S2H

Ok, this idea, I like.
Take a look at the S2H - really a good idea, i think. You wear this little wrist watch device during the day and it registers how much you move. The more you move, the more points you get. The more points you have, the more you can trade in for real physical goods. Or digital goods. So I am liking the idea that if I wear this this thing at the gym, i rack up points that I can trade in for itunes goods. Or other things. And it doesn't even look half bad. In fact, kinda cool.
The website is here in case you are interested in reading more about it...

It was created for kids mainly. Like the kind that just sit on the sofa all day and watch tv...

The Sports and Food Weekend

Last night was Swiss food over at Mel and Philippe's (thanks guys! was lots of fun - looking forward to the next get-together, wherever and whenever that is). Fondue (yum) and a dessert I had never had, but always wanted to try: a chestnut puree with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. I read about it in a Marcella Hazan cookbook and wondered how it would be. I thought it was therefore an Italian dessert, but in fact it is (also) Swiss, and Philippe brought the chestnut puree when he was in Switzerland a couple weeks back. I have to admit - I was happy to try it finally. :-) And the cheese fondue with mushrooms and potatoes - very nice.

The gym, both yesterday and today, compensated for the calorie bomb (but very pleasurable food experience) weekend. Must have burned around 1000 calories both days - felt really great.

I decided to FINALLY GO FOR IT with Küchenschlacht (the hobby cook tv show here in Germany on ZDF) and am assembling my application and recipes this week and next. Tried out a recipe tonight (needed to time things) that is at least under consideration: Salmon roulade - butterflied salmon fillets stuffed with an artichoke, mint and almond stuffing. Results: very good, but possibly a bit too long to assemble (I would have 35 minutes from start to finish.) Let's see. Have a bunch of ideas...

When in Switzerland...Eat Bircher Muesli

Breakfast. Bircher Muesli...uuuuuummmmmm. And healthier than croissants...

The Ei Phone

Haven't run into this one at the grocery store yet, but I will be looking now!!! (I am guessing this is an old joke...)

and...

Really nice views from the top floor of our client's building. A nice open airy space - a pleasure to have meetings in.

Hello Allgaeu

Beautiful landscapes on today's trainride

Breakfast for Dinner

Had a craving for south Indian food this past week so decided to make a traditional south indian breakfast...for dinner tonight. Turned out quite well, even if I did cheat a bit on the Idlis.

What is it?
Two different kinds of chutneys - both delish - a coconut chili chutney with mustard seed and a roasted red pepper chutney with cashews.
Yogurt (actually not south indian - you don't find much yogurt down there, at least not in my experience which is admittedly quite limited...but we needed it cause everything else was pretty spicy)

and
Idlis - essentially cornmeal-texture muffins (although technically I think they are made out of ground rice...). Here is where I cheated. I used a mix. You mix the powder with yogurt and sauteed and chopped vegetables to make a batter and then steam them. They are also not the traditional idli shape, although fairly close...next time I'll try from scratch - I don't think they are that difficult. Need to find an idli steamer...

I remember the first...and second time I ate idlis. The first was actually in Singapore. A friend who I was studying with there (Amarpal) dragged me off to a food court to try them out (not much dragging was needed though). We were both sadly disappointed though. They were not fresh enough - idlis should really be fresh out of the steamer to be really good or else they have a tendency to get heavy. But the second time was another thing completely. We were travelling from Cochin down to Trivandrum by train. It was 6 in the morning and we had just landed the night before quite late. Had slept perhaps 5 hours and then it was time to get up and run for the train. After breathlessly grabbing a berth, we settled in for the 4 hour train ride and I realized we'd not had dinner the night before and breakfast/lunch was looking pretty far off. A guy who worked on the train asked if we wanted something to eat. (Of course we did!) and so on the next stop, he jumped off the train and bought us breakfast from a vendor working just next to the tracks. He brought us back Idli and Appams - both breakfast breads - with chutneys. So good.

