<a href="http://www.staceyscafe.com/dinnermenu.htm" title="Stacey's Cafe - Pleasanton California">Stacey’s Cafe - Pleasanton California</a>: “No matter how finicky you are, our servers are trained to resist the urge to slap you senseless. Feel free to ask for changes to your meal. We can add garlic, delete spices, remove meat if you’re a vegetarian — whatever change you like — as long as it’s legal. And if no one is watching, we’re flexible on the legal thing too.”
Dilberito: Why?
<a href="http://www.dilberito.com/why.htm" title="Dilberito: Why?">Dilberito: Why?</a>: “Founded in 1998 by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert™, and Jack Parker, food research and development veteran, Scott Adams Foods plans to make waves in the food industry. ‘Quite simply, we want to change the way people eat,’ says Scott Adams, CEO. ‘Scott Adams Foods started as a personal quest to find foods that were nutritious, fast and easy to make, and most important, taste great. When I found that it was impossible to find anything like that, I knew that we could do something to make the world a better place, and make some money in the process. It’s called enlightened capitalism.‘
“Scott Adams is enjoying creating a corporation modeled after tenets set forth in his best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle: Create a vision, hire good people, then get out of the way. True to his word, Adams created the vision for the company and hired one of the best minds in the food industry, Jack Parker, to run the operation. The company’s first creation was the DILBERITO — a delicious handheld meal fortified with 100% Daily Value of 23 essential vitamins and minerals.”
Dweezil makes a brisket
<a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/food/la-fo-dweezil17dec17,0,6522764.story?coll=sfla-home-dots-right-utility" title="Sun-Sentinel: Food">Sun-Sentinel: Food</a>: “Beginning Jan. 16, [Lisa Loeb, the petite pop songstress with the cat-eye glasses, and Dweezil Zappa, the guitarist son of rock music legend Frank Zappa,] will star in their own Food Network show, ‘Dweezil and Lisa.’ Last summer, they filmed 10 episodes of the weekly half-hour food travelogue, in which they visit restaurants, ask experts about their favorite foods and get cooking lessons from Tarbell, chef at Tarbell’s in Phoenix, and Scott Conant, the chef at L’Impero in New York.”
Coffee fuelled the information exchanges of the 17th and 18th centuries
<a href="http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281736" title="Economist.com | Coffee-houses">Coffee-houses</a>: “Where do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments? Today, the answer is obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a coffee-house. There, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike business deals, or chat with like-minded people about literature or politics.”
Food Log
No real breakfast or lunch today, though I did sample Gretchen’s holiday cookies throughout the day and I had a cup of Mint Green Tea. Gretchen and I made turkey noodle soup for dinner, Gretchen made popovers to go with it. I also had two glasses of <a href="http://www.bolla.com/view_wine.asp?nWID=8" title="Bolla Wines of Italy - Open Up">Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon</a>.
The Tomato Page
<a href="http://erik.nerim.net/tomato/faq.htm">The Tomato Page - FAQ</a>: “Cleaning up my kitchen once, a long time ago, I discovered that I had three or four different brands of canned tomato paste. And it actually were nice-looking cans. So instead of putting them back in the cupboard, I decided to put them on a shelf. Shortly afterwards I noticed again different cans in a supermarket. I guess that at that moment I started to collect.”
Low-carb diets are catching on, to dismay of bread- and pasta-makers.
<a href="http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/7430619.htm" title="Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/07/2003 | In Atkins era, sandwich is no hero">In Atkins era, sandwich is no hero</a>: ”Avoiding bread, pasta and potatoes at what food experts say is an astonishing rate, many Americans are evangelically fixated on the low-carbohydrate dining espoused by diets such as Atkins and South Beach. Depending on the estimate, between nine million and 35 million people are following all or some of the tenets of a high-protein, low-carb eating regimen.”
Food Log
No breakfast this morning. I weighed in at 158 pounds. Lunch was Panda Buffet’s orange chicken on chow mien with hot and sour soup and a small sierra mist. I walked downtown to get Gretchen’s watch from the jeweler and stopped by the HUB for lunch, then walked back — maybe three miles round trip. When I got back, I had a candy cane that our administrative assistant was giving out to everybody before the holiday break.
<ins datetime="2003-12-19T18:52:00-05:00">Dinner was a Caesar salad and two Beck’s Dark Beers. We are making cookies for the holidays— and sampling as we go. The first sample was a cherry walnut bar cookie. Yum. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/smile.png" height="18" width="18" alt=":-)" /> We also made spritz, oatmeal, refrigerator cookies, and pecan crisps.</ins>
Safari Gets Tooltips
With the Mac OS X 10.3.2 update, Safari now has tooltips. So, I am tentatively retiring “Nice Titles.”
Cooks warned of turkey fat crisis
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3321177.stm" title="BBC NEWS | UK | Politics | Cooks warned of turkey fat crisis">Cooks warned of turkey fat crisis</a>: “Instead of pouring cooking fat down the sink, householders are being advised to put it into an old tin or other sturdy container.
“Once cool and solidified, the fat should be wrapped in newspaper and binned.
“However, fat with high nutritional content, such as lamb and beef suet, can be mixed with seeds, food scraps and dried fruit and hung outside for garden birds.
“Tony Dearsley, Thames Water’s environment manager, said: ‘Cooking fat poured down the drain can be a recipe for disaster at any time of year — but the risk is much greater at Christmas, the peak time for meat sales.
“‘A blocked drain is bottom of everybody's Christmas list, as they can cause householders’ own properties to flood, a costly and very unpleasant experience.’”