The Chili

Ingredients 1/2 to 1lb ground veal, beef, or turkey 1 large onion, chopped several cloves of garlic (to taste), chopped 1 large carrot, finely chopped (optional) 1-3 stalks celery, finely sliced (optional) 1/2 each, green and red bell pepper, chopped (optional) 1-2 hot peppers (jalapeƱo, serrano, habanero, to taste) 1 small can Old El Paso […]

Baked Chicken Breasts with Parmesan Crust

Recipe courtesy of Ted Allen Total time 35 min Prep: 15 min Cook: 20 min Yield: 4 servings Level: easy Ingredients 2 tablespoons dijon mustard 1/2 teaspoon thyme leaves, chopped Kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 8 ounces each) 3/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese 3/4 cup panko […]

Rustic Pear, Fig, and Almond Pie

Serves 12 Prep time: 12 min Cooking time: 50 to 60 min Refrigeration time (for pie dough): 1hr Pie dough: 2 1/2 cups flour 2 tbsp sugar 1/4 tsp salt 3/4 cup cold butter, cut into cubes 3/4 cup (approx) ice water In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, the sugar, and the salt. […]

CSS3 Support Still Spotty

When it comes to some of the useful CSS3 candidate properties we’d like to take advantage of for our website’s upcoming redesign, the expansion of possible values for the “`background-repeat“` property is of the more noteworthy. In particular, the values “`space“` and “`round“` promise to clean things up quite a bit from the point of […]

The A9F1BDF1DAB1NVT4F4F59 Wireless Access Point Mystery

The ad-hoc network with SSID of A9F1BDF1DAB1NVT4F4F59 appears all over our office building. I see it as an option in my wireless network chooser as I write this on my laptop, but not on either of my mobile devices; connecting to it requires a WEP password/key, but any character combination appears to work. Strangely, once […]

Beurre ManiƩ, or Why I Blog Recipes

There’s few things in life as satisfying as cooking my own food – especially when it’s just plain tasty and healthy. That’s not to say I’ve not had many a mind-blowing meal out at restaurants, both fancy and not. I’d have a nervous breakdown, though, if I ever thought for a minute that – living […]

German Red Cabbage

Red cabbage prepared according to this recipe is one of my favorite side dishes, especially for a meal served in colder weather. Whether it’s with beef stew, roast poultry, or even pork tenderloin, the tangy sweetness of the braised cabbage offers a delicious contrast to the richness of a heavy meal. Use a generously-sized cast […]

Well-written WordPress Plugins Have Overrides

Working with WordPress plugins can often be an experiment akin to finding your way in the dark. Many plugins are hastily cobbled together, and more are just badly documented. I recently found myself faced with installing and using a plugin that was intended to send tracking data to an external server. To do so, the […]

Hey Facebook, Where Are All the Sharing Image Choices?

Most publishers who care about maximizing traffic to their websites take advantage of their visitors’ sharing habits on social networks. In its most basic form, sharing takes place when a reader copies the link for a page they liked, and pastes it into a Facebook status update or a tweet on Twitter. Until a month […]

That Pesky Blank Open Graph Image on Your WordPress.com Posts

Recently, we noticed an issue with Facebook sharing of posts from our WordPress.com-hosted site: our posts, when shared on Facebook, would appear in the sharing preview without a thumbnail image – in spite of all the word we’d done in the past to provide not only an image but a choice of images. Alarming at […]