Chocolate Mousse Pie

This post is part of a series called ‘Flavors of The Holidays‘.

Its fall and the flavors and aromas of the holidays are upon us. Join me for the next few weeks as I reveal some of my favorite holiday dishes from family, friends and around the world. Check back every Wednesday for a new recipe until Christmas.

Sky-high and scrumptious, this fluffy chocolate delight is a huge step up from the basic JELL-O chocolate pie for only a little more work. This recipe is a modified version of one I found on the internet some time ago, its slightly simplified from the one I found but just as good.

Chocolate Mousse Pie
Cook Time: 20 min | Level: Basic | Yield: 8 servings

Make sure you get the whipped cream to room temperature (4 hours if frozen) before you start or you will not be able to fold it into the chocolate.

Ingredients

1 bag (12 ounce) milk chocolate chips

4 cups miniature marshmallows

1 Graham cracker or Oreo pie crust

1 cup milk

1 8oz tub prepared whipped cream (at room temp)

Instructions

In a heavy saucepan, heat the chocolate, marshmallows and milk over low heat until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth, stirring constantly

Let cool for 10 minutes, fold in whipped cream and pour into pie crust

Refrigerate at least 3 hours or until set

Refrigerate leftovers

Happy Holidays!

I know I promised a new recipe today, but I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to wish all my friend, family and readers a very Merry Christmas, Hanuka, Kwanzaa and a happy new year. Check back next week for another recipe (trust me, its a good one).

This short clip is made in After Effects using a couple presets: “Distribute”, “Sure Target” and “Falloff”. Sure Target and Falloff handle the motion between text segments with minimal key-framing and Distribute is very useful for randomly distributing the text in 3D space without spending any time actually moving layers.

I plan on putting together a tutorial for this (or a similar) effect. By using the presets and being careful about your layer management you could animate a few hundred layers of text or images in minutes.

Lingonberry Stuffed Meatballs

This post is part of a series called ‘Flavors of The Holidays‘.

Its fall and the flavors and aromas of the holidays are upon us. Join me for the next few weeks as I reveal some of my favorite holiday dishes from family, friends and around the world. Check back every Wednesday for a new recipe until Christmas.

Other than having made it half a dozen times, I can’t take any credit for this recipe. I first had it at Christmas when my cousin Jason made it for the entire family, and he got it from the Food Network. It was served on a bead of creamy mashed potatoes and covered with a sweet pea & cream sauce which gives it a nice festive color too. I simply love this recipe though, it does take a bit of prep work and a couple ingredients you aren’t likely to have but once you serve it to your friends and they beg you for the recipe it’ll all be worth it.

Lingonberry Stuffed Meatballs
Cook Time: 30 min | Level: Intermediate | Yield: 6 servings

Best served on a bed of mashed potatoes with a mildly sweet sauce.

Ingredients

2 pounds ground beef

1 pound ground veal

1/2 cup minced yellow onion

3 sprigs fresh tarragon, leaves stripped and coarsely chopped

2 teaspoons herbes de Provence

3 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons white pepper

5 eggs

3 cups panko (Japanese) bread crumbs

4 tablespoons lingonberries

Vegetable oil

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Put the ground beef, veal, onion, tarragon, herbes de Provence, salt and pepper into a large mixing bowl. Lightly beat the eggs and pour over the meat. Mix well using your hands (it’s the best way to make meatballs). Add 1 1/2 cups of the bread crumbs and mix well. Set aside.

Form the meat mixture into 12 balls. Make a hole in the center of each ball with your thumb and fill the hole with 1 teaspoon of the lingonberries. Push the meat back over the fruit, making sure to seal the hole well. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. (The meatballs can be made to this point 1 day in advance.)

Pour 3 inches of vegetable oil into a large deep sided skillet and place over medium heat for 7 to 10 minutes. Test the oil by dropping a bread cube into it. If the cube browns quickly, the oil is ready. Remove the meatballs from the refrigerator and roll them in the remaining bread crumbs. Carefully place them into the skillet 4 at a time. Keep a close watch on them, making sure to turn them so they get golden brown on all sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and place on a sheet of paper towels. Repeat with the remaining meatballs.

