Eat at Joe's!

Ten Years

Kinda hard to believe:

First post, ten years ago

Another Day, Another Social Media Platform

"Life is short, but the days are long."  Somehow, that seems to mean that we should get our mittens into every possible crevice, in case we miss anything while we're in a hurry, sticking our mittens in other crevices.

Ahem.  Anyway, I have a presence on Google+ as Joseph D. Eater.  You will find me there on occasion.  You may find me there more than you find me here, or maybe not.  I certainly prefer G+ to FB.  It's certainly easy to drop items of interest there.  

I stuck a link in the top section of the sidebar.  

Ugh

I just put away over 1000 unread pieces of e-mail.  If I missed you, I apologize.   I should go back to just letting people leave me comments.  

Maintenance

I haven't been paying much attention to the sidebar recently, so it had gotten a little stale.  No longer: pretty much anything obviously dead or not recehtly updated has been removed, along with Twitter feeds to places I'd already linked to.  I've also added a couple things.  

Speaking of Twitter, my twitter feed is at https://twitter.com/eatjoe.

Enjoy.  

De-Polled

Vizu has decided to stop offering its free web-based polls.  So everything under the link for polls, as well as the polls themselves, is no more.  

If anyone has a suggestion on a similar service I could start using as a replacement, I'd appreciate hearing it.  

Good News, Bad News

I have a job.  I could say that I'm digging ditches in northwest Raleigh — in fact, let's say that, shall we?  So there's money coming in, which is good.  OTOH, I started a post about, er, fat over 5 weeks ago, and even though I found my copy of On Food and Cooking only 2 weeks afterward, I still haven't gotten back to the post, or anything else blog related.   No fun, is it?  No fun for my Gentle Readers, either, perhaps?  

So, I apologize for my poor organizational and time management skills.  With skills like that, how the hell was I ever any good at anything in a kitchen?  Actually, my cooking skills do seem to be going the way of the handbasket, with everything of mine being rote, utilitarian, or just plain lame.  I'm not cooking enough, or well, or creatively.  Any special meals are prepared by someone else or paid for or both, most of the time.  Not that I mind either, of course, but use it or lose it... and of course I'm glad to be working during the Great Recession, or at least it's (hopefully) rather long tail....

I should at least do a link dump sometime soon.  Then you folks can read delicious nuggets like how fish can make you happy in a bad way, &c.  Let's hope we all get our hobbies and enjoyments back, not just memories of them.  I hope you all have enough to eat, and I hope it's good.  Perhaps you can have a drink, too.  Go have a glass of sherry, a G&T, or a beer, and enjoy the rain.  Perhaps I'll do that myself.

State of The Blog, Or De-Kvetching — An Addendum

Despite my occasional flatulent complaint, I still enjoy writing this damn thing.  I hope you, my Gentle Readers, still enjoy reading it on occasion.  As always, thank you for your support.  This is not intended to be a diary; occasionally it may turn into one, but after almost seven years and around 741 posts, it's the ones like these that keep me going.  Again, thanks for your readership.  Enjoy your holiday season, and cook a little if you can.  It's good for you.  :)

Another Personal Note

You know, I've really grown to dislike all the stoopid crap I do to remain semi-anomymous.  Mostly it's the separate web browsers, sets of cookies, and e-mail accounts I dislike.  I screw up all the time too, and it's not like half of Durham doesn't know who I am anyway.  Then there's the people I want to out myself to because I like them or whatever, but that causes its own set of problems.  I even set up a Linkedin profile after someone sent me a request.  I still think it's a good idea for reviewers to be anonymous, but it's not like I do a hell of a lot of reviewing.  I should just give up.  

Twitter! I Hardly....

So Typepad allows a automatic Tweet when I post here.  I'm doing it semi-automatically; Tweeting posts that seem substantial (like the previous corn post), but not for, say, the typical one-liner or repost of an article found elsewhere.  I don't want to drown my few followers in Tweets, but I would like to point out the substantial stuff.  Any opinions, O Gentle Readers?  (I'll Tweet this post too.)

Countdown

You have approximately one week  until Beaujolais nouveau release day.

That means you have about two weeks  until Turkey day.

Party on, Garth.

Bookkeeping

I nuked some links to dead restaurant sites, blogs with no posts in like 6 months, blogs that are now locked down or dead, &c.  If your site becomes active again, let me know.  

