A note from my friend Henry:
We’re sending $1475 to the Kerry Campaign and $301 to MoveOn.org, for a grand total of — drumroll please — $1776. Pretty cool huh?
(Okay, I must admit that Jill and I cooked the books a bit to arrive at this patriotic grand total. Last night it was $1770, but then I tore up my $50 check to MoveOn and made it $56.)
Today my friends Henry and Jill are having a barbecue. It is a “Beat Bush Barbecue.” Everyone who attends is supposed to bring a check for John Kerry for President or MoveOn.org. At first I thought this was kind of annoying, but then I realized that these are both organizations I believe in. I haven’t given either organization financial support yet, and this BBQ is just the kick I needed to donate.
I made a chocolate mousse for the BBQ. I got the recipe from Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. This is a great cookbook. All of the recipes are well tested, and you don’t have to be an expert chef to use them. It is definitely one of my go-to cookbooks.
Below is a photo of my chocolate mousse. It is in a pretty Emile Henry dish. The dish is red, but you can’t tell because the mousse is backlit.
The recipe is not as safe as it could be. It contains raw egg whites, which could cause Salmonella poisoning. You can cook egg whites to 160°F to kill any bacteria, but this is a fairly annoying extra step. I will definitely let people know that there are raw egg whites in the mousse, but I am not too concerned. To look up techniques to make raw egg whites safer, just do a Google search for “safe raw egg whites.” Many sites will come up. I found the directions at Aki’s Kitchen fairly easy to read. Again, I didn’t bother.
I think a chocolate mousse is only as good as its ingredients. I used heavy cream from Ronnybrook Farm, unsweetened chocolate from Lindt, orange liqueur from Grand Marnier, and large organic brown eggs from Organic Valley (cool domain name). I also used white granulated sugar to sweeten the chocolate, and vanilla beans from Blue Apron Foods.
[Wonderful Blogger behavior. After spending a good 20 minutes writing this post, I clicked preview. When I clicked the “back” button, Blogger essentially deleted my post. Web sites that cause the “back” button to have poor functionality are very lame.]
I went to my apartment around 8 pm last night mainly to pick up the mail. Even though I haven’t moved in, I still have to pay maintenance. Whenever I visit my apartment, I get a really happy feeling. It is great owning my own place, even if it does need a lot of work that hasn’t been started yet. And the view remains fantastic. I can’t wait to take more photos.
Check out this view at night:
Isn’t it amazing?
So I just spent the past hour or so making sure that this page validates to all of the correct standards. This was more or less a pain in the ass. On the flip side, the site looks pretty good on a variety of browsers now, and it degrades nicely for folks using text-only browsers.
The only hiccup is publishing the list of blogs I read using bloglines. My text browser of choice, Links doesn’t appear to support javascript. However, I am running an old version, 0.96. The new version, 0.99, may have better javascript support. (Links is available on Windows platforms as part of cygwin.)
Bloglines is the best syndication aggregator I have seen so far. Sam sez check it out.
Today I found out that a guy I know from Park Slope, Brooklyn went to High School with me in Highland Park, NJ. He broke out his yearbook and we flipped through it. Some relevations:
There’s more to this story for now, but it’s nothing I feel like posting at this time.
It’s a damn small world.
I made a cherry pie a couple of weeks ago. It will be my last cherry pie in my old apartment. I picked the cherries from the back yard with the girls next door. The pie was very tasty; the harvest was great this year.
A couple of weeks before I made the pie:
I closed on my new apartment a couple of weeks ago. I am pretty excitied to be moving in, but I will need to do a lot of work on the place. They have a useful website for tenants.
The best thing about the place is the view. Check it out:
Taken from West Broadway and Chambers
This is my first post. This log will be a place for me to post photos and writing.