jazzsequence

pink goat cheese fondue

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:30:23 PST

like this, except pink

i discovered/created a fondue recipe that i think is kind of awesome and offbeat. the (possible) problem with it is that it’s pink. sort of mauve actually.

traditionally, fondue has 2 – 3 cheeses: gruyere and emmentaler are pretty standard. you can also use appenzeller or raclette (swiss, not french, although french would do in a pinch if you needed to) or even jarlsberg if the stinky feet cheeses are getting to you. also traditionally, those of us even remotely lactose-sensitive are going to be bent double after eating a large enough portion (say, half a fondue-pot full).

the other thing is that, while fondue typically calls for a dry white wine, a good, bold red (like a pinot noir or cabernet of syrah) pairs better with with the sort of aged cheeses used in fondue (or so says my wine and cheese book). i’ve decided the white is strictly for aesthetics.

my first foray into throwing the rules out the window was for Valentine’s day, for which pink fondue could be considered somewhat thematically appropriate. that wasn’t the goal, of course — the idea was just to make a goat fondue (goat milk is easier to digest than cow milk and has been found to not cause the symptoms of lactose intolerance) and pair it with a wine that both went better with the cheese (the same wines that pair well with gruyere and emmentaler also pair well with goat cheeses, especially aged goat cheeses) and that we both liked better (we prefer reds to whites any day).

thus began the first experiment. for this, i got cypress grove lamb chopper and a mahon reserva. my first choice to go with the lamb chopper was cypress grove’s midnight moon, but that was unavailable pretty much everywhere (my theory is that the goats were “kidding” — a time of year when goat dairies do not produce as much milk because the goats are giving birth to and nursing their kids, something i learned when i was working in grocery). i had forgotten (until i got home) that mahon, unlike a lot of other spanish cheeses, was cow milk, not goat or sheep.

the result was really good. the cheese didn’t melt as smooth as fondue usually does, which i’m guessing was because the aged mahon was pretty dry and goat cheese, in general, has a less smooth texture than cow cheese. we used a smoking loon pinot noir and, aside from the pinkness, it was really good.

so last night i thought we’d go for an encore, and last night’s ended up being even better. so here’s the recipe, more or less:

8oz (1/2 lb.) cypress grove lamb chopper
8oz (1/2 lb.) young (6 mo.) manchego
1 cup red wine (in this case it was Goats Do Rome South African red)
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp corn starch
1 clove garlic
pinch of pepper
dash of nutmeg

my recipe says to get a clove of garlic and rub it on the inside of the fondue pot. well, i didn’t have a single clove of garlic lying around, so i got some crushed garlic and scooped some with a spoon and rubbed it onto the pot with my fingers. the result was garlic-y but tasty (if you like garlic).

next, mix the wine and the lemon juice and heat on medium until bubbly. pour yourself a glass. turn the heat down to low and stir in the cheese. mix the corn starch with 1 Tbsp more wine. the original recipe says kirsch, but the idea of cherry liqueur sends e running for the hills. pour corn starch/wine mixture into the fondue. stir regularly. drink profusely. add pepper and nutmeg to taste (original recipe called for white pepper but using black pepper didn’t seem to hurt anything).

serves two with room for dessert

the manchego melted a lot better and fit the goat theme. the fondue still doesn’t have the same elasticity that you get with the traditional cow’s milk cheeses, but that’s goat cheese for you. i’m still holding out to try this with midnight moon, an aged goat gouda, but that will most likely have to wait until next time.

i have this philosophy about fondue that you can’t really screw it up. some cheese melts better than others, and some pair better than others, but cheese is pretty much cheese, and if you have a few cheeses you like, why not throw them together in a pot and melt it? if you like cheese and you like fondue, you’ll probably like what comes out regardless of if it’s by the book. for this reason, i think that fondue is the ultimate anything goes gourmet food; you don’t need to be an iron chef, you just need to like cheese.

Jizz In My Pants response: “Puke In My Mouth”

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:49:19 PST

this, on the other hand, is glorious

via YouTube – Jizz In My Pants response: “Puke In My Mouth” -MsTaken.com.

THE NEW DORK

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:40:17 PST

i seriously don’t know whether to applaud this or groan loudly.

YouTube – THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof | Grasshopper.com via @mashable

you’ll have to wait for the book [rpm2010]

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:04:33 PST

it occurs to me that rpm came and went with very little said on this blog about it.

i finished my rpm 2010 album. it’s called you’ll have to wait for the book. you can listen to it here, on bandcamp, or on alonetone, where my track 1 is currently in the top 40. there’s more of my thoughts on the process on the page i devoted to it.

year zero

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:32:07 PST

i know it’s several years old now, but i’m thinking about finally doing a full-on year zero remix album…unfortunately, my remix of “the beginning of the end” was done in garageband and i didn’t save (or i can’t find) an original lossless version, which means the only surviving version of it is a single ogg file somewhere, so i suppose i’ll have to do a *different* remix of that. oh well…

YouTube – OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – RGM version

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:53:04 PST

YouTube - OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – RGM version

this via @neilhimself’s blog

Happy 20th anniversary to Photoshop! on Vimeo

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:55:02 PST

sure it’s cool that photoshop has been around 20 years and that most of the tools have been around from the beginning, but all i’ve got to say is: imagine having to do design on that screen. i think i’d claw my eyes out.

