Rlandau

Whether you're commuting to the office or planning a cross-country journey, find the motorcycle jacket you need.

Post-apocalyptic isometric RPG Underrail [official site] will leave its sprawling metroworld to visit an underground sea in its first expansion next year, developers Stygian Software announced today. Underrail: Expedition is off to the Black Sea, a huge subterranean sea filled with pirates, strange wildlife, ancient ruins, and all the usual expansion merriment. I’ve heard good things about Underrail so heck, I’m glad for the reminder to check it out. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Bernband [official site] has my favourite alien city in a video game. Stuff the Citadel, Bernband is where I want to go. Wandering its streets, corridors, and passageways at night you might see bands play in bars, visit nightclubs, stumble into school classes, wonder what high-tech devices even do, and find folks discreetly pissing in corners. It’s the best experience I’ve had of wandering in a strange city, and I will keep talking about it until everyone has visited.

… [visit site to read more]

In What Is the Business of Literature?, Richard Nash tells a story about how the ideas underlying writing, books, and publishing have evolved over the centuries, shaped by the desires of both creators and merchants. One of the key points is that technological innovation has generally had a far greater effect on the ability to consume literature than on the ability to create it.

But books are just one example of this phenomenon. It is, in fact, a pattern:

For the most part, however, the technical and business-model innovations in literature were one-sided, far better at supplying the means to read a book than to write one. ...

... This was by no means unique to books. The world has also become better at allowing people to buy a desk than to make a desk. In fact, from medieval to modern times, it has become easier to buy food than to make it; to buy clothes than to make them; to obtain legal advice than to know the law; to receive medical care than to actually stitch a wound.

One of the neat things about the last twenty years has been the relatively rapid increase in the ability for ordinary people to to write and disseminate creative works. But an imbalance remains.

Over a shorter time scale, this one-sidedness has been true of software as well. The fifty or sixty years of the Software Era have given us seismic changes in the availability, ubiquity, and backgrounding of software. People often overuse the word 'revolution', but these changes really have had an immense effect in how and when almost everyone uses software in their lives.

Yet creating software remains relatively difficult. The evolution of our tools for writing programs hasn't kept pace with the evolution in platforms for using them. Neither has the growth in our knowledge of how make great software.

There is, of course, a movement these days to teach more people how to program and to support other people who want to learn on their own. I think it's wonderful to open doors so that more people have the opportunity to make things. I'm curious to see if the current momentum bears fruit or is merely a fad in a world that goes through fashions faster than we can comprehend them. It's easier still to toss out a fashion that turns out to require a fair bit of work.

Writing software is still a challenge. Our technologies have not changed that fact. But this is also true, as Nash reminds us, of writing books, making furniture, and a host of other creative activities. He also reminds us that there is hope:

What we see again and again in our society is that people do not need to be encouraged to create, only that businesses want methods by which they can minimize the risk of investing in the creation.

The urge to make things is there. Give people the resources they need -- tools, knowledge, and, most of all, time -- and they will create. Maybe one of the new programmers can help us make better tools for making software, or lead us to new knowledge.

Look, we can’t put this off much longer. I’m putting up a dado rail in the sitting room and if I have to go to B&Q on a Sunday afternoon, you have to go to B&Q on a Sunday afternoon. No lone person deserves that grim hellscape. If it’ll help you steel yourself, here, have a play of MiniDayZ for free. It might not prepare you for a couple furious that the paint-mixer’s out of a particular pigment, but a top-down 2D take on Bohemia’s zombie apocalypse survival sim comes close to the experience.

… [visit site to read more]

Tireless preservers of multimedia The Internet Archive have begun adding videogames to their publicly-accessible non-profit digi-shelves. You can now play 900 ye olde arcadee gamese for no-pennies, including Galaga, Defender, Outrun, assorted Pac-people and as I’ve screenshotted above, the one everyone talks about all the time time, The Three Stooges.
… [visit site to read more]

Simple handheld versions of our favorite dishes are not really what the art of sandwich-crafting is all about. A perfect sandwich occupies only one culinary niche—its own. We've rounded up a wide variety of sandwich recipes—from casual sliders to meaty bread-bound mains—making it easier to enjoy great sandwiches all the time.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: 25 Sandwich Recipes We Love

This corn soup, from The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Vegetable Cookbook by Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer Purcell (co-authored with Sandy Gluck), is laced with a bit of chipotle powder for a smoky, toasty edge, which is enhanced by roasting the corn kernels with poblano and red bell peppers. A simple and sweet broth is made by simply simmering the cobs in water for a short spell, and the soup is finished with heavy cream, because why not. It looks rich, but it feels surprisingly light and goes down all too easily. Read More

If I could be anywhere right now, it’d be Somewhere. Look at this video game! Now listen to the song which plays on that radio. Now listen to that song while continuing to look at Somewhere.