Put the meatballs on a baking sheet and place in the oven for 20 minutes. Remove and serve immediately.

NOTE: Substitute cranberry sauce if you can’t find lingonberries

The first time I made this I couldn’t find ligonberries, so I substituted cranberry sauce. Recently though, I’ve found that IKEA sells a ligonberry sauce that could be used. In the end though, I frankly can’t tell the difference between the lingonberry sauce and cranberry sauce so it may just be easier to stick with cranberry.

Otherwise, I incourage you to make these WAY ahead of time (like the day before) and do the cooking right before you serve. Once you start the cooking process you can’t really stop so its very nice to be prepared ahead of time, and if they are cold they hold together better when you fry them. This makes an incredible alternative to traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and is one of my all time favorite dishes.

Spiced Apple Cider

This post is part of a series called ‘Flavors of The Holidays‘.

Its fall and the flavors and aromas of the holidays are upon us. Join me for the next few weeks as I reveal some of my favorite holiday dishes from family, friends and around the world. Check back every Wednesday for a new recipe until Christmas.

On a cold, blustery day, nothing warms you to the core like a hot cup of spiced apple cider and its probably one of the easiest things to make. Just writing out the recipe is enough to make me want to go have a cup! Besides being simple, cheap and tasty, it’ll make your house smell like warm apples and cinnamon all day.

Spiced Apple Cider
Cook Time: 30 min | Level: Basic | Yield: 16 servings

Ingredients

1 Gallon apple juice

~10 whole cloves

2-3 cinnamon sticks

3-4 star anise heads

Instructions

Put everything in a large crock pot and heat until steaming

Enjoy

NOTE: It takes a good while for everything to heat up, so if you’re in a rush you may want to start it on the stove top, but you’ll lose some flavor. If you can’t fit the entire gallon of cider in your pot just set the remaining off to the side and top off the batch as it gets low.

A note on the difference between apple juice and apple cider when your shopping. From what I can tell the difference is that cider is made by pressing the apples which results in the typically refrigerated cloudy stuff found in the produce section and juice is the pasteurized and filtered liquid from a cider. That said, you may notice in the juice aisle of your supermarket there will be both ‘Apple Juice’ and ‘Apple Cider’ (both from concentrate) that look nearly identical, most notably that they are clear. As far as I can tell there isn’t a difference between these two products and either will work for this recipe. The key is to get a 100% juice from concentrate that is clear, as it makes the best presentation.

Battleship – My First AE Project

I’ve been in a particularly creative mode lately, so I decided to tackle Adobe After Effects. After Effects (AE) is primarily used for creating motion graphics and visual effects. My interest in AE originally was to be able to do dynamic pans and zooms on my time lapse footage, which is captured on a tripod as still frames and can sometimes be rather boring. After Effects will allow me to compose the time lapse at the full resolution of the images (~2000 x 3000 pixels) and then build a ‘camera’ that can zoom and pan around the shot without any loss in quality. Lending interest to slower shots or helping to direct focus on a particular spot.

All that said, I had never used After Effects before this weekend so I spent a long time watching tutorials online about how to use After Effects (Video Copilot is a great resource). Using what I’d learned, and various other Google searches online I was able to put together this shortened music video using the song Battleship by The Usuals.

The whole clip probably took me about 10 hours to build. Its basically a lot of key-framing to get the animation and camera moves.

I had a lot of fun animation the battleship tilting, breaking, and sinking. I played with adding bubbles and flames to certain words and scenes but in the end didn’t render them because they detracted from the overall feeling of the clip. Just about every word in the clip is a 3D object, built as a pre-composed scenes for the blocks of text. I animated the block for simple fly-ins and then used camera moves to rotate the blocks and pan around to each letter. The whole thing was tedius and I had to ask Cody for the lyrics in a few spots to make sure I was getting it right but overall I’m really glad I did it, because it got me comfortable with After Effect and ready to take on the next challenge.

