Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

One of the things I like about Seattle is that we don't get snow often, but when we do, it's a good amount. Thick enough to be fun, not often enough to be a pain.

The updated Video Game Shrine. Always hated having the computer in the floor. Now it's got some space for itself, and all I had to do was turn the 2x4 shelving on its side.

Not that I bought an extra shelving unit or anything....

I picked up some IKEA furniture today, and decided to see about rearranging the living room while I was at it. I'v enever liked how the sofa "sat" in the room, making it hard to get into the living room unless you were thin (which I am not).

I pushed the sofa up against the wall to make a larger area to get into the living room, but it seriously broke the Feng-Shui of the room. Now, the sticky-outy bit of the sofa kind of "defines" a small area off to the side of the living room, and there's a giant open area near the fireplace. It's split the living toom in two parts.

I have a four-day weekend coming up, I think what I'm going to do is breakdown the sofa and move that sticky-outy bit from the left side of the sofa to the right. That should open the area up a lot more, and make it "one room" again.

As much as I love cooking, my meal prep absolutely destroys my kitchen.

This Week's Meals - Zelda Spectacular (3/3): Energizing Glazed Meat.

Tastes SUPER salty, but at the same time, the glaze is SUPER sweet. Getting sweet-and-sour vibes from this dish.

# Energizing Glazed Meat

The Legend's Cookbook
5.0 servings

2.0 8 oz Filet Mignon steaks
4.0 strips strips bacon
Salt
Pepper
0.25 cup honey
2.0 cloves garlic (minced)
0.5 cup balsamic vinegar
0.25 cup brown sugar
1.0 tsp ground ginger
1.0 tsp dijon mustard
1.0 tbsp olive oil
2.0 tbsp salted butter
scallions (garnish)

1 - Preheat oven to 375°F.
2 - Mix balsamic vinegar with brown sugar, honey, ginger, and mustard in a medium saucepan over medium heat.
3 - Stir constantly until sugar has dissolved.
4 - Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer until reduced by half, about 15 to 20 minutes. The glaze should coat the back of a spoon.
4. Rest meat until it reaches room temperature.
5 - Wrap the sides of the filet mignon with bacon and secure with toothpicks.
6 - Season both sides with salt and pepper to taste.
7 - In a cast iron skillet over medium high heat, add oil and garlic.
8 - Once garlic is fragrant, place the steaks bacon-side down. Cook bacon on all sides, about 1 minute per side.
9 - Sear the top and bottom of the filet mignon for 2 to 3 minutes per side or until nice and browned in the cast iron skillet using the bacon fat.
10 - Put 1 tbsp of butter on top of each steak and bake for 7 to 8 minutes.
11 - Remove and let rest for a few minutes.
12 - Pour on all the glaze your arteries can handle.
13 - Garnish with some scallions.

#zelda #thisweeksmeals

This Week's Meals - Zelda Spectacular (2/3): Meat and Rice Bowl.

The serving sizes are set up for my diet, and seeing as I'm diabetic, and nearly all this is rice, it makes for a small dish. Could use some green onions to drizzle on top. :)

# Meat and Rice Bowl

The Legend's Cookbook
5.0 servings

1.0 pound top sirloin steak (thinly sliced)
0.5 cup soy sauce
1.0 tbsp sesame oil
0.25 cup mirin
1.0 tbsp fresh ginger (minced)
3.0 cloves garlic (minced)
2.0 tbsp brown sugar
2.0 tbsp chili paste
3.0 whole scallions
pickled red onion (garnish)
1.0 tsp vegetable oil
1.0 tsp sesame seeds
1.0 cup short grain Asian rice
1.0 cup water

1 - In a large bowl, mix soy sauce, sesame oil, mirin, ginger, garlic, brown sugar, and chili paste.
2 - Add thinly sliced steak making sure to coat well.
3 - Refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or overnight).
4 - Add water and rice to a pot. Bring the water to a boil.
5 - Once at a boil, cover the pot and reduce the heat to medium. Wait five minutes.
6 - After five minutes, reduce the heat to low. Wait five minutes.
7 - After five minutes take the pot off heat. Wait five minutes.
8 - Chop scallion into small rounds.
9 - Remove steak from marinade and pat dry to remove excess.
10 - In a pan on high heat, add vegetable oil.
11 - Once hot, add steak and cook 1 to 2 minutes on each side. (You want to hear a nice sizzle and see a good golden brown color!)
12 - Add cooked rice to a bowl and top with meat.
13 - Garnish with sesame seeds, pickled onions, and scallions.

