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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Unique Recipe Presentation


A unique way to present a recipe? Preposterous. I've been reading recipes since I owned my first cookbook, The Boxcar Children Cookbook, which my parents purchased for me when it came out through my school's Scholastic Books program. Since then I've spent a lot of time learning as much as I can about the "how" of cooking as opposed to just following a recipe blind. One of my favorite resources is Alton Brown, creator of the Food Network TV Show "Good Eats". Then I was searching around the other day for methods and recipes on how to prepare T-Bone steaks for our Christmas Dinner with the family and found a recipe on one of the websites I've seen in the past but hadn't been able to pay much attention to it. It is Cooking for Engineers and was created by Michael Chu. On his website, Michael will present recipes like the following:


Not sure if everybody is able to understand this presentation, but I'm sure that for most mathematical types you might agree that this is a pretty awesome way to look at a recipe. I chose this Osso Buco recipe because it's somewhat complicated so I could show you how a complicated recipe is shown, and because it sounded delicious! Check out the rest of the content on Michael's site for many other helpful hints and recipes!

Update: Sorry for the poor presentation on this site originally, hope it looks ok now. Had a tough time showing the HTML table properly so I just uploaded as an image. Thanks for the patience!

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Snowmageddon 2010


Hello all from the frozen tundra of Minnesota! Quite an adventure today as close to 24" of snow is scheduled to fall and our town has announced a state of emergency. Of course, I only found this out after I tried to go out. Normally the rule of thumb is if you can escape your driveway and onto a main road, you're good to go. Not the case today because they decided it was a losing battle to try and clean it up now, so they are waiting. I got about 3 miles from my house before I finally called it quits and went back home. Why was out I out do you ask? Well, it just so happened that I got one row of my driveway snowblowed out, when it decided to sputter and die. After careful inspection, we suspect that it has a clogged fuel filter. So I figured I'd either be staying and shoveling or going and snowblowing. So I made a run for it. Immediately when I hit the snow in my driveway I knew I was in trouble for I could feel it start to slow me down instantly. The Explorer fought against it with all it had but it gave up the ghost just at the end the driveway when it hit the hard pack from the initial plowing that occurred before the announcement. After an hour of getting all the snow out from around, under, and behind the truck I finally was able to manuever and made the decision to try and punch it into town. At this point, I should have known that there was going to be a problem when a couple goes walking past my driveway in the middle of the road on snowshoes, we said hello like it was a sunny summer's eve and I was washing my car, I love Minnesota. But on the other hand, the roads had less snow, and all I needed to do was keep forward momentum going, right? Easy peasy...until after 20 minutes of fighting heavy drifts and almost stopping to help somebody who was stuck in the middle of an intersection in a 4x4....I decided that my snowblower wasn't the most important thing and I should probably hightail it home.

Out my driver door when I arrived back home...all the way up to the door.

Another picture after I punched it into the driveway on the way home.

So yeah...I pushed about 2"-3" just to open the drivers door.

All in all, this is part of the reason I love living in MN, the high highs, the low lows, and the fact that I just saw another couple outside out walking their dog. This is definitely a strange place to live...