Starry Wisdom

White socks are boring, but if you wear sneakers 90% of the time, it’s a good bet you’ll be wearing a lot of white socks. I wear sneakers at least 90% of the time, so most of my socks are white. And, over the past 3-4 years, my ‘collection’ migrated from calf length to ankle length. This was all well and fine until my left ankle decided it had taken enough abuse over the years and it started hurting me pretty much all the time.

My primary care doctor was baffled by my ankle, since I could support weight on it, hop on it, do whatever I wanted, it just hurt. So he sent me to get an Xray and to see a specialist, who told me that the tendons were inflamed, and that I should wear a brace for 6 weeks. I did this, and my ankle was feeling much better, but he said that really, I should get an MRI to see what’s really going on. The MRI showed a ‘loose body’ near the joint, as well as some damage to the ligament, and these were the primary problems – the inflamed tendons were a side effect of this other damage – and these problems are most likely a side effect of me breaking that ankle when I was 14.

The upshot to all of this is that since the end of January I’ve been wearing the ankle brace pretty much all of the time. The brace is fairly comfortable, that’s not a big deal, but you really need to wear a calf length sock with it. Luckily I still had a few of those left over from the old days (as well as my fancier and heavier hiking socks), so I could get by, but socks became my laundry limiter, instead of underwear, and since I don’t have laundry facilities in my building, doing laundry is sort of a pain in the ass. While the brace was going to be a short term solution, I figured I would just deal with it…

However now that I know what the real problem is, and that it requires surgery to fix (thankfully pretty routine surgery), and that I don’t want to be hobbling around in the summer, I am going to need to wear the brace for quite a while longer. I’m planning on surgery in November (so as to be after my birthday – I guess I can see if I can do very late october too), which is 6 more months of brace wearing prior to surgery, and then there will be months of wearing afterwards.

All of this is a long way of saying that I bought 20 pairs of calf length crew socks at target the other day, and my ankle length socks are going to be taken out of the drawer and put into a box under my bed for the time being. Also, congratulations if you read this far!

Yesterday I tried my hands at hot wings. This was in preparation for an event later this month where I intend to bring some of the wings, but I figured I should try them out myself first! I based the recipe on the one from Good Eats, but I changed the sauce a bit to use Sriracha as the heat component. I did this mostly because I like the taste, but it had the added bonus of creating a sauce that was thicker than the standard buffalo sauce and therefore more of it adhered to the wings.

Sriracha Hot Wings:

12 entire chicken wings
3 ounces (6 tbsp) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
~1/4 cup Sriracha – more or less depending on how spicy and/or thick you want the sauce to be

1) Cut the tips off the wings, and then seperate into and drumettes and wingettes.
2) Heat 1 inch of water to a boil in a large pot. Spread the wings out in a steamer basket (or make the multi stacked one Alton Brown made in the episode “The Wing and I”. Place the basket into the pot, cover and let steam for 10 minutes. This step renders out a lot of the fat.
3) Pat the wings dry, carefully, with paper towel, and spread out on a cooling rack on top of a paper towel lines half sheet pan. Place the wings into the refrigerator for not less than one hour and up to 24 hours.
4) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Replace the paper towel lining with parchment paper, and roast the wings for 20 minutes. Flip the wings over and roast 20 minutes more.
5) Melt the butter in the microwave along with the garlic. Put the melted butter and garlic mixture into a large bowl and then stir in the Sriracha.
6) Immediately after taking them from the oven, place the wings in the bowl and toss to coat. Serve warm.

That’s it, simple as can be. I will admit that I did a partial recipe for the test run, but it’s pretty easy to scale the sauce as you see fit for the amount of wings you are serving.

After a fairly long hiatus, I’ve rejoined the CSA (well, I’m splitting it with Mackenzie – and we’ve changed the pickup to the place near her apartment since it has much better hours than the one 2 blocks from me – but which is inaccessible to someone who works normal business hours). I’ve been eating a lot more vegetables since rejoining, which is good, and I’ve also been cooking a bit more.

