influences

Get Better

October 15, 2009
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Merlin Mann is one of my favorite bloggers. He had me hooked years ago with 43 Folders, when I was obsessed (along with the rest of my geek circle) with Getting Things Done. Today, I found this talk  — How To Blog — on Kung Fu Grippe, his personal blog, and the slide shown above. [...]

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Whip It

October 6, 2009
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Jell-O® put me through college. I wasn’t a door-to-door Jell-O® salesman, but I was the son of a General Foods (GF) employee – Dad programed IBM 370 mainframes for the warehouse inventory systems in assembly language – which made me eligible for a corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship. All I had to do in return was [...]

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In Which I Confess to Being the Last Food Blogger in the U.S. to See Julie and Julia

October 1, 2009
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I feel like a traitor. I have declared here that Julia Child is the reason I can cook today, but I waited more than two months to see Julie and Julia. Part of the delay can be attributed to finding someone to watch He Who Will Not Be Ignored (difficult in the summer when all [...]

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Mahlon Hoagland: 1921-2009

September 25, 2009
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He worked with James Watson and Francis Crick. He discovered transfer RNA and amino acid activation. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. His name was Mahlon Hoagland, he passed away last week, and you have never heard of him. I had never heard of him until a series of unlikely circumstances brought us [...]

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Readercon 20

July 9, 2009
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This afternoon I’m heading to Readercon 20, the speculative fiction conference I have been involved with for twenty years. The best explanation of what I’ve been doing there all this time is in this essay I contributed to the Souvenir Book, whose cover is pictured above: Twenty Years of Readercon Looking back, I can blame [...]

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“Pork Dinner for Four in Half an Hour”

April 13, 2009

In “How I Learned to Cook” I mentioned that one of the two cookbooks I owned was Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook. As I read through the book looking for recipes that I could prepare in a tiny kitchen with no oven, I also noted recipes that I wanted to try in a “real” [...]

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How I Learned to Cook

March 31, 2009

Blame it on the MIT Food Service. For my first two undergraduate years I ate my meals in the dining room in my dorm, MacGregor House. I had a book of “points” — tickets I turned in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The points could be used in any dining hall, but MacGregor was my [...]

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Reverse Engineering a Memory

March 19, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I “discovered” The Daily Catch, a restaurant in Boston’s North End. I usually didn’t bother with Italian restaurants — I cooked my own pasta & sauce, and anything more exotic could be supplied by Mon when I visited home. But Mom had one gap in her repertoire: she didn’t cook seafood [...]

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Fresh Pasta

January 29, 2009

My most vivid memory of my Italian grandmother – my mother’s mother – is watching her make pasta. She had a board and rolling pin she used to roll out paper-thin pasta dough, which she would then cut into different shapes. Once I saw her make cavatelli, little tightly-wound shells, by dragging her fingertips across [...]

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Mom’s Tomato Sauce, and the Magic Spoon Theory

January 18, 2009

Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn’t stick. You get it [...]

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