Viewing Category: Food
Friday is my last day in San Jose, which was pleasantly sunny but chilly--chillier than I expected, actually. I shouldn't complain since I have been hearing that New England is getting hammered with snow. Here's hoping that I don't end up camping out in the Chicago Midway airport Food Court tomorrow. On the plus side, Midway has a pretty decent food court, as airports go. But I digress! Here's what's going on:
Geek Dinner
We had a small gathering of five productivity nerds on Thursday night, meeting at an open air mall called The Pruneyard in Campbell, California. My fellow productivity enthusiasts informed me that The Pruneyard is a popular meeting place for events in Silicon Valley, particularly because there are several good restaurants right there. After convening at The Coffee Society, we moved on to a diner-like place called Hobee's, where I had a club sandwich served with TORTILLA CHIPS on the side instead of fries. It's these regional differences (or perhaps it is just a Hobee's thing) that I find fascinating about new places.
The conversation opened up with an inquiry into The Great Big Mess that all the information capturing we do seems to create. After a great deal of inquiry about job text, performance metrics, and the tossing around of the word "orthogonal" more than a few times, we came to a tentative conclusion that the ideal system would have the following characteristics:
- minimal overhead in note taking and information capture
- not necessary to do a structuring pass to make the notes useful
- available everywhere and anywhere
This is the DREAM SYSTEM, and on first glance it seems untenable. Note taking is essentially the entire scope of information capture; anything we think we should be able to recall later is fair game. This includes conversations in the hallway, planning meetings, things on the Internet, email email email, and pieces of documents scattered across dozens of computer systems. A great deal of our time is spent processing all this raw input into useful resources (or it should be); the seminal information system designer Douglas Engelbart had observed that much of our time is spent just doing clerical work. TThe percentage of time spent being CREATIVE (like, actually making something) is pretty small. Once you have your nuggets all in a row, you naturally want to have them accessible. This is a form of magic. I think the reason devices like smart phones, PDAs, and even Moleskines and Hipsters are so popular is because they are arcane artifacts in a mundane world filled with ordinary information. At least they would be, if they actually worked. Right now, these systems function because we spend a lot of energy maintaining them with methodologies like Getting Things Done and 7 Habits. That isn't quite magic, though...what we want is something we DON'T have to work at constantly, because we're lazy and believe we have better things to do. Even if we force ourselves to do them, we don't enjoy it.
I've written about productivity systems in the past in terms of the importance of context, but lately my emphasis has shifted to continuity as being even more fundamental when it comes to doing stuff.
- If you are just doing without thinking, you'll make progress, but maybe not the right progress.
- If you are doing within an understood context, you have an idea of how your work will be applied; therefore your work is theoretically better.
- If you are maintaining continuity in doing, you have a form of momentum that tells you what to do next, because it follows from what you just did.
The better user interfaces I've seen have addressed context through intelligent screen layout and functional grouping, but I haven't seen anything that really pays attention to continuity. My paper-based tools tend to enforce continuity probably because I need it; I don't have a manager who's job would be to direct my energies along fruitful paths. The modern knowledge worker has so many things going on that it's impossible to maintain continuity of everything, so you're forced to do it very badly or learn to shut things out. For people who want to do more, they turn to a methodology that ensures that they ARE maintaining continuity; this is one of the strengths of GTD, though it doesn't help you with WHAT you should be doing to achieve your desires. That's a different system.
After realizing that we were chasing a system spec that was basically asking for the moon, our brainstorming became more animated. Some of the suggestions (that I think I can share):
Maintaining several distinct information data streams, based on "beautiful filters", that create themselves without you having to be involved. Instead, you use days of the week as continuity. When you need information from a particular area, you go and dip back into it.
Creation of a universal work/life filtering language that imposes a standard continuity description language on different information sources.
Capture metadata about the day by recording what you see throughout the day with Tivo-like camera glasses; when something important happens, you press a button to timestamp that moment and say something about what it is. Since a lot of interesting information is recognized only after it has been observed, the digital rewind capability ensures you don't miss anything.
Get email programs to re-implement really excellent conversational threading, and provide a visual overlay tool that you can use to create a continuity of relevance and context. In other words, methods of organizing who conversations, not just tagging individual items. Nerd analogy: Sort of like using Ethereal to isolate HTTP packet traffic, filter out the non-http stuff, and reconstruct the actual back-and-forth between client and server.
