our kitchen, also noisebridge, thing a day, and the google

The ancient ring of

Steel cross iron vibrates the

Pot while it's fired

First, while the haiku is fresh in your mind, I want to say a few words about the Google.  The ACM Tech News e-mail I received this morning included a link to (and summary of) an article on NPR about how Google is doing some AI research to develop algorithms for translating poetry into different languages.  It's neat stuff!  Just think: someday, everyone in the world could appreciate my haikus.  :P

Nerdiness aside, what I wanted to talk about was our interesting kitchen setup here on Market St.  Since it's such a small space and we're so newly on our own, we don't have that many different things.  We do have a few that are AWESOME that I want to advocate for a minute and share with y'all.

This is a handsome little cast iron teapot that Evan gave me for Christmas.  It makes nice tea.  It's also a good size for two people, and it happens to hold the same amount of water as one of our pots (we don't have a tea kettle yet, but we're hoping to get one soon).  It's lovely!  The two teas that are sitting here are Japanese green tea with brown rice (the rice makes a huge difference, just trust me) that we purchased at a Japanese grocery store in SF and Turkish tea that we brought back with us from Istanbul.  We've also got a box of Twining's assorted black teas (English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast, Earl Grey, and Lady Grey) that we like, but we don't use them nearly as much as these teas.  Yum!

Next is a photo of our Italian espresso maker, our new milk foamer, and a bag of espresso grounds we picked up in the Castro.  We like these A LOT.  The milk foamer is tons of fun (and super easy) to use, and at just $30 it started saving us money after we'd made a week's worth of cappuccinos.  Plus we've discovered the joys of cold foamed milk + sugar + sunny seed drops as a delicious and refreshing snack in the middle of the day.  We were taught how to use the espresso maker in the Napolitana style by a friend we met in Italy (it's all about the shape of the espresso grounds), so we drink good coffee around here.   :D

This is an image of our knife collection.  They are currently the only knives -- other than butter knives -- that we own.  But we love them!  The two on the left are in the santoku style, and they are pro for cutting vegetables  The ceramic knife (the smaller one) is incredibly sharp, and it was a steal at $20.  We also got a ceramic peeler to to with it!  The half-moon knife on the right is also interesting to cut with... it actually came with it's own, specially-shaped cutting board!  It's about the safest knife there is, since there's not as much up and down-type finger-endangering motion, and as it's German-made, it's a super high quality cutting instrument.

That is our oven knob.  Notice that this is the "Oven Temp," which in my experience is measured in degrees rather than as "low," as "low" is not descriptive enough for baking.  Also, note that this is the "off" position of the knob (as the oven sees it).  We speculate that someone must have broken off the original knob and replaced it with an incorrectly-oriented other-oven-knob at some point.  Either that or the manufacturer was drunk.

These are my mixing bowls.  A rainbow!  They're satisfying to look at, but I regret that we don't have any ceramic bowls, especially since we've started making bread now.  These bowls aren't oven safe, nor are they heat safe, so they're generally terrible for especially the rising part of making bread.  I do love them, though, as we have a mixing bowl to suit any need that may arise.

Er, anyway, that's all I wanted to talk about re: kitchen, I guess, and mostly I was just using it as an excuse to show some photos.  We're still posting more over at http://picasaweb.google.com/biketotheearth , though be warned that the quality might be a little strange as we're now both set up to upload from our mobile devices.

Stuff!  I spent this morning doing the overhauls necessary for my bike, including installing a new tire and ordering a new rack.  Who knew that my rack would crumple from being mailed after it carried 40 lbs for 6 months?  Hrm.  :)

Thing a Day!  We're committing to do Thing a Day, though we aren't going to sign up in any official capacity because we have no desire to get another user account for a website.  They want us to join something called posterous.com?  Has anyone even heard of that?  Anyway, we bought a bunch of materials yesterday for use doing our thing-a-day projects.  We have a lot planned, but if anyone has interesting ideas for short projects, we have a couple unfilled days!

Noisebridge!  We went there for the first time last night to watch their Five Minutes of Fame presentations, which are monthly talks during which people can share whatever it is that they've been working on with the group.  There were a variety of presenters who talked about everything from a watch that talks to your smartphone to Maslow's hierarchy of needs to clown porn.  I think we're going to enjoy spending more time there in the future.  :D

tost, a name we call ourselves

First off: yes, I started work at Facebook - about five weeks ago, more or less immediately after coming home from a six-month-and-11000-kilometre-long bike trip. (Well, okay, there was time enough in between for American Thanksgiving at Valkyrie's house, a few days with my parents up near Toronto, frenetic rounds of packing and unpacking and repacking, and a 3.5 day cross-continental train trip through some of the most fantastically picturesque mountain passes in good old America. All of which was packed into about two weeks.)

