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- Category: Transit Blog
I pondered the title of this article for a bit because we're currently struggling over the future of trains in America. One party wants to break up Amtrak into the NEC or Northeast Coridor (40% private) and then leave the current Amtrak to die on the vine trying to manage the rest of the non-profitable lines. The other party put 8 Billion into HSR (high speed rail) lines and wants to spend more. Amtrak has said it will cost about 100 Billion to rebuild the NEC. So having read Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding across America by James McCommons I know a few things about the history of passenger rail in America. For those of you who don't want to read an entire book about the history and current state of passenger trains in America I ran across a PDF entitled On the Wings of the Zephyr
The Rise and Fall of America’s High-Speed Streamliners (click to download). This tells the story of the Pioneer Zephyr an advanced high speed train in America. It left Chicago in the evening and arrived in Denver first thing in the morning. The average speed was 77 mph and it topped 116 mph. These numbers look a great deal like our current Acela high speed train in the Northeast Coridor. They also look a lot like the proposed high speed rail line between Orlando and Tampa that was refused by the current Florida Governor. As we struggle to get even single lines built it's hard to imagine that at one point in time the United States had 49,000 miles of high speed rail lines. The top 10 fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world were American. The year? Nineteen thirty-four! Yes I said 1934. Steam engines gave way to diesel and American wanted to prove it's chops so we built (using private money) a high speed rail system with entire trainsets engineered in America. The Pioneer Zephyr trainset (97 ft) weighed a total of about 200,000 lbs including engine. That's about what the engine on a modern Amtrak weighs by itself! Weight costs money - the more a train weighs the more stress on the tracks, the more diesel fuel it uses, the more it costs to pull. The freight railroads say it costs $1 to pull one ton (2000 lbs) 50 miles. With this train weighing about 1 million pounds less than our current Amtrak Superliners it makes sense that it would be drastically cheaper to run.
It all came to an end for various reasons. Diesel locomotives were required to have a fireman onboard even though they no longer had fires to tend to. A days pay was calculated by 100 miles traveled so the Zephyr engineer and fireman were paid for one week every day they worked. This was good for the engineer and fireman but bad for the railroad. To discourage traveling during WWII 15% was added to train tickets. Between 1945 and 1953 this raised 1.4 Billion dollars for the US treasury. The tax wasn't lifted until it was all over. Speed limits of 79 mph were placed on trains without specialized switching gear that would cost 500 Million dollars (current dollars) to install. During this same period of time the US Government started directly subsidizing airlines and indirectly subsidizing the airline industry with fixed airmail prices. In 1946 the Airport Development Act called for construction of 2000 new airports and provided 500 Million (1946 funds) to build them. By 1960 they'd spent more than 2 Billion on airports. The Federal Aid Highway act of 1944 authorized $500 Million per YEAR for highways. This however, wasn't enough so Vise President Nixon (yes tricky Dick) proposed a 50 Billion dollar highway plan (remember this is 1954 money equivalent to 1 Trillion dollars today). The entire United States budget was 71 Billion so 50 Billion on one project was immense. This would be roughly equivalent to us spending 2 Trillion today on one project. In 13 years the Airlines portion of intercity travel went from 6% to 39%. After 28,000 miles of interstate highway was opened 49,000 miles of passenger rail track was closed.
Was it even possible for passenger trains to compete with the deck stacked against them? Probably not. By 1971 the private passenger rail companies wanted out of the business and the government handed them a carrot. Amtrak would be created to relieve them of the burden as long as they let Amtrak run on their rails. So the next time someone complains about Amtrak's subsidies remember that the entire airline and car infrastructure was built on trillions of dollars of tax money. Ironically the political party pushing in those days for tax subsidies to create this infrastructure and ultimately kill off an entirely independent private industry were the Republicans. Quite the change of philosophy in relation to now. Now the same party wants to end subsidies to Amtrak. Maybe the goal is the same but it can't be about dollars can it?
