26 June 2009

More uses for kimchi

So, I had some noodles from the Thai restaurant near work for lunch yesterday. There were enough leftovers to be worth saving but not enough for a full meal. And I have this home-made kimchi -- so I brought it to work and stirred a bunch of it into my freshly microwaved noodles.

Who knew? It worked great! They are astoundingly complementary flavors. It's great that this stuff is easier to use than I had feared.

Tonight or tomorrow I'm going to start a new batch and document the making of it here.

24 June 2009

Blogging -- how, where and when?

If you're one of our three readers, you've noticed that we're crazily sporadic in our blogging. There's the whole "why am I blogging" question, of course, but also some other issues: When do I have time? Where am I when something blog-worthy happens? How is it best to get the notional information into the blog?

Cathy and I have had iPhones for a few months now. Wow. We love them. I'm thinking they should help us blog on the go. I can Tweet pretty easily from my phone, so why not "real" blogging. But after a few hours of looking around and configuring various services, I think the options are pretty lame just now. At least if you're on blogger/blogspot/Google. They don't have a custom iPhone app -- maybe because that would be unsupportive of Android and the combination of other things doesn't add up to a seamless whole.

Here's what I can do:

I can email to the blog. From the iPhone, this can include a single picture and I have to initiate the process from the image -- I can't just attach it from the email client (can you say stoopid?). But this is actually a pretty elegant solution for simple posting while out and about.

I have enabled the iGoogle widget that lets me blog (among other things) from within Safari. It's also an adequate option for low-complexity posts. The good thing with this is that I can save the draft and edit it later. And I can even do it immediately -- this tool provides a quick link in. But no images without following that link. And the tool is a bit hard to use on the mobile screen.

We have a Flickr account under Cathy's name. And there is an app for the iPhone called Flickit. It does a pretty astounding job of getting images from my phone to Flickr. And I configured Flickr so that we can blog right from an image over to here. That's neat. But again, it only supports a single image. You can add more, but it's a hassle on the phone. And actually, what I do from my desktop PC seems to be impossible. Flickr knows that I'm using a mobile browser and present a simplified interface. One of the simplifications includes not displaying the "small" version of the image and not giving out the URLs. So again, it's a pretty hopeless tool for anything but the most simple use-case.

There's also an SMS-posting tool but we're on a limited texting plan and I don't want to go down that route.

So, with this imperfect array of tools, I'm going to try to blog stuff a bit more. Maybe I'll have to come back and edit things when I have a real keyboard or maybe I'll develop a style around these tools.

I keep thinking about buying a new Mac Mini so that I can write iPhone apps of my own. Here's an amazing example of something that needs to be written.

Home-made food

I've been reading Wild Fermentation lately. Inspired by the book, Cathy helped me make some kimchi. And a few days ago I made a ball of Farmer's cheese.

So...making these things is very cool, but I don't always know what to do with them. Tonight I decided to dive in.

I started by sauteeing the "paneer" with pepper and celery salt and then I dump quite a bit of the kimch into the pan and stir-fried them together. To round it out, I added a package of commercial vegetarian kebobs -- some textured wheat gluten magic.

It was actually quite good.

(Also, this is me blogging from my iPhone for the first time -- it's a bit awkard, but cool.) (And as it turns out, I haven't yet figured out a decent way to add images...I had to come back in and edit...grr!)