zen.org Communal Weblog

Well, we knew it years ago, but apparently, Ireland is the best place to live in the world.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Just not in the pub.

We did our first podcast of The Accidental Cook. It’s our own approach at a cooking show where we talk about what we made recently, complete with some production notes offering recipes and links to what we were talking about.

It’s a 9Mb mp3 file for about 18 minutes. We’re looking at fixing the sound levels (too quiet), adding some music, and using a better microphone.

No matter how few or how many people choose to listen, it’s a lot of fun to make.

Here’s the big problem, as I see it, regarding Podcasts and OPML and all that…

there isn’t a SIMPLE page explaining it all in NORMAL human terms. I’ve been searching for what exactly OPML is, and how to do it, for about a half hour, and my eyes are crossing from all the tech terms. I think I got it now, but jeez….

Guys, if you want your software to get to the masses, YOU HAVE TO START MAKING IT ACCESSIBLE TO THE MASSES!!!!! We, the end lusers, have to understand simply what we’re doing. The fact that we still can’t get iPodderX to recognize our Podcast is just…dumb.

The funny thing is, I mentioned this almost 4 years ago at CFP in regards to encryption. Yeah, notice where the end user is with encryption right now….

Here’s our first show. We cook our favorite artichoke and tuna pasta, plus our recipe for Japanese salmon salad. All comments welcome (unless you’re a spammer).

The Accidental Cook 16 November

And here are the notes from it, including recipes.

After crazy effort, we got everything set up in WordPress so iPodder/iPodder-X/whatever get the RSS enclosure properly. Well, at least for us…

Normally I try to stick to cooking vegetarian, but 余艾蕾 had this coupon, $10 off a ham. Now we have ham laying around the house, I was thinking about pasting the walls with it. Instead, I made this cauliflower based ham soup tonight, and it worked out surprisingly well! Unfortunately, I failed to take good notes, but here is the summary.

I started with about six inches of leek whites, well mostly whites, and a large garlic clove. I minced the garlic clove and chopped the leeks into a pile of rings. In the pot went two teaspoons of butter (I should of used oil I think) and the above mentioned onion matter and sautéed them.

I took half a large head of cauliflower and thinly chopped it; this made a mess as little bits of cauliflower flew all over the place. I threw the cauliflower in the pot and put enough water to cover it, and brought to a boil.

After the cauliflower started getting soft I made it into a purée; I used my hand held blender. Then in went in a healthy portion of white pepper, dash of salt (the ham already has a lot), a bunch of chopped ham cubes, a few spoons of mustard. I let that sit for a bit after stirring. Last, to balance with the red color of the ham, some peas.

Serve with a slice or two of pumpernickel bread for dipping. Now, only if 余艾蕾 would come home from work so I have somebody to serve it too.

Elana was hacking away yesterday trying to get her iBook to create a decent recording. It’s a first step to being able to do her own podcast. As a test she left an audio comment for Adam Curry, who put it into his Daily Source Code show.

It sounded pretty cool, particularly when you consider she started from scratch only a few hours earlier.

Question: What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?

Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.

Linked from Slashdot, a great article on what is encryption?

Most people reading this will know that our son, P, has food allergies. Not severe, thank heavens, but present and uncomfortable for him. Once he was diagnosed, his doc said that we had to be incredibly strict about what he eats, and that he has a good chance of outgrowing the allergies. What we had to do was be vigilant about what he eats. No dairy of any type, eggs, tomatoes, strawberries, shellfish or nuts. Til he’s 3. Which meant for the next 17 months. I’m still nursing him (not too often, we’re at about 2x a day), so that means I’m off all that too. And if that’s the case, then B might as well be off it. So we try to not have anything in the house that would make him break out.

It’s much easier to do here (Ireland) than when we are in the States. The ingredients on ready made foods here look something like this:

Contains: Wheat flour, sugar, whole egg, skimmed milk powder, natural flavourings, E122, E723

Where in the States, a package of bread has more chemical names than everything I learned in chemistry class put together.

So we’ve learned how to read food labels really well. It’s interesting, you learn a lot from those labels and a bit of research.

We don’t really do much takeout anymore (tomato and dairy avoidance means no pizza, egg and nuts mean no Chinese, tomato and dairy also means no Indian, shellfish means….). The chipper around the corner does us well, once a week when we’re just freaking tired and don’t want to think anymore.

Most of our food is homecooked. And it’s pretty good. I’ve always liked cookbooks, I read them like regular books. So we’re learning how to adapt recipes using soymilk, Rice Dream rice milk, egg replacer and fake butter (as I call it. Most margarines still have dairy in them, we’ve found in Ireland that Pure doesn’t and is deeeelish for both spreading and cooking). Most recipes have turned out okay. Some we haven’t even tried yet. Toad In The Hole (sausages in mini Yorkshire puddings) even works decently. Any recipe that uses more than 2 eggs is out tho, the replacer doesn’t work for that.

Funniest thing we’ve found: Boland’s Custard Cream Biscuits don’t have custard or cream. And generic Double Stuf Oreos don’t have any dairy in them.

Adam Curry put an audio comment I did for him into the DSC yesterday. Wheee 🙂 Meant to create our first podcast last night, but the fates were against us. Today, hopefully, since we don’t have anything pressing today. Other than grocery shopping. Urk.