Current Amtrak trains average about 45 mph and have only a fraction of the track that we used to have. Most every small town in America had a passenger train station. It doesn't bother me so much that one technology would replace another, what bothers me is how much it cost American tax payers to unbalance competition and how much it's ultimately cost us in the end.
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- Category: Bash
While demonstrating that you can use BASH for more than system administration I put together this script that accesses OneBusAway's ReST API to show what buses are coming to your stop next, their scheduled arrival time and their real arrival time (for King County Metro). You can download it from the Downloads section if you wish -
This script was made on Ubuntu Linux using BASH 3.2 and requires wget and xml2. Wget is usually installed on Linux but I had to install xml2 so I have the script checking for that. wheresmybus3.sh (1 kB)
Syntax: wheresmybus.sh stop_id
Example: wheresmybus.sh 1_400
Route Number: 358E
Destination: DOWNTOWN SEATTLE VIA AURORA AVE N
Actual Arrival Time: 0 Minutes
Scheduled Arrival Time: -8 Minutes
Route Number: 2
Destination: MADRONA PARK VIA E UNION ST
Actual Arrival Time: 0 Minutes
Scheduled Arrival Time: 4 Minutes
If you don't know what the agency number is (and who does?) just leave it out and wheresmybus.sh will give you a list. The example above would show the arrival times for King County Metro's stop number 400. Output will look like this.
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- Category: Gadget Blog
I started out with Virgin Mobile cell phone service this year because they had an unlimited Internet/Texting plane for $25/month. It was limited to 300 minutes of talk which is a great deal for me since I don't talk on the phone much anyway. This plan was contract free as is all of Virgin Mobile's plans and uses Sprint for the carrier. I've had good luck with it but the one caveat is that you have a limited number of phones you can use. When I bought mine they had some crappy cheap phones, one Android phone and a Blackberry phone - I chose the Android unit. It's served it's purpose but not satisfied with Android 2.1 and later 2.2 I really wanted to try a Nokia n900 which is a GSM phone and I really didn't want to sign a contract especially since I was just trying it out. After some searching I found Simple Mobile which uses T-Mobile as a carrier, has contract free plans from $40-60/month and worked with the Nokia so I jumped in. I've decided to write this article because unlike Virgin Mobile it's not "Simple" to get Simple Mobile to work. Here's what I had to do.
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Buy a Sim Card (Called a Sim Kit on their website). I bought mine off of Ebay for $4.
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Buy Re-Up money on the Simple Mobile website.
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Activate your Sim Card by going to Simple Mobile's website and
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Inserting your 19 digit SIM card number
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Inserting your 15 digit Phone ID number
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Inserting a 16 digit pin number (Re-Up minutes)
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Inserting a numeric 8 digit password
Once that's done you should be able to make phone calls. Data (Internet) however, will not work quite yet. With Sprint/Virgin Mobile your data and cell connection appear to be the same thing. With T-Mobile/Simple Mobile your cell connection is seperate and your data connection looks like a WIFI hot spot connection. However, you can't just select the 3G data connection quite yet.
To setup Internet access for your phone
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Point a web browser to http://simplemobile.wdsglobal.com/phonefirst
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Insert your phone number, the make and model of the phone and a security code
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Insert the pin number shown into your mobile phone, select Internet connections and choose Simple Web
All of this in comparison to just entering the number off a Virgin Mobile card bought online or at any Best Buy or Walmart. I think Simple Mobile has something to learn from Virgin Mobile. However, once you get it working you have unlimited T-Mobile internet for $60/month without a contract. A straight T-Mobile plan will cost you $80 for "truly unlimited" (plus taxes and fees) which includes up to 2 GB of data and requires a 2 year contract. How they can call it truly unlimited and then limit to 2 GB is a mystery to me. To be clear they won't shut you off after 2GB but they will throttle you back. My other choice was to use AT&T since they use SIM cards too. Their cheapest unlimited plan with data (200 MB) was $85 and also required a contract. To bump up to 4GB of data the price goes to $115 and also requires a 2 year contract.
