Cirince

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Note: All Asian ingredients can be found in Asian specialty markets or ordered onilne. Kombu is dried sea kelp; order online here. Katsuobushi is dried, smoked bonito; order online here. Niboshi are dried anchovies; order online here. Gochujang is a Korean chili bean paste; order online here. Doubanjiang is a Chinese chili-bean sauce; order online here. Kochukaru is Korean red pepper flakes; order online here.

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.

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

Ingredients

serves Serves 4 to 6, active time 1 hour, total time At least 5 hours and up to overnight

• 1 (6-inch) piece kombu (sea kelp, see note above)
• 2 ounces niboshi or shaved katsuobushi (see note above)
• 12 scallions, divided
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 pounds beef short ribs or oxtails
• 1 medium onion, split in half
• 1 (3-inch) knob ginger, cut into three slices
• 8 cloves garlic, divided
• 2 tablespoons gochujang (see note above), plus more to taste
• 1 tablespoon doubanjiang (see note above)
• 1 1/2 quarts homemade or store-bought low sodium chicken stock
• 1 tablespoon kochukaru, plus more to taste
• 1 (8-ounce) jar cabbage kimchi, with its juices
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8 ounces hon-shimeji or sliced shiitake mushrooms
• 4 to 6 servings ramen-style noodles
• 4 to 6 soft boiled eggs

Procedures

1. Cover kombu with 1 quart cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Immediately reduce heat to low and add niboshi or katsuobushi. Let steep for 15 minutes, then drain broth and discard solids. Set aside. While broth simmers, roughly chop 8 scallions and set aside. Finely slice remaining 4 scallions and refrigerate in a sealed container until ready to use.

2. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a heavy Dutch oven or stock pot over high heat until lightly smoking. Add as many short ribs as fit in a single layer and cook, turning occasionally, until browned on all sides, about 10 minutes total. Transfer to a large bowl and repeat until short ribs are all browned.

3. Add onion (cut side down) and ginger to pot and cook until well browned, about 5 minutes. Add 6 cloves garlic and roughly chopped scallions and cook, stirring, until lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Return short ribs to pot along with gochujang and doubanjiang. Stir to coat vegetables and beef in spice mixture, then add strained kombu broth and chicken broth, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Bring to a boil, reduce to a bare simmer, cover with the lid slightly cracked, and cook until beef easily separates from the bones, about 4 hours. For best results, allow to cool and transfer to refrigerator overnight.

4. When ready to proceed, strain soup through a fine mesh strainer (if refrigerated overnight, you'll have to reheat it slightly until it liquefies). Transfer liquid to a medium pot and skim off any excess fat. Pick out short ribs and transfer to a bowl. Discard remaining solids. When cool enough to handle, pick meat off of short rib bones and transfer to a cutting board. Discard bones. Roughly chop meat and set aside.

5. Add kochukaru to broth. Place a fine mesh strainer over the pot and strain kimchi juice into the broth. Finely mince garlic with a garlic press or a microplane and stir into broth. Add soy sauce. Season broth to taste with salt, pepper, and extra kochukaru and gochujang if a spicier flavor is desired. Bring to a simmer and keep warm.

6. Heat remaining tablespoon oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add mushrooms and cook until lightly browned, about 4 minutes. Add chopped short rib and cook, tossing occasionally, until crisped in spots and well browned, about 5 minutes longer. Remove from heat and set aside.

7. Cook ramen noodles according to package instructions. Divide into individual pre-heated serving bowls. Top with broth, followed by crisped beef and mushrooms, sliced scallions, kimchi, and a soft boiled egg split in half. Serve immediately.

Ranging from assemblage to video and photography, Michel de Broin has developed a constantly expanding visual vocabulary. Piece by piece, the objects involved are sometimes universally recognizable but their behavior defies their functions and uses taken for granted. Crafting new relationships between waste, productivity, risk and consumption, established modes of signification are endangered, yielding retooled technological environments that feed a constant questioning.

