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Tag Archives: so delicious

On deep fried hard boiled eggs and phones

SavedPicture-201526112337.pngI don’t know why, but I really like this screenshot of a bunch of fried, hard boiled eggs.

So, as you know, I recently had to acquire a new phone as Peppero went and shattered his face.  I stayed with the same OS with the new phone, but a completely different manufacturer.  I went back to HTC, which I never planned on doing.  I had several bad experiences with HTC.  But Microsoft/Nokia has the weirdest business plan with their phones and they decided not to release the next gen of Peppero, the Lumia 930, in the US.  I…don’t understand this reasoning at all.  That meant, if I wanted to stay with the Lumia line, which I wanted to do, I would have to go down a level on my phone, which I did not want to do.  I would be missing out on storage, possibly processor speed, and built in wireless charging.

Going with HTC, one of the very few other manufacturers releasing phones with the Windows Phone OS for ATT, I could keep my storage and even get expandable storage and gain processor speed…but now I’m missing out on my Lumia specific apps, the really nice camera, and…built in wireless charging.  And it’s not like the HTC One can ever incorporate wireless charging because it has an aluminum housing.  Sugh.  SUGH.

Well, with the wireless charging, I’m getting around that with a wireless charging adapter.  It’s a microfilm with a coil inside that outputs to a micro USB connection which you then plug into the normal charging port of your phone.  So…I can still charge my phone wirelessly but I lose my USB connection.  I don’t often transfer things to/from my phone with my computer, so it’s acceptable.  But it was SO. CONVENIENT. to have inductive charging on my Nokia.

With my Lumia specific apps…I just miss them.  There’s really nothing I can do about that.  One that I hadn’t realized that was Lumia specific was the call block app because they had incorporated that so well into the phone settings I thought it was just included with the OS.  So…now I have to manually screen calls again.  Yay.

I also miss the camera more than I thought I would.  HTC’s and Nokia’s (now Microsoft’s) approach to what makes a good camera has been different.  Nokia tries to jam as many pixels as it can into is sensor (it occurs to me that I don’t know if camera phones use CCDs or CMOS and that I should probably look into this) and give you nice optics and various built in filtering to give you clean shots.  HTC uses “ultrapixels” to help with low light scenarios, which means you can only cram so many pixels onto the sensor, and…a second lens?  I haven’t really figured out this second lens thing.  Something about depth?

Now, it may sound like I am completely dissatisfied with Derrick (as in gallows), but I am not.  It’s a really good phone.  The build quality, which was a huge thing with my previouos HTCs, is really good.  Great.  Wonderful even.  The hardware inside is also wonderful.  And the screen is beautiful.  It’s a really good phone, whether you prefer Android or Windows.  I would definitely recommend the HTC One M8.  But…I do miss the Lumia line.

Anyway, about the egg.  I was playing with the camera, trying to take a photo of this deep fried hard boiled egg I had gotten from a place that claims to be an Irish pub, and I had burst shot on and didn’t realize it.  So I ended up with a lot of photos of this egg.  And I like the result of the tiles of photos of eggs.  Probably more so than the photo of the egg itself.  The end.

I make! Cranberry nut rolls edition

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You may have noticed with the last post that there were rolls that looked suspiciously not like cinnamon rolls.  That’s because they weren’t.  You might remember that I mentioned that I made cranberry nut rolls with the other half of the dough.  Because…I had.

I had a great deal of cranberry sauce (1lb of fresh cranberries, 1 cup of water, 0.75 cup granulated sugar, boil to death) leftover from Thanksgiving.  This isn’t really a problem as I’m very fond of cranberry sauce.  In fact, I typically make too much cranberry sauce and then jar it to use as jam through the year.  But I saw someone had made cranberry sweet rolls, like cinnamon rolls but with cranberry sauce.  I decided I would have to give that a try too, especially since I was going to make cinnamon rolls already.

The first attempt yielded rolls that didn’t have enough sauce.  The recipe I originally saw suggested half a cup of cranberry sauce.  That wasn’t enough cranberry punch for me.  I was kind of ambivalent about the black pepper too.  It wasn’t bad, but it was distracting me from the cranberry.  I really like cranberries.

Also, it was really hard to roll.  Cranberry sauce is…a sauce.  There isn’t much friction to allow you to roll.  I have the feeling it wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if I used her recipe for the dough.  Hers baked up kind of like shortbread so I would guess that it would be easier to work with and roll with cranberry sauce.  I used a more traditional, softer dough that you would associate with…cinnamon rolls.  It made everything rather squishy.

Anyway, the second attempt I used a full cup of cranberry sauce and also a half cup of chopped walnuts spread over the sauce and I left out the pepper.  This made it much easier to roll, gave me a nice cranberry punch, and gave the whole thing some texture.  I think I like this version of the cranberry roll.

I actually did end up icing the cranberry nut rolls because I had leftover icing.  Meh.  I think it was better without.  I did a nicer looking job with the icing on the cranberry rolls though.

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