May 07

Porcini Mushroom Risotto Recipe

Posted on by

My first attempted at making risotto was 3 or 4 years ago.  It came out quite well just using the box recipe from a Trader Joe’s risotto package.  Quite simple to make, and a good amount of flavor.  As I started to learn to cook more through cookbooks and online recipes, I began to run across many different variations of risotto.  Apparently, it can be an endless list.  After completing several different variations of risotto, I got to a point where I understood how it was made where I stopped using a recipe anymore, (well, sometimes).

One of my favorite types of risotto is mushroom risotto.  Specifically Porcini mushroom.  The flavor and aroma is wonderful. A good balance of the earthy flavors of mushrooms and the warm gooey texture of the risotto rice.  Here’s a recipe that I ‘created’ that is adopted from the general methodology of risotto, and through several different recipes I’ve seen.  This one works for me.   Unlike most recipes on the web, this one is made for about 2 or 3 servings.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup Arborio rice
  • 2 cloves fresh garlic
  • 1/4 to 1/3 cup yellow onion
  • 1oz bag of dried porcini mushrooms
  • 1/4 to 1/2 cup of dry white wine
  • 1 can of your favorite chicken broth
  • salt and pepper
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons of butter

Optional but highly recommended:

  • Truffle oil
  • Parmesan cheese
  • 1/4 cup Shitake mushroom
  • Fleur de sel

Tools:

  • Small pot to heat broth
  • Another small pot to heat and soak dried mushrooms
  • Dutch oven (a deep skillet will work)
  • spatula, serving spoon, small spoon knives etc…

some of the ingredients used

Step 1:   Start heating up the dutch oven and toss 1 tablespoon of the butter in to start melting it.  Heat up the broth (don’t boil it!) in the small pot, and in the separate pot, boil some water.  Once the water is boiled, toss in your package of dried Porcini mushrooms per the instructions on the package. (hint: Save the water)

Step 2:  Start by finely chopping the onions and mince the garlic cloves and begin to saute’ it in the dutch oven with the butter.  Move it around, and get every nice and coated.  Optionally, you can use olive oil too.  Let slowly cook until everything is soft.

 

 

Step 3:  Pour the risotto rice into the dutch oven and immediately begin to move it around.  At this time, you may need to put the other tablespoon of butter in to get everything coated.  Keep moving it around until the risotto start to look clear. DON’T BURN IT!

Step 4: Once the risotto starts to look more clear, pour in the wine and quickly start stirring.  There should be enough wine to submerge the risotto, but not too much that they are drowning.  Let it soak up the wine slowly.  You may need to adjust the stove temperature as needed.

Step 5: Start to ladle the hot chicken broth into the pot slowly.  Make sure you put enough to submerge it much like you did with the wine.  Stir it a bit to mix.  Add some salt and pepper.  Once the risotto absorbs the broth, add another ladle.  Again, make sure it does not dry up and burn.  Repeat until the risotto start to get to the point where it’s starting to get softer.

Step 6:  Put all the Porcini mushrooms into the risotto mixture and mix.  At this time, you can also put optional shitake mushrooms into the mix too.  Mix well, then ladle in some of the broth from the Porcini mushrooms.

Step 7:  Repeat step 5 but with the remaining Porcini mushroom broth until the risotto is soft and done.  Make sure you have enough to keep the risotto very moist.  It should still be drippy if you pick it up with a spoon.  Turn off the stove, and cover with a lid to let it sit for a minute or 2 to absorb the moisture.  Add a little bit of broth to keep it moist as needed. 

Step 8:  Use a serving spoon and serve on to a saucer.  Sprinkle a little bit of salt on the risotto (Fleur de Sel works well here).  Optionally, I like to grate some cheese onto it along with a little drizzle of truffle oil to really bring out the flavor of the mushrooms.

And there you have it.  Porcini Mushroom Risotto!  An easy to make, and wonderful dish that’s easy to make.  Goes well with a nice Cab, and a side of fresh French baguette.

