Month: February 2004

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, two cups of coffee, and some has brown potatoes.

Lunch was another serving of Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping and a glass of Morassutti Chardonnay.

We did our taxes this afternoon and had some tortilla chips with our home made salsa and another glass of Morassutti Chardonnay to celebrate.

Dinner was the very last of the Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping.

Last week, I linked to Dave Scarpetti’s delicious looking attempt at making Rustic Country Bread. Well, today Gretchen and I tried it out.

Yes, it is very dark, but according to the recipe it is just barely done. This recipe does not say to cook it for so many minutes. It does not say to cook it until it is golden brown. It says to cook it until the internal temperature has reached 210°F. We both wanted to take it out at least ten minute earlier, but the temperature was too low. But it is not burned.

It has a tasty chewy crust and a moist, hearty interior.

Gretchen and I started pruning the apple trees today. The best time to start would have been about two weeks ago, but the weather has not been cooperating. This weekend changed that. It was in the 40’s today and sunny. A perfect day for pruning.

These pictures show the before and after on the first tree we did. You can see the pile of brush that we cut off in the lower right corner of the “after” picture. Though, for the life of me, even I have a hard time seeing the difference in the tree itself.

Breakfast this morning was a glass of orange juice and three cups of coffee. I weighed 156 pounds. We also tried something new.

The other day, Martha had Sara Foster on and they made refrigerator rolls. This is actually a recipe for refrigerator dough that is quite flexible and is as happy making biscuits as it is making pecan sticky rolls. So that is what we made. We each had two refrigerator biscuits with our homemade strawberry jam and two pecan sticky rolls. Plus, we still have a bunch more refrigerator dough in the refrigerator to whip up biscuits and sticky rolls in the future.

Lunch was a bit more of yesterday’s Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping and a glass of Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon.

Dinner was a salad with two slices of Rustic Country Bread and a glass of Morassutti Chardonnay. The bread was great. The wine was… eh. I guess we are not chardonnay fans.

I would like to thank Deb, over at In My kitchen, for adding me to her list of “Food Journals I read.”

For breakfast this morning, Gretchen made waffles with maple syrup. I also had a glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee. We normally would not have waffles during the week but Gretchen wanted to find out what would happen if you made waffle batter with soy milk instead of cow’s milk. The waffles were nice and light, though that may have been because she beat the heck out of the batter. They were also not quite as dark a brown as normal, but otherwise they were excellent. I weighed 155 pounds.

For lunch today I went to the Penn State Forum’s presentation Prospects for the Internet by Douglas Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2. For those who are not familiar with Internet2, this is how it describes itself.

Internet2 is a consortium being led by 205 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today’s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:

• Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
• Enable revolutionary Internet applications
• Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.

In other words, Internet2 is the next generation of the Internet. It is currently a physically separate network from the one on which you are most probably reading this post. Large parts of it are purely experimental. It is designed to be much faster, and with much greater potential. You think your cable modem or DSL is fast? From my desktop at the Pennsylvania State University, I can sustain a 98.6 Mbps transfer to the University of Indiana — and my connection is not one of the “really good ones.” You think listening to streaming audio is pretty cool? I can watch C-SPAN broadcast live from Northwestern University. Unless you have a direct Internet2 connection, I would not suggest clicking on that C-SPAN link. The application for viewing it is included in the stream itself and then the video feed is 2 megabits per second.

Internet2 is looking for new challenges, but first… lunch!

The thing about buffet lunches is that you get a chance to sample a bunch of dishes. Today I tried anduille and sweet potato soup. Mmmm… Spicy! I would not have said that I would enjoy a sweet potato soup, but I really enjoyed this. The sausage was quite spicy. I followed that with a small green salad. Then there was bow tie pasta casserole, sautéed zucchini and summer squash, turkey and dressing, and roast beef with fried onions. Dessert was a slice of apple pie and I washed it all down with some iced tea.

After the buffet, Mr. Van Houweling spoke. As I just mentioned, Internet2 has significant bandwidth in mind. The speaker was around for the discussions of the original Internet as well and talked about the heated discussion about whether the new “world wide web” application should allow images to be transferred because of concerns over the amount of bandwidth that would be required.

He also mentioned that several corporations turned down the opportunity to take the original Internet commercial. In his words, “Only those in higher education can understand that good things can happen, even when no one is in charge.”

A little while ago I posted a link to Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping in the New York Times. Well, tonight we tried it, and I can say, “It is good.” I washed down two servings of the chili with three glasses of Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not know how the original recipe tastes. You see, I am one of those people who feels that you have to follow the recipe — at least once — or else you do not know how the recipe tastes. Gretchen, on the other hand, likes to look at a recipe and immediately say, “I don’t like cardamom, I’m going to use cloves,” and “There is no chili powder in this chili, I’m going to add a teaspoon.” So when I say, “It is good,” I mean with those changes. I suppose the original is pretty good, too.

On the heals of the success of the first “Is My Blog Burning?” event, Alberto over at Il Forno has announced that there is soon to be a second. This time, the mantle of leadership is being taken up by Clotilde over at Chocolate & Zucchini.

