I was at the farmers’ market last week and the local citrus stand had, among the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, what looked like an elephantine lemon and labeled "shaddock."  I was intrigued and inquired what the difference was between that and a pomelo, and whether this would be appropriate in my favorite Thai pomelo salad.  The proprietor, not having much of a run on his bushel of shaddocks, simply gave me one for free to try out.

Wikipedia doesn’t distinguish between pomelos and shaddocks, though the shaddock does seem to be a slightly different variety of pomelo with a thicker skin.  This one has a diameter of about 6 inches including at least an inch of rind.

I had this salad several times in Bangkok years ago, and I haven’t yet recreated it to my entire satisfaction (somehow I’m missing one of the earthy undertones) but it’s pretty refreshing nonetheless.  I promised myself that I’d write up the recipe to give the vendor so he could boost his shaddock sales.  Here ’tis!

• 1 pomelo or shaddock
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1 T fish sauce
• 1 T palm sugar (or white sugar if you must)
• 2 cloves of garlic, pressed
• thinly sliced chilis to taste (or a few pinches of red pepper flakes)
• 1/4 cup peanuts, roughly crushed
• cilantro
• mint
• deep-fried shallots (available in jars at international markets, or make your own.)

Shred the pomelo into pearls, keeping them intact as much as possible.  For me this takes about 20 minutes.  Some images on how to do this here (decent looking alternative recipe as well!).  Dissolve the palm sugar in the lime and fish sauce.  To taste it should be equal parts salty, sweet, and tangy, though since in this case it’s going on more citrus I usually under-represent the lime a bit.  Add the garlic and chilis, and toss it over the pomelo, cilantro, and mint, and peanuts.  Top with the deep-fried shallots, and enjoy!  Each pearl pops in your mouth and releases it’s juice.

If I’d had any, I would have also tried adding:

• 1T super-thinly sliced lemon grass
• chiffonade of kaffir lime leaves

The next week, my wife went back and mentioned how much we’d enjoyed the shaddock.  He simply handed her the entire last bushel of the season.

Clearly the pomelo industry needs our support!  Do your part today.  You’ll be glad you did!

Laine was inspired by this story we came across in the Christian Science Monitor about hedgehog rescue in England:

This is St. Tiggywinkles - a wildlife hospital. It’s where 500 hedgehogs are served meals in bed every day in the hope they’ll put on enough weight to survive the winter.

…

The phone rang constantly with people who’d found ailing hedgehogs…  Stocker would give advice on hedgehog care, but sometimes he’d ask the caller to simply put the hedgehog on the train.

"I knew that the British Rail network used to carry racing pigeons," he says. "So I contacted British Rail and made the arrangement that if somebody had an injured hedgehog, they could put it on the train at their station [in a box] and they would go straight through to Aylesbury." Hedgehogs from as far away as Scotland made the free journey as a Red Star parcel.

Is that straight out of Beatrix Potter or what?  Gotta love the British, especially their flair at names.

Sadly, I can’t guarantee Laine’s hedgehog will be the one in this household putting on weight to make it through the wet season.  In fact it’s unlikely to make it through the night in one piece.  Life’s rough out here on the frontier!

Recently discovered the amazing flavor of Taaza Spicy Garlic Chutney.  I’ve been enjoying Taaza brands of Tamarind and Cilantro chutneys for a while, and picked this one up somewhere (Seattle?  Folsom?).

We smeared a little of this elixir on tonight’s homemade paratha and - wow!  A must for garlic naan and baked garlic lovers - true distilled essence of garlickiness right from the bottle!

P.S. The meal also included a Saag Dal and acorn squash in a sauce borrowed from my favorite Kofta recipe - yum!

I took this quiet Saturday afternoon to finish up a project that has been in progress for months - organizing my spice collection.  I found a set of nice little tins at Ikea a while back that fit nicely into my spice drawer, replacing the hodgepodge of spice bottles, tins, and baggies.  Now I have a "standard" spice container for all my most commonly used spices.

But as I know from my day job, with standards comes homogeneity.  That diversity made it easy to quickly find a particular spice based on the shape and color of the container, and often of the color of the contents.  My tins aren’t transparent, so there is no visual clue as to their contents.  Naturally, I printed out some labels, so I wouldn’t have to open each tin every time I was looking for a particular spice, but each label varied only in the text.  You’d still have to read through a lot of labels to find what you are looking for.  I found myself relying more on the patterns of stains and peeling corners than the text on the label itself!