For the chart below I tried focusing on my needs which are primarily Internet access everywhere and enough minutes to call home and ask if we need milk. I've included the cheapest plans to offer some sort of data and some minutes and then also Unlimited plans for reference. Some plans don't actually include unlimited data plans no matter how much money you pay. Some have unlimited data (T-Mobile) but throttle your speed after you star abusing it.
Cost |
Data |
Texting |
Talk |
Contract |
Notes |
|
Virgin Mobile |
$25 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
300 minutes |
no |
Limited phone selection, 3G only |
Virgin Mobile |
$40 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
1200 minutes |
no |
Limited phone selection, 3G only |
Virgin Mobile |
$60 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
no |
Limited phone selection, 3G only |
Simple Mobile |
$40 |
None |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
no |
Any GSM phone, 3G only |
Simple Mobile |
$50 |
100 MB |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
no |
Any GSM phone, 3G only |
Simple Mobile |
$60 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
no |
Any GSM phone, 3G only |
T-Mobile |
$59 |
200 MB |
Unlimited |
500 |
2 year |
Any GSM phone, 3G only no matter what they claim |
T-Mobile |
$109 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
500 |
2 year |
Any GSM phone, 3G only no matter what they claim |
T-Mobile |
$119 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
2 year |
Any GSM phone, 3G only no matter what they claim |
Sprint |
$55 |
450 |
None |
Unlimited Web |
2 year |
Not clear what data isn't included in Unlimited Web, 4G |
Sprint |
$65 |
450 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited Web |
2 year |
Not clear what data isn't included in Unlimited Web, 4G |
Sprint |
$99 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
2 year |
4 G |
AT&T Wireless |
$55 |
450 Anytime |
None |
200 MB |
2 year |
Any GSM phone |
AT&T Wireless |
$85 |
450 Anytime |
None |
4 GB |
2 year |
Any GSM phone - supports tethering |
AT&T Wireless |
$105 |
450 Anytime |
Unlimited |
4 GB |
2 year |
Any GSM phone - supports tethering |
AT&T Wireless |
$135 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
4 GB |
2 year |
Any GSM phone - supports tethering |
Verizon |
$70 |
450 |
None |
Unlimited |
2 year |
4G |
Verizon |
$90 |
450 |
5000 |
Unlimited |
2 year |
4G |
Verizon |
$120 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
2 year |
4G |
So a long story short I'm saving $480 over Sprint, $720 a year over T-Mobile and Verizon and $900 over AT&T and they require 2 year contracts. Even though Sprint and Verizon are not compatible with my N900 I compared their plans just out of curiosity.
It's worth noting that for Virgin Mobile and Simple Mobile you have to buy your phone ahead of time. Is it worth it to have a restricted set of phones to choose from (Virgin Mobile) or a lengthy setup (Simple Mobile) and having to buy your phone seperate? After buying my n900, an extra 32 GB memory card (for a total of 64 GB), a new case, screen protectors, extra stylus and 2 extra batteries I have hundreds of dollars left in my pocket at the end of one year. Yes, I think it's worth it.
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- Category: Food Blog
Grocery outlet gives me a lot of material to talk about. This is a product I saw there recently - Cheese Ravioli with Creamy Pink Sauce. If you love Red sauce you have to try this! What's the difference between red sauce and pink sauce you ask? Pink Sauce is a lot like Red Sauce but with more White! There's nothing quite like a good Creamy Pink Sauce that's for sure. Don't be tempted by Green Sauce, Blue Sauce, White Sauce or Yellow Sauce. Only settle for the best - Pink Sauce. Oh and keep it all natural if you've got a moment. I was tempted by All Unnatural Pink Sauce once and boy was I sorry. You owe it to yourself to just keep on looking if it's not 100% All Natural Pink Sauce.