It’s a first-person “exploration and stealth” game (with leaning and everything) about different perspectives and incomplete understanding, possessing people to see the world through their eyes and turning the world around. We cast our eye over it in March but oh my, two-man team Oleomingus have been very busy since then. Look at all these wonderful things.

… [visit site to read more]

I grew up listening to a lot of Christian rock, most of which, in retrospect, really sucked. But nothing could have prepared me for the horrors of Christian rap. Here are a couple videos that will probably leave your jaw on the floor as they did mine. This is spectacularly bad.

And this one…I should probably just apologize in advance.

Neila Ray is a fitness expert who knows how to motivate geeks to get in shape. She has an ongoing series of workout routines that require no equipment but a serious connection to at least one fandom. There’s no My Little Pony workout yet, but there are workouts for fans of 300, Batman, Firefly, and more. Conveniently, there’s a workout that can be done without leaving the couch. There’s one that I can do. Well, right after I get bored of Netflixing tonight.

-via Incredible Things

In the 1980s, a serious moral panic gripped the United States -or at least a substantial number of people in it. It seems like conspiracy paranoia now, but at the time, many were convinced that satanic cults were kidnapping, ritually torturing, and sexually abusing children on a large-scale. Parents were already primed to believe the worse, after hearing about drug abuse and seeing their children participating in a culture they didn’t understand. Along with heavy metal music, the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons was part of that culture. So when college D&D player James Dallas Egbert III disappeared, it was easy to blame the game instead of his depression, drug use, and conflicted sexuality.

[Private detective] Dear, along with the Egbert family, wanted to keep Dallas’s drug problems and sexuality out of the news, but Dear recognized the high profile case as a fantastic opportunity for self-promotion. Never shy of an opportunity to talk to the press, Dear promoted his D&D theory, and the media ate it up. So did their audiences. The D&D theory became gospel and rapidly assumed a place in urban legend. Sadly, Egbert remained suicidal, and in 1980 he died as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Others got into the act, and before you know it, bookstores and TV talk shows were full of “experts” and ex-cult members telling tales of satanic ritual abuse and the vast network of occultists behind it. Another phenomenon, “repressed memory,” came into use, to explain why adults suddenly remembered incredible tales of abuse from their childhood. The ball kept rolling downhill until everyone who worked or lived around children was a suspect. It culminated in the sensational McMartin Preschool Trial, the longest and most expensive trial in American history. Matt Staggs has written a condensed history of the moral panic of the 1980s, with profiles of some of the key players who saw the satanic ritual scare as a chance to grab headlines and make some money. -Thanks, Matt!

There are many interesting things to discuss in Judge Leon’s opinion from yesterday, finding the NSA’s phone metadata program likely unconstitutional. In this post, I’ll focus on an interesting bit of computer science in the judge’s ruling, and I’ll explain why the judge’s computer science argument is actually more powerful than he realized.

The judge found that the plaintiffs had standing to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA’s practices, based on the NSA’s use of plaintiffs’ data in processing queries. (He also found standing for other reasons.)

To do this, the judge found that the NSA’s contact chaining analysis was necessarily using data about these specific plaintiffs.
(The relevant part of the opinion starts at the bottom of page 38, and goes through page 41.)

The NSA’s contact chaining analysis uses a notion of distance based on “hops”. If A has talked to B in the last five years, then A and B are one hop apart. If A has talked to B in the last five years, and B in turn has talked to C in the last five years, then A and C are two hops apart. And so on. The NSA’s analysis starts with a “seed” phone number that has been approved as meeting a legally required level of suspicion. The analysis then extends up to three hops away from the seed number.