All images © Michel de Broin

Zack Seckler created pictures of animals, vegetation and salt ponds in Botswana from 500 feet above the ground. The result is a series of images that are an aesthetic mixture between landscape and pattern. The photographer describes his experience: ‘Being above the ground at such low elevations, and having the ability to precisely maneuver, was like gliding over an enormous painting and being able to create brushstrokes at will. As soon as I saw the landscape from above I knew there was potential to create a special body of work.’ The effect is pure beauty. You can see the series at Robin Rice Gallery in New York until February 23, 2014.

All images © Zack Seckler | Via: submission

© Downtown Bookworks

I loved my Easy-Bake Oven when I was growing up. I adored it. You could make cookies and cakes all by yourself and eat them without permission. But I didn’t buy an Easy-Bake for any of my kids  because they never seemed interested and, besides, they were already helping with regular baking.

Instead, we looked up kid-friendly recipes on the internet, using my own time-tested recipes and invested in some kid’s cookbooks. The latest one we’ve been using is The Official DC Super Hero Cookbook by Matthew Mead.

But this year, my youngest son, already a teenager, got an urge for an Easy-Bake because he thought it might make learning to bake simpler and so a friend, who heard about it, bought him one for Christmas.

“Okay,” I thought. He’s a little old for it but, hey, he’ll be able to have fun without creating the mess of the kitchen that regular baking seems to require.

So which is better for kids to use in the kitchen?

The answer wasn’t what I expected.

First, the Easy-Bake.

A 1970s Easy-Bake Oven, just like the one I had. Image via wikimedia commons, user rdmsf

This isn’t the oven I remember. I was a child of the 1970s and my Easy-Bake was basically a little miniature oven. It looked like one  and the controls were on buttons or dials.

What I didn’t know until we opened the box of the new one this year is that the Easy-Bake has been completely redesigned in the last 35 years.  Food goes in one end and is lifted out the other via a specially designed spatula. It’s now energy efficient but that so far seems the only good thing about it.

This Easy-Bake doesn’t teach how to cook proper food, just how to prepare food for this type of oven. The digital clock doesn’t work, it’s just for show. The redi-mixes that are designed for the toy aren’t simple and often don’t produce good baked goods.  The pretzels took the same amount of time as the regular size pretzel mix for a regular oven and tasted worse. The various cookies and cakes mixes had erratic cooking times and often had to be altered to get the right consistency.

Then there’s the effort spent in actually putting the square pan just right into the oven, and there’s a little trick of lifting the pan up just so to remove it from the oven. My son only just managed this on his own and he’s a teenager. I can only imagine the problems younger kids would have with it. I never had this problem with my own Easy-Bake.

Boo all around.

So how about the DC Super Hero Cookbook? Is that any better?

The good: The recipes range from very simple to somewhat more complicated. They tend to produce good results when following the recipes: always nice, they’re bright and colorful, and great for smaller kids. There are also a variety of stencils of superhero logos included, along with character cut-outs.

The cookbook contains 50 recipes in six chapters: Flying Start Breakfasts, Hero (and other) Sandwiches, Super Salads and Sidekicks, Mighty Main Dishes, Sweets and Treats, and Power Drinks.

I gave the book to my twins to pick a recipe. Their first choice was the Aquaman Ice Cream Float.

Ingredients are:

• 12 oz. of orange soda
• 1 scoop of vanilla ice cream
• 1 optional fresh orange slice
• 1 optional package of Swedish Fish

We left out the Swedish Fish (not fans), they made the float themselves and the results were delicious.

We also tasted the Super Hero cookies at an event in New York City in November, and they were good sugar cookies. The tricky part is adding the logos. The book recommends that this can be done by using the stencils with edible pigment powders but it can take some fiddling to get those powders to stick exactly right.

The downsides: There are healthy recipes in this book but it’s definitely not a book for those wanting only healthy-style cooking for their kids. Sometimes, the recipes have little to do with the superheroes that inspire them. However, they all make great use of the colors inherent in each of the superheroes, like with the Star City Lettuce Wraps (Green Arrow).

So, the winner is definitely the cookbook over the toy oven, and the loser is my nostalgia for a toy that isn’t quite right anymore.

The post Baking DeathMatch: The Easy-Bake Oven versus the Super Hero Cookbook appeared first on GeekMom.

Unless it’s for a good dishwashing detergent. I’m all too eager to hear the merits of your dishwashing detergent.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

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.

