Cooking With Julia Child

This last weekend, I made my first Julia Child recipe. It sounds almost sacrilegious, loving to cook and not using Julia Child until now. But I can tell you, it was worth the wait.

As you may know from reading my blog, my grandmothers are my muses in the kitchen. Both my dad's mom and my mom's mom were excellent cooks, very different in style but experts in their styles nonetheless. As a result, a lot of the food at mealtimes was and is heavily influenced by Scandinavian and Mediterranean fare. I grew up loving good food thanks to them. My grandmothers are always with me in the kitchen. But on Sunday, I added another great lady to my cooking muses. Julia Child--a woman revered by cooks all over--has gotten another devotee. No, I'm not going to erect a statue or a shrine for her, but she has a lot to teach me about cooking and I am ready to learn.

As I recently posted, my aunt passed on her Mastering the Art of French Cooking book to me. It's an older printing of the title and dates back to 1965. It's not a first version, but it's an early version. The pages have tanned over time, and I found an old newspaper clipping about one of Julia Child's recipes hidden among the pages. The words, even in the recipes, read almost like a story. And I suppose one could say that cooking is like telling a story, as well as an art. It's a story of the cook's journey, and for me it has become a very personal journey because of my cooking as a tribute to my grandmothers. But it's a journey that I'm happy to share, especially since it's much more fun to share good food than eat it alone!

So which of Julia's recipes did I choose to try? No, it was not the beef bourguignon. I decided on the coq au vin. This is actually a dish I made a long time ago in high school (though not from Julia Child's recipe). It was a rather failed experiment. I was not a good cook back then, although I liked being in the kitchen. I was in the French Club, and for our end-of-the-year event, we had a dinner at the school. We watched a really bad (read cheesy) 1980s French movie ("La Boum") and ate French food. The main course was coq au vin, and to this day I don't know what happened. Perhaps we were dancing too much in the kitchen and not paying enough attention to the food. Long story short, while it was edible the coq au vin did not taste even close to how it should.

Fast forward to this last Sunday. With a few years of good cooking under my sleeve, I felt compelled to try again. So Scooter and I bought what ingredients we didn't already have. I pulled out my wonderful dutch oven--a perfect cooking vessel for coq au vin--and started cooking. A couple of hours later, Scooter and I sat down and took the first bite. It was culinary bliss. I didn't even try to improve on the recipe; it didn't need it. It was perfect as it was.

And since I'm not improving on the recipe or changing anything about it, I am not going to post it here. But you can find Julia's coq au vin recipe all over the Internet. A quick Google search will give you many variations. The recipe on WGBH's website and on What's Cooking America are almost identical to the 1965 version I was working off of (apparently Julia kept modifying and improving her own recipes). Give it a try and taste for yourself the work of a master.

Bon appétit!

Internship: First On-Site Day

Yeah, I know, I know--more about my internship. Well, I do have to continue posting regularly about it for credit. But I will post again this week about something not related to my internship, so stay tuned.

Yesterday was my first of three (possibly four) days over the course of the semester that I will be on-site at the library where I have my internship. A lot of Marin County is beautiful, so my drive (at least when I got into Marin County) was scenic. I actually pass through the area when Scooter and I are heading to our favorite coastal town, so I was moderately familiar with where I was going. The Technical Services department for the library system is actually located on an old army base. The work area is in a remodeled hangar building, and I was able to appreciate the aesthetics of the building's structure. It was fairly obvious that many of the surrounding buildings had recently been remodeled or built from the ground up, and from the front door of the building you can see newer private homes. One of the neighboring old hangars was still under construction.