So how does the judge find that the NSA analysis necessarily uses the plaintiffs’ data? Here’s the key passage in the judge’s opinion:

The Government, however, describes the advantages of bulk collection in such a way as to convince me that plaintiffs’ metadata—indeed everyone’s metadata—is analyzed … whenever the Government runs a query using as the “seed” a phone number or identifier associated with a phone for which the NSA has not collected metadata (e.g., phones operating through foreign phone companies). According to the declaration submitted by NSA Director of Signals Intelligence Directorate (“SID”) Teresa H. Shea, the data collected as part of the Bulk Telephony Metadata Program—had it been in place at that time—would have allowed the NSA to determine that a September 11 hijacker living in the United States had contacted a known al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. Presumably, the NSA is not collecting metadata from whatever Yemeni telephone company was servicing that safehouse, which means that the metadata program remedies the investigative problem in Director Shea’s example only if the metadata can be queried to determine which callers in the United States had ever contacted or been contacted by the target Yemeni safehouse number. [The same point is reinforced elsewhere in the Shea declaration.] When the NSA runs such a query, its system must necessarily analyze metadata for every phone number in the database by comparing the foreign target number against all of the stored call records to determine which U.S. phones, if any, have interacted with the target number.

(pp. 39-40, emphasis in original, internal citations omitted)

The basic argument is that if the analysis needs to know whether Alice and Bob ever talked, then it must look at either Alice’s or Bob’s record. If Alice’s record is unavailable, then the only way to know whether Alice and Bob are connected is to look at Bob’s record.

(You might argue that instead of looking at Bob’s record, the analysis could instead look at some kind of precomputed index to find out the answer. But that doesn’t change anything, because the index-building process would still have to look at Bob’s record, otherwise the index couldn’t “know” whether Alice and Bob were connected. There’s no way to get the answer without looking at Bob’s record at some point.)

It follows that if you want a full list of people who talked to Alice, and you don’t have access to Alice’s record, then you have to look at every record in the database, to figure out whether that record is connected to Alice. If you fail to look at any record, then you can’t be sure that you have a complete list of Alice’s contacts.

This result is actually more powerful than the judge seems to have realized. He applied this argument to the case where the seed number was external (i.e., from a carrier not providing data to the NSA). The same argument, that you must look at every record in the database to get an accurate result, applies not only to the case where the seed is an external record, but also to every case where an external record appears at any point after one hop or two hops. In such a case, the analysis would have to look at every record in the database in order to extend the results to the next hop. (As above, you could instead use an index that was built by looking at every record.)

This case will come up very often. Using the judge’s very conservative calculation, there are at least 10,000 numbers within two hops of a typical seed. If even one of those 10,000 numbers is external, then the system will have to look at every record in the database to complete the three-hop analysis. It looks like this would usually be the case in practice. So the plaintiffs’ data—and your data as well—is not just used occasionally; it is probably used in most every contact chaining calculation done by the NSA.

[Photograph: Yasmin Fahr]

In my mind, steak tacos equal summer vacation. When I see the juicy charred meat and flavorful toppings, I can't help unhinging my jaws and going for gargantuan bite, causing all the contents the spill out, the juices dripping down over my hands, only to be scooped back in and repeated. It's all part of the fun.

But despite their casual appearance, great tacos can be a pretty involved and messy affair to make. You've got to marinate and grill the meat. You've got to cook the toppings. You've even got to get a pan out to heat the tortillas before you can put it all together. It's enough to push tacos out of weeknight meal territory for me. I couldn't help but wonder if there was a way to pack all that flavor into a taco using only a single skillet.

I started by focusing on the meat. Of all of the inexpensive cuts of beef, skirt steak is the most meaty, buttery, and intensely flavored. Not only that, but its coarse grain makes it ideal for rapidly picking up the flavors of a good spice rub (I used a homemade mixture of cumin, coriander, chili powder, and oregano), and its thinness makes it quick and easy to cook. I didn't want fire up the grill, and found that getting a large, heavy-bottomed skillet ripping hot before adding the meat created the char I was after (make sure to switch off the smoke alarm and open a window before the steak goes on), while still maintaining a tender, medium-rare center.

Skirt Steak [Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I could have gone with a store-bought salsa, but with fresh corn in season, I figured its nutty sweetness would work well with the meat. To really maximize flavor, I cooked it in the same skillet while the steak rested, allowing the corn to sop up some of the steak's juices and spiced flavors. The trick with the corn is to let it sit in the skillet without moving for a few minutes to really let it char, adding a layer of caramelized, toasted flavors to the dish. Some onion, garlic, and diced jalapeños are the only seasoning the corn needs.

The last problem were the tortillas. Heating them individually in a skillet is a painstaking process, and heating them as a foil-wrapped stack in the oven takes too long. As I sat there trying to solve this issue, I noticed the steaming hot pan of corn and realized my solution was right in front of me: I fanned my tortillas out over the corn as it charred, letting them soften and warm up in the steam from the pan. By the time the corn was cooked, the tortillas were perfectly pliant and ready to be stuffed.

