The Wireless Developer Blog

On Christmas Eve I made a pot of 15 bean soup with kielbasa, italian bread and wine (Menage a Trois, can't beat it). The soup smelled so good as it simmered during the afternoon. I think the only downside to it was that the onions weren't quite soft when the soup was done. But, oh, did it warm you to the bone!

Christmas Day was cinnamon rolls for breakfast with coffee and orange juice. Usually Christene or I would make a loaf of banana bread, apple bread or something similar to have a simple breakfast since who really gives a fiddler's fart about eating when there are presents to open and games to play?

I got a decent cache of gifts: Kindle 3, Green Lantern tshirt, Jonah Hex on BD/DVD/Digital, two CDs from The Tragically Hip ("Road Apples" and "Yer Favourites")(if you don't know this band, you should, they are awesome), a cooling/baking rack that's half-sheet sized, replacements for my wooden spoons made of composite materials (so they won't degrade), chocolate cherry cordials and white chocolate, and a lot more!

For dinner I made black forest ham, apples and gruyere paninis on country white. I fried the apples in some butter with fresh thyme until they were soft. Then I layed the apples, ham and cheese on slices of bread and slathered them in whole grain mustard. Then they were pressed until the cheese melted. Absolutely delicious!

Sunday I woke up and the place is completely covered in snow! At least four inches have fallen so far and doesn't seem to be letting up. For breakfast, I made a simple country meal: bacon (cooked on the new rack), eggs, fried potatoes and biscuits.

So, who wants to come over for breakfast?

Christene left a note on it say she thinks it's dead. I tried to heat up some coffee in it this morning and there was a very distinct smell of plastic coming from it.

Which couldn't have happened on a worse day. We got a little bit of snow overnight, which of course shut down all of North Carolina as a result. So on a day when I'd want to heat things up, I can't.

Lowes has a perfect replacement for what we have that I could run out and get later today. Though I'm sure Christene's going to want to do some comparison shopping first.

Still won't get me a hot cuppa right now...

I've got a copy of Sleepwalker, by author and friend of the show Keith Latch, to give away for the month of December, 2010.

To enter, all you need to do is send me an email with the subject of "Sleepwalker Contest" and I'll enter your name into the Little Dead Prize Box.

The contest will run until 29 December. Then, on the 01 January 2011 episode I will, along with Keith himself, announce the winner and also talk about the book.

On the last day we can use the leftover turkey meat from Thanksgiving, I decided to make a chicken veloute and fill it with turkey meat.

I diced up a yellow onion, about eight small carrots and three stalks of celery and sweated them in three tablespoons of butter and a shot of salt. I then added 24 grams of flour and heated it for about three minutes, when it had a nice, nutty aroma.

Next I added 3/4 cup of sauvignon blank and stirred until the flour absorbed it. Then I added four cups of chicken stock and brought it to a slow simmer. I let it simmer 20 minutes, then added two cups of chopped turkey (dark and white) and one cup of half-and-half and let it simmer another minute.

We had it with a nice boulle and it was amazingly simple and delicious!

Check out my review of Dawn Of The Dead (2004) on A Little Dead Podcast here.

We had a good day.

I brined our turkey overnight in a solution of 3/4 C salt, 1/2 C sugar, vegetable broth, pepper corns, thyme and rosemary. It rested for about 22 hours total until I was ready to cook.

I dried the turkey, then put the into a 500F oven after coating it with canola oil and generous amounts of salt and pepper. I also put aromatics into the cavity: one sliced apple, half a sliced onion and a cinnamon stick, which I first steeped in a cup of water for 5 minutes.

I started the turkey at 11a with plans to have dinner ready at 3p. My inlaws showed up a little earlier than expected, so I had to scramble to get a shower (I hadn't planned on doing that till after most of the cooking was done) and finish up the sides.

Christene had to run out in the morning to get some sweet potatoes: what we had purchased at Walmart had gone bad in just two days, with mold. With the fresh sweet potatoes I made a sweet potato casserole that was VERY sweet on top and light underneath.

I also made mashed potatoes, which also didn't quite work as I had expected. I had peeled and boiled nearly 5 lbs of potatoes. But when they were ready for mashing they barely filled up a serving bowl. It seemed that most of the starch had boiled away, leaving less potato than when I started.

Christene made green bean casserole and, with the cranberry dressing and gravy, we had a full meal. The turkey was very moist and tender. The skin had that perfectly golden hue and crisp, and the salt and pepper were just right for it. And there was so much meat left over that we have two wings, two drumsticks and a ton of white meat in a gallon freezer bag for leftovers.

For dessert we had apple, pumpkin and mincemeat pies and vanilla ice cream. And except for a little incident with the coffee were somebody mistook my salt cellar for sugar, dessert was delicious as well.

I hope everybody else had a great Thanksgiving as well!

After two years of some very math-intensive classes (calculus and physics), I'm now enrolled for what's going to be a piece of cake semester. This spring I'm taking CSC 216 - the second semester Java programming class that's a part of my degree program.

AH! Having programmed in Java for 15 years now, this is going to be a piece of cake semester!

If only I had time to take another, more challenging class...

http://www.alittledead.com/2010/11/episode-75-death-of-dead-2010.html

Check out the review I did for "Death of The Dead" (2010), the zombie comedy by Bo Buckley.

Anybody watching this series? If so, what did you think? And how about calling into my podcast and letting me know? (206) 338-0665