The Technical Services team encompasses a group of staff with multiple purposes and duties. There's the staff that's in charge of processing all items purchased by the library before sending it off to the branches for shelving. There's the staff in charge of ILL and Link+ (a program many SF Bay Area libraries are members of) requests. There's the cataloger--there was only one for the whole county library system! I know she must be a very busy lady. There's my site supervisor who oversees my internship and several other Webmasters Team staff, and of course the library IT staff who are often in and out of the office as they head out to branches with malfunctioning equipment. And there's the staff that works with the county library's subscription databases and library catalog data, one of whom I got to speak with for a few minutes. He was discussing some of the growing pains with adopting the Encore interface that they very recently started using, as well as the difficulties of trying to maintain the Encore-run catalog and the classic catalog. He noted that one of the (relatively) nice things about the classic catalog is that the files and data are maintained on a local server; when something goes wrong, they have direct access to the files and can work on fixing the problem. With Encore, as with any service maintained by a vendor, the data and files are all on a remote server; when something goes wrong, they must rely on the vendor to fix it--which can have varying results depending on the vendor. I would say this is definitely a con of cloud services: you have less control over your content. But, as he mentioned, it would cost the library more to hire the people needed to do the same thing on site. It was an interesting conversation, and I appreciate him giving me a few minutes of his time so I could learn.

The main room that houses this team of people is not much unlike the office space in your average building--except for the books and other library items. There were so many of them! My hands were itching to pick up one (or a dozen) and browse the shelves as I would the library stacks or the shelves at a bookstore. The desk area where I worked for the day was right next to a full wall of shelves and I couldn't help but glance at the titles every so often, picking out ones that I knew or at least heard of. My site supervisor mentioned shadowing one of the people who help process items next time I'm there--I'm going to have to be extra-careful to keep on task and not browse as I work. Perhaps I can browse during a break.

Yesterday, I was tasked with updating a page of the staff site. The page where all the library system-wide policies and procedures are kept needed to have some items deleted, and the remainder updated with ownership information. It sounds like something I could do at home, but I was glad to be there to complete it. First of all, I had to work off a paper packet rather than a digital list. Second, my site supervisor made many notations that I had to ask about, mostly abbreviations of the departments that had ownership of the item. It would have been hard for me to ask as many questions as I did if I had been working from home. I liked being able to walk over to her desk and simply ask "How do you..." and "What is..." It's definitely much easier to collaborate in person.

The rest of this week will be spent on updating another page on the staff site in a similar way. Many of the abbreviations are the same, so I will have far fewer questions and am already familiar with the process. I'll also be updating user permissions for all the users on the staff site (something I definitely know how to do since we've gone over users already in my Drupal class). Someone--not sure if it was a fellow internee or the internship instructor for the MLIS class side of the internship--mentioned that as we go along, we start to gain confidence in our abilities. I think I'm starting to see more of that in myself this week.

My latest web conquest--wireframing!

This week found me learning about something new that I had never had the opportunity to work with before: wireframing. I liken it to mapping out and moving blocks on a CMS (content management system) with the added ability to position everything exactly as you want it (and not have to stick to the block limitations of a CMS). It's essentially another way to map out the layout of a page.

When I had done this in the past, I would use pencil and paper to map out where certain pieces of content would go, and make notations for special pieces of content. Basically, I would sketch out the page before I created it. Wireframing accomplishes the same thing, except it's a lot easier and faster to make changes to a design that you're not happy with. The program that my internship site uses is Mockingbird. Each of the items that you put on the page (text, links, drop-down boxes, etc.) are called "widgets," which I think can be a little misleading. When I hear "widget," it makes me think of an object that does something--like my desktop widgets. The widgets in Mockingbird don't do anything except act as place holders.

And that's something that I had to get used to--the idea of a placeholder for content, not the content itself. It took me some time fiddling around with links to figure out that there is no way for me to get them to link to anything--they are only there to show where on the page they will be. You can put in the text of the content to see how much of the page it will take up and how you want to arrange it, but links, buttons, images, and the like are only represented and will not work like they will when you create the final page. You're putting together the layout for content, not the content itself. If you put in a drop-down box widget, it won't act like a drop-down box--because it's not the actual box, just the representation of it. I think I had to play around with the Mockingbird program for almost an hour before I really understood that concept. Once I did, my comfort level with wireframing dramatically increased and my progress went much smoother and faster.

The whole point of this project was to put together the layout for a page where patrons would go to find out about the online books clubs offered by the library. But in the process of putting that together, I learned a whole new (and better) way of doing layout. I will definitely take note of this for my future personal and professional online web design/development projects.

