So I set out tonight with the goal of making a baked shrimp dish that I’ve been wanting to try. Instead I decided I wasn’t that hungry so I’d do something a little smaller. I looked in my fridge and decided to do the following and wow did it come out amazingly. I really can’t believe how well given I just threw it together.

Serves two as an appetizer.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 12 minutes

What you need (these are all approximate…)
2 Roma Tomatoes cut in half length wise and scooped out
1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
2 tablespoons fresh chopped basil
1 salt
1 tablespoon pepper
Small amount of black truffle oil (or good olive oil)

What you do
Take the basil, salt, and pepper and mix it all together with the crumbled feta. Scoop the mixture into each tomato, filling each (don’t over fill too much or it will run over). Once they are stuffed sprinkle salt liberally over them then drizzle with truffle oil. Put them in the oven at 350 for 12 minutes. Eat a few minutes after taking them out of the oven. Awesome.

This weekend I made this as a appetizer and it was fantastic. Very quick and easy to make, the mix of the sweet flavor from the dates goes wonderfully with the Prosciutto and is balanced out well by the basil. Very recommended. Here’s how:

What you’ll need
16 pitted Medjool dates
16 large basil leaves
1/3 cup soft herbed goat cheese (I would use smoked next time)
4 wide, thin slices prosciutto, each cut into 4 long strips
16 toothpicks, soaked in water a few minutes

What you’ll need to do
Heat broiler to low. Stuff each date with cheese then wrap with a basil leaf and a prosciutto strip. Secure with a toothpick. Broil until cheese bubbles, about 3 minutes. Serve warm.

What they’ll do to you
The great thing is each wrapped date is about 80 calories so not that bad for you at all. Enjoy!

I struggled with what to call this recipe since I made it last night. I think Trailer Park Apple Desert is about the best thing given that’s pretty close to what it is. I will say it was surprisingly good, much better than I expected given the recipe below:

What you need
1 Granny Smith Green apple
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter, melted
5 ounces room temperature Sprite. Do not use 7 up
1 package Original Crescent Rolls (with the canned biscuits)

What you do
Peel and core apple and cut in to 16 slices
Separate crescent rolls and lay out on cutting board.
Put 2 slices on big end of each roll and roll up – jelly roll fashion.
Put in greased 8 X 8 pan with seam side down.
Combine sugar, butter and sprite. Pour over apples. Sprinkle with cinnamon to taste.
Bake at 350 for 40 minutes

Sprite, I know. Hence the name. Any desert that you make with Sprite just has to have trailer park in the name right? I will admit it was pretty good, we had it with some vanilla ice cream and it was quite tasty. So if you’re looking for a quick and easy apple cobbler type desert (and some extra Sprite) I say go for it, you’ll feel trashier than you have in a while!

A long while back i got what turned out to be a worthless box that I thought would forever live in my closet, an AppleTV. I first got it with the hopes of hacking it to play DivX and other media but soon learned that was much harder than I expected. Since I simply hate iTunes and would rather eat glass than be forced to use it the AppleTV was of very little use to me. And yes I knew all this going in and didn’t care, I just wanted to play.

Well Apple finally released the Take 2 update for AppleTV last week. So yesterday afternoon I took advantage of my sick day off and updated my AppleTV to see what the new changes were like. Gone is the pretty scrolling interface of the first AppleTV, instead replaced with an extremely boring, square two column menu system. While this works just fine it looks like shit – very non-Apple if you ask me. But ok, how are the new features? Well the main one I was interested in (and will review here) was renting an HD movie from the iTunes store directly from the device. I’m happy to say this works well and is easy enough. You can browse through the HD movies and once you’ve chosen one you can even watch the trailer if you want. I selected my movie and for $4.99 I rented the HD version (their HD selection sucks right now but should be growing). Once I selected it I had to put in my iTunes ID information (which I should only have to do once). A few minutes after it started downloading it said it was available to view, a nice touch. It of course has the typical DRM shit on it, I can watch it as much as I want for 24 from the moment I start watching it.

