Holiday cooking

It's that time of year again...Thanksgiving. It's time for us Americans to be thankful for all that we have, yet avoid our families at all costs. For about the 10th year in a row, I get the honor of cooking for my wife's family. Don't get me wrong, I love to cook, it's the company that drives me nuts. There, I got that off my chest.

This Thanksgiving should be easier than others as we're eating at my sister-in-law's house. Easier in the sense that I only have to prepare the Turkey and my world famous Chocolate Pies. And I can say world famous since people from Italy have eaten and loved my pies. I have mixed feelings about not having to prepare the family feast. I will miss the days of preparation, the late night chopping and organizing what to cook when. Since I know that it will taste good when I get done, this is something yearly I love doing. This year, I'm a little apprehensive for the side items to compliment my wonderful Turkey. Maybe I should explain a little...See until my wife's family at my first Turkey a few years back I'm not sure they had ever heard of spices; things like sage, thyme, lemon juice, garlic..... This year I have my sister-in-law's infamous dry bland stuffing....

OK, I forgot I'm writing to focus on the positive things in life......

This year I am faced with a choice for Turkeys. I have traditionally stuffed my turkey with garlic gloved inside of the breast, and a mixture of pepper, thyme, sage, and lemon juice under the breast skin (I love to type breast skin....). I finish this off with the cavity stuffed with celery, carrots, and onions. I'm not big on putting my stuffing directly into my turkey. This year I'm bucking Thanksgiving tradition and going with a Wolfgang Puck recipe I made last Christmas. It is a Brined Roast Turkey with Pan Gravy. The honey/maple syrup mixture is incredible and softens and tenderizes the turkey like you wouldn't believe. My turkey descriptions are probably not causing you to get up and run to the fridge for a turkey sandwich, but trust me...you'd want to sleep with me after eating this, it's that good. Still skeptical, try to make it yourself...here's the link to the recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_25005,00.html

If the turkey doesn't get them my chocolate pie usually does the trick. I'm not big on pumpkin, apple, or fruit pies of any kind . I'm a chocolate pie in several variations sort of guy. Besides, have you ever read an erotic story where they rubbed cherry pie or apple pie filling on themselves and licked it off? The best part is my Chocolate-Cream Pie recipe comes from cooking light so it is naturally low in all those things that have made me the rotund little man I am today.

If you're able to view this recipe, then I recommend making it. The fun part is making the mess in the kitchen...who knew that cocoa got on everything? I've found using a flour sifter or a wire mesh strainer is easiest for getting out the lumps in the cocoa and the cornstarch lumps. Make sure you leave plenty of time to cool this pie:

http://food.cookinglight.com/cooking/display/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=222479

If you can't get to this one, let me know and I'll email it to you....

While this first pie is cooling and my Turkey is cooking outside on my grill (did I mention that I use my BBQ grill like an oven to cook my turkey...yummy) I make my Chocolate Fudge Pie. I highly recommend keeping vanilla ice-cream on hand for this one. Don't waste it on that store bought Apple pie, use it on this one instead. This is simple to make, mix dump in a pre-frozen pie crust (baking is too precise for me so I buy my pie crusts...uh oh, here comes the culinary police).

http://www.grits.com/fuge_pie.htm

It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving only a couple of weeks away. Where did this year rush off to? This year I'm thankful to have had the chance to meet many new people, deliver some really cool products, and play golf (though not as much as I would've like, sort of like sex....). I haven't made any 2005 resolutions, which is not surprise as I usually don't wait until some random calendar date to make goals for my life. As you read in my past posts, I'm on a mission to take better care of myself, eat healthier and seduce as many women as possible in the coming year, and enjoy my first group sex experience where I'm the only male (ok I threw those last two in there to see if anybody was paying attention...)

Affectionately yours. Gio

Writing as therapy....

As many of you may or may not know I suffer from depression. For the most part it is controlled by medication, but I'm searching for new ways to get off of the meds. I'm trying many different things like a new exercise regime (running hurts is my motto), writing down my thoughts, and working on feeling happier in general. I have recently picked up a copy of "The Feel Good Handbook" by David D. Burns. There are some exercises in this book about Self Talk and monitoring anxiety and depression through a series of questions. Another section deals with keeping a Daily Mood Log to counter Automatic Thoughts, Distortions, and Rational Responses to upsetting events in life. As I was creating some spreadsheets I could do all of these things on last night, it dawned on me that I should also look at other ways of writing out my thoughts. This place on the web is my home to do that.

If you find that you have highs followed by lows and times when you could not really care about life, seek professional help. After many self-destructive periods in my life and many manic highs and depressive lows, I finally realized that I needed to do something. Two long years later and many hours of Yahoo therapy and daily doses of Zoloft, I feel much better about life.

I have also realized that I'm a wanderer and searcher in life. There appears to be this force pulling me along in directions that I do not seem to control. There have been are decision points along the way and I've always had a choice, but there seems to be a mystical force pulling me in the right direction. Some may say it's God, others may say it's the Matrix, yet others of you out there may be thinking that I'm a Jedi Knight, but for me it is what has helped me be as fortunate in life as I've been with where I've ended up so far.