Apr 23

Japanese Efficiency

Posted on by

According to Wikipedia, the population of Tokyo is over 13 million people.  13 million!  One of these most densely populated cities in the world.  Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Japan, specifically Tokyo most of the time.  On the long 10.5 hour plane ride there, I knew what I was going to get myself into.  Trains, trains and more trains.  I couldn’t help but wonder what it took to move that many people in and out of the city with minimal use of automobiles.  Fast forward to recently spending a few days in Tokyo, there really wasn’t that many vehicles on the road other than buses and taxis.  It wasn’t Manhattan gridlock, or the 1 hour commute to go 8 miles on 101N through Mountain View and Palo Alto, Ca., but it was hectic.

Here’s a photo of the famous Shibuya crossing in the rain.

I took it upon myself to remember to make some observations of how people got around Tokyo on a daily basis. Given that I was there during the weekends and weekdays, traveled around in or around rush hour, I got a pretty good sense of what the Japanese did to ensure that everyone was orderly, and tried my best to document everything with various cameras (Nikon D7000, old Canon SD1000, iPhone 4S).

Starting from when you enter the station, you will need to figure out where to go and which platform to take the train from.  There will be several signs, but they are generally easy to read. Just follow the arrows towards the correct platform for your train.  To minimize pedestrians from crashing into each other, Japan’s railway system lays down arrows to keep everyone flowing in the right direction on specified sides of the walkways and hallways.
This really helped the confusion of which side you should stand on, especially during rush hour where there could be 500 people ascending a staircase, while you and 5 other are trying to go down it.  Again, follow the arrows!

Eventually, you’ll need to pass through the ticket gates. The ticket gates are as simple as they appear. Enter your ticket, or slip in your PASMO then walk through.  However, during my frequent observation when we had to pass through the same station several times during our stay, I noticed that the reversible ticket gates switch directions for which way you may pass depending on the flow of the commuters.  That is, if it’s rush hour, it may go in one direction and flip to the other direction during the other part of rush hour.

ticket gate

An interesting observation I did make is how flexible this system is.  Notice the arrows in this photo noting that the gate is open, and the (-) ones noting that it is close for that direction.  I noticed that *sometimes* the (-) sign could just be a suggestion.  During times of sudden heavy pedestrian traffic in one direction, commuters can just use their passes to pass through these ticket gates.  This temporarily switches the direction of the gate to help the flow of pedestrian.  So basically they let the crowds decide which way it should go!

Once through the ticket gates, you’re met with more arrows directing traffic. Eventually, you’ll make it to the platform where you should await your train’s arrival. But where to stand?  Never fear!

Although this photo does not show it, passengers should be standing and lining up where the yellow and white shoes are.  Some stations use this method, some use dotted lines.  Nonetheless, you should stand in these locations to ‘line up’.  90% of the time, the subway car stops at the perfect spot denoted by the grey area in the photo above.  Some stations have a yellow landing area.  The reason for this is to open up space for passengers to disembark the subway car, keeping the boarding passengers to the side.  An observation was that there is a lot of courtesy the locals give to others by leaving this space.  No one gets on until passengers leave the train first.

But wait, there’s more to this madness.  At the Shinagawa Station, there is a train that uses the same track and platform, and heads towards different final stops.  The overhead screens provide the clear data of when and which subway goes to which station.  Since this is a very busy station, they put landing areas for boarding passengers to wait on.  In the photo below, one area is designated for passengers heading towards 1 location (Haneda Airport), and another area is designed for passengers heading to another location (sorry, can’t read Japanese).

What’s even more efficient about this is that the subway stops so that the doors align with the correct landing area.  This is a great example of a simple solution for a potentially complex problem.  And just for fun, a humorous photo of a warning sign helping prevent collisions.

