A Little Bit of Wisdom

I was doing a bit of reading on Wikipedia tonight and came upon a reference to The Hedgehog Signaling Pathway. I had no idea what it was referring to, but knew it had something to do with genetics and thought it was a silly name so I decided to read more.

I didn’t have to read long before I noticed this sentence, “Mammals have three Hedgehog homologues, of which Sonic hedgehog is the best studied.” Thank you Wikipedia for linking everything that has an entry. Of course, I stopped reading about silly hedgehog pathways. I want to read about Sonic the Hedgehog! Again, I understood very little of what I was reading, but was intrigued. (more…)

I’m currently playing catch-up after a couple of trips, but I do plan to write a couple of posts about our first-ever trip to NYC soon. But first, since it’s a quick and easy post to make. Here are some of my favorite shots from the city that never sleeps! (more…)

Our favorite Thai restaurant in the area so far is Krung Thai and although my favorite dishes are the special noodles of the house and pad see ew, I noticed that they had their recipe for pad thai up on their site so I decided to take a stab at it.

I changed it quite a bit based on my preferences and what I had access to, but overall it’s still pad thai and still quite delicious. I did overcook the noodles the first time because I just wasn’t vigilant enough and had forgotten how easy it is to overcook rice noodles, or any noodles for that matter. Next time I think it will turn out better if I go through the steps quicker instead of letting it cook so much in between (I have a tendency to run into the other room to check the recipe on my computer in between steps) and I plan to add some spicy hotness with crushed red peppers or powdered cayenne. You can find the original recipe on the Krung Thai site. Here is my modified version:

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One of the assumptions when moving to a larger metropolitan area is that there will be more access to services. With so many people here, in and around the Bay Area, there is seemingly a service for everything (there’s an ice cream trolley outside my apartment right now!) and competition to keep those services affordable and hold them to a standard of quality.

Consider this assumption debunked! (more…)

Today was my first Super Happy Dev House (SHDH), which is an event that happens once a month where a bunch of developers get together in a big house somewhere in the San Francisco bay area and develop stuff. What kind of stuff, you ask? Whatever they want, of course. (more…)

One of my favorite places to go biking is along the Stevens Creek Trail here in Mountain View. Most of the route is on bike trails so I don’t have to worry about people in cars trying to murder me and I avoid the loss of momentum that comes with intersections. Plus, it’s pretty! Here are some recent photos: (more…)

I’ve gotten close to perfecting my garlic mashed potato recipe. It occurred to me the other day that when I simply add minced garlic the flavor tends to come in short bursts. Instead, this time I incorporated the butter, cream, and garlic before mixing them into the potatoes. I’ve followed a few recipes recently that called for steeping things in warm cream to bring out the flavor so I thought, “why not do that with garlic?”. Here’s what I did: (more…)

Last weekend Katie came down from Sacramento and the three of us (yup, Dave and the Katies) went hiking around the Foothills. We let the GPS do the thinking, which first led us to the Palo Alto Foothills Park, where we were turned away because we are not Palo Alto residents. The park ranger pointed us in the direction of the the Pearson-Arastradero Preserve that is open to the public. I got some pretty sweet scenic shots on the way there and while hiking:

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At our wedding almost two years ago I was overjoyed to have Raghavan Iyer in charge of the dinner for our reception. I still hear from friends about how much they loved the food in the buffet so I was excited, when going through my recipes, to find instructions for each of the dishes we had at the tasting with Raghavan.

So far I’ve only made one of these dishes, but it was one of my favorites. It was surprisingly easy and turned out well both times I’ve made it. I accidentally bought sliced almonds instead of blanched almond slivers, but it turned out great nevertheless. The following recipe is from Raghavan’s book The Turmeric Trail: (more…)

The first couple times I went to Trader Joe’s I really didn’t get what all the fuss was about. I found it crowded, difficult to find things, and didn’t really see much I wanted that I couldn’t get somewhere else, in some cases for the same price or cheaper.

Sarah pointed out that it’s a good place if you’re looking for something very particular that is hard to find elsewhere. Also, that those particular items, which would normally be terribly expensive because they are hard to find, are actually reasonably priced. This coupled with the glowing recommendation from Chef Nanci Wokas who presented the cooking class I took Monday night (and who also apparently drove her RV to NOLA to cook for people after Katrina) convinced me to give it another shot. (more…)