The final touches were a dollop of Greek yogurt (I prefer its bright tang to sour cream) and a squeeze lime juice and sriracha (which I put on everything). Rather than reaching for the cilantro, I added a bit of chopped mint for a unique, flavorful twist. The only other things on the table? Some ice cold beer and a killer margarita (freshly squeezed lime juice, please!)

About the Author: Yasmin Fahr is a food lover, writer, and cook. Follow her @yasminfahr for more updates on her eating adventures and discoveries, which will most likely include tomatoes. And probably feta. Happy eating!

Every recipe we publish is tested, tasted, and Serious Eats-approved by our staff. Never miss a recipe again by following @SeriousRecipes on Twitter!

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[Photograph: Lucy Schaeffer]

As Raghavan Iyer explains in his new cookbook, Indian Cooking Unfolded, dals are a cornerstone of Indian cuisine, especially when you're talking about vegetarian cooking. They're relatively easy to make, full of protein and fiber, and offer countless variations in spice and color. You could probably live off of dals for weeks and rarely get bored. This version, made with regular yellow split peas (or chana dal if you can find it), features a particular seasoning technique. Instead of cooking all of the spices with the peas and potatoes, Iyer blends together toasted seeds and chiles with tomatoes to form a thick, ruddy paste. This paste gets stirred into the dal towards the end of cooking, which allows the spices to retain their vibrancy.

Why I picked this recipe: I make dals all of the time, but I am usually pretty lazy about seasoning.

What worked: Despite the unfamiliar technique, this dal was easy to put together and had a lovely smokiness I've never been able to bring out in my own dals.

What didn't: While I think there was enough salt in the dish as a whole, the potatoes and peas weren't seasoned as deeply as they could have been. Next time, I'll add some of the salt to the simmering pea and potato mixture.

Suggested tweaks: If you can get your hands on chana dal (split baby chickpeas), by all means use that here in place of the yellow peas. If you can't get either split yellow peas or chana dal, you can use regular split green peas (the kind you use for split pea soup) in their place.

As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Indian Cooking Unfolded to give away this week.

About the author: Kate Williams is a freelance writer and personal chef living in Berkeley, CA. She is a contributor to The Oxford American and Berkeleyside NOSH, and she blogs at cookingwolves.wordpress.com.

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VIEW SLIDESHOW: 25 Quick Vegetarian Recipes We Love

We're in the height of summer's produce bounty, and you're faced with the ultimate quandary. You want to cook and eat everything, but the weather's so nice out that you also just want to relax on the deck with a cold beer and nothing on your mind. What's a Serious Eater to do? Here are 25 vegetable-based recipes that will help make a dent in the season's best produce. The best news? They're quick enough—most of them take less than 30 minutes from start to finish—that you don't have to miss any more of that sunshine and beer than is absolutely necessary.

Jump straight to a recipe below, or click through the slideshow for some more inspiration.

Snacks and Sides

Roasted Zucchini Dip with Za'atar [Photograph: Josh Bousel]

• Grilled Cremini Mushrooms Stuffed with Basil- and Parmesan-Mayo
• Mexican Street Corn (Elotes)
• Roasted Zucchini-Chickpea Dip with Za'atar

Eggs and Breakfast

Eggs Baked in Avocado [Photograph: Sydney Oland]

• Salt and Vinegar Spanish Tortilla with Quick Cheaty Allioli
• Skillet Egg-in-a-Hole with Avocado, Asparagus, and Feta
• Eggs Baked in Avocado
• Shakshuka

Hearty Salads

Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Fried Almonds [Photograph: Jennifer Segal]

• Grilled Romaine Hearts with Buttermilk-Dill Dressing
• Italian Easy: Farro Salad with Lentils, Beans and Oven Roasted Vegetables
• Make-Ahead Spicy Green Bean Salad with Sesame-Lime Tofu
• Panzanella with Artichokes, Black Olives, and Capers
• Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Fried Almonds

Soups

Spanish Chickpea and Spinach Stew [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

• Make-Ahead Zucchini and Quinoa Dill Bisque
• Vegan: Garbanzos con Espinacas y Jengibre (Spanish Chickpea and Spinach Stew with Ginger)

Pasta and Other Mains

Herb Ricotta Gnocchi with Quick Tomato Sauce [Photograph: Deborah Mele]

