adamyntium

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  • Waffanas (#1 in Adam’s “Cooking for the Lazy” series)

    Waffanas (#1 in Adam’s “Cooking for the Lazy” series)

    tl;dr:  Want to save time and scrolling? Pour waffle mix. Throw sliced bananas on it. Wait ’til cooked. Eat. YUM!

    Today I made waffanas, my brilliant name for banana-stuffed waffles.  They were super delicious and very easy to make, even for cooking-incompetent and kitchen-lazy people (like me and, perhaps, you).

    NOTE:  I’m linking to Amazon products below* for your informational convenience, but if you’re gonna buy any of this stuff, I strongly encourage you to shop around. Much of it may be quite a bit cheaper at your local grocery store, or on Jet or Google Shopping Express.

    PREP TIME:  About 4-6 minutes of actual work, plus another 5-7 minutes of waiting for the waffle iron to heat up and cook your waffanas :).

    The basics for making waffanas!
    The basics for making waffanas! Note that, while multiple bananas are pictured here, I only used one big banana for the four waffanas and that ratio seemed about right 🙂
    Almost but not quite perfect
    Almost but not quite perfect! Next time I’ll add a bit more mix so the bananas are better coated… avoiding some, uh, over-crispiness.

    THINGS YOU’LL NEED:

    • Waffle iron:  I love my Cuisinart WAF-300 Belgian Waffle Maker with Pancake Plates, in large part because it has removable (dishwasher-safe) plates.  But I’m betting nearly any waffle maker would do.  Or, for that matter, you could make pancakanas on any griddle or frying pan! 🙂
    • Waffle/pancake mix:  Who has time to make this stuff from scratch?  I am smitten with the Kodiak-brand mixes because they’re high in protein, have very natural ingredients, contain little sugar, and — unlike most mixes which require oil and eggs and such — you only have to add water to the Kodiak mixes!  But again, you can surely use any mix you like or have handy.  The Kodiak mixes should cost you around $5-6 a box, each of which allegedly contain 18 (!) servings but which is probably around 12 servings for us hungry Americans :).  Still, that’s like 50 cents a serving at most.
    • Oil to ensure non-stick’ness:  I use these spray bottles and they work great, but I’m betting you could find cheaper ones that work just as well.  Or heck, just put a bit of oil on a paper towel and rub it over your waffle iron or griddle.
    • Bananas:  Duh!  Any ripeness (or lack thereof) is totally a matter of your own preference here.
    • Other optional goodies:  Chocolate chips.  Chocolate sauce.  Chocolate spread (sensing a trend here?).  Berries (frozen or fresh).  Syrup.  Me?  I went with some drizzled honey 🙂


    HOW TO COOK WAFFANAS

    • Pre-heat:  Turn on the waffle iron or griddle.  Optionally rub or spray some oil on it first to make cleaning easier.
    • Slice the bananas:  Pretty self-explanatory.
    • Mix the mix:  I love this measuring cup ’cause you can see the numbers from the top.  But heck, you don’t even really have to measure this very exactly, so probably any cup’ll do.  A whisk is helpful, but probably not necessary.
    • Pour stuff:  When your waffle iron or griddle is hot enough, pour in the mix!  And then just sort of throw the sliced bananas on top, pretending to space them evenly throughout the waffle iron or whatever, but hey, no need to get all precise with this.  They’ll get all smunched into the mix anyway in a moment.
    • Close the top tightly:  Assuming you’re waffling and not pancaking, you’ll want to close the lid pretty tight so that the bananas indeed get appropriately smunched into the waffle mix.


    TIME TO EAT!
    You can optionally drizzle honey or chocolate or syrup over the waffanas or throw whatever toppings you like on top.  But remember that you’ve already got some sweetness from the bananas (especially if they were on the ripe side), so don’t go overboard.  Unless you’re intending to make dessert waffanas, in which case, hey, knock yourself out, sweetie!


    TRY WAFFANING AND LET ME KNOW HOW IT GOES!
    This is my first in a series of absolutely indeterminate frequency and length, called “Cooking for the Lazy.”  If you really like it (and let me know) AND if I end up making other tasty things with my new’ish waffle maker and smoothie maker / blender thingy, then I’ll consider posting more episodes.  For now, though, I’m off to eat some of the waffanas I made earlier.  Let’s see how they are in the toaster or microwave!

    EDITED TO ADD:  I can now confirm that they are still amazingly delicious when toasted :-).

    IDEAS FOR NEXT TIME:  I think I will try adding shredded coconut.  Or peanut butter.  Or hazelnut-chocolate paste!

    —

    *And now for a disclaimer and more pretty images:  My Amazon links are affiliate ones, so that maybe I’ll get 30 cents here and there and treat myself to more food.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I’m gonna buy booze for the smoothies.  Don’t judge.  Or judge, I don’t care :-).

  • An ode to universal music locators (let me take my playlists with me!)

    I’m polymusical.  Not only do I have various music talents, but — more relevant to this post — I’ve “dated” quite a few music services in my time, and not all of them purely sequentially.  Heck, I even served as a volunteer community leader for one and a nicely-compensated community-UX designer for another.

    PressPlay, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Napster (the legal version), Real Music, Virgin Digital Music, MusicMatch, Mog, Rdio, Spotify and others I’ve likely forgotten for better or worse.  I’ve tried ’em all.  And I’m not even counting the music lockers, the music purchasing sites, the music radio sites…

    In some cases, I’ve fallen in love, or at least deep like.  But then comes the inevitable breakups; they keep my money, they keep my subscription tracks, and well, that’s fine… that’s the deal.  We had our good times, honest!

    You know what just kills me, though?  They also keep my playlists.  They don’t let me have custody of that library of artists and albums and songs I so lovingly put together and oft-categorized over the last months or even years.  All my ratings?  POOF!  Not even a CSV dump, dear old flames?  No, apparently not.

    This doesn’t just make me sad about my prior “relationship,” it makes me more wary of getting into new ones.  Put more plainly, I believe the lack of portability of our playlists and related personal music data is hurting adoption of music subscriptions.

    But wait, Adam, do you really think the plethora of non-geeks in the world are worried about this? Aren’t they flocking to Spotify, at least not yet worried about what happens when they want to move their library and playlists to another service?

    Frankly, most folks probably aren’t worried.  But the online music community — of bloggers, API developers and users, etc. — most likely is significantly discouraged.

    *  *  *

    Let’s look at a couple of specific examples of how the lack of music portability hurts music online for everyone:

    1. I want to curate a “best of a cappella” blog, legally showcasing great tracks to encourage discovery and purchases (with money going to the artist!).
    • To do this, I have to link to or — better yet — embed the tracks.  Let’s say I used imeem embed codes back before imeem went to that great big jukebox in the sky (and I’m not talking about cloud services).  Today, not only would all those links/embeds be broken, there’d be no easy way for me to switch them to working links on another service; it’s not like Blogger (or most blogging systems) offer grep, and there aren’t any consistent music identifiers anyway letting me link a song on one service to a song on another service.
    • Maybe I’d be luckier and choose to point links to Spotify, a fine service that’s still alive and kicking.  But hey… not everyone has the Spotify app installed.  Worse, the Spotify service isn’t even available in most countries in the world! 🙁  So for that majority of people, the links would be practically useless (and certainly frustrating).
  • I subscribe to an online music service, but it goes out of business.  I’ve spent countless hours creating playlists — perhaps even collaboratively with others! — and now those lists are inaccessible.  I can’t download them, and even if I could, it’s unlikely I could then “import” these lists effectively into a new service (Spotify-supporting third parties offer some of this functionality, but I’ve found it to work spotily at best).  Again, this is likely because there are no universally consistent music locator codes per track, album, and artist.
    • *  *  *
    I think two things would greatly help make this overall situation much, much less painful.
    1. Unique music locator codes, at least per track.  Imagine if music://owtgia42 or music://moxy-fruvous-king-of-spain7 linked to a unique track globally… and clicking on that would open up a web-based or client-side music service of the user’s choice!
    • Bloggers wouldn’t have to worry about link-rot.  
    • Users would be empowered to listen to music via services they like (and that are supported in their region!)
  • Changes in global intellectual property laws to enable track snippet-streaming (e.g., 30 seconds) of songs even in the absence of artist/label permissions.  It’s difficult to imagine how this could possibly harm music sales (“Gee, I don’t need to buy that song anymore; I’ve got the first 30 seconds of it!”), and opening this up would enable not-for-profit organizations to set up servers for supplying music samples.  WikiMusica? 🙂  This’d likely help existing commercial music services, too, freeing them from having to negotiate permissions and payment structures for simply streaming song samples. Not to mention it’d allow bloggers to select and post their own 30 second track samples without worrying about legal ramifications.
    • *  *  *
    Sure, there’d be some pretty major challenges!  Looking at the unique music locator codes…
    • What would happen if the person clicking on the link had no installed web or client resources to play the song?  Or if they lived in a region in which they were not allowed to access and play that particular track? (that situation in itself seems silly to me — the whole balkanized rights stuff — but I digress, and that’s certainly a hefty fish to fry)
    • How could artists — concerned about how others experience their music — be ensured that listeners’ experiences would be positive ones? (e.g., high quality, authentic tracks)
    • What would be the reaction from artists and the music industry when people chose to have music:// on their system be parsed by P2P services, garnering them perfectly matched but not-paid-for tunes?
    • What different things would have to support a music:// option?  Probably browsers, operating systems, others?
    • Would the music services even embrace this?  One might cynically argue that they have an economic incentive to perpetuate lock-in vs. supporting portability, particularly when their competitors are not offering portability.  But I’d argue that universally setting playlists and libraries free would jump-start citizen-music-sharing and in the end, greatly swell the numbers of people paying for online subscription services.
    And for the changes in global intellectual property… well, that’d be such a gargantuan task, certainly, that I’m not sure it’s even something to attempt tackling in my lifetime.  While “30 second snippets are good for listeners, musicians, and the entire music ecosystem” sounds sensible to me, “sensible” does not always take precedence in the world of law.  Believe me, as someone with a law degree, I know this more painfully than most ;-).
    *  *  *
    So is at least the music locator code idea doable?  Are there any organizations making substantial, promising headway on it?   There’s Gracenote, but I don’t believe their database is available for free.  A buddy told me about Echo Nest, but I’m still getting my head around their API and am unsure whether it really accomplishes what I’m yearning for.

