http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/6dct7Yg72pY/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=316

I have seen pictures of romanesco online for years but have never actually found any in stores. That’s okay — it’s really just like cauliflower, if you disregard the appearance. But isn’t it one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen? Good thing nick has a camera worthy of shooting its amazing fractals. I found some at my supermarket the other day and wanted to make something pretty with it, so I got my friend sam’s recipe for fresh pasta and made some broad spinach noodles to go with it.

The pic shows the noodles served with sauteed garlic, romanesco floretes,  thinly sliced red pepper, coarsely chopped black chanterelle mushrooms, halved artichoke hearts, salt, and pepper plus grated parmesan. Sam’s fresh pasta recipe below serves 4 and does not require (although it’s a real time saver) a pasta maker.

Ingredients

3 c flour

2 large eggs

pinch salt

water

anything else you want; here, 12oz spinach and a few tsp parsley

Process

Depending on what you’re adding to the pasta (if anything), prepare the additional ingredient as necessary. I heated my spinach in a pan plain until it wilted, then squeezed it out as best as I could. Sam suggested that good additions are beat juice or basil and onion. Personally, I’d like to try pumpkin. Regardless, try not to make it too wet lest you ruin the recipe.

In a food processor, mix the flour with any extra ingredients and the pinch of salt. Add the eggs. You should basically wind up with a gritty flour. Now drip water in very slowly until it all starts to stick together. Don’t add too much. It helps if like Sam you have a jet-engine cuisinart or a kitchenaid standup; my cheap chinese processor was getting stuck so I had to do a small bit of kneading to finish it off.

Press the dough into a ball and wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, then refrigerate for at least a half hour and preferably the better part of a day or overnight. Then, let it sit for a while to get back to room temperature or it’ll be really hard to roll.

If you’ve got a pasta maker, go for it. Otherwise, roll the dough out as long and thin as you can get it. Mine was a bit stiff, so I wound up cutting it smaller before rolling completely thin (obviously if there’s less dough surface area, the pressure you apply on the rolling pin is proportionally greater in each spot). Use a rotary cutter of some sort if you’ve got one to cut it into whatever width noodles you want. I went with very broad noodles ’cause they’re sexy. Make sure to separate the noodles some rather than letting them clump together.

I heavily salted and oiled my boiling water before adding the noodles and stirred them aggressively while cooking so they wouldn’t stick. Fortunately, I had no problems, so maybe you don’t need to be quite as aggressive. They came out incredibly well and were really very delicious. Although I tested them for done-ness and didn’t keep exact time, cooking time was less than five minutes like most fresh pastas you might buy at a store.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/3Z_7gmZjSyo/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=300

These are some shots of the iPhone game I’m working on. The game is designed to use the iPhone’s accelerometer like a virtual flight stick–you pull back, the plane pitches up; you angle left, the plane rolls left. The premise is a ridiculous false history: instead of entering WW1, President Wilson calls for a massive international tournament of the air to decide the victor. The warring nations agree to abide by the treaty, each builds its own arena, and the best pilots in the world get sent to duke it out.

Since I got my iPhone with the goal of building this game, a few other such apps have come out (XPlane, FAST), but I don’t find any of them very fun. For example, in FAST you just fly an F-22 in the open sky and launch heat seeking missiles in the right general direction. It’s a lovely gane, but it gets kind of old. Sky barons is designed to let you swoop dramatically between obstacles and do ridiculous-nosedives-with-last-second-pullups with ease, all with the goal of putting a few shells through your opponent’s fusilage. It’s got online p2p combat and crazy complex courses like Germany’s “gauntlet” with swinging mines and turret guns, or the US “Southwest Canyon”, a snaking canyon/tunnel complex filled to the brim with dangerous stalagmites.

I’ve finished the single-player mode including rendering a subset of levels, target practice, etc., but am switching platforms from Unity3d to SIO2 + Blender so I can make better use of Apple’s multiplayer toolset and more flexibly publish for Android phones.