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- Category: Photography Blog
I haven't done a lot in the way of photography blogging or even uploading photos lately since I've not been on vacation. Most of the photos here have to do with food or travel but I've just added a new menu item under Photography labeled Galleries. Generic I know and I'll probably change it but these are galleries that have to do with photography itself as opposed to photos for other purposes. What spawned this was that I have a gallery of photos taken with my Canon S90 where I'm just showing off the camera to see what it can do. I decided to share. Another thing happened that spurred this decision is that I bought a Nokia n900 cell phone. If you're wondering what a cell phone has to do with photography you've obviously not seen the photos this thing takes. I'm not going to say they're camera quality but I'm very very impressed so far especially within the context of "cell phone". The photo to the right was taken with the Nokia. See what I mean? So in the future I'll be taking more photos with both my S90 and the n900 just to show off what the cameras can do. Currently I'm thinking of taking a Vehicle mount for the Nokia and hacking it into a tripod mount since it doesn't have a mount on it. It might seem silly to take photos with a cell phone but it's also fun to see just HOW good they can be. The standard Nokia software is about as good as aftermarket Android camera software. I downloaded Bless900 which allows me to take RAW and HDR photos with the nokia so I'll be playing with that too.
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- Category: Food Blog
I swear I could have a blog just covering Grocery Outlet's products. I'd have to carry a camera around and take pictures of all the crazy things in their stores. Wait, I already do that.
So what's happened this week is that Grocery Outlet has a killer sale on SPAM. That's right, hard to resist isn't it? Not only is this an interest for The Man, The Myth, The Legend's cost conscious SPAM eating readers (who admit it) but also those health conscious penny pinching, tight wad, SPAM eating readers too since it has 25% less salt! Please hold your applause until I'm done, thanks!. If my math is correct this means that it probably weighs about 25% less now too. There's been no word on which 25% of salt has been removed though. How much money will you save if you run by Grocery Outlet on the way home to pick up a can of Montanan's New York steak? About $5 a pound! That deal is too good to be true for sure. Actually you may be wondering how it's possible to even give a $5 discount on a one pound can of SPAM.
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- Category: Gadget Blog
I've been very excited about Android for quite some time. It's nice to see a form of Linux take over the mobile device market. Until the beginning of the 2011 year though hadn't personally experienced Android. For the couple of year before I got my phone I'd been using Nokia's Mobile Internet Devices (n800/n810) which have served me well outside of not having Internet connections everywhere. Nokia understood this and made the n900 a cell phone and released a new more finger friendly Maemo 5 operating system for it too. Because they needed to get the phone out as soon as possible they kept Maemo 4's Hildon (gtk) based gui with the idea of going to a QT based GUI for Maemo 6. Nokia had just purchased QT for millions of dollars. And then something happened, Android started to gain traction so Nokia did what any smart company would do - join resources with another large corporation getting the snot beat out of them - Intel. Intel had a mobile operating system called Moblin which was designed primarily for tablets. Nokia's Maemo had largely been a small tablet OS and since both were based on Linux it made sense to merge and form MeeGo. This however, put an already late project (Maemo 6) an additional year behind in the merging Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. This resulted in Nokia being in a bad position as their Symbian OS was getting very long in the tooth.
Years ago I had a Psion Revo+, the forerunner to Symbian which I liked a lot. I wrote applications for it in the included OPL language. Then Psion spun off the OS and every major cell phone company jumped on the bandwagon but it was really Nokia that carried the torch. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when a company called MobilePC accidentally sent me a Nokia N97 instead of a Nokia N900.