It being winter, turnips are in season, so we’ve been getting them in every box. Until recently they were small salad turnips, which are nice because you can eat them raw OR cooked, but those are now grown up to bigger cooking turnips. But this begs the question – how do you cook a turnip? I’d like to provide a simple, delicious recipe:

Maple Braised Turnips
Serves 2-4 as a side dish
(Adapted from Vegetables Everyday by Jack Bishop)

note: the original recipe was half carrots and half turnips – feel free to substitute carrots back in, or replace the turnips with them completely – however the carrots do not need to be browned before the simmering)

1/2 tablespoon unsalted butter
3/4 lb turnips peeled and cut into 3/4 inch cubes
1/3 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1 tablespoon maple syrup
Salt
Freshly ground pepper

1. Melt the butter in a large saute pan. Add the turnips and cook, turning occasionally until lightly browned (about 8 minutes).
2. Add the carrots, stock, maple syrup, and salt and pepper to taste. Cover the pan, reduce the heat, and simmer until soft, about 20 minutes
3. Remove the cover, raise the heat to high, and cook until the liquid in the pan reduces to a thick glaze, about 2 minutes.

I thought I had a picture of this, but alas, my camera says NO.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so first the good news – which is the update on my previous post. Yeah, it was the wireless router, and the new one works perfectly. Yay!

Bad news – I’m falling apart. My ankle had been bothering me since mid December, and I finally managed to get in to see the specialist this Thursday. He said it’s tendinopathy, probably aggravated by some extra bone – remnants of me breaking my ankle nearly twenty years ago. I’m on Aleve for 10 days and I have a pretty fancy ankle brace that I’m to wear for 6 weeks. Hopefully I’ll be better by the time of the followup.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Yesterday morning, as I got up from lacing and buckling up the brace my back decided to spasm. So I’ve been laid up, unable to stand straight and barely able to walk since then. My weekend plans are pretty much ruined. I tried to go to the urgent care place near my apartment today (to maybe get muscle relaxer or the such), but alas, they are closed on weekends.

Oh well, at least my ankle is feeling pretty well.

I’m not sure if I posted about this, in fact I’m quite positive I didn’t, but back in September my Windows computer died. It was nearly five years old so this wasn’t completely unexpected. It wasn’t the end of the world either, as I mostly use my laptop. But still, it served a function as my media server, so it needed to be replaced.

Out of laziness, instead of building my own, I ordered a mid tier Dell system, which came with WIndows Vista, but also a free upgrade to Windows 7, which was due to be released within a couple of months. I was loathe to run Vista, but the free upgrade cheered me up somewhat.

I finally got my upgrade DVD in December, but I dragged my feet in installing it. In hindsight, I really should have done it last week while I was off of work, but alas. Instead I just killed two weeknights dealing with the ‘upgrade’ and its fallout.

First of all, because I’m crazy, I decided I might as well see if the actual upgrade functionality would work, as opposed to doing a fresh install of Windows 7. I didn’t really have anything of value on the OS drive, so I could deal with a clean wipe, but I guess I wanted to see how elegant Microsoft could be. The answer is not at all, and I was forced to do a fresh install after wasting 2 hours doing the upgrade process. Pretty sad, since the install only took about 45 minutes. And now things were OK. Except they weren’t.

I alluded above to the fact that I had more than one drive in the computer. The second drive was the hard drive from my old, dead machine, which was filled with various media files (video and audio). Was is the key term here, since that drive perished in the upgrade. Actually, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to it, and it seems it’s half my fault for not keeping my drive’s firmware up to date (hah, clearly everyone needs to do that!). There is a bug on particular Seagate Barracudas, of which my drive is one, where upon bootup the drive can basically become a spinning brick. All your data is there, but since you cannot talk to the disk, you cannot retrieve it. The only solace to me in this is that I am 99% sure I have all the music on my old Ipod, which I can pull back off it. Oh, and that I can get a warranty replacement.

