Puff pastry in three sheets (this I get from Pillsbury Farms, not made from scratch). Spread the layers with "pastry cream" - kind of a soft egg custard, kinda tough to make. At the last minute I had the idea to use the new Starbucks instant coffee Via packets - they are perfect, blending and adding the perfect flavor and colour without adding any liquid. Finally of course powdered sugar and chocolate syrup over top. Voila, le triomphe de Napoleon.
Did I make this one on baking day? I forget. I saw Lemon Curd in a gourmet food store for something like $12.95 a bottle. This one is super easy - I use a wok so it doesn't boil or curdle. It's 4 eggs and a cup of sugar, the rind grated off a lemon, squeeze in the juice (try not to drop any seeds in!), and add another 1/3 cup of lemon juice. Then heat and whisk til it thickens. It's pretty fantastic all by itself but I add the raspberries for color and to make it look pro.
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Nancy makes the crust in the food processor for me. It's not a French-style cookie crust, more of an American style flaky crust. She's pretty much got that kind of crust perfected via the processor . Finn won't touch it, of course. Makes a great breakfast or dessert with coffee. The lemon flavour is super-strong.
We hit the Seattle Restaurant Store yesterday for about $300, replaced the dishes and got excited about cooking even more.
Nancy got a new stockpot and made a killer soupe a l'oignon. Apparently the key is to buy the purple onions - I would've thought we needed the sweet ones. The onion acid permeated the kitchen so we wore the new ski goggles. Also a thin crust pizza (Nancy is great at crusts from scratch).
Today while Finn and Nancy went skiing at Snoqualmie Summit and Elijah and I baked. We started with creme puffs which are pretty easy - you boil a cup of water and a stick of butter, then throw in a cup of flour and mix. Then let it cool a little and mix in 7 (seven!) eggs. No sugar! These turned out perfect on our aluminum baking sheets without any butter or nonstick coating or parchment paper.
Then Elijah wanted 
"black cream!" and I asked him how one made that. He insisted on brown sugar, heavy cream and vanilla. Dad's idea was to add a cup of Dutched cocoa, which really did turn black. This chocolate whipped cream didn't have nearly the volume, but it tasted wonderful and it was plenty to fill then twenty or so puffs.
Elijah types: b
Then we started on the creme brulees. (Elijah pronunciation: kremah bay!) I only wanted to make this to test out the torch we got. Since I was out of heavy cream we used the creme caramel recipe instead, which it turns out is lighter (milk and whole eggs, rather than the cream and yolks of creme brulee), and is kinda more eggy and separates a bit...if you've had both you'd know the difference. But the sugar/melty/firey/crackey thing is where the excitement is anyway. Those went in the fridge til Finn and Nancy came home.
Finally we made a chocolate cake (at Finn's request). The cake is just a mix, but I did a professional buttercream icing (sugar syrup to softball stage into 6 heavily whipped yolks, then add a pound of butter on high for 20 minutes or so - and we added half cup of cocoa too). This is incredibly light and yummy. Mom taught me everything about baking cakes but I got some new ideas from James Patterson's book. I cut the cakes into 4 layers, and used springform pans. I brushed the layers with an orange liquer before putting the buttercream between them, and covered the whole thing. It really is a lot lighter-feeling than the powdered sugar and butter I'm used to. This cake is incredible and so far we've only eaten the scraps from cutting the layers with leftover icing.
So, no meals today (just a salad) but a whole dinner of desserts. Finn claims he likes desserts more than me...heh. Maybe the eating of them...
Weird flash today on the idea that self-esteem is relative to surroundings. That idea is used to explain why people with more wealth are only marginally more happy; why lottery winners don't feel better off a year later, etc. And why otherwise poor people in miserable conditions often report feeling good about their situation. It's relative. If you are wealthier and more successful than your neighbors (or are on your way there) then you are happy. I wonder if surrounding yourself with people who are very similar to yourself (such as, when working at a big company or on a medium sized team) feeds into this. The stuff I know and work with is meaningless jargon and trivia to people who work in other (maybe more meaningful) professions. It's performance review time - is it silly to measure people who are all so similar against each other? We're vastly more productive and knowledgeable than 99% of the world's people; yet in 50 years who will weigh human worth in i/o wait times on a i386 architecture or type-inference on embedded query syntax ?
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Looking for importance?