• Skillet Pearled Couscous with Tomatoes, Feta, and Spinach
• Torn Pasta Sheets with Brown Butter, Herbs, and Poached Eggs
• Sweet Potato and Spinach Curry
• Herb Ricotta Gnocchi With Quick Tomato Sauce
• Macaroni and Cheese with Black Beans and Chipotle
• Mushroom Fried Rice with Pickled Ginger

• Halloumi and Vegetable Skewers
• Korean Fried Cauliflower (Vegan)
• Mexican Mushroom and Spinach Sandwich (Vegan Torta)
• The Best Vegan Mapo Tofu
• Sicilian-Style Pasta with Eggplant, Tomatoes, and Ricotta Salata (Pasta Alla Norma)

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

[Photograph: Primal Kitchen]

Making naturally-fermented pickles or sauerkraut is something of a gamble. You put food and salt and maybe some spices or water into a jar, and you wait for it to go bad. And then you hope that it goes bad in a good way. Just like when you're growing a sourdough starter or making yogurt or crème fraîche, you want the good bacteria to ward off the bad.

My mother made fermented pickles in an old pottery cookie jar. More than half the time, the pickles went bad. And once they started to go off, there was no saving them. The pickles would get soft and slimy, and they'd start to smell bad. She'd toss them and try another batch.

Kraut Kaps ($9.99) are designed to help prevent the bad bacteria from working their evilness on the pickles, while letting the good bacteria proliferate. It's a simple idea, really—an airlock on the top of a cap that fits any wide-mouth canning jar.

So does it work? I made two batches of fermented pickles in half-gallon jars, and both were successful. Now I have a batch of sauerkraut in process. It's bubbling like it's supposed to after a couple weeks, and I'm not seeing any sign of rotting.

Whether these products would have worked without the airlock is the question. I've successfully made pickles and sauerkraut without a gadget, but it requires a lot of attention, scraping off the scum on the top, adding water as it evaporated, and constantly looking for mold. Using the caps made the process a lot easier. I still checked the pickles on occasion, and there was a little evaporation, but I didn't need to check them every day. And for those with sensitive noses, not much aroma escapes the jars.

Remember that even with these caps, you can still introduce bacteria into the process with a jar that isn't quite clean enough, pickles that aren't washed well, or utensils or other ingredients that could introduce bugs. But the caps do keep nasties from coming in from the outside, so your chances of success are better.

The caps are a bit pricey, but if you do a lot of pickling, they could save you from having to throw out batches of pickles that have gone bad. Also, since the lids only fit wide-mouth canning jars, the batch sizes you can make are limited.

The caps were recently redesigned with silicone replacing parts that were previously made from rubber, so these new ones should last a bit longer.

About the author: Resident yeast whisperer and bread baking columnist Donna Currie also has a serious gadget habit. When her father-in-law heard about this column, he upgraded the nickname for her kitchen from "gadget world" to "gadget heaven." You can find her on her blog, Cookistry or follow her on Twitter at @dbcurrie.

Disclaimer: Testing samples were provided to Serious Eats.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

It was the morning after the first leg of my recent cross-country road trip and I woke up to aroma of cinnamon and butter wafting through the air. We'd arrived at the home of Stella Parks (aka BraveTart) in Lexington, Kentucky, late the night before and spent far too long drinking and chatting before we called it a night. With a full day of driving ahead of us the next morning, going to bed early would have been the smarter move, but I'm wise enough to know that you shouldn't ever turn down bourbon from a Kentuckian in their own home.

Stella, hard at work on her book (slated to be released next fall!) had been up early to test just how sticky a sticky bun could get before reaching the upper limits of absurdity (answer: very sticky) and there was already a batch in the oven by the time I finally rolled out of the fold-out bed in her office. I'm never the type to do anything half-assed, so I resolved then and there to fully commit to procrastinating before getting back on the road by having a long and leisurely brunch.

I'm also wise enough to know that when a gentlelady offers you her buns, no matter how sticky, it's only polite to offer her something in return, so I turned to my in-a-strange-kitchen-with-no-knowledge-of-what-they've-got staple breakfast: vegetable hash. In this case, Stella happened to have some gorgeous sweet potatoes and purple bell peppers, two of my favorite hash ingredients.

If potatoes or sweet potatoes are your base, the best way to make hash is to par-cook them in salted water. Not only does this help season them to the center, but it also ensures that they'll be evenly cooked in the final dish, allowing you to focus only on the browning and crisping stages once they hit the hot oiled skillet. Since sweet potatoes take a little longer to brown than other vegetables like onions and peppers, I give them a good head start before adding the rest.