And now we come to the third woe: my wireless router is a piece of crap. I always knew that the Linksys WRT54G that I had was a less desirable version (v6 if you must know) but because it worked pretty well, I didn’t care. But now my new printer (bought to replace my more than nine year old deskjet that barely worked with Vista, and based on an experience at Erin’s with Windows 7, I figured I was best served with spending $100 to enter the modern age. Oh and I would be getting a scanner and a copier at the same time), which is fully wireless, taught me why that router might not be so great.

You see, I configured the printer to use my wireless network, and it seemed to be happy. But when I tried to find it on my laptop, no luck. And please remember, on this first night, I wasn’t done futzing around with the desktop, so I had no other way to test the printer. It just seemed like it wasn’t working. But on the second night, I found I was able to connect to the printer if I plugged it onto the router via wired ethernet. And on the third night, I learned that my wired windows computer could connect to the printer when it was connected wirelessly to the router. A bit more fooling around with devices and I determined:

So everything works except two wireless devices which try to talk to each other. I am mostly certain, but cannot be positive that this used to work. I decided to see what I could do to debug this, but the router’s web interface doesn’t really give you much to see. Then I looked up custom firmware to see if that would help me debug, and it turns out it probably would, but the dd-wrt website told me I should just sell the old router and get a better one. I don’t think I’ll be selling my neutered router, although I might see if someone at work wants it for free, but I did order a WRT54GL. The L stands for linux, and it’s basically Linksys admitting it was evil with the later revisions of the router. The first thing I’ll do is get the custom firmware on the new router, and after I get that working, I’ll unleash the old one on someone at work.

Anyway, there was a lot of rambling here, but I think you can see how this defends my thesis, I HATE COMPUTERS. At least some of the time, when I don’t really like them.

2009 was a pretty poor year for me and reading. Only 23 books finished (one additional book is still being read, and as such will get counted as 2010, or perhaps not at all).

Here they are in all their glory:

I’m not going to make excuses, I just didn’t read a lot. I will point out a couple of personal highlights in the list, and we’ll just leave it at that:

• Boss – Richard J. Daley of Chicago: this was a fantastic book, but I really wanted to punch the guy (Daley, not Royko!)
• Infinite Jest: This was my second read, which I did for “Infinite Summer” and probably helps account to my less than one book per two weeks total. Upon a second reading I noticed a lot of things I missed the first time, although I still ended up with a lot of questions

Well, it’s actually fruitcake, but that word has some bad connotations, thanks to the radioactive studded substance we find at the grocery store this time of year. For the past 6 or so years, I’ve been baking fruitcake annually around Thanksgiving. Around Thanksgiving because it takes several weeks for the cake to mellow and age (with many spritzes of brandy) before it is ready to be eaten. This way it is ready just on time for Christmas gifting or parties.

This is basically Alton Brown’s recipe from I’m Just Here For More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking, which is subtly different from the Good Eats recipe from the episode “It’s a Wonderful Cake” (although I do recommend watching that episode, you can find it pretty easily on Youtube).

Fruitcake
(Makes one 9″x5″ or two 6″x3¾” loaf pans)

Note: The original recipe calls for the single larger loaf. But I had come across a pair of smaller loaf pans, and it turns out the smaller size is perfect for gifting, and doubles your unit yield. Instead of doubling the recipe, prepare multiple batches of the dried fruit mix, as it is hard to split into proper portions.

1. Mix together dried fruits, ginger, zests, cloves, allspice and rum – you can do this in the pot you will be using the next day (see step 2). Soak overnight.



2. The next day, stir in the apple juice, cider, butter and sugar. Bring to a boil, stirring every few minutes. Reduce heat to low and simmer 10 minutes



3. Remove from heat and cool ½ hour until it is room temperature. Stir in the eggs.
4. Put oven rack to lower middle position and preheat to 325°F. Either butter and flour your loaf pan(s) or spray with “Pam for Baking”.
5. Whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Stir in the pecans.
6. Pour the spiced fruit mixture into the bowl and fold in until it is just combined. Do not overmix.
7. Put the batter into the prepared pan(s). Bake for 1 hour. Check for doneness by poking a skewer into the middle of the loaf. If it comes out clean, it is done baking, otherwise let it go a few minutes more before testing again.