This month’s theme is Tartine. For those of us who are not native French speakers, Babel Fish offers this translation for Tartine: Slice of bread, while Clotilde offers this explanation:

A tartine is a popular Parisian dish, in which different ingredients are arranged and served on a slice of bread — a sort of open-faced sandwich if you will — usually on a bed of greens.

She also offers a link to her post, The Wonderful World Of Tartines, as further explanation. It includes a very appetizing photograph to illustrate the concept.

As a geek, I find the possibilities of this highly exciting. I had been under the mistaken impression that the bread/filling combination we know as the sandwich was purely an n-ary structure. While most people consider the sandwich a binary structure, that is, two slices of bread with something in between, in reality, the sandwich is actually two or more slices of bread with something in between, hence n-ary; where n≠1. Now, with the introduction of the tartine, we can extend this, in a kind Unified Sandwich Theorem, to include the long sought after unary condition (where n equals 1)!

Of course, we are all familiar with the origin of the sandwich, although not created by, but rather named for John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (alias the Insatiable Earl) who, during a long night of gambling, and not wanting to stop to eat, was rumored to have sent a servant to get him some meat between two slices of bread so that he would not soil his cards.

Of course, even the Earl’s title is not without an interesting etymology. You see, “Earl of Sandwich” is a hereditary title that the fourth Earl obviously inherited from the first Earl, who selected the title. The first Earl was originally going to select the title “Earl of Portsmouth,” but at the last moment changed it to “Earl of Sandwich” to honor the town where his fleet embarked on its journey to return Charles II to England. So it is only through happenstance that we are not all eating Portsmouths.

All of that said, the tartine does predate the sandwich. In fact, the Croque Monsieur — similar to the Monte Cristo — is now reverting back to its original form as a tartine.

Anyway, the big day is Sunday, March 7th, 2004, so start planning.

It is time to strap on the napkin because once again there is food in the news!

• We all knew that watching television makes for fat kids, but now we know why. It turns out, according to a new report, that the culprit may actually be the junk food commercials.

  “We want kids to buy our products,” said Steven Rotter, chairman of the Rotter Group in New York, an agency that specializes in marketing to children. “But Mom and Dad, if your kid is eating too much and eating the wrong stuff, don’t let them have it.”

  So, not only is it your fault you are fat, it is your fault that your kids are fat, as well.

• If you want to help kids get proper nutrition, and make a little money too, it seems that the New York City school system is looking for a head chef. The job, which pays $125,000 per year, requires the production of 800,000 meals per day that “appeal to youthful but discerning palates from Staten Island to the Bronx and cost about $2 each, if not less, to produce.” Piece of cake.
• If you think proper nutrition for kids is not important, you might want to look at another new study that “found that improving the diets of young offenders at a maximum security institution… cut offences by 25%.”
• While most kids think that school is prison, this guy waxes lyrical, in one of the most eloquent pieces I have ever read, about his sorrow over the introduction of fast food into the British prison system and longs for the good old days when he was “dining at Her Majesty’s table.”
• If you think cooking for the head of state would beat dining in prision, you might want to read Kim Jong Il’s Chef, which is excerpted in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

  Kim Jong Il has an exceptionally discriminating palate. There is an episode I remember well that demonstrates this. I was preparing sushi in the Number 8 Banquet Hall. All of a sudden Kim Jong Il said, “Fujimoto, today’s sushi tastes a little different.”

  He had had a lot to drink that evening before the meal, and I suggested that maybe that was the reason.

  He replied, “Maybe…” He seemed doubtful, but didn’t pursue it any further.

  However, when I returned to the kitchen, I checked the seasoning used that day and found that the sugar was ten grams less than usual! Kim Jong Il was the only one who had noticed. Even I was astonished at this.

  With respect to rice, before cooking it a waiter and a kitchen staff member would inspect it grain by grain. Chipped and defective grains were extracted; only those with perfect form were presented.

• Finally, while I knew that French Toast was probably named for it’s inventor, rather than a country of origin, I always thought that the French Fry was named for the way the potatoes were cut, but now it seems that it was merely a case of mistaken identity¹. “The name French fries probably arose among non-Belgian allies fighting in the first world war alongside the Belgian army, which spoke French.”
• P.S. If you are suddenly thinking about fried potatoes, here is a recipe for fries and another for chips.

¹ This requires a subscription to see now. You can find a copy here.

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a bowl of steel cut oats with brown sugar, soy milk, and hazelnuts. I weighed 155 pounds.

At work this morning I had two cups of green tea with a cinnamon stick.

For lunch, I walked over to the Joegies at the HUB (two miles, round trip) and had a Hawkeye — a chicken cheesteak with provolone cheese, grilled onions, mayonaise, marinara sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Dinner was a salad and the last bowl of tin roof ice cream.

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit and a cup of coffee. I weighed 154 pounds.

Over lunch, I walked to the HUB and then to the IST building and back — I am guessing about three miles. I had a banana when I got back and there seem to be a bunch of fund raisers going on right now, so I broke down and got a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup three pack.

Dinner was broiled flounder, roasted potato wedges with balsamic vinegar, a small salad and a bowl of tin roof ice cream.