A touch of acid and heat brighten things up, and I add mine in the form of a vinegary hot sauce. In this case we had Cholula on hand, but my go-to is Frank's (Tabasco would work just fine as well). Finally, to make a meal of it, I make a few wells and crack eggs directly into the hash, cooking them in the oven until they're just beginning to set.

There's nothing like a good 1,200-calorie breakfast to help you power through the pretty countryside of Western Kentucky, or to make you want to fall asleep at the wheel doing it.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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From Drinks

Almost every time I use Delectable, I end up convincing whoever I'm with to download it right away. It doesn't take much pushing: this iPhone app does all sorts of things wine lovers want.

At its most basic, Delectable serves as an automated wine diary. It recognizes wine labels, making it easy to collect a list of wines you've tried without having to type in long producer or vineyard names. You just take a picture of a bottle you're enjoying, and through a little computer magic (well, a combination of label image recognition, algorithmic matching, and wine-smart people behind the scenes) the app knows what wine it is. You can rate the wine and take notes on it, tag the restaurant where you tried it or the friend you tried it with, and share to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram...or keep your list private if you're not the social type.

If you are the social type, you can follow friends you know in real life, or see what other folks are drinking...including, say, wine writers like Jon Bonné of the San Francisco Chronicle, or sommeliers like Thomas Pastuszak, wine director of The NoMad in New York.

There's more: Delectable also helps you track down that amazing bottle you tried at a restaurant or a friend's house—in fact, they'll arrange for the wine you loved to be shipped right to your door (if the state you live in allows such things.) They're not a retailer with an inventory; instead, Delectable serves as a 'wine concierge'—they know where to find the exact bottle you're looking for. In the app, you can click on the little shopping cart for any wine that's been posted and find out what that bottle would cost to purchase. If possible, wines are sourced directly from the winery or importer, otherwise there are trusted retailers who ship the wines.

Today, the Delectable team is launching a new version with spruced-up design and a faster photo-submission process, plus a few other cool features. If you tap on the name of a wine, you're taken to a profile that shows what everyone in the Delectable community has been saying about it, how different vintages of the wine have been rated by Delectable users, and all the photos taken of that wine.

For me, it's the community of users that sets Delectable apart from other wine apps. The new version offers a few new ways to find interesting people to follow. The lists of recommendations include a collection of sommeliers, another of people who work in winemaking (like Steve Matthiasson or Cathy Corison), a list of wine writers and educators (like Jordan Mackay or hey, me!), and those who work in the trade as importers, retailers, and distributors.

There are also a few new tools for figuring out what to drink next. You can see a chart of all the wines you've tried from France, for example, that shows which French growing regions you've explored and which you haven't tried yet. You can see which subregions in, say, Burgundy, you've tried or have yet to sample.

The 'Discover' section offers wines you might like that are similar to bottles you've tried; say, wines from the same region as something you tried, or the same grape variety, as well as wines that are different from anything you've tried in case you want to sample something new. You can also see a list of wines that are recommended by the people you follow, as well as some highly rated bottles under $25.

Are you on Delectable? Have you tried out the new version? What do you think?

Delectable 3.0 is available on iTunes today. (Sorry, Android users; they're working on a version for you, but it's not out yet.)

About the Author: Maggie Hoffman is a Senior Editor at Serious Eats, based in San Francisco. She founded Serious Eats: Drinks in 2011. You can follow her on Twitter @maggiejane.

From Drinks

With so many new whisk(e)ys coming into the market these days, it's a challenge to decide which ones will make the cut for review. But some bottles instantly prove they're something special, standing head and shoulders above the flood of middling booze. These 3 whiskeys stand out from the crowd of recent releases.

Jim Beam Signature Craft Rare Spanish Brandy

Jim Beam has taken the trendy concept of unusual whiskey finishes a step further with their Signature Craft Rare Spanish Brandy expression. Rather then aging the spirit in a brandy barrel, they add a measure of brandy straight into the bourbon. This direct approach keeps the resulting spirit from spending too much time in oak, yet still benefiting from the fruit and spices of the brandy.

The resulting blended spirit has a wonderful spicy aroma, with ginger, cinnamon, and anise blending with classic vanilla and oak bourbon notes. With a rich and creamy body and raisin custard flavor, the brandy influence comes through loud and clear.

It plays as well in a Sidecar as it does in a Manhattan, an makes a really amazing Boulevardier. But Jim Beam Signature Craft Rare Spanish Brandy really is best served neat—it's almost a cocktail straight from the bottle. If you really want to give it just a little kick, an ice cube and a splash of spicy bitters does the trick nicely. In national release as of August for $40 a bottle at 86 proof, it's an easy pick.

