Eat at Joe's!

Resurrecting both my blog & Twitter account for the holidays always, hopefully.  Feedback appreciated if you have the time?  Thankye, & have a *good* Xmas & holiday season.  Luv, Joe. :)

Resurrecting both my blog & Twitter account for the holidays always, hopefully.  Feedback appreciated if you have the time?  Thankye, & have a *good* Xmas & holiday season.  Luv, Joe. :)

Ugh II, maybe

Gods, this thing is ugly after I went to the free version of Typepad.  Oh well.  I asked for it, I guess.

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.  

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.  

Paleo-Strangulation

At the Washington Post, Dr. George F. Will opines on the gagging of North Carolina blogger Steve Cooksey and his opinions on the "paleolithic" or paleo diet:

"Bureaucrats declare war on free advice"

At Least There's Not Much Cholesterol

Oh, Beauty, Eh?

Maybe someone can Tweet me some back bacon too: 

Mashable: Tweet-A-Beer Lets You Buy Drinks for Twitter Pals

Not sure where I ran into this beauty at, but I think it was from our Canadian agent, code-named "Peach."  Whoever it was has advanced the cause of civilization several thousand-fold.  ;)

"Then We Played A Game On It, And That Was Fun"

From The Atlantic: At the Restaurant of the Future, This Gadget Takes Your Order

Blacked Out

I'll be blacked out tomorrow. 

My Next Big Career Change Angle

CNN: "Blog your way to a better career"

Wow, this is how to get out of ditch-digging?  I guess I better start blogging more. ;) But n. b. : "Trying to earn money from your blog is a lost cause."

Durham Historic Restaurant Hunt

Gary Kueber at Endangered Durham is going to be doing a sort of treasure hunt of historic restaurants.  He'll be posting clues on his Facebook and Twitter sites, as well as on the ED post above.  I won't be able to attend the dénouement/tour due to prior ditch digging commitments, but I think I'd really enjoy it.  Gary is also giving away small prizes as part of the treasure hunt.  

By the way, this activity is in part to publicize Open Durham, Gary's new project to re-work ED while adding a bunch of neat stuff.  

Looks cool.  Y'all have fun.  

Fakes? Really?

Via the NYT:

"Is That Review a Fake?"

Make sure you read the accompanying article.  

Here at EAJ!, all the reviews are real, if you can find a review to start with.  ;)

For Bastille Day, An All-American Meal -- In Space

So you should dine with the astronauts today and have some grilled chicken, barbecued brisket, baked beans and "southwestern corn."  I imagine your version will be better than their pre-cooked one, but I hope everyone enjoys their dinner, no matter how or where it's prepared.   Sic itur ad astra.  :-D

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.)

Dinner? WTF

Via T.Rev: WTF Should I Make For Dinner. 

The site is so stark that it took me a few minutes to realize it gave one different choices upon reloading pages. 

When Produce Goes Bad II: The Quickening

Some of you may have seen my post a couple years ago when I pointed out a table from Cook's Illustrated containing recommendations on how to store a gamut of fruits and vegetables.  The problem was you had to get a copy of the magazine or join their online WWW site. 

Today I ran into a table from some folks at UC Davis, which is quite the place for "agriculture, viticulture and enology, the biological sciences and veterinary medicine."  The PDF table, by Adel Kader, Jim Thompson, and Kathi Sylva, is called "Storing Fresh Fruits and Vegetables for Better Taste." It's served off UC Davis's California Backyard Orchard WWW site, but still has plenty of entries for non-orchard fruits and vegetables. 

The table also points to UC Davis's Postharvest Technology Research site, itself ripe with plenty of juicy information about what can and does happen to your plant foods in the time between when they're harvested and when you eat them. 

---

I'm reminded of a quotation I heard once from a spiritual leader in a community where I used to live.  The quotation is from at least as early as WWII or the Great Depression, but I'm sure the sentiment is much older:

Use it up,
wear it out,
make it do,
or do without.

I need hardly point out that if you practice the first three, the last is less of a burden.  And with food prices going up faster than the core inflation rate, saving on food and saving food itself seems like a smart way to provide more for yourself and others. 

---

Q.v. http://jhv.blogs.com/eatatjoes/2008/06/when-produce-go.html

"Truth" In "Advertising"

Since I understand I've hooked some of you on Achewood, I thought I'd drag in another web.comic:

[If you need further assistance: xkcd and Achewood articles at Wikipedia.]