Manam

The problem with a lot of ethnic food here in Germany is that the cooks try to adapt it to the tastes of the German palate. Namely (often, not always): bland, salty, heavy, meaty. So once in awhile you come across a real AUTHENTIC place and you get really happy because the original flavors all burst out at you. And in such places, you don't care if you're sitting on a tiny little wooden stool in a tiny space with 10 chairs with your coat on the floor behind you. You are focused instead on the kitchen behind the counter where the cooks are chattering in their native language, sauteing the dishes on the spot, and pulling other amazing things out of ovens or steamers, etc. The menus are generally short and provided in the native language (and english/german), there is a secret special of the day that is not on the menu which they will offer to you if you are nice, and you find that when you leave the place, you want to keep it to yourself.

Yes, well, some people have big mouths. ;-)

I've been wishing for a great Thai place around where I work and finally there is one. Manam apparently opened up about 6 months ago. It's a hole in the wall (as my mother would call it), crushed into a little corner of a "hinterhof" (parking yard in this case) just off of Rosenheimerstrasse. The guys who work on the second floor in my building discovered it one day about a month ago and apparently have been keeping it a secret. But Ranjith came and grabbed me for lunch today and then we grabbed another 4 people and traipsed over to the little place, crossing our fingers that it wouldn't be crowded with the Thai lunch crowd that is apparently frequenting the place.

I had my favorites: a green papaya salad (didn't beat the amazing green papaya slad I had the last time I was in Singapore, but it was really really really good - although be careful if you don't LOVE garlic...) and some green curry with squid. We were all trading bites of each others' dishes and I can tell you the pad thai was great, as was the steamed fish with lemongrass and coconut that Ranjith ordered.

Looking forward to Monday next week - Mallorie and I agreed we'd go again.

This Gives Me A Headache

In recent meetings with clients, I can't seem to shut up about Augmented Reality and how cool it is going to be when someone finally gets one of these apps working in Germany. (Buncha cool stuff already working in the US. Unfortunately, I don't dare use my iPhone in the US because of how outlandishly expensive it would be...).

I am guessing that not everyone knows what I am talking about when I casually throw out the words Augmented Reality - this is the ability of an application to take something like a photo or a video or merely a glimpse through a camera lens, combined with your GPS-sensed location and layer on additional, potentially useful information.

Here are some examples below - ripped directly from GigaOm. (Thanks for the tip, Scholly!)






So you can use this kind of info to help you find the subway, get recommendations at a restaurant, etc.

But with all the hype over Augmented Reality, you might imagine that things could get a bit out of hand. And they have. According to AdFreak, this little video showcases the crazy imagination "from London architecture student Keiichi Matsuda, who envisions just how bizarre your life might look in the not-too-distant future—a logo-dominated age in which every structure and visual space is aglow with advertising and the insignia of global commerce is woven into all aspects of your existence."



Augmented Reality Overdrive. And I already have a headache. No thanks. Pass on this one.

Phil, The Social Media Groundhog

Well, the news is in apparently. In Punxsutawny, Phil has spoken:
Winter will continue for six more weeks. (At least in the United States...)



But apparently he transmitted this unwelcome piece of information in a number of new ways this year:

via text message.

The article also mentions the other social media platforms Phil is apparently using:
"On the Pennsylvania-tourism Facebook, Punxsutawney Phil fans responded to his prognostication with lots of "nos" and "boos." One commenter asked, "Does this forecast count for Europe? In which case I am pushing the dislike button."

People interested in Punxsutawney Phil's prediction also had the option of receiving his forecast by text message or through Twitter. Unfortunately, many of the Groundhog Day text messages did not go out on time, and the Twitter account for visitpa.com was apparently hacked, so Phil's forecast was not posted there either.

"Somebody got into our Twitter account. It was compromised," Bonds said.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, this National Geographic article describes what I am talking about: "Tradition has it that if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow on Groundhog Day—always February 2—winter weather will continue for six more weeks across the United States. But if Phil doesn't see his shadow, then spring temperatures are just around the corner." Read the article further for the whole history of this "holiday."

Meanwhile, I'm just happy to see that Phil is able to communicate with us in so many more channels...

