pour vegetable oil until 3-4 inches of depth. You want enough to submerge the wings but you also want to avoid using too much as it is just wasteful. Heat to 360 to 400 degrees.

While heating the oil spread flour in a baking sheet and coat each wing lightly.

Once the oil is ready drop in the wings, I did 4 wings at a time but you could scale to whatever makes sense for your saucepan. I wanted to avoid using a lot of oil as I was limited in my quantity at home. I also didn’t want a spatterfest in case things got out of hand. I did 4 minutes for each batch of wings.

When the wings have turned a slight golden brown remove and drain on paper towels.

In a mixing bowl (I used a medium sized stainless steel bowl) place 4 tbsp (or whatever you feel like) of BBQ sauce. Drop the wings in as a group and mix them with the sauce. Each wing should be covered lightly.

Serve immediately!

All in all this was one of the easiest things I have done. Next time I would look to improve with the following:

• Have a better thermometer. All I had was a meat thermometer which didn’t do the best job as it couldn’t read temps above 400 degrees and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it in the saucepan. Have a thermometer meant for measuring the temperature of hot oil would have made it easier to control the temperature of the oil.
• Get more creative with the batter and sauce. I just coated the wings in flour - which worked really well as a base for the BBQ sauce I added in the mixing bowl. However I could have gotten a lot more creative both with the batter around the fried chicken as well as the sauce I coated the chicken with. This was a “out of the blue” recipe and I was very pleased with the results but even still I could see a few small easy things I could do that would makethis recipe even better.

On top of that the game couldn’t have been more enjoyable. A great close contest with the Patriots coming from behind and outlasting the beleaguered Colts in the 4th quarter!

After I completed the upgrade to Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon I realized my Automatix installation was broken. Since I had installed Automatix to get an easy Thunderbird 2 upgrade I said to myself “no big deal” and removed it from my system. This didn’t cause me too much of a worry until I ran an aptitude show thunderbird to see what happened to the automatix package.

I wasn’t comfortable returning to Automatix - I have gotten to the point where I am trying to keep my sources.lst as clean as possible to make upgrades simpler. However without Automatix, I discovered that the package was for all intensive purposes lost. I could run thunderbird but aptitude had no idea it was there and I figured at that point my upgrade path was not so clear. I set about to uninstall it manually and after reading a couple posts on how best to accomplish this I did the following:

sudo rm /usr/bin/thunderbird

This removes the link to /usr/bin.

sudo rm -rf /opt/thunderbird

Automatix Thunderbird 2 was installed in this directory. A nice way to perform an install since files are not trickled all over the place.

sudo rm -rf /etc/thunderbird

There was nothing really in this directory but I noticed it and I deleted it.

sudo rm /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop

Remove the Icon from my KDE Menu

At this point as far as I could tell Thunderbird was uninstalled. Performing an aptitude search thunderbird revealed no installed thunderbird packages. I completed my migration back to a proper ubuntu package by installing the default thunderbird package (which in Gutsy is Thunderbird 2).

sudo aptitude install thunderbird

This restored Thunderbird and my Thunderbird 2 was now back to an official Ubuntu package.

I completed the upgrade from feisty fawn (4.10) to gutsy gibbon (7.10) over the weekend. There were a few issues - the upgrade hung during the installation of a package and I had to resume it manually using dpkg. This was not really much of a big deal - the same thing happened when I upgraded from edgy.

However today I was sliding my mouse over the KDE Power Manager and I noticed that the CPU Frequency only displayed one processor. Given my Dell D620 came equipped with a duo core processor I took immediate notice. Inspecting /proc/cpuinfo revealed the issue wasn’t with the PowerManager but rather in the CPU detection being performed by the kernel.

It turned out that during the upgrade a 386 kernel was installed and made the default. The 386 kernel lacks duo support (I believe) based on a few things I read on the topic. I rebooted into the generic kernel and the Power Manager displayed the two processors.

After determining that was the problem I removed the 386 kernel from my system which fixed my system to use the correct generic kernel as that was the next one on the list.

I am not sure why the upgrade process nixed the cpu detection but given the ease of the fix not something I will dwell on much. It could have been caused by my interrupted upgrade, the fact my kernel had been patched for vmware, or something wrong with the upgrade process itself.

