Adventures in kitchen gadgetry

Yesterday, I bought a coffee grinder. It wasn't even all that fancy a coffee grinder -- settings for coarse, medium and fine, with markings on the cup that holds the beans for 4, 8, 12 and 15 cup amounts and corresponding time settings for each of the granularity settings. I call that a good deal for $20 (which is what Target wanted; for some reason the one I bought isn't on their website).

Tonight, enochsmiles suggested that I could make almond flour if I set it to the finest granularity. Conveniently, I had plenty of roasted, unsalted almonds on hand, leftovers from the last Mues1337 cereal-making adventure. Curious, I filled the bean cup to the 8-cup setting and gave it a grind. A minute or two later, presto, almond flour. At first, it looked like I had gotten just a tiny amount of flour from the almonds -- there wasn't much in the cup -- but further inspection revealed that quite a bit of finely-ground flour, adhered with almond oil, had become lodged beneath the blades. The blades are not large, though, so it was easy to remove the impacted flour in clumps. I shook it around a bit and it came apart pretty readily; perhaps almond flour ought to be sifted before use.

In any case, I am now in possession of a quantity of almond flour, with the means to make a great deal more if I so desire. Does anyone have any good almond flour recipes? I'm going to see if I can find one for the sort of almond cookies you can get at Chinese bakeries (at least the ones in Houston), and I am given to understand it makes pretty decent tempura batter as well. I know I have a few readers of the non-gluten-eating persuasion, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Settling in

I got about an hour and a half of sleep this morning.

enochsmiles went back to the land of chocolate and bureaucracy. The house will be very quiet tonight. I've gotten used to the quiet domesticity of humming laptops, fixing dinner or warming up leftovers, watching movies, cuddling up together at night. Dear CodeCon, please hurry up and get here, love always, Meredith. I suppose I will spend the intervening time finishing the unpacking, building bookshelves, making window treatments, and hacking on QBE, but it would also be nice to be able to do these things with him around.

I am now making actual contributions to the codebase at work, and as is typical (at least, typical with respect to my Adventures in Postgres), the moment I started actually touching the code instead of just reading it, things started going click click click into place. It has left me feeling a bit grumpy thanks to some typesafety behaviour which, um, I really can't talk about this in any great detail but let's just say I wish I could use the Boost MPL but I can't and so cipherpunk, if you have some free time, I would like to bitch on your shoulder sometime soonish kthxbye(). Still and all, progress.

yoctohedron is off to more of the Noir City film festival tonight, for a couple of ambiguously described "SF noir" films; this could equally well describe The Maltese Falcon or Dark City, but I am too far from the city to be able to go investigate. I should really fix this eventually.

So, with that, off to dinner with $sysadmin. Those Bay Areans whom I have been neglecting, please feel free to thwap me upside the head once I have had some sleep.