NYTimes: Paying a Price for the Thrill of the Hunt
If a company sells chances to win a prize, taking in far more revenue than the value of the prize, how is that different from a casino?
I think I'm missing the gambling gene. Slot machines just seem like a really bad video game; blackjack doesn't excite me. To me, poker with friends is just a way of paying for the socializing (er, I don't mean that in a bad way - going out to the movies or dinner costs money too and it's ok - as long as you're not doing it as a way of leveling your income). Buying lottery tickets isn't any more fun for me than taking out the recycling. I'm as likely to find money in either set of scraps of paper. I'm not against gambling in principle, it just doesn't hold any thrill for me.
But I do object to the advertising, any misdirection away from the numbers, which (usually hamfistedly) prey on human nature. I recently finished Stumbling on Happiness - which I thought might be a kind of scientific self-help, but was actually a lot closer to a Steven Pinker -ish entertaining survey of psychological studies. One point I remember is that people prefer (and are much better at) predicting good outcomes from actions they take (or conversely, when people imagine bad scenarios, it's often in trying to find a course of action to avoid the bad outcome). If I buy a stock and it goes up, I feel pretty good - if it goes down I feel pretty bad. But I don't really care too much about the ones I didn't buy that go up; and I really should be more worried about not selling the bad ones that are going to go down. Lotteries and gambling prey on the same flaw in human nature - if you don't buy you can't win - and if you do buy , wouldn't it be awesome if you did win? Concentrate only on the good outcomes of the actions you take - and whatever you do, do something to avoid the bad outcome (not winning!) What's not obvious is that the best outcome comes from ... doing nothing at all.
I think I like this guy. Um, yes, a lot of bad language past this link.
From Coders at Work, a conversation between Peter Seibel (the author/editor) and Dan Ingalls (physicist, builder of Smalltalk and Lively Kernel:
Seibel: Is there anything I haven't asked about that you thought I might?
Ingalls: Often, reading about famous people, the side of it that I'm interested in is, how do they make their life work? All the things that weren't their passion, and how did they deal with that, and with their family, and with their finances, and balancing that. Or did they just hole up and say, "To hell with everything else," and just let it come crumbling down until they had their work done?
Um, yeah? I'm trying to glance at this paragraph in between requests for more milk and making coffee and get the dog water and eating a muffin, and it is exactly what I wanted to know too. I felt like when Paul McCartney found the meaning of life on an acid trip and wrote it down on a napkin and anxiously opened it up the next day, waiting to read what it said sober...revelation on the back side of a paper napkin.
Seibel: Do you feel like there were times in your life where your passion for programming ran amok to the detriment of other parts of your life?
Ingalls: Yeah, there are times when it's been hard on others because I'm focused and need to stay focused. It's a risk with anybody who's got a passion for what they're doing. I think either you learn to moderate it somewhat or the other thing you do is communicate it so that everybody around you knows that you're dealing with this thing, and you'll probably be done in a week, but until the Daddy's somewhat inaccessible. /p>
Seibel: And then you win your "Dad the Determined Debugger" award.
Ingalls: Exactly; right. The other thing is, the more you can reflect the satisfaction from progress back out to all the people who have dealt with you during that time, at least they have a sense that Daddy's doing something good, and we'll all be happy when it's done.
Ok, not the meaning of life, or Liff. Still it's good to hear even master coders have this struggle - and not all of them actually solve it. This book is exactly what I needed right now.
Postscript: oh, you still want to know what was on Paul's napkin? "There are seven levels." :)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan :
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. LEt us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Lately I've decided to spend a little of time every day sharpening the saw - sometimes it's just posting this blog; or getting the security cameras to integrate with the website; or reading a technical paper; or getting emacs, flymake, and perlcritic to play nicely together; or writing something in a new language.
I wondered how I should record what I'm working on. Putting it on this website is a highly motivating public declaration of what I want to work on; but it's also an embarrasing list of things I don't know. But Eco's antilibrary's given me permission to post such a list. As much as your library is the books you've read; your resumé lists the things you do know; your anti-resumé is the list of things you haven't done, haven't read, and don't know.