Oh, and the feedback from my first project was overall very positive. But since there seems to be some bugs with posting blogs on the staff site, I had to go back and modify it to exclude those features that are still "buggy." My site supervisor and I agreed that it would be better to do so to prevent staff from getting frustrated with not being able to "do it the way the guide says."

First Project Complete!

I turned in my first project for the MCFL earlier this week (yesterday to be exact). It's a guide that will be made available to the library staff that shows them how to make posts on the staff blog (which is powered by Drupal).

Last week during my weekly meeting with my site supervisor, I had asked why another guide I was using for comparison had a fairly complex process for including pictures in a post. It didn't make sense to me when all that users have to do is drag pictures into the WYSIWYG text box to include them (the system is set up in a way that does not allow users to upload them directly from their computer--hence the complex process). I first wanted to find out if there was an existing policy that said it had to be done the way outlined by the other guide. If there was, I knew that I would have to create my guide to follow suit. But if there wasn't, I felt that the drag-and-drop method would be a lot more user-friendly because it had fewer steps and was similar to dragging a file from one folder to another (which a lot of people have done if they regularly work on a computer). So, I had to wait a bit for feedback since my supervisor needed to check with another individual to make sure that there wasn't a policy we had to follow. I got the OK to include my suggested method (Yay!) but with a few notes that they wanted me to include as well--mainly to let staff know that the drag-and-drop method is only for the staff site, not the public site (the original method would still need to be used for that).

So I finished the guide and sent it off to my site supervisor. I'm still waiting to get feedback from her about my work.

The week before last, my supervisor made a point of saying that I don't need to rush through the tasks and projects that she gives me, even for the "high-priority" stuff. So with the guide, I was able to take my time, plan it out, get the screenshots I wanted and edit the pictures, and basically do quality work. I'm not sure I would have felt compelled to do as many visuals if I felt pressure to get things done quickly. I feel really lucky that my supervisor is not a I-need-results-yesterday kind of person and is willing to let me take whatever time I feel I need to complete a task and complete it well. My paid librarian position definitely demands more awareness of deadlines, so it's a nice contrast.

The rest of the week will be taken up by research. I'll be trying to find out if some of the things that my site supervisor and the Technical Services team wants to do and include on the site is possible. So it's off to the Drupal how-to's to find some clues. I would love to be able to tell them "Yes it is, and here's how you do it!"

A Dinner to Remember

I turn 30 this week.

A year ago, I knew that this day would come (as long as the world didn't end on 12/21/12), and I knew I didn't want a big party. I don't have a large circle of friends that I could invite anyway. I wanted something small and intimate, something special that I would remember for the rest of my life. And I figured out what that would be: a formal French dinner.

This story actually has roots older than last year. My mother once (and only once--it was a LOT of work) cooked this elaborate traditional French dinner as part of a church charity (someone won a silent auction item that included a French dinner). I'm not a member of my parents' Church community, but I do know how to cook, so my help was enlisted. That dinner--the food, the wine, the ambiance--looked so wonderful. And although I was in the kitchen and didn't get to enjoy the dinner the way the guests did, I knew one day I would want a dinner like that.

So last year, I decided that for my 30th, I would like a traditional formal French dinner. When I made mention of this to the family last fall, my older brother, who not only teaches French but has many ties to the country and the culture, offered to help plan and cook it. (As a side note, my older brother had a tradition for several years that he would host a French dinner for his senior French class at the end of the school year as a celebration.) I feel compelled to note that my older brother is such a francophile that he is assumed to be French when he travels in France. He has so completely embraced the language and the culture; and so he was very well-suited to planning the menu, knowing where to look for ingredients, and cooking the food.

So fast forward to last weekend. My brother and my mother planned for me an exquisite 12-course dinner in true traditional French style. Wine accompanied nearly every course and paired with the food in such a way that my mouth is watering just thinking of it. My mother pulled out all the good dishes that almost never get used, the silver, the crystal--basically all the stuff that she hides away that we maybe get to see some of at Christmas. My older brother was a magician in the kitchen, creating flavors I wish I could copy but fear I won't taste again. He was a general too, keeping things organized and synchronized (with some help from two friends of his), sending out each dish with a flair. One of his friends was our sommelier and did a presentation for each wine, explaining a bit about its history, the strain of grape that goes into it, and its flavor (I had no idea he knew that much about them!). We would take a bite of food and a sip of wine and exclaim over it--it was almost too good to be reality. We made a kind of chorus with our praises of "The food!" "The wine!" "The flavor!" "It's so good!" "I can't believe it!" It was like a movie dinner. You know, one of those lavish course-after-course dinners you might see in a scene in a movie and dismiss with a thought because that's Hollywood and would never actually happen. Except it did.

