The #1 Matt was in town on Wednesday night, so some folks organized a meetup at the Heartland Brewery. I only took a handful of pictures, none of which turned out very well, but fortunately John Keegan has shared some nice snaps.

It was neat to chat with Matt and find out more about Automattic as a company and what some of their plans are for Wordpress. He’s a really fun, personable guy. It’s awesome to use a product with such a great spokesperson.

My room is the cleanest it’s been in months. The dishes are washed, and the counter is wiped. This morning I had bacon and eggs for breakfast, and last night I baked fresh bread. Now there’s a delicious-smelling pot roast on the counter that’ll be ready in a few hours.

It is officially exam time. Can you tell?

I’ve mentioned The Book of Bread previously, but it really is the definitive resource for any kind of bread you can imagine. I thought I’d share one of the recipes I tried recently that was particularly delicious.

I’m cautious of any recipe that claims to be creamy, as I had a bad experience once with bread so creamy that each bite tasted like a glass of whole milk. This recipe isn’t just soft and airy, it’s also tough enough for nice big sandwiches, and has a yellowish colour and very slight sourness that’s extremely pleasant. Read on…

This seemed to go over well at a pot-luck on Saturday. With prep, rising, and cook time, it was a mite over an hour total, of which twenty minutes was kneading dough and shredding cheese.

Read on…

Exam time means study time. Study time means not enough time. And this, of course, means streamlining.

Obvious targets are tasks that can be eliminated altogether. The justification which allows fast food to replace real food becomes more muddled, and can even extend as far more bizarre substitutions. For example, the purchase of new clothes to save that hour and a half spent on laundry. (Possibly a guy-only savings; apparently some females find clothes shopping to be a veritable black hole of time consumption.)

But besides killing chores, what about the necessary recreation? Man cannot live on studying alone… What kinds of relaxation activities give the highest degree of relaxation per unit of time invested? Read on…

I don’t normally use this space to express negative opinions, but I’m making an exception for the Low Fat Yogurt commercial from Tim Hortons.

The advertisement in question is not simply annoying, it is offensive.

A trim, red-haired woman is featured, enjoying a fruit and yogurt cup on a couch. A small crowd gathers outside the window, presumably to observe her consuming the treat.

On seeing these people, she assumes the look of a trapped animal. “It’s low fat,” she pleads, eyes wide, “It’s low fat!” Read on…

There are lots of reasons to love working at a small company. No, spending nights sipping a Corona and tweaking the templates is not one of them.

But it is really cool to be developing for the web when the company in the next office is innovating for the supermarket. This is an organic tea-based carbonated beverage. It’s really delicious, but it won’t hit shelves until the middle of next year sometime.

And it probably won’t be sold in an unmarked clear glass bottle.

I bought a bag of potatoes. The intention was to boil and mash them, and make shepherd’s pie. But then I had mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving.

So I did homemade french fries instead. And here’s how it went down.

Recon

The only “real” home deep fryer I’ve ever encountered was an intimidating affair comprised of thick stainless steel and heavy plastic.

The primary function of it simple: It completely contains the volatile grease as the food is lowered into it.

As chopped and washed potatoes descend into 150+ degree oil, all the surface water boils very very quickly. Beneath the surface, this causes the oil to go psycho and splatter all over the place. At 150 degrees, this isn’t simply messy, it’s hazardous.

It was this functionality that would need to be replicated. Read on…

When I was originally figuring out my living arrangements for school and decided I was cooking for myself, I budgetted a lot of money for eating out, figuring that I could, considering the savings on rent.

But I hate eating out. The food on campus is awful. In an emergency last night between a meeting and WCF, I had the special at a major campus eatery. Terrible. For the $8.50 that cost, I could’ve made three meals each twice as good. And I’m not a chef. Definitely not a chef.

But I had a nice piece of success Thursday after the bananabread fiasco. I thought I’d make Pizza for the other Mike and I. Now, I know making pizza is supposed to be really difficult, but I also knew that my sisters and I had had a moderate amount of success with it a couple months ago at home. Well, it worked famously — absolutely delicious. I bought a slice of Pizza Pizza today just as a control variable to make sure, and it was sort of lousy in comparison. :)

I might as well take this opportunity to link for the first time to my other big project — the Quickcook Database. It’s not finished, but there’s still a lot of great meals there that my family members and I have contributed.

It exists primarily to provide me with things to consume so I don’t starve, and secondarily as a playground for me to work on my PHP and MySQL skills. It’s not supposed to be a gargantuan beast the way some recipe sites are, just a small collection of honest, reliable, simple food ideas. That said, the database behind it is far more sophisticated and intricate than anything I’ve seen anywhere else to date.

I’ve updated the Pizza Recipe to reflect my observations from the other day. And I’ve got the other half of the dough in the freezer for another time.

Mike

Chemistry lecture was cancelled today, so I had a few moments this afternoon and thought I’d try my hand at baking a banana loaf.

Well, something went wrong…

I took it out after an hour of cooking, plunged a knife into it, and realised it was still mostly dough inside. Was it missing some key ingredient that I neglected? Is the tired old oven in our kitchen just not able to hit 350F any more?

I stuck it back in for another 20 minutes. The results can seen on the right. Yes, it was cooked all the through. No, it wasn’t burnt. Yes, it is in many small chunks. Yes, I did grease the pan.

Baking is sort of like studying. You spend time studying in order to purchase the satisfaction of a good mark on the test — and that of having learned something new, but it’s less tangible. When you bake, you invest time in the present, and the payoff is a yummy snack.

Well, I’m pretty sure that loaf’s pieces will be yummy when I consume them slathered in butter with chunks of cheese and a tall cold one of milk… but not quite the way I envisioned it.

Mike

EDIT: It seems that all unsatisfactory results were the product of a single miscalculation. I used a slightly smaller pan than was recommended in the recipe. This caused the loaf to be a lot thicker, and therefore not cook properly in 60 minutes, leading to the overdone crust and subsequent disintegration.