I aim to be finished by some time in January, if not late December. In the mean time, here are some screenshots of the plane flying through the SW Canyon level:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/4DP2vGm_3Ow/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=241

This is a quilt I made a while back for an ex-girlfriend. It’s a tetris board with her name (Amy) spelled out in the pieces (it is not to scale with a regulation tetris board). Some day when I have more time I’ll better document my quilt making activities. I don’t quilt a lot, but on occasion they make really unique and personalized gifts.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/mtVmJXdyYX4/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=169

Last summer while at my friend Dave’s place on cape cod I invented the best dessert ever: pears marinated and roasted in mango juice, ginger, and brown sugar, and served over vanilla ice cream. They’re always a hit and relatively healthy compared to most desserts. This is really simple, and the best part is that it scales like crazy; you can easily plate beautiful dessert for 20 people if you want. I’ll portion this recipe for four.

Ingredients

four pears (I usually go for bartletts)
1 bottle of mango Naked juice (you can use some other mango juices, but a lot are thin and watery and should probably be reduced first, which is a pain).
1 large ginger root
1/4 c brown sugar
vanilla ice cream for four

Process

You can fit four pears into a regular 8×10 baking dish (or use whatever you want; I’m just telling you what fits). Halve the pears and carve out the seeds, but don’t fully core them (in fact, leave the stems on, they look great). Put them face down in your baking dish. peel and mince (or food-processorize) the ginger, and mix it, the naked juice, and the brown sugar together in a sauce pan over medium heat for roughly 10 minutes to get the flavors homogenized. Let cool for a few minutes, then pour onto the pears. Try to make sure the ginger is spread out well and that the juice gets to the bottom of the pears, which won’t happen if they are to flat to the bottom of your dish. Marinate for 4-8 hours. It doesn’t hurt to periodically spoon the juice around to make sure the pears are well covered.

Pre-heat your oven to 450 and roast the pears for roughly 40 minutes or until quite soft. More won’t hurt. Serve two scoops of ice cream in each bowl and put two pear halves on top, then drizzle the extra juice plus ginger on top of it all. Serve immediately.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/j0J2delT1fs/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=139

I learned a few important things when I worked in cheap tourist seafood restaurants in rural maine during high school. One of them was how to sear perfect scallops, which comes in handy because seared scallops are nearly my favorite food. It’s really easy; you just need to forget what you know about cooking meat and obey a few simple rules:

1. Buy the biggest, freshest scallops you can. Okay, that’s no different from meat.
2. Bring them to room temperature; if they are colder, they won’t cook through to the middle before burning on the outside.
3. Be very, very careful with them. Rinse them, but rinse them carefully. If you don’t rinse them you run a small chance of your guests finding some sand or grit in their food.
4. Pat them dry and let them sit between two towels to dry out well. Like with the temperature, if too much water has to evaporate they won’t cook well.
5. Salt and pepper both sides liberally.
6. Get a large pan as hot as it can possibly be on your stove. Thick or cast-iron pans will work better here, particularly if you’re on electric heat. Add a very small amount of olive oil and let it coat the pan lightly.
7. Put the scallops in the pan evenly spaced out rather than crammed towards the middle (if you’ve let your pan get appropriately hot, the heat shouldn’t be especially concentrated at the middle anyway); they need their own sections of metal to get the surfaces as hot as possible.
8. Leave them for between 2.5 (for very small scallops) and 4.5 (for extremely large scallops) minutes, then flip. Don’t flip them early; you can’t go back on these once you do; trust me, you won’t burn them if you just don’t touch them.
9. The first side is not a science; it’s to see how quickly they’re cooking. The second side may require slightly more or (more commonly) slightly less, but you basically just need to look and see whether they look slightly more than half cooked or slightly less.
10. Err on the side of pulling them early rather than late. Even with really large scallops, they’ll get chewy fast if you leave them on too long, and unless you’re an idiot you probably haven’t totally undercooked them.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/JOPUGYoebXY/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=94

I finally got around to painting Alice and the Cheshire Cat on my wall:

It was really easy, it just took a few steps. Here’s how:

Photoshop your image down to basic lines

• Get a hip image, open it in Photoshop, and trim out all the junk until you’re down to just the part you want as the basis of your stencil (use the eraser or the select tool). I wound up cutting all the leaves out of mine to keep it clean.