I Always Wondered What "Regional Cuisine" Meant

Artwork: "Number of Residents per Waffle House" by Cat and Girl.  Edward Tufte, eat your heart out.  ;)

Edit for my Canadian friends: Not as neat as being by population, but this map let me know we had Tim Hortons in the US.  

It's Squirrely Bacon!

Because I'm trying to be hip:

Bacon and squirrels!  How hip is that!  :)

Edit: Squirrelizer.  Bacon. 

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.)  

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.]

Style over Substance

So, yeah, this blog has been sucking lately.  No posts.  The posts I've had suck.  I should go out and review some restaurants, or should have done more restaurant reviews on my Big Travel Swing Through The US.

Instead I set this up. 

At least I also got caught up on some e-mail. 

Cook's Illustrated and... Open Source?

I'm not sure how many of my Gentle Readers are followers generally of the food blogosphere and its rumblings.  But for the past few weeks, trouble has been rumbling between some of the Web's food blogger community and Cook's Illustrated.  The mess has been chronicled already by local food blogger/friend Maura, but the short of it is that Melissa at Alosha's Kitchen posted a set of recipes for a 4th of July menu, including her first attempt at making potato salad.  She got her recipes from elsewhere, and credited all her sources.  She also detailed modifications she'd made.  Ok so far, right?

The problem was she used a recipe from Cook's Illustrated (actually Cook's Country) as the base for her potato salad recipe.  And the folks at CI got a little upset.  I leave it to you to decide whether they're upset about their recipe being copied, modified, used, credited, a combination of the foregoing, or something else.  But they told her to take it down.  She did, but she's not particularly happy about it.  Neither are a lot of people, including Kate at Accidental Hedonist, who published, er, another potato salad recipe.  (In short, Kate thinks that a recipe cannot be copyrighted.)  There are also people this writer has spoken with personally who say they're dumping their Cook's Ill. subscription over CI's treatment of Melissa. 

The immediate answer to Melissa's dilemma seems to be not to quote their recipes exactly (which she didn't), and don't credit them with anything.  :)  But that seems an unsatisfying answer here, at least to me. 

So while I've been thinking about this event and its sequelae, I started feeling like I'd been here before.  I finally realized I was witnessing another fight between The Cathedral and The Bazaar (paper available here).  And I started thinking about this mess a little differently.

---

For those of you who aren't up to reading the above links right now:  Let's say you write software.  And let's say, for your own reasons, you want to give it away: you want anyone who can get their hands on it to use it, copy it, modify it, and basically do whatever they like with it, including continuing to pass it on.  So, other people do so with your work, maybe even making their own modifications, or embedding your software in theirs.  You're all good with that.  It's what you want. 

Then TIC -- Three Initial Corporation -- grabs your software and starts doing things with it, including embedding it in their own product.  You're good with that.  They go on to sell a product with your product in it, maybe do some work on it, and maybe even charge for support for your product.  You're good with all that too.  They're adding to the usefulness of your product, and making money at the same time.  Cool.  :)

Then TIC claims copyright or patent protections for "their" product, which includes your product.  They also modify your product so that their version is incompatible with yours.  Maybe they start suing people who make their own modifications, or refuting prior art claims by saying they'd done the same work in-house first.

Not cool.  You start to wish you'd never released your software. 

Don't say this won't happen.  There are entire companies making their living off nothing but litigating this kind of issue.  Sometimes they resolve the issue between themselves by agreeing not to sue each other over offsetting patent claims.  IBM even developed a product (that IIRC, it tried to get a business method patent for) that involved a system for leasing patents among disagreeing companies involved in this kind of litigation.  I.e., they automated a process for arbitrating this kind of situation, and wanted to sell that process.

So, what do you do when you want to release your software, but want to make sure someone else doesn't co-opt it? 

You release it under an open source license.  What that basically means is that anyone can do pretty much what they want with the software except restrict in any way its propagation.  They can even sell it, sell support for it, and maybe even incorporate it into their own product.

---

Whew, that was a long aside, wasn't it?  What the hell were we talking about?  Oh yeah, recipes.  Let's get back to that, shall we?  ;)

As some of you may remember, I have a love-hate relationship with Cook's Illustrated.  I love all the work they do on food, recipes, and equipment.  And I understand that, since they don't accept advertising, they have fewer options for making money than other publications.  But one of the things that bothers me is what CI does with recipes.  My thinking about Open Source is one of the things that helped crystallize my thoughts.

