techie toys for cooks

one of my new favourite things is delicious library, a database for your books, music, dvds, and games brought to you by the fine swiss cheese plants at delicious monster. each item of your library is easily added by typing in the title or barcode, or even better, by pointing a handheld scanner or firewire digital video camera to the item's barcode; information from all of amazon's international databases (us, uk, germany, france, canada and japan) is accessed and downloaded. you can display your library as a database or as these nifty shelves, which can be browsed, searched, or sorted. i've just started, but i've already got a better grasp of my cookbook collection, which in the real world is strewn across various rooms, flats, even continents. and huzzah! book covers are also downloaded, so i have my entire fiction collection at my fingertips (which as many of you know, is organized in a most unorthodox manner).

unfortunately for many people, delicious library is optimized for macs; for the mac user, it is christmas in a (window)box: you can use your built in iSite for scanning, there is a lending library synchronized with your address book and iCal, there's a widget for easy access to your database, which can also be stored on your iPod. iImpressed. it's a solid US$40 investment.

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appetites.us is one of the first food blogs i'd ever read, and continues to be a favourite; for a food blog it has remarkably few photos, but remains evocative and appealing--chalk that up to robert peyton's excellent writing skills. it was also a prime source of information about new orleans during the katrina crisis, and continues to enlighten me on what life is like for a typical citizen in the aftermath. a recent post mentioned a new (beta) website, rouxbe, which features detailed instructional videos by real chefs cooking real recipes. it, alas, does not provide this as a free service, but from the free preview you can see the videos are attractive, thorough, and most importantly, all about the food. if all that dreck on the food network bugs you as much as it bugs me, this could be for you. no mucking about.

however, if the US$49/year ($99 lifetime) membership is too steep--yet you still managed to blow $299 on a video iPod--epicurious.com offers free video podcasts of various cooking and entertaining techniques (no, not how to not spill a drink on someone--think napkin folding). these one to two minute segments look not unlike rouxbe's videos, but deal with the basics: how to sharpen a knife, how to julienne, how to poach an egg, la la. there are currently 36 free episodes (search "epicurious food and drink" in the iTunes directory), 14 of which i've seen and digested. i honestly was always vexed by how to dice celery in a uniform manner until recently. now i can rest easy at night, knowing The Truth About Mirepoix. you can, too.

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and finally, not a techie toy, not even a toy. just toyed: a gummy bear rug. you know you want it.


tagged! software podcasts videos library fun with gelatinous substances

when logic (board) fails.

ah, remember my iBook from a few posts back? that particular model seems to be prone to logic board failure, and so, being the perfect little apple, myBook decided to follow its brethren into the apple repair center somewhere south of the island of misfit toys and um, bakersfield. i'm lookin' at a 6 to 16 week wait while it grows a new brain or somethin', so in the meantime, it's time to break into the vacation funds and buy a new laptop.

i am loyal to the mac daddy mac, so there's no question the next book shall not have an orange on it. i'm toying with the idea of getting a mac mini, but the demand is so great that there is a three week wait, and i prefer the portability of a notebook. so, a question to other mac users out there: what book should i buy next?

show me your music and i'll show you who you are(...and possibly what you eat)*

photo inspired by man that cooks composition--thanks!

*real title: music in my kitchen**, but i don't listen to music in the kitchen; regards to steven "sunny ann" schayer who used to demand this on a regular basis


What is the total amount of music files on your computer?

i have a dozen on iTunes--but they're about 105mb each--downloaded from my favourite mp3 blog, pop 77.

The CD you last bought?

the fiery furnaces ep on iTunes.

What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

"northern sky" by nick drake--i never felt magic crazy as this/i never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea/i never held emotion in the palm of my hand/or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree.... damn, skippy. that nick drake was the business. and now i'm watching "american idol". the pain. oh, the exquisitely painful pain.

Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

[i suspect, that like pieman, my music stories are not fit for public consumption, so this is the food reference edition....because i know most of you haven't heard any of these, you can download them here, unless otherwise indicated (files are clean of viruses)]

“appetite” by prefab sprout. one of my favourite songs, on one of my favourite albums, “steve mcqueen”, named after one of my favourite actors. quite possibly the song that spawned the blog, as it's about all sorts of hunger and appetites. the music swirls around paddy mcaloon singing unabashedly of loving and longing, yearning yet learning--the stuff that teenaged girls (and women who call themselves girls) swoon over. paddy is positively femme-y as he sings his slightly obtuse but true lyrics; outside of this song, i would say he was a pussy, but here and on this album he is me, in odd moments, in odd years. it reminds me of buying pastel cassettes in tokyo on a rainy day, picking raspberries off canes in the summer heat of upstate new york, of driving on pacific coast highway to malibu on a foggy day.


