Skirts On Fire

#ndb

Me to Pieter: How old are you?

Pieter: Twenty-three

Me to Sean: How old are you?

Sean: Twenty-seven

Pieter to me: How old are you?

Me: Thirty

Pieter (rather quickly and avoiding eye contact): No big deal.

>: (

Two Greedy Italians – Ricotta Dumplings

So I have been watching this show on the BBC called Two Greedy Italians.  If you like food, watch it.  It’s about these two older Italian guys who travel back home from the UK to check out how food and cooking might have changed in their native Italy.  They say silly things, make fun of each other, eat delicious things, cook delicious things, you get the idea.  Here’s a recipe from the first episode.  It’s very easy to make and you get to be all proud for making the dumplings from scratch.  Total time to do this is maybe 45 min the first time and then once you get the hang of the dough, it’s faster.  You can start the sauce while you wait for the water to boil for the dumplings.

Ingredients

For the dumplings

• 200g/7oz 00 flour, plus extra for dusting
• 225g/8oz ricotta
• 3 free-range egg yolks
• 30g/1oz parmesan, freshly grated (I used romano, but really, any hard cheese would do)
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg (no idea where to get whole nutmeg so I used the ground stuff)
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the sauce:

• 6 tbsp olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, peeled, cut into thick slices (thick, in this case, means about 2mm)
• 1 chilli, sliced (or you could use the chili flakes that you find in those shaker thingies)
• 2 x 400g/14oz cans tinned plum tomatoes, each tomato chopped in half (this is an excellent opportunity to use Save-On’s Western Family Fire Roasted Tomatoes)
• few basil leaves (always best to shell out for the fresh stuff, but dried will work fine in the sauce too.  Add them in when you add the tomatoes, rather than tossing the fresh leaves on top when you dish up)

Preparation method

1. Mix the flour, ricotta, egg yolks, parmesan, nutmeg and seasoning together in a large bowl to form a soft, moist dough.
2. Tip the mixture out onto a floured work surface and knead for 3-5 minutes.  If you don’t knead for the full time, the dumplings won’t feel as smooth as they can be. Roll the dough into a long, thin sausage shape, then cut into dumplings about 2cm/1in long.
3. Cook the dumplings for 3-4 minutes in a large saucepan of salted boiling water.  I waited for them to float and then added another minute or two.  The first time I made this recipe it seemed like I didn’t cook them enough so I tacked on a couple of minutes the second time.
4. Meanwhile for the sauce, heat the olive oil in a frying pan and fry the garlic and chili for one minute (don’t burn the garlic!), then remove the pan from the heat and add the plum tomatoes.  Give it a stir and taste it as now is the time to add things: fresh ground pepper? salt? splash of red wine? spices other that basil?
5. Return the pan to the heat, bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes.
6. Remove the dumplings from the pan with a slotted spoon and add them to the tomato sauce.
7. To serve, spoon the dumplings onto a serving plate and sprinkle over the basil leaves.  Feel free to add a bit more parm or whatever cheese on top.

Basil & Veggie Mini Quiches

Pretty sure this recipe is from Chatelaine. You could sub in whatever veggies you have kicking around. Further, I wasn’t overly precise with the eggs vs egg whites so don’t worry too much about that. Good with side of toast or a salad. Or both if you are extra hungry. Although you probably won’t have room for ice cream then and that’s a shame.

5 eggs
3 egg whites
1 cup milk
1/4 cup finely chopped red pepper
1/4 cup finely chopped scallion
6 basil leaves, chiffonaded
1/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese, although any cheese will do
Salt and pepper
Cooking spray

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs. Add the milk and whisk again.
In a medium bowl, combine the red pepper, scallion, cheddar cheese, basil and salt and pepper.

Spray a muffin tin well with cooking spray. Read further down about the quiches sticking. If you absolutely don’t want yours to stick, now is the time to take action. You could probably up the cooking spray to butter or margarine or seek out a parchment paper solution. You could also try those silicone muffin things your mom gave you a couple of Christmases ago, that you forgot about until now and which are brilliant in this type of situation. Note: silicone still requires oven mitts.