People have been roasting chicken, making bread, and yes, even making potato salad for as long as there've been chickens, wheat, and potatoes to eat.  They've been writing down recipes, publishing them, improving them, and sharing them for almost as long.  Occasionally they argue over where a recipe came from, or who started it.  Usually such an argument is bootless, as the origins of a recipe and its original recorder (if there can be said to be one) are lost in time's mists. 

Cook's Illustrated seems to be trying to change that.

Is anyone else annoyed by when CI publishes a recipe titled something like, say, "Ultimate Roast Turkey," but then three years later publish a new version of "Ultimate Roast Turkey"?  First off, aren't some things matters of taste?  Secondly, what happened to that first "Ultimate" recipe -- the one that I guess isn't so "Ultimate" any more?  And the big one: where did they get the idea to roast a turkey in the first place?  Did they invent that?  Did they invent the no-knead bread phenomenon, or beer-can chicken?  I don't think so. 

What Cook's Ill. is doing is taking the work of thousands of years of culinary efforts, making minor changes and testing -- pretty minor, IMO, if you consider the work that's gone before by millions of home and professional cooks, going back to the first person to spit a chicken over a fire -- and than claiming absolute right to that work. 

Their argument seems to be that since they mixed their labor into the recipe, it's theirs now. 

What do you think?

Edit: Another opinion at Tigers & Strawberries. 

Wordle-Icious

Graphic below generated from Wordle, from a snapshot of Eat at Joe's! taken right before this post, with some tags, dates, and the like stripped out:

Full-size version here, in all its largish impressiveness, or click to embiggen.  I had another one that looked even cooler -- kinda like a burger.  :)

Stolen from Sin Noticias de Stew. (Thanks, Stewie!)

Edit: somewhat larger:

 

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.  :/

Tester? I just met her!

Cook's Illustrated:  You've probably seen the magazines or the related TV show, America's Test Kitchen.  I've subscribed to the main magazine for years, even since my friend Claire Cusick turned me on to them when she worked as Food Editor for the Herald-Sun.  And like a lot of folks I've talked to about CI, I have a love/hate relationship with them that's worked its way up to a fine head of steam. 

But right now, I come to praise CI, not to bury it.  I've been on a mailing list of theirs for a while.  It has its pros and cons, just like the magazine.  But a few months ago, they had a short note in one of their posts asking for recipe testers.  Since I'm an idiot  Since I'm a food professional  Since I'm not a food professional  Since I have nothing better to do  For some reason, I decided to sign up. 

It's nice.  They send me a recipe every week or two.  They ask folks not to make the recipe if they don't want to, or if they think up front they won't like it.  Certainly if you don't have time, you can blow it off too; they make that clear in each recipe I get.  But if you do have time and desire, you have about a week to 10 days or so in which to make the recipe; once you've made it, you can fill out an online survey about your experience.  You'll answer questions like how long did it take, did you like it, did you make any changes, &c.  The survey only takes a few minutes.  They do specifically ask that you not post the recipes online, as some of them may or may not be ready for prime-time: you're testing them, remember? 

I've made about half of the recipes they sent me so far.  They've varied from ok to pretty darn good.  I've also been taking the food (sometimes) to a pot-luck organized by a friend, so I get additional feedback from those folks.  No one seems to mind being used as guinea pigs.  :)  So it's kind of fun in its own way.  And the dessert I made last night was yummy.  So if you're on their mailing list, and you see this opportunity float by, sign up: it's neat. 

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Another bit of eBay stupidity:

Cheeto Chuck Norris sold on eBay

Mmmm... long pig... mmmm....

37%

Needs More Fallow Time

Mama mia. 

Scott Belan of Durham NC used to write a nice food blog at needsmoregarlic.typepad.com.  He stopped a while back, started again, then quit for good. 

Now not only has someone bought the subdomain, but they've also turned it into spam: Needs More Garlic Spam.  I've seen old domains bought and turned into (say) porn sites, but buying a previously used subdomain from a reputable service provider and turning it into a spam site that looks fleetingly like the real thing, complete with 8 bogus posts (all within a couple days), is a new level of badness. 

If you used to be linked to Scott, you might want to take the link down, or you're errantly making him look bad.  On the other hand, if you really do want people to see "the top Romanian Dating sites," knock yourself out.