(It gets a lot more navel-gazy and a lot less professional from here; that's what blogs are for right? Luckily for me, no one reads blogs. TL;DR ? I'm awesome and have worked hard to convince myself of the fact. Ha! :)
In the academic world, they don't call it a "resume" or even a "resumé"; French is perhaps too blue-collar, so they use Latin: curriculum vitae, or if you are in the know and also in the humanities (at least, far enough away from actual statistics or finance that you couldn't be talking about a coefficient of variation), shortened to the CV. Meaning the race of life; or a summary of your life's education so far. A resumé has to be one-page, and intensely focused on the couple of sentences a employer might be expected to read; or in my field where employers don't read, hit the right regex in the recruiter's feedreader. But a CV, if you have confidence, tenure, scholarship, or an inheritance, could be a lot more wide-ranging. What's the most important thing you've ever learned? Were you sitting in a classroom or on the clock at work? Probably not.
The Referendum , and a certain lack of career progress, reminded me not to compare my resumé with my CV. More important, don't compare others' resumés with your CV. When you see people of a different age, a different background, and different schooling and start comparing careers, it's very easy to feel you're falling behind. As you get older it's harder to brush that off as just not having hit the big time yet. But there are a couple of antidotes to this destructive manner of thinking.
Even assuming you've not already succumbed to Impostor Syndrome , the fact that you are close enough to these people to compare yourself already means you are far more alike than any other people on the planet. People are likely to see the tiniest differences as evidence of a huge career gap; without noticing you both do the same kind of work for the same kind of company for about the same kind of money which is certainly thousands of times more than what anyone was willing to pay someone who just sat in a chair and thought for nearly all of human history.
Second, for as much as those differences exist (and they do feel so unfair!) consider the vast number of decisions that have been different.
After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves of paper and fed them through the machine.
She handed the copies to Arthur.
"This is, er, this your advice then, is it?" said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.
"No," said the old lady. "It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life" -- she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout -- "in a smelly old cave like this!"
She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve. Stomped off to her pile of dead goatlike things and started to set about the flies with vim and vigor.
Not that any of that advice (or its opposite) would've done you any good. "You must do what feel is right, of course." is my favorite Obi-Wan Kenobi quote; it's in fact impossible to do any different (or, more accurately, it's impossible to avoid thinking your own semi-random actions were anything but rational and correct decisions at the time).
"You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a pole to work out?"
"What about winter? Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?"
"Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life," said the man, "doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack."
"Do you have any advice for a traveler?"
"Yes. Get a beach house."
"I see."
The man stared out over the hot, dry, scrubby landscape. From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies. "You see her?" called the old man, suddenly.
"Yes," said Arthur. "I consulted her in fact."
"Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned it down. What advice did she give you?"
"Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done."
"In other words, get a beach house."
(Both the above from Mostly Harmless)
So here's my antidote CV. It's not meant for employers; in fact if any current or prospective employer reads it, I'm screwed. But that's my personal list of experiences and learnings that perhaps explain the difference between my resumé and anti-resumé - and explain why those differences are OK.
When the kids and I get bored, we bake. I've loved making desserts since I was 8, when my Mom started teaching me how to use the mixer and read the back of a cake-mix box recipe. I think she wanted to professionally decorate cakes for a while; it's a kind of art. But I was a lot more interested in art that was made of sugar that I could eat, than in some Crayola scrap you hang on the fridge. So cooking with Finnegan reminds me of her.
Last week at Dahlia Lounge we had a Cinnamon Orange French Toast; this is my version, Lemon-Cinnamon Pain Perdu with a Columbia base:
and a customer:
Sunday, at Finn's suggestion, we made a Chocolate Cream Pie. It's Ghiradelli chocolate with basically a simple simmered milk and sugar custard base.Nancy made a crust, which got a bit overdone, and I made the filling. Having the crust overdone was a blessing actually; something this sweet and heavy needs a crispy, salty base. The meringue on top is just what you do with the leftover egg whites; a good mixer makes this nearly automatic:
Today Finn and I did a Tarte au Citron to use a few of the lemons we had on hand; it's the zest (peel) of 4 lemons, all their juice (plus another half cup of lemon juice), so the lemon flavor is really strong. I had enough to put some filling in some pastry shells , topped that with some cream from the ISI nitrous canister: 
sorry no pictures of those lemon tarts; they're already gone! So there were 3 egg whites leftover, so those and a half-cup of sugar whip up to nearly beach-ball sized. Now on a pie you want a soft spongy meringue; but if you want to eat it like a candy, or make a shell to fill with something else, you can bake it for a long time at a low temperature, say 45 minutes at 300 degrees F. These are crispy and sugary and stick to your teeth like cotton candy (though there's really not that much sugar in them):