You can see all the camera move key-frames in the screen shot above.

Epic Waterfight

The most intense squirt gun fight I’ve ever whitnessed

Time-lapse Project

Day In, Day Out is a project of mine to capture a typical day in Downtown Sacramento through time lapse. It will likely take me a long time to get the whole thing done, I’ve estimated it will take a little less than 50,000 shots to complete the entire length of the video. Anyway, last night I started sketching out some of the shots to get the timing and ideas “on paper”, and went a little bit overboard so I wanted to share:

Its a very short clip, in case you can’t tell (which is very likely, Adeline could have drawn better sketches than I did) the first shot would be a time lapse of the sun rising over the capitol, a shot which I hope to be able to capture from the Penthouse balcony of my building and the second shot is looking down at the corner just in front of my building (from roughly the same location) at 7th street, and the Light Rail station as people board the trains.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas for some cool time-lapse of downtown sacramento. If your interested in helping with this project too, let me know it might be fun to have a couple people doing time-lapse and join it all together into one continuous movie.

My Summer Vacation

Do you remember in elementary school, after summer break when your teacher would have you stand up in front of the class and explain what you did over the summer? Me either frankly, but its so cliché I couldn’t avoid brining it up since it leads right into my post today.

I want to actually start this off by saying I’d love to get some input back on this, tell me what you did over the summer. A lot of the people I’ve grown up with are just getting their families started while others aren’t done exploring the world. I’d like to know where life’s path has lead you.

As much as it irks me to admit it, Facebook is great for keeping tabs on old friends, but it lack any personality, its nothing more than a list of milestones. Facebook lacks the telling of a complete story. And I know this sort of thing is often left to a letter in a Christmas card, but frankly the Holiday’s have enough things going on, I think its time to go back to elementary school when we updated our friends at the end of the summer. So without further adieu, My Summer Vacation, a report by Kyle Klaus:

I’ll admit, 2009 started out on a bit of a sour note. But I ended up having a great new years with Matt Lockyer, his girlfriend Kelly and brother Travis in Oakland. It was a bit of a foreshadowing event, but more on that later.

2009 marks the fifth year of this blog (through various forms) . While its not much of anything to celebrate, and to say its been constant would be a lie, I’ve still enjoyed putting my musings, ramblings and ravings to ‘paper’ and I hope to continue. This post actually makes number 316 over those five years for anybody who is counting.

In February Kerry and I (as well as the rest of her family) made the long drive down to San Diego to watch the 2009 Rugby Seven’s tournament. It was only the second time I had ever been to a rugby game, and this was on a whole different level. I had a great time and took a ridiculous number of photos of the event. Also, before we left to San Diego we spent a brief amount of time enjoying the very very rare snowfall in Cameron Park.

In April though, Kerry and I split up. Without trying to be too much of a downer, there wasn’t much love left there and it was just simply time to move on. Unfortunately, our lease wasn’t up until the end of September, so we stuck it out and continued to live together until the end of our lease (not really something I would recommend, but we managed it OK).

On a better note though, I started taking tests towards my MCSE certification. The link does a better job of explaining fully what that means than I will here, but basically its a Microsoft certification that says I know what I’m doing when it comes to managing computer systems and, bottom line, is a meal ticket to higher pay. I still have 5 more tests to take to finish my certification, but with the tests I’ve done so far I can officially call myself a “Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).

I also was able to spend a brief time with the Hoffman’s at Cody’s parents cabin. We went for two reasons, one because the place is awesome and a great way to spend a weekend, but more importantly Cody and Becca wanted some portraits of the very beginning of their new family.

In September I moved out on my own! This is somewhat of a highlight to the year for me. I’m living on my own now in Downtown Sacramento. Its only a studio apartment, but its comfortable and makes me feel très chic. Keith (my brother) only lives a few blocks away, so we’ve been able to work more closely on a small project of ours called Flublub (more on that when its closer to finished). Being able to walk to family, friends and the downtown life has been a gift I don’t plan on wasting.