I'm no longer on Twitter, but I check in on friends who are still there and no where else (I'm happy to help you move to Mastodon, you know).

Nice to see some of the places on Twitter haven't changed.

This Week's Meals - Zelda Spectacular (1/3): Yeto's Superb Soup.

I love going on about this one because you wouldn't think pumpkin, feta cheese and salmon would work, but it absolutely does. Atleast when the salmon is fresh. And didn't go bad in the fridge. Oi. Had to go out and buy another salmon filet.

# Yeto's Superb Soup

Cucco's Kitchen
9.0 servings

2.0 pounds canned pumpkin
4.0 cloves garlic
0.5 cup white onion (chopped)
1.0 cup carrots (chunked)
2.0 whole potatoes (chunked)
1.0 cup celery (chunked)
4.0 cups fish stock
8.0 oz feta cheese
1.5 cups heavy cream
salt
pepper
1.3333333333333333 pounds salmon

1 - Cut onions and garlic.
2 - Add 2/3 of the garlic and onions into a pot with some olive oil and cook until brown then add in pumpkin and add fish stock. Cook at a simmer covered for 20min.
3 - Add in your goat cheese and heavy cream.
4 - Peel and cut your carrots potatoes and celery into chunks.
5 - Add some oil to a pot and add the rest of the garlic till it browns.
6 - Add the veggies and sauté them for 10 min.
7 - Then add in the puree and cook on low heat for 10-15min.
8 - Cut your salmon and add salt and pepper inside the cuts.
9 - In a pan on med-high heat add the salmon and cook skin side first for 4-5min.
10 - Flip, cook for 3 more min and then flip back to skin side.
11 - Take off heat and rest for 3 min.
12 - Cut your salmon into pieces and add to your soup.

#zelda #thisweeksmeals

Computer Generated Jenn watches "Computer Generated" Max Headroom.

The latest iteration of "Saturday Sci-Fi Theater" is now:

10:30PM-11:30PM - Night Gallery
11:30PM-12:30AM - Star Trek: The Next Generation
12:30AM-1:30AM - Max Headroom

I adore Max Headroom. I really loved the sadly shortlived cyberpunk genre of TV Sci-fi. It's kind of funny how close we ended up getting to that.

I loved how the production had the show as 25fps film, but any video screens and POVs from cameras were 60fps.

Also, Amanda Pays as Theora? Baby Jenn's Trans Goals.

Tonight's ST:TNG is "Family." One of the reasons I thought Season 4 of TNG really did stand on it's own was that this was one of the few episodes that I didn't think TOS could do, and was so different from the original Star Trek, but so right for Next Generation.

An episode that explored family with so many characters so deeply. It was an Star Trek episode only TNG could so.

Out and About

You can keep your Runts. My fruit flavored hard candy is Rascals:

For anyone wanting the Kolache Recipe, here it is, courtesy of Mrs. Nettle of Fredericksburg Texas.

# Kolatschen (Kolaches)

Fredericksburg Home Kitchen Cook Book
16.0 kolaches

0.5 cup milk (scalded)
0.5 cup sugar (dough)
1.0 tsp salt
0.5 tsp mace
0.5 whole lemon rind (grated)
2.0 packages dry yeast
0.5 cup warm water
2.0 eggs (beaten)
0.5 cup butter (melted) (dough)
4.5 cups flour (dough)
0.3333333333333333 cup sugar (streusel)
2.0 tbsp flour (streusel)
2.0 tbsp butter (cut into chunks and chilled) (streusel)
1.0 tbsp preserves or cream-cheese ricotta filling

