Pancake Recipe

I've been wanting to write about my pancakes for a little while now, and since I don't ever think I'll have them perfect, so timing this post with Ze Frank's "Pankegg" recipe seems as good enough.

Here's my current recipe:
Dry:
1 cup flour
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (optional)*

Wet:
1 egg
2 tbs butter, melted
1 cup milk

Equipment:
Mixing bowl, microwave-safe cup, teflon pan, spatula, fork (or sifter), and spoon.

*Cinnamon is tasty, but not for everyone. Even if it's not your favorite thing, beginners who don't own sifters (much like me) may want to add it to help them see when all the dry ingredients have been reasonably mixed. Also, note that if you do choose to add cinnamon, your pancakes will end up noticeably darker. They should end up a brassy-brown instead of a golden-brown; a lesser metal, maybe, but certainly a tasty pancake!

Method:
FIRST melt the butter. You want as much time for it to cool down as possible. Personally, I should wait longer than I do, but I only cook when I'm hungry - things tend to get rushed. To melt the butter: put it in a glass and into the microwave for about 2 minutes.

In a dry bowl, dump in all of the dry ingredients. If you're a little more affluent than me, you can get a sifter and sift 'em together. I just stir it up with a fork for a bit.

For the first time tonight, I tried this method with mixing wet ingredients. It worked pretty okay.

Poor the milk into the cup with the melted butter. If your milk is cold (and it probably is,) much of the butter will clump back into solids and float to the top. This looks kinda disgusting, but is OK. You can think of those clumps as flavor crystals. Crack an egg into the cup, and mix it all up.

I like to add the wet into the dry in half-steps. I like to think that helps cut down on major lumps, but it probably just helps to keep me occupied during all the necessary stirring. Add half of the wet mixture, and mix in until it's mostly a doughy consistency and you don't see much try flour left. Then add half of what's left of the wet mixture. Stir until it's all an even consistency. It should become fluid in this step, but you'll probably say to yourself "Damn, this'll never become pourable batter with how little fluid I have left!" Then add the rest of the wet mixture. You'll quickly see that it's becoming a fine batter, and that you were wrong to think otherwise (yes, I think these same things every time I make 'em.) The batter should stay just on this side of "soupy," but if you like thinner 'cakes, feel free to add a splash more milk.

You should've been heating up the pan while you were mixing the batter, but if you're like me, then you either forgot or didn't read the recipe far enough ahead. That's okay, it only means that you'll be starving for a couple extra minutes. Grab a cookie.

After the pan is heated to medium heat, poor a glop of your batter no bigger than your spatula into the pan. If you pour out gigantic 'cakes, they can be hard to flip. Note: I don't add fat to the pan because I use teflon pans. I add the butter flavor in the batter, and clean-up is a lot easier when my pan isn't coated in grease.

When you see bubbles appear near the center of your 'cake, it's time to flip. Flip quickly, because the top will still be a little wet. If you get some splash, just scooch the batter back towards your 'cake with the spatula. If the top wasn't wet, you may need to turn up the heat or flip a little sooner. If the pancake solidifies before it's flipped, it'll still taste just fine, but it'll be a little ugly on one side.

After forty seconds (?) or so, take the pancake off and start again. I've never actually timed these things, and the first one is never perfect. You'll be doing it several times, so you should have the hang of the timing before you're done.

Makes 7-8 pancakes, and serves 2. I wrap the second serving up in plastic wrap and throw it in the fridge, to heat up in the oven and eat later in the week.

I wrote a lot of words, but they're really pretty simple to make, and kinda hard to screw up. If you want to experiment with the basic recipe, try getting the butter in there in different ways, or adding more or less baking soda. Of course, you can also experiment by adding blueberries or chocolate chips or whatever you like. I hope you enjoy 'em.

Black Fish

For dinner tonight, I had blackened halibut and some cheese bread. I wish I could've taken a picture for ya, 'cause it was the best looking meal I've had in a long time.

I've never managed to make blackened fish before. Honestly, I don't know how I've managed to screw it up in the past. Here's the recipe I used: Put salt, pepper, cayenne on a fish; heat up some butter in a pan; fry the fish. If you do it right, the fish'll be very spicy and kind of tough on the outside, while staying soft and creamy on the inside.

Lesser preparations are often served with remoulade or a spicy mayonnaise, and they tend to be over-cooked. You need the sauce to compensate when your fish isn't quite so soft. Normally, I like a bit on these typically-bland white fish, but with tonight's halibut being more than an inch thick, over-cooking was not a problem, and it came out perfectly. Which was good, since I don't actually have any mayo on hand, not to mention remoulade.

