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- Category: Food Articles
There is an increasing number of cooking classes in the Seattle area which is encouraging. I used to put them all on my public calendar but now there are too many. I'm providing links to PCC Natural Market's classes as well as classes from Culinary Communion. Classes and food events that are not on these two calendars will still be on mine.
Culinary Communion class calender
PCC Natural Market's class calender
Puget Sound Area Farmers Markets
Le Corden Bleu Seattle Workshops
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- Category: Food Blog
Now that the recipe module is operational again on my site I'm starting to upload my recipes when I get time. Tonight I added the Gulab Jamun recipe as well as the Boniatillo recipe. Both are desserts, the former Indian and the latter Cuban.
Both recipes are done for all practical purposes so I won't be changing them. Tonight I made ghee so tomorrow if I get time I will upload the "recipe" for that as well.
Boniatillo is a favorite dessert that we make out of sweet potatoes. It's really easy to make but because the potato needs to cook for about an hour you can't really have dessert in 5 minutes.
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- Category: Food Blog
It's been a long time coming but I've gotten the recipe module back online. There's only one recipe there which is pizza dough. I'll get the other recipes uploaded when I get time. I'm using a Joomla! component called Gary's Cookbook and don't really care for it much but don't have time to hack out the 20,000 or so lines of code or rewrite Gary's Cookbook (which is under the GPL license so I legally could) so for the time being I'll just deal with it.
I will only be uploading recipes that I am at least 80% satisfied with. If a recipe that you know I cook isn't up there it's because I don't yet like it so you probably shouldn't waste your time in asking for it. I will try to post a note at the bottom letting you know if I think it's done yet. It takes a lot for me to be satisfied so most are in various stages of completion.
For those of you that are seeing this via Facebooks feed the URL for the recipebook is http://www.grantmcwilliams.com/index.php/food/recipes
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- Category: Site News
For currently unknown reasons my server is rebooting about once a day so I'm troubleshooting it now but so far nothing seems to be wrong which means it's probably hardware, maybe memory or motherboard issue. I'm hoping for motherboard because I have two more dual Xeon motherboards sitting on a shelf waiting for action... So until then there may be intermittent outages. Thank you for your patience.
Grant
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- Category: Travel Blog
Everything is encouraging us to spend our money but we just keep holding onto it making the situation worse. I'm not going to talk about the economy because everyone else is doing that just fine but I've been buying meats and produce at amazing prices lately. Maybe sales are off and they need to clear things out. Also right now is probably the best time in recent history to buy stock because everyone is trading really really low. Those who have money have the opportunity to make a lot of money. OK so there's some risk but if you wanted to avoid risk you'd go on vacation to Arizona right? I have a better idea...
The U.S. Dollar was at a 5 year low last summer when I was in Paris and it hurt. Now even though the economy stinks and everyone is worried that we might be headed for a depression the dollar surges up and most other currencies lose value in comparison. Why has this happened? Who knows of such things. What I do know is that there hasn't been a better time to travel in many years.
Currently the good deals are in the UK (yes you heard me), any country using the Euro, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil and Russia. There are others but all of the above mentioned currencies are have lost to the dollar from 30% - 50%. This means that a 2 week trip to New Zealand will cost you 50% less than it would have a year ago. One U.S. Dollar used to buy you 10 pesos but not it get's you 15. That hotel in Cancun that was going to run you $100 will no only run you $66.
A couple of years ago I was planning a trip to South Africa, total price was about $10,000 USD. Now the same trip would cost me less than $5000. The Rand was trading at 6 to 1 and now it's 13 to 1.
Add to this the airlines are in a price war to Europe. US Airways was offering $288 round trip from NYC to anywhere in Europe they fly. I'm seeing round trip airfare to Beijing China from San Francisco including 5 nights of first class hotel stay for $588...
Yes, it's time to get out of the house and go somewhere!
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- Category: Photography Blog
From a company that has for a long time believed in photographs having that certain Impressionist look to them they've been pulling off some amazing things. First they come out with the DMC-LX3 which outside of not having much of a zoom is THE perfect small camera then they come out with the micro four-thirds format which allows you to have everything a DSLR has in a much smaller body because it doesn't have a mirror (thus it's not a DSLR). The lenses can be smaller, the body can be smaller and theoretically (although not yet realized) they can be cheaper than DSLRs. The Panasonic DMC-G1 at this juncture is a great camera but has no advantage over the competitions DSLRs, can't be bought without a lens and isn't cheaper so even though I think it's a monumental first step I won't be standing in line. I've been considering a Canon SX-1 superzoom to go with my Panasonic LX-3 (which I don't yet own) because it does awesome video, has decent stills and a monster zoom. Problem is the price is somewhere in the $600 range which is a lot for a Point and Shoot even if it is awesome. The Panasonic G1 is closer to a grand with a decent zoom lens and doesn't do video. Up until today I've decided to sit on my money (that I don't have) and wait. Today I think I made up my mind though... Introducing the HD version of the Panasonic G1...
I'm not sure the name is written in stone but for now they're calling it the GH1 and for all practical purposes it's a G1 with HD video. The cool thing is that it can maintain focus while recording video and it records stereo audio with built in speakers as well as a mic jack. The second feature is missing on just about every point and shoot camera out there. I end up taking video with the camera and recording my audio seperate and then merging them later. With the GH1 you can just hook up a decent mic and record right there. This camera has so much of what I want that I'm not sure I care about the price which I'm sure will be high. Way to go Panasonic. Give me more zoom on the LX-3 and I'll stop complaining altogether!
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- Category: Virtualization Blog
As a strike against the industry leading VMWare, Citrix releases it's Xen Enterprise Virtualization platform to the public for free. Note this does not mean it's been released OpenSource as the Xen hypervisor is, it's just free to download and use on as many installations as you like. The difference is that it's free as in beer, not as in freedom. If Citrix wanted to change the license back to pay only after it hooks a million customers it can.
Game Changing Move Goes Well Beyond Free Hypervisors to Accelerate the Adoption of World-Class Virtual Infrastructure for Both Enterprises and Cloud Providers
BOSTON » 2/23/2009 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today unveiled a groundbreaking new version of Citrix® XenServer™ – the company’s enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform – that will be offered free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment. While basic hypervisors have been free for years, most have had limited practical use in real world environments. With this new release, XenServer sets an entirely new standard for free virtualization with the addition of powerful new features like centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion. Dramatically lowering the entry price of virtualization also helps address today’s challenging economic climate by making enterprise-class virtualization far more accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of budget.
Xen Enterprise is running in 5000 datacenters worldwide. Downloads will be available in March. Here's the official announcement.
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- Category: Food Blog
We're just staring to cook Thai food but so far it's very similar to Italian in that it's dirt simple. Once you have a curry paste created you can make this in about the same amount of time it takes to steam the rice. Total cost for 4 people to eat Chicken Panang and Jasmine Rice - $3.60. In a recession you CAN eat decent food!
The Fresh Spring rolls in the background were made by Natalya.
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Two days ago we had Chicken Tikka Masala and tonight we prepared Chicken Marsala. People who know us have a hard time telling these apart because the names are almost identical but there's no two dishes further apart than these two. Chicken Tikka Masala is Indian and Chicken Marsala is Italian/Sicilian. The former gains it's flavor from Garam Masala spices and the latter from what I think is the nicest of the fortified wines including Port, Sherry and Madeira - Marsala. The wine we refer to as Marsala was born out of a Brits fondness for the then popular Port which was unavailable in Sicily. A fortified wine is one that has added alcohol added to it such as ethanol. Yes, people do that! Port is a fortified wine from Portugal as does Madeira which come from the likely named islands off the west coast of Africa. Sherry comes from Spain and Marsala comes from the city of Marsala in Sicily and is my favorite of the four. Chicken Marsala is a favorite dish amongst the southern Italians and I think I've about perfected it. The secret to great Chicken Marsala is the amount of fond you're able to build up in the pan and the quality of Marsala you use. I've tried just about every Marsala from every store in the area and I've settled on two. Unlike a Cab, Merlot or virtually any other wine you usually only have one variety of Marsala per store so if you don't like the one you had the last time you have to drive to the next store to try a different variety. My two favorites are Opici Italian Sweet Marsala available at Central Market in Mill Creek and Pellegrini Italian Sweet Marsala available at PCC markets. I use only sweet Marsala in my recipe but if you want to use dry you can add a touch of grade B maple (Grade A is not as strong) to your sauce for a nice variation. The other issues with Chicken Marsala is getting a decent Pancetta which can be a bit difficult. Central Market had an awesome one but they've since changed brands and I don't like the new one as much but it's edible. Costco's Pancetta is pretty bad as is most pancettas you get in a package. I'm still looking for a replacement so I'll keep you posted. The last thing I'm a bit picky about is using Portobella's instead of Crimini (baby portobellas) or god forbid Oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms give up quite a bit of moisture and shrink in the process so you really want a good meaty mushroom.
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All of my domains were down last night due to my personal file server finally dieing after 5 years of reliable service. It's an old dual Athlon MP system with 3ware 9550SX Raid controller and 5 drives. This doesn't have to do with my web domains outside of the fact that I finally moved the Raid controller over to the Super Dual Dual Core Xeon server that hosts my Xen Web and Mail servers. Now the file server is also hosted in a Xen domain on the same server. Because I had to shut the machine down to install the Raid controller my sites (soundlinuxtraining.com, grantmcwiliams.com) were down.
I appologize for the inconvenience.