Check Out Proinsurance

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In my last job my company worked with a fantastic insurance provider, Proinsurance. I worked with Adam Houchins, who provided excellent support and information directly.  Literally, he took time to talk to me and answer my questions one on one.

Best of all, they handle insurance for businesses of all kinds – from the large to the very small.  So I wanted to give them a plug because the service I received was excellent – and may be right for your business, which I know a lot of you are thinking of!

Insurance is a pain to handle in a lot of cases, but the staff made it real easy. Give them a ring!

– Steven

The Loss of Cool Futurism: Disunity

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Serdar and I were recently’ discussing the revival/return of Omni magazine. If you’re not familiar with Omni then you’re . . . probably younger than I am.  So stop playing your music so loud and get off my lawn.

Anyway, Omni was one of those publications that had a theme of what I call “cool futurism”, of the amazing stuff we’d see, of soaring cities and great technology and a better world. It was hip and happening and often positive. Cool futurism is the kind of thing you see in Star Trek TOS, in speculations on future architecture, on imagining how we’ll solve disease or poverty – not naive, but, well, “Cool”.

It’s cool to make things better. Cool to imagine awesome things we can make.

It just doesn’t seem to be that popular anymore in America. So I began asking what happened, and you’ll be utterly shocked to hear there’s a blog post about it to follow. Probably several.

First of all, I think Cool Futurism is gone because there’s no sense of unity or potential unity.

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Curry Diary 8/3/2013: Red Wine

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So as noted earlier, I’ve got several servings of my Japanese Curry, and each time I make it I reheat it I try tweaking it with another ingreedient.  Today was red wine.

To do this I heated up about 1/4 cup of red wine (Rosemont Estate Shiraz if you’re curious), let it boil for about 10 minutes to get the alcohol out, added a bit more when it reduced more than I expected, and reheated the curry in the same pan, mixing it all together.

The color, obviously, ended up a bit darker.  But how did it taste?

This got interesting.

First, I think the taste of the wine amplified the spices.  Maybe it was the further cooking, but it was “more” than I’d expect that to do based on past experiences.

It did add a definite richness to the sauce, enough to impress me and make me think.  This may be a direction worth exploring.

Clearly a lot of Japanese curries use fruits or fruit juice components.  Also wine, like beer (and other alcohols, but mostly I see wine, beer, and sake used) has a very rich, unique taste due to the ingredients and fermentation progress.  That fruity taste combined with the richness of a fermented product was interesting – and richness has been what I’ve been seeking in my current stage of my quest for curry.

So I’m very much thinking next experiment I’m going to try a 2-to-one ratio of broth to wine and see how it goes.  I think going full-on-wine could really overdo it.  Also, obviously, there are many red wines to choose from so I’ll need to pick an appropriate one.

This also makes me wonder what wine-curry pairings could be done in other forms of cooking.  Dahl perhaps?  Or maybe red wine in one of my baked bean recipes could be delicious as that is spicy.

Very educational and worth trying.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.