• Time (magazine)
• CF-105 Arrow
• Pong
• Yellowstone Caldera
• Tricorder
• The Ant and the Grasshopper
• Five elements (Japanese philosophy)
• Fibonacci number
• Caraway
• Fiddlehead fern
• Teleprinter
• George Eliot
• Swamp Thing
• Black Stone
• Blipvert
• Chartreuse (color)
• Pomelo
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh
• Maltose
• Aircraft flight control systems
• Hadrian’s Wall
• Katherin Hepburn
• Abraham Lincoln
• Letterpress printing
• Shuswap language
• Nehi
• Sagrada Familia
• House Hippo
• Civitas
• The Education of Little Tree
• Clifton Cathedral
• Isobutane
• Vashti
• Oregon Death with Dignity Act
• Ashanti mythology
• Ozymandias
• Gecko (layout engine)
• Japanese map symbols
• Persian Empire
• Eurotas River
• Schrodinger’s cat
• ARM architecture
• Chaordic
• The Wire
• Kubler-Ross model
• Chac Mool
• Standing Stones of Stenness
• Chimay Brewery
• Brownie (camera)
• Gallia Narbonensis
• River Phoenix
• Molcajete
• Pelagic zone
• Containerization
• Horse archer
• Roger Tory Peterson

The list totals out to around $2200 which seems like a lot, but it includes a lot of decent quality gear you’ll only ever have to buy once. Most of it is spent on cookware (pots and pans) because good cookware really does make a huge difference in the end. Oh, and knives. High quality razor sharp knives are your friend. They’re not cheap, but you only need two anyhow. This isn’t everything you will ever need ever, just most of it. Pick up other bits and pieces when you need them.

Ok, here’s the list. Feel free to leave comments if you think I’ve included something silly or forgotten something essential. I will amend the list if need be…

Knives and knife-related items ($185)

• 4″ utility knife ($50)
• 8″ chef’s knife ($91)
• Bread knife ($10)
• Knife sharpener ($34)

Cookware ($935)

• 8″ non-stick fry pan ($70)
• 10″ non-stick fry pan ($110)
• 10″ stainless steel fry pan ($116)
• 4 qt stainless steel straight-sided saute pan ($88)
• Dutch oven - largish ($260)
• 2 qt saucepan ($63)
• 4 qt stainless steel saucepan ($55)
• Stock pot - 8-9 qt ($93)
• Lids for all of these (4 @ ~$20ea = $80)

Bakeware ($203)
Do not get non-stick bakeware except for muffin tins and pizza pans. You will just end up scratching the crap out of it and wasting your money. Never cut pizzas on the pizza pans — slide them off on to a cutting board first.

• 8 x 8 pan ($14)
• 9 x 13 pan ($24)
• Baking pans (2) ($17 ea)
• Cooling rack ($12)
• Glass pie plate ($8)
• Loaf pan ($14)
• Pizza pan (or two, non-stick are preferred) ($5)
• Pizza stone ($40)
• Roasting pan ($33)
• Roasting rack that fits in roasting pan ($19)

Electric gadgets ($157)

• Digital meat thermometer ($19)
• Digital scale ($50)
• Spice grinder ($25)
• Stick blender ($54)

Tools and fiddly bits ($610)

• Box grater ($15)
• Can opener ($20)
• Citrus juicer (just get the orange one, lemons and limes will fit too) ($15)
• Colander ($29, but you can get cheaper)
• Corkscrew ($20)
• Cutting boards - at least 3, plastic, var sizes, colour coded if you like ($12 ea, $36)
• Dish towels (many - get six to start, wash them all the time) ($16)
• Food storage containers, square, many (leftovers + storage)
• Glass liquid measuring cup (large, pyrex) ($32)
• Heat-resistant plastic spoons, spatulas, etc. ($3.50 ea, ~$12)
• Heat-resistant silicon scraper ($18)
• Heavy-duty utility scissors/shears ($32)
• Mason jars, 125 ml ($12/doz), 250 ml ($13/doz), 500ml ($17/doz), 1 litre ($15/doz)
• Measuring cups ($16)
• Measuring spoons ($20)
• Microplane grater ($12)
• Mixing bowls (glass and/or stainless steel - large, med, small) ($30)
• Oven mitts (not silicon) ($11)
• Pastry brush or silicon brush ($8)
• Pepper mill (the best you can afford) ($55+)
• Potato masher ($10)
• Salad spinner ($30)
• Small spray bottle for water ($4)
• Stainless steel ladle ($9)
• Stainless steel serving spoon ($7)
• Tongs (2 pair) ($10 ea, $20)
• Vegetable peeler ($8)
• Vegetable steamer insert ($5)
• Whisk ($14)
• Wire sieve ($20)
• Wooden spoons (at least 3) ($9)