Six Things

A friend asked me to write six things about myself that most people wouldn’t know. I’m a pretty open person, so it’s taken me a while to think up these things, but here ya go.

1. I kept up a livejournal for about a year, starting just before I moved to Florida. On it, I talked almost entirely about myself and about abstract thoughts I had in my head. Since I’m supposed to write about myself, I guess I'll hearken back to those old days, although I have rather mixed feelings about the dramatic persona I assumed while writing that journal. It allowed me to produce some of the best texts I've ever written, but at the same time it made me frequently depressed or upset, and I was often embarrassed by the emotional immaturity shown in my entries. I eventually deleted the journal for these reasons, but I archived nearly every post first. I could still zip up my history and send it to you, if you'd like. Of course, you can just read this blog if you want something more current.

2. As a related thought: from when I graduated highschool until I left for Florida - a span of about five years - my primary career goal was to become a writer. I kept several paper journals and wrote quite often, if not daily. I eventually abandoned this goal for two reasons: I didn't feel that my writing style was commercially viable, however much I liked it, and I didn't want to become jaded with writing because I loved it so much. Since moving to Michigan, I haven't been writing nearly as often. I've abandoned my writer's persona in order to lead a more sane and happy life, and this led to a lot less emotional drama and hence, a lot less to write about. No big loss, though. It’s still something I enjoy doing from time to time.

3. I've recently been discovering how much of a visual memory I have. This comes as quite a surprise to me, because most of my thoughts are about language and programming, neither of which can be considered exactly ‘visual.’ I also have a very hard time understanding visual arts. I had to study a bit of art history before I could "get" art (paintings, drawings, etc) in any meaningful way, and I'm famously bad at watching movies and TV (unless they're very surreal, they tend to make me uncomfortable.) I'm the ‘trivia guy' among my friends - I'm often found reciting all sorts of obscure and useless facts; I don't really understand how I could store all of this random information in a visual manner.

But the facts remain: I remember maps better than I remember directions, faces better than names. When I begin to create or design, ideas most often appear to me as boxes, with a general aura or feeling about what information they contain. When writing, I set these boxes up in lines, and the auras flow into each other as context and emotion. In programming, the boxes are set into 2D space, and then connect via information flows. The elbow grease comes in when deciding what meat-hook realities that those flows represent - often times, this is a direct analogue to the text I need to create. It's the process of turning pictures into words.

In my studies of writing and literature, I've been most fascinated by connotation. I'm always on the lookout for the most subtle facets of every word I read or use (although I admit that I often can't see connotations as well as other readers might.) They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I guess my search is for a word that will exactly meet the picture in my head and prove that saying wrong.

4. To switch gears a little bit, I’d like to talk about the rice cooker my sister gave me for Christmas. It's changed my fucking life. No one seems to believe me on this point. Perfectly cooked rice with no work is not something to be overlooked.

I keep containers of various rice toppings around, and whenever I'm hungry I just warm up the rice leftover in the cooker, and the topping warms in the microwave. Combine and eat. It's about as simple as a microwave dinner, while being cheaper, healthier and tastier. Every few days, I run out of cooked rice and want some new topping, so I spend about an hour making them both, and then I can sit myself down to a fresh, home-cooked meal. I buy a few ready-made toppings, too. I'm a particular fan of salsa, but beans are also good, of course. My favorite home-cooked topping is a mixed-bag stir fry, using whatever meat I have ready and some frozen vegetables. (I use frozen vegetables because fresh tend to rot before I can use them all, and they tend to be more expensive.) I've also put my leftover barbecue chicken on rice, when I was tired of eating it on bread. I’m always on the lookout for more crap that might taste good on top of rice. Mmmm.

5. If you hadn’t already gathered, I like to cook. I taught myself how when I was 19 or 20, because I was developing a taste for “fine” foods but didn’t have the money to go out and eat all the time. It was a little awkward for me at first, because cooking rarely happened in the house I grew up in. Luckily, two of my friends were teaching themselves how to cook around the same time, so we helped each other out, and continue to share food ideas to this day.

I’m very much a recipe-free cook. Many of my favorite things to make, I learned by reading a bunch of similar recipes or, occasionally, just by reading the ingredient lists on stuff at stores. (That’s how I taught myself to make taco sauce, for instance.) I think that’s the best way to learn cooking, because you learn more about what ingredients you like instead of just what dishes you like. It teaches you how to experiment. Of course, it’s very hard for me to make the same dish twice. I like that, though, because I get bored very easily.

