Monthly Archives: March 2010
Review: ATC Best Recipes and Reviews 2010
| March 28, 2010 | Posted by matt under Uncategorized |
I got the magazine version of The Best of America’s Test Kitchen Kitchen: Best Recipes and Reviews 2010 (that’s a mouthful) a few months ago. I have been working my way through the recipes and have tried about ten of the 64 recipes so far. If you aren’t familiar with America’s Test Kitchen, I would describe them as a Consumer Reports for cooks, but with a few extra side businesses. First, they have an excellent cooking show on PBS that performs food product taste tests, product reviews, as well as recipes and cooking techniques. They are also known for Cook’s Illustrated magazine.
The greatest thing about America’s Test Kitchen is that they take every recipe and experiment with different techniques and ingredients, testing each one until they find the best recipe possible. They say they will try a recipe 30, 40, or even 70 times before they publish it. As a result, a number of the recipes have some very unique ingredients or techniques that can provide surprisingly good results. For example, their Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup uses white bread blended into the soup instead of cream to provide a creamy and thick consistency. I never would have thought to try bread in the soup, but it was quite good.
The Ultimate Cinnamon Buns are outstanding, although they were almost too rich. They are made with a cream cheese glaze that is very good, and the filling uses brown sugar instead of regular sugar with lots of butter. Since they freeze very well, we would eat them two at a time with a week or so in between.
The Baked Ziti uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, fresh basil instead of dried, and fresh mozzarella cut into cubes instead of shredded. All of these ingredient choices make a big difference over the usual recipe. It is definitely the best Baked Ziti I have ever had, and they also solve the usual problem of soggy pasta by having you undercook the pasta before the baking portion of the recipe.
There are a few things I would like to see changed in the recipes. First, they don’t give you a very good idea what the total prep and cook time is for the recipe. I usually like to know how much time I’m going to have to set aside without having to read through the recipe and add up all the time periods. This is especially annoying for bread recipes that have multiple rise times. The second thing that is missing is nutritional information. This can be added up pretty easily, but for the more complicated recipes with many ingredients, this is a hassle.
This magazine has been a great source of recipes. I will have to think about whether the entire book is worth getting. It appears that the full book is 352 pages with about 133 recipes and a number of pages of tips, techniques, and reviews, but the magazine is 64 pages with 64 recipes. I think maybe an online membership might be the way to go, since it provides access to all their content, including historical recipes.
Book Review: Respectable Sins
| March 21, 2010 | Posted by matt under reviews |
I received a copy of the venerable Jerry Bridges’ latest book Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate as a gift from my parents recently and slowly but steadily made my way through it. This is a very practical book that attempts to point out to Christians the sins that we have allowed to take root in our lives and accept. He starts the book with a discussion of sin and how it has disappeared not only from the vernacular of the country, but from most churches as well. When sin does come up in many Evangelical churches today, it is used to describe the actions of others instead of the actions of Christians. The first five chapters deal with a discussion of sin, how it separates us from God, and how the gospel is the only remedy for sin.
Chapter six is where the book begins to be very practical, providing some directions for dealing with sin. For example, Bridges recommends that once we identify that we struggle with a certain sin we should internalize scripture that deals with this sin, recognize the place of the Holy Spirit and pray regularly and specifically about the area of sin, and finally bring along others to help us in accountability and prayer.
The rest of the book deals with individual areas of sin: ungodliness, anxiety and frustration, discontentment, unthankfulness, pride, selfishness, lack of self-control, impatience and irritability, anger, judgmentalism, envy, jealousy, sins of the tongue, and finally worldliness. Seeing a long list like that would make just about anyone want to put the book down, but Bridges does a good job making the discussion encouraging and practical, often including examples from his own life.
I found that as I worked through the chapters I was really convicted in areas that I have ignored or not spent time thinking about. For example, the chapter on unthankfulness helped me to realize how little time I spend being thankful for the things that I have received in life. The chapter also dealt with the topic of being thankful in difficult circumstances, not just being thankful when everything is going well. The chapter on self-control helped me realize how a lack of it can wreak havoc in so many areas of life, and that overindulgence in any area can bring unhappiness.
In the chapter on impatience and irritability, Bridges describes impatience as a strong sense of annoyance at the (usually) unintentional faults and failures of others. I found this to be a very good definition that helped me to put some perspective on my irritability. I take the train to work, and I have turned into a typical experienced commuter who gets irritated with people who talk on the train. In almost all situations, the person doing this is not doing it intentionally, so if it is bothering me it is my problem.