Happy 20th anniversary to Photoshop! from Giovanni Antico on Vimeo.

happy halloween

loaves of men

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:46:23 PST

the entire catalog of the once-great and world renown experimental rock band, the loafmen is now available in its entirety for free download.

okay, i lied about the world renown part.

lemonade

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:40:58 PST

this was a big deal on twitter a couple weeks back and i never had time to check it out. you can watch the full film (it’s 35 minutes) on hulu, and i recommend it. it’s a great look at the emerging economy of new startups that are coming out of people who’ve been laid off and used that as an excuse to do the thing they love and make a business out of it (or, in a few cases, just do the thing they love and figure everything else out as they go along).

In-Place Windows 7 RC downgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium

chris@jazzsequence.com (jazzs3quence) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:02:28 PST

a few months ago, i posted a link to a hack that revealed how to do an in-place “upgrade” (although it’s really a downgrade) from Windows 7 RC-1 to a lesser version of Windows 7. as the nag alerts saying i need to backup my stuff and reinstall have started cropping up, i decided to finally put the copies of Windows 7 i actually purchased to use. but i knew i was going to be in for some issues.

click here to skip the narrative and go straight to the fix.

see, what i did — which made perfect sense at the time — was i took advantage of the limited-time, special pre-order discounts that were available towards the end of the official testing period, grabbing two copies of Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade for $50 each. i figured, someone, somewhere, would figure out how to hack them to just do an upgrade from the RC. they figured out how to hack the beta to the RC when you weren’t supposed to be able to do that…

the problem of course (which didn’t apply to the beta → RC upgrade), is that Home Premium is a different version of Windows than RC, which uses Ultimate. and therein lies the issue — an issue i realized would be a problem when i tried the upgrade sometime in december (before i found the hack) and it was giving me this message:

when i went to do the upgrade using the method i linked to after christmas, i still got the same message. i didn’t get it. yes, the hack was a pretty stupid hack, just changing a couple registry values from “Ultimate” to whatever version of Windows was less than what you were trying to install, but still, supposedly people had done it with success.

it wasn’t until i found this hack — which is based on that one — that i was able to figure out a way to get it to work.

so the original hack goes like this: open regedit, and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion and change the values for EditionID and ProductName. The assumption is that you could change them to whatever you want, just name it the name of the operating system. so you’d go from “Ultimate” to “Home Premium.” the problem, of course, is that this didn’t work. and from what i could tell in the comments for that post, it didn’t work for a lot of other people trying to downgrade to home premium.

the difference in this other hack i found, first of all, is in how the edition is named — e.g. it’s important that you use the exact name that the edition identifies itself as on the DVD, which he displays in a graphic:

so, that helped, but it still didn’t work. i used “HOMEBASIC” and “Windows 7 HOMEBASIC” in the correct keys and still got the same message saying i can’t upgrade from Ultimate to Home Premium.

really, Microsoft? i finally decide to spend money on your operating system and — because of a loophole in your installation process — you’re still going to try to either suck even more money out of me or force me to find a pirated copy anyway? i started warming up my demonoid searches…

but then i notice that the post indicates that the registry values you enter need to match the version you are installing. but that can’t be right…surely changing the values from “Ultimate” to “HOMEPREMIUM’ aren’t going to work on a Home Premium install, are they? it works like the cversion.ini hack used to upgrade from beta to RC — you just need to make it something less than the current version…

i tried it and, whadayaknow, i saw a new screen:

so i knew i was in pretty good shape when i saw the installation actually start working. i was a little nervous, however, when the install hung at 20% on “Gathering files, settings, and programs”. i stopped and restarted it when i didn’t see it changing at all, and it hung again at 20%. this time i left it alone and went away from the computer. a while later i came back and saw it had moved to 88%, and it was fine from there.

note: i will say that at some point the computer rebooted and brought up a screen about how the repair wizard couldn’t fix the startup error. i closed that screen, the pc shut down, but then started windows for the first time fine after that. it’s been working with no issues since, so i’m calling it a fluke for now.

after that, it booted up fine and asked for my product id (which, of course, i have), and has been working like a charm ever since with a retail version of windows 7 home premium.

so, once again, here’s how to downgrade from Windows 7 RC-1 (Ultimate) to Windows 7 Home Premium
(note: presumably this would work with other versions but as i have not tested it on any other version, I can’t vouch for it personally, although the original post i used as reference indicated it would work for Home Professional as well)

1 – open the registry editor by going to Start > Run > regedit

2 – navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ WindowsNT \ CurrentVersion

3 – double click EditionID to open it and change the value from “Ultimate” to “HOMEPREMIUM”

4 – double click ProductName to open it and change the value from “Windows 7 Ultimate” to “Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM”

you’re done. it works without a reboot. you should be able to just start your installation.

also note: this is still using the method that changes the cversion.ini file on the DVD image, so you’ll still need to do that first.

okay, ready, break. you’ve got about 9 days left before your computer starts shutting down. if you waited this long to install the retail version, wait no longer, do it now.