One reason I was doing that is I'd like to improve load times for pages on my blog.  Does it seem slow to anyone else?  I'm actually paying Typepad to publish this, so I want to get my money's worth.  :)

Mea Culpa

A personal note: 

I'd like to apologize to you, my wonderful population of Gentle Readers, especially you Gentle Correspondents who've written me over the past several months.  Not only has my posting dwindled off, but also my inbox is up to over 140 messages (not counting the spam the filters didn't catch).  Some of that has been, er, unmolested since last summer.  All I can say: four residences and two broken computers over eighteen months or so is a lot to put up with.  I've also been without internet access for part of that time -- indeed, without a job for maybe half of it.  My bad. 

But the news is good: the trends are up, good things are happening all over the place, and most of the above are fixed.  I've been able to post more lately, and hope to be working on the backlog of e-mail that's accumulated.  I hope I'll be able to post even more, and maybe even expand my coverage to some of Chapel Hill.  I hope you folks can once again enjoy reading my blog, and I can get back to the enjoyable task of writing it. Maybe I'll even sneak a review in here somewhere. 

Laissez les bons temps rouler.  ;)  And enjoy your 4th of July weekend. 

State Of The Blog, Graphic Version

Click to enlarge.

More Web.Distractions

If you feel a deep need:

Plurk: http://www.plurk.com/eatatjoes

Or if you're older-school:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/eatjoe

I have Plurk fed to Twitter, so following me on Plurk will essentially get you my Twitter feed, except in those rare cases where I follow up or re-Tweet directly on Twitter.  I'm more likely to follow up to Plurks via Plurk, and those *don't* go through to Twitter.  So there.  :)  

(It's not like I do a lot of microblogging anyway.  I just have a lot of free time on my hands.)  

New Durham Food Blogs

I've added a couple new Durham food blogs to the sidebar:

• Green Eats
• BakingPolicy

Go introduce yourselves.  :) 

Wow, I really would love a quarter's worth of Spam squirted thru a little metal tube

http://gastromatic.net/

[Via Wine Authorities, after they clearly had too much to drink.  Dude.]

Happy Birthday To Me!

Eat at Joe's! is 5 years old today!  Yay! 

It'll get better

I know my fans must be pissed at the low posting volume these days, but I'm both ill and trying to move.  It's yucky.  Wish me luck.

D'oh

Feed problematic.  D'oh.  Of course if you're reading me via a feed reader, you won't get this. :-/

Comment Feeds for Individual Posts

Sometime during the last few months, TypePad made a change such that you, my Gentle Readers, can now read a syndicated feed of comments for individual posts by using a feed reader.  I keep a list of recent comments up, but the feed might make it easier to keep up with a particular comment thread.

BTW, thank god I'm caught up on commenting, I think. 

A Little Break

I'm out of Durham for a week or two, some of the time in areas without reputations for things culinary.  If I find anything interesting, I'll let you know.  Or maybe I'll have time for useless blather.  OTOH, as little as I've been posting, maybe no one'd notice if I just kept my mouth shut.  :)

Minestrone

When I haven't been eating enough vegetables, or when "the fleshpots have gotten too rich for your blood," as Julia puts it, I pull out my copy of Moosewood Restaurant's first cookbook, called simply Moosewood Cookbook, and make the minestrone:

There are a number of things I like about the recipe:

• It's simple.
• It has lots of vegetables.
• Most of the ingredients are either pantry staples, or are vegetables I'm likely to keep around anyway (like mirepoix vegetables).
• It's flexible: there's no reason one can't add other vegetables one likes, or meat, as I did in this case: I had some "Italian sausage" I wanted to use up.  I also often use different beans than the suggested garbanzos.  This time it was kidney beans; next time it might be cannellini.
• It's an excellent repository for leftovers.  This batch got about a cup of leftover peas and a half-cup or so of leftover corn kernels.
• It keeps well, like a lot of soups.  But the pasta will absorb as much water as it possibly can, and become gargantuan.  The pasta in the above photo was originally orzo.  It's now as big as small macaroni.  :)

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Edit:  I'm beginning to appreciate how difficult food photography is.  I took about 50 shots of that damn soup in maybe three different bowls and in the pot, with different lighting and flash settings.  Even after editing the one photo I used, I'm still not happy.  And then TypePad cuts down the size of the thing.  Argh.  At least you can click on it to see a bigger version. 

