Late Night Thinking

by Thomas L. Kula

Avocado Eggs

I wish I remembered where I first came across this. Take an avocado, cut it in half and remove the pit. Scoop out the hole left from the pit a bit to make it large enough to hold an egg. Drop an egg in, dash some salt and paprika on top. Put in a low oven, cook until the egg sets how you like it. It took a little while, but it was tasty.

Awesome Sauce

Taken from the Hoppin' John recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen Blog: 1/2 cup tahini 1/3 cup Frank's Red Hot sauce 1/4 cup water, more or less 2 tbsp nutritional yeast Several glugs liquid smoke Combine everything, add enough water to get to a pleasant consistency. Amazing on rice, beans, kale, everything....

Cranberry Sauce for Cheesecake

I'm being dragged to a Thanksgiving Day dinner with a friend, and am taking along a cheesecake. I wanted to make a topping for it, and in the theme of the day, why not make it with cranberries? 1.5 cups water 1.5 cups sugar 3 tbsps corn starch Juice from 2 oranges Juice from 2 lemons 1 14.5 oz can cranberry sauce (I used the one with whole berries) 2 tbsps vodka 5 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters 2 tbsps butter More sugar, to taste In a saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the water, sugar, corn starch and citrus juices (if you don't want lumps, shake the water and corn starch together in a jar first).

Birthdate of the Little Lebowski

In a Facebook posting by David Palmer he posited that Dude Jr. (the child of the Dude in the film The Big Lebowski, whom I'm calling the Little Lebowski) would be in his/her early 20s. Surprised that I couldn't really find any reference online to anyone actually calculating the date, I sat down with my copy of the movie, and I posit that the Little Lebowski was born on 12 June 1992.

Resurget Aquis

Those of you on The Quote File have already seen this, for everyone else, here's something you can read in full. Before I go there, however, a bit of an update on how things have been around New York City, during and after Hurricane Sandy. You may have been following my brief notes via Twitter or Facebook, but those are really more suited towards short things; and while I'm certain to have a much fuller treatment of this past week in the next issue of Late Night Thinking, I thought I'd give you all an outline of how things are right now.

A ZeroMQ Protocol for Remctl

Here are some initial notes on writing a ZeroMQ backend for remctl. This is more of a quick brain-dump of ideas. The idea behind this is that often I use remctl as an authenticated communication layer, but it's native method of "fork a program, return the output" is painful for things that have expensive setup times (establishing a database connection, etc.), so I often end up writing a shim that talks down a socket to a persistent daemon.

Getting a list of git tags to a particular ref

For some reason, I'm always doing something related to backups, and frequently I need a way of testing backup software to see how it operates, if it's doing things properly and working the way I expect, etc. One way I came up to test is to use a large git repository as a testbed — it's got easily reproducable history and you can check the correctness of any restore --- does a particular restore match what git thinks a particular ref should be?

Oatmeal, with STUFF

I mix this up the night before, shove it in the fridge, and heat it in the microwave the next morning. 1/2 cup oatmeal 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon soy protein powder 2 tablespoons flax seed meal 2 tablespoons Ovaltine powder

Peanut Butter and Nutella, with STUFF

This was roughly made tonight, because I was bored and hadn't gone grocery shopping yet. Really tasty — tasty enough that after grocery shopping two of these sandwiches are my lunch for tomorrow. Very rough estimates, I mostly just glooped stuff together. 3 parts peanut butter (almond or cashew butter would work here as well; get the stuff that is basically "this nut, ground up. maybe a bit of salt.

Simple Dip

No measurements: take a container of sour cream, add nutritional yeast (lots), paprika (medium), liquid smoke (medium), onion powder (little). Throw in some salt and pepper. Stir well. Enjoy.