Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Brussel Sprouts!

This will be my first, and hopefully not only, blog post on food, because I love food and recently (thanks to my CSA box) my love of cooking has blossomed almost out of control.

Tonight I undertook the heretofore impossible task of cooking edible brussel sprouts. Mostly because they came in the CSA box and I hate wasting perfectly good CSA veggies. Oh, and I had eaten on raw recently, and yeah. They're awesome.



yeah, that just happened.

However, if this is indeed the case, why is it that so many people consider them decidedly NOT AWESOME? My totally awesome theory is that, besides the obvious "YUCK VEGGIES YAY MCDDONALD'S" conditioning we all go through as American children, the very simple fact of the matter is that most people just really don't know how to cook veggies. This is not meant to be disparaging, as I'm sure all your mothers were a Saint, but how many of you as children ate canned veggies prepared in exactly the same way as a side dish to the meat? Sure, steams green beans are good, but you had the same green beans every time you had pork chops.

Part of this has to do with the desire for consistent food, the primary reason why people will eat at McDonald's when they're traveling. This also, in my mind, contributes to the reason why meat is so popular in the first place (beyond the fact that it's technically a cheap luxury item)...you can cook meat 100 different ways and still be able to tell what kind of meat it is, for the most part. (Good article that touches on this subject).

Besides that, learning how to cook vegetables well is very much a matter of knowing not only a wide variety of cooking styles, but to be able to juggle a variety of spices. Both of these require experience, which requires both time and money, both of which many people are in short supply of.

The solution? No idea. Though the WSJ prediction in this article of meat becoming an expensive luxury item in the future will likely help.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

More OS Tutorials and Motivation

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/index

One word: awesome. I'm going to try and spend some time working through these articles in my free time. I've always been interested in OS development but never felt like the topic was that approachable, but things like this and the MikeOS tutorial I talked about before have completely changed my mind about this.

Related to this train of thought...I've been powering through Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is incredible. If you haven't read it, read it. It does a great job of destroying the misconception that successful people just have their knowledge and skills beamed into their head, which is something I still have to tell myself regularly to this day.

Another great link: http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run.html. This is one of the best TED Talks I've seen in a while, mainly because it very neatly distills the appeal of participating in AustinH3. It also makes me a bit sad at how far we've come from what our bodies are built for, despite all the amazing science and technology we've achieved. But that's a train of thought for a deeper mood.