"falling and laughing" by orange juice. how can i possibly describe how i feel when i hear the opening riff of this song...? it’s like looking towards a darkened doorway, and seeing the silhouette of someone who moves like a sexy beast; as he or she moves to the light, you are faced with the most beautiful person you have ever seen, but then you belatedly realize this person is your best friend that you’ve known your entire life and he or she is smiling at you. and is suddenly scottish.
for whatever reason, my love of this band has led me to some of my greatest adventures, has brought me some of my greatest opportunities and friendships in the most improbable of ways. without it, i don’t think i would have ever known how ginormous the urinals are in the men’s room at the olympia theatre in dublin, that peter gabriel is kind to spiders, or how to pronounce the word “gyro” properly. it doesn't really remind me of food, but of great nights out with faraway friends in faraway places.


"the kitchen” by downy mildew (realplayer audio available here--mouseover click on "the kitchen"). downy mildew is a plant disease and was a band in los angeles. they were the first band signed to the label spawned from the little indie record shop where i worked. la at the time was an amazing place to be; some of the best and most innovative music was coming from local bands and so many great ones from elsewhere were coming to town on a regular basis. i also worked at the university radio station and at a record label, so music was constant. all my friends were musicians or deejays, so they were the soundtrack to my life. downy mildew was, to me, the epitome of the west coast sound: shoegazey but beautiful to behold, breezy yet bold, sweetly sad and sometimes bitterly bright. and i am a sucker for a girl with a cello. and songs about kitchens.


"choco latte" by parokya ni edgar. i find it a bit annoying that the older i get, the less filipino--tagalog and kapampangan--i remember, especially since i'm trying to make more of a connection to my culture. cultures. actually, the culture of the one-and-a-halfth generation--somewhere between east and west, now and then, first and third. those that are in it know the conundrum. i'm hoping that listening to more OPM (original pinoy music) will help me connect. in some ways it doesn't because, as i said, the language is escaping me, including the strange colloquialisms that are more there than here, while i'm more here than there. however, the funny thing about music in the philippines is that they've got the same penchant for britpop that i've got, esp. stuff from the eighties, and you can hear it in a lot of the bands coming out today. anyway, it's comforting to know i'm not the only one.
"choco latte", as far as i can discern, is about this guy's girlfriend who claims to not like melted chocolate ("it's like poo") but he discovers a car trunk full of chocolate from another guy, and then he gets to make some neat little similes and metaphors like how trust is harder to reshape than a box of melted chocolates. i'm sure there's someone who can correct me if i'm wrong :-) it is, however, a bouncy boppable little tune that i bouncily bop around to in my car. which does not have any chocolates innit, melted or otherwise.


"island style" by john cruz. "island style" was written by cruz when he was living in new york and feeling homesick for hawaii. i can imagine him alone in an apartment, during a cold winter's night in a noisy city, remembering the gentle breezes and easy way of islands.
this song, to me, is hawaii. when the plane begins its descent into the honolulu airport, it sweeps over the leeward side of the island, and when the plane taxis, you can see honolulu and diamond head in the distance. this song always pops into my head: "from the mountain to the ocean from the windward to the leeward side". i spent many a day in my aunt and uncle's house near honolulu; i learned to drive in the parking lot of pearlridge shopping center, went to my first gig at the wave (icicle works!), spent weekends on the north shore watching surfers and eating shave ice from matsumoto's.
too recently, my uncle was diagnosed with cancer. towards the end, he began visiting all his friends and family around the west coast, guam and the philippines to say his goodbyes. when he was here, he would sit on my lanai, looking out into the "winter" ocean--darker, grayer, more turbulent than usual--for hours on end. i would sit with him, not speaking, and think of the things he would never get to do for the first time, like go to alaska, see the children his daughter would have, or have that dog he always wanted. i think, perhaps, what he was going through was a kind of homesickness i hope to never experience--thinking not of the things he would never get to do, but of the things he would never get to do again: tinker with things around the house, embrace his wife and children, sit on his lanai in his little wooden house in pearl city, underneath the mango tree, feeding the birds in the morning, and 'talk story', while eating poke and drinking whisky with his buddies late into the night. when i think of him now, that's how i choose to remember him, with this song on the radio in the background, while my auntie prepares the evening meal. and just maybe that dog by his side.
*
there are three food references in the song, and even though these are staples in hawaii, they embody the three different things i hope my food blog portrays: beef stew, a universal food everyone knows; lomi salmon, something you might know if you have visited the island; and poi "real sour", which is something only a local would really know about. i started the blog so that i could give a taste of comfort to the homesick islanders, a smile of reminiscence to those who have visited, and maybe even offer something that can be related to by everyone.


Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

reid because about 9 months ago i was reading his blog and i thought, huh, if there can be a honolulu food blog, heck, there can be a guam food blog....and because he likes the cocteau twins.

special combo because she is a guamish girl, and we don't get to talk that much anymore, so we communicate through the web now. we have similar tastes in music, but i know she'll have completely different answers. and i once spent a very entertaining evening watching her write and rant at some poor girl on the web about...the cocteau twins.

chika because i don't really know anything about her, and i don't even know if she listens to music. and i hope this worries her that i picked her. haaaaaaaaaaaaaa ;-)

**pieman honoured me by picking me to answer these questions, because he thought i'd tell him what's groovy on guam. which i didn't. but there was a 6.1 6.4 earthquake today, and it was raining rain and ash from a nearby volcano all day, so as you can see, we don't do groovy here, just scary :-D