They steal my shiny things...

Another morning favorite.

Ingredients

• 2 cups milk
• 4 large eggs
• 8 slices of thick dry or stale bread.  "Texas Toast" or thick sliced French bread.
• 4 tablespoons butter
• Cinnamon (optional)

Instructions

This is the important part, the bread needs to be dry or stale.   To dry out the bread, leave it out overnight on a cooling rack.  If you forget, just preheat the oven to 100 and then TURN IT OFF.  With the oven OFF, place all the slices on a cooling rack inside the oven, close the door and leave it alone for about an hour.  That dries it out pretty good.   Don't worry, you are going to replace the moisture.

Preheat the oven to 375f.

Whisk the milk and eggs together in a wide bowl and then dip each slice into the liquid, allow to soak for 30 seconds on each side, and then remove.   Put each soaked slice on another cooling rack that is sitting in a sheet pan.  Allow to sit for no less than 2 minutes.  This will allow time for the liquid to soak into the bread.   Sprinkle cinnamon.

Over medium-low heat, melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a pan. Place 2 to 4 slices of the bread at a time into the pan and cook until golden brown, about 2 to 3 minutes per side. Remove from pan and place on a rack in oven for 5 minutes. Repeat with all 8 slices. Serve right away.

I thought I would post my thick Teriyaki sauce recipe for the friends who have asked.  It is good served over chicken, fish or beef with sushi rice or soba noodles.

Sauce Ingredients

• ¾ cup of water
• ¼ cup of pineapple juice
• 1 tablespoon of liquid smoke (optional)
• ¼ cup of soy sauce
• 2 ½ tablespoons of honey
• ¼ teaspoon of ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon of garlic powder
• 6 tablespoons of packed dark brown sugar
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• Pinch of crushed Chili pepper flakes

 Thickener Ingredients

• ¼ cup of cold water
• 2 ½ tablespoons of cornstarch

Instructions

1. In a sauce pan, mix all of the sauce ingredients and heat over medium heat and bring to a low boil.
2. In a cup, stir the thickener ingredients until it dissolves completely. If it sits more than a minute, you may have to re-stir it.
3. Pour the thickener into the sauce pan and keep stirring and heating until it reaches desired thickness. As it thickens, the sauce will turn clear. If it becomes too thick, add a teaspoon of water after it has cooled a little.

Notes

Never add cornstarch directly to the sauce. Always dissolve it first.

Let the sauce cool off for an hour or more before using. This will let it thicken a little more and it will taste better.

I took some time off of working on the new update to SaidSimple to work on a side project.  I needed to create a new and separate site because some of my goals are entirely different.  I even considered using one of the other public blogging sites but their advertising models have gone off the deep end and made them cumbersome to use, if not flat out useless.

My new site is called GenericJournal and it's the exact opposite of SaidSimple.  While this site is more about personal blogs, GenericJournal is geared more toward topic oriented blogs.  SaidSimple is very visual, GenericJournal is pure text.

A couple people have asked for SaidSimple blogs but unfortunately I lost all of the emails after I sold avenues.org.  Sorry about that.  For normal blogs, I will be adding new people here when the new site design is done, but if your blog idea was about a specific topic you're knowledgeable and passionate about, then GenericJournal might be the better place.  Please use the contact form here to get back in touch with me.

   I've been doing a lot of cooking lately and unless everyone is lying to me, I'm getting good.  I've been cooking a long time for myself, simple stuff mostly, but the stuff I'm doing lately has received the "holy shit that was good" seal of approval from all those who I've been cooking for and some of them are damned good cooks themselves.  I guess that's good.

   A month or so ago Amber and I decided that every Wednesday is "Daniel Cooks Day" and I'm rather enjoying it.  I go over to her place in the morning and make everyone breakfast and then dinner that same evening.  Every week it's something new.

   During the past few months I have been told I have mastered the art of breakfast omelets.  I've only made them for everyone once but I make them for Amber pretty often.   I usually put in red and green bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, diced ham or turkey, garlic, sharp cheddar cheese and a dash of crushed chili peppers for a little bite.

  Last Wednesday I did breakfast burritos for all.  It was pretty much the same as making an omelet except you mix the all the same ingredients first and then give it a few scrapes before it sets.   I put in a little salsa too.

   Tonight I experimented with sunny-side up eggs.  This may be old hat for most people but I was raised my entire life without ever eating a cooked whole egg.  Mom thought I was allergic to them, which in retrospect is weird because I ate all kinds of food made with egg in it, but the whole childhood experience of one kid, one egg, one mouth and a fork never happened.

  In experimenting I went though the the few remaining eggs in a just expired carton and by visual reference, they look picture perfect.  I think Amber will be having sunny-side up eggs for breakfast tomorrow so I can see if they taste as good as they looked.

   When I finish the update to SaidSimple, I'll start posting the menus and some recipes.  As a teaser, I have come up with a Teriyake sauce that is a clone of Yoshi's dynamite chicken sauce.  I'm still perfecting it but it's close, and even if it weren't close, it is still awesome.

    So where exactly is the new site design?  It's late.  It's very late.  I've been pretty busy lately so I have an excuse.

    Summer heat is starting to get on my nerves.  As soon as the temperatures drop into the low 80's I'll put on my hiking boots and get some miles under me.  I miss my desert creaters.  I wish there was a trail I could take Amber on but none of them are powerchair friendly.  Perhaps we can check out some of the city parks instead.

   As I mentioned earlier, one of Amber's caregivers at her group home decided to steal the laptop while she was away at the hospital and to replace it I picked her up a new MSI E7235-295US and installed Fedora 13 Linux.

   Everthing worked right out of the box but a few tweaks were needed for optimum performance.

   Since it took a while to find all the info I needed, I thought it would be helpful to others to share my results here.

   The start, get all updates and install the rpmforge repository.  As root, do:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Audio

The first thing you're going to notice is that internal speaker audio is really crappy.  Easy to fix.

Add the following line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/dist-alsa.conf

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

Next, edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and change default-sample-channels to 6.  Don't forget to remove the semi-colon too.

; default-sample-format = s16le
; default-sample-rate = 44100
default-sample-channels = 6
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

Video

By default, Fedora installs the nouveau video drivers, which work but they don't take full advantage of the GeForce GT 130M.  To install the vendor nvidia drivers, as root do:

yum -y install kmod-nvidia

If the default 1440x900 video mode is a little too much for you, ModeLines can be added to xorg.conf for other resolutions.  Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf which you should only modify after installing kmod-nvidia

###

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen         "Default Screen" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    ModulePath      "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
    ModulePath      "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "keyboard"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    Option         "DPMS"
    Modeline "1280x768" 80.14 1280 1344 1480 1680 768 769 772 795 -HSync +Vsync
    Modeline "1280x800" 83.46 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 -HSync +Vsync
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "Videocard0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Modes      "1440x900" "1280x800" "1280x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option         "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

###

For everything else, I recommend reading Personal Fedora 13 Installation Guide

Last but not least, if this has helped you out, please help Amber get her service assist dog.

   Now I'm really starting to know how Amber feels about all her missing iPods.

   My old Dell laptop disappeared when the person I loaned it to left the country before returning it.  At least I know where it went.

   But now, while Amber was at the hospital recovering from surgery, one of the staff members of her group home went into her bedroom and stole the Gateway MX8711.  Unfortunately, I had just upgraded the OS and had not re-installed the anti-theft software yet (it was on my todo list for today, in fact.)  To make it worse, when I got home and tried to access the backup drive which I used just a couple days ago, it was completely dead.  I am so incredibly screwed at the moment.