More recently, I’ve been actively using two different recipes. The first one, which I’ve written about here before, is a recipe for Chinese roast pork. I follow that recipe because 1) I’m still very unused to working with Asian flavors, and 2) I’m making enough pork for 10+ meals, so I want to play it safe. Experimentation has the nasty side-effect of occasionally making food inedible. The other recipe is simply for pancakes. This is a recipe I came up with myself, after reading many different recipes. I’m working from a strict version of that invention because I’m experimenting with minor changes in each batch, in an effort to get consistently wonderful pancakes. I’ll write about that in more detail sometime soon.

6. It’s mostly unrelated to my previous points, but I think it’s interesting to know that I grew up in a different household than what’s considered “normal.” I try to tell all of my friends about how I grew up, but sometimes I forget. So if you didn’t know these things about my family now’s your chance to learn!

My parents were nearly forty when I was born. I am my dad’s only child, but I have a half-brother and half-sister through my mom. I never shared a roof with my brother and I only lived with my sister for about two years; they are 19 and 16 years older than me, respectively. My parents got divorced when I was about three years old. Growing up, I primarily lived with my mom, but I visited my dad almost every weekend until I was sixteen or seventeen, and he moved a few hundred miles away.

It might be a “different” upbringing, but it couldn’t have been all that bad if it still produced a person you like, right?

-

I think that’s a fair enough six points. I’ve included some current stories and some history, some easily discovered things and some uncomfortably personal ones. It’s been fun, maybe I’ll do it again sometime.

A minor success and a dismal failure.

Last week, I finished my first Magic Online league. I did pretty well, finishing 26th of 256, and I picked up 3 packs for my trouble. I think my play skills improved tremendously, but I’m not so sure about my deck building skills. Although I may play or build better in the future, I don’t plan on placing much higher. I only lost 6 “real” games, which isn’t far from the T8 who all lost between 2 and 3 games, not counting tiebreakers. (And they all played a ton of tiebrakers, probably more than real games, and certainly more than I would have time & patience for.)

So I’ve been trying to decide what I want to do with all these shiny new cards I bought to play with in the league. Now that packs are opened, I can’t use them again in any limited games, which was my primary reason for signing up to Magic Online.

The simple solution is just to sell the cards and use the cash to buy more fresh packs for Limited games. That seems like a good idea, but I’m a bit of a packrat. It’s frustrating enough to have paper cards which I don’t have online, I don’t want to compound that by finding myself one day saying “Oh, I had four [card in neat deck idea]s, but not anymore!”

Collecting tons of cards and piecing them into decks is a little outside my budget right now. Furthermore, with all this online competition, my inner Spike has been growing a lot. Collecting enough cards to build a Competitive deck is waaaaay outside my budget (in fact, it’s outside of most peoples budgets.) So, in order to feed my inner Spike and manage my cards online, I’ve decided to start trading down to two specific colors and a specific archetype.

I decided to play two colors because it's both competitive and flexible. Three color decks would spread my resources thin and they're only workable right now because of all the color fixing in Ravnica. Mono is certainly a less expensive route, but right now in Standard mono basically isn't viable. Sometimes, a specific deck will come to the fore, like black rack right now, but that puts me on the course of collecting for a specific deck, which decreases my card collection's flexibility.

Eventually, I'd like to have four-ofs of all the tier-one cards in my chosen colors, but to give myself some kind of direction, I've decided to pick an archetype. I'd like to play control because sealed is primarily an aggro format, and so I feel that those skills will be improving as I play Limited. In constructed there is the card pool to be able to play control, and that's something I'm eager to learn. I currently only have the vaguest ideas of how to play that archetype. Combo isn’t really an archetype I want to pursue. If I play in Standard, playing combo means collecting towards a specific deck list instead of collecting cards that fit a general strategy. Again, that decreases flexibility. As an added bonus, if there's no R/U storm combo after Time Spiral rotates out, most of the cards in my hard-won Dragonstorm deck would be useless.

So it's decided: I’m gonna play control. Now let's move on to choosing colors. First, I want to play Black. I like the flavor, and it usually works well with my strategy. My guess in PC Standard is that the best black control deck will be B/w. (Although W/U might still be better. Hi, Blink-Bounce decks!) Don’t ask too much about this guess; my meta-gaming leaves much to be desired. If I want to go into white, I know some of the basic cards I’ll want in my collection. And they cost a million dollars. Damnation, WoG, Bob, Godless Shrine, just to name the top 4. But I’ll want Damnation and Bob in black either way, and I’m sure that any other color I’d pick will have its pricy duals and other must-haves.