Non-permanent

• Baking paper
• Paper towels
• Plastic wrap
• Tin foil
• Ziploc freezer bags (lg, and md size)

Essential references ($79)

• How to Cook Everything ($20)
• The Bread Bible ($24)
• Cook’s Illustrated website subscription ($35/a)

Things not to get

• Silicon oven mitts - they’re terrible. Get regular cloth mitts.
• Almost anything “single purpose”. For example: garlic press, grapefruit knife, cherry pitter, citrus zester, nutmeg grater, cheese plane, melon baller, corn stripper, etc. Notable exceptions: citrus juicer, pizza wheel.

You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”

I still need to solder some loops on it so I can attach a chain and hang it in a window, but I haven’t had a chance to get to the hardware store yet. Happily my glass order arrived as promised, in two business days, and shipping was much less than expected. (I budgeted $80 for shipping, it cost $23. Huzzah!) I’m really happy to have found the very friendly and helpful folks at Atlantic Stained Glass — having a relatively local reliable supplier just makes this all so much easier.

Spending a full two weeks offline turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Like many of my friends, I believed that I’d be itching for some connectivity or email or news or Twitters within a matter of days. But I wasn’t. I thought I’d end up feeling cut off and isolated having no access to Web feeds, news sites, email, or TV. But I didn’t. I thought that, by the end of my exile, I’d be relieved when I was finally able to get back online. But that didn’t happen either.

Instead what I discovered is that being online all the time is profoundly fragmenting, stressful, and distracting. It turns out that I really don’t need to be incessantly jacked into the Matrix, that having constant, up-to-date information about all the myriad details of global, economic, political, and technology news doesn’t make me better, stronger, faster, more knowledgeable, or better informed. What it does make me is more scattered, erratic, stressed, edgy, and flighty.

Yes, flighty.

During my two week exile from the Intarwebs, I rediscovered my ability to read long, complex pieces of writing in a single sitting. I regained a sense of calm and an ability to focus of which I had forgotten I was capable. Without the constant distraction of email and IM and IRC and Twitter and Growl and SMS and Web feeds and the telephone and everything else, I found myself more present than I have felt in a long, long time. By contrast, the constant barrage of interruptions and distractions feels very much like a system that appears stable only because all the subsystems are equally unstable. Let just one of those subsystems get out of whack and the whole mess comes crashing down. This, I’ve realized, is neither wise nor healthy.

I also discovered that the lack of a clear line between “work” and “not-work” makes me insane. Now that I have regained some tenuous grasp of my sanity (which I hadn’t realized I’d lost until I stumbled across it again), I’m going to try to hang on to and strengthen it by being very, very disciplined about establishing and maintaining work/not-work boundaries. I’ve been working from home for four years now so this could be a bit tricky, and I’m bound to backslide now and again (and crunch-times are fair game, of course), but it’s a worthy and necessary goal. So far it’s working out.

It’s just time to slow down. I’ve spent the past eleven years continually ramping up my information consumption and communications channels, while gradually blurring the lines between work and not-work to the point of invisibility. I’ve been boiling that frog so unbelieveably slowly that I really had no idea just how stressful it had become. But now I do, so now it’s time to start fixing it.

Vacation lesson #2: Slow isn’t just for food.

We stayed in a house in a small town called La Roque sur Pernes in the south of France for two weeks (pictured above). There was no internet, no tv, no radio. I didn’t take my laptop or cellphone. I did take a bunch of books, and there was a shelf-full already there. The result is that I read a lot. Here’s the list, with very short reviews.