In case you thought I forgot to mention work; I’ve been working for Airtop Technology Group since February ‘08 as a Technology Consultant. Its a small company (only four of us) but we have some big plans. Most of my time is spent with clients providing proactive service on their servers and workstations to make sure they continue operating 24/7. Its sometimes a thankless job, and that can wear but if I’ve done a good job, nobody knows I was there in the first place, so in a way its a complement.

So that brings us to about now, where I’m enjoying the cool crisp air of the night, listening to my eclectic collection of music and composing overly lengthy posts. Now its your turn, tell me what you’ve been up to. You can email it, post it in a comment below, or put it on Facebook somehow.

Until next summer my friends.

Greylisting

So one of my clients showed me some rejected mail she got when trying to send to a user whom she knew she had the right email address for.

The return mail was a “451 4.7.1 message delayed” error and had a link for http://greylisting.org. So I went to check it out thinking we were on some sort of deny list (IE, a blacklist).

Turns out, greylisting.org’s policy is to deay/block ALL incomming mail the first time from any source. They rely on the user trying a second time to allow the message through … I’m not making this up:

What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again.

What the fuck? This is ludacris. If things keep going this direction then SMTP is due to become a proverbial paperweight, and we’ll go back to the days of faxes and carrier pidgens.

Furthermore, whoever came up with his “greylist” idea needs to be drug out into the street, shot in each join and told to walk to a hospital, where they’ll be rejected the first time and have to try again later.

May God have mercy on the soul of the internet.

Bagged Lunch

In the past few weeks, I’ve missed easily 4 lunches. In those same past few weeks, the lunches I did have, were nearly exclusively fast food. I do on occasion make time to sit down at a Subway, but even then I usually get a food long, and sometimes ask for a toasted BMT (likely they worst sandwich on the menu).

Besides the fact that I’m eating extremely poorly (my late night math puts my average caloric intake for just lunch well over 1000), but I’m spending more money than I need to be. According to Mint.com (a subject I’ve been meaning to create a whole post on) in the month of June I spent $135 on fast food. Its hard to get a solid per day cost though since often I use cash, and occasionally it goes on the company card but some guestimating tells me I spend about $8 per day (during the work week) on fast food, or expanded out a little under two-thousand dollars per year. Yikes.

So today, on my way home from work (at 9pm) I decided to do something about it. I stopped in Raley’s, grabbed a basket and started gathering supplies. My goals were more along the lines of getting a filling, satisfying and physically robust meal than making a perfectly nutritious one. I figure the nutrition can come in more seriously when I get used to this new pattern, and I have more time to plan meals than skimming nutrition facts in the super market.

Over the past seven years I’ve been working, I’ve taken in maybe 10 bagged lunches. For a very long time I’ve had excuses, and "reasons" to not take a bagged lunch. However, no matter what I tried to convince myself of, I can easily put together a lunch that can sit in the car all day without being destroyed and if I make the lunches ahead of time (like, when I get home from the store) then it doesn’t take up any more of my mornings.

All that said, what did I end up with in my bagged lunch? A single serving of Oberto Beef Jerky Strips; "Chicken of the Sea" Tuna Snax (tuna dip with crackers); A bag of Sun Chips; A bottle of water and a few pieces of hard Caramels for desert. Which puts this meal at a much healthier 390 calories (overall nutrition information is posted to the right)

I also took the opportunity to look at more than just my lunch eating and spending habits. Its no secret that I like Starbucks (mmm, venti, soy, no-water, Chai Tea Latte). But, the amount of money I spend on Starbucks each month could probably feed a third world village. Not to mention that a twenty ounce cup of steamed milk (albeit soy milk) satisfies none of my morning nutritional needs. So I also picked up some instant coffee (for my caffeine fix) and a variety pack of instant oatmeal.

Its not a complete plan, and has some gaps (like dinner) but its a change for the good, and one that I hope will inspire others to do the same. Save yourself some cash, and make those miles on the treadmill count for something: brown bag your lunches this week! I’d also like to hear from people with the things you put in your bag.