Hip cooks at Hipcooks

This week I attended a cooking class at Hipcooks Seattle, courtesy of Goodness Knows snack squares, with a few bloggers and social media people from around Seattle.  As my blog has humble traffic and my Facebook feed is mostly filled with updates on my CrossFit workouts, I was pretty honored to be in that bunch.  Plus, I was the only guy in the class, so lunch with a bunch of ladies always works out.

I have to be honest, it started out with two faux pas on my part.  First, I messed up the calendar and put the wrong location down.  Instead of going someplace about 5 blocks from my work - walkable - we took a 15 minute drive, paid $4 to park and then drove back.  Luckily, we were ahead of schedule and were only a few minutes late to lunch.  Obviously, I was still flustered about the wrong location and when I was introduced to our host, Jenni Hogan, the first thing that came out of my mouth was "Hello. You're tall."  We've got a big flat panel TV and I've seen her do the traffic many times, but even on our big TV, she didn't seem model tall.  Evidently, she used to be a rower and she was wearing tall heels. And she's also probably the first big media personality that I've met.  I wonder if I would have been able to fit both feet in my mouth if I had been as lucky as Whit to interview Scarlett Johannsen (in my research for this post, I learned she canceled but Whit interviewed Samuel Jackson instead!).

We participated in Hipcooks Healthy, Fresh and Zingy class, making two red pepper soups and a seared tuna with fresh mango cucumber salsa.  I was a little concerned heading to a cooking class given my paleo-ish eating.  But with a name like Healthy, Fresh and Zingy I had little to worry about, although there is photographic evidence of me holding bread, gently rubbing it with heads of garlic.

I didn't eat any! Photo by @unitedstatesofmotherhood

The Hipcooks class was fun and about just cooking with your senses. No measuring, kind of a tough one for me, just doing it all by feel.  I do like a recipe as a starting point, but after I become familiar with it, I do it by feel.

I learned a few awesome things too.  When roast peppers, I usually cut them into slices before hand.  I lose the liquor, the juices from inside the pepper, so I'll be roasting peppers whole and then cutting them into slices/strips.  Our salsa had lime zest in it and we discussed using leftover zest to make citrus sugars which would make a nice hostess give or rimmer for a cocktail. I'd be interested in trying to make lemon pepper, as we've been eating a lot of chicken lately. I even learned how to pour two soups in a bowl and keep them separated and make a ying-yang look (sorry, no photos).

I wasn't the only one who was learning things - two of the ladies don't cook and they've got photographic evidence of them making some pretty good food now. And now, their friends want Kat to make it for them.

@beauraines @scoutshonor Well now they're all asking me to!! #UhOh #ImInTrouble
— Kat is my first name (@Kat_Kim_) April 12, 2013

We chatted and snacked on Goodness Knows squares. They're pretty good, not paleo, but small enough that the amount of non-paleo things is pretty negligible.  A cheat with some grains and sugars, but all in all still a good snack.  Since there are four bites in a package, I could even cheat-snack and not feel too bad about it.  Its not like its a whole slice of bread.  I really like the Very Cranberry one (the only one I've tried so far), but my kids and wife like them a lot.  Goodness Knows snack bars will have a place in my messenger bag as emergency snack food. They're currently only available in Portland, Seattle and Denver, but if you pester them on twitter, I bet you could find out when they're coming to you!

After our snack, we went back to class and made a super easy strawberry sorbet. I've made sorbet before, but it involved sugar syrups and mashed berries and my ice cream maker.  This was just frozen strawberries, some vanilla bean paste and a blender!  Throw them all together, blend till smooth and enjoy! I think that this could even be made as a one person snack, say for when a kid comes home from school on a hot summer day (if we ever get those in the Pacific NorthWest).

It was a great break from work to cook and meet and network with some cool people.  I got to meet Kerri's new baby, who was quite possibly the quietest baby I've ever met.  Hopefully, with help from Kristin and my nagging, Heather will move her blog to Wordpress.

Changing Templates

Look at how I'm using my new found time!  I'm playing with my blog's templates.  My wife wrote a while back that she didn't like my blog template.  My stock blog template.  The one with terrible use of whitespace.

She found a nice looking one for Wordpress and I started to look into the Wordpress migration.  I hear its a headache, but not impossible.  And a friend of mine showed me Wordpress and it has a pretty nice set of features and is quite extensible.  I was about to really start the migration when, Mashable had a post about free blogger templates and Blogger in Draft released a template designer.