Create "Project Manager ELIZA", a chatterbot that can be used as a tool for continuity reflection and conversational memory storage. The theory is that maybe all we need is someone to talk to about what we're doing, constantly, to maintain our own continuity. ELIZA is known for taking the user's text input, extracting nouns and ideas it recognizes through simple pattern matching, and then spitting back a canned reply using those words. The results can sometimes be very insightful, and certainly they are just as good as the average "bad project manager" :-) Combine this with conversation logging, and the ability to just tell the chatterbot to remember things for you, and you might have a pretty decent personal assistant that doesn't cost you anything.
There were various products mentioned throughout the night in this context: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Microsoft OneNote, 37Signals Basecamp / HighRise / Backpack, That Mac Program That Keeps Track Of What You Are Looking (name?), Tablet PCs, and Moleskines are what I remember.
RSS Feeds
Some readers have had problems with the RSS feed updating multiple times for the same article. I've started seeing this too in the email subscriptions, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why certain posts kept reappearing. I finally dipped into Expression Engine's RSS template and looked around to see what actually goes in there, and after some reading have tried changing:
<guid>{title_permalink=blog}#When:{gmt_entry_date format="%H:%i:%sZ"}</guid>
to
<guid>{title_permalink=blog}</guid>
From what I can tell about RSS feeds, the "globally unique identifier" (GUID) is supposed to be unique but is otherwise just a string. I don't know if there are strange inconsistencies happening in the way {gmt_entry_date} is producing its output as a HH:MM:SS...maybe my server is wobbling slightly on the way seconds are being reported. And wouldn't the date of the post be a more stable GUID string? Anyway, I just nuked that whole part and I hope the RSS problem fixes itself.
Hot Sauces and Yummy Tacos
Two culinary food finds on this trip. First, this is an excellent spicy hot sauce:
My cousin Ben, who tries every hot sauce he comes across, turned me on to this. He warned me to use only a little bit. I spooned on just a bit more than he suggested, and my mouth was scorched in the most loving yet alarming way. The entire top of my scalp started to sweat profusely and my eyes filled with tears of joy and consternation. At the same time, it was more than just heat...there was flavor and warmth and a feeling of some accomplishment. The heat lingers too, becoming stronger over the next 5-10 minutes, so be careful. Really yummy.
We also had lunch at a place called Plaza Garibaldi in San Jose, which had these tacos:
They were good in a way I didn't expect: as an ensemble cast of ingredients, each offering its own contribution to the overall taste. For me, my reference point for tacos are Taco Bell and the numerous so-so Mexican restaurants scattered around New England. The tacos were not intensely flavored, and because of that there was a much more interesting flavor arc. It was subtle like a quiet passage in a piece of classical music, requiring you to listen carefully so you can catch what is going on. I liked them quite a bit, but in a reflective way.
Last Christmas, a good friend of mine surprised me an indoor electric grill. I was surprised in that Why, I never considered getting one of these way, where you're actually not sure what you're going to do with the gift. I like grilling outside and burning stuff, and the idea of doing this in my house didn't seem like quite a good idea because of two problems:
My kitchen doesn't have a good exhaust for high-heat cooking, not that my crap stove can generate the tens of thousands of BTUs I'd need to make a decent stir fry. The exhaust issue is related to the second problem:
My overly-sensitive smoke detectors, which readily go off if I even boil a lot of water. On second thought, the smoke detectors are probably just right, but it's still pretty annoying.
Because of this, I couldn't even conceive of grilling in the house. This course of action had, in the past, produced too much smoke and anxiety to be fun. So the gift, after an initial period of admiration, was left in the box unused and forgotten.
Fast forward a year, and I stumbled upon the grill again while cleaning my office. With the wisdom that advancing age must have bestowed upon me, I could immediately see a new application for the grill, and this was entirely due to the grill being in my office. You see, my office is vented to the outside. It's in the basement next to the storage room, which is also host to the litterbox for my cats. One of the first things I did after I started working down here with the cats was to figure out how to exhaust the fumes from their sandy deposits. Step 1 was to get a Littermaid Automatic Scooping Litterbox. Step 2, after the Littermaid failed to completely contain the smell, was to visit Home Depot to by an electric ventillation fan and an outside vent pipe that would fit in the tiny basement window. With one portable Ground Fault Interruptor outlet for the fan (just in case) and some duct tape to seal the vent pipe to the window, I now constantly vent the nastiness into the Great Outdoors where it belongs. There have been some additional side benefits too: visiting smokers can actually smoke in my office when it's cold out, and the smoke gets sucked outside pretty quickly.