While I'm venting:  I've occasionally tried to submit Eat at Joe's! to various food-related engines and link listings.  Something always goes wrong:  They fail to answer.  They tell me I need to link back.  Once someone told me I didn't have enough links to other food blogs, because she only saw one; I had about five links up at the time.  Or they tell me I don't fit into their scheme, even though it seems to me like I do when I submit my request.  The last person told me I didn't have enough recipes or pictures.  I'm not going to ask that person again, but I tried to stick a big-ass picture on this post as sort of revenge.  And of course it didn't work.  D'oh. 

I get the impression that while I think my blog is clearly a food blog, it's neither fish nor fowl as far as food blogs are concerned, so it just doesn't fit into other folks' ideas of what exactly a food blog should be.  Oh well.  You folks just keep linking to me instead.  That'll show them.  ;)

Burger Poll and Housekeeping

I usually do a follow-up post for a poll when that poll drops off the front page of my blog.  I'm a little late this time.  :) 

When the poll actually dropped off, Dain's, the Fed, and Wimpy's were very close to being tied (they were actually tied at some point, but I don't know if that's exactly when they dropped off).   In any case, the ranking right now has Dain's in the lead (25.6%), with the Federal 2nd (24.1%), and Wimpy's 3rd (23.6%).  But it's very close: out of the current 203 votes (you people, once again, totally rock!), Dain's is ahead of the Fed by just 3 votes, with the Fed being ahead of Wimpy's by also 3 votes.  Coming in 4th was Cook Out with 17.7%.  "Other" is 5th with 10.8%.  Everyone else after that is at single-digit percentages. 

This was an odd poll.  The Fed, which at first no one even nominated, jumped out to a big early lead.  But then, over the next month, both Dain's and Wimpy's made up the gap.  But these polls are more for fun than anything, so maybe I shouldn't sweat the occasional oddity in the polling. 

As I usually do, I've taken the poll out of the sidebar.  However, it's still open, and you can see and vote the poll off its original post or the polls page.  Knock yourself out if you feel so inclined.  And thanks for playing. 

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Once again I've done some minor site tweaking.  I took the explicit showing of Technorati tags off while still using them.  Unfortunately, that meant posts I tagged weren't being picked up properly by outside.in.  So I put that back. 

I also installed an all-singing, all-dancing widget for sharing posts: ShareThis lets you share links through around 30 different services like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Friendster, and old fashioned e-mail.  I don't think that, compared to my number of readers, very many people use a link-sharing service.  But some do, and I like not discriminating, while also keeping clutter down. 

I've added comment feeds for individual posts.  So now, if you like, you can use a feed reader to check and see if anyone is commenting on a particular post you're interested in.  I don't think I can get stats for that service, so it'll be hard to tell whether it's useful, but it sounds neat. 

There are also some changes I'm thinking about.   Maybe 18 months ago, I put up a widget that allowed folks to give me cash.  :)  I set the donations to go directly toward paying my blog bill.  I got an almost immediate $25 donation (thanks), but since then there's been nothing.  I actually have to pay extra money to get that widget, and it costs me about $40/yr.  So I took that down.  But I may try running ads to see if I can make this site self-supporting.  That also costs money, but I already paid for that service level when I got the donation widget, and my next annual billing date doesn't come up for 2 or 3 months.  It might be interesting to see if I can make the site pay for itself that way without running off all my readers.  I can also stick ads in the site feed.  Any of you have an opinion?  Would you stop reading if I put up ads? 

I'm also thinking about ditching the pork barrel.  I thought it would be neat to run a shared food blog.  Unfortunately, all my initial recruits bailed on me (if they started at all). I do have one new person who has posted there twice.  But my thinking now is that maybe I should just offer those people the ability to guest post here on Eat At Joe's!  Again, your feedback is welcome.

As always, thanks for your support.  I'm at close to 200 regular subscribers for the RSS/Atom feed, plus regular readers who drop by.  That's gratifying.  Thank you. 

