Seattle.BloggersPub

Trying to be clever sometimes gets me into trouble.

I was planning to make a soup this week. I thought it would be a good idea to cook some black-eyed peas one night ahead of time, so that I’d be able to eat dinner at a reasonable hour when I went to prepare the soup the next evening.

I didn’t soak the beans earlier in the day, so I pulled out my 70s-era slow cooker after dinner, and let it do its thing. Clever, yes?

Just before bedtime, I went to check on the peas. Disaster had struck.

The peas were way overcooked. The soup I had in mind was not based on a puree. Of course, I didn’t want to let the effort, or the food, go to waste.

A small disaster, yes, but I was disappointed. I lose interest in hearty soups the moment warm weather takes hold in Seattle, and there’s not much time left before that happens (he says hopefully).

A rescue operation was in order.

I remembered having a sort of black-eyed pea johnnycake at Seattle’s Kingfish Cafe several years ago, and then I thought that these overcooked beans might have a second chance at life. Not being a Southerner, in spite of a couple of years living in Knoxville, TN as a teenager, I’m not the right person to ask how to make the "real" thing, but I ground up a bunch of cumin, a little coriander seed, and even a touch of dried gobo (burdock root), only the first of which is terribly likely in any Southern version of this dish.

Although the beans were already pretty well mashed on their own, I used a fork on a little over half of the beans to make them a little more likely to hold together, and then worked in a couple of eggs, some panko, the spices, and salt.

The only kind of cornmeal I have around is instant masa, so I went ahead and used regular flour (an early experiment with the masa wasn’t promising). I formed the bean mixture into patties, dusted each patty with the flour, and placed them one-by-one in an hot cast-iron pan. I used plenty of oil, more than coating the bottom of the pan, but not so much that the patties would be floating in it.

The patties are cooked until just a bit beyond golden brown.

To serve, I mixed up some harissa, a chili and garlic mixture with cumin, coriander, and a bit of olive oil, with some prepared mayonnaise. This went on each patty rather artlessly, as my squeeze bottle’s tip fractured, leaving me to resort to a spoon.  A little parsley made it almost look pretty.

From a near fiasco, I had a very high protein, fairly flavorful dish, built from the humblest of ingredients. Sometimes failure is rewarding.

In this walkthrough I’m going to take you through using ColdFusion (which contains LiveCycle Data Services) to create real time communication between an application in the browser and one on the desktop built with Adobe AIR. Both applications are written in Flex. You’ll see how we can create a better user experience on the desktop […]

In 56.98 hours, I will walk out of my final lecture of graduate school. But who’s counting?
Between papers and another writing project I am in the midst of, I haven’t been able to blog as much. But that just feels like a small taste of what the last three years have been like. I’ve anticipated […]

Thanks to CrunchGear I just caught wind of the Beatport Downloader. It’s an AIR application that lets you download and manage music you buy from the beatport service, a music store along the lines of Amazon MP3 and iTunes but that focuses on trance/techno/electronic.
I’ve been hoping and wishing on the stars here in Seattle that […]

America is not the final destination.

America is a layover.

I, your neighbor, am likely on a different course than you. Neither of us cares.

I’ll talk over the announcements you care about, you’ll talk over mine. We’ll take turns glancing at the clock in anticipation.

Your other neighbor may be on the same path as you, but guaranteed she’ll fight tooth-and-nail to get where she’s heading if it comes down to her or you.

We’ll turn to junk food, magazines, mobile phones and laptops to find anything that can take us, at least temporarily, away from this place.

And all the while, we’ll complain about how we’re not yet where we want to be.

TechCrunch has a post about the just-launched beta of TOPO! Explorer, a site which provides a Google Maps interface on top of real topo data and it lets you upload your GPS data as well as geotag videos and photos of the trail.
Now is a good time to introduce you to my latest pet/side project, […]

Almost every feed I subscribe to contains meaningful or at least marginally meaningful post titles associated with every post. Jason Kottke’s feed, on the other hand, contains post titles that are, in the majority of cases, substrings of the post content’s text. Because of this, my inner monologue while reading his feed goes something like this:

Some great photos of Americans commuting by Vincent Laforet using…

Some great photos of Americans commuting by Vincent Laforet using a tilt shift lens.

Ten ideas for making NYC streets a more friendly place…

(Oh, crap. I’m doing it again).

Ten ideas for making NYC streets a more friendly place for those not in automobiles, including the woonerf, bicycle boulevards, and the green grid…

I feel like I’ve posted this one before but the Google…

(Oh, crap. I’m doing it yet again! Remember, Bernie, skip the post titles when reading Jason Kottke’s feed!).

I feel like I’ve posted this one before but the Google says no so….LUNCH is a blog written by a couple of NYC architects who believe in the sanctity, sanity, and satiety of the lunch break…

Frustrating? I’d say so. But I love his blog, so what’s a guy to do?

I’ve always kinda wondered why you couldn’t reverse ordered lists in HTML, especially given people’s propensity for counting down in “top ten” lists. Via The WHATWG Blog, Lachlan Hunt shares the news that ordered lists can be reversed in HTML 5:

These are the same as ordered lists, but instead of counting up from 1, they instead count down towards 1. This can be used, for example, to count down the top 10 movies, music, or LOLCats, or anything else you want to present as a countdown list.

Through the use of a reversed and an optional start attribute on the ol tag, one can reverse an ordered list and even dictate what number the list starts counting down from. A key thing to remember is that in XHTML, the attribute has to be used somewhat redundantly, by specifying reversed="reversed".

Head on over to The WHATWG Blog for all the details, including some examples of the new feature put into use in various ways.

TechCrunch has a copy of Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends report for March and there’s a lot of good news in there for anyone in the Adobe developer sphere. TechCrunch’s analysis revolves around the social aspect of the report and there is a lot of data about the value/opportunity/popularity of social sites. The contrast between the […]

I ordered a non-PC electronics product from Dell on April 2nd. I received a pretty good deal on it, so I was pretty excited about the purchase. The boilerplate order confirmation I received via email noted that my estimated ship date would be April 17th. I hoped that that was simply boilerplate and nothing more, since I wasn’t buying a custom PC, but rather an electronics product that is manufactured by someone other than Dell.

However, April 17th arrived and my order had not yet shipped. In fact, at that time I received an email from Dell informing me that the shipment of my order had been delayed due to product availability issues. I was told shipment would be delayed by a week, and was therefore estimated for April 24th.

When April 24th arrived, I had no email from Dell. I received nothing to confirm shipment and nothing to explain why the shipment hadn’t yet happened. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the order status link I had received in my original order confirmation, and I was taken to a page explaining that my order had been canceled due to the product I ordered having been discontinued by the manufacturer. Keep in mind, I received no email from Dell explaining the cancellation. If I hadn’t checked that link, I probably still wouldn’t know to this day what the status of my order was.

In exchange for the three weeks of my time that were wasted waiting for my order, I received what I perceived to be a consolation email today, offering 10% off any purchase toward electronics, software and accessories. The kicker?

Expires 05/02/08.

Oh, so you can waste my time, but I can’t waste yours, huh Dell?

You just gave one loyal Gateway customer even more reason to remain loyal.