The trouble is, I can't think up the B/W control deck that will be so great. I can think up a pretty good mono-G (or G/R) aggro. Mono'd be cheaper than 2 colors, but 1) it's not black and 2) I'm not sure it's competitive. What I *did* think up was a U/B control deck that I think might be pretty okay. I don't know enough about control though, so I'm not sure it's worth pursuing. Here's a decklist, lemmie know what you think.

Dismal Failure
(Parenthesis means that I wish I could fit it in/test it out.)

Instants:
4 Funeral Charm
4 Piracy charm
2 Venarian Glimmer
4 Rune Snag
4 Spell Snare
4 Boomerang or Wipe Away
4 Clutch of the Undercity
4 Dismal Failure
(2 Haunting Hymn)
(4 Remand)
(4 Snapback or Repeal)

Sorcery:
4 Smallpox
2 Damnation
(3 Stupor)

Creature:
2 Petrahydrox or Mindslicer or Plague Sliver

Other:
2 The Rack
(4 Phyrexian Arena or Dark Confidant)

Land:
Duals, duals, islands, swamps, etc.



Here's my thoughts on card choices:

Discard: 10 instant-speed spells. The charms can double as removal. Only 2 Venerian Glimmer because they only have the one use. Smallpox and Dismal Failure are discard++.

As a quick aside: I’ve read several set reviews now, and no one is mentioning Venarain Glimmer. Did I miss something? Why isn’t this being mentioned? It’s not super-exciting, but I think it can wreck a ton of decks, esp. combo. In Vintage it's practically a blue Duress. Just sayin’. Also: its name has just been officially changed to Venereal Glimmer. Because I like dirty words.

Counterspells: They, um, counter spells. 12 was all I could fit.

Unsummon: helps with early control, and late game can be used as removal or LD when como'd with discard.

Creature: I just want a good finisher. The Petrahydrox is good against an empty hand, because with all that instant discard, any removal will have to be instant i.e. targeted. If he had Flash he’d be golden. Mindslicer kills a little faster and is better against cards-in-hand because he sets up The Rack on removal. Plague Sliver just gets the job done faster, and he stands up against most removal. Any of these can be fetched with Clutch of the Undercity.

Core:
Smallpox: everything it does works well with this deck. No creatures. Low mana costs. The self-discard is the only drawback.

Dismal Failure represents the essential strategy of the deck: counterspell and discard. Here, I think it really is better than Rewind, because it's the exact kind of 2-for-1 this deck is looking for. In fact, I'm calling this deck 'Dismal Failure,' because it's the heart of the strategy (although not the winning card.) It's also a funny name for a janky rogue deck.

Damnation is really what gets the ball rolling. I don't think I have to say much about WoG in a control deck.

The Rack: The main source of damage is the Creature, but this can make a handy alt. win.

To walk you through it: you basically sit on your hands until you drop Damnation, then draw-go to counter/discard. Eventually the Creature or Rack kills 'em. I'm not gonna bother about the sideboard until I've made the deck and tested a bit. It'll take me a long time to gather up all those cards (although the base number of rares is pretty small, just Damnation and Duals. Maybe I can start testing earlier expected.) I'm not sure that this deck is playable without a draw engine, but those spells cost a lot of money.

I guess you've read the whole post by now, but if somehow you haven't, here's the short version: I want to start collecting cards towards a serious deck, but I feel a like I’m stabbing in the dark. I’m thinking about going B/U control. What do you think its chances are in PC Standard? Do you think I should go in a different direction? I like this deck, but I know it needs a lot of work. What changes do you think I should make?

Steamed Pork Buns, a Journal

I was at this convention one time (GDC 2005, to be specific), and during an evening of free food and beer there, I managed to score a couple of pork buns. They were good. Maaaan, were they good. It's the only time I've ever had them, before or since.

They were so good though, that every few months, I remember how awesome they were, and that happened again recently. I've also been trying to figure out how to work with flour. I seemed to recall that the buns were steamed, and it just so happens that I got a rice-cooker/steamer for Christmas. Score!

Now all I needed was a recipe. A little clicking around brought me to This. Well, I didn't want to possibly ruin two dozen buns, so I cut the recipe in half.

So begins this cooking journal.

Monday.

In the morning, I went to the store to gather ingredients. I already had most of what I needed for the dough from my recent experiments with flour, so I just picked up some yeast and the stuff I'd need for the roast pork. I cut a couple corners with the ingredients, because I'm kind of poor and I don't want to buy a thousand things. I'll cover how I got over those speed bumps as I go along.

