Eliot Kristan's Blog

Week in Review

eliot — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:52:29 +0000

Highlights from this past week:

Last Sunday Mom put together a most delicious cheese fondue dinner complete with kielbasa, french bread, veggies and baby gherkins. The 30 year old fondue pot produced a ghostly high-pitched squeal as it kept the cheese nice and melty but all in all it held up very well. Ars, Mom, Dad, and I ate it in front of the fire. Warm food, warm house, warm people.
On Tuesday I was crowned mayor of Christina’s Ice Cream on Foursquare. I picked up a pint of pistachio and a pint of coffee toffee frozen yogurt. It feels good to be the king.
Christina made such deliciously memorable meals this week including pasta with homemade sauce and baked ginger veggies and garlic bread. She also made chicken parmesan with pastina. She definitely knows the path to my heart. <3
Liz and Julio put on this great installation show at meme gallery in Cambridge called encontracosas or ‘found things’ that I went to on Friday Night. It was awesome. You’re encouraged to actually touch and play with all of the found things, move them around, stack them, spin them, mash them. All sorts of things. VHS cassettes, toys, furniture, photos, hair bands. All things lost or discarded at one point (or perhaps multiple points) and then found. It was cool to be part of the art like that. From the website: In MEME, encontracosas: real time weavings uses installation and improvisation to form paths, webs, ensembles and gathering points made from found materials and sounds, creating new axes of ‘meeting/finding’ each other and things in space. The axes of ‘meeting/finding’ each other was the coolest part. There were always little things around to play with while I met people, which seemed to aid in lubricating those exchanges in a neat way. That and the people I met were so friendly like those who run the gallery – Vella, Derrick, Phil, and Sandreen. Oh, and I got to spend some time with the wolf moon walking to and from meme. It was a beaut.
Yesterday C and I went to 1369 while we waited for a table at the ECG for brunch. There was this neighborhood guy there that channeled some Daniel Johnston and he danced to the jangly music while he waited for his drink. He talked to C and I about how you used to be able to buy the male chicks that are now ‘discarded’ at egg houses for 5 cents around Easter. He was great.
Then onto an excellent brunch at the ECG served by the always gracious and wonderful brunch captain. Art steers that ship and he steers it well. Incidentally, Drew Houston, the founder and ceo of Dropbox came into the ECG when C and I were waiting to be seated but didn’t stay after he found out about the wait. When I mentioned it to Art, he offered that the Grill could have shared a brunch platter to his Dropbox He and his team have created an awesome product for wicked easy sharing of files between computers and/or people and is worth checking out if you haven’t yet. Here’s a video of him giving a talk at Berkeley recently.
Then tonight Matt and I met up, got jazzed up about work talk over a burrito, then went to a Haiti Relief Concert that my friend Adam helped organize. It was a good time and this one band called Zili Misik really rocked it. Here is a video (although it doesn’t really do their live music and energy justice):

See you in a week, week in review.

Shakshouka: It’s What’s for Dinner

eliot — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:03:03 +0000

This past Sunday I made a North African dish called Shakshouka. I was inspired by a food-travel show (a la No Reservations w/o all the sass) where the host went to Israel and visited a restaurant where the proprietor made up a gigantic pan of this stuff. It looked so good I had to try making it that night.

One of the neat things about the dish is that when it’s time, you plop eggs in and let them slow poach over the peppery stew slurry.

C and I both agree that it came out very tasty. We ate it with hummus, pita, and some simple homemade olive spread (chunky chopped olives, a bit of thyme and olive oil).

And even though there’s traditionally no meat in the dish (although you could certainly add sausage or other meat), it has a thick and beefy vibe along with the egg protein that doesn’t leave you missing it.

(I’ll include my recipe after the pics)

Cut up peppers hit the pan after sauteing the onions and garlic

Fresh peppers and onions up close

Neat texture on the wood spoon, right?

Just added generous amounts of cumin and coriander

Starting to come together

10-15 minutes into a steady simmer

Volcanic love

Eggs are in! It’s poaching time. You can see four here but there’s actually a fifth that was lost to the abyss in the top left.

Opera in the background. It’s good egg-poaching music.

Photo fail, video win.

Note the hummus on the table. It’s the perfect compliment for the shakshouka. We also had fresh and chunky olive spread with it. Also note our cat Petunia under my thumbs up. She’s the perfect compliment to shakshouka making.

The end result! Yum! Seriously.

Recipe

Thanks to Tamara, whose recipe I worked off of with some revisions along the way.

