Xor News

Here is yesterday’s haul of 100% organic home-grown raspberries. That is 7 lb 11 oz of pure deliciousness.

raspberry harvest

We have been getting a tremendous harvest from our little row of raspberries this year.

Mamacita made paella last night and it was truly fantastic. It was very authentic, real spanish short grained rice, chorizo, jamon, shrimp, scallops, chicken, smoked Spanish paprika, saffron. There is a certain kind of pepper that true Valencian paella would have that we didn’t find in time, but I’m thinking that just gives us an excuse to have it again pretty soon, right? Right?

Paella de Valencia

So here it is, probably enough paella for 12 people. My new favorite food has displaced Maryland crab-cakes from the top of the list.

We are starting to use thrift and needed an ant build recipe. Here’s what we came up with. It works good and the only thing that looks like an abstraction leakage to me is that I needed to know the package, the java namespace, for the resultant generated thrift code and the name of one of the thrift generated files. The primary goal was to eliminate running the thrift generator when the generated code is newer than the .thrift files. There isn’t a one to one mapping between .thrift files and generated output so if any of the generated stuff is newer than any of the thrift then it all gets recreated.

I also didn’t want to have to copy the thrift output to someplace else, so a javac target was added to just treat the “gen-java” thrift output as a new source directory for direct java compilation. The normal ant target to compile the java code can now just depend on “thrift-gen”.

  <property name="thrift.dir" value="${basedir}/src/thrift"/>
  <property name="thrift.out.dir" value="${basedir}/src/gen-java"/>
  <property name="thrift.package" value="your/package/name"/>

  <!-- thrift files -->
  <fileset id="thrift.files" dir="${thrift.dir}">
    <include name="**/*.thrift"/>
  </fileset>
  <!-- Determint if thrift generated java is up to date -->
  <target name="thrift-init">
    <dependset>
      <srcfileset refid="thrift.files"/>
      <targetfileset dir = "${thrift.out.dir}/${thrift.package}">
        <include name="**/*.java"/>
      </targetfileset>
    </dependset>
    <available file="${thrift.out.dir}/${thrift.package}/Foo.java"
               property="thrift.uptodate"/>
  </target>

  <!-- Generate thrift java -->
  <target name="thrift-gen" depends="thrift-init" unless="thrift.uptodate">
    <pathconvert property="thrift.file.list" refid="thrift.files"
               pathsep=" " dirsep="/">
    </pathconvert>
    <echo message="Running thrift generator on ${thrift.file.list}"/>
    <exec executable="thrift" dir="${basedir}" failonerror="true">
      <arg line="--strict --gen java -o src ${thrift.file.list}"/>
    </exec>
  </target>

An old recipe that our family has been making for a few generations. I found out recently that my maternal grandmother used to make this a lot around Thanksgiving time. We always loved this fudge as kids and I still like it. Most of my kids don’t really enjoy it though so there’s more for me : – ) I don’t know what’s wrong with kids these days.

Smith College Fudge

• 1 c. sugar
• 1 c. dark brown sugar
• 2 T. dark molasses
• 1/2 c. milk
• 2 T butter
• 2 squares unsweeted bakers chocolate
• pinch of salt

Melt butter, add milk, sugars and molasses and boil exactly 3 minutes.
Add chocolate and salt.
Beat until hardening.
Pour into a buttered 8×8 baking dish.
Cut while cool (about 45 minutes to 1 hour).

Feast on the pure nutrition of these ingredients!

Here’s my summer-time recipe for cold-filtered iced-coffee. If you have had iced-coffee before but it was normal hot-brewed coffee, well, please be seated before taking your first sip. : – )

1. Measure 8 tbs ground coffee into a quart mason jar – a nice full-city roast would be good, or a good breakfast blend, or … oh just about any good fresh coffee will do because some coffee is better than no coffee.
2. Fill the jar with some nice water, give it a stir and put on the lid
3. Place the jar on your kitchen counter, not in direct sun, overnight or 8 hours
4. Strain. I use the gold-wire filter that came with the coffee maker, straining it through twice so that the coffee ends up back in the mason jar.
5. Refrigerate the black gold, elixir of life, uh, the coffee.
6. Put some crushed ice in a tall (or grande, or vente) cup, pour in some coffee until about 2/3 full
7. Top off with cold water
8. Add a little Torani caramel or vanilla bean, perhaps a little cream. To taste
9. Sit back and enjoy

The worst thing about it is, when you want a glass full, you will have had to make it yesterday. Which is hard to do.

Well Buford has always wanted his picture on this website. So there you go — Happy Burthday Buford! I guess having an entire case of monsters on your lap could make anyone act pretty silly.

I was recently reminded by my dear wife (who has known me since I was 7 years old, so I can’t get away with one single thing) that I drank more than my share of caffeine when I was a youth. Quite true. They didn’t have monsters back then, but if they did, I probably would have desired them.

We went to see David Grier at Baldwin’s Station Thursday night. David is an old school-mate of ours and several folks from the old neighborhood were there to hear him. He put on a fantastic show and we really enjoyed it.

Baldwin’s Station is a cool little restaurant in Sykesville in a building that was formerly a train station. The trains still run through there regularly (not through the building but it sounds like it…) and a few went through during the evening, laying on the whistle. Too bad none of them were in the middle of a train song, but it was cool anyway. The concerts are put on by Uptown Concerts, a local non-profit and they do a nice job. The venue holds about 50 people and you can be seated for dinner up to 90 minutes before the show starts, but service proceeds all during the concert, though at somewhat reduced frequency of wait-staff visits to the table. The room was pretty full for David’s concert, only a couple of seats were empty. We had a great meal and a great dessert too.

I hadn’t seen David in years, since high-school I guess, and it was great to see him again. His picking was just extraordinary, very crisp, fast at times, and just great to listen to. David played several well known tunes as well as quite a few of his own compositions. They ranged from the hauntingly melancholy “Road to Hope” to the sparking beauty of “High Atop Princess Cove”. David’s seemingly endless ability to produce variations on a theme was a marvel, it encompassed so much deep knowledge of the structure of music and tonality and was just a delight as the variations would keep rolling along. At some points so much music was coming out of the guitar that he seemed to be just giving the instrument little shakes on his knee to shake out even more things, like shaking powdered sugar on top of pancake syrup or something — good on good, you know. I really enjoyed how David used the guitar to play counterpoint and harmony with itself. It was a real treat to hear someone of his caliber in such a small setting, feeling that we were right up close to the action.

We heard some about David’s youth during the concert, and thankfully he didn’t mention any of the bad stuff any of us did with him (or to him) during high school. David’s dad, Lamar Grier, played banjo with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Yep, the Father of Bluegrass himself might have been in Maryland City at one time sitting on David’s back porch just picking away. It’s hard to take, since I like that kind of music, that I never knew any of this until years later. It is surprising how little you can get to know people during school hours.

Now if only he would have played some tunes that I know so I could tell if he was any good or not. : – )

So run right out and buy David’s CDs if you like bluegrass and good picking. They are really nice.