Tuesday Musings: Food Edition

Been hanging on to a lot of little tidbits for a while, so I'll be grouping them this week and posting them as we go along. First up are topics that are loosely related by their relevance to food.

1. Inappropriate, Party of One. Did John Curtas, the brilliant KNPR food critic whom I very much admire and whose recommendations I flawlessly follow, really Tweet this below about Namaste Indian Cuisine?


And, as a side note, are there really (m)any Native American ("feathers") restaurants anywhere? I've never actually heard of a Cherokee eatery, have you? Would people have actually been confused as to which sort of Indians he meant?

2. Photo of Last Week: I just love this image of the birds perched on almost every letter of the Bagelmania sign:


I wanted to tell the two birds not perched that there are spaces reserved for them on the L, M or I.

3. Snakes At the Cafe: If you didn't catch this on my Twitter feed on Saturday, take a look at the accessory around this fellow's neck at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf I write at near UNLV.

Wow. Just...wow.

4. Blogger's Rorschach Test:


What is that little graphic thing? It's been there on my Blogger dashboard for weeks. Is it a boat? A piece of cake? What? And, more importantly, why?

5. My Kitchen Misadventure: Last week, Miles had to work really late on the fifth anniversary of our first date -- see, it's not just the podcast that's suffering! -- so I decided to salvage the occasion by making a special dessert from this recipe I got from Gourmet. Actually, it wasn't from the magazine itself but from an ad for Spice Island cinnamon (which I did not use) in soon-to-disappear Gourmet. Here's the recipe and this was what it was supposed to look like:


Yet when I tried to make those almond crisps, the first time this is how it looked:


Oops. I didn't get how little of the batter would spread out. I also didn't know the difference between wax and parchment paper. (That's wax. It sticks. Now we know.) Still, I kept trying and managed to pull off three of them the right way after a lot of trial-and-error. Here's what I served Miles:

Mine is not photographed as it went hatless owing to the fact that only three crisps actually turned out right. KLAS-TV's Edward Lawrence, reacting on his Twitter feed to my posting of that image, wrote:

Eddie was, in a rare shock, wrong. It was yummy. And I got the filling spot-on.

What Just Happened?

Two questions:

* For about 15 minutes, this blog was missing its postings. Everything else was there except postings. Anyone know why that would happen? And is there an easy way to backup blog posts so that if that happens again I'm not totally screwed? This is what was seen:



* That brings me to the second thing. The Google Adsense ad then and right now is for Las Vegas water heaters. I have not blogged or Tweeted at all about my recent water heater drama. I wrote about it on Facebook and in IMs with friends. And I guess I did some Google searching the other day for more information about what was wrong with the old one and then information on installing the new one, all of which I did myself. But how would the computer know to associate me or my blog with that topic? Is Google Adsense tracking everything I'm saying in every forum and using that to advertise at me? Isn't the spooky?