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Awesome, A+++, will definitely re-read it. Highly recommended.
• Moving Targets, by Margaret Atwood. Must read for Atwood fans, missable otherwise.
• The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck. Fantastic.
• Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. This was a third re-read for me, so obviously I love this book.
• Toujours Provence, by Peter Mayle. Meh.
• My Life in France, by Julia Child. Fun and interesting. Julia was quite a woman.
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. Excellent. My favourite of the trip. Short, one-sitting sort of thing, but absolutely fantastic.
• World Without End, by Ken Follett. Another medieval page turner, but very, very similar to his other medieval page turner (the story of which happened in the same town some 400 years earlier). Good, but not great.
• The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. Erratically written and awkwardly paced. Feels like the outline of a more epic trilogy that just never got written.
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Sadly, this one doesn’t hold up. Loved it when I first read it however many years ago, sort of slogged my way through it the second time. Luckily Stephenson has already completely redeemed himself with Anathem.

Vacation lesson #1 - I love reading. I’m going to be making a lot more time for it again, mostly by getting up at 6am and not opening the laptop ’til 10am. Turns out it’s a really nice way to start a day.

Rob and I just got back from a two week vacation in the south of France where we drank wine, ate cheese, and spent a bunch of time hanging out with Zab and Alice. Being the photo nerds we are, of course, we took a bunch of pictures. You can see Rob’s at his Flickr set, and mine are in my Flickr set.

Part of my vacation was getting away from the computers as much as I could (seriously, I was offline for 14 days, more on that later when I’ve had a chance to reflect), so I took a decidedly minimalist stance regarding what gadgetry I packed. I had to take a camera, of course, but I took a very, very stripped down kit that included only:

• Nikon D80 body
• Nikon 20mm f2.8 prime lens
• Nikon 35mm f2.0 prime lens
• 2 8gb memory cards (of which I used one)
• An extra battery, a lens brush, and a microfiber cloth

This all fit nicely into my de-badged Domke F-5x shoulder bag, which is about 1/3rd the size of my regular camera bag. The kit was a little limiting, but the limitations were challenging in a fun way. (More than once I did find myself very much wishing I had 85mm and 135mm lenses with me, a few instances where a tripod would have been good, and I really should have included a polarizer filter.) I ended up taking around 650 pictures over the course of two weeks, of which I’ve posted around 190. I’ll write more about the trip later on sometime, but it should be said that a good time was had by all, although I may be ruined for cheap wines and not-French butter now.

Rannie Turingan is a completely kick-ass photographer in Toronto. He was one of the Zap Your PRAM crew, and spent a whole lot of time chasing down the other attendees and taking our pictures. He’s now finished up processing and posting the formal portraits on his website: Zap Your PRAM portraits. It’s a really nice record of the event, so @Rannie: many thanks for taking the time to do this. You rock.

One of the earliest discussions to emerge during the Zap conference centered around the what seems to be a growing drive to record everything and every moment (by twittering it, Plazing it, photographing it, etc.)

The questions that emerged were: Does recording the moment change it? In recording it, are we essentially mediating it for ourselves, taking a step back and observing rather than simply experiencing? Are we stepping outside the moment in the act of recording (or thinking about recording) it, essentially separating ourselves from the experience to a certain degree?

Opinions were mixed. Thinking about it more, I believe that recording a moment does, in fact, separate you from it to a certain extent. And I think that the more you record or think about recording, the less present you actually are.

A few years ago I was in Amsterdam to attend a conference. Naturally we went a little early and stayed a little late so we could take time to experience the city, and during that time I took hundreds of photographs, most of which were just terrible. In spite of taking all these photos, however, my most memorable moment in Amsterdam was when I encountered the works of Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. They are absolutely breathtaking. Looking at prints in books just doesn’t come anywhere close to the experience of seeing the originals. It was overwhelming and deeply emotional and really quite astonishing for me. I have never had so visceral a reaction to art before, and it was entirely unexpected. I will never, ever forget that experience. And I didn’t take a single picture while I was there. Not one. And my other memories of Amsterdam are of moments where I wasn’t bothering to take photographs. Dinner with friends and coworkers. Having drinks with Rob at a small side street cafe. Talking to some locals while exploring the city’s nightlife. Almost getting killed by a ravaging horde of cyclists before I figured out how traffic worked. Sitting in the lobby watching people walk by the hotel in the morning, drinking insanely good coffee.

The photographs I took? I don’t remember experiencing the thing in the photo, I remember taking the photo. Recording the moment separated me from it, and it now feels almost fake.