Anyway, I reasoned, what works for cigarette smoke and litterbox odor probably would work for the gently smoking meats and sizzling steaks. So I cleared off the top of my drafting table and set up the grill:
The grill itself, a nice West Bend electric, is about the size of a large scanner, fitting approximately 4 burger patties at once with a flat area off to the side suitable for toasting buns. Unlike my mom's ancient electric skillet from the 70s, the electric grill unit is immersible in water (simplifying cleaning considerably) and has a separate drip pan that fits underneath it. The manual instructs you to fill the drip pan with water, which is a good trick to make cleanup easier (the grease doesn't harden and char). I have tried this in conventional ovens but it tends to create steam at the same time, creating a mushy gray yuckiness on the bottom of the meat. I was pleased to see that this grill didn't seem have that problem when I tested it just now with lightly-salted cross-cut beef short ribs marinated with a touch of low-sodium soy sauce. Overall cooking time was around 15 minutes per batch. While the smoky charcoal taste was lacking, the convenience of working and grilling in the same space was, dare I say, exhilarating. I can see a bit of grease that has escaped, so this isn't the sort of thing I would do every day, but it's just a bit crazy, which is what I needed today :-)
Recently, a Vietnamese market opened near me, and every Saturday morning they've been bringing in specialties like Vietnamese-style roasted chicken and pork from somewhere; this is very similar to the Chinese-style roasted meats that I like to get in Chinatown. I started getting the very intriguing Vietnamese sandwiches that they also stock on Saturday morning, as a kind of after-gym reward.
The cuisine of Vietnam has fascinated me for some time, as I've been told it's a hybrid of colonial French and native Indochinese cooking traditions. The sandwich, which I just found out is called Bánh mì, is one of those interesting mashups of foodstuffs, a tantalizing collection of mystery meats nestled into a French baguette. The aroma is sweet and aromatic from the carrots and cilantro, and when I bite into the delightfully-crusty baguette, I'm delighted by the crunchiness of the vegetables and slight spiciness that pervades the ingredients. It's quite a different sandwich experience than almost anything I've had before, a melange of savory, sweet, spicy, and tart flavors playing musical chairs in my mouth. Compounding the mystery: I couldn't identify any of the meats or underlying flavors with confidence.
So today I finally decided to get to the bottom of this mystery. I bought three sandwiches: one to eat right away, one to dissect, and one "just in case" something went wrong.
For explicit pictures of sandwich dissection, read onwards! But be warned: this is not for the gastronomically faint of heart :-)
To kick off my investigation, I decided to disassemble the sandwich into its constituent components. I have been inspired by the forensic crime drama Bones, which features a crack team of quirky forensic experts that do a lot of really gross lab work to uncover evidence regarding each decomposing victim's last moments. What would I uncover? Would I be able to stomach my findings?
THE INTERIOR INGREDIENTS
The vegetable components: cilantro (green and aromatic), lightly-pickled carrots (crunchy, fresh, slightly sweet and slightly vinegary), lightly-pickled daikon/white radish (treated in a similar manner as the carrot), some slivers of onion (white, raw), a cucumber spear (raw, not pickled at all), and some small seeds which I believe were from a hot pepper.
The meat was unidentifiable to me, but appeared to be of the "loaf" variety. There were three kinds:
This was a savory, slightly sweet meat that I think was pork-based. The consistency of the meat was like a coarse-packed sausage but not as salty. It was rather mild, and kind of chewy.
This one was darker in color and with a saltier flavor than Meat #1. It appeared that there were large chunks of stewed tendon (which Asians love for the crunchy chewiness) intermixed with the actual meat, which was sort of ham-like in flavor. There were peppercorns also embedded in this meat.
A spongy, processed minced-pork meat, sort of like a chicken loaf. If you have had the Vietnamese-style fish cakes, fish balls, or pork balls, you would recognize this flavor. If you can imagine an unbattered and steamed "Pork McNugget" that was big enough to slice, you'd be pretty close what this is. I think. It was more mild, like Meat #1, but more subtle. Perhaps it was due to the slightly spongy texture of the meat.
