More adventures in #4HBB slow-carb meals: Lentilles Saucisses a l'Ancienne

 

Lentilles Saucisses a l'Ancienne: Puy lentils, cooked in red wine and stock, with good sausages (I like Polish sausages in this dish), tomatoes and tomato puree, thyme, bay leaves, diced onions and finely diced garlic. 45 minutes does it nicely. Garnish with finely diced parsely. 

Serve with good Dijon mustard (Maille is the best in our house) and a salad of Endives (or small Chicory) done with a simple French dressing. Délicieux!

My favourite recipe comes from this book: The French Kitchen by Joanne Harris and Fran Warde. Here's a similar one, just don't use canned lentils.

Meeting Otto

Our friends recently had a baby, and he's gorgeous. I got a good 15 minutes snuggling, and exercised the new EOS 7D a bit. What a great day.

Amazon Kindle: just $114. Only one tiny catch.

With a small catch - "special offers", which means that the screensaver and home page carries advertising. See here: http://amzn.to/h0sDb3

Merely because a few optional offers are delivered with your Kindle. This is the power of pre-load economics, right here... 

According to the blurb the reading experience is not changed so I'd expect to see full pages without advertising. This makes sense, you spend most of your time here on pages and and you want to have full focus. I suspect because of that, the Kindle is subsidized by these pre-load economics by $25 instead of a significantly higher amount. 

Thoughts? Are you going to buy one?

Have Plantar Fasciitis? Here's How I Fixed Mine

Here's how I (largely, still working on an injured Achilles) fixed my Plantar Fasciitis. To start out though, let me disclaim with YMMV (your mileage may vary). If you've ever had PF, you'll have likely been through various physio appointments to treat the affected fascia structure directly, stretch the Achilles and calves, and had orthotic inserts of some kind along with advice to buy expensive, "supportive" shoes. PF can be extremely disrupting to your fitness lifestyle and really is one of those constant, frustrating, niggling pains that just grinds you down.  

Some of that worked for me, and some of it didn't. Specifically, when I realized that my PF was due to weakness in and around the foot and ankle (like many), I also realized that strengthening that foot was crucial. Out went the supportive shoes and in came barefoot walking. Here's my list of fixes that I employed regularly for several months, committing these to simply being a part of my daily lifestyle;

  1. Barefoot walking on large grained gravel. Trust me. Or trust Danny Dreyer, author of Chi Running, where I found this tip. 10 minutes a day
  2. Deep tissue massage along the Plantar Fascia (by this I mean a thumb all the way into the crunchy, bubbly tissue, run back and forth along the tight section until it "lets go". You'll feel it). 10 minutes every 3rd day
  3. Barefoot style walking and light jogging when pain settled down somewhat, using Vibram's FiveFingers. 20 minutes every other day
  4. Tiger Balm. Every night
  5. Ice + water baths. Fit a Ziplock bag full of air around your toes with a rubber band, to protect them from extreme cold. 5 minutes a day
  6. PF brace at night. The large brace boots are an uncomfortable large presence forever getting tangled in the sheets. Try this minimal Futuro brace, or this Strassbourg sock, or even this el cheapo brace instead.

That's it. PF takes forever to heal (punned!) primarily because we're often on our feet, and secondarily because there is not a lot of blood flow throughout the area. The above steps strengthen the little muscles that help support your arches and foot, and reduce inflammation (ice) and bring new blood to the area (massage, Tiger Balm). Good luck!

Don't Buy a High Speed Cat 2 HDMI cable for more than $12

Recently I went to Best Buy to purchase a couple of 6' HDMI cables for general use with my LCD HDTV (which I love, btw) and Apple TV, PS3, and Canon EOS 7D. 

I wasn't overly surprised that the cheapest offering Best Buy had on the retail floor was about $60.00 USD, but I was disappointed (they have some cheaper, lesser quality cables on their website). Retailers do this as when you buy a TV for example, their strategy is to ensure that you also walk out the door with a couple of cables that you "need", or other accessory items. Why? The markup and profit margin on these is extremely high in comparison to the large ticket item you just bought. I should know - I worked for Brashs in Australia when I was younger selling goods on the retail floor, before it went bust (inb4 "it was you, wasn't it!" - not entirely me, heh). When you bought a TV from me, you usually walked out with 2 cables and a packet of batteries for the remote - I got paid solid commission on those items and they were in fact, the key targets management gave us. Nothing much has changed. 

I left Best Buy and went home to look at Amazon and some technical information about HDMI cables. Turns out you can get decent 6' Category 2 (High Speed) HDMI cables for less than $10, from MediaBridge in this case. Category 2 certified means they work well with 1080p, 1440p, 3D signals and so on. I promptly bought 3 and have been enjoying high-fidelity sound and 1080p video signal with them since 2 days later. This is what I suggest you buy.    

Shibby! Unboxing new toy time

Canon EOS 7D. I've wanted one of these since release, and since we're about to have a baby now is the *perfect* time.

Interestingly enough, credit card rewards through Citibank got me this camera, so it's somehow additionally gratifying - it's by no means “free” but the transaction carried some of the same feel, because I didn't spend any tangible monies here. If you have credit cards and want to earn rewards, you could check out http://www.thankyou.com, or any of the rewards-earning cards that http://mint.com can refer you to.