I’m not a fan of all things seafood – in fact, I’m pretty much a fan of no-things seafood – but well prepared seared tuna with sesame seeds can be wonderful, provided the tuna is very, very fresh. It’s the best of both worlds; a light fresh sushi-ish interior with a tasty, seared, sesame-crusted outside. This recipe is easy; all you need is a pan, a burner and a source of very fresh high quality tuna steaks.

Serves 2

Requires about 10-15 minutes of work.

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This is another indispensable kitchen item.

I have a pair of them. I use them to make salad dressing, chop nuts, make small amounts of pesto, make bread crumbs, make breading, chop herbs and spices, chop garlic. (more…)

If you make salads (and who couldn’t use a little more salad in their diets?), a salad spinner is indispensable unless you really enjoy drying salad by hand or eating dirty greens.

I never knew there were so many salad spinner options until I looked up the Zyliss model, which I have, on Amazon.

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6 peeled garlic cloves
1 large peeled shallot
1tbsp olive oil
2 acorn squash (you can substitute butternut squash or pumpkin if you want)
3c chicken or vegetable stock
1/4c half-n-half or light cream
1/4c maple syrup
1tsp salt
ground pepper to taste

Serves 4

1. Wrap the peeled garlic cloves in a bit of tin foil and roast them in the oven at 400 degrees F for about a half an hour. They should be soft, fragrant and sweet when they come out of the oven.
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This is my favorite coffee. The local food coop that I shop at carries it, but I haven’t seen it at many other stores. You can order through their web site if you want to try and can’t find it.

I like their Sumatra the best. It’s mellow with a robust flavor. We usually use it with our coffeebot, but it makes fine french press or drip coffee as well.

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Apple’s Airport Express is indispensable.

It’s a small 802.11b/g wireless base station. It also has an ethernet jack, a USB port for printer sharing or connecting a remote control, and – best of all – an audio port (analog or digital). It’s great for use at home and it’s great for travel, so you don’t have to be tethered to the desk at your hotel.

The Airport Express is roughly comparable to the Airport Extreme in terms of acting as a base station. It only has one ethernet port. It can act as a NAT (Network Address Translator), so you can use it to connect multiple computers to a single Internet connection. If you use NAT, it can act as a DHCP server to allocate IP addresses to the computers as well. If you’re using NAT, you can also map inbound ports to ports on particular computers behind that NAT.

You can also use access control – you can either list the acceptable MAC addresses or have it talk to a Radius server.
The Airport Express broadcasts the availability of a USB printer via “Bonjour” (ZeroConf) and the printer can be accessed via IPP – the Internet Printing Protocol.

The most exciting to thing about it to me, though is the audio out port. (more…)

The AirPlay is an FM Transmitter for iPods which have a remote control jack – that would be most iPods up to but not including the current generation of iPods with video and the iPod nano’s or the iPod shuffle (but does include the iPod photo, U2 iPod, iPod mini and most other iPods).

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I use an iCurve to support my Powerbook when I’m using my Powerbook as my desktop computer. I go back and forth… for a while I used the Powerbook portably and a G5 as my desktop, but the G5 is noisy while the Powerbook is very quiet and I get annoyed sometimes at needing to keep the two in sync (or failing to keep the two in sync). In those parts of my computer-using cycle, I switch to just using the Powerbook, with a larger external display and a bluetooth keyboard.

The iCurve is a sexy stand which helps free up desk space by letting me keep stuff under the Powerbook. It’s stable and sturdy… I can’t find a lot to say about it; it’s a passive piece of plastic, but certainly a sexy notebook computer deserves a sexy stand…

The Pro… what to say about The Pro…

It’s one of the funniest comic books I’ve ever read. It’s written by Garth Ennis, creator of Preacher and the character “Arseface” within. Ennis doesn’t really hold back… when he wants to do something in a story, he just does it. (more…)