I sampled each of the ingredients by themselves to get an idea of how they each tasted. The dominant flavors were the slightly-sweet pickle taste of the vegetables, the aromatic greenness of the cilantro, and the salty-savory-sweet taste of the meat. The peppercorns and pepper seeds added a little jolt to the the nasal passages, but didn't add much heat. Texturewise, the ingredients were all different kinds of "crunchy" with the exception of the cilantro and Meat #3. This is a sandwich that you can munch and crunch on.
THE BAGUETTE INGREDIENTS
The baguette was cut down the middle, and spread with mayonnaise (the sweeter Asian variety), some kind of minced organ meat (some form of pate; there was a light liver-like taste to it), and some kind of brown sauce (it tasted like soy sauce, possibly a soy sauce-based meat broth mixture).
I sampled the bread by itself to get a sense of its flavor. It was a nice loaf that was just salty enough, but not so salty that it would overwhelm the ingredients. It was a little stale from sitting out, but overall it was a cut above the usual run-of-the-mill sandwich roll.
The combination of flavors: sweet mayonnaise and the slightly-eggy surface of the baguette dominate first. The soy sauce seemed to be like a very subtle anchoring flavor (soy sauce + pork is a comforting taste to me). The pate adds a slightly unsettling flavor; if you don't like chopped liver or liverwurst, you probably will find it disgusting. I happen to like liver these days, so it's merely an unexpected flavor for me. It probably is what helps make the sandwich taste so unique; without it, you basically have a crunchy cold cut sandwich with sweet mayonnaise.
THE CONCLUSION
This is a crunchy sandwich due to the carrots, radishes, and cucumber, and it's this texture I notice first. The meats in the sandwich, while flavorful, are not the dominant flavor at all. What dominates is the sweetness of the mayonnaise, and the lightly sweet-and-tart pickled vegetables. The savoriness of all the meat, soy sauce, and pate assert themselves more softly toward the end of each bite, acting more to provide a needed counterbalance to the sweetness of the overall experience. The meat itself is a bit chewy-crunchy too, due to the tendons that seem to be part of the sausage grind. Aromatically, the sweetness, the cilantro, and the bread assert themselves from the moment you pick up the sandwich and give its crust an anticipatory squeeze.
I can't quite think of another sandwich experience like this, and while I wouldn't go out of my way to have one every day, it certainly is a nice change from the typical fare one gets around here. So next time you come across a Vietnamese market and see a pile of sandwiches, grab one and see how you like it. If you can eat a hot dog, fabricated as they are from beef lips and pig snouts ground and stuffed into a natural intestine casing, then you should be able to eat this sandwich. My main concern was that there would be shrimp in it (I hate shrimp), but the flavor that was throwing me off turned out to be the pate.
While it's no Dibella's sub, it will do in a pinch. I will have to try different ones now to find the King of All Bánh Mì in my local area!
UPDATE: My sis points out that the awesome Porkchop Express blog has an excellent Bian Mi Basics article, detailing the ingredients further. Though I didn't need to know about the "head cheese roll".
Several years ago I stumbled upon Gothamist, which is a city blog written by locals covering New York City. I really liked the local color of the reporting, and of course there's writeups about interesting food; this writeup of by Jen Chung about how she ran into Jeffrey Steingarten at a BBQ event is a good example. It's since grown into a urban blog network covering many major cities, Austinist being one of them. When I get home, I should check out Bostonist again to see if it's gotten livelier; when it first launched, it was a bit understaffed on the writing side I thought.
Anyway, I'm in Austin and I'm hungry, so I searched Austinist for recommendations and got last year's SXSW Chowdown Guide. Just what I needed. Now I have a purpose for getting out of the hotel room.
Today's Itinerary
Kill time until around noon, when I head over to the Austin Convention Center to get registered. Maybe explore the area a bit. Study the bus routes. Do some more research on places to go and see.
Noonish - head over to the convention center, check out the Interactive Playpen,
630PM - New England Dinner with Ian, Kelley, and maybe more, so we can start to form our first day scooby gang alliances. A quick cab ride!
830PM - Then I want to check out the BlogHer Meetup because I like the whole idea of empowerment that pervades the organization, and would like to talk to people about what it means to be a part of it. There's something very similar to what they do and what I want to do, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Of course, all bets are off if I collide with anyone I know and get steered elsewhere...this seemed to happen a lot last year, and it was kind of neat to just go with the flow. We'll see how that goes.