WWW Woes

If you read this blog with a feed reader, you may notice or have noticed a blip in service.  Typepad is currently (1:45 pm, 18 April 2008) working on an issue with RSS/Atom feeds through FeedBurner.  I do not have an ETA.  Of course, if you do read EAJ! through a feed reader, you'll never get this.  :/

100,000 Hits

I got my 100,000th lifetime hit on Eat at Joe's! early this morning.  It was a hit on the post "'Nor any drop to drink.'" by someone Googling the phrase "water+usage+restaurant" at 12:32 am EDT. 

As always, gang, thank you for the support and readership. 

Happy Birthday

Today is a special day.  Maura -- my friend, occasional partner-in-crime, and frequent commenter here -- has a birthday today.  She too has a food blog: The Wooden Spoon.  And hopefully she'll be appearing in print, with some food-related writing in the first issue of the forthcoming Durham Magazine.  Go wish her a happy birthday.  :)

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Today is also Eat at Joe's! fourth birthday!  I'll probably be rolling over 400 posts sometime in the next few weeks.  In the next several days, I'll get my 100,000th hit.  I was kind of hoping I'd get to it by today, but it's all good.  I still have more readers than I ever imagined.  Thanks, gang.  :)

I'm also having to make some choices about how I blog.  One thing I like doing is following up on most comments left here.  It's not that I have to get in the last word,  :)  but I want people to feel connected to the site.  I may not follow up on every comment, and sometimes I'll make one comment be an answer for the previous three or four commenters, but I like to try.  However, I'm failing: right now I've got 21 comments in my inbox I haven't responded to.  I also have unanswered e-mail to [email protected], which is my contact address here.  A couple days ago I realized that I was not posting more entries because I hadn't caught up on comments and mail.  Short-term, that might be ok.  Long-term, it's bad: if I don't post, there's no blog.  So I posted.  :)  But I say something here because I might start backing off on the amount of feedback you folks get when you leave comments.  One good thing is that you folks generally have achieved a sort of critical mass, where your own comments to other comments and posts are self-sustaining.  Just remember that even if I don't answer, I still love you.  :)  I also read every comment, whether I answer it or not.  Hundreds of other readers are reading here, and they may read or answer your comment too.  So keep it coming.

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Have a happy March Thirteenth.  It's a nice day out there in Durham, so go pack a snack and a bottle of wine, and sit outside somewhere nice.  And if you're having a birthday today too, Happy Birthday.  :)

Edit: I forgot to mention that we've moved up in Google's search rankings.  If you put "Eat at Joe's" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky," you'll get this blog.  Same for "durham food blog."  Excellent.  :)

Backed Up

Folks, I'm a little behind on comments and correspondence.  Hopefully I'll be getting caught up soon. 

On the other hand, I've done two of what could be considered reviews in the past week.  Maybe that makes me The Man.  ;)

Feed Me

At the risk of cluttering the sidebar into unintelligibility, I've added a feed for the pork barrel.  TPB is a shared food blog I've set up with some other folks.  I've been inviting a few other people to post occasionally: some have and some haven't.  Anyway, you'll see the subject lines of the last 5 posts as links to the posts themselves. 

"We are building a blogging force of extraordinary magnitude."

Kira, my friend and regular commenter here at EAJ!, has started her own food blog: 

Le Vin et Le Pain

I've linked to her in the sidebar.  I've also asked her to post on my new shared food blog:

The Pork Barrel

I've invited some other folks too, both local and out-of-state.  We forge our tradition in the spirit of our ancestors. You have our gratitude.

The Golden Age of Wireless: Tips & Tricks #4

FWIW, I've put up a page with Durham restaurants that have wireless net.access for their patrons.  I imagine it will constantly be an imperfect work in progress.  I can't decide yet whether I want it to be anyplace with wireless, or anywhere I've actually been and confirmed that there's wireless.  But if someone wants to write me and tell me about places that have wireless, maybe I'll put them up, or maybe I won't.  :)

While I was doing that, I set up a separate chunk in the sidebar for all my "pages," as opposed to "posts."  I forgot about an automatic feature TypePad has for that, so I did it twice, and threw the first one away.  :)  And while I was doing that, I had to reconfigure the sidebar anyway, and while I was doing THAT, I moved the sidebar to the other side, which will make pages seem to load faster.  And I imagine while I was doing all of THAT, I could have easily screwed something up, so let me know if I did, ok?