The Serious Eats Guide to Sandwiches
Here is an excellent tour of all sorts of sandwiches, from the classics like BLT and Club to Greek Doner Kebab and Dutch Crunch. The descriptions are based on the sandwiches as cooked in different parts of the US, but, I think, that would be pretty accurate for other parts of the world as well.
Warning: some seriously yummy pictures ahead!
Via kottke.org.
Cooking and eating a whole suckling pig has been a dream of mine for a few years now. Not just me – it was a dream that I shared with a very good friend of mine. Yesterday it finally came true. My friend decided that we’ve waited enough and that we should finally do it. So he got the pig and invited me over (as well as a few other people).
We soon discovered that cooking this thing was not as easy as we imagined. For one, it seemed that the pig was too heavy for the motor to rotate it. A new motor, more powerful, was bought. But it still it didn’t work. Luckily, almost everyone at a party was an engineer in one sense or another. So we figured out that the pig had to be re-adjusted, for better balance. It took us a couple of tries and a few meters of metal wire, but we managed to set it perfectly. Too bad it was still too heavy for the motor and it simply died. Gladly, we had more motors that finished the job.
One other thing we had to re-adjust was timing. Somehow we thought it would be somewhere around two hours to cook it. But finally it took more than four. I know there is some formula to calculate the time based on weight of th meat, but nobody seemed to knew it. Not to worry though – we had plenty of beer and things to talk about.
When the pig was finally cooked, put on table, and tried, I realized that all the wait was definitely worth it. It was one of the best dishes I ate ever. And it was the best pork ever. So soft and so tender, it was unbelievable!
Now that we tried it and realized that it’s even better than we expected it to be, something tells me we’ll do it again. With more preparations and better understanding of the process. And even though I’m still digesting it, I can’t wait for that next time. And if you never tried a suckling pig, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s one of those things everyone just have to try. Yes, it was really that good.
The following video is one of the excellent examples of how important the presentation is. I’ve been told a billion times, and I’ve said it myself a few more, that nobody cares about the work you’ve done until it looks good. Yes, sure you can get a few geeky friends to take a look and appreciate the smart algorithm or an elegant solution to the problem. But if you want to make it big time – work on the packaging of your work as much, if not more than on the actual result itself. If in doubt, watch the video. If not – watch it anyway.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9J1b3MqiX8]
By the way, one other thing I want to point out about eating the food someone else cooked – if you are not sure you can handle the truth, don’t ask for it.
Via you are not as smart as you think you are.
During the last few month I’ve been explaining software engineering to management types quite a bit. Most of the “bosses” that I talked to weren’t technical at all, so I was trying to stay away from famous concepts, examples, and terminology as much as I could. Of course, that required some sort of substitute for concepts, examples, and terminology. I’ve tried analogies from different unrelated areas, and was surprised as how good cooking was fitting the purpose.
Before I go any further, I have to say that I am not a cook and that I don’t know much about cooking. But. I know just about the same as any other average human being. Which, sort of, moves me into the same category with my targets, or “bosses”, as I called them before.
Here are a few examples that worked well.
Continue reading Software engineering is like cooking
Yesterday I’ve got the chance to use my hatchet knife. It was the first time I bought one (a few month ago), and I never had anything to chop into pieces. Why did I buy a hatchet knife you might ask. Well, it’s a long story.
Note: this post is really a long story and it has some creepy details that involve the dead flash and a hatchet. If you are sensitive about this sort of things, maybe you should probably avoid reading this post altogether.
Continue reading The butcher job