Protip - Kauai Causual Dining.
From a recent vacation to the Poipu area on Hawaii's island of Kauai, I have a few tips for casual dining:
- Keoki's Paradise is always delicious. If you don't have have the time or budget for the main dining room, you can ask for bar / cafe seating where they have a simpler menu in the $15 range. If you bring your receipt back on a second visit, you'll get a free Hula Pie dessert - yum!
- Merriman's Fishhouse, in the Kukui'ula shopping and dining plaza, has a Downstairs Cafe which is a more casual and cheaper version of the upstairs restaurant. The Downstairs Cafe has a happy hour with $5 mai tais and $3 draft beer.
- Brennecke's Beach Broiler has fabulous open air seating right across from Poipu Beach park. The full menu is rather expensive for what you get, but you can use the happy hour (3-5pm) menu for some relaxation after an afternoon at the beach.
To Dos.
There are a lot of useful tips in Lifehacker's article about how to make your to-do list do-able. Here are the best tips:
- You're the boss of you. Put yourself into "think" mode and figure out what you've gotta do.
- Break it down. You can't do a whole project (like "buy house") all at once, but you can do "find open houses for Sunday" and "schedule appointment with bank".
Intro to Fused Glass.
This summer, I took an "Intro to Glass Fusing" class at Aquila Glass School in Portland. Instructor Scott Curn showed off several finished fused pieces and explained how we could get the same effect as the demo piece. Then we made our own fused glass plates, and a few pendants which are not shown here. The class was a great introduction to both glass fusing and Aquila's studio. My only complaint is that the class didn't teach us how to cut large pieces of glass, but the staff is willing to teach that if you come in for open studio time.
This small nut bowl was the result of Scott's challenge to take a boring grey square and "make it art". For "art", I decided that pink was in order. I'm really in love with the result - particularly the slightly pulled-in sides of the dish.
This was the "go crazy" plate, where each student got full access to the scrap drawer to build on their clear glass rectangle. There was a reasonable selection of large pieces from the blue bin, so I grabbed some nice ones and made this patchwork pattern. This plate is great for servicing fancy truffles, or crackers and cheese.
I was surprised at how easy glass fusing is; compared to glass blowing. Fusing is pretty much about cutting glass, stacking it, and then melting it. While fusing isn't quite as fun as blowing glass, but it is much easier to do in hot weather.
If you want to learn about glass fusing, check out Bullseye Glass' online video kilnforming lessons. They have a few videos available for free!
As always, thanks to the husband for the photography.
Cookies For Science.
I have been struggling recently with the question of how old can baking soda get before it's inappropriate for baking. I decided to do some science - and baked up these cookies last Sunday night.
The above picture shows the cookies made the old baking soda, after having cooled on the rack for about half an hour. They're a little flat; they're tallest where the chocolate chips provide structure for the dough.
The above picture shows the cookies made the new baking soda (sorry for the poor focus). These cookies are puffy; the dough holds it's own structure.
A cookie with old baking soda is on the left, and a cookie with new baking soda is on the right.
As before, the cookies with old baking soda are on the left, and the cookies with new baking soda are on the right. The stack on the right is clearly much taller.
The Results
The results were clear to me - the old baking soda delivered a significantly worse cookie. The cookies made with old baking soda were too flat (they were puddles of dough clinging to chocolate chips), and dried out in just 2 days. The cookies with new baking soda were cookie shaped; and still tasty 4 days later. I hereby strengthen my resolve to buy new baking soda every 6 months.
The Recipe
Here is the recipe that I used:
- 11 1/4 oz all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
- 1/2 cup shortening
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Stir flour, baking soda and salt together. Cream the butter, shortening, white and brown sugar. Add eggs, one by one, to creamed mixture and beat until incorporated, then add vanilla. Gradually mix in flour mixture. Dish rough tablespoons of dough onto a baking sheet and baked for 9.5 minutes at 350° F (until golden brown and delicious). Allow cookies to set on cookie sheets, and to cool on wire racks.
Test Methodology
I prepared two mixtures of 5 5/8th oz flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and added 1/2 teaspoon of each version of baking soda to each mixture. I prepared two mixtures of 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1 egg for each batch of dough.
I creamed the entire recipe of butter, shortening and both sugars together, weighed the total amount (with the bowl zeroed out), and spooned material out of that bowl until was split in half. While finishing the dough and baking, I stored the creamed mixtures and dough in the refrigerator.
The dough with the old baking soda got proper chocolate chips. I figured this would give them the best chance at being tall; as the chips provided some height. The dough with the new baking soda got chopped bar chocolate, which contributed to its darker color (and did help me to tell the cookies apart.)
Science is re-producible, so I urge you to preform your own experiments!
Firefox's Scratchpad.
The below information cost me 90 minutes of my working day to earn. I pass it to you, loyal reader, for the bargain basement price of about 3 minutes.
It used to be that Firefox could execute JavaScript directly out of the URL. But, since Firefox 6 (August), this is no longer functional. Instead, Mozilla has provided a much nicer multi-line Scratchpad for editing JavaScript. Executing new JavaScript on a live page is something I do almost every day, so this is a great addition. And of course it's well populated with keyboard commands. Nicely done, Mozilla!
The current production version of Firebug (web developer add-on par excellence) has a bug where the JavaScript resizeTo function will not work if Firebug is enabled in the browser. To use resizeTo, you must disable Firebug from Firefox entirely; simply disabling Firebug for the browser window in question is not sufficient.
iOS 5.0.1.
Last week, I upgraded the software on my iPhone 4 from iOS 4.something to the newest version (5.0.1). The new iOS adds a lot of great features that make the iPhone even easier to use. Here are some of the best features that I've noticed:
- In the text messaging application, the keyboard now moves out of the way when I'm not using it so that I can read more previous text messages. Finally!
- I can set a custom text tone (the sound that plays when a specific person sends a text message), and I can even use the custom ring tones that I set up. Finally! Also, I can set my alarm sounds to the custom ringtones.
- Text messages will appear on the screen even when the phone is locked. Finally!
- I can take a picture and control music playback right from the lock screen. (By double-tapping the Home button.)
Lastly, just before I upgraded to iOS 5.0.1, I had noticed a distinct drop in my iPhone's battery life. I know there were some problems with the iOS 5.0 battery life, but I started noticing battery life issues at the end of October, and I hadn't upgraded to iOS 5.0. Previously, the iPhone would have 30% - 20% of its life left by the time I plugged it in to charge at night. When the problem started, the iPhone was getting down to 5% - 10% of a charge by the same time. The good news is that the iOS 5.0.1 upgrade also fixed the issues that I was seeing with battery life.
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The Sezmi.
In February, our household ditched cable T.V. service in favor of a combination of Netflix, a new DVR and less T.V. overall. For our new DVR, we chose an over-the-air DVR from a company called Sezmi. Unfortunately, last month Sezmi decided to cease providing direct to consumer service.
While we could watch previously recorded shows, the DVR stopped recording new shows, and seemed to lose the listing service. We could still manually set recordings, and choose live T.V. by network.
However, we recently rebooted the Sezmi, and since then it's started automatically recording shows, and it's been showing the listings information again. Hooray! This will certainly stave off the need to research and purchase a new DVR solution for a while.
