Soft, sweet, browned onions go great on burgers, among other dishes. But the time and know-how required are why dishes like French onion soup, and dip, aren’t made at home. Here’s how to get from raw to caramelized in just 20 minutes. More »
Blog Archives
Caramelize Onions in Half the Time [Food Hacks]
Posted on January 25, 2011
The Reddit College Cookbook Helps You Stop Eating Like a College Student [Recipes]
Posted on October 15, 2010
If you’re on a tight budget, but you’re tired of instant noodles as your go-to meal, the Reddit College Cookbook may be just the right thing to kickstart a good, low budget eating plan. More »
Quickly Brine Chicken When You Don’t Have Much Time [Recipes]
Posted on October 12, 2010
Brining meats before roasting, grilling, or frying them, especially chicken, makes them moister, more flavorful, and all-around better. But brining usually requires overnight forethought, or at least some quick morning work. Not so with Michael Ruhlman’s 2-3 hour lemon-herb brine. More »
Cloning UIImagePickerController using the Assets Library Framework
Posted on September 7, 2010
Hello iCoders. This is a follow up post to my initial post on the Assets Library Framework and Blocks. We came across an interesting problem when working on the application for Animoto.com. They have had an app in the store since the very early days of the app store, and one of our biggest struggles has been creating an interface to allow users to select multiple photos from their photo album for a slideshow. While the iPhone photos application allows for this the UIImagePicker does not. With the release of the Assets Library framework we can not recreate the experience of the UIImagePicker with some custom functionality to fit our needs. As a result we created a new cloned version of the UIImagePicker that allows for multiple photo selection just like the photos app. We have decided to open source the view for other developers to use. This post will explain the process of creating the new image picker as well as the method of incorporating it into your code.
Make Ice Cream Without an Ice Cream Machine [Food Hacks]
Posted on August 19, 2010
If the record heat across the US has you hankering for some ice cream, try your hand at his simple no-machine-required homemade ice cream to cool off this afternoon. More »
Skip Expensive Spice Mixes and Make Your Own [Saving Money]
Posted on August 16, 2010
It hurts to pay $5 or more for Cajun seasoning, Old Bay, or other spice mixtures you only need for one or two recipes. Never pay for pre-assembled convenience again with this DIY mix list from the Cheap Healthy Good blog. More »
Make Homemade Pickles in One Hour [DIY]
Posted on July 28, 2010
You know what goes great with hamburgers, and summer in general? Pickles. Know what’s even better than buying a jar of Vlasic and calling it a day? Making them yourself after only an hour’s time. More »
Cook Every Course of Summer Meals On the Grill [Recipes]
Posted on June 30, 2010
It’s always worth busting out the grill for great steak or other entrees, but it’s better if you can spare your kitchen and grill the whole meal. Food writer Mark Bittman offers up 101 grilling recipes, covering fruits, vegetables, desserts, and more. More »
Cook – Home – Outdoors – Barbecue grill – Mark Bittman
Make Perfectly Cooked Sous Vide Steaks On the Cheap [Food Hacks]
Posted on February 19, 2010
Tech-savvy chefs pull off amazing dishes with sous vide, or cooking vacuum-sealed food in temperature-controlled water tanks. If you’ve got an instant-read thermometer and a vacuum sealer, you can produce similarly paradigm-shifting steaks with a DIY sous vide setup.
The Savvy Housekeeping blog suggests that all you really need are those two main components—and there's a good chance you could just borrow your parents' or neighbors' vacuum sealer for a set of steaks, if you can't find one on Craigslist or eBay—to pull off a sous vide technique that doesn't require a $400-plus piece of equipment. There's a few other items required to keep the steaks in the water, but it's stuff you probably have. Savvy Housekeeping also gave their steaks a post-bath pan searing with just salt, pepper, and olive oil, but you can feel free to get nuts with your uncle's secret seasoning or whatnot.
It's not a set-and-forget method, though—you'll need to really watch your sealed-off steaks in their immersion bath:
We wanted to keep the meat between 134-135 degrees. To do this, we set the stovetop on the lowest temperature and the alarm on the thermometer at 136 degrees. When the temperature got that high, the alarm went off and we added 1 cup cold water to the pot. This brought the temperature down to 134 degrees. It took the water 10 minutes to raise the two degrees again, the alarm went off at 136 degrees, and we added another cup of cold water. We did this every ten minutes and it kept the steaks right around 135 degrees.
After your steak gets to that perfect temperature, you give them a little sear on the pan, and, well, the photograph results speak for themselves. You’ve cooked a steak to a healthy temperature at a slow pace, without oxidizing your meat, and without succumbing to your oven’s inconsistency.
Update: Commenter thinkerer posts two helpful notes and links on sous vide cooking in the comments. Douglas Baldwin at the University of Colorado at Boulder has A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking that provides far more depth on the techniques, science, and safety considerations involved. He also points out the Wikipedia entry for sous vide, which suggests that, when cooking sous vide, you should ensure you hit the right temperatures and use meat that’s had minimal exposure to bacteria and other contaminants, as you trade open-air exposure concerns for botulism-related contaminants. Then again, the author herself comments that those fears seem lessened for meat you’re searing and eating immediately.
Pulled off your own submersion cooking stunts before? Do tell, and link or post pictures, in the comments!
DIY Sous Vide [Savvy Housekeeping via Serious Eats]
iPhone Coding Recipe – Shortening URLs
Posted on February 4, 2010
I had some a to shorten URLs for an in-application Twitter client I’m working on and thought I would share my simple solution with you guys.
It’s actually pretty straight forward and can be done in 1 line of code. I have broken it up into several for clarity.
NSString *url = @"http://brandontreb.com"; NSString *apiEndpoint = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://api.tr.im/v1/trim_simple?url=%@",url]; NSString *shortURL = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:apiEndpoint] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding error:nil]; NSLog(@"Long: %@ - Short: %@",url,shortURL); // Outputs Long: brandontreb.com - Short: tr.im/MRDd
Pretty easy huh?
The magic here is in a method that Apple gave us as part of NSString. This method is called stringWithContentsOfURL. It will easily allow you to grab the text of any remote source.
I have used Tr.im as an example here because their service is very easy to use and has little overhead. I would have used bit.ly but they return a JSON string which would then have to be parsed. Tr.im’s trim_simple service simply outputs the string of the shortened URL.
Sure Twitter may shorten links for you automatically, but what if you want to use a custom service? Or,…wait for it… use it for something other than Twitter (please post in the comments if you do. I would love to hear some other uses 
)
Questions? Comments? Complaints?
Happy iCoding