I read two stories about tourism and Japanese villages. The first is The Morioka Experience by Craig Mod.

Why Morioka?

Because your city is beautiful. Because your food is delicious. Because your people are kind and committed. Because your streets face nature in a way that buoys the spirit. Over and over I said: Thank you for making this city. I am honored to walk your city. I am healed by your city, by what I see and the archetypes I feel all around. Thank you for making this place and letting me be here.

Are there other places in Japan like this?

Is Morioka the only place in Japan like this? There are many cities like Morioka. Strong, fair social contracts have made these places and the lives lived within them possible. But Morioka is, in its own right, archetypically unique. The number of youth not just returning, but vigorously returning is remarkable. It’s thrilling. In the context of all the chaos happening in the world, I walk a city like Morioka and think: Yes, this is possible.

There is other interesting tidbits hinted at, with local creatives running businesses locally.

The other Japanese place is Miyama, a story in The Tyee: Revive Tourism? An Answer from One Japanese Village:

Miyama was recently recognized by the United Nations World Tourism Organization as one of its “Best Tourism Villages,” showcasing small towns taking smart and sustainable approaches to tourism. The town has also been recognized as an important preservation district by the Japanese government thanks to its many thatched roof cottages known as kayabuki.

A small town that is ~3,400 people and shrinking, and trying to figure out what “tourism” means.

I see this local vs global tension everywhere. And also the tension of making a city for living in, that can remain a place where young people can grow up and stay, or come back to, and build new things.

I’m still feeling pessimistic about Vancouver being a city where one can do things. Never mind just live.

My first delivery of Chefs Plate meals arrived today.¹

My company sent everyone SnackMagic boxes with treats for the holidays, and the box also came with a discount code for Chefs Plate, a meal delivery service.²

I decided to try it even though I’m not really the target market for it. We live close by to grocery stores and I enjoy cooking things from raw ingredients.

But, it was steeply discounted, and I’ve always been curious about these services. I don’t know how long this one has been available or what others there are in Canada / are live in Vancouver.

I picked the meals ahead of time with Rachael. This order included:

• Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken
• Creamy Butternut Squash Orzo
• Loaded Beef Burrito Bowls

Usual price $60CAD, discounted price $27CAD. For 2 people for 3 meals that’s pretty good.

Unboxing

You can pick different days of the week for delivery and they leave it at your door.

There is a glossy double sided print out of meal prep and cooking instructions. My first reaction was that this is a lot of packaging and paper and inks and it’s definitely wrecking the planet.

The kits are in a big cardboard box, each meal’s ingredients in a bag. The bags are compostable so you can use them for your bucket liner (as it says in the explainer).

There’s a compartment in the bottom with an ice pack and things that need to be kept cold. This week, chicken breasts and some ground beef. There was also a loose whole bulb of garlic.

The kit bags aren’t full to the brim, so the tops could be folded down. But I still had to find room in my apartment sized fridge to stick them.

Making Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken

We decided to make the chicken for dinner.

Here’s everything from the kit laid out on the counter. The sticker on the bag has a full ingredient list for everything like the spice blend and then mayo, plus the nutrition info for the whole meal.

The double sided instructions are good. Tells you the equipment and other stuff you need (basics like salt, pepper, oil, honey). And the instructions are laid out in time it takes to cook. So preheat the oven right away and get the potato wedges started.

And now we’ll teleport all the way to the plated meal. Chicken breast covered in mayo and panko-crusted, potato wedges baked in the oven with Montreal Steak Spice, and honey glazed carrots.

It was good! We added our own salt and pepper to everything as instructed and it was nice and flavourful.

It called for parchment paper for both the potato wedges and the final bake of the chicken. That was a nice tip for me to save on clean up and keep things crisp.

It definitely reminded me that potato wedges are something we can make any time!

The carrots are pretty much how I make them anyway - finished with a little butter and honey. Dill if you like, or I’ll add cumin seeds sometimes.

The mayo-instead-of-egg was another nice tip that I’ll be using.

All in all, a good, tasty first experience.

On Meal Kits Generally

The discounts to get me on a subscription is very much an investment driven business.

The packaging feels like a lot. But: no plastic other than on the meat.

There is an app, so maybe I can opt out of the printed meal instructions.

Are the ingredients local? Could one check a box and have 80% local ingredients?

Could one apply this to community supported agriculture?

This meal was ~$9CAD with discount, ~$20CAD without. For 2 people, that’s reasonable. The chicken breasts alone would cost me $5-6. Everything else low cost: 2 carrots, 3 potatoes, mayo, steak spice. Maybe another $1.

We used to do zero take out. And then the pandemic. Now we’re at 1-2 take out meals per week. This would be cheaper.

I’m interested in perhaps doing some food sharing with people, where everyone cooks a larger quantity and then shares with the group. Don’t know if I’ll get to it as a habit this year, but it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.

And bulk buying!

I have done zero research on this in Vancouver. If you have thoughts on meal kits or on fun community food locally, let me know!

Time for another blogging about blogging and Mastodon’ing.

It turns out you can import posts made to Mastodon into your own Micro.blog.

So I did! Both @boris@toolsforthought.rocks and @bmann@social.coop RSS feeds are being imported here.

I also turned off cross posting to Social Coop, because that would cause a time loop ;)

This means that with current settings, you can subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed and get all of my posts across local Micro.blog posts (like this one) and those two Mastodon accounts.

There is a “blog only” feed that I’ll need to figure out around these long posts — but they’ve been in short supply over the past several years!

Blog to Mastodon and Back Again

You can search for and follow the blog directly on ActivityPub systems at @boris@blog.bmannconsulting.com ¹.

Screenshot of how the blog profile looks in MetaText on iOS

Erratta

It’s not at all perfect yet.

There is something strange where Markdown is inconsistently parsed.

For this post on the blog, italics were applied, but the asterisks weren’t transformed into an unordered list.

And the URLs were not correctly linked.

And only the first photo was included, not all four.

See [original on social.coop](https://

social.coop/@bmann/109496328943570699).

For Twitter cross-posting (which goes Mastodon -> Micro.blog import -> Micro.blog Twitter cross-posting), this may cause all sorts of things to happen. Sorry Twitter readers!

Feature Requests: Only import public posts

This post is an unlisted reply but got imported.

Ideally only public posts would be imported. This isn’t a cross posting tool, so I wouldn’t get much more complex than that.²

Mastodon RSS

This is a side effect of taking whatever comes out of a Mastodon RSS feed. I’ll have to dig into all of the errata and other items to understand what’s in the feed, how it’s represented, how the content might be escaped or marked up as structured data.

Micro.blog would need to run a whole bunch of parsing tools to handle these cases. At the same time, there’s likely a good case for a shared library here.

And of course — it’s a bit of a hack. ActivityStreams are a different, arguably richer vocabulary which natively contains all this information. Squeezing it into RSS isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

Up Next

I’ve still got 3 conversions of my bmannconsulting.com site underway. It will likely end up being on LogSeq with GitHub Actions publishing.

And finally, my FoodWiki. It’s now statically published TiddlyWiki, also with GitHub Actions.

It doesn’t yet have an RSS feed, but it will, and will likely also get folded into this main feed.

But Why????

Im experimenting, as I often do when these social network and posting systems evolve.

For me, I can have rich posting interfaces on my phone for short microbloggy posts across a number of topics, as well as long form blog posts, and I get one archive. The one archive may be the least interesting - especially if it lightly mangles posts and misses images.

If anyone out there in RSS land hates it, let me know!

I was reminded that I wrote about running your own Mastodon (on Heroku!) back in 2017. Heroku is on its way out, so I wouldn’t recommend it today.¹

Interesting to look back at that post and see how the beginnings of what would become Fission are there.

Digital Ocean also has one click installs & @RangerMauve reports that you’ll need the $12/month droplet size.

This is fine for highly technical people who like to experiment. @walkah is running his own Pleroma instance — I think even at home in his lab?²

When I rejoined Mastodon more seriously 2 years ago, I joined Social.Coop. I didn’t want to worry about the care and feeding of a server, database, backups, and so on. I did want to be part of a group that supported such an activity.

As you pick a Mastodon server to be part of, do some research. Who are the admins? Where is it hosted? Do they have a place to accept donations and support? Can you get involved in governance of the server? Which instances do they block? Or not block?

At this point my main recommendation is to look for a donation and support link. As a “regular” user, $5/month or $50/year seems about the right amount to be donating.

If you do a search on Open Collective you’ll see several pages of results of server admins having set up collectives.

This also includes the “core” Mastodon project.

If you’re going to be running a server instance for yourself or for an organization, don’t forget to also donate to your upstream. The way Open Collective works, you can use your collective to fund other collectives, so you can make this part of your standard way of operating. Supporting open source software development in this way should be a standard expense.³

And anyone who says that’s “too hard for everyone” — sure, those of us who are more tech and media literate may need to go first. But if we’re not willing to support something better, who is?

I’ve been thinking about kickstarting a couple of different app ecosystems.

I’m going to be a bit vague here, but imagine a tablet like dedicated device. I wrote a post about using the reMarkable — so maybe consider something like that. But more open and a desire to build a software ecosystem around it. If you’re intrigued, ping me and I can tell you more¹.

At the same time, for my own use and generally thinking what I want to see in the world, I’m a fan of end user programming.

Or at least, no code like customization. That could range from Zapier automating getting data from one system into another, or building custom forms, data, and views with Airtable.

The web technology stack is the one with the lowest bar to entry for custom apps. And even there you immediately need logins and storage to make an app that users can come back to and have some preferences and content tailored for them.

When thinking about new systems — new interfaces, new devices — how do you get developers to commit?

Actually, even better, how do you get developers — or end users — to start?

One way is customization directly. Think MySpace²: give people tools to directly customize their environment.

But is that even the right metaphor? With smartphones, users customize some icons and widgets and background screens. Very much within proscribed parameters.

To be clear: I think in popular culture, the concept of an “app” is an excellent base layer object. Web apps, mobile apps, I have an idea for an app, what app do you use for that? — and so on, this is very mass market concept at this point.

So: you should support apps, and developers. User accounts choose which apps to use to customize their usage of the device. Maybe you support some sort of git-repo aka “link” based sideloading, because the lift of going “full App Store” is a lot. Maybe you want to have some app manifest files with required info to get basic info from the developer and for the user. Use a git repo of your own for people to PR in links to their plugins and widgets, and use that as a source for your “App Store” to start.

What if we think in more basic primitives? What do I want from a reading / processing / note taking device?

Notes. Links. Images. People. Environment-wide entities.

Pretty quickly you maybe end up taking on the whole complexity of the mess we’re in. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff and standards out there.

Do I want to sync my contacts to such a thing, so it needs to support CardDAV? Not really, although as we know, every piece of software eventually gains the ability to send email³.

But email is maybe an “API that isn’t an API” to consider. Can my device system account be issued multiple inboxes? So I could configure and route all sorts of info — from notes to self to read letter to images — into the system.⁴

RSS might be another primitive that works as an inbox like thing.

And since connective tissue tools like Zapier have both email and RSS outputs, creative users can pipe a lot of stuff.

Bonus: build your own first class Zapier integration that exposes your system primitives as much as possible.

And of course, you need outgoing tools in the same way. Sync is a super power. Export is considered harmful.

Right. Display layers and canvas and widgets. Being able to target a widget type as a Zapier endpoint for max flexibility.

The reMarkable has notebooks and pages as its core data metaphors and visual / display metaphors. It has list view or grid view. No dashboards. No clock widget. No histogram of pages created by day / week / year.

Making some core widget types like lists, galleries, show first N words and then a more link, etc.

At which point developer-designer-tinkerers⁵ can make custom widget display types before they have to make an entire app.

There’s a whole other riff here about building plugins and widgets into OTHER systems. eG build a widget for WeChat-like super App ecosystems, so content from your ecosystem can easily be manipulated inside the super app, and easy content flows in the other direction.

And I think I’ll end my somewhat context-free stream of consciousness here. Stay tuned!

Looking back at this weekend, it was filled with adventures and cooking AND relaxing.

I had a fancy work lunch on Friday with Ryan at VV Tapas Lounge. It’s close to our coworking space (Makeshift) and we hadn’t tried it yet.

Warm Cauliflower Dip

Beet Salad with Parsnip Crisps

Hanger Steak with Mango Slaw & Chimichurri

I had meant to make it to a YVRDAO meetup but cancelled and instead Rachael and I went for dinner at Kin Kao, a great Thai place in our neighbourhood. Had this rice noodle, chicken, and gai lan dish for the first time. Really good!

And yes we started watching Stranger Things new season to round out our Friday night.

On Saturday, we went to Oide Coffee on Clark for the second time. A friendly bunch, and Rachael really likes their matcha lattes.

A quick lunch snack at Rise Up and then we grabbed an Evo and went to the Nikkei Museum. The Japanese Design Today 100 was excellent: a showcase of Japanese designed items in many categories.

Titanium cups made in a way to recall the colouring of more traditionally made Japanese cups.

One of the three spaces with the items displayed:

After the design exhibit we went next door to Suzuya, a Japanese grocery store. Stocked up on locally made frozen ramen noodles, snacks, and a couple of condiments: Yuzu salt and Ichimi Togarashi.

We decided to see what was at the Burnaby Art Gallery but skipped the show and instead walked the park grounds there.

This was a perfectly shaped tree in my opinion

View across the water to Metrotown towers

The rhododendrons were in full bloom and gigantic.

The final Saturday stop was a big shop at Real Canadian Superstore, since we had the Evo car share for several hours already.

We usually shop locally on foot in our Commercial Drive neighbourhood, but Superstore has fried onions that Rachael likes for salad crunch, so we stock up when we go.

I bought two big club packs of meat. One of blade steak and one of ground beef.

The ground beef got turned into taco filling for dinner. I was happy with how it turned out. I used a food processor to mince a bunch of cilantro, an onion, and three cloves of garlic. This was sautéed in a little oil until the onion and garlic started to brown. Then I processed 5 tomatoes in the food processor as well.

I browned the meat separately with some cumin seeds and salt and pepper.

I combined the mixture, added a diced yellow pepper, and seasoned with ancho chile and cooked it down.

I froze some of the ground beef and combined the rest for meatballs later in the week.

The blade steak I trimmed of fat and gristle and chopped into a crock pot. Combined with 4 chopped carrots, half a head of chopped green cabbage, a bay leaf, garlic, and salt and pepper, plus about half full of water. It cooked overnight.

Today on Sunday we went out for a longer loop walk to Laughing Bean Coffee on Slogan and then down towards Wall Street.

We stopped and read on a park bench in Burrardview Park for a bit.

Here’s Rachael taking a close up of a flowering red hawthorn tree.

We watched a little bit of Stranger Things every night and finished it this evening.

A good weekend.

If you’re checking out Mastodon the open source Twitter-like microblogging service, my first recommendation would be to pick a home server that isn’t the main mastodon-dot-social one.

There is a list of community servers. 
Figure out who runs different servers, what their model is to be sustainable across moderation & hosting, and what kind of people hang out there.

What do I mean? What could go wrong with many part-time server admins? Read @atomicthumbs thread for some examples. 
And yes, you should consider if #socialcoop is right for you. It’s my home server that I pay to be a co-op member of. Read more on the Social Co-op Wiki.

And of course, this is open source software. Consider supporting Mastodon on Patreon.

I know that @walkah recently setup a personal Pleroma server at walkah.social, which is an option if you’ve got a bit of a home lab.

My personal goal would be to see truly individual p2p microblogging flourish. The tools and protocols that we’re building at Fission are meant to help with that.

And we’ve got grand hopes from our friends at Bluesky, who are also dedicated to moving “from platforms to protocols”.

Finally, I help run a little twitter <> mastodon cross posting service called Moa Party. You can hook up your accounts on the app at moa.party and read more about the project at https://moaparty.com.

We’re looking for both volunteer maintainers as well as developers who are paid an honorarium to work on the Python codebase. I wrote a thread about moa with more info.

Yesterday was a nice weekend adventure day with Rachael.

Didn’t get up too early, had some nice bacon & eggs weekend breakfast, and lounged a bit in the morning.

Rachael needed to go out to pick up a new ceramic mug she ordered. We stopped in at an art / craft / design market being held in the Bosa space on Venables at Commercial.

Here’s work by ceramic vendor Dirt Spindle with some fun pieces:

Then to the mug pickup on East Hastings, and on to Laughing Bean for a hot chai for Rachael to drink.

Having come this far, we headed towards New Brighton Park.

The ducks are enjoying the pool that we try and spend lots of time in, in the summer.

There was a big drop of snow on the mountains over the weekend. And there was a bit of sun shining down through the broken clouds.

Rachael and I with weirdo expressions, testing the new iPhone camera.