A few years back in one of my depressive lows and in searching for something to fill the perceived non-existent gap in my life I stumbled into the Yahoo! chat rooms. The magical force pulled me into a room with a lot of great people that I've remained friends with. I call it magical because believe it or not it was the first room I stumbled into, and have pretty much remained in. There I have met some folks that I have been able to share things I never thought I would share. It is amazing how easy it is for me to open up to complete strangers through a 2-dimensional medium like chat. I've shared things with people on Yahoo and other chat rooms that even my wife doesn't know. The whole experience for me has been a soul search of sorts and has allowed me to explore things with some relative safety. For this I think that the internet is a great place.

As my Yahoo addiction has grown and subsided and changed over the past couple of years, my room preferences have varied. I have spent a lot of time in what I affectionately call the Yahoo Underground. Did some of you know that there are rooms where you can act like a baby wearing diapers while your mommy spanks you? For the record, I didn't spend much time there.

Recently I've had the feeling that there is more to chat than just sitting in my first room and listening to the new breed of idiots from the past six months or so clutter up what used to be a great place to have some good discussions. For this reason, I've been exploring my darker side and had some crazy discussions with strangers who want to watch me sleep with their wives. Fascinating stuff.

You have to love the internet though. Where else can you see your neighbor naked on one page, and discussing car-pool options on the next? Where can you in one instant learn a complicated calculus formula and how to apply it to measuring the weight and surface area of the water in your kiddie pool, to playing sponge-bob games, to killing people, to gambling, to discussing politics, to seeing some stuff you never knew people could do with vegetables. I highly recommend taking a few hours and picking a topic to start and follow it to see where it leads you. It is amazing the things you can learn. I've learned about so many subcultures that I didn't even know existed before. Like I said earlier, Fascinating.

My question to leave you with from today's reading is what's the craziest thing you've learned about on the internet or in a chat room, and have you done it? Those of you who know me best know what that is for me....but there's always hope for crazier things to be done.

Affectionately yours. Gio

What is the Axiom of Choice?

Truth be told, I'm a math geek and a genius. I have paperwork that tells me so, but I'll leave it up to you to form your own opinion. As for me, I'm just trying to get by in life and make the most out of every day, learn as much as I can, and push the people around me to be the best they can be (no this is not an Army ad).

The Axiom of Choice, as terrorist as it may appear, is really an important and fundamental axiom in set theory (it is also a band that I've never listened to). The axiom was formulated over a century ago by Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo. It is considered by many math geeks and academics to be the last great controversy of mathematics. Enough of that...I got to Axiom of Choice via something that a college professor of mine used to love, Zorn's Lemma. Zorn's Lemma is stated as "If S is any nonempty partially ordered set in which every chain has an upper bound, then S has a maximal element. This statement is equivalent to the axiom of choice." To put it in terms that most people will understand, there is always a top element in any set of things. It has taken me years of reflective thought and wasted brain cells to understand my professor's fascination with this lemma. If you take it out of context of math terms, it means that if you have any group of people there are always people you can choose from, which means you always have a choice as long as there are options to choose from. This by no means matches what the mathematicians of the world will explain this as, but it works for me.

If you want to learn more about this fascinating topic, MathWorld is the place for you: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZornsLemma.html. You can also take a look at WikiPedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice. I think that I'm supposed to put this here as well: "Eric W. Weisstein. "Zorn's Lemma." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZornsLemma.html "


As for me, math theory is a lot like the opera. There are talented individuals performing great acts, all of which I can appreciate, but none that truly touch my soul. I will always be able to appreciate it for the art that it is, but never truly understand it.

For me, mathematics was always a way to count things, put things in order, and look for relationships between them. I noticed at an early age that the difference between two squares always equaled the sum of the first number plus the number after it. For those of you having trouble keeping up, (5*5)-(4*4)=9 which is 5+4. So if you know 1 squared, you can find the rest of them. Keep in mind, I was 9 when I figured this out....So I didn't know anything about algebra. I later learned that this is simply (X+1)^2-X^2. Which once you work it out is (X+1)+X. Which a guy named Fibonacci proved a long long time ago. For me, I think it was some sort of autistic pattern recognition.

Why all the math talk you're probably wondering? For me, it helps to put things in perspective. You see, I spend my days and my time trying to break computers at all levels. I am constantly looking for new ways to combine parts to produce an error that nobody looked for before me. It is this freakish gift of looking at a vast amount of variables and seeing a minimal path through for maximum return that gets me through most days.

My days you ask, how do I spend them? Well I manage a test team responsible for testing products like our customers will use them. This has always been something that I've done. It gives me a chance to not really have to ever build something, but to sit back and find fault in it. (I come by it naturally, lack of positive feedback as a child.) It is the career path that chose me, so I've stuck with it. I get the opportunity to make things better, build relationships with people that I get to tell on a daily basis they did their job wrong, and I get paid for it. I've been fortunate to actually see some of the things I've worked on in my life get sold for profit, and I've seen some shelved for reasons that only the deity of your choice knows why. It is satisfying for me to see my product and efforts be successful and allow other people to make a difference, learn something new, or make a living from it.

This about does it for my first blog post. If you've gottent this far, thank you for reading my whole post. Please stay tuned for more rambling thoughts from a depressive nymphomaniacal insomniac. And remember, you always have a choice. You may not like all of the options, but you always have a choice.

Affectionately yours. Gio