Not Yet There

There are not always AMAZING SUCCESSES in the kitchen when it comes to my cooking. :-P But what I like is that I have the feeling that I am always learning at least. So I had this vision of what I would cook this weekend/evening - I wanted to try some pumpkin...and some spinach...and some scallops...all layered with different complementary flavors. And in general I got the flavors right - I am pretty sure about this. At least most of them. But the textures were off. I wanted crispier drier pumpkin. And the parma wrapped around the broiled scallops was WRONG. In general, a bit too mushy. Nice presentation, but something was a bit off - need to figure out how to optimize.

These were all MY recipes...so it stands to figure...that even if I have logged the 10,000 expert hours (in any discipline if you log 10,000 hours, you are generally considered an expert - at least according to Malcolm Gladwell, and it seems like a reasonable conclusion to me...), that I am an expert in following recipes, but perhaps not yet an expert in creating them...at least not a really EXPERT expert.

So, Emily my dear, this is not yet ready for your test kitchen, but I will be sure to alert you if I get it to that point.

We have: pumpkin and baby corn and leek saute, spinach and pinenuts with a squeeze of lemon and broiled scallops wrapped in parma ham...which I will NEVER EVER broil again. Parma was ruined, although scallops were edible.

Needless to say, no publishing of the recipe quite yet.

Free iPad...sorta

I apologize, but I have taken part in this drawing and that means some of your email addresses have been sent off....:-)

I mean, if they gave me a freebie, I would hardly turn it DOWN!

Mediterranean

Another great recipe recommendation. I am a little embarrassed because I don't remember which blog I found this one on. Lately, I have subscribed to an aggregator blog called Foodgawker. It's a blog of food photos - if you click through you get taken to the blog on which the original photo and recipe was published. For those among us who are inspired by visuals rather than words (yes, me...at least when it comes to food....), this is the place to peruse.

And some days back (yes...i think just days), I came across a fish recipe where I thought - "yup, gotta try that one." The original name of the recipe was: Pan-Roasted Sea Bass and Couscous with Clementines, Olives, Dates and Chickpeas. But....I made a bunch of changes to the original recipe. (And the original was already an adaptation from a Gourmet magazine recipe.)

What is really nice about this one is that it is relatively fast. You could theoretically have this one on the table in about 40 minutes from start to finish. Interested? Ask, and I will make the effort to type up my version of the recipe.

Some modifications from me included: halibut instead of sea bass (but halibut was extremely mild and sea bass might have been even better), thyme in addition to mint, far less butter than called for, bulgar wheat instead of couscous and a fennel and preserved lemon salad on the side.

The local fans were impressed with the flavor and went back for third helpings.

So...you are looking at: pan-fried halibut on a bed of bulgar wheat and chickpeas flavored with clementines, dates and olives with a drizzle of an orange juice and thyme reduction, and a salad of fennel, olive oil and homemade preserved meyer lemons.

9 out of 10 points if I do say so myself. Nice, subtle mild perfumey flavors and a rich buttery undertone from the fish and dates.

Secret Addiction

I admit it, these days I peek at my iphone way too often to quickly take care of my cute little farm and cute little ranch. Take a look - I have quite a little plot, and now two sheep on the ranch!!!

Yes, a number of people make fun of my geekiness on this particular count (and yes, here is the little video that parodies the ridiculousness of this game),



BUT!!!! WAIT!!!!

While I am not the only zombie busy planting grass for her sheep and harvesting ridiculously expensive eggs, there are actually people out there making this game somewhat USEFUL.

And in fact...if I were to begin a business of my own (which I think about on occasion and should really begin to think about more seriously perhaps), I think my business would somehow go in this direction: linking the virtual world to the real world.

Check out these two REAL businesses that are doing just this.


The first one is a farm in Italy (beautiful webstie, btw) that lets people purchase plots of land in a virtual way, and then the farmers there plant vegetables, harvest them, and send them to the people who have paid for the land for the year. It's a bit pricey, but I think for a particular target group a very entertaining prospect. One has to buy vegetables anyway, so why not this way if it tickles your fancy? Here's the description: Users first select a garden size based on the number of people they'd like to feed; 30m2 is sufficient for 1–2 people and costs EUR 850 per year. The virtual gardener can then choose from 40 different types of vegetables, using a highly intuitive interface that includes information on expected yields and harvest times. Optional extras include a photo album of the garden's progress (EUR 49), herb and fruit beds (EUR 50/75), and even a scarecrow with a picture of the customer's own face (EUR 39). Once the garden has been designed and fees paid, planting begins on the farm, which is located between Milan and Turin in northern Italy. As the organic produce grows, it's picked and delivered to the customer's door within 24 hours. Weekly deliveries are part of the package.


