Thursday, July 25, 2002
Experiments in cooking
“Mmmm, this is delicious,” said Spring. “Is that cinnamon I taste?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I got a bit too much in there though.” I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. Spring, however, seemed to like it enough. “Can you taste what else I added?”
Chicken and Orange Rice
An experiment in cooking
Ingredients:
- one can Cream of Mushroom
- one can Cream of Celery
- one can (cup) orange juice
- 1 ½ cups rice
- 1 teaspoon tyme
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- pinch of cinnamon
- several black peppercorns
- chicken pieces
- Preheat oven to 375°F
- Mix all ingredients except chicken in a large bowl (careful with the cinnamon).
- Pour ¾ of mixture into a large casserole dish.
- Add chicken to casserole dish.
- Pour remaining mixture over chicken.
- cover casserole dish with lid and place into oven for 1 ½ hours.
- Serve and enjoy.
Spring took another taste, and pursed her lips in thought. “No,” she said.
“Orange juice.”
“Get out of here!” She took another bite. “Really? Orange juice?”
“Yup. I'm glad you like the experiment though.”
“When I experiment, it never turns out good,” she said. “What made you mix orange juice and cinnamon?”
“Well, I had a craving for orange, so I thought I'd use orange juice and since cinnamon is used with apples, and an apple is a fruit, and so is an orange, I thought they might go nicely together.”
“But orange juice?”
“Well, I get sometimes get Orange Beef at the Chinese restaurant so it's not unheard of.”
“But in rice?”
“When have you ever gone to a Chinese restaurant and not gotten rice?”
“But they don't put it in the rice,” she said.
“Well … yea,” I said.
“I would have never thought to put cinnamon and orange juice in the rice.”
“I'll have to leave out the cinnamon next time,” I said. I didn't quite like the taste; it wasn't bad mind you, just … a bit … off. It would be something that would have gotten shot down rather quickly on Iron Chef no doubt.
“Well, try less next time,” Spring said. “What happened? Did too much fall out when you added it?”
“Yea, a rather large cloud of cinnamon clumped out.”
“Yes, that happens to me too.” She took a few more bites. “But it is good … ”
Syndicate this!
Rob and I were talking the other day about a feature of LiveJournal—the friend's page. If you have an account on LiveJournal, you can list other users of LiveJournal as “friends” and then read their new entries on your “friends” page. It basically collects the X most recent posts from all your friends (who have to have LiveJournal accounts themselves) and presents them on a single page, only with a style you choose.
I have a LiveJournal account, if only to read the journals of my friends who are hosted there. If you check my friends page, you'll see that I picked a rather conservative style. Yet visit the actual site of any of my friends and you'll see their words in a different style.
Which leads me to yesterday's post about styles, only coming in from a different perspective. This time it's not about historic perspective (although Michelle has changed the default template of her site since I started reading it; I'm not sure when she made the change since I mostly read her through my friends page, which is a different style altogether) but about current presentation through a form of syndication.
Ah, syndication. Most blogging software supports syndication via one of the several flavors of RSS (in order, 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 0.93 or 0.94—yes, that is the correct order and no, I'm not about to get into the why of it right now), an XML based file that contains the interesting bits from a weblog—author, last date updated, and the last few entries. So in theory, it is possible to make a “friends” page reguardless if you have a LiveJournal account or not, and to include more than just friends on LiveJournal.
While I like the “friends page” feature of LiveJournal (as I use it) I'm not so sure how I feel about it though. I only include the links and titles to each of my entries, although I could include the actual entry itself in the RSS file. I didn't though, since I was uneasy with the idea that someone could reformat my content to suit themselves. Which is odd, since browsers will do that anyway (like under Lynx, or Netscape 4x or IE or Mozilla) and I'm much less concerned about that.
For instance, the feed for Marcus' site does contain the entries themselves, so it's possible I could pull that down and format his content to my liking, even though he spent over a month working the style of his website to his liking. I wonder how he would feel knowing someone was reading his stuff if it looked different? Yet a “friends page” is exactly what he wants though (since he was one (out of several) that pestered me to get email notification going for my site). And how would I feel if someone was formatting my stuff differently?