You know what? Better than keep talking about it, I will show you:

This is only one place setting for one person -- and we reused silverware for multiple courses!

Champagne with black current syrup was the cocktail that started us off.

Pureed butternut squash soup -- this had an especially amazing and delicate flavor.

Foie gras -- very much a French food, and not illegal to consume in California, although it is now illegal to produce or sell in the state.

These prawns and scallops were cooked perfectly and served with a white champagne sauce.

This lemon sorbet was served right before the "Intermetzo" or intermission -- at this point, we certainly needed it! Incidentally, I was getting in some serious baby time at this point of the meal.

The highlight of the meal: a beef tenderloin with a reduced sauce made of ruby port, black trumpet mushrooms, and foie gras (no, of course we weren't gilding the lily).

Anyone familiar with French cuisine would recognize the cheese course. All but one of the cheeses we had were from various regions of France.

A cream puff for each of us was the dessert -- and my mom makes excellent cream puffs!

If we were sticking to true tradition, the coffee would have had its own course. Here it was served with some local candies (aka See's chocolates).

By the time we got to the coffee and candies, I could not eat another bite. I ended up passing on the cognac as it made its way around at the very end. There was actually another course in this line-up after the champagne cocktail at the beginning, but in my moment of tasting food ecstasy, I forgot to take a picture. This was certainly a very special dinner--the most incredible I've had to date--and one I'll remember for the rest of my life. I'm so lucky that Mom and Brother were willing to do this for me. I don't think this post and the pictures do it justice.

And I couldn't believe that I was actually hungry the morning after.

Creating Guides

My first and current project for my internship is putting together a guide that will teach MCFL staff how to create blog posts on their staff site. The original guide was a "quick and dirty" how-to that went over the basic steps--essentially providing just enough information to allow the staff to create said content. However, now the task is to create a guide that will be much more illustrative and provide information on some of the other things they can add to their blog post (as well as include the basics found in the first guide).

Before I even started the project, I took a look at the available guides--the original guide that my work will replace and another guide created for posting blogs on the library's public site. The former gave me an idea of what skill level I would need to accommodate, and the latter let me see an example of a much more complete guide that included illustrations. It is important when creating anything to know your audience and make sure that you are keeping in mind the lowest denominator (aka the lowest skill level) of those that will be using it. This is actually a concept that came up in my first coding class of my MLIS program. To be truly "user friendly," your content will need to reach the greatest number of users possible. Because I knew that screenshots of the pages would be particularly helpful for those less computer savvy, this was my first step. I took a number of screenshots, from the log-in page for the staff all the way through the process to where they save and publish their blog entry.

My next step was to start outlining the process--using language that was not heavy in technical jargon, of course--and editing the screenshots to serve as useful illustrations. This is the part I'm still in the process of completing. As I've been editing, I've realized that there are additional screenshots of particular buttons/features that I now want to include. I'm hoping that this guide doesn't become TOO big with everything that I would like to put in it. I haven't been given a maximum page length, but I know that the longer the guide the less likely anyone will read the entire thing. It needs to be useful both in content and in length; since this is for library staff, I must assume that my audience does not have a lot of free time to read a lengthy how-to guide.

I actually made a discovery as I was doing this (never stop trying to learn new things!). I'm creating the original guide using Microsoft Word, with the intent to convert it into a .pdf file for the format that will actually be made available to the library's staff; this is done both for longevity and to make sure users can't accidentally delete content of the guide and not know how to bring it back, which I can foresee happening with an editable Word file (yes I know editing can be restricted, but that can create problems if passwords to allow future changes are lost). Anyway, as I was using Word, I discovered the beauty of text boxes (something I've never used in Word before because c'mon, it's Word!). One in particular was of a style very appropriate to that of the guide, so now I'm using it to compartmentalize information that may seem like a "duh!" kind of thing for those with my skill level, but would not be immediately obvious to those with less computer comfort. That way, more experienced users can easily skip over this information and spend less time reading/skimming through text they don't need. It's a way to increase accessibility through visual cues. Neat, huh?