Without knowing it was a mess-up I took the Nokia from the box and immediately I thought I'd been ripped off. The phone said N-Series and felt very very cheap. My first thought was that it was a Chinese clone of the N900. I powered it up and the operating system looked like it was from a different era, it felt very clunky and not very intuitive. It was only then that I looked under the LCD screen and saw that it was a Nokia N97. Having only dealt with the Nokia MIDs I was shocked that this hunk of junk could be a Nokia. Looking at the specs it looked great - 32 GB of flash, 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, 3.5 inch screen, Quad Band cell radio and more. This appears to be a thoroughly modern phone - however, I'd be ashamed selling it. Without thinking (or doing a proper review) I put it back in the box and sent it to MobilePC then waited patiently for way to long for my N900. In hindsight I probably should have spent a day or two with it so I could give it a proper chance but since I didn't my opinion that it's a hunk of junk stands.
As soon as the N900 arrived I took it out of the box and immediately knew I was dealing with a completely different animal. Even though it is only 1 ounce heavier it feels good. It feels like it was made of good solid materials. The screen is sharp and clear, the keyboard slides with a satisfying clunk and the plastic case even feels better. They clearly are spending more money making this phone than the N97. The specs look similar with a 3.5 inch screen, 32 GB of flash, Quad band, same lens and so on but boy is there a difference. Powering it up introduced me to Maemo 5 which is definitely different than Maemo 4. A lot of the same applications are available in updated versions, the gui effects show off the beefier hardware and it's way faster than my old N810 tablet. It however, doesn't have the "start menu" for lack of better term. Instead it has desktops not unlike Android and it has a "view all applications" mode just like Android. What's different though is how widespread widgets are and how easy it is to switch between running applications. I'll be doing a video later but for the record Maemo is a breath of fresh air after using Android for 5 months. My biggest concern going back to Maemo was that Android has about 160,000 apps and Maemo has about 400. What I'm finding out is that if an OS is designed properly you only need about 10 apps. With Android I spent a lot of time just trying apps and finding out none of them did what I wanted. Things like having a weather widget on the desktop showing the next 4 or 5 days weather forcast. I can glance at it while I'm getting ready to launch an app without having to start a weather app, then leave it running because Android doesn't shut anything down. With Maemo I have more than one weather widget that does exactly what I want. There will be apps I miss though like Yelp and OneBusAway. I'm looking into writing a version of the latter for Maemo though.
Overall it's a very nice piece of hardware. I LOVE the stylus (any screen under 5 inches needs a stylus no matter how clever the interface designers are), the OS is fast and shows no noticeable slowdown when multitasking, it doesn't need to be "rooted" to work right, it's Linux so if you want to overclock the CPU to 1100 mhz you can, it has Video Out, FM radio, FM transmitter, 32 GB built in memory and expansion for another 32 GB, decent audio, a really nice camera for a phone and it seems very stable.
Update two weeks later:
I've now been using my n900 for a couple of weeks and I'm very frustrated, not with the n900 or Maemo but with Nokia. Are they really that stupid? Their plan was to move to QT for Maemo 6 then that got shelved for the MeeGo joint venture with Intel. The reason I'm frustrated is that Maemo 5 is a very very nice product. Once in a while you'll find an app screen that doesn't look finished (the app manager) but it's rare. The overall user experience with Maemo 5 and the apps built into it is so much nicer than Android (I have 2.2) that I'm just speechless as to why Nokia couldn't make a decision or stand behind a product. I just don't know what to say. Really Nokia, are you on drugs? I'll do a proper review of the n900 when I calm down. :-)
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- Category: Food Blog
One of the most fascinating migrations in history for food buffs happened in about 1400 (besides the seasonal migration of water buffalo on the Masai Mara, if you could just sneak a tranquilizer gun and a barrel smoker out there when nobody was looking) when the Muhgals went from modern day Turkey, through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and settled in northern India. You can actually see the path they took in restaurant menus. In Persian restaurants you have Korescht-e, Afghan you have Qorma-i and Indian you have Korma. All three are meat braised in a sauce served over rice. In Indian cuisine you often eat naan which happens to be the farsi (Persian) word for bread. There are many many other similarities. Last night we decided to explore further and went to Kabul to get a closer look. Not Kabul Afghanistan, foodtard - Kabul restaurant in the Wallingford district of Seattle. Located at 2301 N. 45th Street it's centrally located and if you're a local you've probably walked past it a million times and only noticed the mural on the wall. Like most places in Seattle it's difficult finding a place to park but once you do there's plenty more to do in this area including two movie theaters and lots of shopping.