So there you have it.  Several examples of how simple ideas can make daily life just that much easier for everyone.  This along with the incredible on-time record of the trains down to the second, makes for an efficiently run city.

Apr 07

Power Pointless

Posted on by

Like many working people who have desk jobs, we’ve all been in countless meetings with long, and sometimes boring slides.  Slide after slide, graph after graph, bullet points after bullet points.  They can just drag on like there’s no end in sight.  A person’s attention span can only last so long, and it’s important to capture the audience’s attention quickly to keep them engaged.  As someone who has presented countless times, I’m guilty as charged.  Charged with disorderly slide creations, confusing context and flat out being boring.  But don’t get me wrong, I’ve attended some very good meetings with great slide management and presentation skills.

I think I learned a few things for the next PPT I create:

  1. Context:  Set the context of the presentation first.  Communicate to the audience what the goal of the presentation is.  What should they get out of it?  Keep it simple.  Your audience wants to know why they need to be there.
  2. Less Animation:  Animation is something for Pixar to handle.  It may add some flare to your presentation, but don’t overdo it.  Using Fly-ins, Spinners and Dissolve for everything isn’t going to win over your audience.  I generally like to use “appear” when I need to show each item in a list one at at time.
  3. Less Text, more Talking:  One of my pet peeves about presentations is writing exactly what you want to say right on the slide itself.  My personal thought on this is that the presenter loses a little credibility when you read what’s right on the slide.  That tells me that they don’t know the content as well as they should.  Take away the sentences, keep the bullets short.
  4. Fewer Slides:  I wouldn’t put a number on this.  Your presentation should be long enough to convey the message.  Period.  I worked for a company that had a presentation slide deck that had 135 slides.  No, that’s not a typo.  135!  What kind of person would want to flip through all of those slides and memorize each one?  Let alone, an audience who wants to sit through that torture!
  5. Smooth Operator:  Keep talking.  Transition from one slide to another smoothly by making sure the following slide has the correct content that was based on the prior slide.  That is, make sure you don’t make it seem like the presentation jumps around back and forth.

I think this about sums it up.  I may not be the best at this, and everyone has their own style.  This is mine and what I like to see and practice.  Or at least I try to.

Mar 25

7 Stories to read this weekend…. via GigaOm

Posted on by

Got a small mention on GigaOm this weekend too.  15 minutes of fame is over.

http://gigaom.com/2012/03/24/7-stories-to-read-this-weekend-15/

Thanks @Om Malik!

Mar 22

Attending all F1 races reposted to Forbes Blog

Posted on by

My answer on Quora was reposted to the Forbes Quora Blog.

Original blog post here . I’ll write something about my experience pending permission from Quora.

Update: 3/22/12.

Just got the ‘ok’ from Quora to speak about how I was approached to have it posted on their Forbes Blog.  Nothing special, other than I received an inbox message from an employee at Quora about how they liked my answer.  They wanted to repost it to their Quora blog on Forbes’ website, which I had no knowledge of its existence (now I know). Thought it was interesting, so I agreed to it.

I had originally put a little more context to the trip stating that it would be a good way to do a Round the World trip in conjunction with the Formula One schedule as seen on my site.  I removed that part since it wasn’t technically answering the question on Quora, and just stated what it would cost if you just went full fledged and never came home.  In retrospect, maybe I should have added that part into the answer.

Back to the story.  I went back and forth Steven E. Johnston from Quora about the post.  He suggested some edits, and I approved them.  None of the edits were grammatical (shocking), but it was more along the lines of how it looked when I cut/pasted it into the answer.  Quora does not support tables at this time, so the list of the flights and destinations were not displaying very well.   I would have hoped that they tablized (not a word) that list so it looked more aesthetically pleasing.  Another one of them was the removal of the reference to this site (no big deal), but also the horrible screen shot of the map I had originally put up.  That’s ok, since it was a pretty bad image anyways.

From the social media side, it’s interesting to see how people reacted on Facebook, and to see it reteweeted, although I did help  Helps feed the ego!

