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I love panini. I even have a fancy press on my Amazon wishlist so that I can make more of them. D and I make all sorts of panini but the one we always come back to is the turkey and roasted red pepper panini with cilantro pesto.

We slice and flatten the red peppers and then roast them on a skillet. The pesto is made with cilantro, chipotle en adobo, oil, and nuts (pine or walnuts though one time we used Macadamia nuts, which were to die for.) The rest of the sandwich is just sliced turkey, (get it sliced fresh from your deli) Monterey jack cheese, and wheat bread. Since we’re members of a food co-op that focuses on local produce, sustainability, and organic food these particular panini also happen to be USDA organic.

Oh, man these are a slice of heaven folks.

If you find yourself fascinated by the food I eat you should check out my wife’s blog, Origins of the Cook

I’ll get right on that this weekend…

Last year I purchased a beer brewing kit from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. I put up a quick post on the kit and then months passed without it ever being mentioned again. Well, the fact that I had grains, hops, and a brew kit sitting around the kitchen for nearly three months bothered me too; so, over last weekend, on Martin Luther King Day to be exact, I decided to do something about it. I brewed an apple ale.

The first and most important step in beer brewing is to clean and sterilize everything you plan on using first. If I ruined my beer this is where it happened.  I diligently cleaned everything with sanitizer but it only takes a few stray microbes to kill of yeast. I was careful but I’ve never brewed beer before and so I don’t know if I was diligent and paranoid enough about cleanliness.

Once you’ve cleaned all the tools you get a pot full of water, get it boiling and then dump in your grain and let it cook for an hour. It’s a lot like making a giant pot of oatmeal. Regulating the temperature of the cooking grain is important because it determines what type of beer you will make. I had trouble keeping the beer in the correct range for an ale. I don’t know how big of an issue this is; friends say it shouldn’t be too much of one. Once the grain is cooked you run it through a strainer, capturing all the water it was cooked in (wort), add some more water, and then run the wort through the grain a couple more times.  Then you boil the wort for an hour adding hops, and other things for flavor; this recipe called for apples and a cinnamon stick.

After the wort was boiled I strained it again then put it into my carboy, added the yeast, shook it up, and capped it. It sat venting for three days (you don’t want it to explode) and now will sit for an additional two weeks (in the dark) before I move it to bottles. The fact that I won’t know if the beer is a success or not until near the end of February has been the most difficult part to deal with.  My fingers are crossed, and I’ll certainly mention the end results here!

I have a lot of video games. Up until 2001 or so the vast majority of those games were on the PC. There used to be stores where the only thing they sold were PC games (and a little bit of productivity software on the side.) No longer.  PC games also came in big boxes with sleeves inside, before CDs, you’d find stacks of disks, thick manuals, charts, code-wheels, posters, maps, doo-dads, feelies.  It was pretty awesome.  This wasn’t just A-list title stuff either.  Every game, even the crappy ones came with neat stuff, they had to fill those boxes somehow.

Today, that isn’t the case.  Most PC games come in a DVD case.  If there is manual it is an afterthought.  Some black and white 6 page, poorly edited affair ran on cheap paper.  It’s depressing to look out which is why they’re mostly left out.  All that other stuff that used to come with PC games?  That stuff you now have to pay a premium for it’s reserved for collector’s editions and Bicarbonate editions, or pre-order specials.  The profit margins must be razor thin these days…

The sad thing is that I got rid of all of my boxes when I came up to northern California for college to conserve room, with the boxes went most of the cloth maps, doo-dads, feelies, and chotskies.  Also dumped were probably 100+ games that I felt had no value to me anymore.  Too bad there isn’t a secondary market for PC games.  Too bad there isn’t some sort of Musuem or Hall of Fame for them yet either…

Anyway, let’s see what I got in these stacks:

Next time we visit these manuals I’ll talk about some of my favorites; what makes them so wonderful; and, what we lose by not having them…