Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Taste of Cincinnati was this past weekend and I attended on Saturday and Monday. Although I've been in Cincinnati for almost 6 years this is my first Taste experience. I was very impressed with the festival. It was busy but not too crowded and there is nothing wrong at all with having dozens and dozens of the city's great resturants hawking their tastey wares. My personal favs:

• Famous Baked Potato Soup from the Courtyard Cafe - So unbelievablely creamy



• Andy's Mediterranean Grill's Kibbeh - Moist minced meat in a football shaped outer crust made from lamb and bulger wheat



• Andy's Mediterranean Grill's Chicken Tawook on a Skewer - So juicy with such powerful flavor...incredible



• Mike Fink's Maryland Crab Cake with Chilli Mayo - lots of crab and a nice blend of spices



• Song Long's Curry Chicken Wings - Not greasy, perfectly cooked and an interesting flavor



• Song Long's Sweet and Sour Chicken - They found a way to make this ho hum staple of Chinese resturants stand out by making the battered chicken be very light, very crispy and not greasy at all



• Tandoor's Mulligatawny Soup - My first time trying this dish and i wil definitely be trying it again



• Tandoor's Vegetable Samosa - Great crispy shell and and a nice spicey filling

I did notice that there are some chains on the list of resturants. While its obvious that all of the resturants attend for advertising/community relations purposes, I think some of them do a better job then most. Don Pablo's for example has 4 menu items and shows off somethings the average resturant goer might not have tried. However, places like LaRosa's pizza and GoldStar chilli serve there most popular menu items. I guess there are some people who are looking for a known quantity and are bit less adventurous then me, but come on, isn't that the whole point of a festival of this type?

Update: My Photos from the event are now online.

As I mentioned before, French Bread Pizza is an incredibly easy and adaptive recipe. I made this latest batch with Italian Sausage and spicy Capicola. Yummy.

The Daily WTF is a nice collection of all those weird and wacky things that make us stop and say WTF.

Jeff kindly arranged a nice get together for my birthday at Baba India in Oakley. It was a very nice way to spend my birthday.

Thanks Jeff and to everyone who came.

More pictures here.

A silver Porsche Boxter...Now that's what I call a great silver anverisary present.

(BTW: I just started a new gallery photo album devoted to the license plates I come across).

Finally got around to posting the pics from the Taste of Cincinnati. I previous posted my review and the rest of the photos are in the gallery.

Jena was able to snag free tickets for James, harry, Jeff, Angela and I so we spent last Friday at the ballpark. Great day for the game and although the Reds lost in the end, it was a good time.

More photos in the gallery.

I'm a big fan of Gallery and use it to power my photo gallery. Recently, I had found out that a few people had left some comments on the photos but I had never found out because I didn't have comment notification turned on. After spending a bunch of time turning it on individually for each album (I have a lot of albums), I went looking for a global configuration switch to control this. Alas, there is not. You would think this would be available. If I have overlooked it, please let me know.

I had some leftover cilantro and limes from the weekend so went searching for recipes. There was surprising variations so here was my take:

2 tsp sugar

6 cloves of garlic sliced thin

2 tsp soy sauce

juice of two limes

freshly ground black pepper

a small handful of cilantro chopped fine

1/4 tsp of roasted red pepper flakes

I mixed this and added to a ziplock bag filled with 4 chicken breasts. I let them marinade for about an hour and half before grilling them.

They turned out quite nicely. Very juicy with a nice subtle hint of cilantro. I will try this again with more limes and maybe a bit more red pepper.

There is another patch available for Gallery, the popular open source photo album software. Since I wasn't on the latest p1 patch, I did the full upgrade rather than just applying the deltas to the affected files. I ran into a snag where running the configuration wizard post install resulted in an empty config.php file. That causes all sorts of problems. Basicly it will tell you that the gallery isn't configured but when you go to the configuration wizard, the page won't load. Highly annoyin and took me awhile to figure out. Fortunately, I had a backup of my install, so i just replaced the config.php with the old one and the configuration wizard ran fine.

via Unix Girl