Patate Al Sale Profumato is an Italian dish that seems wholly unlike the stereotypical Italian fare. It makes a great side or brunch, and will have you coming back for more (and probably tasting garlic for the rest of the day). Even if there are only two of you eating, I recommend that you increase all of the ingredients so that when someone sneaks back for seconds, they wont be disappointed.

Use ingredients from your garden, a CSA, a farmers market or the organic section of your local grocery store when you can.

Patate Al Sale Profumato
(Potatoes with Sage and Rosemary)
Serves 2

1.5 pounds of potatoes
1/4 of a cup of olive oil
6 fresh sage leaves
1 sprig of fresh rosemary
1 sprig of fresh parsley
freshly ground pepper
1 clove of fresh garlic

Peel and rinse the potatoes and then dice them up into roughly half inch cubes. Dry them on a table cloth and then saute them in a casserole dish in the oil. Warning: Make sure that your casserole dish is suitable for oven top cooking. I don’t want you shattering your cookware while using this recipe. That would make me feel bad!

Keep the potatoes moving so that they don’t stick to the bottom of the pan too much. Once the start to change color and look like they are getting that golden brown color, move them into your oven which has been set to 350 degrees. Leave it in there for about 20 minutes.

Finely chop your sage, rosemary, parsley and garlic and mix them together with some freshly ground pepper.

Toss the hot potatoes in a large bowl with your herb mix and serve.

Then come back here and leave a comment about how much you love them

If you’ve purchased Yankee Candle brand jar candles, you’ll know that they cost an arm and a leg.

So when I had a Yankee Candle jar candle with an entirely defective glass jar (no seriously, look at the picture), there was no way that I was just going to throw it out, and there was also no way that I was going to light it so that it could spew its molten love wax all over the place…

Initially, I thought… Mmmm, this is the perfect job for the Handy Man’s ultimate – DUCT TAPE! But the crowds of uncouth heathens shouted me down, and I was forced to come up with a better, more destructive alternative. Damn. Luckily, I had a spare jar from a spent candle. So I went to work on my fallback, and I might add… devious plan…. transplant one candle into the jar of another…

Step one involved a hammer (and quite frankly was the most fun and satisfying step).

Once I had beaten up all the defective glass, and peeled it away (with only minor wounds suffered by yours truly), I was left with a amusingly naked candle.

Which was unfortunately, too girthy to fit into the glass jar of the expended one that I had intended to use as its replacement vessel. Bugger.

So then, out came the serrated knife and Step Two (which happens to be the second most fun and satisfying step of the whole process) – trimming the excess body fat.

Once the candle was taught and trim, I was FINALLY able to get it into the spent jar. And viola a brand new candle is born.

It’s alive… its ALIVE!

All part of the blurb describing Dark Fall: The Journal, a point and click adventure game that I was playing last night.

The should have added “A pissy PDA.” to that blurb as well.

You play the brother of an architect whom is redeveloping an, as you soon discover, haunted hotel and train station. He leaves you a troublesome voice mail, and filled with fear for your sibling, you rush off to help him.

But he is nowhere to be found. *cue spooky music*

After bumbling around for a bit you do stumble across his PDA. Fiddling around with it you get this error message (click for a larger version):

Perhaps he didn’t meet a grisly end at the spectral hands of some nasty otherworldy spooks after all…

If his PDA knows what it is talking about, maybe his debt collectors finally caught up with him.

A baby inside the yellow bell pepper (capsicum) that I was cutting up for dinner is not something that I had expected to see that evening. Click the image for a bigger version.

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1. Pretty Sky

A good idea is a good start, but it shouldn’t be the only thinking that you do about your future website.

Imagine driving in a strange place with no map or GPS, knowing that you have to get to a certain town but not knowing where it is.

Throw in some dense fog, and this is exactly the job that you are assigning to your web developer if you don’t have a clear concept of what you want them to do.

A builder wouldn’t construct a house without an architectural plan, and your web developer shouldn’t either. Attempting to do so will lead them into not realizing your idea, either partially, or even worse, completely. It will result in inefficient use of time and delays and most likely leave you unhappy with the result.

Fleshing out your idea, crystallizing the concept in your mind, drawing up those architectural plans for your new website will make the entire process of developing your site smoother, and help your developer give you exactly what you had envisaged.

A good web developer knows this and can help you through the process of taking your idea to the level of a fully fleshed out concept, but the more you bring to the table, the easier this process will be.

Rasages de M. Frog à être lisses pour les dames

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1. Adventures of M. Frog: The Pillow

Meet Romeo -Click For Larger-

Meet Romeo. He is the new cat in the house, and I have to admit that I am already smitten, having known him for less than four hours.

He’s a fairly standard male short haired black cat with white splotches on his chest, throat, chin, belly and each of his paws.

But its not his physical characteristics that draw me to him.

It’s his personality.

The moment I picked Romeo up, he embarked upon a non-stop program of rubbing, purring, making biscuits in my shirt, and general cutes-y-ness. It was like he was auditioning for a part he knew that he could nail.

After the first few times he bonked his head against my chin, I was sold.

Welcome Romeo.

Wait, You Bought A Box of Communion Wafers, And WHAT!?

In an unusually funny collision of buying habits and technology, Amazon.com makes a social comment on some portion of the community. I’d like to think its was an error, or perhaps some snarky developer pulling a quick one over us while giggling and showing his friends. But what if it isn’t?

Take a look at this product in a screenshot from Amazon (click on the thumbnail to see the larger image).

Its a box of Communion Wafers. Not exactly bestseller material, granted, but it does have an unusual distinction that you probably wouldn’t expect from a box of Communion Wafers.  Take a look at the section “Customer’s Who Bought This Item Also Bought”.

Inevitably, when I look, I’m not moved by what I see. I don’t know if its the fact that I have been seeing the sky for the past 37 or so years of my life, or that I have been spoiled by amazing graphics on computer games (eg. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) or the special effects in movies (eg: Avatar in IMAX 3D), or even, believe it or not, gorgeous scenery (too many to mention).

It’s kind of sad really. I feel like I might be missing out on something. That maybe I am not able to appreciate the subtlety of beauty that may be laying all around me, if I would only just look up with new eyes.

Recently, it happened again.

“Look at that pretty sky”

Like many of the times before, I looked.

And like many times before I didn’t really see anything that grabbed me. I tried looking harder, and maybe this is where my problem is – I look too hard.

Perhaps if I can just relax, maybe I will start seeing better.

I took a resigned sigh.

Turned to my right.

And I saw the pretty sky.

A shot of the sky heading out to Farmersville, TX, USA -click for larger version.

Union Workers Credit Services Merchandising Interface Main Menu

This is the main menu for the Merchandising interface where the user can determine the function that they want to perform. The ‘planner’ design stems from the fact that the head of the Merchandising department always seems to be carrying around an overstuffed real life version, and it made for a good way to lay out a menu system. [View Larger]

Union Workers Credit Services Merchandising Interface Add A Product Menu

This interface is one of the functions and allows the user to add a new product. Unfortunately, what is half chopped out of this screenshot is the power button on the monitor – when moused over the power indicator changes from green to red, and when clicked it returns the user to the main menu (shown above). [View Larger]

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1. Release of the Redesigned Chapman Data Services, Inc. Website