So how did it look and sound? Well it sounded great, no pops, cracks or scratches. It also looked very nice, but not “full” HD. I’ve got my AppleTV connected to a 46″ Sharp 1080p LCD and while it looks very good I definitely could see some encoding artifacts and lots of banding in gradient color areas. I’m not sure what real resolution/bitrate it was but it sure wasn’t 1080p. It didn’t look so bad that I was upset, I’d say it looked like a standard DVD upscaled to 1080 – but a very good upscale.

All-in-all a good experience, if they continue to increase the HD selection I will definitely be renting from them again. Now if only it were prettier and if it only had a real remote, gotta get my Harmony 880 programmed to control it, I just know I’m going to break that little thing.

I’ve been struggling a bit lately with what to write about, how to better focus my site. I’ve been paying lots of attention to my Lijit and Google stats and of course reading the comments people have left here. So I thought today maybe I should just ask.

I’ll continue to write about things that I enjoy, but want to try to write about things you would find interesting too. So here’s your chance, tell me what you want and I’ll see what I can do to give it to you.

This week Jason decided he wanted the MacBook Air so he went out and got one (don’t you just love impuslive VCs?). Being a fairly huge Lenovo/Thinkpad fan I semi-tried to talk him out of it and into the X61 which is also an ultra portable (we have several X series laptops already). Since I knew he was excited about the Air (hell it is an Apple product remember) and since I know that Apple makes great hardware (come on the are a hardware company) I didn’t argue with him too much at all. Man am I glad I didn’t.

I’ve been working on the Air for a few days now getting it all setup. I have it dual booting OS X and Vista, and it’s doing it quite nicely. Vista is plenty snappy (this is the lower end 1.6 with the 80 standard drive). And yes, it is so amazing because of how thin it is. But that’s not it. What’s amazing about it is that you know it’s thin, but you don’t get how thin. Like many Apple products you have to touch it, feel it, hold it. When you do you instantly appreciate that it isn’t thin – it’s anorexic! When I told a friend it was roughly the thickness of a DVD case he didn’t believe me. “Then it must be a flimsy piece of shit” he quickly said but see, that’s the truly astonishing part, it isn’t. Not even a little bit. The Air is so solid you’d swear it was built from Adamantium. It doesn’t flex or move in your hands at all, it’s ever bit as stable as the MacBook Pro. The keyboard is responsive (even if it is missing a bunch of “special” keys) and the screen is wonderfully bright. The backlight keyboard is very easy to see in low light (I do think I prefer the color of the MBP keyboard vs. this black one).

The Air is however not without faults. First: expansion. The biggest oversight of the Air is no 3G wireless data. See that I can forgive, there will always be things down the road you want to add (yes it should have 3G now). Sure it’s got WiFi but ONLY WiFi, not even Ethernet. So if you want to add 3G to it (which of course Jason does) you have to use a USB dongle. But of course the USB port (there is after all only 1) is in a little flip down door that is so small you can’t plug the dongle in. So you have to use an extension cord. So guess what, your tiny USB 3G dongle is now almost as large as the whole fucking laptop. Brilliant huh? There’s also this stupid Mac keyboard, missing all the “techie” keys like PrtScn, etc. (which yes, I do actually use). It also assumes I either need volume up or F12, not both. Since to use both I have to add a key to the mix (the function key). Likewise with page down, home, end, etc. This isn’t specific to the Air, rather a design fault on all Apple laptops. Then there’s the price. Roughly $2,000 for this thing is quite a lot given it’s relative lack of power. Since you don’t care about that given you’re using this as an email type device (you’re not editing video on it that’s for sure!) generally I’m fine with paying for the miniturazation but the asking price is quite steep.

All-in-all the Air is a staggeringly good laptop. I emailed Jason this morning and told him I had to have one. I really think I do. Which is a shame since I got a MacBook Pro about 2 months ago. It just may have to go up on eBay soon. It just might. So if you’re considering a small laptop anytime soon look hard at the Air. Then again don’t, it’s so small you might not see it if you squint.