gracewoo@ml

photo: Taken with my webcam

This is a picture of a screw I took with my webcam today.

food: poached pears

Poached pears are incredibly easy and delicious. The only drawback is that they take a lot of patience. I used Alton Brown's method here. Basically, peel and cut out the core of the pear from the bottom. Then, boil some water with your choice of spices and bring it back down to medium. Let the pears simmer in the broth for about 30 minutes until they're tender. Then, bring the pears out and let them cool in the refridgerator while reducing the broth to a sweet sauce.

I chose to use brown sugar, cinnamon, almond syrup, nutmeg and blackberries in sweetening up these pears. If you're like me and allergic to a lot of raw fruits that you love, poaching them is a great solution :) Serve the pear up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a vanilla mochi for something extra delicious.

food: blueberries, strawberries and rhubarb custard tarts

One of my favorite fruits as a kid was rhubarb. Basically, one of my good friends in my neighborhood grew rhubarb during the summer time and her mom would chop off a stalk for me to take home whenever I went over. I don't know why but I really liked to freeze the stalk of rhubarb and then dip it in a bowl of pure cane sugar to eat it up.

Anyway, it's 4th of July and since we're going to be doing a picnic and fireworks later, I decided to be a little more adventurous and try making some fruit custard dessert. Szym and I picked up a great deal of fruit earlier in the day from Haymarket so we had a whole lot of cherries, strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb and limes.

Ingredients:

For cocoa crust:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup confection sugar
2-1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp cocoa
1 tbsp almond syrup
cupcake paper cups - recipe makes about 24 cups

Chop up butter into small pieces and fold in salt, sugar, cocoa and syrup. Mix using fork or hands and slowly add in all flour until one big ball. Put in fridge for at least an hour. I decided to make cupcake rounds so take out crust and press thinly into the paper cups. Bake these empty cups at 350 deg. for 30 minutes and let them cool completely.

For rhubarb compote:

4 cups chopped 1in rhubarb (about 4 stalks)
1/2 cup sugar (you can always add more if you want)
1/2 cup water

Put everything together and bring to a boil. When the rhubarb starts falling apart keep mixing and continue to cook on medium until the water is boiled off and the compote begins to thicken. Turn off heat and let compote cool off. You can store this in a tupperware for other uses as well.

For custard (enough for 6 cups):

2 egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar (I ended up using more like a 3/16 of a cup since my rhubarb turned a little sweet)
1/4 cup flour
1 cup full-fat whole milk
2 tbsp almond syrup

Whisk the eggs yolks together with sugar and flour. Bring the cup whole milk to a boil and immediately begin pouring into mixture. Then return whole mixture to stovetop and cook on low until custard is creamy and sticks to the spoon. Turn off heat and let it cool completely, the custard will thicken a bit upon cooling.

Putting it all together:

Spoon two spoonfuls of custard into each crust. Top with a thin layer of rhubarb compote and set berries pretty into the base. I used a bit of mint (another thing I always felt goes really well with rhubarb) as garnish and if you like one can heat up some apricot jame to brush on to the fruit and give it a good glaze.

Edit: After serving these to a bunch of people, I found that having just the custard on it's own with rhubarb compote and fruit is also great tasting although perhaps not as pretty.

food: Winnimere cheese

Winnimere cheese: From Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, it is made by washed rind comes from a raspberry lambic beer brewed from the farm's yeasts. Then the wheels are wrapped in spruce bark and aged for 60 days, the minimum period required by the  U. S. government to age raw cheese giving an unusual depth and lingering finish.  It is also only made between November through April. Got some today from the local store in Union Square. Good stuff!

tech news: 1974 Television in a Picture Frame

In 1974, Time magazine showed off television in a picture frame which was developed by Westinghouse. There are a ton of devices out there that now have a form factor of a picture frame or a paper-like, thin hand-held device.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945316-1,00.html

food: foodcam

Media Lab foodcam:

http://foodcam.media.mit.edu/view/view.shtml

tools: nmap

Nmap is a very useful tool for various tasks including getting a list of all the IP addresses that are on your subnet. For example, in order to find all IPs on subnet 192.168.1.xxx, one can do: nmap 192.168.1.*

The whole thing is available at http://nmap.org/

tech news: brain reading interface

They say that any good technology is indistinguishable from magic. Also, in a previous post I suggested the potentials of designing for the extreme.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/621094/cebit-2010-the-computer-that-reads-your-mind

I would say that this interface, although intended for the disabled, has some very neat potentials for some new experience designs. This sort of thing is certainly not the first of it's kind but getting letters pumped out is certainly at least some sort of interface.

food: birthday cake!

Babi and Mami sent me this delicious cake from Rosie's bakery. It got just slightly smushed but is still as delicious delicious

tech news: Opinions of the Internet in 1995

Polychronis passed this link along today: http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554

This is an article about the Internet from 1995 published in Newsweek on my birthday. Basically, Clifford Stoil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll) thought that there was far too much hype about what a few computers getting connected together could do. In 1995 (15 years ago), he says:

"Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

In contrast, Nicholas Negroponte, now director of the OLPC project felt the Internet was the future of social computing and interaction... to which Clifford Stoil said:

"Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure"

This brought me to the conclusion: You can't go wrong with optimism for you will always be "ahead of the times"