AlexH

My nephew sent me this link to a set of Lego Salt and Pepper Shakers.  It would make a really cool gift for a geek foodie.

Last night’s salad:

• Spinach
• Arugula
• Chard
• Tom thumb
• Buttercrunch
• Mustard
• Parsley
• Mint
• Nasturtium
• Radish greens
• Bee balm
• Chive flowers

Now I just need to figure out a good dressing I can make from my home grown ingredients, and I’ll be set.  Maybe soybean oil, lemon balm/lemon thyme, apple cider vinegar, garlic, and sea salt.
Just doing some guesstimates, it takes about 3 spinach plants for a small salad.  Using the SFG technique, if I wanted to eat a salad each day, it would take about 19 squares to have a continuous supply.  Of course, I would have to stop planting from May 1 - August 1, so that takes out about 1/4 of the year where I could be harvesting spinach.

Niloufer King has a great article on rice.

How to Cook Rice Perfectly

Letting your rice rest enlarges the window of opportunity for serving perfectly cooked rice.

I really need practice with rice cooking, I usually use a rice cooker but I’m only successful with large batches. And then I end up throwing some away because I’m tired of having rice with every meal.

We had a Mexican dinner at Justin’s place last night, and Willow brought a really good black bean soup:

• 1-3 Tbsp Butter
• 1 large onion
• 2-3 chopped carrots
• 2 diced tomatos
• 3/4 cup chopped cilantro

Fry the above ingredients until carrots are tender.

• 2 cans black beans
• 1 can corn kernals
• 2-3 cups water

Add the above ingrediants to pot, bring to boil, then simmer for 5-10 minutes

• 3 Tbsp brown sugar
• 3-5 Tbsp sambal olek (or similar hot sauce)

Add and stir thoroughly.  Simmer until water thickens up.

Serve with sour cream, grated cheese, or cornbread.

technorati tags: food, recipe, mexican

Introducing our newest innovation — KitchenAid® Drawer Dishwashers. A unique two-drawer system delivers the powerful performance of two independent dishwashers in the same space as a standard dishwasher, giving you the freedom to run small loads as often as you like.

KitchenAid®: Find Drawer Dishwasher

I’ve been saying for a long time that when I buy a place and I’m able to renovate the kitchen, I’m going to put two dishwashers in, one for clean dishes, the other for dirty ones. This cool setup puts two drawers in the same space as a standard dishwasher!  Great idea!  It should be better for the environment and the water heating bill as well since you can run smaller loads when you need them.  I wonder if any stores in Vancouver carry them.

technorati tags: food

A scary article on Tony’s Wine Warehouse in Dallas, Texas:

This deeply irks many longtime professionals in the Dallas wine trade. Tony’s, they insist, butters its bread by dispensing instructional swill during class sessions–preying on participants’ gullibility to justify inflated prices, often for wines well past their prime obtained mostly from distributor closeout lists. This sullies the whole wine trade, they say.

dallasobserver.com | News & Features | Feature | Sour Grapes | 2005-11-10

It sounds like a used car lot, but with wine!

technorati tags: wine, dallas

Tracy and I hitched a ride with her parents who were going up to Kelowna for the Dragon Boat Festival to go wine touring.

We’ve been up there before, so we decided to do a more specific tour of our more favourite places rather than the shotgun approach we did before.

I put a bookmark summary on del.icio.us. There are other bookmarks for wine + okanagan from other users as well.

Wineries we visited:

• Thornhaven

On the way to Dirty Laundry, we stopped by Thornhaven. Picked up a nice buttery Chardonnay for myself, and a dessert wine for Tracy.

• Dirty Laundry

(Previously Scherzinger) Our favourite winery in the Okanagan, it’s had some renovations done and they’re moved to a larger tasting room. They still have great Gewurztrameiner, although the ‘Woo Woo’ that was apparently award winning wasn’t our favourite. We picked up two bottles of the Riesling which is Tracy’s favourite. Also got a Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and a dessert wine. Did I mention this is our favourite winery?

• Spiller Estates

A fruit wine specialist, and a newcomer since our last visit, so we decided to check this one out instead of going to Elephant Island again.

• Lake Breeze

We meant to go to Lake Breeze for lunch, but unfortunately for us there was a wedding taking place that afternoon, and they weren’t serving food to the public. We still picked up some wine of course! We also met Maggie, the best dog evar. She’s a lab/standard poodle cross, or labradoodle. If you’re a dog person, it’s totally worth it to visit this winery just to meet her. I picked up a Cab Merlot that’s going to go perfectly with a big steak.

• Greata Ranch

Recommended by Tracy’s aunt, this winery is right off the highway, and is very nice. I found a pinot noir for Thanksgiving, and we got some unoaked Chardonnay, and also some Rose that was cheap (but we never tasted it).

KelownaDragonBoating05/117_1743

We also went to the Naramata Heritage Inn for lunch, and Summerland Sweets to stock up on jams and syrups.

On Saturday night, Tracy’s aunt and uncle treated us to a Kelowna Rockets hockey game, where they were playing the Vancouver Giants. It was a lot of fun, and a lot cheaper than the Canucks!

the tyee continues their series on local eating with this article: A Local Eating Rhapsody.

It’s got some neat recipes to try out. I’ll have to head down to the Farmer’s Market next Wednesday to get some ingredients.

The Tyee has a very interesting article called Living on the Hundred-Mile Diet, and the second part of the story was published recently.

The concept is interesting. Vegetarianism still has a large environmental footprint. It is better for the environment to be consuming things that are in a 100 mile radius of you. This means that even things like bread made locally can only be bought if the ingredients are all made locally.

In BC, there are a few things that make this a bit easier:

• Wild salmon and other seafood
• Nomad cows (I love that pun)
• Farmer’s Markets

Other links can be found in my del.icio.us page, under the tag ‘organic‘

I’m going to head out to the UBC Farm this weekend to check out the eggs, and after that I’ll head to the Farmer’s Market to get some salad mix.

In light of Bill Gates’ complaints that “Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn’t do that well today.“, there has been a lot of discussion on Boingboing, slashdot, and other forums about searching.

rbolkey provided a link to Google Local for pizza joints in Redmond, WA. Kind of funny, but I thought to myself, that’s not going to be right, MSFT HQ isn’t at the centre of Redmond. It was something that always bothered me, since I live in Kerrisdale (which my grandpa calls South Vancouver:) ), but my Google Local searches always gave me locations in the more northern areas like Kits or downtown.

Well, I noticed that I can now do a Google Local search with my postal code. I really hope that this can be used with their cell phone search technology, because if I ever get a cell phone, I’d use that all of the time.

Combine that with Keyhole, the satellite picture service, and a site like MapQuest for directions, and that would be a killer app that I’d use almost every day.