Blog of the Week

I had a particularly delicious meal last night at my Dad's house, Crawdad Étouffée. It’s likely you have never heard of it and more likely you have never had it, even more likely if you have had it at a restaurant up here in the north it was not up to par; and that is a shame. It’s a Creole/Cajun dish that is very simple but incredibly amazing. It got me thinking about how good food can be, even with a minimum of ingredients and little prep time. Fortunately there are blogs out there dedicated to serving us simple, delicious dishes.



Two Fat Als has been seen on this blog before, but their blog deserves our full attention. Two Fat Als is a cooking and recipe blog written and photographed by two New York City graduate students, Alanna and Alex. The recipes are cost-effective, healthy and delicious, and designed for anyone who loves (or is learning to love!) food.

There really is no end to the foods they show us how to prepare. Every sort of dish can be had; hell they even make bread easy. The instructions are simple and direct, the pictures make your mouth water and the little anecdotal storied that accompany the recipes remind us they are two working stiffs (actually students) and not a couple of professional cooks in a studio kitchen. The weather this week is going to suck, so make the evenings enjoyable in your kitchen and make yourself an awesome meal.

Want to try your hand at Crawdad Étouffée?
3lbs crayfish (DiBruno Bros has frozen bags, perfect)
1 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
3/4 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup finely chopped bell pepper
1 1/2 cup rice
1 1/2 sticks butter
Tony Chachere's More Spice Blend seasoning (or any Creole seasoning)

Prepare rice.
Melt the butter in a sauté pan at medium-high heat.
Once the butter is melted add in the vegetables and sauté them for about two minutes.
Add in the crayfish and its juices.
Add Tony Chachere's seasoning to taste.
Sauté for another 5 minutes.

Serve Étouffée on a warm pile of white rice and enjoy!

Blog of the Week

Winter is gone, and seemingly, so is Spring. Over the weekend we saw temperatures hovering in the high 80s and low 90s. So much for those mild days and cool nights. However, all is not lost. After all, if you are going to sweat you might as well make the best of it. And what better way to sweat than hovering over a smoky BBQ!?



BBQ Addicts is your new resource for all things BBQ. These guys are hardcore BBQ fiends. Their product is destined to cook in a smoker, never an oven. As you can guess BBQ Addicts revolves around the Webber (actually i have no idea whose grill they use, but i digress). They are another fresh upstart blog having only begun their adventure last October. We can expect nothing but good things to come from them as the BBQ season gets underway.

Grilling is more than raw meat on a hot grill and BBQ Addicts has you covered. While the majority of the recipes are meat-on-grill, you'll also find the sides to these meals as well. BBQ Addicts started off with a bang by introducing the Bacon Explosion to the world. I can't wait to see what they bring out next.

Blog of the Week

You are all no doubt by now avid followers of autoblog thanks to me directing your attention that way. No? Ohh... well that in that case this weeks post is probably going to excite you even less. But the point of Blog of the Week is simply a year long answer to Barry's question "what sites do you visit". This is another site I visit and enjoy.



Asphalt & Rubber is the autoblog for the motorcycle world. Sort of. Asphalt & Rubber is still in its infancy, only being begun in October 2008. Hell, Regal Beagles is an older blog. But they came out with a clean format long missing from the motorcycle blog world. There are others that have more content, more postings, larger sites but none of them are very user friendly or as comprehensive in their reporting. In this day in age when our attention span is shorter than that of a house fly, it helps to have a clean format that is easy to read.

Not enough of you have a motorcycle, you should all get one. They are awesome. All of them, even Harley Davidson.

Blog of the Week

Just the other day, Kira and I were talking about how we have to go camping soon. Later that day I find an e-mail in my inbox from Liam suggesting we get a camping trip together. It’s time to go camping, friends. And, yeah, there are blogs out there for camping too.



Camping Blogger is a great resource for finding answers to your camping questions. The site is relatively new to the internets but there is new content posted regularly. The site focuses on the casual camper and doesn't get into the treks and equipment that look good in the glossy magazine but are unrealistic for those of us who work a full time job and have expenses outside camping in the Ural mountains or the Patagonian Desert.

