Coconut cookies
By Sparky | April 29, 2009
Bakers coconut and a hint of white chocolate make for a moist, adult cookie.
Whipped together 2oz sugar and 4oz of unsalted room temperature butter until light and fluffy.
Combine in 6oz of flour, mix until a proper dough
Add 1/3rd cup white chocolate chips and 2/3rd cup bakers coconut.
Bake flattened 1 1/2 inch spheres of dough for 15 minutes at 350 until slightly browned.
One more shot for extra food porn goodness:
Topics: Cooking, Food, How to, Photography, Picture of the day | No Comments »
Noodles
By Sparky | April 18, 2009
I love pasta. I love pasta in almost all it’s forms! Having experimented with several types of factory made pastas in the last month I decided to give it a go at creating my own. After having both the King and Queen of the Weekly Geek impress upon me how much better a handle-free rolling pin was I made a detour to <fancy cooking store> in the U-Village to pick up a french style Vic Firth maple rolling pin.
Following the 3:2 flour to egg ratio recommended in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio I set out on my quest. Things got a little messy at first until I figured out how to properly dust down everything with flour. In the spirit of experimentation I kneaded half of the dough for a few minutes longer than the other half to get different textures. Once the kneading was done each half was let to rest for 15 minutes before being halved again as below.
I obviously could benefit from a little practice in rolling and cutting technique to make each individual noodle a more uniform length, but I am actually pretty pleased with how well they came out. The thick cut reminds me a lot of some of the egg noodles my grandparents would put in their Mennonite soups every day for lunch.
Once cooked in lightly salted water for 6 minutes the results were delicious. The more-kneaded dough came out to my favorite – much thicker and more substantive, a hearty egg noodle.
Check out more photos of the process and finished noodles on Flickr.
Topics: Cooking, Food, How to, Photography, Picture of the day | No Comments »
Experimentation and mixing flavor
By Sparky | April 17, 2009
I was in the mood to experiment tonight so dropped by the store and picked some things up on my way home to try putting together a few combination I hadn’t used before. An hour later this was the result:
The chicken is marinated in olive oil and sun dried tomatoes and was served over a bed of sauteed garlic, onion, and apples with crisp lemon asparagus in the background. I’m still perfecting the grill technique on the asparagus – a little bit of charred blackness is fantastic, but it’s really easy to do.
The biggest experiment for me was the garlic, onion, and apples. I reduced a little lemon juice with the mix after caramelizing the onions to help bring out the sweetness in the onion. The end result came out sweet yet savory and filling. Next time I’m going to put the cloves of garlic in a few minutes early in the hopes of further softening it to better match the cooked apples.
Dessert was reheated from last night – a pureed pear and lime syrup baked over pear and apple slices with a crisp style top served ala mode with vanilla bean ice cream. This is certainly the tastiest thing I’ve ever made and possibly one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. NOM!
Topics: Cooking, Food, Health, Photography, Picture of the day | 2 Comments »
Egg-free oatmeal cookies
By Sparky | April 10, 2009
Ingredients:
- 2 cups quick cooking oats
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup melted butter
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup raisins (optional)
- 1/4 cup water
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Directions:
Beat melted butter, sugars and vanilla until light and fluffy.
Add flour and salt, mix well.
Dissolve baking soda in water and add to the mixture.
Add rolled oats, raisins – mix well a final time.
Form into tablespoonful sized mounds onto cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.
Bake at 350F for 10 minutes.
Cool and enjoy some massive nom .
Topics: Cooking, Food, How to | No Comments »
Daylight Savings, I do
By Sparky | March 11, 2009
DST has finally caught up with me. The first few early days I my body thought it was a fling, some hot new timezone I was flirting with. Now that I’ve done it for 4 days it realizes I’m committed to this new temporal relationship and as a result my body is playing the part of the jilted boyfriend, sulking in the corner and complaining about everything.
Topics: Daily grind, Health | 3 Comments »
Friendfeed invades metaspark
By Sparky | September 7, 2008
Metaspark.net has just been redesigned to reflect my friendfeed addiction. If you had been following metaspark as a way to stay current on all things Sparky will likely find this to be a much more complete feed. If you want to see the old version it’s still available at http://sparktography.tumblr.com/.
If you follow metaspark via RSS you will want to move your subscription over to this new feed.
Topics: Daily grind, Infobits, Internet, Software, Technology, Web gems | No Comments »
And then the floods came
By Sparky | August 14, 2008
Just days ago I twittered about how twitter had killed my desire to write long form content (how meta). In a cruel twist of fate I now find myself with events in my life bringing back the need for long form content: a personal disaster. My condo was flooded on Tuesday, and although I ‘broke the news’ on twitter the topic definitely deserves a more through write up.
Tuesday morning my dog walker called me in a panic to let me know my condo was flooding and water was pouring in through the cling. I came racing home to find 20+ gallons of water a minute draining in from my ceiling in the entryway, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom and my dog Skype laying in a puddle whimpering.
A quick call to the fire department later and they beat the door in for my upstairs neighbor to discover a faulty toilet valve and full water mains pressure flowing into the unit. They were able to shut off the water, but at that point it was too late – my unit was completely soaked, and my downstairs neighbor’s unit had sustained quite a bit of damage as well.
After filing an insurance claim the work begun. Service Master appeared to start cleaning up the water and ripping out drywall, insulation, and the carpet. The condo is a total disaster now – I’m missing a ceiling, several of my walls, my carpet and sub floor. Additionally my bed was soaked through, one of my couches was destroyed, and most of my clothing was ruined. All of this has effectively made me homeless in the short term.
Thankfully I have an both excellent friends and an excellent insurance agent so I have a place to stay and everything will be back to normal in a month or so, but Christ – what a nightmare. All this is of course happening on the eve of when I had planned to list my condo to upgrade to a house so life is just complicated coming and going.
Ahh the joys of owning property.
Topics: Daily grind, Events, Friends, Photography | 3 Comments »
Only in America
By Sparky | July 23, 2008
…can picking something to drink be so difficult and drowned in an over-abundance of choice.
Topics: Daily grind, Food, Photography, Picture of the day | 1 Comment »
Twitter: downtime as a matter of course
By Sparky | July 23, 2008
What is it about Twitter that makes it such a success in spite of frequent and continued service availability issues? If you ask me it’s a rabid user base (like me) willing to use the service in the face of hour after hour of downtime, tweet after tweet lost to the ether. Any other service this unreliable would be hard pressed to keep the numbers of users around that are causing Twitters instability in recent months.
Why so rabid a user base? You have me at that one – I’m hooked and have no clue why.
Topics: Daily grind, Development, Internet, Reviews, Technology, Web gems | No Comments »