And here is a spontaneously created business which addresses an immediate need: donate money to the Haiti relief fund and get "virtual" money in exchange. For those who planned to donate anyway and who are simultaneously farmville freaks, here is added impetus for donating. Crazy, but who cares if it benefits the relief effort and this is what it takes to get money from the public?

Product Imitates Nature

You know that time you were in Thailand or India or Bali...relaxing on the beach with a great book in hand, sun shining down on you, crabs scuttling by, the office a million miles away. But you were suddenly very thirsty and at that moment, a guy came by selling green coconuts which he very willingly cracked open for you and stuck a straw in. And at that moment, as you took your first sip of the coconut water, you realised you could drink coconut water for the rest of your life and never miss any other liquid....

Well ok, maybe you have not yet experienced that moment.

But JUST IN CASE YOU DO....and you do not happen to be on a beach in Thailand or India or Bali, or walking around Little India in Singapore, or in fact anywhere near a place where coconuts grown wild and people sell them as a refreshing drink on the street, you can BUY a product which fulfills the same purpose.

Check it out.


Just found these at one of the local asian stores. And...I am a sucker for great packaging. (And yes, I suppose we need to admit that this is a big waste of natural resources for many many reasons so I swear I won't buy another one ever again and I will keep the package from this one for many years and admire it forever....now I feel guilty for buying it and only spending a measly 2 Euros on it based on the fact that it has obviously cost our environment far more...) But I am sitting here drinking 100% coconut water from a super cute little plastic replica with a straw in it.

And now that I have written this blog entry...and processed the fact of my actions while writing...I realize I can no longer enjoy the coconut water or the packaging. Very sad.

Back to work. :-(

iNakedScanner

Quite a funny cartoon from a German website/blog...:-))) I guess they have solved the whole debate over how to get people to want to go through the naked scanners at the airport.

The german can be translated: "People can barely wait ever since we stuck the stupid apple on the machine"


tee hee...

Apple Tablet Rumors

Reposting this one from Mashable, which is reposting from The Green Room Blog...but I like the visual explanation - easy skimming to quickly see the rumors around the apple tablet condensed in one space (rather than reading the 500 articles a day about it...) along with a nice key that tells you how likely the rumors are. Wonder how they managed that one. Maybe there is a correlation between the likelihood the rumor is true with how often it appeared in the press. Anyway...just a few more days until January 27th and then all will be revealed.

Ah...and they also have this similar visual around the next generation iphone rumors...

Red and Green

I've been sitting here all weekend waiting for "Daisy" to strike with her mountains of snow - a snow to end all snows - to stop all traffic, be it land or sea or air, to send millions to the markets to stock up on non-perishables for the weeks-long wait for the snow to slowly disappear and life to return to normal. Still waiting. We have only gotten a drizzly sleet that is coating everything with a treacherous layer of ice. Daisy, you are late - no dinner for you!

And to further reject the white beast who did not bother to visit us in Munich, I made some lovely spinach and ricotta gnocci with a tomato sauce for dinner last night. It was a Marcella Hazan recipe rather than my tried-and-true Suzanne Goin. And I gotta say...Marcella whooped Suzanne's butt. Compared to the gnocci with wild mushrooms I made some months back from my ever-favorite "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," (which at the time I thought were divine) the spinach and ricotta gnocci were much lighter and tastier. On the other hand...they were also a bit harder to handle. The dough was barely a dough - there was no rolling out and cutting it into 3/4 inch lengths. It was more of a sticky gooey process of tentative shaping and hoping that it would all be ok in the end. But it was. They were lovely - little pillows of cheesy green covered with a bright tomato sauce. Looking forward to making them again. Total time to make? About 1 hour start to finish.

As usual, the photos do not do justice. Ranjith commented on Friday..."hey, Julie, I need to give you a photography lesson...your New Year's food looked great, but the close-ups were terrible." But if I got serious about the photography I guess I would have to transform this into an only-food blog rather than a technology and food blog and that...would be really strange! Because OBVIOUSLY technology should be paired with food.