Ingredients (for four good-sized portions):

1/4 to 1/2 cup of olive oil (olive oil is a key component here and you won’t more than just a coating on the bottom of the pan)
2 medium to large onions chopped
6-10 garlic cloves minced (garlic is big in this dish too)
4 large bell peppers (red, green, yellow, and/or orange) knuckle-sized pieces or anything would work really
5 tsp cumin
3 tsp coriander
4-5 tsp paprika
A dash or cayenne or red pepper flakes (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes
4 (or more or less) large eggs

Steps

Saute the onions in the olive oil until translucent (not browned) in a large pan.
Add the minced garlic and saute them w/ the onions for a few more minutes.
Add the peppers and stir it all together
Add the spices – cumin, coriander, paprika
Saute all of that until peppers soften up
Add the tomatoes
Saute the entire mixture on low heat for 15 (or more minutes) stirring regularly along the way. Also taste and add salt and pepper to your liking.
Now it’s time for the eggs! Take a spoon a push it into the top of the mixture to make a little hole where you want the egg to go. But don’t make it too deep. I lost an egg that way.
The eggs will probably need 10 minutes or more from when you put them in. It all depends on how you like your yokes, a bit runny or more well done.
Spoon and serve!

Great w/ pita and hummus!

Manny’s last homerun

eliot — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:13:44 +0000

My friend Jamie caught a great photo of Manny’s last home run at Fenway park:

http://www.jamesconnell.com/?p=106

I Met The Walrus

eliot — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:07:25 +0000

]]>

Donkey Kong Awesomeness

eliot — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:30:14 +0000

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Donkey Kong on the virtual console, so this made my evening:

http://gizmodo.com/5035196/moving-lego-donkey-kong-people-lego-donkey-fcking-kong

Nas Delivers With “Sly Fox”

eliot — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:42:33 +0000

When I first heard the new Nas album last week, the song “Sly Fox” stood out to me as a great track. Turns out Nas is doing more about alerting people to the malignancy of Fox News and teamed up with colorofchange.org for a petition to “Demand Fox stop race baiting and fear mongering.”

Check out Nas’ appearance below:

And hear the song for yourself:

Sly Fox – Nas

iBot Delight!

eliot — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:26:39 +0000

A couple days ago Kate from Independence Technology gave Mom a demo of the iBot. She was a wonderful person and very adept at walking Mom through all of its functions.

If you’re unfamiliar with the iBot, it is a power chair that was invented by Dean Kamen (also the inventor of the Segway) that is capable of standing upright, climbing stairs and tackling rough terrain using sophisticated gyrometric sensors and computer power.

Below is some media from the demo. It may take some time for the videos to fully load.

The iBot being calibrated and Mom coming up to eye level in two-wheel mode.

Off-roading in the back yard with the iBot in 4-wheel mode. Mom’s scooter would definitely choke on this terrain.

Rounding a tree way back in the woods.

Climbing the stairs!

The iBot coming down the basement stairs. I have to admit that I was a little freaked out shooting from this angle but Kate, Mom, and the iBot handled these narrow and steep stairs wonderfully.

Mom touching down on the basement floor for the first time in about 8 years. Note Bowie barking up a storm in the background. He was a little nervous about the iBot.

A photo of Mom downstairs.

And another.

Coming up into 2-wheel mode in the kitchen.

A push from Kate can’t phase the iBot in two-wheel mode.

Mom demonstrating how she can reach tough spots using the iBot in two-wheel mode.

In the kitchen reaching a high cabinet

10 Principles for Good Design

eliot — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:54:30 +0000

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.

True that, Dieter Rams.

Skype down … grrr

eliot — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:22:52 +0000

Dear Skype, you were so reliable up until today.

Seems as though Skype’s network is down and they say it’s a P2P software issue.

I first tried calling my ISP, Cox, to see if they had recently blocked ports required by Skype. Funny thing was, when I finally got to a human and explained the problem, the guy hung up on me! Coincidence? Not sure…

I checked Google News and the hits there showed the issue was on Skype’s end.

My Skype line isn’t crucial for my work, although I’m feeling some anxiety not being connected. I sure do feel sorry for companies that use Skype and are more phone-phocused.

Skype’s blog post says 12-24 hours … we’ll see.

No new mail! Yay!

eliot — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:41:01 +0000

Every 6 months or so I finally get around to clearing out my email inbox.

Tonight I was inspired by this video of blogger Merlin Mann discussing his technique for attaining “Inbox Zero” to a crowd of Googlers. Mann explains that it’s just no fun (and non-productive to boot) to be working out of the inbox all day, constantly refreshing like a mouse hitting a lever to get some cheese.

So 2 hours later, I reply to an old email from back in March before archiving it, and then … drumroll … no emails in my inbox! Instead, I’m greeted with this message:

Oh no, please no.�

Using Google Reader to check my RSS feeds is my other vice. And I’d rather confront that another night.