Injera

A couple of weeks ago we ate at Addis Red Sea in Boston. It’s an Ethiopian restaurant. One of the fun parts of eating there is the platter the dishes are served on – it’s made of this giant spongy pancake that you eat at the end as it’s sopped up all the delicious juices.  Of course I came away from there wondering how it’s made. So here’s my first try at making injera – traditional Ethiopian bread.

The first challenge was finding teff flour. Injera has the texture it does because the teff grain has no gluten – a good thing to know if you’re someone who can’t eat gluten. However, for my first try I decided to use a mix of teff and regular flour. The next challenge was getting it to ferment and basically turn into sourdough starter. I decided to give it a bit of a jump start with some yeast and then left it on the counter to bubble away for a couple of days. In the end it’s a bit like slightly think crepe batter.

Traditional injera are made in a special pan that is 15 or 16 inches across. I don’t have that pan – I was also worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it out of the pan if I used my large 12 inch one, so these are mini injera.

You can seen the nice bubbly texture of the bread as it cooks – it’s a little bit like a giant crumpet. We took them over to a neighbor’s house for dinner where we had them with a chicken tagine. Ok, that was mixing cuisines from different parts of Africa, but it was all yummy.

I started out following the injera recipe I found on the Exploratorium website. But there are lots of helpful recipes including a series of videos explaining each step. It didn’t have quite the nice sourdough flavor that we had at the restaurant, probably because I didn’t have time to develop a really good starter. I guess that means I’ll just have to experiment a few more times to improve – should be delicious.

Winter Band Concert

The Lexington Schools Winter Concerts were this week. Tom’s not doing band this year, but Pete still is. And doesn’t he look good in a tux?

This is the big annual concert where they have everyone from the fifth graders just learning their instruments…

... up to Seniors who are applying to music schools and conservatories.

Every year Mr. Leonard makes a point of having the students in the top high school band (Wind Ensemble) that had their first performance as a fifth grader in the Winter Concert stand as group. It’s amazing to see how many of them there are, and to hear how far they will progress in just those few short years.

One of the highlights every year is the Percussion Ensemble.  Percussion Ensemble is an entirely student led group. They write, choreograph and perform the pieces themselves, and they always stretch the limits of percussion. This year they outdid themselves with a really cool piece which culminated with them playing in the dark with lighted sticks.

Kitchen Shelves

I spent yesterday installing these new shelves in the kitchen.

They give us a little more storage space, but mostly they just make the area where we took down the overhead cupboard look a little more interesting.

While I did that, the kids took care of all of shoveling all of the snow. That meant that this morning, Chris & I were able to just go out and just enjoy the nice sunny day.

Wasn't that nice?

SOPA Protest

Yesterday many sites either went black, or symbolically covered elements of their sites to protest the SOPA/PIPA bills going though congress. If you’d like to understand what’s so bad about these bills, the Khan Academy does a pretty good job of covering the issues. One of the funniest protests is this one.

But seriously, as the singer asks about a minute in ‘Why, why are laws a thing you can buy?’ Why is it that congress can’t work together to work out important things like budgets, but  a bill that is just to benefit one particular industry seemed to be on a fast track to passing until some of the internet giants realized what it was going to do. Perhaps SOPA wouldn’t have gone after YouTube to start with, they would have started with little sites like Scratch, who wouldn’t have the money to fight the shut down even if the ‘infringement’ was really fair-use.

SOPA may look like it’s dead, but really it’s just gone into a quiet room for some re-working – after all, the RIAA and movie industries have paid big bucks to get something written into law. Don’t let it happen.

Fixers

I’ve mentioned iFixit here before (link1, link2). Their website is a great source of information about what’s inside your favorite gadgets and what you can do to fix them when they break.

They’ve just announced a new site called ifixit.org. They’re traveling around the world interviewing interesting people who fix things. They’ve already got several good stories in their blog from places like Cairo and Nairobi. Go check it out.

6.S184

Chris and I were both a bit concerned a couple of years ago when MIT announced that 6.001 was changing from Scheme to Python. Luckily Alex Vandiver has been keeping the SICP flame alive over IAP with 6.S194 – Zombies drink caffeinated 6.001. A good way to start Code Year, if you’d like to learn to program the old-school MIT way. But, as the course notes say:

• This is not a class to teach Scheme
• Nor really a class about programming at all
• This is a course about Computer Science

If you’re not familiar with MIT’s culture, IAP is the name for the month of January. During that month, they put “real” classes on hold, and everyone does something they’re interested in, like trying to build the world’s largest yoyo. It’s also when the famous mystery hunt occurs.

Tile Explorer

When Mario saw my recent post about different sets of tiles, he asked for details about how I drew them. When I started to clean up the Processing code to give to him, I decided that it’d be more fun to go ahead and turn it into an interactive tool for exploring sets of tiles.

So here it is. The arrow keys will move you through different sets of tiles. You’ll probably have to click in the window to get started.