You will find reviews of practical items like cast iron cookware, comparative lists of popular camping items like tents, coffee pots and the like. Tips on everything from what food to pack and how to start a fire to how to repel bugs and pick out a great camping site.

Click through a few pages and the itch for a camping venture. I am shooting for getting out into the great outdoors sometime in late April/early May.

Blog of the Week

Spring is here and along with the cook-outs, motorcycle rides, and short skirts come another enjoyable past-time. America's past-time in fact; baseball. The WFC Philadelphia Phillies are looking to repeat last year's success and their fans will be there to shit on them when they are failing, and cheer them on like no other group of fans when they are succeeding.



The Fightins represents all that makes the Phillies fan a Phillies fan. The insults cut like a master's samurai sword, the praise elevates those it is laid on to an almost mythical status and the love for the big green thing known as the Phanitic is endless. The Fightins' bloggers cover anything and everything Phillies. From Ryan Howard's batting stance to that random old lady with a Phillies cap over her sun hat. At all times the posts are entertaining and clearly written from people who live and love the Phillies.

Admittedly, i have only jumped on the Phillies band wagon in the past few years following in Kira's enthusiasm for the team, but i'm hooked at this point and my old wagon pulled by the Philadelphia Eagles hasn't taken me on too many happy trails lately.

Get excited for the 2009 season. Go pick yourself up some tickets, with the economy in the crapper its nice to know that baseball is still there to offer you three hours of entertainment for as little as $16.00.

I'll let everyone go after a quick interview with Shane Victorino and Jimmy Rollins.

Blog of the Week

Blogs can come about in the most random ways and their purpose on the interwebs, aside from the obvious "web logging", are as varied as the number of blogs. Some websites are pretty clearly defined. Autoblog for example is obviously about automobiles and the auto industry. Some are very loosely defined. Neatorama is a blog about neat stuff, neat is about as subjective as it comes. Other sites... well them seem to have a direction but don't exactly follow it. Ohh... and their name initially makes no sense.



Telstar Logistics is an employee blog for the Telstar Logistics company. The funny thing is, there is no Telstar Logistics company. The name and faux company originally came about as a scam for parking illegally in loading zones. The nerdy answer is that it's an ongoing experiment in corporate phenomenology, urban camouflage, and brand development. Don't understand? Go here to get the full answer and then come back wishing you had thought of it first.

As for the employee blog, the focus of the blog seems to vaguely hit on and around the basic theme of land, air, sea, space and the culture they have created. The site is not updated as often as many of the other blogs i have featured, but it holds a distinction of offering up truly unique posts not found on other blogs. This is not so much because the posts are no good, but more because Todd Lapin, the sites founder, does much of his own leg work. It is a highly entertaining blog for those of us interested in the culture that has been created around our fascination with the motorized machines of locomotion. The blog isn't always on subject, but rest assured that when they do leave the mark, they still entertain. Importantly, the photography on the site is excellent. The other subject that gets page time is randoms of San Francisco. I kinda wana check the town out now.

Blog of the Week

Sorry about skipping last week, had a family emergency.

I get all nerdy on a variety of subjects. Marvels of engineering and architecture, industrial design, HDR photography, abandonments to name a small few. What do they all have in common? A focus on the urban and there is a website dedicated to them and a variety of other subjects.



WebUrbanist blog collective writers are interested in all things urban - from urban design to subversive art and strange architecture. They scour the net to find neat new stuff to pack it into an article with relevant images and links, as exhaustive as they can manage within a single subject area. The team is comprised of web designers, bloggers, architects and other curious urbanists. The site is highly entertaining and provides for a variety of different interests. The photographs they provide are excellent, the articles themselves are well written, but always leave you curious. Personally, I think this is a good thing. After poking around on WebUrbanist, I'm always left wanting more and I end up going out on my own searching for more info...

Blog of the Week

What is with Fridays being busy for me? I love Frank Lloyd Wright. His Prairie House designs are the epitome of my idea home. The work of Frank Lloyd Wright gave the United States its own unique and distinct style of architecture; it is a blend of arts and crafts, mission, and craftsman architectural styles along with his own keen vision as to how a building should flow both inside and outside. If you build a house on top of the hill, you destroy the hill, if you build a house into the hill, you integrate with the landscape. This was his ideal, for the building to blend with its surroundings. His influence in architecture and design is felt to this day especially in modern design.



