Month: February 2010
Serious Eats has a Food Lab feature on how to make Ricotta cheese, where they dispel some myths about temperature and level of difficulty, and confirm something anyone who has ever heated milk on the stovetop already knows:
As milk heats, the proteins and fats on the top surface begin to coagulate, forming a sort of “raft” on the surface. Once it starts getting close to its boiling point, water vapor forms, getting trapped underneath this raft. As soon as enough pressure has built up, the raft goes the only way it can: up and over. This tipping point can occur in a matter of moments, and in fact, it has been independently proven by several renowned chefs and scientists that milk will only boil over when your back is turned.
True dat.
Yes, I suppose we can mitigate our guilt by tossing plastic bottles into a blue box recycling bin (originally promoted by the packaging industry to put an end to returnable bottles). But the fact that non-renewable petroleum is used to make beverage containers, and then more petrol is used to ship them across the countryside, and still more fossil fuel is consumed to collect and ship them back to a publicly subsidized recycling depot for (presumably) additional processing to make bad lawn furniture, makes bottled water one of the silliest products ever conceived — simply because the product is so unnecessary.
Amen, brother!
Dan Wineman: A conversation I have every month or so:
Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
[via DF]
So a while back I added a plugin and setup my blog to collect my tweets each week and aggregate them into a weekly post like the ones below. My thought then was that since I publish quite a bit at Twitter and not so much here, these weekly posts would keep this blog a bit more active in the long spaces between my postings here.
Unfortunately, it’s turned out that I’ve ended up with weeks and weeks and weeks of aggregate posts of tweets that crowd out what little actual content I publish here, and it’s just gotten out of hand – I no longer believe it’s useful to collect those here, since if you wanted to read my tweets, you’d follow me over on Twitter. Plus I just find the posts are uglying up the place.
This blog is in a weird space for me right now. I love having it, and I do publish here a lot more when I have stuff going on like Bluesfest, Burning Man, or the Toronto Film Festival. The rest of the time, I’m still active online, just not here – I tend to push lots of links and short-form stuff to Twitter, my Tumblr log has been seeing lots of action recently, and I have lots of stuff going to my Google Reader list, not to mention places like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and now of course there’s Google Buzz that all fill different spaces in my online life.
Ideally I’d like to find a way of pulling all of that stuff together to represent my online identity in some cohesive way, and I think that’s what I was attempting with the aggregate posts, but that obviously hasn’t worked.
So I’m discontinuing the weekly aggregate posts here, and though I can’t really promise that I’ll write more to fill in the gaps (we know how that usually works out), I am going to try to find a better way to integrate my other online activity here. In the meantime, here are some links to the places where I am active to varying degrees online:
My Google Profile
My Google Reader Shared Items
My Facebook Profile
My Flickr Photostream
FineDiners.ca, my foodie blog
My Twitter Stream
My Tumblr Log
My LinkedIn
My YouTube Channel
A butcher on how to choose, wield and horribly injure oneself with a knife.
However beautiful the shinogi line of a charcoal-forged Santoku, and no matter how solidly made the vintage steel of a French chef’s knife, I have to admit that after years of collecting the world’s finest knives I have settled on one that has more in common with the knives found in the average American’s kitchen.