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

Special equipment: Waffle iron

Ingredients

serves Serves 6 to 8, active time 30 minutes, total time 30 minutes

• 2 cups all-purpose flour (about 10 ounces)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 3 whole eggs
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 6 ounces bacon, cooked until crisp, crumbled, plus 1 tablespoon reserved bacon fat
• 6 ounces freshly grated cheddar cheese
• 6 scallions, whites and light greens only, thinly sliced, plus more for garnish
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Maple syrup

Procedures

1. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a large bowl and whisk until homogenous. Whisk together eggs, buttermilk, melted butter, and bacon fat in a medium bowl. Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix until just combined and no pockets of dry flour remain. Fold in bacon, cheese, and scallions.

2. Preheat a Belgian waffle iron according to manufacturer's instructions. Spray waffle iron with non-stick cooking spray and cook waffle batter according to manufacturer's instructions, using about 1 cup of batter per waffle. Serve as they're ready with maple syrup, or keep warm on a rack in a 200°F oven while you prepare the remaining waffles.

Let me start by saying that I know many people feel that the last season or two of MythBusters have not been their best ever, and that they’ve seemed a bit scripted at times. But, even if you number among that group, I strongly recommend watching tonight’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Myth special.

The episode features the team running three tests based on one scene from each movie in the original trilogy: Could Luke really have swung across the bridgeless chasm while carrying Leia? Would being stuffed inside the dead Tauntaun really have kept Luke alive long enough for Han to build a shelter? And would the Ewoks’ swinging-logs weapon really have been able to crush an AT-ST? The gang have a ton of fun testing the myths, as you’d expect — Adam Savage, who is of course a huge Star Wars geek, looks positively giddy most of the episode. Costumes are worn, including, hilariously, Jamie as Luke Skywalker. (No, Kari does not dress as Slave Leia, in case you were wondering.)

I won’t reveal the outcomes of the tests, of course, but I will say that they do one of the things I particularly love about the best MythBusters episodes: They show their failures as well as their successes. An integral part of one of the experiments goes pretty badly awry, and they have to hustle to get it fixed before they run out of time to finish the test. I love this first of all because it proves that they’re really doing everything they appear to be doing, but mostly because it shows viewers that even professionals can screw things up and have to scramble to improvise.

In any case, the special (also serving as the new season’s premiere), which also features Sophia Bush of NBC’s Chicago PD as a cinammon-bun-haired Princess Leia, is a heck of a lot of fun for any Star Wars fan. It premieres tonight at 8pm ET/PT on Discovery Channel.

If you watch the premiere tonight, you can also participate in a very fun-sounding “second screen” experience. From the official press release:

Starting at 8PM ET the MYTHBUSTERS stars join a LIVE video feed from M5 on discovery.com/MBLive where they will answer fan questions during commercial breaks, provide behind-the-scenes insights, interview special guests and give away unique prizes from the episode. Fans using the crowd-sourced hashtag #SithBusters can ask questions via Twitter and Facebook that could also appear on-air.

See a clip from the special below, and a teaser video for the new season below that.

Images and videos: Discovery Channel

Thanks for reading GeekDad. Please consider clicking through to our site, we'd love to have you become more involved in our community!

Let us know if you have any interesting and attainable new year’s resolutions here.

Someday is probably a pretty crowded place.

Merry whatever you believe! Happy everything you hoped for. As always, comments are welcome!

Somos geeks, somos raros, somos la fuerza que mueve el mundo y crea el polvo mágico con el cual Papá Noel vuela (?). Bueno, no tanto, pero si somos divertidos, racionales y hacemos malos chistes ante gente normal, pero ante todo, somos buenas personas que quieren lo mejor para el mundo y para todos, por ello en estas épocas explicamos porque Papá Noel no puede existir -lo siento niños-, no cabe por la chimenea, es imposible que en una sola fabrica se creen todos los juguetes del mundo y alguna que otra racionalidad haciendo referencia a videojuegos, series, comics y lenguajes de programación.

¿Y tú cómo vas a celebrar tu Navidad?

Vía: Mashable

Este artículo Así celebra un geek la Navidad fue publicado originalmente en Punto Geek.

What would you wanna do? Let us know here.