At the store, my grocery list asked for star anise. I was pretty sure this was some kind of plant, so I went looking in the fresh produce section. I ended up coming home with a fiberous lump of green and white labeled Fennel/Anise. I soon learned that this was quite different from the little dried star that the recipe calls for. After some consultation online and with friends, I learned that fennel and anise are nearly the same thing, and although I now had a big chunk of plant instead of a little dried star, I could make do with what I had.

That night, I made the marinade. I chopped up the fennel bulb and saved the stems (these would become important later.) I hacked up a bunch of ginger and crushed a few garlic cloves. I cut my pound of pork shoulder to fit, and everything got dumped in a great big pot and covered with soy sauce and water.

I don't have plastic bags large enough for the pork, but I figured marinating in a pot would work

Goblins

Yeah, I read a lot of webcomics. I know. I don't even really keep a count anymore, but there's probably about a dozen that I try to read every time they update. Then maybe another five or six I stop in at from time-to-time. And I found another one today.

Now, I know how it is: You probably don't read webcomics (few folks seem to.) I'm not here to try to convert you to my favorites, like XKCD or Scary Go Round, because they can be a little odd. Webcomics is a wide and diverse genre, so I don't really expect you to fall right in love with any of them, although they can be good for a chuckle from time to time.

That being said,
Holy Shit, Goblins!

Goblins is the best comic I've read in a long time. Medium notwithstanding. Goblins is easily up there with Leisure Town for Best Comic Ever, and in paper-comic terms is beyond Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and somewhere in the realm of Too Much Coffee Man. If I had the 30$, I'd be buying Book One immediately.

I see now that there's a running theme among all of my favorite story comics. I hadn't realized it was true until I started reading Goblins, but it made me remember something that R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties once said about Goats. Paraphrasing, we both heartily enjoy comics that are actually funny and the characters exhibit real pathos, a seemingly impossible feat. Goblins has both those things in spades, and that's precisely why I enjoy reading.

It's all fun and games, but I should warn of one small piece of overhead. If you're reading this blog then it likely shouldn't matter, but Goblins is a gaming comic. Specifically, it's set in the world of D&D, and there are a lot of jokes and even plot points that can probably only be understood alongside role playing games. While geeking about games can be fun all by itself, that's only part of the story with Goblins. (As well as with Order of the Stick, which is also good, but I digress.)

You shouldn't be reading this post anymore, you should be off reading Goblins, but since you're still here, I guess you need more convincing. In simple terms, the storyline centers around a clan of Goblins who have been trying to save themselves for generations from being easy XP for low-level adventurers, but it hasn't been working out well. It also concerns a group of low-level adventures that come to destroy the goblins. It's a moral play, and it comes off astonishingly well. The goblins also have comical names like "Dies Horribly," "Thaco," and "Complains About Names."

Read it. Start from the beginning, which is a little rough and in black-and-white, but it's well worth it to watch the characters build up. (Don't worry, it changes to full color pretty quickly.) After you get caught up, you should note that it updates every Saturday-ish. Then you and I can read along together. Soon, when you're feeling especially generous, you can buy me the book.

Various

I should write in here more often, so that all these little things don't pile up so much.

I beat some videogames!
I never beat one-player videogames. I usually play a given game for two or four days, and then go off to do something else, but I recently beat Castlevania DS (although I started from a save-game leftover from summer) and Titan Quest. The latter was so much fun that I immediately started a second character and got about 1/3 through the game again. I like playing that character more than the first one, but it was time to move on. So for my next project:

I've ripped a Bunch of CDs.
My plan is to move my stereo equipment into the office, but leave the speakers in the living room, so that I can have all my musics in one handy place. As of presstime, I've ripped a little over a hundred CDs. That's roughly a third of my collection. I've been ripping them all into .wma format. The little option says that it's lossless, but I'm not so sure. Can anyone verify this for me?
It's all been pretty time consuming. There's just enough time between swapping CDs to get bored, but not enough that I can really do anything productive that doesn't also involve the computer. So in those ten-to-twenty minute chunks,

I've started designing a videogame.
Basically, it's a choose-your-own-adventure book with musical page-turning. You get to play DJ for some poor sap's life. I haven't worked out the story too much yet, because I want to work in environments that my (as-yet unknown) artist is comfortable with. Equally important for this game will be the music, and I've got a guy to do that for me. Ideally, this will be a three-person game development, let's see if I can make it happen.
Since I have a basic concept of the game mechanics, I've started work on the tech design. I'll develop the game tech in tandem with the story. I've never done 3D animations before, so the graphics tech could be very tricky. I'm willing to work in 2D, but that might make the artist's job impossibly hard. If I'm lucky, this will be a fun forray into fuzzy logic and neural networks. If I'm not, it'll be months and months of frustrating animation development. I'll keep you posted.