I thought this was an interesting design concept:  Each tin has all the right design points for it’s appointed task: the size and volume are just right, the wide mouth is works for scooping, pinching, or sprinkling, the surface matches the stainless elsewhere in the kitchen, and the surface is easy to clean.  But when that good design is repeated over and over, something happens. The repetition of an appropriate form might exhibit some qualities that aren’t that appropriate.  Amount is a design quantity that needs to be considered.

That reminds me of a statement by Robert Irwin about the components of color.  Desktop publishers are used to Hue, Saturation, and Brightness as sufficient to define all the possible colors.  Irwin added a surprising forth component - Amount.  While HSV is sufficient to determine an individual color, the amount of each color in relation to others has a profound effect on how one perceives those colors.

The traditional solution to the Amount problem in a set of spice containers is transparency.  Each container automatically takes on some of the diversity of it’s contents.  Not having this "automatic" option, I had to craft an artificial mechanism for diversity.  I based the solution on the diversity of spices by making new color labels which include a photograph of each spice.  At a glance you can differentiate the various spices by color, upon closer inspection you can differentiate shapes, and if that fails for similar spices (like ground thyme and ground oregano), you can fall back to the text label.

Taking all those pictures, cleaning them up in Adobe Photoshop, adding the circular text in Microsoft Publisher, printing, cutting, and affixing each label, was a rather time-consuming effort, multiplied by 50 tins.  Perfect for a lazy afternoon.  But now it’s time to go cook Christmas Eve dinner, spices standing ready, each with its own character despite the regimented rows.

I like turkey and all, but I also like cooking something a little more challenging. For several years now I’ve cooked an ethnic feast the day after Thanksgiving. It’s usually Indian, as it was again this year - I can’t resist dabbling in the alchemy of spices. I rationalize it as a tribute to the land Columbus was originally seeking.  I even found a local-ish source for fresh curry leaves: India Bazar Grocery in Folsom, about a half hour away.

Here’s the menu I prepared:

• Prawns with pomegranates: Prawns marinated in tomato paste, ground dried pomegranate seeds and other spices, and baked in foil packages with onion, cilantro, and fresh pomegranate seeds.
• Ooroomas Badun: A Sri-Lankan disk of pork chunks simmered in rich dark spices, curry leaves, and coconut milk.  Awesome!
• Saag Maas: Spinach with lamb chunks.  I added turnips (Charmaine Solomon’s Saag trick) to the recipe this year for the best results ever.
• Bhindi Masala: Okra and jalapenos in a dark, rather dry spicy sauce.
• Spicy Eggplant: Wedges of eggplant in a tomato-based sauce, prepared in the style of pickles but even tastier fresh.
• Dosas: Rice and dal crepes, filled with Potato Masala or chutneys, (or any of the other dishes, actually).
• Potato Masala: Mild potatoes in an onion, tamarind, and tumeric sauce. Actually I find Charmaine Solomon’s Gujharti Potatoes better - more tamarind plus some grated coconut give it a more interesting flavor.
• Naan Bread

Most of these recipes were from The Food of India, though the Ooroomas Badun was from Charmaine Solomon’s Complete Asian Cookbook.  Those two resources are certainly something to be grateful for!

Just cooked up a rather impromptu Indian dinner for some visiting friends - always fun to spice up the kitchen!  I’ve got three cookbooks on my shelf that I turn to regularly for inspiration on an Indian menu. These were all recommended to me - I hereby pass along my +1 to those recommendations…

The Food of India by Priya Wickramasinghe

My friend and now co-worker Asir introduced this one to me, and I’ve found it to be full of inspiring photos and some great recipes that promise to be above average.  Some of the my favorites of the ones I’ve tried so far:

• Pork Tikka: Tender chunks of pork encrusted with spices and a lot of red onion reduced to a maximally carmelized essence - practically charred.  Apparently a popular street food wrapped in a chapatis, but I just use it as a main course contrasted with a saucier dish and a side of rice.
• Chicken Tikka Masala: Chunks of chicken marinated in a spice yoghurt sauce, then grilled (I have no tandoori oven), then mixed with a smooth creamy sauce based on tomatoes and cream, laced with cardamom, almonds, and spices.  Not too spicey which keeps the rest of the family happy.
• Naan: The best recipe for Naan that I’ve found in terms of duplicating the tandoori effects in a western oven.  Detailed directions for using a regular oven, including putting a pan of water in the bottom to keep the bread soft and moist.