Prairie Mod focuses on Frank Lloyd Wright's work, its influences in Modern Design and the sustainability of the work. Prairie Mod is a great blog, but I particularly like them because they are so much more than just a blog. They have your frequent blog postings as one would expect but there are additional sections of their site dedicated to going deeper into the subjects they cover. Their Features section I particularly enjoy. In here they delve deeper into the subjects, beyond the blog posting that generally just scratches the surface. Prairie Mod frequently has the opportunity to interview today's designers, architects, and homeowners who are living out the "Prairie Mod" ideal. These interviews are posted on their Podcasts page. What is the "Prairie Mod" ideal? You can find the answer to that in the 10 Principals page; this is what makes Prairie Mod tick.

There are additional sections of the site, including the store, submissions, subscribe, freebies, links and the archive.

Go hit it up, explore the site. Tell me you didn't like it. I won't believe you, nor will I pay you any mind. I love this site.

Blog of the Week

Sorry to those who were anxiously awaiting a Blog of the Week last week. The little lady and I made a trek up to Mystic Ct. with her sister and her man to go visit a friend of theirs for her birthday. This trip kept me from my duties to the blog and for that I apologize. If you have never been, Mystic is nice little town. If you care enough, trip pics are here. But enough of that, back to the business at hand.

Times are tough right now. The economy is down and most people who are employed have seen their salaries frozen (me included). Fortunately there are those out there looking to help us in our hour of need.



Woot! One day, one deal. It is as easy as that. Every day a new product is offered for sale at a discounted rate. At the end of the day, the item disappears forever and will not be offered again. If the item sells out before the day is over, nothing else goes up and the day is over. What do they offer? Random stuff, mostly electronics related. Today it is little R/C cars but in the past there have been TVs, computers, vacuums, toys, etc. The items they sell are generally new, though sometimes you see refurbished items. However, rest assured that all items for sale still carry the manufacturers warranty. These are not White Van Speakers or knock-offs, just good products at good rates.

Woot! also has two sister sites Shirt.Woot! and Wine.Woot!. I think you can get the idea of what is sold on those sites...

Blog of the Week

I take a lot of pictures. If I am headed out to some sort of event, vacation, expo, party, whatever; I like to drag my little point and shoot with me. Back in the days of 35mm film I used to take entire weekends alone and walk the city, Valley Forge, and various other places looking for new photogenic spots. I truly enjoyed walking under the Ben Franklin Bridge at night and finding new lighting and textures that were never present in the day time. One of these days I'll get a nice DSLR and pick the hobby back up. I do miss it. In the meantime I still like to keep up with the world of photography.



Digital Photography School is an excellent resource for all questions digital photography. From the site: "DPS is a community of digital photographers of all experience levels who gather around a number of blogs and a forum to learn, share and grow in their understanding of photography." Articles on the site are provided by both the administrators of the site and by the general public. They are always looking for new submissions, regardless of your technical knowledge. If your submission is well composed and offers new and useful information, they want it. The site is broken into three main sections:

Photography Tips & Tutorials where the focus is, obviously, based around the camera itself and its uses. This can range from simple techniques for framing the perfect shot to more advanced approaches to lighting.

Cameras and Equipment goes in-depth into the tools of the trade. Here you'll find reviews for the latest technology from point-and-shoots to the most advanced DSLRs available on the market. But there is more to photography than just the camera and they review all the ancillaries too; camera bags, lenses, flashes, software and hardware. The reviews come from professional in the field, so expect a thorough and comprehensive review. Torn between the new Canon ELPH and the Sony Cyber-Shot? Now you know where to get a review of each.

Post Production is where you go to get the tips and tricks to making your picture stand out after the shot has been taken. I am usually reluctant to play with my pictures in post production, not so much because I'm worried I'll mess up the picture but more because I have no clue where to start. The features in this section range from the simple removing red-eye and delve deep into the advances applications of Photoshop. This not just a Photoshop tutorial section, in this section there is also a wealth of information ranging from easy ways to manage the storage of your photos to the latest advances in online programs.