8. Set pan(s) on cooling rack and spritz top with brandy. Cool completely before turning out onto wrack and spritzing with more brandy.
9. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and then foil.
10. To age, unwrap and spritz with brandy and re-wrap every 2 or 3 days for 2 weeks, and then once a week for the next two weeks. After one month of aging and spritzing the cake is ready to be eaten.

Serving suggestion: toast lightly and spread with marscapone cheese.

Contrary to what you might think after the last post, this is not a product review blog (well it’s not much of anything, as I am super lazy). However, I wanted to talk about this toothbrush I bought yesterday – the Colgate Max Fresh.

I was spending the night in Sunnyvale, since I had to take my friend Erin to get some surgery done at 6:30 AM this morning, and driving down to Sunnyvale, then up to Palo Alto from San Francisco would have mean leaving home at 5AM. However, I left my tooth brush sitting on my couch at home, so I bought a new one.

I can’t find a good picture of it online and don’t have a good camera ready and available to take a picture, so I’ll just point you to the official site. This is one of the fancy modern toothbrushes, with a rubber contoured handle and bristles that point off at various acute angles. The site lists some fantastic additional features, including a minty fresh handle to invigorate your brushing experience. I am not sure how much this adds to the experience when you already are most likely using mint scented dentifrice, but at least it has some humor value when you hear about it.

The other feature, the tongue freshener, is what I really want to talk about. I guess it’s a not uncommon feature to have these days – a bit of rubber on the back of the head which supposedly cleans off the tongue, but there is more than just a bit on this toothbrush. The rubber ‘stubble’ is also on the sides of the head, so when you brush you are constantly rubbing it against your cheeks. This is not what I call an enjoyable experience, and even a minty fresh handle can’t change it.

To sum it up, as far as fancy new toothbrushes go, the Max Fresh is a dud. I much prefer my current Oral B CrossAction Pro-Health Toothbrush.

The makers of POM pomegranate juice (oh, wow, I just recall I have a POM branded pomegranate in my fridge, I should rip it apart and get the tasty arils) have decided to create an iced coffee beverage.

I saw this while at the grocery store this morning, and I decided I would try one out, just for kicks. I bought the chocolate one, as the only cafe au lait at the store was in a very battered looking bottle.

Anyway, the beverage’s ingredients are: nonfat milk, organic cane sugar, POMx (pomegranate extract), coffee, erythitrol (why another sweetener?), cocoa, natural flavors, caffeine and carageenan. From these ingredients, I expected it to be a sweeth, thick, chocolately beverage, like the iced Starbucks beverages in the bottles, and indeed that’s what it was. A bit too sweet, actually – I think they were tying to mask the tart pomegranate flavoring, which comes across as an aftertaste more than a taste. It’s not an unpleasant concoction, but not something I would choose to drink very often.

I suppose you could be more unhealthy in a beverage pretty easily, but I’m not sure that this stuff is particularly healthy. Given a choice, I’d rather have one of their juice blends, or even their tea (which I liked a lot more when it came in the wide mouthed glasses).

I’m trying to decide if I should do NANOWRIMO this year or not. For the record, I’ve attempted it every year since 2003, not getting too far that first year, due to job searching, but completing it in 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008 (in 2006 I only got to about 45,000 words, due to moving in November).

I’m trying to fathom if I have the desire to go through with it again, knowing that if I want to I can complete it (most of the stuff I’ve done has been incredibly stupid, but hey, it’s easier to write stupid than smart). It’s a lot of hours of time blocked off, when I could just as well be doing something else, either more or less useful. I have a seed of an idea, but I would have to spend some time prethinking of it before I could actually write on it, which means even more time spent.

Should I or shouldn’t I? I have 26 days left to decide!