• Crank the contrast way up and adjust the brightness if you need (image > adjust > brightness/contrast)
• Use a gaussian blur to reduce the detail (filter > blur > gaussian blur); you might have to play with how strong you want it; I think I had mine set at 5.6. For this step and the next the image size actually matters though, because they operate in absolute pixels rather than a relative scale.
• Do a cutout to get the stencil look (filters > artistic > cutout); use 2 for the number of levels and play with the other two settings to get the level of detail you want. Because mine was so big, I used the lowest setting for ‘edge simplicity’ and the highest for ‘edge fidelity’.
• If you need to run brightness/contrast again to get back to a simple black-and-white, do so. You might also want to invert the black and white of the image (image > adjust > invert) to make the next step easier, depending on your wall color.

• If you need to do any touch-up (like my cheshire cat’s right eye, for example), you can either do it here or on the wall, depending on your free-hand skills.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jackphelpsnet/~3/AhlhhD3SAr8/

http://jackphelps.net/?p=123

This is my friend Dave’s fantastic recipe for veggie pot pie, of which I made two for our annual “harvest dinner” party a few weeks ago.

What makes this recipe so tasty is the phenomenal thyme/mushroom gravy, so I actually increased the proportions thereof and decreased the other filler ingredients. You should also feel free to not make the pies and simply use the gravy recipe for some other application; it’s well worth it.

This recipe makes two pies. You should feel free to use store-bought crust if it’s simpler, although you’ll be missing out on a design opportunity (you don’t want to know what was on the crust of the other pie I made).

Mushroom/Thyme Gravy (two pies)
1/2 c olive oil
5 medium onions, medium slices
2 bunches fresh thyme
7 c chopped mushrooms
3/4 c flour
1 1/2 c port (substitute sherry if necessary)
6 c veggie or mushroom stock
3/4 c soy sauce

Saute onions in olive oil for roughly 3-4 minutes or until slightly softened; add thyme and mushrooms and saute for another 5 minutes. Add flour and mix well while continuing to saute, then add everything else and saute until reduced to a thick gravy.

Pie Filling (two pies)
3 medium potatoes
2 medium onions, thinly chopped
4 medium carrots, sliced to not-too-thick coins
2 stalks celery, sliced
1 1/2 c peas (frozen is fine and easiest)
Olive oil
salt
Optional: more exotic mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, or bell peppers; you can also sub tofu in for some (not all) of the potatoes if you want a protein; just crumble it small.

Peel, cube and then boil potatoes in salted water until mushy. Drain. Stir fry onions, carrots, peas and celery for a few minutes in olive oil to soften slightly. Add potatoes and mash everything together.

Pie Crust (two crusts):
1 tbs sugar
4 cups flour
2 cups shortening (butter flavored is preferable)
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup ice water
1 egg
1 tbs distilled white vinegar
Grease two pie plates (glass typically cooks more evenly but metal is fine). In a large bowl, mix flour, shortening, sugar and salt; add vinegar, egg, water. Knead until homogeneous, then roll out and line the pie plates. Reserve the rest for tops and decorations.

Pie Assembly:
Each pie should have two layers each of filling and gravy (filling then gravy then filling then gravy). Then cover with crust and make sure to cut some slits in the top. A good cosmetic tip is simply to go around the edge with two fingertips on the inside and one on the outside between them to seal the top and make pretty waves (like this). Optimally, you’ll brush the pies lightly with egg white; then bake at 350 for about 45 minutes or until nice and golden — they’re veggie so the timing is fairly flexible as long as you’ve softened the veggies beforehand.