Dakshin: Vegitarian Cuisine from South India by Chandra Padmanabhan

Asir also recommended this one - it is intriguing because it contains many items not found on the average Indian restaurant menu.  Some of these are more challenging in terms of a more exotic mixture of spices.  I also love the frugality of some of the recipes, a few tablespoons of dal can form the basis of a tasty lunch.  These recipes also are very spicy, I usually tone them down quite a bit, and the family still often finds them a bit too much.  This book also requires an extensive spice shelf, which I’ve been cultivating for a while.  Some of my favorites so far:

• Curry Leaf Sambar: I have trouble finding curry leaves in the stores, but Asir provided me some and I immediately made this recipe since it had more curry leaves than any other recipe.  Wow, what a way to discover a rich and complex new ingredient!
• Garlic Rasam: Hard to believe you could make a soup based just on garlic cloves, but this one shows how one can deliver a rich and complex taste with humble ingredients.
• Mixed Vegetable Curd Salad: Looking past that rather unglamorous name, this is essentially a boosted raita - cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and cilantro mixed with yogurt.  The kicker is a final mix of tempered spices including some whole spices, chana dal and urad dal which gives the smooth cool texture a nutty crunch.
• Instant Mango Pickle: Not pickled at all, but a delicious mix of tempered spices coating a fresh mango (calls for green, but I just use the least ripe I can find).  Takes minutes to make and is a great snack on a tortilla (if you have any leftover naan.)

The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon

This classic (originally published almost 30 years ago) book was one of the first I remember seeing in large format and full of amazing photos.  It has sections covering the cuisine of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan.  My mother used this cookbook at home, and I think she gave me a copy after I married.  I already had (good) experience with the Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese sections, but I am discovering gems in the Indian section that show that the breadth should not be interpreted as a lack of depth.  Some favorites:

• Gujarati Potatoes: A great side dish of potato cubes flavored with tamarind, shredded coconut, and spices.
• Saag: I learned (from dining out in London with Asir I think) that the smoothest spinach purees have a secret ingredient - turnips!  I’d made various saag recipes before, even off the internet, but there it was, secret ingredient and all, in Solomon’s book all along.
• Pani Puris: Asir also turned me onto these delightful appetizers - a crisp semolina puff, holed on top with a fork, stuffed with savory chickpeas and spiced potatoes, filled with tamarindy cumin water, and popped whole into the mouth to explode in a crunchy, tangy, taste explosion.  I went searching for a recipe, and Solomon came through with the precise recipe where even Google did not…

Gee, writing this is making me hungry all over again.  I think I’ll raid the refrigerator for leftovers…

From a story on this week’s Weekend America:

Hot Dogs and Buns, Together at Last

For years, a dilemma has plagued hot dog lovers — what to do with the extra buns. Their prayers have been answered. Manufacturers have reached an historic truce vowing to sell hot dogs and buns in the same quantities — packs of 8. We talk to a hot dog vendor about the good news.

Strange little story - a Chicago hot-dog manufacturer exec got tired of hearing about the incompatibility between the typical number of hot dogs in a package and the typical number of buns in a package.  The meat industry likes neat packages of one pound, which is typically 8 hot dogs.  Bakers like dozens or a fraction thereof.  You either run out of dogs, or buns.  Finally the exec got fed up and started discussions with the bun makers to fix the problem.  They’re promoting a universal convention of 8-packs.  Most of the hot dogs I buy come in 10 packs, and the buns in 8 packs.

This kind of cooperation is often hailed by vendors in the IT industry, and I’m glad they didn’t have to found a consortium or promote government regulation to solve the problem.  But the core problem here is not a lack of communication between hot dog vendors and bun bakers.  It’s between those two industries and their customers.

Why is "8" the magic number?  What’s wrong with 10, or 6?  Each might have a specific consumer demand.  The problem is not enough ranges of choices.  If hot dogs are available in 6, 8, 10, or 16 packs, that seems like a good thing to me.  The only problem is if the buns are not also available in a similar range of choices.  Bun and hot dog makers should provide more variety, not less!  I predict in the future customers will be asking these same vendors why they can’t find a 10-pack of hotdogs anywhere.

I heard a few snatches of NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday program discussing the shortcomings of the USDA’s food pyramid.  It highlights not only is the graphic representation as ugly and primitive as you’d expect in a third-rate Powerpoint presentation, but it is extremely uncommunicative of many of the nutritional recommendations it’s designed to communicate.

Contrast this with what you get when you provide requirements and let the designers figure out a set of coherent and effective solutions.  The moral: hire top-flight designers and give them enough rope to allow them to amaze you with a single, coherent, consistent viewpoint.  Know how to recognize such coherency when you see it, rather than hen-pecking a designer into a hodge-podge that is widely ridiculed instead of admired.

There are those who see parallels in the development of Web standards :-).