Tomatoes and canning

M and I recently read "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver for a book club, and we were inspired to try the canned tomato sauce recipe therein.

We started out by canning a ha'bushel of tomatoes into 7 quarts of Kingsolver tomato sauce. "Canning" for historical reasons means putting something into glass jars in a sterile way, and boiling them so that you don't die of botulism. Kingsolver emphasizes that it's important to preserve the acidity of the recipe, so you're not supposed to mess with it. This turned out to be about 7 hours all told given our equipment, i.e. 1 hour per quart of sauce, i.e. a pain in the ass.

However, the farmer's market tempted us into more tomatoes, so we canned another bushel of tomatoes into 17 quarts of ..well, canned tomatoes, using a Fannie Farmer recipe which was basically tomatoes and salt.

More temptation pulled us into another ha'bushel, but this time we decided to make S's uncle's sauce. Since we didn't know if it is canning-safe, we've been eating some and freezing some. It is awesome. We've made two 4-quart recipes. A lot of water boils off, and it turns into 3 quarts or so. It's so good!

All told, we've probably cooked more than 100 pounds of tomatoes in the past 4-6 weeks. (A ha'bushel is ~25 pounds.) If you're not, you should really be buying farmer's market tomatoes, you lazy Seattle alcoholics. (j/k?)

Embarassed of my Minnesota heritage

JR and I proudly wear the badge of our former Minnesota citizenship out here in Seattle. Or rather we did, until Michele Bachmann started spouting off.

It's pretty tough to convince our West Coast friends that Minnesota isn't a bunch of poorly-educated, ill-informed hicks when Michele keeps spouting her verbal diarrhea. Can you remaining Minnesotans please get this neanderthal out of office?

Tax evader appears to have no grip on reality

Did I mention following this tax evader's story? He seems not in touch with reality.

DF

rlwrap, a geek's friend

Have you ever used a UNIX command-line utility that doesn't have filename completion? Painful, isn't it? Someone clever produced a wrapper to add filename completion. Here's the example for gnuplot:

$ rlwrap -c -a gnuplot
...
gnuplot> plot "

now hitting tab at that spot (the double-quote) gives you file options. Yay!

DF

Internet Memes

Jenny hadn't seen the Weezer Pork and Beans video, and watching it sent us on an internet meme-fest, reviewing all the referenced videos. I was surprised/saddened that the Back Dorm Boys weren't represented. After Gary Brolsma, they might be my favorite YouTube sensation.

Feymann

Feymann has so many incredible stories.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feymann is a classic, but here is a web post. He lived many lives. The only problem with his writings is he set the bar so high for the rest of us.

DF

Five Daily Show segments

The Daily Show makes M and me laugh.

5. Conan fight, the culmination of a week of trash talking on the
daily show, the colbert report, and conan o'brien during the writer's
strike, when they are desperately trying to fill airtime.

4. John Oliver.

3. Kristen Schaal, that made us laugh most recently.

2. Aasif Mandvi in his breakout role (according to us).

And of course,

1. the master of ceremonies.