On with Kabul which happens to be pronounced closer to "cobble" than "kabool" like you might hear a lot. Kabul is a small somewhat intimate restaurant with very pleasant ethnic staff. I mention this because it's really irritating to eat at an ethnic restaurant and the server is some white kid that can't even pronounce the dishes let alone know what's good. I didn't ask our server where he was from but he looked the part and was very knowledgable about Afghan cuisine. For the record Afghans are more white (like Persians) than brown (like Pakistani/Indian). The lady in the mural on the wall outside has green/grey eyes which may surprise some who don't know about this region.
Here's the Kabul Menu if you like to look up the items below.
Anyway on with the food. We ordered Bolani for an appetizer. Think of Bolani as thin sheets of pastry dough layed over scallions and potatoes dipped in a sort of tzatziki sauce and you'd be close. They were a hit as both Piper and I liked them.
For our Entrees Piper really wanted Badenjan Borani which is an eggplant topped with tomato sauce, meat and a yogurt sauce. The Kebabs came with a side of this for an extra $2 so we passed on ordering it separately. I was curious about the Kabuli Palow because of it's mention of carrots and dried berries on it. Probably my favorite rice dish anywhere is Javaher Polow (Persian Jeweled Rice) and the similarities peaked my interest. Our server though pointed out that all the Entrees came with this and indeed they did, we took home an entire to-go box of it. So in the end we ordered Qorma-i Sabzi and Bara Kebab which came with Badenjan Borani and Kabuli Palow. The former is a dish with Spinach and chunks of lamb with flavorful sauce served with Badenjan Borani. The lamb was good, the rice was good but I'm not a huge fan of spinach. I did eat some of it though but once the lamb sauce was gone and I only had spinach left I was done. No Popeye forearms for me. The Bara Kebab (the top photo in this article) is a shish kabob like you'd expect of Lamb pieces marinated in garlic, onions, coriander and lemon juice. It was tender enough to mostly eat without a knife and the flavor was really good. Piper filled up on lamb and barely had enough room for dessert. The Bara Kebab also came with Kabuli Palow and Badenjan Borani. Both meals also came with "Afghan bread" which would be similar to cooking pita until it inflates then seperating the top from the bottom into thin strips and serving them. Not a lot of substance but good for wiping up the Badenjan Borani sauce left on the plate.
So my thoughts on all three, I think the Badenjan Borani is the star of the show and let me say that I'm really not a fan of Eggplant. I eat moussaka but there's plenty of other substance in that and I'm not a fan of eggplant parmesan. However, having said that this is a very nice dish. The eggplant is sliced really thin, covered with tomato sauce, meat and the yogurt sauce. I was pleasently surprised. Piper didn't eat her half as she'd filled up on Kebab and planned on taking her Badenjan Borani home. I couldn't however, see any reason in the Badenjan Borani sitting in the fridge wasting away so I convinced her to hand it over which she did. The Kebab was very good but not "OMG I think I just had an orgasm" good. It's meat on a stick with flavoring on it. It wasn't dried out though which is common with these types of things. Also the lamb didn't taste all Wheel of Fortune like some. You know, gamey. The Kabuli Palow was a nice filler but doesn't hold a candle to Javaher Palow. It's a flavored Basmati dish and the carrots and raisins seem like an afterthought.