The chapter on anger was also interesting. Bridges addresses the issue of righteous anger, something that many Christians use as an excuse for their anger over the actions of others. It seems to me like many Christians are very angry about political issues in the United States, and many may feel it is justified as righteous anger. He says:
“The fact that we may be reacting to another person’s real sin does not necessarily make our anger righteous. We are more likely more concerned with the negative impact of the sinful actions on us than we are that it is a violation of God’s law. Or we may even use the fact that it is a violation of God’s law to justify our own sinful angry response.
I would recommend this book for individuals, but it might work even better if read in small groups where there can be some discussion and accountability.
Bridges finishes off with some recommendations of putting some of the lessons of the book into practice, and ends with a very appropriate verse, 1 Peter 5:5: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble”.
Easy way to combine pdf files into one
| March 13, 2010 | Posted by matt under howto, techie |
This is a bit of a techie post, but I wanted to document how I do this since it seems to come up once or twice a year and I always forget the steps.
I had to submit a form via email to get reimbursed for my flex spending account and had to include scanned copies of my receipts. I wanted to send this as one file, but couldn’t remember how to combine the tiff files that my scanner software generated into one file. If you do a google search, you end up finding little utilities for windows or a tutorial of how to use Adobe Acrobat to accomplish this. Using a mac or linux machine, this is pretty straightforward with some free software.
You need ImageMagick and ghostscript installed. For the mac, the easiest thing is to use the wonderful Darwin ports to do this. To do this with ports is easy:
$ sudo port install ImageMagick ghostscript
Then, if you have tiff files (or other formats) from your scanner you want to convert them to pdf. This is easy using the ImageMagick convert tool. For example:
$ convert filename.tiff filename.pdf
The convert command determines the format based on the file suffix, so this will convert the tiff file to a pdf. It really is a swiss army knife of tools and this is just one of the most basic things you can do with it.
Then, take the multiple pdfs and combine them into one using ghostscript:
$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=combined.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
Tada!
Community Supported Agriculture with Cedar Valley Sustainable Farms
| March 6, 2010 | Posted by matt under Uncategorized |
After watching Food, Inc. recently we started to investigate alternatives to the local grocery store for obtaining our meat products. We recently signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) meat share with Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm. The farm is a family run farm in Ottawa, IL. Their meat share program allows you to purchase a wide selection of beef, chicken, and pork products from their farm which are available for local pickup once a month. The program currently costs $255/3 months, $500/6 months, $975/year.
The usual meat share has several cuts of beef or pork, hamburger, 1 1/2 to 2 chickens, some pork products, and a dozen eggs. All the meat is delivered frozen, and is in a freezer bag that is returned in the next month. The local pickup is in downtown Evanston and is a quick and easy errand for us on a Saturday around noon.
We have received two shares so far, and the quality has been excellent. In February, we received 1/2 dozen eggs (the chickens were cold!), 1 1/2 chickens, two filet mignons, one large sirloin steak, 4 bratwursts, and a pound of ground beef. This seemed to be a light share, but the two cuts of grass fed beef were excellent and were a good size. We especially enjoyed the sirloin steak.
The January Meat Share
In February, we received a 1 1/2 dozen eggs this time, 2 1/2 chickens that were smaller than the previous month, 1 pound of italian sausage, 1 pound of ground beef, a package of beef patties, and a pork loin.
The February Meat Share
The eggs from Cedar Valley are quite different from what I’m used to. Their yolks are a bright orange, and the yolks are very round and firm. You can’t see this in the picture below, but the yolk in the Cedar Valley egg is probably twice as high as the Phil’s Fresh egg. I’ve had them scrambled and fried and they are very good.
A Cedar Valley egg (top) vs. a Phil's Fresh egg (bottom)
I especially enjoy getting a variety of cuts of meat and trying new recipes. We have been stuck in a ‘boneless skinless chicken breast’ rut for some time, and making meals with chicken parts or whole chickens is kind of fun. So far we have only had to supplement a pound or two of ground beef, eggs, and chicken breasts for a few larger meals we have made for larger groups.
I highly recommend Cedar Valley, and hope that Community Supported Agriculture continues to catch on and become available for more people. It feels good to support a local family farm and be more connected to our food and where it comes from.
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