Tag Archives: food

Life is death is life »

November 7th, 2012

Rohan Anderson:

So after breakfast we all ventured out to the front yard to say hello and goodbye to the birds. The girls loved the soft feathers and the sounds they made, but when it came time to kill them they knew what needed to happen. I was rather proud of them, they saw my dispatch, a second and it was done, a quick twist of the neck, the delicate neck broken cleanly in my hands, the bird shakes in its death rattle, then it’s lifeless. Its now transformed from animal to food.

Looks delicious.

Pizza Delicious and Facebook Ads

June 8th, 2012

This is going back to mid-May but I’ve wanted to chime in on this NPR article about Pizza Delicious in New Orleans and their attempt to use Facebook Ads to drum up some more business.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign.

“Is that feeling of exhilaration worth $240?” Michael said. “I don’t know — hopefully that translates into new business.”

It didn’t.

After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.

The problem wasn’t with Facebook Ads, the problem was they did it wrong. The ad pointed to their Facebook Page. And they doubled their fans. That is a success. If Pizza Delicious wanted to sell more pizza to people in New Orleans looking for New York style pizza the ad should have forwarded them to a Facebook application that would allow them to order a pizza delivered to their door.

It would have cost them more than $240 but the result could have been very different. Pizza Delicious got exactly what they paid for. If they wanted to sell pizza they should have sold pizza.

Jay Torres and food truck etiquette

May 28th, 2012

I love street food.

Jay Torres, who used to work on a food truck, has some great lessons in food truck etiquette to share. Listen up.

I’ve been wanting to write something like this for awhile, but I didn’t want to do it while I was still working on a truck. I didn’t want to make it seem like I was a jerk and potentially alienate some customers. Now that I’m no longer in that line of work, I thought I’d write some things down to help your food truck experience.

I love how practical his last tip is – simply to throw away your trash. Usually when I order truck food I ask for “everything on it” and leave it at that.

PHP is like scrapple

April 12th, 2012

Paul Ford, of NYMag, about Facebook:

The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

I use PHP. Which makes sense because man do I love scrapple.

An artisan style bread recipe

January 3rd, 2012

Artisan bread is best described by thinking about the person who makes the bread. An artisan baker is a craftsperson who is trained to the highest ability to mix, ferment, shape and bake a hand crafted loaf of bread. They understand the science behind the chemical reactions of the ingredients and know how to provide the best environment for the bread to develop. – Artisan Bakers.

Eliza and I have a bread machine but for a while I’ve had the desire to fool around with making really, really simple bread recipes. The above loaf consists of salt, flour, water and a bit of yeast. Small variations of those ingredients, the amount you knead the dough, and how you bake it – can wholly change the way the final product comes out.

I’m having a lot of fun trying different things (I also made my own tortillas with nearly the same ingredients) and learning a lot as I go. I recommend making homemade bread to anyone that wants to learn about this process. Here is a recipe which I tailored off of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois who have authored a book about making artisan bread in five minutes. I happened upon their recipe via YouTube. Smart strategy.

The recipe

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast.
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
  • 6 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, more for dusting dough.
  • 3 1/2 cups of water (about)
  • Some cornmeal. (optional, you can use flour)

Put yeast and salt into bucket. Dump in lukewarm water. Dump in flour. Mix with wooden spoon until no more dry flour. Do not over mix or knead at all. Let sit in bucket for 2 hours. Rip off grapefruit sized pieces and bend them into a UFO shape (watch this video to see). Place on pizza peel to rest for 40 minutes while the oven preheats to 450. Preheat oven with an empty baking pan under pizza stone on the middle shelf. After dough ball has rested and oven, pizza stone, and baking pan are preheated – place dough ball on center of pizza stone, drop in a few cups of water into baking pan (this will steam to make the crust of the bread) and bake for 30 minutes.

That’s it. Give it a try!

Tweeting for steak

August 19th, 2011

Guy half-jokingly tweets that he wants a steak hand-delivered to an airport terminal from one of his favorite restaurants. They show up with a free meal. Great, fun story.

Pardon me while I tweet about that new Jeep I’ve been wanting.