This past Tuesday I took my first cooking class. The class was at The Wooden Spoon, a purveyor of cooking supplies and classes. I have been interested in taking cooking classes for awhile now - mostly to learn new things as well as improve on things I already thought I knew! I attended the class with Beth - she was a bit nervous about taking the class but we both had an awesome time and the results were fantastic.

The class was titled Healthy Weeknights with the following four items which I will talk about.

Pan Seared Chicken Breast with Garlic Cascade Sauce

It was nice to get education on pan searing - it is a technique I have been using for some time with some success. I learned the following useful things:

• Pound the chicken so it is the same width. By doing this the cooking times for all the chicken breasts will be the same and it makes results more predictable.
• Lightly coating the chicken with flour contributes to a better browning finish.
• Lay the chicken skin side first and then finish on the flesh side when searing
• When searing use vegetable oil instead of extra virgin olive oil. At medium high the olive oil cannot withstand the high temperature.
• When searing the chicken will “stick’ to the pan while cooking. Avoid moving the chicken as it will disrupt the browning. The chicken will release from the pan when it is ready to be flipped / complete.
• Heat the pan before adding the oil. If using butter then add before heating the pan otherwise the butter will burn.

Vegetable Tian

The vegetable tian was tasty. However the Wooden Spoon is a bit of a copycat. This recipe they presented was a direct copy of an episode from the Barefoot Contessa which I found on the food network! The concept of a tian (it’s a dish, mainly of vegetables, created in layers and baked to a glorious, crusty goodness) was new to me but I found it to be absolutely delicious. I could see a lot of varieties from its basic principles. It’s very easy thing to make and as it takes over an hour in the oven it gives plenty of time for preparing the main dish.

Arugula Salad with Shallot Vinaigrette

The salad was delicious (particularly the croutons which while I did not make as other students made them seemed easy enough to prepare). One of the things I was uncertain about was the specific goat cheese used to cover them. I really like some of the soft goat cheese varieties I have in restaurants and also in this class but I am never able to find it when I head to the cheese shop in my local markets.

Shallots

Beth and I had never cooked before with shallots. I found them easy enough to work with. I found the gas they release to be even more irritating to my eyes than a white onion. The Wooden Spoon (which sold everything we worked with of course) suggested onion goggles which might be a good idea since I do tend to cook with a lot of onions.

We also used shallots with the pan seared chicken although we were not involved in that portion of the class.

Poached Pear with Winter Fruit Compote

The poached pear dessert was great. Beth and I were responsible for peeling and coring the pears which we did with a peeler and a melon baller. After that I observed our instructor whip some cream (which is something I would like to learn how!). The pears were poached for awhile (20-30 minutes) in a pot of cheap red wine, water, and a few other things in the recipe. While that was taking place the fresh fruit compote was constructed although I was busy working on other dishes at the time and did not see much of what took place.

I was reading a blog post on recipe development and thought I’d present my own.

My recipe development is a fairly straightforward process and kind of follows the Iron Chef mentality. It’s not so much as a race against a 60 minute clock but I rarely cook for more than an hour. I like everything from when I begin to am eating to be 30-45 minutes.

For half a year now I have been working a bit off of recipes I have picked up from various spots (magazines, internet, cookbooks, etc) and using those as inspiration onto my own creation. Sometimes I cook a recipe following all of the directions but that is rare - I am much more apt to do my own thing.

Another habit picked up from Iron Chef is a theme. It is sometimes an ingredient but sometimes a cooking technique. Lately I’ve been working with saute style recipes due to their speed and excellent taste and so I might focus on a cooking technique along with an ingredient (such as my mango lemon chicken recipe).

I have been trying a lot of new things so I will read a few recipes until I find some that I like and then create my own recipe script that I bring into the kitchen. I am usually combining a few recipes so it doesn’t make sense to print anything. Instead I blueprint what I want to do.

Following that I head into the kitchen and follow my recipe - making adjustments as necessary.

The last recipe I tried was different in that I didn’t go into it with a plan but instead wrote what i was doing while I did it. I didn’t really like this - I was trying to capture all of the steps I made while also cooking a meal and I was time crunched.

My end results can be excellent (an example was a red snapper recipe i created before I began blogging) and also not so much. I think that is the most important part of recipe development - take risks on something original and enjoy the rewards and not be disappointed by the tribulations along the way.

Embarking on my sauteed chicken fruit exploration that I mentioned at the conclusion of my last post I decided to take my chances with Mango and Lemon.