Dessert posed some interesting choices - have Afghan desserts and learn something new or have Gelato because you like it. I did the former and Piper had chocolate gelato. What do Afghans eat for dessert? That depends but you can bet it will have pistachio nuts, rose water and cardamom in it. I had a choice of Firni a custard, baklava or ice cream - all three with at least two of the holy trinity in them. Since I've had Persian baklava with rose water and cardamom which I like very much and is in fact my favorite baklava I chose Firni because that's just how I am, I like living in the edge and looking death in the eye without flinching. Firni is a custard with all three of the Rose Water, Cardamom and Pistachio combination and is very good I must say. I will have to duplicate it at home.
Closing thoughts. Afghan food is as good as I expected it to be and since it's a bit of a novelty in Seattle (only 1.5 Afghan restaurants) it's also quite pricey. Dinner for two without drinks - $71. We probably would have paid half that at an Indian restaurant and 2/3 that at a Persian restaurant. Is it worth it? I think so as a once in a while sort of thing. If it were cheaper I'd eat Afghan food more often I think.
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- Category: Food Blog
I couldn't resist capturing the epitome of our gastronomic downfall in America. I saw this in Albertson's Grocery and couldn't believe my eyes. Flame Broiled Cheeseburgers.... sounds good until you realize that you've wandered haphazardly into the frozen section and the box says they're microwavable. Any burger coming out of a microwave is going to taste like something big and brown from a pasture but it won't be cow. What's worse is that it comes with a bun and cheese. I'm sure the microwave will do wonders to those as well. I'm also a bit confused about the flame broiled part. So they're flame broiled, frozen and then warmed up in the microwave? Why don't they just rub shoe polish on them because a shoe polished patty will look about as close to flame broiling as this pile.
Is it that hard to just make a hamburger? Really? You take hamburger, flatten it and cook it. Seriously folks you could do it with one leg tied behind your back (I'm aware that the saying usually contains an arm but it's more fun for us to visualize this way). If the thought of warming a pan brings sweat beads to your forehead and uncontrollable rocking then head on over to McBurger Queenville's 5 Brothers burger shop and grab a 99 cent cheeseburger. I'm sure their food sucks but at least each part is frozen seperately and then reheated on something that does more than excite the water molecules by beating the crap out of them with electrons.
The worst part of this is the price. Check out the sticker on the bottom left - $5.48/lb! Are you crazy? Buns cost about $1/lb and cheese about $4/lb. That means that 2 oz hamburger patty is coming in at around $9/lb. I have another idea, get a meat grinder and a blind fold. Put the blind fold on and head to your local meat counter (if you're driving be careful), once there point in the meat's general direction, then take whatever you bought home, grind it up (legal counsel tells me I need to inform you to remove the blind fold somewhere around this step) and cook it. I guarantee you this will make a better burger for the same price and in under 10 minutes time.
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- Category: Food Blog
After spending 84 days sitting in a hospital I finally have the time to post. Actually I don't but at some point I need to post something anyway so here goes. One of my first chores as soon as I arrived home was to replace the broiler element in my oven. While roasting bell peppers in December some juice splattered up on it and the element turned into a welding rod. I kid you not the intensity of the "fire" was very similar to a welding rod and even burnt along the element until it broke clear through. I ordered a new one online for about $35 and it arrived around the first of the year and sat waiting for me. The other night I wanted to have Sweet Pepper Tortellini and that requires that I have a working broiler element so I took some time to put it in. It amounted to 5 very stubborn sheet metal screws and holding a wrench at a bad angle to get it in but once done it worked wonderfully. Even if I don't broil my oven seems to use both elements because the couple of times I tried to cook pizza in the oven while the broiler element was out the bottoms ended up scorched. With this new element I was able to roast peppers with the rack about 8 inches away which increases the likelyhood that it will survive. I may however, keep an extra one in the garage for such situations as this. I'm sure I'll blow it again roasting peppers or making steam for bread at some point.