Anyway, here's Marcella's gnocci recipe - gotta share this one. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
1 lb fresh spinach or 1 10-ounce package frozen leaf spinach, thawed (Euro readers, 10 ounces = 283 grams, I used frozen and it was just fine)
2 Tablespoons butter
1 Tablespoon onion chopped very fine
2 Tablespoons chopped prosciutto or boiled unsmoked ham (I left this out - and didn't miss it.)
Salt
3/4 cup fresh ricotta cheese
2/3 cup all-purpose flour (I think i ended up using over a cup - I kept adding - just to get it to a reasonably solid consistency...)
2 egg yolks
1 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
Whole nutmeg (I cheated - put in a pinch of pre-ground)

1) Cook the spinach in a covered pan with salt (VERY IMPORTANT) for about 5 minutes (I did about 3...) Drain it and squeeze all the moisure out of it, chop it coarsely (here's where i messed up - I didn't squeeze out enough water...but just resulted in adding more flour, so ok in the end...)

2) Saute the butter and onion in a small skillet until it is pale gold, then add the chopped ham. Cook for a few seconds. Add the chopped spinach and some salt and cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Take off the heat and let cool.

3) In a bowl, combine the spinach mixture, the flour and ricotta and stir. Add the egg yolks, grated Parmesan, and a grating of nutmeg (about 1/8 teaspoon) and mix with a spoon. Taste and correct for salt.

4) Make small pellets of the mixture, shaping them quickly by rolling them in the palm of your hand. Ideally they should be no bigger than 1/2 inch across, but if you find it troublesome to make them that small, you can try for 3/4 inch. If the mixture sticks to your palms (IT DOES), dust your hands lightly with flour. (I tried the flour, but that did not help. So instead, I wet my hands with water and then rolled them - and THAT WORKED).

5) Drop the gnocci, a few at a time (about a dozen or so) into boiling SALTED water. Cook them for about 3 minutes - or for about a minute or two after they return to the surface of the water. Remove with a slotted spoon.

Serve on a platter covered with your sauce of choice and sprinkle liberally with Parmesan cheese.

Yum.

Bavarian Breakfast

To say goodbye to our guests this morning we fed them a traditional Bavarian breakfast: Weiss Beer, Pretzles, Weisswurst, and sweet mustard. Gerd REALLY enjoyed it. Here are the before and after photos - before two beers and around 3 weisswurst and....after.

Snow is Back

And spent the day at the lake. Thankfully in warm saunas for a good
portion of the day. Where i was not allowed to take photos...

...although I took ONE. A very decent one where no naked bodies can be seen. From the upstairs floor of the facility you can look out onto the lake. There were a whole variety of saunas to visit - even a crazy one outside on the lake. They had transformed a boat into a sauna. So you go sit in it and it is set to 90 degrees. The boat rocks back and forth in the waves as you sit there in sweat. Afterwards a lot of people jump in the lake, but I was not that brave...

Before going into the place, we walked around Tegernsee a bit freezing our butts off in order to REALLY want to go into the sauna.

Feeding our Brains

In order to distract ourselves yesterday from our somewhat sore heads and flagging energy, we headed over to the museum district to check out the new Museum Brandhorst and afterwards to the Pinakothek der Moderne, where we spent an hour looking through the product design galleries.

The first photo is a picture of an electric water boiler from France, made at the turn of the century. Looks a bit different than the one that I received as a Christmas present this year. ;-)

I liked the BMW motorcycle from 1928 - somehow a cross between a bicycle and a motorbike.

The green room was interesting - a room brightly lit with these green lights. Your eyes play a trick on you when you are inside of it - the white walls outside look pink when you are standing in the room. But the green light didn't fool the camera...although there is a bit of a pink tinge to the white.

Finally - we called it quits when we saw Gerd and Delphine collapsed on the steps towards the end of the day. ;-)

Headed out for Afghani food last night, which our guests enjoyed a lot.

Today: off for massages and sauna near Tegernsee and then...probably...ethiopian food for dinner.

And then one more day of vacation...ouch.