On Saturday I ended up buying a new iPhone 13. Not the pro version, but going from 8 to 13 means a huge leap in camera quality and features.

The main reason was battery life, as illustrated by my Seattle trip this past week and needing to carry around extra battery packs and chargers.

From here we walked further east to Grog Studios which was having a pottery sale of different artists.

Danica Kaspar’s colourful & psychedelic patterns were awesome.

And, Annabelle Choi with a pop up of her baking. We got a brown butter apple knot thing, and a mini rhubarb custard loaf.

Having walked quite far, we looked for an Evo car share but they were all farther away than a walk home. We ended up getting on a #4 bus at Renfrew and shortening our trip a bit, but we did put in 10K steps by the time we made it home.

I’m finishing this post up on a Monday morning. There’s snow outside and a busy week ahead. Have a good week!

Ton wrote a post about his usage of the Post Kinds plugin for WordPress and used the word “lock in”.

I understand what he is trying to reference by using the phrase “lock in” but I think it’s problematic. It’s open source software (as is WordPress itself) — you are not locked in, you just have to decide where to invest resources of time, money, and energy.

A user has (at least) two options that work with the plugin:

1) Fork it

Find likeminded users and support a fork that does what you want.

Maintain it over time, either as a full fork or cherry picking updates from upstream.

2) Add features to the current plugin

Suggest the feature. Find like minded users. Find a developer to make a PR or compensate David to do it.

And of course for plugins like this, compatibility with the “host” system means keeping up with major architectural changes over time, too.

I don’t mean to suggest that Ton should do either of these two things, just that lock in is not the right phrase at all.

His plan is to store the Post Kinds data directly in the “main” WordPress content:

Over time I can replace the existing Post Kinds dependent postings (about 900 in this blog) in the same way, clearing the way for switching it off entirely. This should increase the autonomy of keeping this blog, and decrease dependencies.

And so the dependency is just on (open source) WordPress, which has a very large user and developer base and is likely to be maintained for a long time.

Also via Ton is a good read on Permacomputing, which has themes I’m thinking about with respect to user agency and maintenance of software over time.

Currently, I think we are entering into a post-open-source world. Large corporates are behind a vast majority of maintained software that happens to be licensed as open source. Software is built dependent on proprietary cloud platforms in such a way that being open source doesn’t make it portable.

I am interested in non-commercial open licensing as a new default I want to encourage for software developers, such as the Prosperity Public License or IndieCC.

And on the user agency side, I want to encourage collectivism: pool your time, energy, and resources to #BuildSoftwareTogether. Not as a “user”, but as an owner or member that wants to see a piece of software thrive.

For this collectivism, new tools like Open Collective exist. I have a handful of projects there running to bootstrap a few pieces of collective software myself.

Anyway, thanks Ton for the writing prompt. Don’t feel locked in!

I realized that Bandcamp Friday is continuing, where Bandcamp passes all sales on to artists on their platform without taking a cut.

So here is a recent purchase, “Not a Party at All”, by Lambs & Wolves:

This is a German indie pop band, singing in English, that I honestly forget how I found it. Possibly through the Bandcamp “New and Notable” section. The album was just released, on Jan 15, 2021.

I’ve got an embarrassment of music suggestions lately, with the #music-exchange channel in the Fission Discord chat getting new posts daily.

I can’t believe we’ve hit February of 2021 already. Go forth and buy music, support artists!

I read Ben Werdmüller’s post on his Medium experiment and started writing in his comment form, and ended up here¹.

Mean time to comment is an interesting metric to think about for the different channels in which readers read your blog.

I didn’t email you because I am in my RSS reader or in my browser and the effort level of ALL the stuff I have to talk to you about crowds out the brief comment ;)

This is totally not an average user thing, but Medium like “comments that are blog posts” is maybe interesting.

The way I’ve thought about this is, use Micropub! You have a comment form, and people write in there, but you give the option to authenticate to their Micropub blog. I would write a post, but it would end up as a reply on my own blog.

Also: logging in via Twitter and posting to Twitter would work too (or Mastodon). And probably be much more widely used.

Or: check a box and say “email these comments to Ben and don’t publish them” or however to word that.

I currently use Micro.blog. I only get comments via Twitter. I need to wedge Webmentions in there but self hosted that plus Bridgy plus various ways I need to set that up… unlikely to happen. Plus I’ve been thinking about what to use for subscribe to my blog by email, since RSS doesn’t work for everyone.

Reply by email to comment —which Discourse forums do — is another thing.

Also: because you have a form — I wrote a TON and just hit submit! Which will likely lead to an email back and forth!

Can I pay for social comments?

Last idea, because you want to build community, is that Discourse forums can be set up so that every blog post gets a forum thread.

It is relatively easy to setup for someone technical like you or me, costs about $10/month on Digital Ocean.

I saw that Richard Eriksson shared news about the “new Gowalla”.

I replied to Richard’s tweet:

I haven’t delved into it, have you see anything about data licensing?

I’ll just come right out and say that I’d love for the basics of location data to be openly licensed, maybe synced or improved with OpenStreetMap over time. <twitter.com/bmann/sta…>

I then headed over to LinkedIn and posted there to see if I could get some mapping friends to weigh in, tagging Will Cadell of Sparkgeo of and Eric Gunderson of Mapbox:

I am completely uninterested in spending a bunch of time on a platform which doesn’t have AT LEAST non-commercial re-use of data around locations.

Do you all know anything about state of the art location (business, place, etc) licensing?

Are people syncing back to Open Street Map as a shared layer?

Can we include IndieWeb protocols like Micropub “check ins” so we can extend beyond a silo from day one?

Any info, speculation, or hard earned learnings welcome ;)

I’d be happy to participate in Gowalla-like activities – but I don’t want to do it if the links, identifiers, and data are all owned by another locked down platform.

The location of a store, what type of store it is, and user “enrichment” like photos, reviews, etc. shouldn’t be locked in one data silo.

There is more awareness around these issues, so maybe we can raise them early, and get these platforms to address this up front.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember at all where this link came from.

Flow State is a newsletter which promises “every weekday, two hours of music perfect for working”.

They shared Hotel Neon earlier this week:

Today we’re listening to Hotel Neon, an ambient music trio based in Philadelphia. The group uses synths, guitar, and strings to produce beautiful sound atmospheres conducive to deep focus or meditation.

They recommend starting with their most recent album, released on Jan 1st of this year (yes, 2021!), All is Memory:

Their full Digital Discography is 80% off…so I bought all 18 releases.

Happy music buying in 2021 everyone!

I was delighted to find theNEWDEAL on Bandcamp!

I watched them live in Ottawa when I was living there in the early 2000s, and the self-titled album came up in my local collection rotation and I went to see what else they had :)

I bought their June 2020 release Isolation Suite to hear their latest¹. This is the third track, Cycles III:

And after listening to a couple of different albums, decided on 2016 release, Mercury Switch. It’s high energy bopping and grooves. Here’s the title track:

The Internet Archive also has a lot of their live recordings. Here’s a 10 minute track from a January 2020 show in Pittsburgh. Yes, they are super fun to experience live!

While this sounds like something that comes straight out of a computer, this is all played and performed live – bass, keyboards, drums, percussion.

We may all be writing in English, debating in English, and working in English, but the web dev scene is thoroughly multicultural even though online discourse doesn’t seem capable of taking that into account.

@baldur Cultural deafness and controversy in tech debates

What a great post. I’ve experienced this for 20 years, being of German background but growing up in Canada. I can more easily translate from what appear to be blunt German commands when typed in English.

This came up in the recent discussion with Rosano, who pointed to Ramsey Nasser’s Arabic programming language.

But @baldur’s post is more about the tone and style of English use, which differs by culture. The average American or Canadian gets afraid or agitated by an intense argument.

I know I get energized by them, and am looking for a counterpoint who fights hard enough to get me to change my “strong opinions loosely held”.

Web dev culture is an anglophone culture.

We can’t change that.

But maybe we should, at the very least, try and make it less American

👏👏👏

Dries, founder of the Drupal project, posted his thoughts and wishes from 20 years.

He included 3 birthday wishes.

The first one, never stop evolving¹, includes this passage:

First and foremost, we’ve been focused on a problem that existed 20 years ago, exists today, and will exist 20 years from now: people and organizations need to manage content. Working on a long-lasting problem certainly helps you stay relevant.

So, roughly, the short phrase for this is “content management”. It was very interesting to read this, because it’s not at all the reason I contributed to the Drupal project.

I got involved using it personally, joined the mailing list, and starting contributing. It was my first open source project and community and I learned so much and have so much to be thankful for to the project, to Dries, and to all the wonderful people I got to meet.

My first contributions were around CSS class names and the recipe module.

Anyway: I got involved and built a company around Drupal because I wanted to enable personal publishing. Not the content management part, but rather giving individuals and groups agency over their content: using open source software to publish their own words online. Without having to go through mass media of a newspaper or other publisher, which is all there was at the time.²

I’m still on that same mission, in part because of Drupal being built as a full stack LAMP application: much too hard to host and maintain by individuals. This reduces user agency: you’re relying on someone else to have the knowledge and expertise and trust to run and maintain a server stack, and hopefully back up your content.

I’m pleased that people are in part solving this by banding together as co-ops and collectives.³. Some of the first worker cooperatives that I was exposed to were building on Drupal, like Agaric, or Vancouver’s CanTrust Hosting Co-op.

My goal: a user with a smartphone as their only computing device should be able to create and publish directly, and participate in the web.

Alongside of this is an understanding that humans make software and can be supported directly, which wish #3 is about.

Wish #2 is continued focus on ease of use, with a specific mention of out-of-the-box experience.

I hacked together SQL queries and config files to invent install profiles for Drupal, with many more capable people doing an actual good job of this afterwards ;)

Mostly, the Drupal community hasn’t internalized what it wants to be out of the box. Modules rather than products. It has gotten better, but there is a lot more to do here.⁴

And, the immense gravitational force of Dries’ commercial company Acquia being focused on (enterprise) content management pulls things in that direction. This is also at odds with my personal interest in individuals and groups, who have very different needs

This is not really this category, but I have been reflecting on it so will include it here:

At the time (in the early 2000s) I had little to no awareness of the concept of equality and inclusion. Around me I saw mostly white, young, and primarily male faces. I was - and am! - so privileged to be able to spend time participating in OSS communities.

This, too, is usability and ease of use.

Wish #3 resonated most strongly with me and I think Dries and I are very aligned on this goal: Economic systems to sustain and scale Open Source.

He links to a shop local analogy: think about the software you use, and understand that choosing software with an open source license pays dividends for you and the people around you.

Related to privilege, I am thinking a lot about “open source as a job”. I have long tried to get open source devs paid in different ways. Now, I think it’s time to have apps as a small business. Can we enable devs from around the globe to earn a living from building and maintaining apps? Yes, we can, and we must — and move past just North America and Western Europe as the focus for this.

All of the things I’ve mentioned are a core part of Fission, my current company:

1. User owned content and personalization of apps
2. Out of the box components for users and developers to build apps
3. A model for users to participate with and support developers directly, so devs can have “open source as a job”

I am so glad to have met Dries and have him as a friend, so we can continue to work together, debate, and argue over priorities over how our missions overlap ;)

Dries is one of the very few people on the planet with 20 years of history of guiding a large open source project, and the changes and awareness of issues related to this that has happened over that time.

Congrats to him, to the entire Drupal community. Here’s to another 20.

I’ve got myself setup to go through my “old” music collection, carried through into this digital streaming future through my iTunes Match subscription. Funny enough, I still think of “gigs of music” – as in, how many GB of space does the music take up.

I checked, and I’ve got 11,279 songs, which totals 32.7 days worth of music, or 73GB of music.¹

I haven’t really used or setup the iTunes Music app in a long time. That is, no stars and curated playlists and such. I’m not used to investing in a desktop music player like this.²

I made a “Not Played” smart playlist which just gives me songs that haven’t been played in 2 months. It’s been a nice start, shuffling through all sorts of different music, dropping a ❤️ here and there for songs to come back to, making it so that Christmas music and Dave’s Jamaican podcast files don’t hit the shuffle in the future.

Primus came on, The Devil Went Down to Georgia (I don’t think I’ve ever seen this video, it’s amazing!):

Did I want to be listening to Primus? You know what, this track isn’t even weird, it’s just a great tune. Aside from the Rhinoplasty album that has this Devil song on it (1998), I also have Pork Soda (1993) in my collection.

Which of course, made me go and look: yep, Primus on Bandcamp. The newest album is The Desaturating Seven (2017).

Here’s a comment:

If you enjoy the trio Primus especially at their weirdest then this is the Claypool Concept album for you. It grows on you after each listen, I promise.

Here’s the one preview track from the album:

Wow, from 1993 to 2017 and back again. I guess I’m listening to Primus, again.

We watched the Lovers Rock movie, part of the Steve McQueen’s Small Axe BBC film series. It’s all about music.

The Independent has a write up, and embeds a Spotify playlist in the article.

This means I can do another playlist deep dive, and find where to look for the artists and tracks separately.

Robin Hood, Cry Tuff & The Originals

On YouTube:

Didn’t find this track on Bandcamp, but did find this one by Cry Tuff:

The entire Pressure Sounds catalog is amazing. In fact, the album covers are all the original 45 records, which you see them playing in the film:

You can buy the entire discography for only like £500!! Tempted…

Kinta Kinta Dub by The Revolutionaries

I originally found the none dub version, which lead me to asking, what does dub / dubplate mean Wikipedia?

A dubplate is an acetate disc usually of 10 inches diameter, traditionally used by studios to test recordings prior to mastering for the subsequent pressing of a vinyl record, but pioneered by reggae sound systems as a way to play exclusive music. They would later become an important facet of the jungle/drum and bass, UK garage, grime and dubstep music scenes.

The first use of dubplates is commonly attributed to sound engineer King Tubby and reggae sound systems such as Lloyd Coxsone and Killamanjaro.[1] Special and one-off versions would be cut to acetate for competing in a sound clash, utilising vocals specially recorded to namecheck the sound system. As such, these would become known as “dubplate specials” often remarking on the prowess of the sound system playing it, in a bid to win the clash.

Oh, interesting, so a reggae sound system is…?

The popularity of a sound system was mainly contingent on one thing: having new music. In order to circumvent the release cycle of the American record labels, the two sound system superstars turned to record production. Initially, they produced only singles for their own sound systems, known as “Exclusives” or Dubplates—a limited run of one copy per song.[4] What began as an attempt to replicate the American R&B sound using local musicians evolved into a uniquely Jamaican musical genre: ska. This shift was due partly to the fact that as American-style R&B was embraced by a largely white, teenage audience and evolved into rock and roll, sound system owners created—and played—a steady stream of the singles the people preferred: fast-shuffle boogies and ballads. In response to this shift in supply, Jamaican producers introduced to their work some of the original elements of the Jamaican sound: rhythm guitars strumming the offbeat and snare-drum emphasis on the third beat, for example.[3] As this new musical form became more popular, both Dodd and Reid began to move more seriously into music production. Coxsone Dodd’s production studio became the famous Studio One, while Duke Reid founded Treasure Isle.

Yeah, this is awesome, and depicted in the film, or at least the version that immigrated into the UK.

He’s the Greatest Dancer by Sister Sledge

Remix version by Lucas D:

Probably a little too clean compared to the version on the film.

How Long Will it Take by Pat Kelly

Darling Ooh by Errol Dunkley

And found it still available on vinyl as a re-issue. Here’s the description:

Errol Dunkley was an early reggae star and one of the youngest, recording his first side (“My Queen”) at the age of 12 for Prince Buster in 1964 and scoring his first hit (“You’re Gonna Need Me”) in 1967. Later, he became a key performer in the ‘70s Brit-Reggae scene, just missing the Top Ten in 1978 with his remake of John Holt’s “OK Fred.” Helmed by groundbreaking female producer Sylvia Pottenger, Darling Ooh! is actually his 1972 debut album, but like a lot of records that came out on small Jamaican mprints that later got swallowed into the mammoth Trojan label, its history is complicated; this record came out on the Gay Feet label under the title Presenting Errol Dunkley and also on the Trojan imprint Attack the same year as Darling Ooh! with different art and an expanded track listing (and, just to make things more confusing, a 1979 Trojan reissue had the Gay Feet track listing and the Attack artwork).

Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglass

Classic.

“Kung Fu Fighting” is a disco song by Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas, written by Douglas and produced by British-Indian musician Biddu. It was released as a single in 1974 on the cusp of a chopsocky film craze and rose to the top of the British, Australian, Canadian, and American charts, in addition to reaching the top of the Soul Singles chart. It received a Gold certification from the RIAA in 1974 and popularized disco music. It eventually went on to sell eleven million records worldwide, making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. The song uses the quintessential Oriental riff, a short musical phrase that is used to signify Chinese culture.

Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung…>

Things in Life by Dennis Brown

After Tonight by Junior English

Lonely Girl by Barry Biggs

Different track, also from Pressure Sounds label:

Here it is on YT:

Baby My Love by The In Crowd, Jah Stitch

Whole Flabba Holt / Roots Radics / Jah Stitch discography looking great, here’s a one track:

Actual track on YT:

Silly Games by Janet Kay

Yes! On Bandcamp:

This was one of the key songs from the film. Looks like it was released on BC for the film:

Janet Kay also is known as the Queen of Lovers Rock earned the title when she made history by becoming the ‘First British born Black Female Reggae Artist to have a No. 1 in the British Pop Charts’ - Music Guinness Book of Records. With this classic song ‘Silly Games’ it was a hit not only in the UK but also in Europe.

Keep it Like it is by Louisa Mark

Another Trojan Records, on YT:

Minstrel Pablo by Augustus Pablo

I’m mainly seeing some sweet melodica action (a keyboard you blow into). Found this in Rockers International Discography.

Actual track on YT:

Dreadlocks in Moonlight by Lee “Scratch” Perry

Absolute legend:

Lee “Scratch” Perry OD (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20 March 1936)[1] is a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks.[2] He has worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, the Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, the Beastie Boys, Ari Up, the Clash, the Orb, and many others.

Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_…>

Well, now I want to go listen to The Orb. Their latest comes out this year:

I have Live 93 in my collection already (one of their earliest), so I now have the pleasure of working my way forwards.

Looks like The Orbserver in the Star House features Lee “Scratch” Perry. Yeah, this is a rabbit hole I can fall down.

Have a Little Faith by Nicky Thomas

Another Trojan Records.

Yes, Trojan Records exists:

Trojan Records was founded in 1968 when Lee Gopthal, who operated the Musicland record retail chain and owned Beat & Commercial Records, pooled his Jamaican music interests with those of Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. Until 1975, they were based at a warehouse in Neasden Lane, Willesden, London.

Trojan was instrumental in introducing reggae to a global audience and by 1970 had secured a series of major UK chart hits. Successful Trojan artists from this period including Tony Tribe, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Upsetters, Bob and Marcia, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Harry J All Stars, The Maytals, The Melodians, Nicky Thomas and Dave and Ansel Collins.

The bulk of the company’s successes came via licences for Jamaican music supplied by producers such as Duke Reid, Harry Johnson and Leslie Kong. While the company’s focus was firmly on the sale of 7” singles, it also launched a series of popular, budget-priced compilations such as Tighten Up, Club Reggae and Reggae Chartbusters.

Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troj…>

Also credited with getting us to rude boy:

Rude boy, rudeboy, rudie, rudi, and rudy are slang terms that originated in 1960s Jamaican street culture, and that are still used today. In the late 1970s, there was a revival in England of the terms rude boy and rude girl, among other variations, being used to describe fans of two-tone ska. The use of these terms moved into the more contemporary ska punk movement as well. In the UK, the terms rude boy and rude girl are used in a way similar to gangsta, yardie or badman.

Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude…>

Which could take us to two-tone ska and ska punk, but I think we’ll leave it there :) Watch the film! It’s pretty intense, and some of the energy around how women are treated is horrible, but it’s an amazing look into west London Jamaican music parties.

Campbell @cambel sent along a note over the holidays with a link to a Spotify playlist of some music that he has been grooving to.

Since I’m in music adventure mode, and looking to buy direct from artists as much as possible, it was a good excuse to do some research into each of the tracks.

Thanks for sharing, Campbell!

Machine Gun, by Commodores

Only thing I could find on Bandcamp this remix by Jayphies. Which is pretty great!

Released in 1974, it’s an all instrumental track with lots of synthesizer. More on Songfacts:

1974 marked the first signs of disco, as R&B was morphing into something with a little more boogie. This is a great example of that sound, an instrumental song by the Commodores, who were recently signed to Motown Records. This was their first single.

The original is on YouTube. The comment on that video: “Machine Gun has only funk music and is devoid of slow-paced ballads.”

Zombie, by Fela Kuti

Fela Kuti has an entire page of albums on Bandcamp. Here’s the Zombie track from the Zombie album:

In my collection, I already had the two disc set¹ from 2000, The Best of Fela Kuti, which includes the Zombie track.

I’ll also recommend the nearly 16 minute long Roforofo Fight:

Spitfire, by Public Service Broadcasting

Nothing on Bandcamp, here it is on Youtube:

Genre is listed as Dance/Electronic – but kind of chill at the same time.

Here’s a direct link to the track on Deezer. Never heard of Deezer, signing up! Here’s my borismann account liking this track.

Here’s an Android Authority review of Spotify vs Deezer.

Hit the Ground Running, by Smog

Smog is on Bandcamp, but only the Cold Blooded Old Times track is available for preview.

Here’s the Hit the Ground Running on Youtube:

And on Deezer.

Voice and lyrics reminds me a bit of Andrew Vincent and the Pirates which I shared back in July, except Smog is a little slower tempo.

Autumn Sweater, by Yo La Tengo

Just one album on Bandcamp, here it is on YouTube:

Here’s a cover by Hunting Bears:

I have the “And then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” in my collection, from 2000. It probably sticks in my mind because of the strange name, but I do like Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House:

Human Performance, by Parquet Courts

Sea of Love, by Cat Power

Wow, there are a ton of covers of this song on Bandcamp. One the 2018 Wanderer album is on Bandcamp, so here’s YouTube:

Here’s an electronic cover I particularly liked:

Florence-Jean, by Damien Jurado

On YT:

And a cover on Bandcamp:

Doll Parts, by Hole

1994! Other than Oasis, probably the most “commercial” track on this list. From 1994, on YT:

Lots of covers on Bandcamp. I listened to a couple of them, a lot of them are just bad, several others are just super basic :)

I’m a 90s kid (graduated high school in 93, university from 95 to 99) so this is right in my prime music listening years.

In fact, I made a smart playlist of 1990 to 2000, and I have 3,300+ songs from that timeframe! That of course includes things like the Fela Kuti best of that came out in 2000, so not totally accurate.

Champagne Supernova, by Oasis

This is the “official HD remastered video” on YT:

And yes, many covers on Bandcamp.

I don’t remember how I ended up finding Jesse Bru’s The Coast. He’s even Vancouver based!

I’ll quote the beginning of the description from the Bandcamp album page:

Returning to French label Happiness Therapy is Vancouver based producer Jesse Bru, with his first LP in 9 years! Influenced by early 90’s hip-hop’s use of samples, Jesse Bru’s sample-heavy music production style is highlighted in this diverse 15 tracks release spanning from Anthemic Summery House to Jazzy Emotional Electro.

My personal genre category for this is electronica, I guess? I used to just call it all house music when I was buying British import CDs in the mid to late 90s.

Some of the rest of the description says “minimal dub vibes, bumping chicago house to astral drum and bass”. I feel like I need to do a deep dive in exploring all these genre labels.

The last track is In My Heart, “an uplifting anthemic house track”:

“the code you depend on depends on you”

Kyle Mitchell is working on the next iteration of a standardized non-commercial license for public software. You may have heard of License Zero which was his previous work in this space. I am a big fan of the clarity around the Parity and Prosperity open licenses that came out of that.

The new project is currently called StrictEq for “strict equality” but it’s likely going to get renamed.

It’s both a catalog of software, and an approach to selling licenses for commercial usage under a standard deal:

To use software listed on stricteq.com to make money or for work, you need to buy a license. If you’re part of a team, everyone on your team who uses the software needs to buy a license.

This is mostly optimized for libraries and components that get combined to build larger apps and services.

The intent is to start baking in the expectation that software builders contribute to pay for the software components they use — if they, in turn, are making money with the software or using it in a commercial company context.

My interest is more around entire applications that get used by “end users”, but I’m a fan of Kyle’s work and supportive of the movement to pay open software maintainers: to have open source as a job, without necessarily having to wrap an entire company around the software.

Join Kyle’s Artless Devices forum to give feedback on naming — and more generally, topics related to building thriving open source software.

Disclaimer: I help run the forum with some light moderation and admin tasks

My mom recently told me that the site she used to use for subscribing to an annual calendar of local tide heights and sun / moonrise times isn’t working any more:

I am stuck, trying to import this to iCal. I used to go to this site, but I cannot open the website and I don’t get an error message. And, yes, I have Internet access as I can go onto other sites. https://tides.mobilegeographics.com/calendar/year/6029.html

The one below has good info but I don’t see how I can import that data into iCal. https://sunrise-sunset.org/search?location=Point+Atkinson+

I looked around and couldn’t really find a place where calendar subscriptions are. They all seem to be generated SEO pages with ads on them.

Xtide is available on MacOS as an app, but only has US locations and no calendar subscriptions. The command line tool tide doesn’t seem to be available for MacOS, which is what I was thinking I might be able to get raw data from.

The government of Canada has annual tide charts published as HTML tables or a PDF. Here’s the one for Point Atkinson for 2021.

I took this info and imported it into Airtable. I had to take the individual Day / Time fields – plus add year, month, and GMT Timezone offset columns – and then use a formula column with Airtable’s DATETIME_FORMAT to turn this into a “real” date column.

Then, I could use the build in Calendar view in Airtable to generate both a calendar view and a calendar subscription link.

With a little more cut and paste work, getting this all done in Airtable for one location (Point Atkinson is the spot closest to Bowen Island where my mom lives) for a one year calendar wouldn’t take that long.

I could follow the same technique to cut and paste sunrise/sunset data too.

I may investigate some web scraping tools to make this a little more scalable, and maybe turn this into a static web page.

Any other suggestions on websites that already do this or techniques to follow would be welcome :)

Also: if you have a location you’d like calendarized, send me a note: I’m happy to repeat the process!

“The goal is a creative, detail-oriented [software] team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.”

— Ben Werdmüller, Engineering vs writing code

Somewhere in here is a longer discussion about building products vs solutions, understanding who you’re building for, and even on to things like learning by doing, prototyping, and more.

Building a business built on software vs writing code to solve a problem for yourself is maybe the two aspects to contrast?

I don’t think the distinction between engineering and programming / hacking that Ben makes is the most useful one.

And perhaps this is my Canadian perspective where “engineer” is a protected, professional term like doctor or lawyer.

So much of software still appears to be based on fashion.

But I do take Ben’s point. This concept of rigor is interesting to me as I think “beyond open source”. I use to think that the license of a software was one of its most important aspects. Now I feel that way more about open data structures, standards, and protocols.

If we agree on the protocol, we can always build the code again, and it can be built by hackers or by engineers as long as the protocol still works.

Do protocols need to be rigorously designed? And we’re back to square one ;)

Monsters’ Den: Godfall by Monstrum Games is a turn-based RPG.

You manage characters in teams of 4 (initially only a single team of 4) and have a home base. You travel overland or in dungeons, and then move to a turn based combat view.

Complex game with things like different factions, time limits, crafting, research, supplies, and your home base to build out. Characters level up into different sub classes.

At the same time, a “simple” fast game to just pick up and play. At 50% off, definitely worth it.

On sale for Windows and Mac on Steam »

Ben Werdmüller writes up monthly reading, watching, playing, using posts. I like these type of posts, and have been enjoying writing up some of my regular habits.

I’m doing reading for books and playing for video games.

The music category would be listening, although I guess it started as Bandcamp Fridays.

I’m unlikely to do watching: I don’t intentionally watch a lot of stuff other than perhaps an evening show that Rachael and I happen to be watching.

Using could be apps, but those usually are for work and end up elsewhere, like this Open Source Company Stack wiki page that I keep adding to.

I can already think of several more video games to post about - like my way-too-many-hours in the Tales of Maj’Eyal rogue-like, or the Vermintide II that I picked up and played for a couple of hours tonight.

I’m still looking through my long term music archive for old artists to revisit, as well as figuring out Bandcamp for discovery.

Here’s to a 2021 of intentional media consumption.

Being sick over Christmas meant that I was flat on my back with lots of time for nothing but reading.

N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy

A fantasy trilogy of politics, world building, and god and human relations. As I wrote before, it’s on sale right now.

Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger Trilogy

Far future space opera with pirate semantics. I’m on book two of three.

I bought this on sale from Steam. It’s a fun sci-fi RPG, rogue-lite, turn-based card battler.

I’ve put about 20 hours into it already across 2 runs. You have a party of three characters that you get to pick a base class for, and then pick a second specialization for.

Lots of loot, plus crafting. It’s not very hard, although when pirates invaded the station on my first run I did get completely wiped.

Recommended!

“Amazon wants to replicate every product it sells, discarding partnerships once they have their own version of that partner’s product”

Dave Mark on the WSJ article ‘How Amazon Wins by Steamrolling Rivals and Partners’, found via mjtsai.

This is exactly how I feel Amazon treats open source. It’s not illegal according to various licenses. mjtsai’s other linked commentary makes the same point about a physical product example.

But the result is the same: clone and crush.

I know there are well meaning open source folks at Amazon. I use Amazon for infrastructure. I think AWS has amazing operators.

But your actions and culture are actively damaging. If you only listen to the law, rather than ethics, courtesy, and a spirit of partnership, we will evolve licenses that force you to behave.

“Imagine if every company using open source were to provide tangible sponsorship, on an ongoing basis, directly to the developers of the open source libraries and tools they use and rely upon.” – Cognitect, Sponsoring Open Source Developers

So many great quotes in this article. I disagree with some of it, eg:

Open source licenses effectively preclude developers from charging for their work.

But the whole thing is laying out facts that have been obvious to some for a long time. It helps build the awareness and movement of the evolution of the concept of open source and how businesses should treat it.

With Fission, we’re just taking the first steps on this path. We’re going to blend “traditional” open source with non commercial, with users banding together to fund features, and more.

I’m really glad to have publicly posted our beliefs.

I’m working my way through past purchases. It’s been nice to at least spend time every Friday listening to and exploring music a little bit. This week is Resurgam by Alias, released in 2008. The artist passed away in 2018.

Here’s the I Heart Drum Machines track:

I’m bad at genres, this is labeled on Bandcamp as electronic / hip-hop / beats. This also gives me a starting point to look for other music that is new-to-me. /me starts browsing ‘beatz’

Song Exploder Vol 2 is now on Netflix:

I really enjoyed the Dua Lipa and The Killers episodes. Genre-wise, I guess both of these are “pop”.

I bought Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia (out now) and The Killers’ Sam’s Town (from 2006!).

The bigger “commercial” artists however mostly only sell through platforms, so I bought these two through iTunes.

I do use Amazon Music for random play lists and discovery. I have had a bunch of Dua Lipa favourited in there that I’ve been listening to.

Oh, and my iTunes Match subscription renewed. It’s not really promoted by Apple any more. For $30CAD annually, all my music from any source (e.g. music I buy on Band Camp and add to the Music app) is stored by Apple and available on any device. Essentially, a fancy unlimited file sync service, optimized for music.

As recommended by @carchrae, here’s one of my Bandcamp Friday purchases: Keleketla! By Coldcut:

I became aware of Bandcamp Fridays from Jessica @ticky and it just so happened that I was buying Good at Falling by The Japanese House:

I also bought Evil! by @dirtyspells. This track America is currently melting my brain in a good way:

The Sifter thesifter.org

a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

– A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

(From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

I always work across multiple machines and operating systems. I wrote up my laptop choices back in Feb 2020, and I ended up dipping my toes back into Windows with a laptop. Before that, I had bought two Chromebooks in a row, and I still think they are some of the best value.

Ryan recently asked me a question about Chromebooks:

I’m thinking of getting my 12 year old a Chromebook for back to school and wanted your input. For context, most of what they’ll be doing is google docs driven and she’s not a gamer.

Yeah, the Chromebooks are solid. And now that you can put Linux on them as a built in feature, there’s lots more that can be done with it.

You can also game on it: with streaming services like Stadia or Geforce Now, or Steam and some Linux games.

I usually follow the Wirecutter recommendations – I have personal experience with buying two ASUS Chromebooks and have been very impressed.

Looks like the ASUS Flip C434 is available at London Drugs for $700CAD.

The Lenovo model that is current WireCutter top rating looks to be good and available for about $560CAD.

If you see Chromebooks for less than $500CAD – they are usually way too underpowered.

And then Greg emailed me, so I’m turning this whole thing into a little Chromebook FAQ:

We’re wanting/needing to get something for my kids to use for school, and since they use the GSuite at school a Chromebook seems like a good idea. However, they still want to be able to play Minecraft.

Is there a site you would recommend for me to go to, in order to figure out what Chromebook to order? What Chromebook are you running?