I'm very pleased with how the guide has turned out so far and hope to have it completed by tomorrow (I would prefer to finish it today). I've definitely enjoyed letting my creativity play a major role in the design--perhaps this is a skill set I can continue to work on and use to market myself for future library positions.

Enough Life Already!

No, the title is not some desperate manifestation of self-injuring thoughts, but rather a cry for some order in the recent chaos of...life.

The last thirty days have been uncommonly eventful. Yes, I know the adage: "when it rains, it pours." But as I've mentioned to several people, it hasn't just poured, it's flooded. Have you ever felt like you were *this close* to your breaking point? Well, I'm there. I'm now in emotional and mental survival mode. It's not an easy thing to admit. I'm a person that likes some measure of control over her life and there's just been way too much that I haven't been able to control lately. It adds a level of nervousness and anxiety onto an already stressed state. I'm more than ready for things to calm down and for me to once again reach equilibrium and settle back into a routine.

Admittedly, not everything that's happened in the last month has been bad. As I mentioned several posts ago, my adorable (enter copious amounts of gushing here) nephew Jaybird came into the world and into my life. Every minute I've spent with him has been a blessing. But then the tidal wave of stuff hit and I've found myself struggling to handle it all: another semester starting for school, several large projects going on at work, family (not going into details), everything seemingly happening all at once. The straw that broke the camel's back was having to put down my cat yesterday. She was very old and had gotten very sick (an incurable cancerous tumor was growing in her mouth), and yesterday we had to make the decision to let her go. I am so thankful that the vet she had been seeing was so incredibly compassionate and supportive throughout Bailey's last few weeks. And I'm thankful that she had a peaceful end.

I end this post with a picture memorial for Bailey, long-time family member and a cat that was not afraid to lay down the law with her peers. We will miss you Bailey, even your sister Sandy who will need to find someone else to stalk around the apartment.

Bailey

1992-2013

Enlightenment

Today is one of clarity. While I had known that I was accepted to the internship I applied to for this semester, and I knew lots of things about it--like who my supervisor is, my Student Learning Outcomes (very important and a required part of the internship), and generally what I would be doing--I had still lacked the real certainty of what I would be doing in a practical sense. My knowledge of the internship was a big cloud with no real definition as to my tasks.

Now, I have seen the light (metaphorically of course). I had my Orientation meeting where I was able to discuss a lot with my site supervisor. I had the opportunity to ask questions about the paperwork I need to fill out; my position as far as the county administration is concerned is that of volunteer, even though I have probably more access than the average library volunteer (and more interesting projects!), yet I am still required to fill out the usual paperwork required by any bureaucracy. And I have to keep a time card for the county--not something I had expected! I will be diving into Drupal headfirst--without a parachute, or a cushion to break my fall--and I already know I will be quickly outstripping the instruction provided by my Drupal class that I am simultaneously taking. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I will be introduced to a lot of functions and features on the admin side of Drupal that I will not get experience with in my class. But, that also means I may not have much crossover between my internship and my Drupal class.

I already have a nice little to-do list that includes actual assignments coupled with things to start thinking about and features to test to discover functionality problems. I also will be researching the ability to integrate specific file types into a Drupal interface. So a nice variety of practical experience. There was a lot of discussion about tasks/projects that will need to be addressed and accomplished in the future, so I also have a decent idea of where my internship will be going. We again talked about the opportunity for me to be on site for additional face-to-face experience, and I will be submitting various dates to my supervisor for days I would be available to go on-site. My goal is to be there two days a month. I'm already planning on attending the Webmaster's Team meeting in March as one of my two on-site days that month.

So all in all, a good (if belated) start to my internship. This weekend will find me diligently starting my to-do list. At least for a few hours!