Full disclosure:  Quora did not pay me to write this, nor did they compensate me for my time to answer the question.  It was never my intention to make a big fuss about this, although I can honestly say I was stoked and got a bit over excited!   I did this purely out of enjoyment.  w00t!

Mar 21

Elementary School

Posted on by

So I discovered Codecademy about a month or so ago and decided to give this coding thing a shot.  The only coding experience I have ever had was some simple HTML classes in the late 90′s and a failed attempt at Basic (or was it C?) back in the mid 90′s.  Wasn’t sure I could tackle this, but to save the embarrassment, Codecademy guides you through the process on their site/platform… for free. They appear to only offer JavaScript at the time of this writing.  Having only been working on this for less than a couple of days, it has been a good primer into coding.  Not exactly sure what I’m really doing just yet, but I’m sure as the lessons come along I will figure it out.

Look! I achieved something!  It’s a bit like checking in on foursquare and receiving a Wino badge.

Some progress…..

I’m lead to believe I’m getting the hang of this.  So far, nothing spectacular to show.  I think I’ll need to do the lessons over again a few times until I remember how things work, and keep practicing.  The problem for me is that I can’t seem to remember, or compile why something needs to be a certain way for it to function.  It reminded me of statistics class.  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was actually calculating, only to know how to calculate it.  Post statistics class, I found that I started using basic stats in the work place during my tenure in product marketing.  It was only then when I actually understood the power of stats and the story it tells.  Standard Deviation anyone?

Practice, Practice, Practice.

Mar 20

Art… in your Coffee

Posted on by

After visiting some fancy coffee shops such as Blue Bottle Coffee, I started to notice the artwork they put into their drinks. No, I’m not talking about the cups. I’m talking about creating art in the drink when mixing the steamed milk with the shot of espresso.

http://images.coolcoffeeart.com/files/2011/08/cool-coffee-art-024.jpg

Now, this is nothing new. Coffee art has been around for a while. I might be late to the game. This sparked my interest. Could I do it? We have a Breville Ikon Espresso machine that we received as a wedding gift.  The only thing I did with it was to pull shots of espresso and dump steamed milk in it.  Consume, rinse and repeat.  So I Google around and find many instructional videos on how to create coffee art.  This one is the one that inspired me.

Yup, I can do that.  Everything I read was on how to steam the milk properly to create “micro foam’.  This seems to be the key to the art.  The foam can’t be giant bubbles.  They must be tiny.  Very tiny.  It’s how you steam it that creates this foam.  We may not have the most expensive, and functional espresso machine, but there are tricks to be able to steam the milk properly.  I tested this several times over the course of a week, night and day.  (thanks to decaf espresso!)  After annoying my wife with my constant offering of lattes, I eventually created my first coffee art.

I swear, it was a total accident and coincidence that I made an Apple.  But you can believe what you want to believe and give me credit for it.  After this, I could never figure out how to make a simple Rosetta.  I tried different methods of steaming the milk to create the microfoam.  I think I’ve been pretty successful at it, but I just can’t get the pour right.  There’s something missing.  Think I’ll have to go observe the professionals to see how they do it.

Mar 19

Round the World trip via Formula One Schedule

Posted on by

My wife and I always wanted to be able to take a trip around the world, non stop.  Basically leave our home in the Bay Area and disappear for about a year.  Sure, we’ve traveled quite a bit together, but there are just so many places that we still have yet to discover.  Me, being a big Formula One fan, thought it would be an incredible experience to travel the world via the Formula One race schedule.  Actually answering this question for myself came from an inspiration from a question posted on Quora, that I was asked to answer.

So, what would it take?  How long will we be gone?  How many flights do we need to purchase?  Do we have enough time to visit all the tourist spots and still have time to watch the race?  There are breaks in between race weekends, sometimes just 4 days, sometimes 4 weeks.  There will be back and forth flying between continents.  You will have to return to the states at one point, the depart again.  I’m going to make a lot of assumptions as to make the calculations easier.

