Other food stuff

A few goodies from here and there in my food reading:

Tea-smoked chicken and free-range pigs at Boston.com.

New York Times: Hold the Risotto, Make It Fried Rice. Apparently über-Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan prefers Chinese food when she’s in New York City. The author of this piece says it’s because Marcella first started thinking about teaching cooking classes after an abortive set of lessons with a Chinese chef; it could equally well be because no New York Italian restaurant measures up to Marcella’s famously sniffy palate.

Too Many Chefs: When Life Gives You A Lemon. I think the best thing to do with a single perfect home-grown lemon—if you’re abstaining from cocktails—might be to juice and zest it for a lemon risotto. It doesn’t take much juice to transform a plain old risotto completely.

And not specifically food related, but close: Boston.com: Firm serves sweet brew for de-icing roads. A fine thing to do with residues left over from distilleries, even if the resulting product’s molasses odor might bring back bad memories for North End residents.

Biomedical networking

Shades of Gray: Biomedical networking. Sloanblogger Straz lands a product management job with a biomedical startup and posts two useful reminders to me as I continue with my own job hunt:

First, it’s a question of not what you know vs. who you know. It is first who you know (get in the door) and then what you know (get hired). Second, even under the best circumstances, 3 months is the bare minimum to complete a job hunt at the professional level.

Might we see legal shipments of wine to Massachusetts?

New York Times: Justices Pick Apart Ban on Wine Sales From State to State. I’d love to see this quashed, but somehow I don’t see Massachusetts, which doesn’t even have the same liquor laws from town to town, rolling over if the Supremes rule that laws barring buying wine through the mail are illegal. Interesting legal battle, with the 21st Amendment (Prohibition Repeal) being pitted against the commerce clause. Ironically, states’ exemptions that allow local wineries to deliver in-state disembowel the states’ argument that regulations against interstate shipments are necessary to protect minors.

Interestingly, one of the plaintiffs in the New York case, Juanita Swedenburg, is proprietor of a Virginia winery (albeit one I’ve never heard of).

Other commentary: Slate, NPR.

RetroBoxen

house of warwick: RetroBox Revealed. Steve bought an old PowerMac G3 for $100 that he plans to use for iLife-related tasks. RetroBox has a great business model—how many of us are doing things that require a 1GHz processor? How many of us couldn’t use an extra machine somewhere?

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to manage my burgeoning MP3 collection, and putting a $200 or $300 G4 on the home network to house a full digital jukebox, maybe backup services, and other odds and ends sounds like just the ticket. Ironically, the only problem is figuring out the monitor situation. I love not having that extra CRT around. Maybe I could manage the machine entirely through VNC? Probably not—there are always some initial setup tasks before you get the VNC server running…