I did a google search for mango lemon chicken and came up well..with nothing. So the idea I had while in the local supermarket could be a disaster but I figure I’ll steamroll ahead.

The ingredients I am starting out with are:
Ingredients

• 1 whole boneless chicken breast
• 1 mango
• 4 lemons (2 sliced into quarter inch slices, the other halved for squeezing).
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• salt
• pepper
• 2 cups prepared rice

Preparation
I peeled the mango using a great large peeler I got in Chinatown I got a few years back, and sliced the mango into bite sized slices, discarding the core.

I sliced the tops off two lemons and sliced them into quarter inch thick slices with the peel still attached.

Next I chopped about half of medium sized white onion and started to think about what I was actually going to do. I had some green beans I had just purchased but didn’t really feel preparing another side and I didn’t feel like cooking the green beans with the mango and lemon so I decided to leave them out and thought about having rice on the side. At that point I said “well I could fry this together if I chop the chicken”.

So you can see where I am going now. I prepared two cups of rice (1 cup of water, 1 cup of rice) and chopped the chicken into pieces.

I placed a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil heating the oil under medium to high heat until it ’shimmered’ which is a term I read for “when the oil is hot enough to saute with” but I really don’t know if what I think a shimmer is, is in fact a shimmer.

I added the onions and once they started to show the slightest color I added the 8 lemon slices and chopped chicken and let them cook for two minutes.

After the two minutes I rotated the chicken, pushed down on the lemon slices to release some juice, and added the mango.

I left the mango sit on top of the chicken for a minute and a half before I tossed the entire contents of the pan and mixed everything together.

Next I took another two lemons and sliced them in half in preparation of drizzling fresh lemon juice onto the final mixture.

After a minute of letting the mixture cook I removed the sliced lemons from the pan and discarded them and added the 2 cups of prepared rice. I stirred everything together and then added soy sauce, salt, pepper, and squeezed 2 lemons worth of juice onto the mixture.

After I stirred everything together I deemed my creation complete.

Tasting

I gave my creation a taste and was a bit disappointed. Overall I used too much lemon - the citrus flavor was somewhat overpowering. The chicken I cooked was a bit overdone and so was a bit stringy. The mango was nice but overall I need a lot more than 1 mango for a 2 person serving. There just was too much chicken in proportion to the mangeo. It wasn’t a total disaster - I went back for seconds - but I felt like I could have done a better job.

I’ll continue to explore mango / lemon combinations but next time I will certainly think a bit more about the proportions.

For the second time this year I adapted this recipe for sauteed strawberry chicken. Beth had made her mom’s raspberry chicken recipe a couple times for me and it was delicious. As a fan of strawberries I said to myself “why not try something similar with strawberries” and after some searching around decided to give it a go. The rasberry chicken differed from the recipe I used as it involved baking and used a raspberry jam.

In the middle of summer I used fresh strawberries as opposed to the frozen. I hulled them but otherwise left them intact. The first time I tried this recipe I did use the pears but this go I didn’t get any at the market.

I wasn’t quite sure why the recipe asked for “2 lg. whole chicken breasts, cooked, deboned”. I used raw boneless chicken breasts which I split and cooked similarly to how I cooked the chicken in my sauteed italian chicken recipe.

The technique of using sauteed chicken plus mixing in a sauce in the same pan is an easy quick way to cook. The options for a sauce are limited by the imagination. I really enjoy using fresh fruit in these dishes and would like to try more.

In November once clementine season hits I’ll try something with that.

On my current project I am playing an iteration manager role. Coming from the development kingdom I have avoided excel like the plague it rightfully is. However I am unable to avoid it any longer and I’ve been playing around with charting. I was creating a simple iteration burn up chart from a series of values. The table itself was simple:

My challenge was the red highlighted values. I wanted to make my table smart so it summed the total complete based on the days progress. That was simple (by summing that days plus the previous day’s total complete value). I used the if(condition, value if true, value if false) function to set the value to blank (”") when there was no value present:

=IF(ISBLANK(C4),"",C4+D3)


This worked visually but then when I charted the values the blanks were displayed as zeros which considering the values were at the tail end of the iteration looked rather silly on top of being inaccurate. It’s not often when a team undoes all the work it has done the last 2 days of a 5 day iteration!