Ardbeg Ardbog

Ardbog is the latest release from Ardbeg in their continuing line of no age statement, mysteriously named single-word whiskies (also in the lineup: Uigeadail, Corryvreckan, Supernova, Alligator, and Galileo). A mixture of whiskies aged in bourbon and Manzanilla sherry casks, it's my favorite Ardbeg to come out in some time. It strikes me as one of the more sherry-influenced Islay whiskies, and yet does a wonderful job of balancing out smoke, spice, and sweetness.

Earthy peat mixed with fruity sherry aromas draw you in, while typical Ardbeg campfire smoke and sea spray drifts from the glass. On drinking you'll find these flavors deepen and evolve, with an underlying caramel sweetness that ties together the oak, fruit, and smoke. Finishing long, complex, and satisfying, it's a thick and chewy dram that will stay with you all night. In limited release for the past two months, it's listed around $100 a bottle and worth every penny, if it's up your alley. I enjoyed mine with just a drop of water to take the edge of the 104.2 proof.

Laphroaig Càirdeas Port Wood Edition

High on my list of dream vacations is a trip to the isle of Islay, home to many of my favorite smoky Scotches. I'm torn about when the best time to visit would be—a moody fall requiring thick sweaters and the warmth of a peat fire has deep appeal, and a spring morning with light breaking free of the clouds certainly is tempting. But for sheer ease of access to the distilleries on the island, visiting during the Fèis Ìle might be the winner. An annual festival celebrating all things Islay, with whisky front and center, it's a chance to hobnob with other Scotch nerds, as well as sample rare treats from the whisky warehouses.

This year, though, I've had to settle for traveling by dram. The Càirdeas Port Wood Edition is the latest in a series of limited release whiskies from Laphroaig, released to coincide with the festival this year. It's definitely a departure from the flagship 10 year expression, known for its intense peaty flavor. The Càirdeas PWE is the same juice as the 10 year, but after the 8th year it's transferred to port barrels for 14 months of finishing. And those 14 months make all the difference.

Lighter and nimbler than the Ardbog, this is a rosé of a Scotch—and it pours almost pink! It's initially smoky on the nose, but berries and barbecue begin to dominate. The flavor is lovely: ripe strawberry and plum, a nice balance of oak and smoke, and a sweet jammy body. The finish is nicely drying. Quite a departure from what you would expect in a Laphroaig bottle, yet with just enough peat to ground it, it's the definition of a sunny, summery Islay whisky. Add a tiny ice cube to emphasize the fruit and take the edge off the 102.6 proof, although it drinks just fine at bottle strength. Unfortunately the limited release is mostly sold out, so you'll have to quest for dusty bottles or cross your fingers and contact your specialty liquor retailers, where the pricing may vary dramatically. But it's worth the hunt.

What's your favorite whisk(e)y of the moment?

About the author: Andrew Strenio is a lover of all things potable. Since sneaking his grandmother's bourbon balls, he's moved on to touring distilleries and sipping snifters. He works by day making documentary television and films for an independent production company in Brooklyn.

Samples provided for review consideration.

[Photograph: Prasanna Sankhe]

Chickpeas are a favorite in most Indian kitchens. Their hearty and versatile nature make them a sought after ingredient in vegetarian dishes. Chole is a chickpea-based dish and arguably one of the best dishes made by the North Indians. Often eaten during breakfast with deep fried bread and slivers of onion and pickles, it's a dish that could keep you going through the morning until a very late lunch. There are many delicious regional versions of this dish, but today's recipe today is more North Indian in nature.

I like to eat chole with white or jeera rice and a good serving of boondi raita (a sweet-salty yogurt-based salad with crunchy chickpea flour beads). But you could have it with rotis or bread and it would be just as delicious.

About the author: Denise Dsilva Sankhe is a writer & creative director by profession. But that's only when she isn't eating her way across India. She recreates this delicious cuisine in her Mumbai home, which she shares with her husband, who has long since given up his determination to have salads for dinner.

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Tired of using conventional methods to decide which board game to play? Do you have so many board games that deciding which one to play takes twice as long as actually playing the game?

Well then this handy dandy flowchart is just what you need- it helps guide you towards the perfect board game with questions like “do you think everyone should just get along?” and “is chess too cliché?”.

