Daily Archives: 12/8/2004

Brainwagon Radio: Too Long Since the Last One

Damn, it’s been nearly a week since I put out my last one, and this was painful to put out. Hopefully it isn’t too painful to listen to.

Items from the show:

  • Shameless plug for my Cinnamon Bear Podcast.
  • I upgraded this weblog to use the latest version of the CG Powerpack.
  • I rambled about the phase vocoder some more. mostly incoherently, plugging papers that I’ve mentioned before.
  • I extol the virtues of cheese once again. Have you considered that the key ingredients in Welsh Rabbit are in fact all ancient foods? History in one dish.
  • The gents at SawStop have electric saws which detect when fingers get in them and break quickly to keep you from lopping off your finger.
  • An Internet Archive “gem”: Superman battles Japoteurs in an interesting (?) look back into wartime propaganda.
  • Need to convert MPEG2’s from archive.org to a DVD? I wrote up how to do that once before using command line programs. Works great because it doesn’t re-encode the video.
  • Want a Matlab compatible language? Try Octave. Need more Octave libraries? Try octave-forge.
  • Try wearing a Santa hat wherever you go.
  • Closing music: We Wish You a Merry Christmas by T. Stipe

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Tom!Didn’t find out about it until late in the day, but I’d like to wish Tom a happy birthday! Best wishes to you and yours, and health, long life, riches, laughter, music, DAT drives that don’t jam and laptops that work with Linux right out of the box.

Chicken and Dumplings, ala Brainwagon

It’s cold (or what passes for cold in California) and rainy today, so it’s time to cook up something healthy and delicious. Here’s my recipe (such as it is) for home-made Chicken and Dumplings, inspired by a similar recipe that I saw on Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals. Nothing about this meal is cast in stone, substitute whatever you like.

  • Begin by putting your largest pot onto the stove and heat it to medium high. Dice a largish onion or two smaller ones, and cook those in a tablespoon of olive oil until they are translucent. Or until you get the rest of the veggies chopped.
  • The rest of the veggies are a couple stalks of celery and two carrots. Dice them up, and add them to the onions. Add a pinch or two of kosher salt. Cook until bored.
  • Chop up some boneless chicken into inch size chunks. Dump into the pot. Stir occasionally. Brown until bored.
  • Open a big can of lowfat/low sodium chicken broth. Add it in, and then turn up the heat until it begins to bubble.
  • Peel and chop two russet potatoes. Dump ’em in.
  • Let cook at a strong simmer for 15 minutes.
  • Take two cups of Bisquick, 3/4 cup of milk, and some chopped sage. Mix into a biscuit batter, which you drop by spoonfuls into the boiling pot of chickeny goodness. Dump some sage into the broth too.
  • Wait 15 or 20 minutes. Serve in big bowls with some fresh ground black pepper.

Each batch I make turns out a bit different. My wife loves this stuff. Guaranteed to make you feel warm inside. Chicken thighs actually make for a better tasting stew, but a little higher in fat. You can also add bayleaf or oregano or thyme or rosemary, whatever you like. This dish goes back to my basic philosophy of food: start with good ingredients, don’t screw with ’em too much and you’ll make something tasty.

Addendum: Cooking is a great geek hobby, with obvious benefits. Plenty of gadgets and books to buy, a modicum of science and lots of hands on work.

Minor website improvements…

I downloaded the most recent release of ChaitGear Powerpack, a set of WordPress Plugins that you include support for the referer list and an Amazon Wishlist. I ended up having to recompile mod_php4 and install a couple of php modules, but now all seems to work.

I put up the wishlist mainly as a lark, but if in the last twelve months you have

  1. Come into vast sums of money…
  2. Have already bought presents for all your loved ones…
  3. Enjoyed either my weblog or podcasts…

then perhaps you might wish to select one of the items to send my way. It’s a sure fire way to get me to plug your website and link it in the next year! 🙂

One of those days…

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