Pour an even amount of the egg mixture into each muffin cup. They will be about 2/3-3/4 full. Anymore than that and you’ll overflow the tins while you are baking as the egg mixture will rise up and bubble as it bakes. Divide the veggie mixture evenly amongst the muffin cups. Sprinkle each with a little pepper and salt if you like, although I didn’t.

Put the filled muffin tin into the preheated oven and bake for about 25 minutes, or until the quiches are just starting to brown. This took me more like 30-35 minutes so if it’s taking longer for you, don’t panic. Just keep setting the time for a few extra minutes at a time until they are starting to brown.

Remove the muffin tray from the oven and cool on a rack for about 5 minutes. Place a cutting board over the muffin tin and flip upside down so that the quiches fall out onto the board. If your muffin tin is like mine and quickly on its way to no longer being a non-stick one, then you’re quiches will probably stick. Once they are done, run a knife around the edge and sorta coax them out as best you can.

Serve immediately.
Makes 12 mini quiches.

BBC’s The Spice Trail

So I’ve finished watching this BBC 3-parter on spices and their history called The Spice Trail. The presenter is incredibly enthusiastic, which at some points is a bit grating but the content makes it worth the occasional grimaces. If you live in a non-iPlayer location, looks like you can stream it online with a little googling.

P.S. Vanilla rhymes with quesadilla. I’m still blown away by this.

P.P.S. The process to make cinnamon is incredible! I had no idea.

A single point of contact?

This morning I was catching up on email – including all of the weekly digests I’ve subscribed to and I came across this guy: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/what-will-facebooks-message-platform-mean-for-your-business

Now, at first I kind of blew this one off. I don’t generally use fb for communication. I turned fb messages off pretty much as soon as they were turned on. Facebook is mostly for events and keeping tabs on my sister. But after a second read through and a couple of sips of water while I mulled, I started to wonder if maybe I was missing something.

I have a lot of information streams – Gmail for longer-format communications, Google Reader for blogs I want to keep up on, Twitter for quick messages to friends and relating what new things I’ve discovered and want to share, this blog for when I’m feeling wordy or want to include some commentary, and my iphone for texts and for calls to persons of a particular generation who don’t quite do the other formats.

It’s up to me to keep all of this straight and organized, managing all these different threads. Sometime email conversations will start as a reaction to a tweet from a friend. Sometimes I’ll DM someone and then need to follow up with a text or a call if it’s really that pressing. So far this hasn’t been a pain. I don’t usually forget things (Am I wrong on this one? Are you laughing at me right now? If so, let me know in the comments.) But I have to ask myself, could one solution make things easier? If I could hit one point of contact for a friend, and everything could flow through that, would communication be simpler and easier? Being able to search is valuable. Wouldn’t having that entire record of communication in a single location provide that ability?

BUT! I still get teased for being reserved with access to my information on fb, so I’m not sure that I’m ready to trust them with to that degree. This leads into the next point, who would I trust?

So, attention internet, someone not evil please get on that.

P.S. Does anyone think email is too slow?? I just have different expectations for the timeline on replies…

Rails 101

I’ve started writing a web app in rails this past week. I don’t expect to make money or change the world but I think it should be flexible enough that I’ll be able to learn everything I want on this topic as well as be able to branch out into building an iphone app and probably playing around with a couple of apis. More importantly, I’ve learned two things – one I’m not so keen on admitting to my dev friends and one that surprised me:
1. Coding from scratch is a bitch. I don’t think I’m a complete idiot and google I have gotten especially close in the past 10 days but there’s a vast difference between tweaking an existing thing vs. having to know all the ins and outs of creating something brand new (or trying to remember how the hell Nathan and CT set this up for the hockey draft fb app.) So, programmer friends, I salute you. Try not to rub it in.
2. Constraining my imagination to a minimum viable product is really tricky. It’s easy to have a list of features and pare it down to what version 1.0 will be, but no sooner do I put my foot down but my mind is already whirring away on how I can improve for the second go-round and even the third. This got me thinking about some sort of versionable design app such that I could see what I had laid out for min. viable, and then v2, etc, etc, all colour-coded and organized. If this exists, please tell me. If this doesn’t, can we make it? It should also allow some sort of flow mapping functionality.

utest.com – round 1

A friend recently recommended that I check out utest.com, a site that brings together companies who are looking for qa with testers who are looking to make some extra money. Today I checked it out. Fast forward to now, when I’m so frustrated with the first 30 minutes of effort that I’m blogging about it. Check out some of my other posts to see how often I blog. That I’m doing so now does imply something.