We’re going to France soon. We’ve never been before, and I’m really excited about the trip. While I expect I will take my camera with me wherever we go, I am going to be much more deliberate and thoughtful about what I photograph. Rather than taking hundreds of photos of everything, I’m going to take only a few — and only if they’re worthy of being photographs — and spend more of my time actually being in the moment, paying attention, experiencing. What I learned from Amsterdam is that the strongest memories are made this way, not by flipping through a shoebox of pictures when you get home.

The beginning

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be involved with what ended up being the best, most fun, and most inspirational “conference” I’ve yet attended — Zap Your PRAM, hosted by the ever gracious and ridiculously awesome folks of SilverOrange.

The conference (more aptly described as an “unconference” by those in the know) was held in lovely Dalvay-by-the-Sea in PEI, a mere stones throw (and a 1.5 hour drive including 12-odd kilometers over the Confederation Bridge) away from our Monctonian abode. When the time came, we just hopped in the car and drove over to the island.

The weekend

The conference itself was astonishing. I could sit here and write for hours about it, but I’ll hit the highlights now and maybe continue with some follow-ups if the mood strikes:

1) No name tags. I’m not sure if this was strategic or just because no one thought of it, but it doesn’t matter. The result was that when you walked up to someone the first time, you looked them in the eye and introduced yourself instead of the standard “wandering around peering at name tags ’til you find someone interesting to talk to” crap you get at other conferences. Sure, this may have also been the result of there only being 50 people in the entire hotel save for a few staff, but it was great either way.

2) No “ice-breakers”. We started with random rambling around the first floor of the hotel with pre-dinner drinks followed by a short introduction session that was maybe 5-10 minutes long. We then immediately broke for dinner where we all ended up at tables of 6 or 8 people. If you put a bunch of interesting folks together for three courses and wine over a 2 hour period, they’re going to strike up a conversation, no matter how shy or reserved they (*ahem* I) may usually be. People were given the space to interact however and whenever they were comfortable doing so, and so they did instead of withdrawing from an uncomfortable situation and retreating to their rooms.

3) The meals. Good lord, the food was incredible. The schedule allowed for 2 hours each for lunch and dinner, so the meals weren’t an “eat and run so you can get to the next talk” thing, they were an absolutely integral part of the experience. It was in the dining room where most of the conversations really got into gear (to be continued lingering over coffee, and later out by the fire with wine).

4) The talks. There was one track and everyone attended every session. Two days consisting of three one-hour slots in each the morning and afternoon, held in what amounted to someone’s living room (albeit with a few more comfy sofas and chairs that most of us have). Talks were generally informal, and the audience equally so — random questions evolved into discussions which further evolved into wild gesticulating and wandering all over the conceptual map. The hosts managed to cut each session off at the hour mark (which is good else we would have just continued the first discussion for the full length of our stay), but topics were inevitably revisited during meals or random-drinking-in-front-of-the-fire later in the evening.

5) The environment. Comfortable, welcoming, and, most importantly, isolated. Zap put 50 people together in a hotel all by themselves with nothing else to do but hang out and talk. The rooms had no TVs, telephones, or radios. There were no local bars or restaurants to wander off to and hide in. If you weren’t in your room sleeping (or lying awake wondering just how haunted the place could possibly be) you were downstairs interacting with the rest of the Zappers.

6) The people. Limiting attendance to 50 is a master stroke. It’s large enough that there was a great diversity of interests and viewpoints represented, but small enough that by the end of it everyone had spent time talking to pretty much everyone else. And everyone was…incredible. Smart, funny, inquisitive, engaging, knowledgeable, interesting, and insightful across the board. No giant overinflated egos, no primadonnas, no holier-than-thous. Just good, friendly, decent folk, all of whom had interesting stories to tell.

7) Which brings us to: the storytelling. Brad Turcotte (aka Brad Sucks, whose music you should go get right now, omg go) managed to establish “storytelling” as the underlying theme for the whole conference. It was wall-to-wall stories all weekend — how a song gets made, what the writer’s strike looked like from the inside, why the economy is in dire shape (and why you should get to know a farmer), how the internet and technology are changing the foundations of art history and how we interact with images, why design matters, how work is changing — and those were just some of the formally scheduled sessions. So many more stories were told in the time before, in between, and after. No bullet points, no sales pitches, no rapid-fire slickly-rehearsed committee-approved marketing “decks”. Just regular folks telling interesting stories about things they’ve done or experienced or thought about.

The fallout

I have never come away from a weekend of interacting with a large group of people this energized and inspired. My need to create something rather than just consume things is in absolute overdrive. My PRAM was definitely zapped.