A bit of searching yielded the charting solution. I found this excel newsletter which described the na() function. All na() does is set the value of the cell to “no value available” which the excel charting is clever enough to ignore. My table now looks like this:

And the Total Complete function now looks like this:

=IF(ISBLANK(C4),NA(),C4+D3)


This is not as preferable as a null which could display as a blank but for the sake of the burn up chart it will have to do. I have no doubt this is hardly worthy of the designation “excel tip” and is something any seasoned excel veteran is familiar with but I found difficult and also found the solution (buried away on the Windmill Software Newsletter #62 from October 2003) difficult to find as well.

As an aside I was reading some excel forum and some guy signed his posts with the phrase “Keep Excelling”. After you get over your involuntary shudder I suggest you all take a look at OpenOffice calc which I have had great success with.

Three weeks ago I migrated my webmail from trusty old Squirrel to RoundCube. I did this for a few reasons

• I was tired of squirrel mail not being more reactive.
• I was tired of errors reading HTML mail. The process to view in HTML mode would break a lot and when viewing the HTML portion of the email the “reply” button was lost. Generally I have no interest in reading the HTML version of an email but occasionally I do want to see the pretty pictures.
• I wanted an ajax preview pane so I would be able to more easily navigate from message to message without a lot of full page refreshes
• I was really tired of not having address book integration. I was constantly going through old email’s looking for addresses. Squirrel mail had some LDAP options but nothing that was accessible from the composition page. I use plaxo and would have loved integration with that but I didn’t need it. Roundcube promised an ajax address book lookup which sounded golden.

I installed roundcube easily enough. LAMP application and the configuration was fairly obvious. The look and feel was immediately snazzy. Aside from my browser shell roundcube gives the impression of a modern web 2.0 application.

I opened an email and was immediately bothered by the full page view. I was expecting the index page to split and see a message preview (I had looked at roundcube in the past and specifically recalled a screenshot showing this). I figured it was in the preferences somewhere but didn’t see anything. After digging through the roundcube roadmap and issue tracker I discovered the preview pane had been pulled out (due to it being buggy) and it was slated for a later release. This was a real bummer.

I said to myself “Well someone must have added a plugin for this” and set about looking for the roundcube plugin repository. To my shock there wasn’t one. On the trac ticket for the preview view I found a patch I could apply to my install and a few roadmap milestones away was the feature “Implement the plugin API with documentation.” under Milestone 3 Beta. Considering the application is in .1 RC1 and there are no timetables I was completely surprised. After the excellent design of roundcube and the ambitious ajax / drag drop feature set (which appears to be custom developed..no scriptaculous/prototype js files) the lack of a plugin architecture up front shocked me. Particularly after using wordpress with it’s outstanding plugin support I really was left speechless. I had no desire to apply a patch to my roundcube install (and the subsequent upgrade hell that follows).

The composition address completion worked great. Even adding addresses to the built in address is a breeze although checking to see if I already have the address and not presenting the “+” button next to the name would be nice.

I noticed a few inconsistent bugs when moving messages using drag and drop. The first few times I tried it the messages did not move. Later the problem went away and I had no issues moving messages among folders.

There is no empty trash button which was strange for an IMAP client.

HTML rendering of email is fantastic. Remote images are blocked by default like I would expect.

So overall I guess I am satisfied. The ajax features are excellent, the IMAP performance is improved, and I can’t say squirrel mail is any better at a preview pane. Roundcube still feels much like a beta application (which is what it is). It shows a lot of promise but I would be greatly concerned about its absolute lack of extensibility. I’d love to contribute (or use) a plaxo address book extension / plugin but there is no easy way to do so. An application like roundcube should be designued up front for drop in extensions and plugins - not a clunky diff / patch system.

I can’t get over how well Lugo has played since the All Star break. For a guy with a .272 career average and someone who hit .197 in the first half of the season (including an absolutely dismal .089 in may) he has turned it around with a .313 july, .338 so far in august for a second half (so far) average of .326. Check out his 2007 Splits

You have to give credit to Terry Francona’s decision to move him down in the order and take the pressure off him. At the top of the lineup Lugo is hitting .226 but at the 9 spot he is an all star at .330.

What is weird is whatever pressure Lugo is facing is not Boston (or at least proximity to it). Lugo is hitting .303 at Fenway (right now he is only hitting better in Kansas City).