Formula One travel flight path.

(horrendous screen shot above)

The F1 race schedule for 2012 consists of 20 races, starting from Melbourne, Australia and ending in São Paulo, Brazil.  The total miles traveled will be approximately 100,000 miles.   Yes, you can probably get some frequent flyer mileage out of this and pick up a few free flights here and there, but we’ll leave those out.  You’ll need hotel stay for each location you are at.  You’ll need a budget for food for each location.  You’ll need transportation to and from the track, and in/around town.  There are 254 days starting from the start of the season on March 16th, 2012, through November 25th.  We’ll use this number for daily rates.

Accommodations:  Let’s account for expensive locations (Melbourne, Bahrain, Japan, Montreal, etc..), and less expensive locations (Kuala Lumpur, New Dehli, Austin, Brazil), and average out each night’s stay to be approximately $150.  This is assuming you don’t stay in $12 hostels since F1 is a luxury event! 254 days x $150 = $38,000.  Yikes!  This is already a lot of money.

Food: You’ll need this to survive.  I don’t think the typical work paid per diem of $40/day will work here.  It might in some locations, but may not in others.  Let’s up that to $50 to be safe so you won’t need to eat at Mc Donald’s every meal.  We’ll eat the free continental breakfast at the hotel to save a few bucks and allow for a couple of nice restaurants.  254 days x $50 = $12,700.

Flights: One would think to assume that this is the most expensive item for your trip.  We will fly coach the entire way, and will pick the cheapest flight.  To make life easier, I’m going to use Expedia and plan one-way flights starting from our point of origin of San Francisco.  Here it goes:

Origin Destination Price
San Francisco, CA Melbourne, Australia $997.00
Melbourne, Australia Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia $553.00
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Shanghai, China $311.00
Shanghai, China Bahrain $884.00
Bahrain Catalunya, Spain $604.00
Catalunya, Spain Monaco $212.00
Monaco Montreal, Canada $1,765.00
Montreal, Canada Valencia, Spain $1,781.00
Valencia, Spain Silverstone, England $884.00
Silverstone, England Hockenheim, Germany $290.00
Hockenheim, Germany Budapest, Hungary $245.00
Budapest, Hungary Spa, Belgium $320.00
Spa, Belgium Monza, Italy $424.00
Monza, Italy Singapore $560.00
Singapore Suzuka, Japan $498.00
Suzuka, Japan Seoul, S. Korea $390.00
Seoul, S. Korea New Delhi, India $624.00
New Delhi, India Austin, TX $1,038.00
Austin, TX Sao Paulo, Brazil $1,006.00
Sao Paulo, Brazil San Francisco, CA $1,485.00
Total flights: $14,871.00

Ah ha!  Thought wrong.  It’s almost the cheapest item.  Might be even cheaper if you go through a booking agent to get a ‘package deal’ .

In town transportation: I’m going to make this easy.  $20 day?  At 254 days, that’s $5,080.

F1 ticket prices:  Don’t forget you need to pay for this too.  There isn’t a ‘season’ pass for Formula One.  We’ll assume you want a grandstand seat.  Most grandstand seats start in the low $100′s, and can be as high as $800!  Let’s take an average of $350 assuming there are tracks that you wouldn’t need a grandstand to have a great view of the race such as Australia, Monza, and Monaco (since you have a friend that has a condo located there, right?)  At 20 races, $350 x 20 = $7,000.

So, there you have it.  Adding all this up results in over $77,000 USD as your final cost.  Whew.  Double occupancy should save you $17,000 since you would not want to travel alone.  It’s huge money for the 99%.  There are incredible destinations that you will cover and it would be an experience of a life time.  Anyone want to sponsor me ?

We’ll cover what attractions at other locations some other day.

test post under car section

Aside

Reply

blah.  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum