Mexican Feast

Even though I'm eating almost entirely Korean food these days, I've made a new habit to cook something "Western" on every Thursday night. This week, I had a craving for Mexican food, and began preparing the ingredients and searching some recipes online. Here is the resulting meal, enough for six people:



The dishes were made entirely from food I can get locally, with one exception - a package of taco seasoning mix which The Stumbling Mom sent me, which it probably way past its expiration date. I don't think I've ever made Spanish Rice nor Refried Beans before, it was both fun and tasty, if I do say so myself.

I wasn't entirely happy with frying the tortillas to make taco shells and a few nacho chips. While they tasted good, they weren't quite as crisp as you would get in a restaurant. I think this means my temperature wasn't quite right. I read in one recipe to fry them at 175 deg C, which I checked with my thermometer. However, I'll try a diffrent temperature if I do this again. Not to mention all the newspaper and paper towels I needed to drain off all the grease - not something I'll do often.

My only real complaint is there was too much cheese. In the past, I would always say "you can never have too much cheese", but for some reason these days I prefer to eat smaller quantities of cheese and other dairy products.

By the way, mashing the beans was really fun! Test for my Spanish speaking friends - what does "refried beans" mean? I discovered, while searching for recipes, it does NOT mean twice-fried beans.

Is Spanish Rice from Spain? I prepared the rice in the skillet as instructed in the recipe. Interesting fact - hot rice in the skillet will start to jump, similar to popcorn! Then I actually cooked the rice in my rice cooker. It worked just great:



And finally, out of curiosity, I tried a little Korean-Mexican fusion. I ate some kimchi along with the enchillada. It was DELICIOUS! Also with the refried beans! I might be onto something. These days we have the Taco Truck folks in California with their bulgogi tacos. How about a kimchi chicken enchilada anyone?

Fountain

I've been walking at lunch time these days, along a "street park" in front of my ofice. Last week, I noticed they dug a huge rectangular hole about 4 or 5 feet deep, lined with concrete. I thought, this must be a fountain, although it seemed pretty deep for a fountain. Over the next couple of days, they filled in the "pool" with a steel lattice work, completely baffling me. I was about to give up on my guess that this was a fountain, when suddenly they posted this large sign. It will indeed be a fountain, completely with a light show!

K-Popular

The Stumbler Meets As One


Through a bizarre set of circumstances last week, I was invited to a phone interview on a local radio program K-Popular hosted by the K-Pop duo As One. Shortly after that phone call, I was invited to come to the studio today for a live segment at lunch time. I was asked to present three of my favorite K-Pop songs, and explain the story behind each selection. It was really tough to choose only three songs. But I finally selected these, becuase they had the most interesting stories.

채연 / Chaeyeon: "위험한 연출" / "Dangerous Presentation"
(1) It's My Time (Aug 2003)

나얼 / Naul (Browneyes): "귀로" / "The Road Back"
Back To The Soul Flight - Remake Album (Jan 2005)

마야 / Maya: "친달래꽃" / "Azaleas"
(1) Born To Do It (Feb 2003)

Here is a CD I had from 2004 that they signed for me:



After the interview, I met a couple of friends who work there at the station, then headed back to the office. But, I stopped along the way at a small place which served pork soup (되지국밥). I didn't take any photos, but found these pictures on someone's blog which is exactly what I had for lunch! (I just had to sneak something about food into the post).

Old Cow, New Cow

GEEK ALERT - THIS POST IS ABOUT OLD COMPUTERS



An unusual set of circumstances found me needing to ressurect a VERY OLD computer that has been in storage for 5 years. And it was already too old 5 years ago! The brief and simplified story: there is a very special (expensive) circuit card in this computer that I need to use, and it won't work in a modern computer. Let me introduce the Gateway 2000 DX2



(well, the CASE of the computer - it's still dismantled). I wouldn't have remembered it was from 1992, except for the date code stamped on the case:



From the press release announcing it:

Personal computer mass marketeer Gateway 2000 Inc of North Sioux City, South Dakota, has introduced a new local bus system based on Intel Corp's 66MHz 80486 DX2: the 4DX2-66V is the first AT-compatible personal computer to use AT&T Co's custom-designed Ultra local bus video board: the system, which is scheduled to ship in mid-September, has the company's first implementation of the VESA VL-Bus local bus specification which uses a 32-bit data path running at processor speed; the computer comes with two VESA-compatible slots at $3,000.

Well, after vacuuming 5 years of dust from the inside and outside of the computer, I tried to make it boot up. No dice. Finally, after a MUCH more thorough cleaning (which involved removing many circuit cards and even chips), I was able to get it to finally boot up. Alas, the two ancient hard disks in the computer were a bit flaky, and I had lost some data (cause unknown). So, gave up on the hard disks, and replaced two hard disks witha single 2GB compact flash card.





Yes, that purple thing is a floppy disk, for you young readers. If you zoom in, you will also see a 5-1/4 in floppy drive!

It has a whopping 16MB of RAM. The date on the BIOS is later than 1992, because at some point in time I upgraded the BIOS for some reason.





Well, end of geek post (I am an engineer, after all). Now I have a vintage DOS computer with almost no moving parts (only the power supply fan). Yeeeeee-ha!

EDIT: Okay, the floppy disks and CD have moving parts, but now that the computer is working, I could unplug them if I really wanted to.