Before you ask what I do for Facebook: all engineers do Bootcamp for the first six weeks, after which they pick their team/project/generic business-sounding term for subdivision of work. I'm leaning backend - which means you probably won't see what I do, but it will somehow make your experience better: faster, more secure, more feature-rich, whatever. In the meantime, Valkyrie and I finally moved into our apartment about half a week ago. Yay!

Tost. What the hell is tost?

Well, we were biking along through Greece when we saw signs for τοστ, a snack-stop mainstay that turns out to be roughly the Greek equivalent of a panini. Yeah, you're supposed to pronounce it "toast", but it looks like "tost" - which we thought was hilarious enough that we decided to adopt it as part of our name.

So, tost. That aside, now that we've moved into our apartment and have a kitchen at our disposal, we've taken our hard-earned camp stove cookery skill and put it to work, scouring cookbooks both paper and online for deliciousness-ness. (And no, we haven't made tost yet; we haven't got a toster.) Without further ado, here are some of the results in recipe format.

Cossack Pie (adopted from The Moosewood Cookbook, page 138 to fit the ingredients on hand:)

pie crust

flour

oil

salt

pie filling

1/4 lb. mushrooms (crimini works)

1 onion (yellow, white - your choice), finely chopped

1 cup cabbage, shredded or finely chopped

1 crown of broccolus (singular of broccoli!), thinly sliced

1 carrot, grated

salt and pepper

3 tbsp. butter

2 tbsp. flour (all purpose)

1/2 tsp. basil (prefer fresh, but dried works too)

2 tbsp. wine (we used red, original calls for white, whatever)

1/2 tsp. dill weed

1/3 cup cottage cheese

2 eggs

3/4 cup yoghurt (we used Pavel's Russian-Style, ~4% fat)

paprika

0. Make crust by mixing together flour, oil, and a pinch of salt until it makes something approximately the consistency, shape, and taste of a crust. (Seriously: if you don't know how to do that, get a premade crust.) Line pan with crust.

1. Remove stems from mushrooms and chop finely. (How finely? We cut them in round cross-sections, a couple of millimetres (sorry, semi-hemi-demi-inches) thick.) Set caps aside; you'll use them later.

2. Sauté mushrooms, onion, cabbage, broccoli, and carrot in butter, salting lightly as they cook. Add spices. Cook a few more minutes. Remove from heat, toss with flour and wine.

3. Meanwhile, whisk cottage cheese and eggs together vigorously. Go heavy on the vigour. (Or you could just follow the original recipe and blender these. We don't have one.) Add salt and pepper.

3a. Start oven preheating to 350.

4. Add egg-cheese mixture to sautéed vegetables (which should be off the heat - if they aren't, DO THAT NOW) and mix well. Spread into crust.

5. Slice mushroom caps and sauté with a bit of butter until they release their mushroomy juices. Yum.

6. Spread yoghurt on top of vegetable-egg-cheese filling, covering the entire pie. Top with mushrooms. Sprinkle generously with paprika. Bake in (hopefully heated-up) oven for 40 minutes. Remove. Let sit for a few minutes. Serve. Eat.

Yum! That's recipe 1 of 2 for this post - the next one is a curry we concocted with some vegan recipe we found and can't refind as a basis. That recipe seemed short on flavour, so we added a bit of chili-garlic sauce and extra-crunchy peanut butter to the mix.

ingredients

some cabbage, finely chopped

2 potatoes, cubed

2 carrots, grated

1 onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushinated (like with a garlic press)

2 tbsp curry powder

salt and pepper

3 tbsp butter

peanut butter (screw that gourmet crap, we used Jif)

chili-garlic sauce (tuong ot toi vietnam, plus or minus a few language-specific accents)

0. Perform indicated actions on vegetables. Preferably with sharp knives (or your judo-chop-worthy hands, or carefully-wielded dental floss, or...)

0a. At the same time, heat lightly-salted water to a boil - enough to put the 2 potatoes in, since they will need to soften before you add them to the mix.

1. Heat butter in deep pan on medium-high. Add onions, cook 1 minute. Add garlic, cook 1 more minute. Add curry powder, plus salt and pepper to taste. Cook a few more minutes.

2. Add rest of vegetables EXCEPT POTATO. Cook until they start to pack down. Add peanut butter a bit at a time, stirring to melt it and spread it evenly throughout the mix. Add chili-garlic sauce. Stir some more.

3. When potato gets soft enough to easily stick a fork into, remove from water. Cube potatoes. Add to curry; this might dry out the mixture, so keep some water on hand to add more liquid if necessary. Stir every now and then, making some attempt to mash the potatoes down for extra creaminess.

3a. If you're planning to serve this over, say, rice - this would be a good time to start that!

4. If you're making rice, cook curry over medium-low heat until rice is done; otherwise, cook for however long you want (which should probably be at least 15 minutes.) Serve. Eat.

Yum! And that's the last of the recipe action. Enjoy!