Pork Satay with Cucumbers and Peanut Sauce

Ingredients 1 Lb boneless pork loin roast 2 cloves garlic 1 C coconut milk 2 Tbs brown sugar 2 Tbs of your favorite curry powder 1 Tbs fish sauce Preparation Mince garlic and mix together with everything except pork. Thinly slice pork and marinade in coconut mixture for at least 2 hours and as long … Read more

Season’s Greetings

Happy Holidays! Season’s Greetings! Those 2 are still safe, right? I’m pretty sure they are. At least things haven’t gotten as bad as forseen in this humorous posting to the Interesting People list: I wanted to send out some sort of holiday greeting to my friends, but it is so difficult in today’s world to … Read more

How’s the Weather?

Using a slick Movabletype plugin, I’ve implemented a current weather conditions report, visible on the side navigation of this site. The weather for any number of sites may be listed and I’ve chosen 3 sites: home in San Jose; family in Salina, KS and Bristol, UK, where I’ve got colleagues and friends. I’m still playing … Read more

Mac OS X Image Browsing (and Management)

I found an excellent tip describing how one can use the (free with recent Macs) GraphicConverter program as very good thumbnail image explorer. I’ve been using PhotoExplorer, from Ulead, both on the PC and the Mac, and while it has all the features I want from such a program, including: * resizable thumbnails * variety … Read more

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2003

While I’m not a big fan of year-end best of lists, the top 10 astro photos of 2003 web site is worth a visit. I don’t agree with all of their choices, but found many of the images to be stunning. Two of my favorites are the photo of earth from mars and the unexplained … Read more

Mike’s Simple Onion Focaccia

I’ve been wanting to expand my repertoire of yeast recipes beyond cinnamon rolls for some time now, and the receipt of two bread and baking cookbooks (The Bread Bible and King Arthur’s Flour Baker’s Companion) for Christmas has already motivated me to try a couple of different recipes. The cinnamon chip bread, while simple to … Read more

Grandma’s Christmas Tree

If this tree looks familiar (to my family), it’s because it was at Grandma Thora’s for as long as I can remember. We sure had some special times at Grandma’s on Christmas Eve, didn’t we? When I was a kid I didn’t care about things like this, but now I’m proud to the one who … Read more

A Gift for the Future

While cleaning out my inbox I came across a message that prompted me to action. It seems that famed bluegrass musician Tut Taylor has around 500 cassette and reel to reel tapes that he wants to sell for $15,000. A group of bluegrass enthusiasts have formed the Steam Powered Preservation Society which is currently attempting … Read more

Spaghetti Carbonara

(I made this one from memory tonight, though I did double-check the recipe before posting!) Ingredients 1 Lb spaghetti 1/2 pound pancetta (one thick slice) 3-4 Tbs extra virgin olive oil 2-3 cloves crushed garlic 1/2 C white wine 2 eggs 2-3 Tbs milk (traditionalists will want to ignore the milk) 2/3 C grated Parmesan … Read more

One Thing Leads to Another

I joined the ranks of firebird and thunderbird users today. So far, firebird hasn’t had any problems rendering the sites I’ve visited, and setting up thunderbird to access my imap mail account was very easy (since both are based on mozilla the dialog boxes, etc. are very familiar). What’s interesting is how and why I … Read more