I have only two regrets about the weekend. The first is that I didn’t stay up ’til 3 or 4 am every night, taking part in the wee-early-hours discussions that were apparently held. There is something in the island air (augmented by wine and so much rich, incredible food) that just made me a sleepy, sleepy girl.

My other regret is that I didn’t take the opportunity in the final wrap-up session to talk about the stained glass project I’m embarking on, because I think the Zappers would have appreciated the strange nerdish craftiness of it. So, since I’ll be pointing the Zappers at this post, I’ll just put it here.

Something I’m working on: a story

I love stained glass — the interplay of colour and light can absolutely hypnotize me, and I will sit and stare at it for hours. I also love making stained glass — even though I’m relatively new to the craft, I find it profoundly satisfying and meditative. Being a telecommuting knowledge worker, I live on the computer, so the act of creating something physical and tangible is incredibly gratifying. I don’t have very many moments in life where I can point at something and say, “I made this.”

What complicates things is that I want to make stained glass based on designs that I create — unique items that have never been done before, by anyone. One day when I was wandering around the internet looking for inspiration, I stumbled across (and this is where it gets a little nerdy) the Florida State University Molecular Expressions optical microscopy website. Here FSU hosts “one of the Web’s largest collections of color photographs taken through an optical microscope”. This may sound less f’ing awesome than it actually is, so here’s an example:

Paging through the gallery, I found dozens of images that are beautiful, abstract expressions of the interplay of science and nature. They also already more or less look like stained glass, so it wasn’t a huge leap from “those look like stained glass” to “I want to use them as the inspiration for stained glass”. The FSU Microscopy website has a relatively scary “Licensing Information” page, so I erred on the side of caution and sent an email asking permission to use the images in this way. They consented, and thus my project was born.

All of this happened the week prior to Zap, so I have no completed panels to show you, but I have more-or-less finished the first design I’m going to attempt. It’s based on the microphotograph of Albuterol, a bronchiodilator used to treat asthma, bronchitis, emphasema, and other lung diseases. (FWIW, I didn’t actually know that, I just read the website.)

Here’s the original image:

Here’s what my pattern and colour sketch look like right now:

Since this is my first complex self-designed piece, I figure I’ll make it relatively small…maybe 12×15″. It’s an experiment and a learning tool, so I really have no idea how it will work out. I’m super excited about getting started on it, however, and I’ll probably post copious updates while it’s under construction. I’m hoping to turn the microscopy idea into a series of at least 12 pieces, but there’s enough material in the FSU site to keep me busy for a lifetime. We’ll see how it goes.

The finish

Reading back through this post I realize that it is more or less in the very spirit of Zap, starting with “I’ll just hit the highlights” and then wandering at length into realms only tenuously connected with the original topic at hand.

I had such a great time. I learned so much. I want you all to be my new best friends.

From John and Ben and Rob…:

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Until a few days ago I have been using the Vienna feed reader for Mac OS X. It’s a pretty decent workhorse of a reader with a standard email-client-like user interface, the ability to group feeds into folders and subfolders (and sub-subfolders), and all that. It has always frustrated me, however, that my feedreader — through which I consume the majority of my Web content — wasn’t part of Firefox. In fact, I could go so far as to say that Vienna was on close to equal footing to Firefox as my core tool for accessing the Web. This has always struck me as somewhat ridiculous, so I’ve played with all sorts of tools for reading feeds via Firefox, whether they be add-ons or web-applications or what have you. None have ever been compelling enough to switch me away from Vienna until now.

I’ve discovered Feedly, you see, an incredibly slick Firefox 3 add-on that’s been in development for quite some time.

While I’ve only been using Feedly for just over a week now, it has already completely streamlined how I manage, view, and deal with my feeds. Brilliantly, Feedly leverages the existing Google Reader web application as its back end, and throws in added functionality, other service integration points, and a significantly improved UI for good measure. It installs as quickly and easily as any Firefox add-on, displays your feeds in their own tab, and essentially integrates your entire feed reading experience right into your Firefox. Feedly is almost exactly the sort of tool I was hoping to find, and while it does still have a few bugs and rough edges, it’s by far the best feed reader I’ve used to date.

Check it out: Feedly at Mozilla Add-ons.

