Firefox Tab Dump

Despite the somewhat dirty sounding title, here is a roundup of tabs that have been open on my Firefox browser the last week or so:

1. Gmail Blog: Gmail changed my life. Seriously. For those of you who have gmail but have not yet harnessed or experienced the entirety of the G-magic, read about the newest features here. I check this blog regularly, as well as its parent blog, the Googleblog.

2. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Short biography of this great Jewish thinker/philosopher/scholar/teacher at the USCJ website. I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of my latest venture into his philosophy, Who Is Man? I'm going to work through it with the outgoing Dean of Religious Life at USC starting after commencement. Works like this offer an interesting counterpoint to the more neuroscientific answers to the question of Who is Man that I spend time reading. What I wouldn't give to witness Rabbi Heschel in dialogue with Antonio Damasio, with whom I am about to start working, on a project looking at the neural basis for empathy.

3. and 4. RGB Color Wheel and RGB List of Palettes: Some references for a neural network model that I am working on, about human color vision for my computational neuroscience class. It's a very very abstract model for color vision, and because I'm a bit more familiar with computer RGB color than with human color vision - though one can be generalized to the other, because of the theory of trichromatic color vision, which has the retina's three types of cones being preferentially sensitive to blue, green, and red wavelengths (i.e. long, medium, and short).

5. Larchmont Grill: Excellent restaurant near Hollywood (not actually in Larchmont Village though). I highly recommend it - great food, cool ambience (it's a converted craftsman-style house). I've been meaning to go there for the Sunday brunch, which sounds amazing. They also have a great room upstairs which can be rented out for private events (which is what I've been there for, now 3 times).

Hungarian Nockerli

Lately I've been on a "family recipes" kick, and I've been cooking up a storm. Today, I decided to go ahead and attempt to make one of my childhood favorites, that it sort of like the Hungarian version of the Italian gnocchi (but not made with potatoes), and sort of like the Hungarian version of the German spaetzle (okay, exactly like it, except with Hungarian paprika).

It is often served alongside a goulash or a chicken paprikas, but when I was a kid and we went to the Hungarian restaurant (it's a decent amount of work to make, and not terribly nutritious so my grandmother didn't make it super often), I always ordered the Weinerschnitzel (traditionally veal, but often chicken) and had nockerli on the side instead of the oven-roasted potatoes that were meant to come with it. In any case, here we go with the recipe:

1 cup A.P. flour
1/4 cup milk
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
optional: 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg (if you like the taste of nutmeg; i don't, and its more appropriate for the German than the Hungarian version)
Paprika
3 tbsp. unsalted butter or margarine

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet in another.
2. Make a "well" in the dry, and pour the wet into the well, and using a wooden spoon, combine the ingredients by taking a little of the dry and integrating it into the wet, a little bit at a time. Mix well, but do not overmix. The consistency should be smooth but thick. Allow the batter to sit for 10 minutes, while...
3. Put a large pot full of about 3 quarts of water to boil, then reduce to simmer. Assuming that takes about 10 minutes...
4. Spoon the battle into the hot water to form little dumplings. The shape is meant to be somewhat haphazard, but they're not meant to be gigantic dumplings. I'd say 1-1.5" long and 1/4" in diameter. But I'm just sort of making that up. Since its a very sticky batter, I like to use two tea spoons. They make special "collanders" through which you push the dough to form the dumplings, but I say death to unitaskers.
5. Allow the dumplings to cook 1-2 minutes in the water. They should float to the top when done, but they might slightly stick to the bottom of the pot. Shake the pot a bit, or use a spoon to un-attach them so they float.
6. Use a spider or slotted spoon to remove from the pot, and continue until all the batter is cooked (this will take a while, since you should not overcrowd the pot)

From here, any number of sauces can be made to go with the nockerli. Here is an easy one that I like to use:

1. Melt 3 tbsp. of unsalted butter or margarine in a pan, and once it is all melted and starting to foam, add the cooked nockerli.
2. Sprinkle liberally with the paprika, and stir to coat the nockerli in the paprika butter sauce.

Now, eat it.

Lexical-Gustatory Synaesthesia

I read an interesting post in one of the science blogs I've been reading lately, on lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, which I guess is common enough to have a line of research surrounding it.

The more traditional form of synaesthesia finds people tasting or smelling colors or something like that...in this model, (ready for it?)
people taste PHONEMES. Like people associate the phoneme /k/ with cake, or /edg/ (e.g. college) with sausage (sauce-edge).

Maybe dyslexic individuals lack sufficient phonological awareness because certain phonemes make them taste asparagus or coconut or limberger cheese, or something. That'd be enough to make me hate phonemes.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/student_report_all_i_want_for.php

So maybe we should drop the line of research surrounding reading remediation, and just feed these kids better tasting foods.

Egg Salad

So I was watching Iron Chef: America, and Mario Batali was competing, and he was cooking this pasta dish, and I'm probably going to do a terrible job describing it, but it was really cheesy (the secret ingredient was Parmesiano Reggiano), and he was serving if family style. So he had this giant platter, and piled this huge pile of finely grated cheese on it (like grated super small, like the kind that comes out of the green can), and then created a large indentation in the pile, sort of creating a cheese volcano. Then he took some kind of alcohol (i feel like it was ouzo) and he filled the crater with it, and lit it on fire. The alcohol all burned off, and what happened was the surface of the crater was smoothed over because it melted, thereby creating a bowl made out of cheese. By smoothing it, the pasta would avoid getting caught on the rough cheese and torn up. So he served a pasta in a cheese-based sauce, in a bowl made out of cheese.

Egg salad?

Emeril's Modified Skillet Cornbread

So I was watching the Food Network's All-Star Thanksgiving Special from 2004 the other day, and was inspired to try creating Emeril's Skillet Cornbread. It's got jalapenos and bacon in it, amongst other things, and seeing it reminded me of the jalapeno cheddar scones that I had while on my family's Alaska trip this summer on a Wilderness 4x4 off-road adventure on Kruzof Island near Sitka, AK (check out the company that runs the program here). Emeril's original recipe can be found here.


I modified it a bit because neither I nor my roommate currently owns a cast-iron skillet. Instead, I found 2 12-count muffin tins that I used...the recipe provided by the website allowed me to fill 20 of the muffin holes. Since muffins bake in a shorter amount of time than a whole skillet of batter, they ended up taking only about 15 minutes instead of 25. Also, after the first 10 minutes or so I pulled the muffins out, spread some grated cheddar cheese along the top of each muffin, and returned it to the oven for the remaining time (basically, until I decided that the cheese was sufficiently melted, but not runny).

Result was overall positive, though the jalapeno taste didn't come through very well, I would have liked to taste a bit more of the heat from the peppers. Next time I may not be so meticulous in removing all the veins and seeds, to preserve more of the heat.