Today, you don’t need to “dual boot” into Linux any more. Like WSL for Windows, you run any flavour of Linux that you want and you can run graphical apps like Minecraft no problem. This site on installing Minecraft for Chromebooks has too many ads on it, but basically – Linux stuff installs directly on Chromebooks these days.

Having a really solid browser environment, plus basic apps you can install, makes for a good stable system that is very inexpensive for what you get. You need to pay more for a Windows or Mac laptop – approximately 2-4 times the price of a solid Chromebook – to get equivalent performance.

My current Chromebook is the ASUS C434, but as I said at the top, I’m also switching between an ASUS Windows laptop and a Mac desktop.

I still wouldn’t pay more than $1000CAD for a Chromebook (and even that is pretty high).

I’ve just ordered myself a custom Timbuk2 messenger bag.

Custom? Yes, custom: you pick and choose fabrics and colours and various other options. This is mine.

I have had a great red/gray reversible messenger bag for many years that my sister Gaby gave me. First one of the inside clips broke so it needed to stay gray, now the outside closing clip broke.

I still use it while walking, but open bag flaps and biking don’t mix.

Asking the Internet about bags is hard, so I went to Wirecutter and they said Timbuk2.

When I was looking earlier the custom options weren’t as obvious, and I kind of wandered off. Did I want a bag the same as everybody else, especially in drab colours?

Which led me over to Freitag, which my current bag is sometimes confused for.

Colourful, unique, up-cycled bags? Yes! Well, except for two things. 1. Fashion is pricey — about $350CAD before shipping 2. Did I really want to ship up-cycled bags across the ocean?

For a well-made, relatively unique bag that I intend to keep for a decade, price isn’t the barrier.

But (2) got me thinking: can we ship IP rather than products?

Especially as the pandemic has people thinking about supply chains and supporting the local economy, what would it take to collaborate with someone locally in Vancouver and make a bag?

Vancouver has lots of apparel, outer wear, and other gear designers, so that’s a plus.

And in fact, when I asked around and shared the idea a bit, both of the people I talked to had a 1-degree connection to people who had made bags. And then I even found a 1-degree connection of my own who had made his own bag and was making more.

So let’s say I budget $400-$500 for a customer one of a kind bag. Could I find 10 or 12 other people locally who would be interested?

And once I did this, could I make the design (and sourcing of materials and manufacturing/sewing, etc) available for others to do in their local areas?

Yes, I could. And we might just have a little network of locally made goods. Never mind connected links of makers and supporters interested in this sort of thing.

Are you interested in the Vancouver custom bag experiment? Is there another custom thing you’d like to see created locally? Let me know!

More on co-op models and small business peers and shipping IP another time.

Starting from the north end of Commercial Drive where we live, we did a grand loop and various adventures on the e-bike today.

We started at Woodland and Venables, going up Woodland to the 10th Ave bike route and headed west.

Federal Store, Quebec at 10th

First stop was at The Federal Store, on 10th just before Ontario.

Rachael’s tea latte cup had a lovely little stamp. My cappuccino just had “The Federal Store” stamp. Note: The Federal Store has Johnny’s Pops and is open most days until 6pm.

Then headed south on Ontario Street.

Main at 28th

Rachael went across the street to Jasmine Mediterranean Foods for fresh limit (Turkish bagel) and picked up a few other things.

Riley Park (Ontario at 30th)

We lay in the grass at Riley Park. It was a gloriously sunny day, but with a bit of a breeze blowing. We had our coffee & tea drinks with limit and hung out for a bit.

Looking at the map, it seemed like a pretty straight forward route south on Ontario and then east on Kent to the River District, which is a new Van Mural Fest neighbourhood.

Rachael and I have never been down in that area at all, so seemed like a good adventure destination.

East Kent Avenue

We drove down Ontario until we hit Marine Drive. We passed by Coupland’s Infinite Tire and continued on a couple of blocks into an industrial area and a set of east - west train tracks. There’s a great bike path all along Kent Avenue.

It’s a bit confusing at times which side of the tracks you need to be on. Both are East Kent Avenue, labeled S or N. In some places there is a clearly marked and dedicated bike path, in others you’re going along the road.

Gladstone-Riverside Park

We stopped at Gladstone-Riverside Park – we made it to the Fraser River! Across the river is Richmond, so this is the southern edge of City of Vancouver.

There are a variety of both bike paths and walking paths, again on either a northern “road” path (which had bike paths, too), or a mixed pedestrian - bike path walk ways on parks and green space that is right next to the river. Several other bikers and e-scooters were stopping and looking at maps.

You can see in the map the dotted green paths along the river, as well as East Kent N and S. We stayed on the road (which had a separated two way bike path), as the park paths had a lot of pedestrians.

It was very interesting to see the mix of single family homes but really quite a lot of condos and townhouses either newly built or under construction. This is an area that I know nothing about. It was nice to have bike paths, but it seemed like where we were there was no transit at all, and no retail either. I guess all of that runs along Marine Way.

River District Murals

Here’s a custom Map label for roughly where the murals are (you can see it in the screenshot above on the right hand edge).

It’s in the middle of a ton of construction, and there are detours and fences that will guide you in a loop through the construction. If you’re following audio map directions, they will be very confused and insist that you u-turn :)

Rachael did a much better job capturing the murals and artists, so I’ll embed her Instagram here:

View this post on Instagram

@bmann and I did an epic ride to the River District to see @vanmuralfest murals. A few are finished but most are still works in progress. They are all fantastic. It’s an area we’d never explored before along the Fraser River… . #getoutside #vancouvermuralfestival #vancouvermural #publicart #streetart #vancouverart #yvrart #vanmuralfest #explorevmf

A post shared by Rachael Ashe - Paper Artist (@rachael_ashe) on Aug 30, 2020 at 3:48pm PDT

The murals are great and many of the artists are at the end of their epic week or so of painting. Apparently they will be up in this temporary space for about a year or so – installed along fencing and the path that detours through the construction site.

The photos I captured below really were about me thinking about this construction and neighbourhood and some of the contrasts.

I asked this artist how they got here, and they said Uber. I continue to have questions about how we’re still building car oriented dense housing in Vancouver.

Caitlin Mcdonagh

Instagram/@northweststyles

This and the next murals were along an east-west path, fencing off a construction site with a few abandoned industrial buildings still remaining.

Rachael looks at an unfinished mural

The sketched out design looked super cute!

Instagram/@luke046_art

Overhead Power and Construction

You see old, original poles, skinny and weathered brown, and the new, larger, treated greenish poles. And this ridiculous jumble of overhead wires that we have all throughout Vancouver. Even in this new area, I guess they’re not burying lines and laying fibre for Internet?!?!?

Van Mural Fest River District Sign

Lists all the artists. More discarded building materials and some sort of hangar or industrial building in the fenced off area.

Looking west, Rachael looks at a mural

The fence to the north (right in this photo) blocks off rail tracks, then East Kent Ave N, with condos, townhouses going up on the north side of that avenue.

Blackberries, Barbed Wire, Power, and Construction

Kerr Avenue

After seeing all the murals, it was time to head home. There are a couple of different south / east routes, the most straightforward looked to be heading back along East Kent, and then going north on Kerr Avenue.

Well, it turns out Kerr is an incredibly steep climb from East Kent to Marine Drive, and then keeps going up with Fraserview Golf Course on one side and Everett Crowley Park on the other. The area at the top is called Champlain Heights :)

Anyway, got off the bike and walked it up a good chunk of this. Not enough power for getting both of us up here. There are a couple of epic hills in Vancouver, where a slightly more powerful motor would really help.

We stayed on Kerr until it turns into Rupert next to Killarney Park, then west on East 45th which is a bike route.

Then right and north on Earles Street, crossing Kingsway at the Purdy’s Chocolate factory.

Left and west on Vanness, which turns into BC Parkway path, and a little left along the edge of Slocan Park.

Right and north on Slocan, which is a long down slope. You’ll pass Banana Grove Market at 22nd, and keep going down and north until you hit South Grandview Highway.

Cross that, and you’ll hang a left and be heading west on North Grandview Highway, which is the Central Valley Greenway.

The CVG has been another common route for us, we’ll often head out to Burnaby Lake. But heading home and west we go to Lakewood, and then head right and south until we hit Adanac, and then turn left and west until we’re back at Commercial Drive and home.

We were at one bar of power by the time we made it home, so one of the longest trips we’ve made. Doing a rough map calculation shows about 30km. There are a couple of mega hills in there as well as just long continuous slopes that are rough with two of us on the bike.

Wesgroup

At home now, I’m doing a little research on this River District. This is a “planned community” being built by Wesgroup. Here’s one article:

The River District is located along the Fraser River, just off Marine Way, west of Boundary. It is a brand new, award-winning, master-planned community created by Wesgroup – a Vancouver based builder that has been building in the Lower Mainland for over 50 years. Wesgroup has spent the last decade carefully planning River District, the last waterfront development in the city. Spanning 130 acres, it is three times the size of Granville Island and will soon become a vibrant destination for living and shopping when complete in 2017…

It’s now 2020, and there are lots of new homes completed, but as you can see from my photos, lots of new buildings still going up.

There are 20 pages of requests for multiple discounts for Shopify to be able to apply free shipping.

The way to do it without a plugin, is to add a new rate, label it “Free Shipping”, and set the conditions to only apply when the min and max are both $0.

Any other paid shipping options will still display – and be selectable by the customer! – but obviously they can just pick free shipping and there won’t be a charge.

So to give a “free” item to someone, make a dollar value discount code of the price of the item, so that the cost is zero, and then this free shipping rate will appear. Note: if you are dealing with multiple currencies, sometimes the conversion means that your dollar value discount code makes it not quite $0. You’ll need to experiment and set a discount $ value appropriately.

Chris Fralic of First Round Capital explains how to figure out what your LinkedIn member number is.

Basically, go to your own profile, “view source” to look at the code for the web page, and search for “member”.

I’m member #1746. Yes, I was early to social networks :)

The hashtag #MozillaLifeboat is highlighting the ~250 people laid off by Mozilla.

Here’s Mitchell Baker’s official announcement.

Daring Fireball has further links and commentary, including that the layoff number is “about on-third of its workforce”:

Firefox was very popular, and Google paid Mozilla a small fortune to make Google search the default in Firefox because it was so popular. But then came Chrome. Why should Google fund Mozilla when Chrome is about 10 times more popular than Firefox, other than out of the goodness of their heart?

It is a very good thing for the world and the web that a truly independent browser exists from a privacy-minded company, but there’s not much of a business model for it unless it’s popular enough to get the dominant search engine to pay for placement.

The Open Web, open source, Web3, global Internet commons infrastructure. Security. Privacy. Data ownership. We’ve got a lot on our plate that is looking pretty concerning.

I pretty much felt the same in the early 2000s, facing down FUD from Microsoft vs. open source. And we … won? Sort of? Except now it’s time to reboot again, because the ad supported web and big tech owned open source is an awkward place to have ended up.

I don’t know Chris Riley who just got laid off and tweeted this, but I’ll bold the key part here:

It’s been a heck of a ride at @mozilla for the past 7 years. But this is where I get off the train too. I’m sad; I’m going to miss the people, a lot. For me, my calling to make the internet better will continue. I just need to find the right next venture for it. #MozillaLifeboat – @MChrisRiley

We’re all in the same lifeboat. Grab an oar and get involved.

Craigstarter on Github

A free to use / edit / extend crowdfunding tool for Shopify with multiple goals and variants as campaign tiers.

Shopify is an absolute massive ecosystem. Blending crowdfunding with straight up sales is a really powerful way to more directly own your platform for the long term, whereas one-off Kickstarters you immediately need to plan for off-platform websites, sales, communications, etc.:

Kickstarter is an excellent way to run a crowdfunding campaign. But if you already have a community built up, and have communication channels in place (via a newsletter, for example), and already run an online shop, then Kickstarter can be unnecessarily cumbersome. Kickstarter’s 10% fee is also quite hefty. By leaning on Shopify’s flexible Liquid templating system and reasonable CC processing fees, an independent publisher running a campaign can save some ~$7,000 for every $100,000 of sales by using Craigstarter instead of Kickstarter. That’s materially meaningful, especially in the world of books.

This is particularly relevant because I’m in the midst of learning more about how to run and setup Shopify stores, both for work, and ideally for some side projects. Gathering interest from a group of people so we can collectively fund / buy things is exactly the kind of thing I want to do.

Via @pat

Responding to @Tobie’s thread on examining open source as a commons.

In the context of digital abundance, the open source code itself can be infinitely copied.

1) open source code = public good

2) support, maintenance, etc. = common good

3) paying customers = common good (assuming multiple consultants or hosting services etc.)

From my understanding of @Dries’ Makers and Takers post, the distinction between a public good which can’t be depleted and a common good which can be, and must be protected, is key.

The activity around open source code is a common good. It is provided by the maintainers and other contributors. @tobie mentions maintenance, but also documentation, marketing, communication, responding to issues, and so on.

The “consumers” of these activities may evolve into new contributors, so in one model providing this activity will grow the commons. And even the add to the public good of the code if the new contributors eventually provide code, too.

But taking time for these activities is a scarce resource, as Tobie points out. Sponsorship and similar types of funding can potentially “buy” more of a maintainer’s time, so they can provide more support for (2) – but isn’t really a business model or a commons management strategy on its own.

Finally, my third point from above. Dries made this point quite clearly: if you have multiple businesses built around an open source code base, the (paying) customers are a common good: they can (mostly) only be the customer of one business.

Approaches that restrict aspects of a project to paying users run the risk of making this no longer a common or public good, and yet Ostrom mostly proved that “good fences make good neighbours”. This is the challenge we face that @tobie highlights, and the ongoing experimental phase that I see open source at large moving into.

For a sustainable commons that goes beyond code, we need more makers than takers.

Slack is Fumbling Developers and the Rise of Developer Discords by @swyx

Slack’s revenue is firmly linked to enterprise, so I don’t see this as a strategic error. It is, however, a fact that open developer communities are increasingly using Discord.

I also expect more Matrix adoption in the next 1-2 years.

Although Discord open sourcing at least server instances while still following their federation model could be interesting. Or interop with the Matrix protocol.

I have a draft post that I’ve been meaning to finish for months of how Fission uses Discord chat + Discourse forum. Soon!

Kyle Mitchell writes The Truth is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free as commentary to Nathan J. Robinson’s editor’s note in Current Affairs of the same name. “Quality” journalism is paywalled and the rest is free?

This point by Robinson on membership models seems key:

a podcaster who sells their product on Patreon rather than giving it away but filling it with mattress and “box-of-shit-a-month” ads has an important kind of freedom: they only have to please the audience, not the sponsors.

“Open Source”, funding, and digital works available at no cost have many parallels in industries beyond software, including journalism.

Kyle points out that not all creators should expect to be compensated just because they are creators:

I deserve…no compensation whatever for the bad musical improvizations, repetitive doodles, or unfunny or dead-end software libraries I churn out from time to time. Everyone, including me, should be fine with this.

Also, that in areas of creative work, especially those available digitally, “giving away” work may be the best strategy:

I happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall. Our business instincts and well-worn patterns haven’t quite kept up with the times, and never do.

I’m thinking a lot about digital abundance lately in this same context.

Read the whole thing. You can also sign up on Kyle’s Artless Devices forum if you want to discuss this further.

My parents have sold their house on #bowenisland. They move out in October, after 41 years living there.

This also means shutting down the Seven Hills B&B, which they’ve run for 25 years or so.

They’re lucky to not have to leave Bowen. They’re building a 4-Plex with 3 other couples, which is just 500m closer to Snug Cove from where they are now.

It was a lovely BC Day long weekend. But also a bit of an end of an era. My childhood home, that was always there for me, always “home”, won’t be around much longer. I’m lucky to have had it, and of course my parents and Bowen Island itself are still there.

The Sunlit 3 beta is available, and now open source.

Is an open source “Instagram” possible?

I had a long discussion with an artist about moving off Instagram and Facebook. I told him he was putting photos up inside a mall, and he didn’t disagree. Because he can sell inside the mall.

He was uncomfortable about it. That I was kind of accusatory, shouldn’t he go first, to walk out of the mall and lure people outside instead.

So how do we encourage people that doing street graffiti is something they might want to do?

Putting my technologist hat back on, an open source mobile app like Sunlit is an interesting starting point.

Supporting Micropub and WordPress are great starting points.

Now what about a SquareSpace interface? Drupal and Joomla? Mastodon?

Tumblr? Flickr?

This mix of open source and protocols and networks gets us to an interesting spot.

Does multiple forks of Sunlit help? That is, say other people use the code and deploy apps to the App Store. Can that be additive to a network of users using open protocols and platforms? I’m sort of asking if we can kickstart a more open and federated network.

What if that app added “Buy Now” buttons? Where users could add their own links to a place where they could buy what is in the photo. Or tip the photographer!

Thanks @manton for open sourcing. That begins to give us the opportunity to contribute and build upon what’s there now.

Tom Critchlow writes ‘Setting up a Discord Room for my Blog’, calling it a “cozy chat space”, for me a direct call back to this:

the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams — Venkatesh Rao, Extended Internet Universe, May 2019

I have introduced/explained Discord to several friends with kids who use it extensively for gaming and hanging out with friends.

I’ve used Discord for several years now, as many of the global tech communities I’m part of use it. I’d say that there is definitely an increase of adoption by open source projects.

I tweeted about why Discord:

[Discord has much better] permissions [than Slack]! It's default open, with members, roles, channels being able to have permissions.

Plus, of course, mod powers like Kick and Ban.

Slack is swipe card entry only, Discord is a public festival with various members only sections, VIP rooms, and an operations center.

Our usage for public, group, and company-only chat at Fission has gone well, all in one server.

I have a longer post in draft about how we pair it with Discourse forums.

Discord being free means…something else is the product. Mostly it’s stickers right now.

Matrix is my exit plan.

Mozilla selected Matrix as the chat protocol / platform to move to, away from IRC. It is an open protocol as well as being open source, meaning many clients and servers can be built and interoperate.

New Vector, the main company behind Matrix development recently announced that Automattic, makers of WordPress, made a strategic investment.

All these things make it clear that Matrix has momentum, and it’s important that there be an open — and secure! — option for chat.

At the same time, because chat is ephemeral, I consider it less important that such a platform be open: the feeling and UX rank much more highly in importance.

You can join the Fission server or try out my AllTheBest.Recipes server if you’d like to experiment.

Prompted by Ton commenting on Tom’s post.

Keeping investors & advisors up to date with monthly email updates

Any company that is serious about growing its business should be tracking some metrics and reporting to people outside the company. The very act of writing those updates are a good time for you to reflect and hold yourself — as one of the founders of the company — accountable.

My belief is that you should get in the habit of sending an update like this as soon as you’re actually up and running as a business. It’s a must and will be required as soon as you have investors, so why not practice your update hygiene early.

Who should I send this update to?

If you haven’t taken any outside funding yet, advisors, prospective investors, and other close allies should be on your email update list. You might not include highly detailed KPIs, but rather focus on the written updates and the asks.

When I meet with someone whose business I am truly interested in, I ask them to “keep me up to date on progress”. That’s code for “add me to your advisor update email”.

What should I use to send this email?

The simplest is to BCC a small group of people. Then it’s up to you to track whether you’re getting feedback and/or your linked information is being read.

Your CRM (such as Streak, which plugs straight into Gmail) usually has a simple way to track opens and mail merge a group of people marked as investor / advisor.

Mailchimp is a bit heavyweight for this sort of thing, but their other product TinyLetter is nice and simple, and you can receive replies directly or manage them inside of the TL interface.

Templates

The basic template of what you should send is simple. You want a repeatable format that people get

• Metrics: the basic numbers that you use to track your business.
• Good / Bad / Ugly: what are some things that happened this month? Be brief, include links if relevant.
• Asks: this could be anything from sharing a recent blog post on Twitter, helping to fill an open position you’re hiring for, or an ask for an intro at a set of companies. Be direct on what you’re looking for.

The articles below go into much more detail into what you should be including.

This last one has a one click button to open their template directly into a template in your Gmail.

EverWiki is a wiki-like structure / interface built on top of Evernote. The goal is to provide an interface to organize and interlink your Evernote notes, as well as to provide a structure to manage permissions, notifications, and comments on those notes.

Update July 5th, 2020: I have no idea where this little fragment of writing came from. Likely something with an interface to WordPress I was testing, and writing up something I would like to see. Today, we have tools like Roam.

Helped make a delicious dinner with friends last night. We had spot prawns fresh from the dock and made them three ways.

One was raw, and they were so sweet. Including some brain sucking.

The second way was spicy with hot pepper paste, red onions, and fresh tomatoes sautéed in butter & olive oil.

The last was in a cream sauce. We made a roux and then added prawn broth from boiling heads & shells, plus cream. We added Parmesan and green peas, and added in a handful of minced, browned garlic. The nuttiness of the garlic went well with the sweet peas and cream. We served this over fresh fettuccine.

Hmm - I guess technically four ways. We took the boiled heads & tossed with hot chilli paste, garlic, red onion, peanut oil, sesame oil, and some more garlic and broiled them in the oven. Best when deep fried, but the shells do get softer & you crunch them & the lovely brains and they’re very good.

(Photo by @mightyvanilla)

I can’t wait to try this some time.

Update July 5, 2020: link replaced with Internet Archive, and then I gave it a more permanent home on AllTheBest.Recipes.

Carrot, potato, turkey curry, a photo by bmann on Flickr.

After figuring out the “secret” of curry from the home style recipe I found, I tried again with turkey leftovers.

The secret is 1) toasting spices in a bit of oil (cumin, peppercorns, etc.) and 2) pureeing an onion or two and sauteing it in the toasted spice oil until the onions brown a bit.

The pureed onions add a solid backbone to the sauce, both in terms of flavour (sweet + caramelized) and texture (no flour or other thickening agents needed).

This was served with roti that Rachael made, which also turned out the best yet.

The neck was via Big Lou’s Butcher from Sloping Hills, and the cheeks were some of the last pork from Cutter Ranch that we prepped at Pete’s Meats. I grilled some neck in the summer and it was delicious.

Apparently, according to Roland, I came close to doing adobo.

The marinade was roughly as follows:

• 2 Tbsp minced fresh ginger
• 1 clove minced garlic
• ½ finely chopped onion
• ½ cup chopped cilantro
• 1 Tbsp sesame oil
• 1 Tbsp miso in ¼ cup water
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp spicy vinegar
• salt & pepper

Served over rice.

J.P.’s Big Daddy Biscuits Recipe - Allrecipes.com

I made this biscuit recipe for the second time tonight (again as an accompaniment to tomato soup). I need to remember to not roll them out so thin, because they actually steam from the inside and puff up nicely when thicker.

Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups | Serious Eats: Drinks.

Hanging out with Lee & Sachi in Seattle, we dove into the world of shrubs:

In any case, the sugar, acid, and optional alcohol preserve the fruit juice, and in fact that was one original purpose of the shrub. Prior to the invention of refrigeration, a shrub syrup was a means of preserving fruit long past its picking. Shrubs were popular in Colonial America, mixed with cool water to provide a pick-me-up on hot summer days.

 

A proper shrub has a flavor that’s both tart and sweet, so it stimulates the appetite while quenching thirst.

This got me thinking about drinking vinegars, which is somewhat a name for the syrup + vinegar that you make shrubs from. We had some in Vancouver  at The Union which was fantastic.

So, Lee and I concocted a shrub syrup from 2 oranges simmered in simple syrup and then added some sherry vinegar.

Lee made up a drink with Averna in it and some soda. It was pretty delicious, especially when we kept amping up the amount of sherry vinegar.

Yep, I’m a fan. And to think, it’s supposedly a summer drink.

Update July 5, 2020: I’ve gone on to make many more shrubs / drinking vinegars. Browse the AllTheBest.Recipes shrub tag »

Home-style chicken curry recipe - Recipes - BBC Good Food.

Modified with tomato paste + carrots + celery instead of canned tomato.

In the blog-only era of the early 2000s, folks like me had our personal site, and we also watched a set of sites that we truly followed. RSS was our Twitter, and we carefully pruned a list of other folks who we’d check each day. I let about 40 or so “voices into my brain” each day, and those voices mattered to me, a lot. Most of us even created “blogrolls” – links to folks we felt were worthy of attention (really – remember those?!). And when someone wrote something noteworthy, others in the network might write a response, always with a link back.

 

This pattern still happens, of course – that’s what I’m doing now. But it happens far less regularly, and without the clear social network that used to define communities of blogs.

I am slowly diving back into Google Reader AND reblogging items. That brief spurt of G+ sharing got some nice conversations, but… I do want things on my own site.

Still a bit of schizophrenia about when to post here vs. when to post at links.bmannconsulting.com.

[vimeo www.vimeo.com/54495310 w=400&h=300]

Making a funky app video - Allen Pike.

Congrats to Allen & the entire Steamclock Software team on launching Party Monster, their music DJing app for iPad and iPhone.

I went for a walk around Gastown with Ross, who lent me his “old” Nikon D90 and a 50mm lens. I definitely want this sort of lens for my camera.

Thanks, Ross, that was fun!

luckyfish posted a photo:

via a selection of Hunanese delicacies from Lucky Noodle friday; spicy shredded potatoes with garcinia cambogia extract, spicy roasted chilies, spicy cumin lamb and onions, chicken gizzards with beans and garlic and “cooling” vegetables. So delish..

This is the same Lucky Noodle that I went to. If you’re in Vancouver, you have to try this place.

I have a bit of a Cthulhu obsession (as does large parts of the Internet). Merry Festivus, and may the Elder Gods not eat your soul with instant green coffee!

Paprika + thyme, with onions, mushrooms, apple, chicken stock + white wine in the braise.

Last night I gave a talk at Interesting Vancouver. This picture is the one I used to start the talk - me at 18, half a life time ago, on the S/V Concordia.

I was really nervous about the talk. I’ve told the story of my Class Afloat trip many times, but it’s so long ago that it doesn’t often come up anymore. In fact, I’m kind of reluctant to bring it up - because it was so long ago.

But it’s been nice thinking about the time and thinking about the experiences I had.

I called the presentation Places on a Map. There are so many stories to tell, but with only 10 minutes, I ended up telling a general arc of not only the trip, but what the program is about. Calling it Places on a Map is to have you think about the fact that we have access today to a ton of information about far away places. Wikipedia has highly detailed facts that can let you go as deep as you wish.

But unless you’ve actually been there, and experienced that place, that’s all they are: places on a map.

I also talked about regret a bit at the end. Having done this voyage - however long ago - it is a part of me. I can’t go outside myself and think about what might have been if I hadn’t gone. And that’s how I mostly treat regret. You’re on the path you’re on, and you may think about paths not taken. But that’s a different path: the you that is in the here and now is the sum total of all those forks in the road, and only the forks ahead of you are ones you can change.

One of the many stories I didn’t tell is how I made it on the trip. It’s all thanks to my parents. They supported me in doing this thing, this once in a life time experience, and ultimately supported me financially so I could go. I also fund raised from my local community of Bowen Island, but it’s my parents that I have to thank the most. They were in the audience tonight, so I was glad they got to see my talk, that that experience still resonates with me so many years later.

Thanks to everyone that came to Interesting Vancouver. If you’re interested, I have  a handful of photos uploaded on Flickr, but I am going through all the photos and will be putting together a mini-site (that link is an older work in progress).

I’ve also set up a Class Afloat 93 - 94 alumni group on Facebook - you’re welcome to join if you were an actual alumni or a friend or family of alumni.

Having made this salad twice now, I wanted to make sure to keep track of the recipe.

The salad is just shredded red & green cabbage. The dressing is tahini lemon garlic, the recipe for which I found over on ohsheglows.com »

You can skip the nutritional yeast, and whipping everything with a fork is just fine, it doesn’t need to go through the blender.

Using the tahini made me think of Na’ama, who gave it to me. She swears that Israeli tahini is the best, and it’s hard to find here in Vancouver.

All this weekend in Oppenheimer Park. Starts at 11am both Saturday & Sunday. Lots of food vendors, cool demos, Bonsai demonstrations, and so on.

Just came back from my first meal at Lucky Noodle, which is a Hunan-style Chinese restaurant at 3377 Kingsway (a couple of blocks east of Joyce).

I heard about it from reading Fernando’s blog review about it, plus Roland saw the same thing and has been wanting to try it.

We missed Roland this time, but Rachael and I were joined by Mark and Andrea.

We followed Fernando’s recommendations, but with only 4 of us had to order less.

The “code” we remembered from the menu numbers was B, I, L, #73, #37, #64. The dishes were (not in the same order):

• Squid & Chinese Mushroom Hot Plate
• Lamb with Cumin
• Boiled Chicken with Special Sauce
• Grilled Green Peppers
• Chopped Potatoes with Chili Oil
• Chinese Bacon with Bamboo Shoots

The bacon was house made Hunan style - smoky & spicy.

We also had some rice on the side, to cool our mouths from the very spicy dishes.

The meal was great, and we’ll definitely be back to try other dishes.

I’ve just had my Vancity Interac debit card blocked for ‘confirmed skimming’. The last time this happened was about 2 weeks ago.

Before that, it was about 3 months ago. That last time, I got my card replaced with a new chip & pin version, being assured that it was much less susceptible to fraud.

My card has been blocked for ‘fraud’ about once a quarter since I’ve been with Vancity. I simply can’t trust my Interac card to be available as a payment tool when I need it.

I’ve asked for more information, both in person at the branch and on the phone. Front line bank clerks have been all over the place with their answers. When I press for more details, they realize I want actual answers, and fall back to saying they can’t say more because of security.

Which store was it? We can’t say. Did my card trigger something? Not necessarily, you might have just used your card in the general area where fraud has happened. Which area is that? We can’t say.

When I went in 2 weeks ago, the clerk told me his own personal story. That before chip & pin, his card got blocked every few DAYS. He said “It completely changed my purchasing patterns” and went on to explain how he switched to using his credit card.

When I asked if that was what Vancity recommended - switching to credit card usage rather than using the bank’s debit card system - he back tracked, explaining it was just a personal story.

The adoption of Interac in Canada has been near universal. But I no longer trust using it, or at least not the debit card & associated automatic fraud detection systems that Vancity uses.

I’ve asked several times in person & on the phone for a manager from Vancity to follow up with me, and it never happened. I’d like an explanation on what Vancity is doing to improve my experience.

Taking time off work to reset my card, having to make alternate payment agreements, and in general my anxiety every time I go to use my debit card - all of these have lead to a terrible Vancity experience for me.

Vancity: let me know if I should give up on Interac & just use a credit card.

I really enjoyed my time on day 1 of the 2012 Northern Voice conference. The conference continues its mission of the personal, individual usage of the web around social media, and as such tends to focus on new users. There is a fantastic crew of people that come back every year, as well as up to 50% newcomers every year. My attendance and participation has been sporadic over the last couple of years, since I find the content to be very beginner focused with a few notable exceptions.

This year I attended day 1, in large part to be there for Moose Camp, which is a block of time that is run unconference style. I really love these free form sessions, since everyone has to kind of get into a flow of what is even going to be talked about, and then (if all goes well), different participants start riffing off each others’ ideas. With the right people in the room, this “idea jazz” is exhilarating.

The keynote by Reilly Yeo - Using the Internet to Save the Internet - was great. From a show of hands, attendees were optimistic about the beneficial uses of technology. But it’s been up to groups like Reilly’s Open Media to rally the troops and make sure that “bad” laws and regulations don’t get implemented.

For me, this linked to a lot of thoughts I’ve been having - that the Internet does, in fact, need saving. In part, it needs more people to be educated and aware of how it works, and to become better participants. This goes back to the old consumption vs. creation topic - are the masses just mindlessly consuming the web? What about media literacy and critical thinking? What about web literacy?

I’ve been mentioning the Mozilla Webmaker initiative as an example of the type of group and activity that is great, and is something that people who are web literate should get involved with.

[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“500”] Improv Me session at NV12 - Nancy White, Be Affected[/caption]

Next I went to Improv Me, Baby with Nancy White, Alan Levine, and Rob Cottingham. My basic rule of thumb is “go to any session that Nancy White is involved with”. Of course Alan and Rob are no slouches either ;) Lots of interactivity and group activity in getting people to participate, and to understand what improv actually means. Rob closed things out talking about how the very best improv can in fact be the result of lots of preparation and practice ahead of time, while still using a “go with the flow” approach to tailor presentations & experiences to the people and energy in the room.

The next slot lead me to coffee, catching up with some work, and chatting with Roland, Rob, Theo and others. The picnic tabels in the atrium of the SFU Woodwards space outside W2 were an awesome gathering spot, especially being semi-public with lots of curious onlookers wondering what these geeks were up to. Before I knew it, it was lunch time.

Roland and I gathered Theo, Blaine, and Tim and set off to New Town Bakery. It was lovely sunny weather so it was nice to stretch our legs for a walk.

[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“320”] Maureen, Blaine, and Tim at New Town Bakery[/caption]

[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“240”] Roland at New Town Bakery[/caption]

[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“320”] Theo at New Town Bakery[/caption]

After lunch, it was time for Moose Camp, with Nancy White as the un-organizer.

Kay Slater led a session that was roughly about online advertising and monetization. Kay comes from a media / marketing / advertising background, and ultimately believes that marketers are using the wrong model for advertising online

Here are a few rough notes I made.

• If you are running an ad blocker and are, yourself, running ads on your blog, you’re a hypocrite.
• Talked about what “free” means, check out the Wired Magazine issue on free (Chris Anderson)
• Pinboard is an example of a set of websites / apps that are actively charging money, rather than relying on ads and lots of free users. See the Pinboard About page, the Pinboard “Don’t Be a Free User” blog post, and the Business of Bookmarking (PDF) for a longer discussion on business models and approaches to running services online, and the responsibilities of both the user and the service creators
• Discussion about subtle differences between free, fremium, loss leader (e.g. free razor, buy the blades)
• CPC (cost per click) model is broken. Clickers aren’t buyers.
• Advertising focuses on 4As - awareness, attitude, action, annoyance – are online ads at the annoyance level for most of us?
• Online media ad buying should go away - degrades the reading experience (hence Reading Lists, Readability). Are those services “stealing” content to make money from publishers?
• HBO had content that people wanted to watch, so they paid for a cable TV subscription; but today, HBO isn’t letting people pay them for digital content
• Media / content sites are there for a place to put ads - they aren’t in the content business, they are in the ad business
• How do content creators make money?
• Flattr given as an example - micro-transactions model, patronage model
• Mike Monteiro says Fuck You, Pay Me
• What about professionals vs. amateurs? Professionals need to get paid, struggle with loss of value from hourly model. Amateurs invest passion, love what they do – but some also get paid, but often charge much less than professionals.
• Even if content sites are mainly built around ads, does cream rise to the top?
• Tentacles vs. Chicken Fingers problem – best content for what type of user

Thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors that make Northern Voice possible. Congrats on the 2012 edition.

The sail freighter Tres Hombres “sustainable shipping”

Ambassador of the new fleet of sustainable hybrid sailing vessels ( fairtransport )

The 32 meter brigantine Tres Hombres is in service since December 2009. She maintains a sustainable freight service between: Europe, the Atlantic islands, the Caribbean and America. Besides a cargo capacity of 35 tons, she has accommodation for 5 crew members and 10 trainees / passengers.

And they even have their own brand of rum that they are importing.

Just bought my ticket for Friday. Looking forward to it! Especially MooseCamp.

Northern Voice 2012 | Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Modified from a recipe for Hong Kong-style ketchup prawns. Except I don’t keep ketchup in the house, so it’s a chili sauce + tomato paste + agave.

Peanut oil in a wok, with 3 cloves garlic + some large chunks of ginger and a couple of kaffir lime leaves.

A bunch of green onions, and a bunch of basil. These went in after the chili sauce.

I brought back some arbol chilis from Mexico. Used a couple of tablespoons of it, then added a teaspoon of tomato paste plus a teaspon or so of agave syrup. After the prawns went into the hot oil, then I added this sauce. A couple of tablespoons of soy sauce were added at the same time as the greens went in.

Prawns cooking.

Finished product on the table. First time I’ve eaten a lot of shells, plus eaten the insides of the head. Next time, I should’ve used less peanut oil and gotten the shells even crispier before adding more sauce and greens.

This is the pickled ginger recipe I used the other day (and that lots of people have asked about). I used organic turbinado sugar instead of white, and also added some slices of meyer lemons, but otherwise stuck with the recipe / quantities.

8 ounces fresh young ginger root, peeled

1 ½ teaspoons sea salt

1 cup rice vinegar

1/3 cup white sugar

I got a really nice gift pack from the folks at Wistia. They do business video hosting, and are a great bunch of people.

WordPress.com automatically removes the “www” from all URLs. Mapping the “www” subdomain is not supported.

This is weird and messy. Either I can move my DNS / name servers to WP.com (which I am not comfortable doing - best practice is to keep your name servers separate from your hosting, so you can redirect if necessary).

Or, I can choose a subdomain.

So, this is now blog.bmann.ca. I will likely move bmann.ca to Octopress & an Amazon S3 bucket as well. Although I’m not sure that I need that top level domain doing anything, so for now, www and the root domain both redirect here.

Tumblr and Posterous both support root A records (which is messy because it ties into a single IP) as well as subdomain CNAMEs including www. If WP.com supported ‘www’, this would be a non-issue.

I guess this is another example of picking your use cases / target customers. Either host your full name servers with WP.com and they’ll handle everything, or be OK with the downsides of a non-www subdomain.

German pancakes!

Kingdoms of Amalur on Steam

If you like Action RPGs, then you’ll love Kingdoms of Amalur. I hadn’t heard about this game at all - it just sort of came out of nowhere.

I guess because it’s mainly built as a console title, so there are SOME things on the PC that are a bit annoying.

BUT - it’s hugely enjoyable. It most reminds me of Jade Empire - definite RPG with both combat and non-combat skills and so on, but you actually fight. Different skills, dodges, and so on.

Highly recommended.

See the DrupalCon tag clusters on Flickr just made me tear up a little - there's a Boris cluster.

Drupal will always be my "first love" when it comes to experiencing a large online community. I miss it a lot, sometimes.

In any case, if you have more photos hiding somewhere of great Drupalcon experiences in the past, please get them to @pdjohnson. There are lots on Flickr, so creating some galleries of "best of" photos would also be something that anyone can do.

These were tucked in the freezer and made a great winter meal. They weren't quite defrosted so I balanced them on the fat on the side in a cast iron pan in the oven. This melted away the lively fat on the side.

Then smothered in Dizzy Pig Jamaican Firewalk rub and seared on each side, with final finishing in the oven.

The sides were purple mashed potatoes and braised kale with mustard. Turns out Rachael doesn't like mashed potatoes when they are purple.

That well in the potatoes? Pan drippings -- delicious!

Rinse a martini glass with Islay, then make a gin martini with kelp pickle ‘juice’. Garnish with a kelp pickle and a smoked oyster.

Note: concept recipe only - no actual taste test performed.

Big Lou's Butcher is famous for their Porkchetta sandwiches. I bought a hunk of uncooked Porkchetta. I cooked it for 4 hours at 250, then added onions and parsnips and cooked it at 350 for another hour or so.

The pork was dark meat and deliciously tender, with a nice selection of fatty bits. There were some hard indelible pieces of skin.

Also pictured are traditional German red cabbage and boiled kale with garlic and mustard.

Not pictured are home made perogies. Yes, definitely a winter meal.

See the full gallery on Posterous

While I'm happy with the plating, not everything worked out as I would have liked.

The duck legs I marinated in whiskey, orange juice, red wine vinegar, sugar, salt, and star anise. Unfortunately, I used way too much kosher salt.

The spinach spaghetti I finished with olive oil, lemon zest, and fresh cracked pepper.

I was most happy with the purée. I chopped parsnips & cauliflower and boiled them in lightly salted water until soft. I drained them, leaving behind a little of the cooking liquor. Using a hand blender, I puréed them, adding a Tbsp each of honey & Dijon mustard. I added duck jus until it was salty enough.

The yellow peppers & onions were sautéed in a little olive oil.

Oh right - duck preparation! Seared in duck fat in a cast iron pan. Separately I boiled the marinade with some additional orange juice. I added several Tbsp of marinade to the pan & placed the legs fat side up in a 350 oven.

I do like duck medium rare, but had pulled pork-like consistency in mind. This was well cooked but not falling off the bone, and too salty (although the flavour was nice). I'll actually research duck techniques next time.

(Saying thank you with meat is *definitely* encouraged)

Today was the expiry date for the certificate, so I went on a meat buying spree.

For the record: 1 container duck fat, 8 maple thyme breakfast sausages, 2 thick cut pork chops, a hefty hunk of porkchetta, 2 duck legs, and 2 Pemberton Meadows Dry-Aged Striploins.

(don't worry - all the other meats had fancy farm sources, too)

I don't usually buy super expensive steaks. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the most expensive meat I've ever bought.

I'm more of a ferial* meat eater - give me a hunk of pork, I'll sauce it nicely, and various carbs to soak up the juices and stretch it out.

In any case, this is me saying I don't cook steak like this very often. The photo is how it turned out - a very nice crust, even pink throughout, somewhere between medium / medium-rare.

The guidelines I used were from this post: http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2006/09/perfect-steak-at-last.html

The only change I did was to use butter and canola oil. The smoke and fire alarm going off tells me the pan was hot enough.

I did use tongs, did cook the steaks one minute on each side, but also held the fatty side of the steak against the pan for about a minute to crisp the fat as well.

The only change I would make would be to salt the meat more. This is easily fixed at the table - I need to get better at trusting my gut with that.

Oh right - taste! The steaks were delicious ;)

*there is a cook book / meditation on eating & cooking whose whole premise is festal (aka festival / special / rich people) vs. ferial (aka everyday / working man) cooking & eating. See my review of 'The Supper Of the Lamb' http://www.allconsuming.net/entry/view/39669

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to-grow-and-share-with-new-windowfarms/widget/video.html

Windowfarms is a project to fund the commercial production of hydroponic gardening kits that hang in your window.

You can read more about the project in an article on Fastco Design, or head straight over to the KickStarter page to help fund it yourself.

One suggestion is funding at $10K or more for a custom Windowfarms installation for a restaurant or other venue. I would love to see something like this in Vancouver.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The pork butt was from J N Z Deli. To my shame, I don't actually know where they source their meat, so this is a reminder to go and ask.

The pork marinated in the dry rub all day, then I cooked it for 5 hours at 300 degrees AKA the usual method. I'll see about experimenting with a whiskey based BBQ sauce in the next day or so.

It's pouring rain, so it's not exactly pleasant to be outside, but I finally have a new rain jacket so I'm dry.

Short walks between places of refuge are the way to go. My parents' place is always comfortable, with the wood stove throwing off a pleasant heat, unlimited mugs of coffee, and the special pleasure of being warm while the world outside is blustery.

Rachael and I are at Artisan Eats, looking down the hill and across Howe Sound at a world lost in mist and rain. "that ferry looks like an iceberg", says Rachael. "all it's details lost, and just the bare white outline showing."

I am sketching out tech designs on paper, writing this blog, and casting my mind forward across near- and long-term time horizons. Could-be's and what-if's swirling.

And after setting up my link blog http://links.bmannconsulting.com, my first post here.

This is a fresh tomato sauce that we're going to eat with radiatore. Nice and simple and so delicious with the fresh picked tomatoes.

2 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup minced onions
2/3 cup finely diced zucchini
1 clove minced fresh garlic
1 fresh bay leaf
4 cups diced fresh tomatoes
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
Salt and pepper

Melt butter and olive oil and add onions, garlic, zucchini and basil. Sauté on low until onions are tender. Add diced tomatoes and turn up heat until bubbling, then reduce to low simmer, stirring in basil. Stir occasionally and cook until reduced.

More details on a nice Sunday to be added...

The team at Growing Chefs asked me to answer a few questions about why I'm participating. I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and turn it into a full blog post.

Why did you decide to take the local challenge?

I decided to take the local food challenge because food is one of my main life passions. The local challenge is really just an excuse to spend slightly more time documenting what I'm eating and drinking this week.

Foodtree is a company that I advise which is trying to help people know more about their food (they have an iPhone app -- go download it). Getting involved with Foodtree and its founder Anthony Nicalo really opened my eyes another level. Once you start thinking about where food is from, who grew it, whether it's filled with pesticides or hormones … you can't unthink all of that.

You've turned the corner, and you start asking more and more questions about food. This can lead into all sorts of depressing realizations, but I prefer to think of it as heading into delicious realizations. It becomes a challenge in the sense that a long mountain hike is a challenge - it's the journey along the way that's most interesting, and reaching the summit is just sort of the bonus.

Now, my bigger challenge is to think about how we can encourage masses of people to think about their food, to try and make lasting changes to our food systems. And we can't do it by making people feel bad - we need to make them feel powerful, inspired, and hopeful!

What will be the hardest part for you to do this challenge?

Well, probably a toss up between finding the time and finding the ingredients. The week is busy with a conference and various activities, so we have to fit in more time for cooking or selecting what we're going to eat.

For instance, I actually forgot that we were starting today (we just got back from a short vacation), so I had to figure out what to get for lunch. Luckily, the Fresh Local Wild food truck is not far from my office, so I had some delicious cod & chips. Now, I happen to know that his potatoes aren't local, because the wet weather has been terrible. But they did the next best thing and sourced some potatoes from Washington state. 

But finding local ingredients is always hard. Heck, finding BC ingredients is hard. And it shouldn't be. But just this evening shopping at Donald's Market, the majority of the conventional fruits & vegetables were unlabeled (but many of them likely local), and virtually all of the organic ones were from far away (because organic labeling & pricing demands a level of "proof").

Finding the time is probably a common excuse. I do the majority of cooking at home, and I tend to cook everything from scratch - that is, limited use of processed foods or prepared ingredients. It doesn't take significantly more time to do this than for prepared foods. But, like a diet, it's easy to "slip" when you get crunched for time. Because of where we shop, even the prepared food is often local and/or tends to be made of good for you ingredients.

One last answer here pertains to how you define "local". Since I know how hard something like the 100 mile diet is, I don't get sticky about things like "if you buy bread, the wheat should also be local" (although I do have some Flour Peddler flour in my cupboards). Similarily, dried pasta that is local is going to be next to impossible - splurge on fresh pasta this week, Duso's on Granville Island is a good start.

Food memories

I think my memories from my childhood are all about food! I grew up on Bowen Island, which has lots of things for a kid growing up to forage. Salmon berries and huckle berries are something that you don't tend to see in stores at all - you need to stop and pick them when you see them.

My heritage is German, so most of my other childhood memories are various German meat dishes and cakes. And jam. My mom still makes massive amounts of jam every year - she just posted her recipe for currant jelly.

Shopping locally

It's been 2 years since I put up a post on Foodists about shopping in Vancouver, which has a huge list of some of the more interesting/ethnic/novel places to shop around Vancouver.

Today, we get a weekly order from SPUD.ca, visit the farmers market a couple of times a week (Wednesdays on Main, weekends at Trout Lake), buy most of our meat from Big Lous Butcher Shop, and round out the list with various stores along Commercial Drive (East End Coop, Daily Catch), and around Nanaimo at Hastings (Donald's Market, Ugo and Joe's). Famous Foods is a long time family favourite that should definitely be mentioned.

I decided to call this section "shopping locally" rather than where to shop for local food, because that's how you should think about it. Find a butcher shop, a sausage maker, and a bakery. Find a farmer's market. All of these places have local food by default, for the most part.

I confess that I find "traditional" grocery stores strange these days. I never go to them, and when I do happen to find myself in one, I just find all the packaged items disturbing. Whole Foods is a slightly better experience, but you just can't afford to shop there regularly, and even they aren't great in the fruits & veggies department (that is, lots of things from California, Mexico, etc.).

Favourite recipes

Recipes are tough for me. I tend to improvise a lot of the time, so a lot of my recipes tend to be documenting something that I've made once. And a lot of the very best tasting foods are very simple - asparagus broiled with olive oil, steak with salt and pepper, in season tomatoes popped straight in your mouth, and so on.

I'll leave you with a basic ingredient list for spaghetti alla carbonara that I made the other day and Kim Werker ended up using for a post on Vancouver is Awesome: guanciale from Oyama Sausage on Granville Island, Rabbit River eggs, and parmesan from Ugo & Joe's. 

Read the original post and updated gallery about #eatlocal, and you can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag.

Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

See the full gallery on Posterous

Growing Chefs is a program that "gets kids excited about good, healthy food". Specifically also how to grow it and cook it.

I am participating in their Going Local! Local Food Challenge. This means that I'll be eating local this week. I tend to do this in any case, but I'm very specifically going to be keeping track of my buying and eating habits, which is the whole point: to raise awareness of where your food is from and who makes it.

I've actually got a donation page up where you can help to support Growing Chefs. In return, I'm going to document what I eat, where I buy it, and the occasional recipe. The Growing Chefs crew recommends the 100 Mile Diet as a starting point, but I find that too unrealistic: it's actually hard enough to just look for BC products, never mind 100 miles.

Of course, Foodtree is another organization I've spent time supporting, and their iPhone app is meant to help solve the problem of knowing more about your food. The team is also participating in this Local Food Challenge Week - check the Foodtree blog for some great resources.

You can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag, and this blog post is where I'm continuing to add to the gallery of food throughout the week.

Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

After pulling off this risotto recipe, I'm confident that I'll be cooking risotto more often.

The recipe was mainly an inspiration to caramelize the carrots - I didn't purée any of them, or really follow the rest of the recipe. The flavour of the caramelized carrots really spread through the dish - rosemary was the other note that came through.

Make sure you caramelize the carrots - I had put in a bit too much butter & oil and the carrots sweated out some liquid, so I had to spoon some of it out to get the carrots to brown. Reserve that liquid and add it later, it was deliciously sweet & carrot-y.

The pancetta was very mild in flavour. The more pronounced smokiness of guanciale could have worked, but it would also have competed with the carrots. What was excellent from the pancetta was the fat, which added to the creamy consistency, as well as adding some nice toothsome texture.

I used Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock paste, which worked well (and in general is my favourite prepared stock base).

I briefly considered working in some of the other cheeses we had (eg a mild and creamy blue cheese) but was glad I stuck with 'just' a cup or so of grated Parmesan.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Weekends are time for me to do more elaborate / longer cooking. I'm the primary cook-er in the household, so I do cook most every day, but cooking is also relaxing downtime for me, especially when I get to try new things, or things that I don't cook very often.

Yesterday was an errand day in general. We bought 10lbs of peaches and apricots coming back from the Okanagan (at the Mariposa fruit stand in Keremeos, to be exact -- recommended by Chris Rich amongst the sea of fruit stands there). By now, it was time to process them in bulk in some way. So I made peach jam and apricot jam.

I've never made peach jam before. I used this Farmstand Peach Jam recipe, although as always, not exactly. I don't like using pectin, and I don't like to put in too much sugar. I ended up taking out a cup of cut up peaches at the last minute since I wanted to stick them in the freezer, and I think that was the error. Or, just that peaches are quite sweet to start with, and without pectin you can't skimp on the sugar. I had originally intended to also make some spicy peach chutney of some kind - I still have those peaches in the freezer, or I could even just use some of the jam and mix it with savoury ingredients to make it.

Next I made apricot jam. My mom makes this all the time, so I was reasonably sure the no-pectin method would work, and it certainly did. It turned out nice and tart. It was a pleasant surprise to find and use Jens Alfke's apricot recipe - a long time blogger whose feed fell from my reader at some point. So, score 1 for a great recipe (since it uses a formula for fruit-to-sugar) and for re-finding a great writer.

This morning I poached a couple of eggs for breakfast. Rachael is a fan of poached eggs, but I usually just find them too fiddly. I took it upon myself to actually look up some egg poaching instructions and they turned out nicely. In short: the water shouldn't be boiling, turn it off as soon as you put the eggs in, put a lid on it, and 3 minutes is about the right time length.

Wandering up Commercial Drive, I decided today would be a seafood day. So, I've got some Qualicum Beach scallop and side stripe shrimp ceviche marinating in the fridge. Recipe in short:

• 10 prawns, remove the shell and chop
• 4 large scallops, chopped
• 1/2 avocado, chopped
• 1/3 cup red onion, minced
• 1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 3 tomatillos, chopped
• juice of 3 limes
• fresh cracked pepper
• small red chile, minced
• 1/3 cup cucumber, chopped

It's marinating now, it may end up gaining some other bits and pieces as I adjust seasonings when it comes out of the fridge.

Plus, look at the dinosaur images: they both (inexplicably) have blue Elvis hair.

I just finished reading "Out of the Black". It's mainly responsible for the magic part of this title, although technically it is set in the far future. You don't really notice the far future part, since you already have to suspend disbelief for the magic bits. Actually, the one technology piece that was interesting (and probably won't age well) was the concept that everyone had a tablet. The unique thing about the tablet was that it could resize. You made it small and stuck it in your pocket, but then you could take it and expand it to some maximize size for mapping or image work or whatever.

This book is a bit of a variant on The Matrix, in the sense that there is a lot of fighting and there is a "layer" underneath reality that can be accessed and manipulated (the magic bit, which is called the Loom). It has thriller pacing, plus some jumping forward and backward in timelines from different character points of view which doesn't _quite_ work (feels more like a movie script). Regardless, an enjoyable quick read.

A 2-book series that I finished some time ago was Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez. I really should be writing a lot more about them rather than tacking them on to review #1, but at least I'm posting something.

Let's see, where to start. It takes place in present day / near future. An MMORPG game company CEO dies, which sets in motion a bunch of stuff involving a "daemon", or set of computer scripts that the CEO had set up. These set of computer scripts interact with the real world and people through lots of automation and scanning news feeds and bot nets and other fairly believable things (the author has a background in computers and security, which keeps things from getting too Hollywood, which I appreciated).

And then self-sufficiency in food systems (including an anti-Monsanto interlude), cryptocurrency, and DIY technology making enter the picture. With eBay-style reputation assigned to personal interactions of all kinds, plus a gamification layer where everybody has levels and classes. See, the daemon has been set in motion to kind of shepherd the human race onto a new way of living. Or at least, a new way of socio-economic organizing.

At the time I was reading the book, the following IRL things were happening:

• Bitcoin was just hitting main stream media
• I've been thinking a lot about local / direct food systems with Foodtree
• our worldwide economic systems have been hitting the crapper
• The Canadian Federal election put a robot prime minister in power

So, I tore through the first book and made it straight through into the second. It also has thriller pacing, and I'm sure is in part designed to feed into the gamer / Internet professional brain.

Fun read, makes you think. If you are at all interested in how technology-assisted collaboration, governance, and economics might work, read the book.

Thanks to Sean for recommending these books.

I'm always on the lookout for regional / unique / church basement cookbooks. I found this Come 'n Get It - Cowboys and Chuckwagons at the "Share Shack" at the Deka Lake dump … sorry, I mean "land fill".

The image below is the first page of the book. The quote says:

"Bacon in the pan,
Coffee in the pot;
Get up an' get it
Get it while it's hot."

The recipes contain a lot of lard, flour, sugar, and beans. Here's the original recipe for Charlie's Doughnuts:

Two tea cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1-1/2 tea cups buttermilk, 2 teaspoons saleratus, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 tablespoons melted lard, flour enough to roll nicely. Boil or fry in lard.

To make things a little easier, I'll let you know that saleratus is baking soda. I never have buttermilk in the house, but apparently putting vinegar in regular milk gets you close.

I'm going to leave the book here for my dad's cabin cookbook collection.

I'm at the cabin with my dad for an extended long weekend. Our cabin is a couple of minutes walk from Deka Lake. Where is that? Well, it's on the Cariboo Plateau. Here's a picture of a map outside the next-closest grocery / liquor / everything store, Interlakes:

Sometimes I also say "it's near 100 Mile House". OK, fine, here's a Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=macabar+road,+Deka+Lake,+British+Columbia,+Canada&aq=&sll=51.609009,-120.853386&sspn=0.04099,0.07596&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Macabar+Rd,+Cariboo+L,+Cariboo+Regional+District,+British+Columbia+V0K+1E0,+Canada&ll=51.618017,-120.849609&spn=8.189808,13.183594&t=h&z=5&iwloc=A&output=embed
View Larger Map

As you can see, it's over 500km from Vancouver. It used to take much longer to get here. I know, because we came here all the time when growing up, and I could read up to two books during the trip here. This time, I read an ebook on my iPhone.

I haven't been up here in quite a long time. I also realized that it's been almost a year since I've been working for iQmetrix. Did you know that when you have bosses and stuff, they give you vacation time? And you're supposed to take time off, like, more than a couple of extra days over Christmas?!?! Yeah, news to me as well. So I'm going to take a couple of long weekends over the summer for various trips and such.

I'm up here over the weekend, and then my Dad and I drive back on Monday.

I've got more pictures on Flickr if you're interested.

Since it's red and my stove is white, this can stand in as a "How I spent my Canada Day 2011 weekend".

It started on Friday with brunch. Then we headed out to Emma Lea farms on Westham Island, where the strawberries are from. Whenever we go to Westham Island, it also means a stop at the apiary. We now have fireweed honey and some pumpkin / purple loosestrife honey. I still have to figure out something to make that lets the unique honey taste shine through.

Then off to Steveston, which initially seemed like a mistake, since it was filled with hordes of people for Canada Day. Well, in retrospect, it probably was a mistake, but the sun did come out. As we walked up to a packed Hogshack (which is a BBQ place that I had been hearing a lot about), there just happened to be a table opening up.

The BBQ was good. I was even more pleasantly surprised by the awesome beer list that they have. I had a Hitachino Nest White Ale, and it was absolutely perfect for a summer day. In fact, my first sip had my face go through various transformations, after which I passed it around for everyone to taste. It's lemony fresh beer witbier that should be mandatory to drink when it is really hot out.

Then, bellies full, a wander around Garry Point Park. There is a sculpture there called Wind Waves that is great to see in person. This it way off in the distance over open fields

And then a drive back home, finally a little bit sun-kissed, and with a really full day behind us. Fireworks? Yeah, off in the distance somewhere :P

Saturday & Sunday was Foodtree's launch of their iPhone app at Trout Lake and Kits Farmers Markets respectively, so Rachael was working for the first half of both days. I got to do a bit of a sleep in and some video game playing each morning, then went off to support the Foodtree team.

On Saturday, the sun really came out for the first time. Spending just three hours in the sun just caused Rachael and I to really wilt. We came home and napped the afternoon away. Getting back up, I decided to start prepping the jam. Anthony traded some of his backyard rhubarb for strawberries, so I was able to make strawberry rhubarb jam. I like how it turned out, even though I never both measuring anything - 1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar, 1 1/2 brown sugar, and some number of cups of strawberries and rhubarb :P The jars all popped, so I'll be gifting them out this week.

Then, to get out of the house for at least a bit, we experimented with my new car2go membership. We had actually used it on Thursday to get home and parked it outside our house, since we're inside the area where you can leave the cars anywhere. It kind of feels like stealing a car. In any case, the one out front had moved a couple of blocks down to Pender, so we jumped in and went for a drive to go for gelato at Bella Gelateria. From there we went up to Queen E park, just to be out and about and enjoy the view.

Sunday morning was cleaning up the jam kitchen plus finishing off Dungeon Siege III, which some people mentioned I should never have bothered to buy in the first place. I don't know if I'll bother writing about it. Was fun to play, there is no replay value, and it pales in comparison to DS I & II. And, it was only 12 hours long. Yes, kind of like the contrast between Dragon Age and Dragon Age II. This joystiq review is pretty funny. I guess my id had fun playing.

Ahem. But I really only played like an hour or so to finish the final game. Then I jumped into a car2go again and went over to the Kits market. This was a one way rental (so I don't have to pay while I'm at the market), and I just happened to park right behind another car2go car, so I was reasonably sure one of them would be available when I wanted it.

It was another long day for Rachael, so after a short rest we biked over to the New Brighton Pool and went for a dip. It was great to be swimming, and yes, it feels like the west coast summer has arrived (even though it was raining and sunny this morning).

After biking back I retired to the kitchen and made lots of things from the farmer's market: kale chips, roasted garlic scapes, bacon, bok choy, and some red potatoes. I also decided to make some more jam, so combined guavas with some of the remaining rhubarb. After I wrote that post about my past guava experience, I thought I'd aim for something like that. I've had a taste, and I think I put a bit too much sugar in AND the whole seeds in thing didn't really work out. I need a fine mesh sieve or china hat before I try something like that again. I also have this sense memory of my mom and grandma making rosehip jam which also has tons of seeds in it, so I'll need to try that again as well.

So there you have it. Canada Day. And Strawberry Rhubarb jam. Hope you had a great weekend.

I bought guavas last night. When I bit into the first one, that flowery perfume flavour wafted out and teleported me back about almost 20 years.

When I traveled around the South Pacific on a tallship as part of Class Afloat, we stopped in Suva, Fiji. There is an orphanage and school run by Canadian nuns there. We visited and brought some gifts - school supplies, books, etc. - as well as playing the muddiest game of soccer I have ever played in my life. The teachers asked the children to bring in something for us - fresh fruit! So, they gathered tons of fresh guavas. We ended up with giant plastic garbage containers filled with guavas. Nothing like these pale imitations I bought in the store yesterday, but just that little whiff of perfume hinted at that long ago time.

Even for a boat filled with frsh fruit starved teenagers, we couldn't eat our way through all of the guavas. I spent a lot of time helping out in the galley, and I ended up making a kind of guava jam. I never did get sick of having it for breakfast pretty much every day until it ran out.

I found this via @awesome, of course.

You can find other fine songs by Disasteradio, like "Gravy Rainbow", on the Bandcamp page.

Captured for posterity, although no picture.

Chop 2 shallots and sauté in a bit of olive oil over medium-high heat.

Grate half an apple and add to shallots.

Cut tough stems from chard and roughly chop. Add to shallot apple mixture in pan and stir to mix.

Juice half a Meyer lemon and add to pan. If using a regular lemon, reduce juice used and/or add a pinch of sugar.

Stir to mix well and reduce heat. Simmer for 5 minutes or until chard is tender, stirring occasionally.

Salt to taste.

I attended Dan Mangan's benefit for homeless youth initiatives, aka Smorgasbord, on Saturday night.

I took my Flip video camera along and captured a handful of songs. The audio is pretty decent (the echo-y quality is because of the acoustics inside St. Andrews Wesleyan Church, I think) but the video is pretty terrible. You can find all the videos in this playlist on YouTube, or embedded below.

http://www.youtube.com/p/2C0F511D32225835?hl=en_US&fs=1

Performances are by The Crackling, Aidan Knight, and Dan Mangan. Plus Mayor Gregor on tuba, of course!

Other than Dan Mangan himself, I was super impressed by Aidan Knight. You can find him on BandCamp.

This was my third shopping trip to Big Lou's Butcher Shop, on the corner of Powell Street at Gore. Their tagline is "bringing traditional nose-to-tail butchery to Vancouver".

Pictured in the gallery is Karsten weighing out some freshly made ground beef. He is also the maker of the rouladen pictured in the next image. I've written about rouladen before. My mom told me in a call earlier in the day that she had been to visit Big Lou's and bought some rouladen just to see what they were like. She said they tasted great, and were about the same price as it would cost her to make them on her own. Duly noted the next time rouladen cravings strike.

The last image is the iPad sitting on top of the old school cash register. It is, of course, a software only point-of-sale system running on the iPad as an app. Which nicely collides with my day job as I think about iPhones and iPads slowly replacing all manner of special purpose proprietary systems like point of sale machines.

Below is a Banh Mi sandwich that Rachael and I shared. Big Lou's also makes sandwiches fresh to order. The bread is a giant crusty baguette, but the innards are flavourful enough to stand up to the hunk of bread. Half a sandwich was a good meal, so definitely good value for lunch. I'll be back during the week to try some of the other sandwiches.

[wpvideo EjM5kk4y]

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When I went to Seattle last weekend, Lee took me along to see the Seattle Sounders play. It was actually my first MLS game.

Attached a short video that starts out focused on the Sounders super fan section, just as the game opening ceremonies are going on.

Thanks for taking me Lee, it was a lot of fun. I’m a lot more interested in the company Whitecaps season tickets now…

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I sat and blogged at the Tully's for a while, then did a walk around the neighbourhood and some parks nearby.

I was relaxed and specifically had my eyes open looking for interesting things to capture. The fact that I found a plastic Sabretooth tiger toy placed in some rocks was a great bonus.

I also had a bite to eat in a little mini Main Street down the road a bit. It reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive - lots of great restaurants and coffee shops.

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Out for a walk around Kits, checking how far the blossoms are.

This is my first experience with Chicken and Waffles. Probably too fancy for my "first time", but it was tasty.

This is, of course, not a screenshot from Rango. Which, by the way, is an awesome, awesome, awesome movie that you really should go see. Animated, filled with animals as characters in an old Western style. Lots of in jokes. Dark, and very funny.

It's "the claw" machine at the Dolphin Theatre, which is in deepest darkest Burnaby. It also has $7 movies, and $2 movies on Tuesdays, and it's where we saw Rango on Saturday night.

I'll definitely be back.

These worked out quite well. Recipe found at Beantown Baker via Foodista search.

The dough was very sticky. Maybe it needed more flour, maybe I needed to knead it a bit longer and work more flour into it. Then came the tricky part.

The astute amongst you might notice that the items in the photo above don't, in fact, look like pretzels. Well, the recipe was on my iPhone and my hands were full of sticky dough, so I ended up with sort of pretzel, erm, "twists" at best.

Rachael had requested some tomato soup and buns, and these were the "buns".

The soup was a mix of a couple of roasted red peppers, celeriac aka celery root, leeks, shallots, a couple of pounds of ugly winter Mexican roma tomatoes (from SPUD, so organic, but still…) and then some ill advised dried chickpeas. That's the second time I've used those chickpeas - they REALLY do need to soak overnight. I made a broth out of simmered chickpeas and some veggie trimmings while I roasted the red peppers. I used the same cast iron pan to then saute the celery root, shallots, and leeks in some olive oil. This all got mixed together with the tomatoes and the broth and the peppers, added some dried basil, a splash of some port that I've decided is best used for cooking, and then simmered down.

I then took a hand blender and blended the whole thing. Those dang chickpeas were still a little on the crunchy side, so the result was a little gritty, but the taste was really good -- the roasted red peppers came through nicely. This was a quick soap, so a table spoon full of Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock base went in instead of salt to round out the taste.

I finished it with some flat Italian parsley, and I'm not too sure about that detail. The texture was wrong and the blended soap didn't need it -- I think I was sort of picturing an Italian minestrone with some flat parsley leaves floating in it.

I am getting better at quantities. A bowlful each for dinner, one portion as leftovers, and froze the rest in a yoghurt container. As opposed to a vat of leftovers and 2 yoghurt containers that I might have made.

Yuuki loves running / pouring water. Here he is right after dinner.

Yuuki Bathing on Vimeo

What they should tell you is to check your physics books. Balance is not rest. It is not quietude. It is what happens when all of the shoving and tugging and swirling and twisting forces in your life are equally matched, and for a moment there is what seems like deep silence but is really the hush in the eye of the storm.

via utata.org

Rachael saw my post on balance and sent this to me and Derek. She’s right, competing forces are a kind of balance.

And I guess that’s what I meant by finding out what balance means to me. I don’t quite know what forces should be pulling and pushing me.

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These were bought too soon and languished in the fridge for some time, hence the wilted look.

Filling was ricotta, crushed garlic clove, fresh black pepper, salt, minced & sauted onion and some of the zucchinis.

Had the leftover stuffing just stirred into linguini the next day.

I have watched my mom prepare rouladen many times, and I'm sure I've even helped in the past. But, this is the first time I made them on my own (aside from Rachael's thread wrapping help).

Rouladen as I know it is made from beef. You can usually ask the butcher for rouladen cuts, and many butchers will already have it pre-cut (especially the Freybe Outlet Store on Hastings just off Victoria Drive). You don't pound it flat or anything - it comes cut as thin as you need it to be.

The quantities I mention here are for 16 rouladen. You want to figure about 2 per person and/or to have lots of leftovers, because they are delicious. Aside from the 16 strips of beef for the rouladen, you'll also need:

• 1 lb of bacon (get something nice, like double smoked European style, but any bacon will do)
• 4 - 6 large dill pickles (or many smaller baby dills / gherkins)
• 2 - 3 onions
• ~8 Tbsp of Dijon or other hot mustard (about a quarter of a jar)
• something to hold the rouladen together (butcher's string, toothpicks, or random thread from the bottom of your sewing kit)

Mince the bacon and cook it over medium heat (or stick it in the oven) until it's nice and crispy. You'll want to drain the fat / juices as you go (save them!) to make sure it gets crispy. Mince the onions and saute them (perhaps with some of that delicious bacon juice) on low until translucent / tender. Mince the pickles. Once the bacon & onions are done, drain the fat / pat them to soak up some of the fat and let them cool. Once everything is no longer piping hot you can mix all of these things together.

Lay out the rouladen on a counter / workspace and spread with mustard. Do a twist of cracked pepper and salt over each piece of meat as well. Spoon on 2 Tbsp or soon onto one end of the piece of meat. Roll up the meat and secure it. If you're using thread, it's easiest if you do all the rolls, and then have someone help you wrap and tie each bundle.

Remember the bacon juice you saved? Put it in a pan and heat. Brown the rouladen on each side, doing them in batches until they are all browned. Place them in a dutch oven or casserole dish, sprinkling a little flour on them as you layer them in.

Deglaze the pan with water (or beer or wine) and pour over the dish of rouladen. Stir in a Tbsp or so of mustard for a bit more "tang" to the sauce as well as any leftover minced bacon / onion / pickle bits. Add water / liquor as needed so that the rouladen are mostly submerged. Cover and cook at 350°F for 45 minutes or so.

I made this for Lauren's birthday party. We ended up serving it as a "meatatizer" - it was lukewarm and we prepped it by cutting all the thread off and cutting it into slices. The cross section of the rolled meat with the stuffing looks nice on a plate.

Traditionally, you'd have this with potatoes or spätzle, plus some sort of highly cooked vegetable like red cabbage or perhaps some sauerkraut.

The picture above is a screenshot from a Flash movie explaining the rendering process. Apparently, rendering is recycling. Also, french fries are a 5th food group? Type of animal?

I especially enjoyed being able to click through the separate parts of the rendering process, and how everything ends up as Fight Club-style soap or protein meal for "feed". Fun!

I posted this originally on Urban Vancouver, way back in December 2004. I thought I'd move a copy here to make sure I could keep a copy.

About a year ago, I put together a collaborative map of places to buy great ingredients in Vancouver over on Foodists.ca. Here's the map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&source=embed&msa=0&msid=108403776136895878523.00046bf165f8fcf2408b4&ll=49.291993,-123.101807&spn=0.13435,0.273972&z=11&output=embed
View Foodists Vancouver map of key foody locales in a larger map

My parents are both originally from Germany. I grew up speaking German, and we originally lived just off "Robson Strasse" as it was then known because of all the Germans that lived there.

Even today, living in Vancouver, most Europeans don't need to change their diet (i.e. lots of good bread, cheese, meat, sausages, chocolate, saurkraut, etc.) if you know where to shop.

And that's where this post really starts. Read on for the tour of shops to fill your Euro-diet needs (and just really good stores/food in general)

First up, the hidden treasures of European Specialty Importers. They're on 220 Prior Street, which is just off Main by the Georgia Viaduct. If you're coming over the viaduct from downtown, take the offramp as if you're going to Main. Instead of turning on Main, cross it (you're on Prior) and it's the warehouse directly on your right, with a big sign with their name. If it looks like you're pulling up at a loading dock, you're at the right place.

What's there? Well, pretty much any canned or packaged European food -- coffee, tea, saurkraut, mustard (in a tube!), dumplings, etc., etc. There is a small selection of meats and cheeses as well, but we've got another spot for that. Oh yes...did I mention the chocolate? There is an entire cold room (under video surveillance) filled with chocolate (cue Simpson's reference here).

Next stop, Andy's Bakery. A very small store front at 935 Commercial (at Venables) conceals the best "landbrot" (big, multi-pound loaves of German rye) in the city. Nice buns, and a really good dark multi-grain as well. No foamy insubstantial Wonderbread here! If you need a lot of bread, you can call ahead to order.

You may have seen the name Freybe before -- they produce a lot of commercially packaged meat stuff. But, they also happen to have a factory outlet store at 716 East Hastings Street. It is sometimes so busy on Saturdays that they have to lock the doors and only let people in as others leave. Cold cuts, sausages, and fresh meat. Have you ever had meat salad? They have it, and it's delicious.

OK, the car is getting pretty full at this point, but there are still a few bits and pieces we need. Famous Foods is at 1595 Kingsway at King Edward. They bill themselves as "The Original Bulk Food Store", but they have so much more. The "bulk" stuff is nicely packaged dry goods, from great spices to pastas, beans, flour, oats, etc. etc. They have a good selection of meat, seafood, cheese, and even vegetables. The last category is natural products -- environmentally friendly cleaning and hygiene products. Yes, the variety is incredible, and the prices are great, too.

Now I'm going to throw in a couple of bonus links, both on the drive -- Santa Barbara, a store a bit like Famous Foods. Expect to spend as much as 20 minutes waiting at the deli counter for service, but it's worth it. The other one is Norman's Fruits and Vegetables. The owners have produce from local farms in the valley, and you can get masses of produce for really cheap -- e.g. $2 for a 5lb box of roma tomatoes.

What are your favourite food shops in Vancouver? Anyone have pointers for shopping for Chinese, Indian, Thai, or other cuisine/ethnicity ingredients?

What must it be like to have the murder of nature upon your very soul? To have sacrificed all the world’s creatures for your own kind, and thereby lost your souls more completely than by any evil magic?

Storm Seed, by Janet & Chris Morris, p 194

The god had been looking for a heart in the city, a heart that was worthy, a heart that knew true worship. And the god had found such a heart, and a voice that called upon Him without greed or demand, without wheedling or whining.

The heart of the prophecy did Enlil find in the stable while the storm raged, upon the altar that was the shore at the end of time.

But though the prophecy was fulfilled upon that moment, the humbling of the city had just begun.

“City at the Edge of Time”, by Janet & Chris Morris, p189

The key part of German potato salad for me is the lack of mayonnaise and eggs. I make this up from scratch whenever I make it, but my version always includes two essential ingredients: Dijon mustard as part of the vinaigrette (I like the flavour and tang that it adds) and finely chopped dill pickles (a satisfying crunch and burst of vinegary / salty goodness).

I also usually put in bacon / guanciale / schinken speck, but this time around, knew that there were going to be a number of vegetarians present and skipped the meat products. Hence, I (*gasp*!) accidentally made a vegan potato salad - which I didn't even realize until someone asked what was in it, and it dawned on me that yes, it was indeed a vegan potato salad :P

The full recipe is on Foodista:

Vegan German Potato Salad

OK, it's down to the wire, and I think I've figured out the menu for the Mover Dinner I'm putting on tomorrow. Mover Dinner? A thank you to all the folks that helped us move. When I'm short on cash, I pay in food!

First Course: Laksa a la Boris

I spent Monday making pork stock. This is going to be the basis for a Laksa-inspired soup - I'll add coconut milk, bean sprouts, noodles and likely some chicken. Fresh green onions and coriander will round it out.

Second Course: Spinach salad with Guanciale

I've talked about the beauty of guanciale before - I'll crisp up some cubes of it with garlic and make a honey / mustard dressing to go over spinach leaves and some tomatoes.

Third Course: Pita Wraps with Chicken

I'll marinate / grill the chicken in pieces, as well as have some roasted peppers, sautéed onions, a tomatillo-based salsa (maybe sort of like this one?), some fresh tzatsiki, and other fixings for people to make their own wraps.

Dessert Course

Some sort of white vanilla cake served with the strawberries & rhubarb that we got last weekend.

I've been jonesing for a new camera. Specifically, while I take a handful of pictures with my Nokia N95 that is with me everywhere, it's just not the same (obviously) as a great camera.

I've been quite happy over the years with my Canon PowerShoot "S" Series - I started with the S1, then ended up with the S5. The all in one, super zoom, great macro performance, and regular AA batteries are all great features. BUT. It's big and bulky, especially with the filter adapter that I always end up buying, and there is no upgrade path other than well, buying a newer model :P

I've been really intrigued by the Micro Four Thirds system - small, compact cameras with small form factor interchangeable lenses. That last link is to Wikipedia, here is the Micro Four Thirds section of the Four Thirds website.

Olympus and Panasonic came together and are using the same standard to make these cameras, and the lenses are interchangeable. I was initially attracted to the Olympus models, but after trying them out at London Drugs, the lower cost ones are made of plastic and feel cheap, and the metal body ones are more expensive and have less features than the equivalent Panasonic.

The first third party (Noktor) is also announcing a lens for this standard, so it is likely that a nice healthy Micro Four Thirds ecosystem will spring up over time.

So, yes, I'm scheming to get back into this game. The fact that R will (I'm sure) be glad to tote around a compact sized camera with DSLR quality doesn't hurt either.

nancy white’s session

I had an all hands meeting at work and discussed a bunch of upcoming stuff.

I went home and relaxed by cooking dinner (braised cabbage in mustard cream sauce, boiled potatoes, and a beef / guanciale / mushroom mixture).

Then the Internet started punching me in the face, and I helped write a quick blog post.

Then I went off and played dodgeball, which was fun as always (the Internet kept punching over mobile).

Then we went for team beers.

Then I came home and tried to sift through all the face punching stuff on the Internet and write something in response.

Turns out, I'm a real person, a lot like you. Please stop punching me in the face. Thanks.

/via @sillygwailo

I'm using Keynote to create a "Startup Drinks" presentation, with Danny looking on in the background. Photo by Weston Triemstra

Anthony and I made Trotter Gear this weekend. Which are, of course, pigs feet, and from Fergus Henderson's "Beyond Nose to Tail" cookbook (which Anthony gave to me for my birthday). Here's a version of the recipe.

What does one do with trotter gear? Well, it features prominently as an ingredient in about a third of the recipes in that book. The pie described in the linked recipe is definitely something I want to try.

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Last of the Cutter Ranch lamb. Marinated with preserved lemons with bay leaves from my parents' garden, plus turmeric, coriander, garlic, etc. Served with cous cous with grilled peppers.

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More on the magic of guanciale in the previous post.

Now that the Olympics are over, Oyama again has guanciale. I picked some up to cook while on Bowen.

The "traditional" recipes for guanciale are all pasta dishes (Bucatini alla Amatriciana, Spaghetti alla Gricia, Spaghetti alla Carbonara - here are recipes for all three plus instructions on how to cure your own guanciale).

Here are some non-traditional recipes I found online:

• Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Ponzu Fried Garlic, Guanciale, and Bonito Flakes - I have my own bacon + mustard recipe for brussels sprouts, so I know this would be yummy
• Whole-wheat pasta with cabbage, mushrooms, and caraway seeds - I'm not a fan of caraway seeds, but I can see how the whole wheat pasta would mesh with the smokiness of the pork
• Tiny potato dumplings with Tomato Onion Guanciale sauce - pretty similar to the pasta sauces, but done with potato dumplings aka gnochetti instead. Mashed potatoes with caramelized onions and guanciale would also be stellar, I think …
• Seattle Shellfish Stew with Kale and Guanciale - there are a variety of recipes that mix mussels with guanciale. Lots of bacon + mussel recipes out there, so this makes sense. The kale has a bitterness to it that goes with the smokiness, which is what I'm hoping for with my recipe.
• Sautéed Ramps in Guanciale - I've never had ramps, which are a sort of scallion/leek/onion/garlic - but are apparently wild leeks

My recipe? I'm doing pasta with a bunch of Red Boar Kale.

Spaghetti With Guanciale and Kale

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The show is called "Trees I have Dreamed", and you can find out more on Rachael's site about it. It runs until April 11th, and there will be some sort of exhibition. In the mean time, make sure to come visit the Altered Books at Bootup this Thursday (Facebook - Little Stories: Transforming the Book).

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Trying for something vaguely like Anthony's ragout. I remember it had carrots and pork, and the nutmeg seemed a good direction to go.

Ground Pork Ragout

I was going for the Banana Leaf's Rendang Beef curry - which is a completely different dish, but I think I got the coconut right, as well as the sweet + tang + spice.

Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

I don’t like Hallmark holidays. In fact, I don’t like ANY holidays / occasions that are musts. I like doing stuff at other, unexpected times of the year, just because.

In any case, I did make German pancakes for breakfast. They were good, and it’s always nice to sit down and share a meal.

originally via <www.flickr.com/photos/bo…>

I had a large kuri squash, and used it over several days. The small amount of cubed squash that I had leftover ended up being this single serving soup.

Monsoon Coast Spices on Salt Spring Island makes a wonderful Berbere: http://www.monsooncoast.com/spices/ethiopian_berbere.html

Simple Ethiopian Berbere Kuri Squash Soup

Today I went to Thomas Haas.

The drinks were nice, as were the pastries, but it was incredibly loud, there was nowhere to sit, and the energy in the room was frantic / hectic. So R and I wandered the streets of Kits sipping our drinks and ended up at the Salvation Army.

I always look for used cookbooks that are ethnic, or old, or from the women's auxiliary of some church in some county from a long time ago.

This first book is interesting because the author gushes about BC regional cuisine. Many of the recipes have place or people names from around the province.

It had a Bowen Island (where I grew up, and where my parents still live) recipe, so I definitely had to get it.

Lots of the recipes have canned goods of various kinds, even if they are things that can be sourced from BC (e.g. smoked oysters). I bet, back in the day, that lots of canned things were more local, so if you made something with a tin of tomatoes, it would taste different in BC because they were local BC varietals. Provenance for canned goods? Of course…

Cookbooks that focus on regional cuisines are also of interest to me. This one is a hardcover, and the pages are a rough type of paper, and the whole book seems to be covered in grease spots. Well loved!

Also, there are little notes like this - "I could eat this everyday" - scattered throughout the book. Again, a must have because of this alone. That, and every recipe seems to call for potatoes and bacon - at least, the ones that aren't calling for whipping cream and butter!

The New York Time Cook Book was another no brainer. Why? Well, because of this next recipe photo…

Why yes, that is a roast suckling pig! The book is great, with lots of multicultural recipes from around the world, as well as good versions of lots of "basics".

I'm very pleased with my used cookbook haul.

I've been continuing on the baking kick. Biscuits are great because
they take only 20 - 30 minutes from start to finish.

New Flaky Biscuits

I thought I might make it all the way through 2010 with one personal blog post per day. Nope!

I can probably cheat and go back and show the picture of my second no knead experiment (which also turned great, even though I let it rise for way over 24 hours) for Monday.

For yesterday? Nope.

I won't stress about not posting every single day, but I am enjoying the better "flow" that I have here and on my asides.