A great year is about to come to an end and we’d like to thank you for all the loving support, your feedback, your criticism, thank you to all the amazing creatives who contributed to our blog and especially to our readers for making all this possible. We hope to start into an even more amazing year 2014, we can’t wait to put new ideas into practice and hopefully surprise you with some fresh and exciting content. To wrap it up, we decided to present the best blogpost of the Year 2013 that you guys clicked the most. Enjoy.

10. Hate Mail

London-based artist, Mr. Bingo, is an eternal naughty schoolboy who arouse our interest in May 2013. One drunken night he tweeted: ‘I will send an offensive postcard to the first person to reply to this message’ and thus, a new Internet art project, called Hate Mail, was born. The response was overwhelming, so he opened a service on his website, where strangers could pay for an anonymous offensive postcard. A great project and our number 10 in the ranking of the best blogpost 2013.

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9. Matchstick Sculptures

It was in September when visual artists and twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes convinced us with their sculptures made of thousands of matchsticks. The Colorado born New York based artists first form was a small grid of matchsticks which curved in two directions to become a portion of the surface of a sphere. After that, they set out on building an entire dome, starting with a ring of matches on a table surface upon which additional rings were stacked.

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8. Hyperrealistic selfies by Eloy Morales

Our number eight in the ranking for the best blogpost of the year is Spanish painter Eloy Morales who creates mesmerizing photorealistic and hyperrealistic oil paintings of himself. He says, thats it’s not simply all about the details, but the constant valuation of tones, the tonal transition and avoiding abrupt cuts.

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7. Alexander Kent

Alexander Kent is a London based photographer shooting modern still life. In his studio in Bethnal Green, East London he makes his sets and experiments with all kinds of things. He loves to explore the idea of ‘Boundaries’, like the idea of light crossing the boundary from ‘light’ to a ‘physical’ presence, in the form of paint or a physical object crossing from being physical to a drawing for a short while. Love his works and he is well-deserved our number 7.

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6. Mother + Daughter

In August 2013, Carra Sykes made a splash with her ‘Mother and Daughter’ photography and we received quite a few inquiries from magazines and interviewers all over the world who wanted to get in touch with the young photographer. ‘Mother + Daughter’ has kind of become a personal study of Carra and her mother’s relationship and physical traits. A lovely project and our number 6 in the ranking.

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5. Zack Seckler

Photographer Zack Seckler made it to the top 5 with his pictures, that play with our expectations. He is often focussing on absurd clichés that seem surreal at times, yet totally plausible. The New York based artist states, that people view life through their own lens. Though he enjoys refocusing that lens by putting an uncommon twist on common experiences.

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4. Nido

The one and only architecture topic that made it to the Top 10 blogposts of the Year. Located in the beautiful Finnish archipelago of Sipoo, lies ‘Nido’, a small cabin built by twenty-two year old Robin Falck. With the help of a local carpenter Falck built the whole hut with his own hands and created a small two-story hut with a small lounge/living room at the bottom and bed as well as a small storage place on the top floor in only two and a half weeks time. The result is a cabin made of local wood and material that fuses with its environment perfectly.

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3. A due colori

We made it to the finalists and our third place was taken by Italian artist Alberto Seveso who created the series ‘A due colori’, experimenting with high-speed photography while trying to find a new way to make something beautiful using ink and water. Loving to play with colors and tones, this series embodies the concept of stopping time through ink in the image.

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2. Anonymous Confessions

Silver goes to ‘Anonymous Confessions’, a public art project by american artist Candy Chang that invites people to anonymously share their confessions and see the confessions of people around them in the heart of the Las Vegas strip. By the end of the exhibition, over 1,500 confessions were displayed on the walls. It’s about sex, love, or fears of dying alone. The project seeks to create a cathartic sanctuary for a temporary community and help us see we are not alone in our quirks, experiences, and struggles as we try to lead fulfilling lives.

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1. Anamorphic Sculptures

The most popular blogpost of the Year comes from London-based artist Jonty Hurwitz who created ‘Anamorphic Sculptures’ which only reveal themselves once facing a reflective cylinder. Each of his sculptures is a study on the physics of how we perceive space and is the stroke of over 1 billion calculations and algorithms.

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The Armadillo Girdled Lizard does this when threatened.