Kolache:

1 - Combine milk, sugar, salt, mace and lemon rind. Cool to lukewarm.
2 - Stir yeast into warm water; let stand 5 minutes.
3 - Add to milk mixture. Stir in eggs and margarine and enough flour to make a soft dough.
4 - Knead on lightly floured board until smooth and elastic.
5 - Cover, let rise in warm place until double in bulk.
6 - Punch down, cover and let rise for 30 minutes.
7 - Shape into 2 inch balls, flatten slightly and place on greased cookie sheets 2 inches apart.
8 - Cover and let rise 30 minutes.

Streusal:

9 - Combine all streusal ingredients and mix together with fingers. Cover and refrigerate until needed

Baking:

10 - Make a large depression in each ball with fingertips, fill with preserves of your choice.
11 - Sprinkle kolaches with streusal.
12 - Bake at 375 degrees F, about 20 minutes or until golden.

My friends...I gotcha kolache.

The first batch browned a little more than I wanted, but at least that let me know o should take the second batch out sooner than later.

This batch also has a cream cheese-ricotta filling and proper spaetzel topping and let me tell you...it's not Weikel's, but it is damn good.

The Star Trek pages are now sort of up as a test of the content template: http://dolari.net/test/startrek

This is an old template I've had designed for a while. Section Navigation on the left, site navigation on the right, content in the center with a banner up top and disclaimers on the bottom. I think it works.

It seemed a little monochrome having everything in flat turquoise, though (my previous versions had nice see-through background gradients that wouldn't work in a dynamically changing table), which is why I decided on adding backgrounds to the pages. I tried a V'Ger blue background, but that made it MORE boring. Using the wormhole from TMP with it's red really made the blue pop.

The links to the Star Trek pages work, but take you to broken sites, so don't click those.

What do you think?

More feedback, more fixes. Even MORE feedback may make for even more fixes, so please feel free to critique.

Off the bat, I'm making these pages for Desktop Viewing, Mobile Viewing is secondary. I hate to do that, but I'm just not that good at putting sites together that can dynamically change. I'm cheating that by allowing the tables themselves to dynamically resize themselves. It works, although it's not ideal.

First up: http://dolari.net/test

I've upped the font size on the text to make it more readable. I'd forgotten that the reaosn I used small sizes was for labelling images, which I'm doing with alt-text and tooltips, and was using it for main text. I did, however, make the "small print" very small.

Text colors and are now gold on the main page, instead of grey/black for stuff that isn't done yet. I'm hoping the [Soon] labels and that the text links don't light up are enough to signal that those pages do not yet exist. The Poop Orange for Alexandria is now dark green. Here's the thing about those colors. Each section of my website is based on a color. That color? Chun Li's outfits in SSF2T. I'm out of colors. So for Voices of Authority and Alexandria, I tried some Street Fighter Alpha colors. But a bunch of those are ALSO the same as her SSF2T colors. Im thinking of duplicating the color schemes, just making them 50% darker at this point for any new section.

There is now a background to the page, jsut to break up the monotony of the black. I actually had this as my Livejournal background, but for some reason, it would stop working after a few weeks.

Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Thanks to some feedback and my own I HATE HOW THE TEXT LOOKSness, I've made a few changes to the proposed main landing page. Let me know if it works for you. That Supposed-To-Be-Orange-But-Its-Poop-Brown is NOT working for me.

http://dolari.net/test.

Hey y'all. Website is getting a bif update in January and a clean-up. Here's a quick shot of what the front page would look like.

I'm going for a much cleaner look to the site, but keeping the color schemes I've had since Day One. It's a little Windows 8, but I still think it looks okay-ish. It also should be dynamic and resize to the size you want it be within some limitations both small and big.

I checked it out with my phone and while it works great in a horizontal alignment, the vertical alignement is not the best.

1) Does this work for you technically? Image wise? Nothing cut off, broken, scrambled? (The links are all broken, so please don't worry about that)

2) Does it work for you aesthetically? Does it LOOK nice?

http://dolari.net/test