A Recipe from My Kitchen

The parents are out car shopping, as the BMW looks as if it has finally croaked. (At 210,000 miles, no less.) Which left the problem of dinner, as they went out at 3 PM, and aren't coming home until later tonight.

Tonight was the first time that I actually cooked a meal by myself, without my mom. (TV dinners don't count.) My mom suggested defrosting and a piece of the frozen tilapia (a white fish) that we have in the freezer in our garage. I also found some baby spinach in the fridge, and sauteed it in a pan. (Also out of my mom's playbook.)

What follows is an account of what happened over the past hour.

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Get Dinner!
A recipe set from Matthew

Begin by placing one frozen filet in tilapia in a bowl of water in the sink. By the time it is needed, it will be completely thawed.

Over-Sauteed Spinach

Ingredients:
3 Handfulls of Baby Spinach
1 Clove Garlic
Salt and Pepper
1 Lemon
Extra Vergin Olive Oil

Place a large skillet over low-medium heat. Drizzle in extra vergin olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Chop the garlic into large pieces, and toss into pan. When the garlic starts to brown on the edges, remove it from the pan. Add three handfulls of baby spinach, but hesitate on the last one, such that it goes in when the rest of the spinach is already moderately cooked. Sprinkle with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Allow the spinach to overcook, so that it becomes one mass that is leaking liquid. Slice the lemon into two pieces, and squeeze one half over the spinach. Reserve that half to be used later; the other half can be returned to the fridge. Remove the spinach from the pan, place on a plastic plate, and cover with foil.


Tilapia. Yes, that's a fish.

Ingredients:
1 Filet of Tilapia
Salt and Pepper
Sage
Extra Vergin Olive Oil

Wipe down the pan that you used for the spinach to remove most of the extra lemon juice, oil, and spinach juice. Add a few more tablespoons of extra vergin olive oil to pan. Sprinkle both sides of the fish with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Try to shake sage out of container until you can actually see a little bit on the fish. Add fish to pan, and squeeze more lemon juice on it. Cook 3 minutes on each side, or until fear of burning the fish overcomes fear of undercooking the fish. Try to flip using two spatulas, one below the fish, and the other trying to hold it on from above. Remove from pan using same method, and clumsily move to plate.

Recipe notes: You will not be able to taste the garlic in the spinach or the sage on the fish. This is completely irrelevant.

Mom!!! Get him to stop picking on me!!!

Bleargh.

I tried adding more random text to the the Ultra-Random-Text-Generator-O-Mizer 3000 at the top of my blog, as I've named it, but there's this weird bug in the code.

If I add more than about 7 or 8 random text pieces, the output completely disappears. I added all of the new text in the same way, and there's basically no reason I could come up with that would make it suddenly dissapear with the addition of more pieces of text.

Meh. And I was getting so creative with it last night.

Stupid JavaScript. Go pick on a script kiddie your own size!

Perils of a Stagnant Mind

I have trouble with getting really bored during the summer. I usually end up spending too much time just messing around, surfing the web.

Evidence:



I've been trying to come up with things to do that are more, well, productive. I finally got around to learning to program in Python, but I haven't been doing much else that I can be proud of.

This may be the first time I'm actually happy to go back to school.

Background Music

I was finnicking around with my Rubik's cube, trying to solve it as fast as I can. I wanted to time myself, so I used the easiest and simplest method I knew of. Start playing a song in iTunes, and when you solve the cube, see how far into the song you are.

Not suprisingly, I solved the cube 30 seconds faster when listening to Archetype by Fear Factory than Alone in Kyoto by Air. (Bonus points for citing a band no one's heard of! Ka-Ching!) That's death/industrial metal versus ultra-light electronica, for you mortals, err, non-geek-types. You could argue that I got a much better starting position with for my shorter, 2-minute time, but I was definately moving/thinking faster.

I love to stream online radio when I'm doing homework, playing poker online, or doing other stuff on the computer. One of my favorite stations is Groove Salad from Soma FM, which describes itself as "Ambient Chill". I can just zone out for something like an hour while playing poker and listening to it. (Kinda freaky when you wake back up and realise, "Son of a mother, I'm 30k down!")

I'm curious to know the extent that background noise or music can affect the brain.

Orginazation Systems

I find it hard to describe how organized I am. My room looks very messy, but I know where pretty much everything is. (Well, the important things, anyway.)

It got me thinking about how I organize, and organization in general. I remember 7th grade vividly, where I had one gigantic binder for school, with one divider per class, and a pocket in the front that got literally stuffed with hundreds of papers.

My thesis is this: A good organization system tends to stay organized with the least amount of effort as possible.

Yes, my room looks cluttered. But my shoes are always in the same nook, and my wallet, cell phone, and car keys are always in the place that I've designated for them. (No, I'm not posting where I keep my wallet on the internet.)

Sure, lugging a binder for every class around was tough on my back, but it let me subdivide my subjects into homework, classwork, etc. Avoiding the one huge pocket, stuffed with months of old papers, made it all worth it.

When I started carrying a folder in my bookbag designated only for paper, I stopped having to search though every binder for a loose sheet, and was able to know when to refill.

The large folder hierarchy of My Documents makes finding documents again a snap. (Yes, I have stuff like \Schoolwork\10thGrade\Physics\StringTheory\FinalReport.doc.) It takes only a fraction of a second to save the document further down the hierarchy, but saves tons of time finding my files.

Sometimes, the solution to disorganization is not to spend more time organizing, but to improve your organizational system.

(Edit: Slightly changed example filename to make it fit on the screen. Stupid Blogger's fragmented CSS made my line run off the page.)