While working on it I discovered the interesting new world of Wordpress widgets. These are essentially just another type of plugin that adds functionality to your blog, usually by way of pulling in data from somewhere else and displaying it in the sidebar or footer or what-have-you. I played around with a bunch, and these are the ones I’m hanging on to (in no particular order):

Twitter Tools - One of several widgets that displays your Twitter messages in the sidebar. I like Twitter a lot (although I’m not really sure why), so this is a pretty obvious one for me.

Flickr RSS - Again, there are multiple widgets that will pull your Flickr feed into your blog, and this is one of them. I like this one mostly because it worked and I was able to customize it to do what I wanted without having to get too fancy.

Delicious cached++ - Lists your most recent delicious.com shared bookmarks. I figure I’ll use this as a way to highlight interesting bits and pieces I find around the Web. I used to do a daily autopost of recent links and stuff, but I decided that those sorts of things generally annoy me. This’ll do.

Turns out the delicious plugin I was using? Totally, totally broken. I’m going to have to dig another one up. Boo.

Now Reading - I’m still trying to figure out how to customize this one because the default state tends to take up an awful lot of room (mostly because I’m inevitably currently reading more than one book (usually 3-4)). I’ve banished it down to the bottom of the sidebar for now.

Disqus comment system - This is an interesting new service that basically provides third-party support for comments on your blog that also lets you track your own comments and discussions on other websites (that use Disqus, of course). It’s…interesting. Needs more users, I think. If it ever hits critical mass, it could be fantastic.

Sociable - By far the best utility I found for adding social bookmarking links to posts and web feeds. It installs easily, is a snap to configure, and just works. Exactly what I wanted in a nice neat package. Great plugin.

Everything else you see over there on the right is put together with default Wordpress widgets that are included when you first install the blog software. I’ve got the about:mozilla web feed over there because that’s the other blog I work on the most. My Friends list, while incomplete, was re-added because someone else relied on it (hi Mom! :) ). Recent comments is currently under evaluation — I’m not sure it’s valuable enough to warrant that sort of real-estate. It probably doesn’t. We’ll see.

I like that definition a lot.

about:mozilla is a blog and weekly newsletter that focuses on the major news items related to the Mozilla Project. These news items can really be about any aspect of the Project, ranging from development news and schedules through marketing and community events. For an idea of what sort of news we cover, just check out the blog or the past issues.

We’re looking for help. Do you follow or are you involved in a particular part of the Mozilla Project? Do you think there’s news and information about that part of the Project that deserves to be included in the about:mozilla blog and newsletter? If so, please send a note to about-mozilla at mozilla.com. Ideally you will include a snappy headline, a short version of the story you’re submitting (a few sentences is sufficient, really — the newsletter needs to be short and to the point), and at least one link where readers can get more information.

I’ve established a base template for vinaigrette dressings which has held up pretty well through on-going tests. It is:

• 1/2 c oil (olive oil, generally)
• 1/3 c vinegar/sour (vinegar(s) + citrus juices, etc.)
• 1 finely minced clove of garlic (not optional, unless you really hate garlic (weirdo))
• 1 finely minced small shallot (not really optional, but you can substitute a couple of tablespoons of red onion if you must)
• 1/2 tsp sweet (sugar, honey, maple syrup, whatever)
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
• Pinch salt to taste

Put it all in a mason jar, make sure the lid is nice and tight, then shake like hell. A lot. Make it about an hour or so before you need it if you can, but that’s optional. Shake it again later. Don’t bother making enough for leftovers — it doesn’t store well and making it fresh is easy and awesome.

Now, I am a crazy vinegar-loving person, so you may want to ratchet the vinegar/sour back a bit. Starting with this basic template (which takes about 10 mins to make once you master the shallot/garlic mincing process) you can add whatever extras you want — fresh chopped herbs, grated cheeses, mustards, chopped capers, minced citrus zest, etc. Whatever.

The most recent was: olive oil, white wine vinegar, and lime zest (quite a lot…it was really tasty). Tonight’s is: olive oil, white wine vinegar, and about 1/3c finely grated parmasean cheese. Yum.

Update: If you’re going to use balsamic vinegar, don’t do the whole 1/3-1/2c with it. Cut that with something else. More than a few tablespoons of balsamic is a) a waste of balsamic, and b) going to be profoundly overpowering. Use the medium-good stuff, not the super-good stuff. Save the good stuff for drizzling over strawberries.

Well let’s post this and see.