    *  *  *
    I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!  Please sound off (ha!) in the comments 🙂

  • The fabulous jazzy score of Metropolis (and Napster vs. Rhapsody)

    Have you heard of the movie Metropolis (the anime one)?  No?  How about film scorer Toshiyuki Honda?  No, again?  Well, you’re missing out!  It’s a delightfully quirky and surprisingly touching film, despite a somewhat slim plot and cursory characterizations.  And the Metropolis soundtrack is especially charming and catchy… in particular, it’s surprisingly jazzy, providing a sometimes-stark (and undoubtedly intended) counterpoint with the dark feel of the film.

    [old outdated links removed]

  • I’m leaving… on a jet plane!

    Dear friends,

    I decided (really) last minute to take a trip to Asia and Australia.  I leave tomorrow (Tuesday) and am still not even close to being ready.  If you sent me e-mail and I haven’t replied for a while, well, I’m a jerk and I’m sorry… and sadly, I won’t write you for at least a month longer.  Wireless connectivity is not so hot around the Great Barrier Reef, and my laptop is not waterproof.

    Hope you still love me.


    Dear bloggy acquaintances,

    Sorry to bore you with such a lame entry.  But that’s better than NO entries, which is what you’ll likely be experiencing with BLADAM for the next month or so.  Sorry.  Hope you will still love me love my blog.  I should have some fun stories and pictures to share in March 😀

  • Dying fan, tasty solution

    Yesterday, one of the two fans (I couldn’t tell which) in my high-end PC started making very unpleasant sounds.  It’s like with cars… hard to describe, but you know trouble when you hear it.

    I got on all fours, shoved the computer out of the under-desk cabinet, and investigated.  Hmm… both fans were still seemingly rotating at full speed.  I could feel the warm air still being pushed through.  Opened up the case to see if the plastic that attaches the chip fan had gotten loose.  Nope.  Checked for generally dangling cables.  Nope, everything still attached just fine.

    I was momentarily baffled and frustrated… until I finally stumbled upon a deliciously useful idea.

    I thought to myself… self… what well-regarded substance is lubricating and tasty?

    HEY, this is a family blog, get your mind out of the gutter!

    The answer, of course, is olive oil!  So I went to the kitchen, got out my Mr. Misto oil mister, and walked back to my room where my computer lay open, vulnerable, and—embarrassingly—not recently backed up.  Oh dear.

    But I bravely sprayed anyway.  A little bit here, a little bit there.  I got a craving for focaccia, but that’s not important right now.

    The end result?  My computer is now lubricated and happy.  Maybe not quite as lubricated and happy as this computer, but still… he’s seemingly content and once again pretty quiet.  Whew!

    (and yes, I’ll be backing up soon, not only to avoid some potential nasty data loss, but to avoid being a total hypocrite after writing this blog entry about backup tips!)