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QotD: Cold Weather Beverage

What's your favorite thing to drink when it's cold outside?

Brooklyn Skyline

Over the last couple of weeks, I've really been enjoying an occasional Red Hook cocktail, which I first read about on the Cocktail Chronicles, and then again on gumbopages.com (which is also where I found the sazerac recipe I'm most fond of).

It's rye-based, so a perfect warming drink for a chilly fall evening. Yum!

The Red Hook Cocktail
(by Enzo Errico, Milk & Honey, New York City)

2 ounces rye whiskey
1/2 ounce Punt e Mes
1/2 ounce maraschino

Combine with ice in a mixing glass and stir for at least 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

QotD: Singing A Holiday Tune

Another Lonely Christmas

Audio: What's your favorite carol or holiday song?

Without a doubt: Price's "Another Lonely Christmas".

I must admit that I'm still a little thrown by the pokeno & banana daiquiris, but that said, this is my #1 when it comes to Christmas songs.

Link Grab Bag

I have a file of things to post to my blog about, and it's become clear to me that I'm not going to have the time/inclination/desire to write full posts about each of them. Some of these are old, so you may have read or seen them already.

So:

• 

  Lady's Bridge
  Wu Tang Clan, "The Heart Gently Weeps". I love this in concept; in reality, it's just okay for me, though Method Man's bit towards the end redeems it quite a bit.
• Richard Hawley's new album, Lady's Bridge, is gorgeous fall music. My favorite so far is "The Sea Calls".
• I'm enjoying Blake Lewis's "Break Another" way too much.
• A combination of a dead hard drive and annoyance at having something like 5 (all different!) iPhoto and iTunes libraries inspired me to do a little cleanup. Applications used both to combine the libraries and keep them in sync, all highly recommended: iPhoto Library Manager, Senuti, and Martian Slingshot.

Broken iSync

Mac OS X 10.4: How to sync with .Mac and connected devices

http://docs.info....

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger you can sync contacts, calendars, Mail data, and other information between devices (such as a mobile phone or Palm device) using iSync version 2.0, and other computers through .Mac Sync.

I used to use Apple's iSync software quite often, but hadn't really used it since upgrading to Tiger (OS X 10.4) around two years ago.

Yesterday I started trying to use it again with a Nokia N73, and to my displeasure the Tiger version is actually less useful, and more confusing, than the previous version. There's a menu bar option that will, ostensibly, make syncing really easy--but in the 2.0 version of iSync, it only syncs with .Mac (not your other devices, like phones), unless you have iSync open already. So the menu option "Sync Now" does something completely different depending on whether you have iSync open or not.

Not only that, but if you do open iSync, there's a "Sync Devices" button that does something else--it only syncs to your devices, and not to .Mac:

If you have .Mac, mobile devices, an iPod, and a PalmOS device and want to sync them at the same time, here's how: Open iSync version 2.0, then choose Sync Now from the Sync Status menu (not the Sync Devices button). When prompted, press the HotSync button on your PalmOS device's cradle.

I feel bad for the poor documentation writer who had to make this seem logical and intentional as opposed to a bizarre implementation choice.

Parmesan-Stuffed Dates wrapped in Bacon...

So good!

... are the greatest thing in the world!

I made a batch of them the other day, and we all loved them. And they're so easy: take some pitted dates, stuff them with little sticks of parmesan, wrap with bacon, and stick in the oven for 10 minutes.

The most difficult part was finding our box of toothpicks.

Made from this recipe, found via The Amateur Gourmet.

Lost Without Careless Whispers

Robin Thicke vs George Michael - Lost Without Careless Whispers

http://apollozero...

Robin Thicke + George Michael == great.

Robin Thicke + George Michael!

"Lost Without U" + "Careless Whisper"!

So good!

QotD: Football Highlight

What was the best football highlight of the past week?

For me, it was going to the Raiders-Lions game last Sunday. Not so much for the game itself (though the seats were great, so it was incredible to see the action that close up) but for the spectacle of the people, the Raiders fans themselves. I thought we were getting there early (around 9:30/10am), but most of these fans must have been there for hours: they had giant RVs; they had grills that had been going since 7am, probably; and, of course, there was a lot of silver and black.

This photo doesn't really capture it, but it's all I've got.

Wow

Pimientos de padron

Pimientos de Padron

For the last two years or so, as I've been reading more food books and cooking more food, I've read about pimientos de padron a number of times, and they've always sounded delicious. I read about them first in Spanish Country Kitchen (still one of my favorite cookbooks), and then again in Calvin Trillin's Feeding a Yen, and they sounded delicious: tiny green peppers, cooked simply with olive oil and salt, with a wonderful smoky taste.

But I could never find them anywhere!

Until last Saturday, when we went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. And just as we were about to leave, I spotted a stand--Happy Quail Farms--with a bunch of peppers, and with bags of pimientos de padron. I bought two bags, and that night I dropped them in some hot olive oil until their skin blistered, then dusted them with sea salt. And they were delicious!

Two makes a pattern

When Movable Type 3.2 was released a little over two years ago, I wrote a plugin just for fun (and, well, to make Anil happy).

Tonight, the team has released Movable Type 4, pretty much the best MT release, ever: a beautiful new UI, great new features, powerful developer changes under the hood, a gorgeous new website, open source, &c. I'm so proud of the team that worked on this release.

And... I've written a new plugin for it. Refeed builds reblogging into Movable Type: configure a list of RSS and Atom feeds that you want to pull in to your blog, and new posts in the feeds will be spliced into your main blog automatically.

It was fun to write, because there are a ton of new features in MT4 that make it easy to set up configuration settings for plugins, make use of scheduled tasks, &c. And so, of course, Refeed requires MT4. :)

Anyway, congratulations to the team for such a fantastic release!

Where I am

I'm posting over at Vox, now.