Without doubt there is more than a lifetime's supply of information on this site. The site for anyone who owns a camera. Everyone from the run-of-the-mill party shooter, through the amateurs on up to the professional will find a wealth of new information that they will find useful in their applications. So go take a look at the site and then go outside and take a few pictures. The site will inspire you!

Blog of the Week

Today's internet is occasionally referred to as Web 2.0. The internet revised. There was no software or hardware updates or anything like that, what spawned Web 2.0 was greater integration of the user. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites and the other sundries that created a web culture community were responsible for Web 2.0. What was revolutionary about this point in the internet's young life was that now, more than ever, the end user of the internet was just as much a part of the internet as those creating the websites. But perhaps revolutionary isn't the right word... to be certain there were plenty of sites out there where end-user interaction was the basis of the sites success long before blogs and myspace were the backbone of the web culture that they are today.



Fark is a site that has been around the internet since 1997. Did you even know about the internet back then? I was 17 at the time and more interested in getting into Theresa Patro's panties. However some dude named Drew Curtis set up fark.com and posted a picture. In 1999 the picture came down and up went a list of random news articles that were inadvertently amusing. In 2000 the site added comments. Fark.com is run by a staff but it is updated by the people. Anyone can submit an internet link and a headline. If the admins approve the link, *poof* it goes up. While the articles and websites that you are directed to are amusing and or interesting; what is more funny is the comments. There are thousands of farkers (commenters) and in that thousands, there are a smaller thousands of funny people. Fark is updated constantly, so if you are looking for a site that'll keep you entertained all day, this one will be able to fill that role. This was the first page in Fark I ever read. It had me crying.

Blog of the Week

(Sorry I'm a day late. Outside activities had me away from a computer yesterday)

I like food. Going out to restaurants is an easy way to get me excited. The variety of foods and tastes and methods of preparation that are available to us is mind-boggling. There is a problem, however, with going out to eat a lot. It is not cheap. But these dishes are prepared by chefs, professionals. Clearly I cannot make even half of these dishes... or can I?



Epicurious is the website "for people who love to eat". Well, then that is right up my alley, isn't it?! The site is sponsored by Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines and many of the recipes provided on the site come from those magazines, but many more come from user submissions. One of the features I really like is "my recipe box", no more printing out recipes you like, you can keep them all organized on the site and can even categorize them. An additional feature is the comments on the recipes, many people will share how they altered the recipes and these suggestions are great for getting creative.

From searching the site and finding some excellent recipes, I have learned that a chefs skill is not so much in making a meal and following a recipe, but in his ability to create a meal. We can all cook, and with the internet at our fingertips, we can learn new techniques we may not have known before or were afraid to attempt for fear of it being too hard. If there is a down side to the site, it is the pop-ups. They are annoying, but not so annoying as to avoid the site all together. So go, think of tonight's meal and hit up Epicurious to find the recipes. Cooking is fun, and this site adds to the enjoyment.

Blog of the Week

I love cars. But my love of cars goes beyond cars. I love motorcycles. I love trucks. I love the automotive industry. I love auto racing. I love the details of the labor contracts. I love the proceedings involved in the auto industry loan package. I love lamp. What is going on in the corporate offices of Ford and Fiat and Nissan are just as engaging to me as the beautiful one-off concept vehicles they create as a design study. The massive economies the auto industry has created and how tampering with one part shakes up the entire infrastructure is thoroughly engaging to me.



Autoblog is my go to site for all things automotive. There are hundreds of sites dedicated to bringing us the latest news on the auto industry but I have yet to find a site that does it so thoroughly and as cleanly as Autoblog. Their tag line "We obsessively cover the auto industry" couldn't be more correct. All those things I love about the auto industry that i listed above? Yeah, they are on the autoblog site.

This site is constantly up on my web-browser. There is only one other site that can make that claim (we'll get to that site later). I realize that i am more of an auto junkie than most but i do strongly recommend that everyone check this blog out. You may find you have more interest in cars than you thought...