I turned 39 at the end of December, and with that came a whole host of aches and pains. I thought I was just imagining things because I was eyeing my impending 40s with some trepidation. But then the spasms began, starting with my left hand. My left shoulder joint starting feeling like it was seizing up, and then the right shoulder blade seemed to be grating itself into little pieces. My back was killing me, each vertebra crunching against each other like little disks of sand. These were pains I had never experienced before, and the usual three-day window it normally takes my body to bounce back from a strain had stretched well into 9 days, no improvement in sight. In fact, things seemed to be getting worse, which didn't help my mood.
"So this is how it begins," I thought gloomily. "Total body distintegration. Just in time for my 40s." I mentallly flipped through the various exotic illnesses that could be afflicting me, my imagination fueled by the recent House marathon I had taken in over Christmas, none of them particularly amusing in this context. I feel into a dark mood, lacking energy and clarity. I stayed in the house for almost the entire week, talking to no one, pushing at projects in a vain attempt to keep my mind off the imminent physical collapse of my body.
Then yesterday, I grudgingly went to have dinner with a group of friends at a very nice Sze-Chuan restaurant in Billerica that serves what is possibly the best Chinese food I've had in the area. Grouchy and in pain, I nevertheless put on my best face to fulfill my social obligation. Why? I know from experience that when I put myself in a place where I'm forced to deal with different realities, new insights always arise.
As usual, the company and meal were excellent, which helped lift my spirits. My friends, however, noticed that I was having some back pain because I was making very odd contorted stretching motions. I explained myself.
"You've never done THAT before, Dave," commented B with some concern.
The other B nodded. "You should take some Alleve to make the swelling go down. That will help."
I nodded grimly. I'd taken some pain medicine, which is a rarity for me since I don't like putting drugs in my body. I also knew it was just a temporary measure, because this type of pain was something entirely new to me. The "Lion's Head" soup, a specialty that I normally enjoyed, failed to register on my tongue at all as I stewed in my thoughts. I noted with disconsolation that I'd finished the bowl without remembering to enjoy it. "Yes, I've been taking some Tylenol, but this back pain is something new I haven't experienced before. I'm worried it's something really bad."
P, who had come a little later than the rest of us, perked up at the mention of my back problems. "Oh, I had that a while ago, and it turned out that I was just really dehydrated."
This was an unexpected diagnosis, and I found the idea that dehydration and back pain were related interesting. I had noticed that I was drinking unusually little water recently, and I pressed for more details.
"I was googling for information on back pain," answered P, "and one of the first things that popped up was dehydration and chiropractice. Apparently, when you don't drink enough water, your body isn't 'lubed up' enough and your muscles shrink, which causes joints to rub together more. So I drank a lot more water, and the pain went away."
When I got home, I started drinking water to make up for lost time. Normally, you're supposed to drink at least 64oz a day. I had been probably doing less than 24 oz of liquid a day for several weeks, since I was just not feeling that thirsty. I drank water throughout the next day as well, and you know what? I felt better. The crackly pain in my back went away after about 12 hours. The knife-like pain in my right shoulder turned into a regular throbbing. I felt...juicier! Apparently I had been turning my muscles into beef jerky by not drinking enough water. The numbness and spasms in my arms and hands have also started to fade away. It might be too early to call, but I can say that drinking water seems to make a palpable difference in the way I'm feeling. A quick Google seemed to corroborate P's diagnosis:
The human body also has its emergency calls for water. These are localized emergency calls. We call these heartburn, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, migraine headaches, colitis pain, fibromyalgiac pain, even angina pain -- signs of dehydration in the body. -- from Joint pain, back pain, arthritis cause by chronic dehydration, says doctor
Pain may be a warning of localized thirst; that is, the pain signal may be a warning of dehydration in that specific area (a regional thirst), for example low back pain, migraine headache, joint pain, and angina. Chronic dehydration may contribute to a reduction in lymph flow, which in turn may contribute to or cause varied problems. -- from Diagnose Me: Condition: Dehydration
I knew that drinking water was good for you, but I had never bothered to find out what could go wrong when you are a pint or two low. Dehydration is usually mentioned as a cause of death only when you're reading about shipwrecks, which is outside the realm of our everyday experience.
So the moral of the story: DRINK LOTS OF WATER. Or else!
UPDATE: There are many excellent reader insights in the comments below, presenting a multitude of views. Well worth reading.
