Kerner.net

Building a MAME Cabinet

If you're not familiar with MAME I encourage you to check it out. MAME is one of the coolest pieces of software available. MAME is an acronym that stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It fairly well describes what MAME does -- it emulates the hardware for multiple arcade systems. The cool aspect of emulating all of these arcade systems is that MAME will play old arcade games (currently 4921 rom sets are supported).

Is My Blog Burning? Paella

This is the fourth edition of Is My Blog Burning and is hosted by pim. It is also the first edition that I am able to join. The theme for this edition is rice. I thought a lot about what I could do for a rice IMBB and the answer was obvious. Paella.

It's been a while since I've actually cooked it because our paellera is about 20" in diameter. It makes a lot of food. We're planning on having a paella party a bit later on this summer.

Hilton Head Last Day

Today is our last day on Hilton head. I'm really wanting to get a sailboat for part of the day, but I don't think it's going to happen. It is kind of expensive and Sarah doesn't think I've sailed recently enough.

In other news Wall's BBQ was not all I'd hoped it would be. I've come to the conclusion (and Sarah's dad concurs) that they don't know how to cook ribs here. The pork sandwiches were great, the sauce was nice and spicey, but the ribs left something to be desired. Wall's parboils their ribs, which leaves them tough. At Sticky Fingers they left the membrane on and slightly overcooked them.

The sides at Walls were excellent. We sampled the okra and tomatoes, squash, and collard greens. All were very good. I'm going to have to try my hand at making a mustard based bbq sauce at some point in the future. Not my favorite, but very good for a change.

Hilton Head Day Two

We spent yesterday lounging around the condo before going kyaking in Broad Creek. On the way to the kyak place ate lunch at a very nice southwestern restaurant (not surprisingly called Santa Fe). I've not had good fish tacos since I was last in San Diego. These were exceptional. They were made with blackened grouper rather than a fried fish and topped with a southwestern slaw. Quite tasty.

Last night we had bbq night one at a restaurant named Sticky Fingers. I think it is a chain in South Carolina. Sarah's siter Mary and I split a sampler platter that included Memphis style wet, Memphis dry, spicy, and sweet ribs. We both agreed that the hot were the best of the bunch. The rub on the dry was not as flavorful as I would like. I was also disappointed in the beans -- at a bbq joint I expect there to be some smoked meat in the beans, unfortanately not at Sticky Fingers.

Today we're driving to Savannah for some history and Wall's BBQ.

Hello from Hilton Head

Sarah and I are taking a much needed vacation with her family this week. We're staying in a condo in the Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island. It's quite nice. We've seen the gator in the pond/lake/lagoon behind our condo several times already. There is a bird that is quite loud every morning, not so good for the sleeping.

On the food agenda for the week is seafood, bbq, and hopefully some low-country cuisine. Sunday we ate at the Hilton Head Brewing Company and I was quite disappointed. The food was very good, but the beer was a bit lacking. HHBC sports a menu with over 10 craft beers. Unfortunately only four are on tap at a time. I was looking forward to a sampler. Instead we ended up with the three that sounded good. A light lager, an american style pale ale, and a dark ale. They were all good, but nothing special. If we can talk her parents into it I'd like to go to the Savannah Brewing Company when we go to Savannah on Wednesday. A higher priority of course is Wall's BBQ.

IMBB: Rice

I'm excited about this Is My Blog Burning because I'm actually going to participate. Okay, so I won't really be cooking on the actual day, because I'll be returning from a much needed vacation in Hilton Head, but I will be posting a special creation.

I really love the concept of IMBB. It brings people together from all over the world to experience food that shares a common bond. This IMBB is being hosted at chez pim and is focused on rice dishes. Anybody who isn't a food blogger should participate in this event as well. It's a great way to test the water.

Kerner.com Owned by Lucas Arts

Every so often I do a whois on kerner.com to see if it has recently expired and I might be able to snatch it up. Imagine my surprise this morning when I noticed that it has a new owner. Until recently it had always been owned by some insurance like organization (the Kerner Insurance Group or something similar). Today the whois kerner.com returns:

Organization:
LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC
Host Master
P.O. Box 10307
San Rafael, CA 94912
US
Phone: 415-472-3400
Email: hostmaster@LUCASFILM.COM

Registrar Name....: Register.com
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.register.com

Domain Name: KERNER.COM

Created on..............: Mon, Feb 10, 1992
Expires on..............: Fri, Feb 11, 2011
Record last updated on..: Sat, May 01, 2004

It's also interesting that the name servers in use are ns1.ilm.com and ns2.ilm.com.

I wonder what's going on here? Hmm. Anybody else know?

Baking is SCIENCE! (the latest cookwise post)

Okay, so it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the Cookwise Project was a bit of a flop. It's a great book, but my original concept wasn't all that suitable to my lifestyle. I manaaged to do fairly well with the bread chapter (I love to bake bread). What did it in was the fat chapter (which features pies, cakes, frying, etc). I thought it wouldn't be that hard, but when it came down to baking several cakes and pies in a weekend I knew it was not practical to actually go through the book chapter by chapter (and would actually be quite detrimental to my waistline). Rather than going through each chapter, I'll be posting interesting tidbits that come from the contents of the book and my own cooking experiments.

All that said I did bake a cake, completely from scratch, without a real recipe. This is the type of baking that I never would have thought was possible. I know I can follow a recipe, but building a cake recipe was something that I never would have attempted previously. It's actually quite easy. Cookwise includes a great set of rules for balancing a cake recipe. Cakes are 100% science: balance sugar to flour, eggs to fat, and liquids to flour.

Lack of blogging

I'm not sure if anybody still reads this blog. I know that the page views have gone down substantially. If anybody wonders it's because I've been overly busy at work lately. We've adjusted our strategy to focus more on knowledge management rather than just training. The Educara web site has also gotten quite a makeover. I'm actually excited about this update. It is completely designed in CSS (no tables!).

I'm still cooking, although it's more regular food. Over the weekend I did get a chance to cook. We had friends over for dinner which prompted a bit more cooking than normal. I made a slow cooked chicken and mushroom dish in a cream sauce. It was accompanied by roasted asparagus, salad, and a nice rustic bread.

The blogging shall resume (this time I mean it), but it may not always be food centric. I probably should change the title of the blog.