I recently found a very nice site about the beauty of LaTeX. It does a close comparison of the type of output you get with LaTeX as opposed to what you normally get with a program like Microsoft Word. There is also another nice article that it links to near the bottom comparing hyphenation using several different typesetting and word-processing programs. I will let you read about the rest yourself:
http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
So tonight for dinner we had some friends over, and I was trying to think of what to cook. Clare suggested some of the bread I made yesterday with some olive tapenade her parents had given us. That sounded like a great starter. So I started thinking of other dishes to go along with it. I thought of a risotto, but Clare was not too excited about that. I also considered pasta, but we had just had pasta. Then I considered polenta, but Wendy (one of the guests), is not too crazy about polenta. Then I thought of israeli couscous, which Wendy gave us, but then I realized that she gave it to us because she doesn’t like it. Finally I thought of gnocchi, which sounded very tasty. But we didn’t have any gnocchi. I looked up a recipe in my cookbook, Verdura: Italian Vegetables, but it seemed like a lot of work, and we would still have to buy potatoes. Then I got the bright idea to use the dumpling mix that we had. The mix was for German-style dumplings, but I thought it would do well enough. I mixed it up according to the directions and let it sit for 10 minutes. It was still a little runny, so I added a little flour. I then made it into little balls, and put it into some boiling water. It seemed to be doing well, but after several minutes they started falling apart. We were left a few little dumplings and some starchy soup. Very disappointing.
I am still not exactly sure what the problem was, but I have two theories, which are non-mutually exclusive (i.e. both could be contributing to the problem) —
I will keep these in mind for the next time.
The rest of the meal turned out very nicely though. I made kind of a primavera sauce, with onions, garlic, celery, green and red pepper, carrots, green beans, and diced tomatoes, cooked until most of the water had evaporated. I spiced it with the usual suspects — marjoram, thyme, oregano, sage, and rosemary. I also made some seitan, which had been on sale. I had never tried this type before. It was “chicken style” by White Wave. I drained it and sautéed it up in some lime flavored olive oil we had gotten for Christmas, with a little tarragon. It turned out very well.
Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) has the neat Spotlight feature which allows you to find all sorts of files very quickly and easily. It even allows you to search the contents of many files, including e-mail messages, pdf documents and Microsoft office documents. There is one flaw however. To do this it creates a database, which it updates periodically. That is all fine and dandy. But if you use an external hard drive from time to time, say for backups, it will also try to index this volume. Not only can this take a long time to index, but you probably don’t want it to return results from that hard drive anyways. The solution - Spotless. It is shareware, with the only drawback for the free version being that you have to wait for 15 seconds for it to start. It is a very simple GUI which lets you set the indexing status for different volumes.
Update: my friend Danny pointed me to another macosx hint which will do this from the command line, including for FAT32 volumes, which apparently Spotless cannot handle:
The same problem exists for the unix command locate. Even if you don’t use the locate command, it might be a good idea to follow the instructions in this article from macosxhints
While I was at the Acoustical Society of America meeting (see prior post for highlights), I roomed with an Italian guy, Gianluca. I did the work booking the room (which wasn’t that much work really), but apparently he thought I should be rewarded, so he bought me a cookbook. He definitely went out of his way to get the cookbook, since he first wanted to get me an Italian (i.e. written in Italian) cookbook, but since I don’t know Italian, that wouldn’t work so well. So he found a nice cookbook for me while he was visiting friends in New York called Verdura: Vegatables Italian Style. So far I have only tried one recipe, but there are lots of tasty sounding ones.
As the title of the post suggests, I tried Risotto with Porcini Mushrooms. For possible copyright infringement reasons I won’t post the recipe here, though I did find a nearly identical recipe on the internet. You’ll have to track down the book if you’re interested. I mostly followed the recipe, with a few exceptions — I used normal (champignon) mushrooms instead of porcini, because I had them on hand, and I also substituted some cream with soy milk. After serving, I topped it off with a little vegan parmesan cheese (nutritional yeast + almonds + salt). I’m looking forward to trying some of the other recipes such as Whole wheat spaghetti with fresh tomato mint sauce or Fusilli1 with spicy tomato and roasted pepper sauce.
1they really are silly, aren’t they?
Supposedly it is good luck to eat Black-eyed peas on New Year’s. I am not the superstitious type, but I like black-eyed peas, and because of their supposed luck, they were on sale at the grocery store, so I decided to make some. Our friend Wendy is a very good cook, and she has a nice black-eyed peas recipe on her website, so I decided to try it out. She had made it for me before, so I knew it was good. (Since I am writing, just a bit more about Wendy. Clare (my wife) and I were recently thinking about how much we cook compared to our friends, and we came to the conclusion that the only people we know who cook more than us are the Comisars. It should not come as a surprise that they are pretty good at it. And they are both very willing to accommodate my crazy vegan ways.)
I won’t copy the recipe here, but just tell you what I did with it. I mostly followed the recipe verbatim, except I left out paneer (not vegan), and added celery, because I thought it would be tasty. I cooked the peas in my pressure cooker, since it speeds things up a lot. Unfortunately I did not adjust the water very well, as pressure cooking usually requires less water (because less escapes from the pot). I ended up with too much water, and it was a bit soupy. To overcome this I added a can of tomato paste, which thickened things up a bit. Though a bit soupy, it was quite tasty. Thanks for the recipe Wendy — it was a good meal to start off 2007.