At first everything was fine except it seemed like most of the details were behind their account creation wall so I signed up for an account and was stepped through their profile creation process. Being the more skeptical sort, I opted to leave most of the details empty until I could determine how committed I was to becoming a utester. Although why a company opts to hide information from non-account-holders is beyond me…

So I signed up and was told that as a newbie, my best bet was to check out some of the info in the forums to learn about getting into a project, bug reports, etc. Alright, click on Tester Forums and hmm, another account creation screen? Didn’t I just set up an account?? Well, ok, deep breath in, let’s fill this one out too. Click to create and I’m presented with this:

“contact board administrator…” well ok, but there is no information on how to actually do that on that page. Although, when you put in the wrong login credentials, you are presented with an email address to contact… Thank you, my mac, for making it so easy to take a screenshot. Turns out that I have to wait 24 hours before getting access to the forums so they can verify my email address, which is bizarre as I did all of that during the original account creation process…

I decided that I’d go back to my profile and start filling it in. One of the tabs let’s you fill out what hardware and software you have access to so you can be matched up correctly with testing projects. Pro-tip: If you aren’t going to let me click on a radio button, please for the love of god properly grey out that section so I don’t spend time trying to figure out what’s going wrong with my touchpad. Alternatively, if you can’t do that properly, put the goddamn Edit button in a more noticeable place. If you are designing a site in a language that reads left to right, PUT THINGS ON THE LEFT! IT’S WHERE MY EYES ARE GOING TO GO. Sometimes it’s so inconvenient being literate and all…sigh.

After the Edit button debacle, I checked out some of the other account tabs and found this guy. Anyone want to guess on the difference between change and edit??

So far, utest, we’re not hitting it off. It’s like you’ve told me your in love with Harper and cats are superior to dogs – I’m suddenly wishing I had arranged for a faux-emergency call from a friend half an hour into this date.

The Competition

I’ve signed up for a whole pile of reading lists lately and this link was on my radar today: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-gain-competitive-insight-with-social-media/

I understand the importance of checking up on your competitors but this seems a bit much, no? If you are a smaller company, with limited resources and time, I’d rather spend it engaging my customer base. Building that relationship gives you so much:
1. better understanding of your customers – if you have that relationship in place, you can ask for feedback
2. source of ideas and innovation – how do they use your product, what could make it better, what other problems can you solve for them
3. brand loyalty and retention – maybe you’ve screwed up your latest release but if you’ve already established a healthy relationship, users will trust you and know you’ll rectify the error
4. growth and acquisition – there’s nothing like a recommendation from a friend to get you to try something

Do other people really never mention the companies and products they love?? I regularly talk about Famoso and how great it is. I am currently hugging my Mac as I type. Mmm Credo…

Maybe it’s my QA perspective?? I put such a high value on customer service and being respectful with clients. I hate when a company jerks me around or isn’t sincere. I just can’t imagine working at a job where I spent my day seeing what the other guy is doing and then playing catch up. Isn’t it obvious? You continue to promote and expand on the good relationships that you would’ve had prior to setting up your twitter account… A good company is a good company and customers will seek that out.

Three and Oh.

Well, today is my 30th birthday. Happily, I keep forgetting. Unhappily, I recall enough to know that forgetting is associated with getting older.

I haven’t done many of the things I thought I would do by now. Is it the same for you too?? Maybe I can take some comfort in the fact that I’ve only really been in charge of my life for the past 12 years and before that my parents were responsible. After that point, I fully accept that the decisions that I made have set me on the path to where I am now. But despite not ending up where I expected, I’m still at a good place. Maybe there are multiple destinations?? So, Self, with that in mind, you know things are great and you know what you do to make things even better. Try to get those done before Three and One.

Toys R Us on Calg Tr on Dec 1 at 8pm for Santa’s Anon

For a couple of years now, I meet up with some friends at the Toys R Us on Calgary Tr and we buy gifts for Santa’s Anonymous. In fact, it’s more like wandering around the store and us playing with everything (read: me trying not to buy Lego for myself) before picking out the toys but you get the idea. Feel free to meet me there this Wednesday around 8pm.

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