When you’re finished navigating through the maze of thin white lines the choices are laid out before you in easy to read boxes, and if you’re playing a game like Warhammer or Arkham Horror this flowchart will be the easiest guide you read all night!

Via 22Words

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

There are some mashups so gut-wrenchingly glorious, so decadently delicious, so damn greasy, that they deserve to be tasted, tested, improved, written about, modified, expanded, contracted, broken down, reassembled, broken down again, and possibly reassembled (after lunch) until they've finally emerged in their ultimate form. Kung Pao Popeye's might be one such mashup. Totchos—that'd be Tater Tots dressed like nachos—definitely are.

There's no shortage of Totcho recipes online, but I'm pretty happy with my own version. I've tweaked each nacho element just the way I like it.

We started with the cheese sauce. Plain old grated cheese on nachos is the worst. It melts unevenly, it breaks and turns greasy, and it congeals into crusty cheese rafts as soon as the nachos begin to lose a bit of their heat. Bechamel-based sauces don't have the requisite goo and gloss-factor. Luckily, our Gooey Cheese Sauce recipe solves both these problems by emulsifying real cheddar cheese with just a touch of cornstarch and evaporated milk.

Rather than going with store-bought salsa, we made our own charred tomato salsa by broiling tomatoes in the oven along with onions, garlic, and jalapeños. Once they were completely black on their upper surfaces, we puréed them with some lime juice and cilantro. The salsa comes out sweet, fresh, and complex, with a tinge of bitterness from the charred bits. (It also happens to be my go-to salsa recipe to go with chips).

Diced tomatoes are generally bland and watery compared to all the other flavorful toppings on nachos. Here's a trick for fixing that: salt the chopped tomatoes in advance and let them drain in a strainer while you prep the rest of the ingredients. Salt will draw out excess moisture, which leaves the tomatoes left behind far more flavorful.

To top it off, I add bunch of finely chopped Spanish chorizo sautéed in its own fat until crisp. Not exactly a traditional nacho topping, but it's so much more flavor-packed than chili or plain ground beef. For freshness, red onions, cilantro, pickled jalapeños, and scallions make the cut.

Just like you can make or break a sandwich depending on how you stack it, proper layering is essential in constructing the perfect tray of totchos. What could be worse than eating the over-gooped upper layer of tots only to find a completely goop-free lower layer? It's like when you go to the movie theater and have to slog your way through the un-buttered bottom half of the popcorn bag, desperately trying to scrape the last vestiges of the golden topping from your greasy fingers.

Moral of the story: layer your tots and ingredients so that every tot is evenly gooped, from the first to the last.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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Confucius (c. 1770) from The Granger Collection/New York/Wikipedia

Michael Puett, Harvard professor of Chinese History, described a society where narcissim and self-centered behaviors were on the rise, and our relationship with one another was strained. There's much fighting and disagreement on how to live harmoniously together.

Sounds like today's modern world?

Actually, Puett was describing China some 2,500 years ago. That background of societal chaos gave birth of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, and despite its thousand years-old age, the same philosophy holds true ... and popular. Puett's class on Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory is the third most popular class at Harvard University.

"This course will change your life," Puett promised, and many of his undergraduates agree, as Christine Gross-Loh of The Atlantic wrote:

Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago. [...] Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans.

Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan.

Gross-Loh continues to explain how Puett gave three specific examples of how practical application of classical Chinese philosophy could change a student's life.

While they used to just be used by moonshiners and old ladies pickling vegetables, Mason Jars are enjoying their hipster moment as we speak. If you’re on board with the readily available jars and are looking to add some additional functionality to yours, check out this spiffy pour over coffee attachment. The Pour Mason is an aluminum add-on for your mason jar that lets you brew some delicious coffee in a tastier manner than using your pod machine. Perfect for ...

I am always counting my cubs. Ever since we left the sett, I have been looking behind me and counting my cubs. One, two, three, four… and a sudden panic that I have lost one, until he bounds up from whatever turnip he was investigating to join us. A sudden flash of anger happens in me. ‘You had me so worried,’ I want to say to him. ‘Never stray from us again. You never know what might happen.’ And then I worry that when I was young, I might have made my mother feel this way, and I feel ashamed because at the time I didn’t care.

Shelter, you are turning me into a mother, and until now I have not had one maternal feeling in my body. (more…)

Mac and cheese, pizza, falafel, and scrambled eggs might not be the first foods you think of when you think about a waffle iron, but they can be made in the device and the results are every bit as delicious as the more traditional versions. Just remember to clean them well so you don't end up getting bits of your cheeseburger in your brownies.

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