Some of them looked pretty nice, in my design challenged opinion.  So this morning, instead of running, I changed blog templates.

Apurtus

Clean Type

Awesome

Daily Notes

Indicator

The current stock template

Let me know what you think.  They all need a little bit of tweaking for my existing widgets (color, number of tweets posted, etc.).  Apurtus was my favorite based upon the preview, but seeing it with my blog, I really like Indicator.  Heather has weighed in that Daily Notes seems to fit my inner geek.

I have a modern, clean design aesthetic, bordering on minimalist.  On my computer, I use a dark theme (Dust for those who use Gnome).

Let me know in the comments.  It's not a democracy, so it won't be straight up votes, but your voice will be taken into consideration.

Measuring my blog's success

I'm a numbers guy and I really like the fact that with Google Analytics, I can measure how many people read my blog.

If you squint, you can see I don't get large number of pageviews. But I'm really not into that. I've got a small group of readers and thats why I blog. It helps keep my writing skills sharp and is fun and keeps me connected with people.

But the way I measure succes is through the comments I get. And sometimes this really flummoxes me.

I recently posted three pictures of my head, taken with the camera on my phone. It took no effort to make these posts, probably 30 seconds each at most. But between these three posts, there were 10 comments.

I don't quite understand it, but is my head really that interesting? Just keep the comments coming.

And thanks for commenting.

Retro-blogging and yelping offline

I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and haven't had much time to blog or post reviews on Yelp.

Yesterday, we were at a swim meet I wrote a mega-catchup retro-blog and retro reviews for Yelp. Actually, there were several not just one big 'un.

I also wrote them offline, with a pen, in my moleskine journal, knowing my battery wasn't going to last long enough to write them all and do the work I needed to do, too.

This post (in my journal) puts me down to the last 3 pages in the journal. Not to worry, I've already purchased another, so I can keep up. And I've also requested another laptop battery, so that I can finish transcribing tomorrow on the plane.

I don't know about this...

Star Wars Horoscope for Aquarius

You can be cruel and torment people who disagree with you. Deep down, there is a peace-loving, friendly side to you. You have a knack for inflicting pain on people and use your intellect during battle. Star wars character you are most like: Darth Vader

What Is Your Star Wars Horoscope?

Daily writing

Writing is improved through frequency. This is something that they try to accomplish in elementary school with daily writing and home journals.

While we were talking with a teacher a while ago, I came to the sudden realization that blogging was just the grown up version of daily writing. I have a fifth grader who sometimes struggles with the idea of daily writing. The geek part of me says, "Start a blog for him." The Dad part of me says, "Do I really want to open up that part of the internet to him?"

Frequency is also important to blogging. Not only do you write gooder, but more posts drive traffic. Having good content is important too...

Now, that Heather blogs, there is friendly competition between us as to how has better stats. Usually she does, until I write something that she claims is boring, something entirely techno-geeky. So, in checking my stats on Google Analytics, I see a big decline this week.

And it is no ones fault but my own. I haven't posted for a few days. But I have been writing quite a bit. I have gotten into Yelp quite a bit and written several reviews (yesterday). It is funny how you often you go places that you can review.

I plan on taking my wife out on a date tonight - either to a place found through Yelp or one I'll Yelp about later. Maybe she'll make me yelp later, too!

How do you read my blog?

My wife has been playing with Feedburner RSS feeds on her blog and I was wondering:

How do you read my blog?
Directly read posts in a web browser
Feed aggregator (bloglines, google reader, etc)
Other
Current results

I must be careful

Now that Heather blogs, my every action and innuendo is available for public scrutiny. Btw, other than the boobie flash I didn't get lucky this morning.

--

Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

It's a record week!

Because I get up so early, I was able to get a jump on a blog review/comment of a new Google feature. This time, my blog posting actually linked to the Google Blog entry and it made it on the trackback list.

Having my posting there brought me record amounts of traffic. I had 69 pageviews, just on Thursday! If only I could get 69 every day!

So far, this week is topping out at 123 visitors and they didn't all read one page and leave! Four people actually read my post about Google and read other pages! I'm pretty excited about that. Maybe I can covert 1 of them into a regular reader... Well, I can hope.

On the other neat factoid, these visitors came from all over the world! The United States, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, Germany, Austria, Philippines, Malaysia and India all were represented in my visitors. That in it self is pretty neat.

To the early bird go the visits!