Posts Tagged recipes
Maple Pecan Granola Recipe
Until college, cereal was something only to be consumed at breakfast. It was something I ate without much of a liking for it, but I had it every morning with milk and orange juice.
Then, I got to college and faced the experience of eating in the dining halls. Our entire cross country team would pile into the Caf every night after practice and sit in the same cluster of tables. Most of the time, we were exhausted from whatever workout or long run we had done that day and were dying for food. Of course, the stingy workers would only hand out a few pellets of nasty roast beef or a few noodles of pasta after standing in line for ten minutes. We were starving — give us more!
“Get back in line,” the workers retorted.
Thus, after whatever inhaling whatever meager rations the Caf workers gave us, everyone on the team finished their dinner with a nightly ritual: cereal. Cereal wasn’t portion controlled by the miserly Caf workers, so we ate a lot of it. When I first arrived as a freshman, I couldn’t believe everyone else ate cereal for dinner. It seemed so out of place, but soon enough, I found myself doing it every night along with the rest of my teammates.
The Caf always had Kellog’s granola, which in some way or another became my cereal of choice for breakfast and dinner. A bowl of it in the morning gave me most of the energy I needed to get through a day of class and practice. It was also great after plenty of grueling workouts. So, I not only ate cereal with almost every meal, but I became addicted to granola.
At first, I stuck to the Kellog’s brand, which I ate at the Caf. It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I discovered bulk granolas in the grocery stores, while a few years later I found Trader Joe’s, which sold the same bulk granolas as well as other granola-based cereals for cheap. All the while I continued to eat cereal for dinner while at school: my parents would have a fit if I did that at home. Then, after screwing around on the Internet, I found that it was easy to make your own granola with a minimum of ingredients. I found a great recipe here and also here, but my version is as follows:
Preheat oven to 275 and combine the following in a large mixing bowl:
- 4 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup pecans
- 1/3 cup, heaping, packed brown sugar
- pinch of salt
- 4 tsp canola oil
- 1 cup pure maple syrup (I use Grade B, but Grade A Dark Amber is also good)
Place on a cookie sheet with cooking spray. Bake for about 40 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes to allow the edges and center to dry evenly. When the oats turn golden brown and the syrup has been absorbed, it’s done.
Since I don’t eat in the dining halls anymore, I wonder if my old teammates still finish off every dinner in the Caf with a bowl of cereal.
“Web 2.0″ Ranking Systems
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on March 17, 2008
It seems that a lot of user generated content on the internet has mutually exclusive sorting parameters. This makes finding the good stuff pretty hard. For example, go to a site like rateitall.com, allrecipes.com, or newegg.com and do a search. These search results can then be sorted by several parameters, but usually only one sort can be performed at a time. Most often, two of the parameters are user rating and popularity. With rating, users rate the item/product/whatever it is in an “x out of 10″ manner, while popularity lists the number of times the item or product has been rated/viewed/purchased.
This leads to a problem: sorting by rating may yield results that have been highly rated by a small number of users. With a small sample size, there is a really high potential for bias. Sorting chicken recipes by user rating may yield a top result with one user rating of 10/10, but the recipe makes use of a ton of garlic. It just so happens that this one user really likes garlic, hence the high rating. However, if many people were to rate this recipe, due to the excessive garlic it might fall to an average rating of 3/10. The results of the rating-based sort would be completely altered with much larger sample sizes. Conversely, if you have weird tastes, you might prefer something that most people detest and vice versa, making rating-based sorts with large sample sizes useless.
One other rating problem is that of user satisfaction. If a user really has trouble with a particular product or really enjoys something, he or she is more likely to express that opinion than if it was something mediocre. This will really affect the distribution of ratings for items/products as most ratings will be either really good or really bad, but very few will be in the 50 percentile range. Forcing each visitor/user/customer to rate each item may solve this problem, but could be a real pain for those who hate leaving feedback at all. I’ll leave this one alone for now.
On the flip side, sorting by popularity alone may also yield poor results. The most popular items or products may have mediocre ratings. Take chain pizza, for example. Everyone knows Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s, but few would argue they make the best pizzas. The question becomes one of how to use rating and popularity to generate meaningful results — specifically results that cater to your tastes.
The quickest approach is to combine rating and popularity into one sorting mechanism. Results can be sorted by rating but weighted by popularity. Thus, a singly-rated item of 10/10 would fall behind a very popular item with a rating of 9/10. Of course, the question remains of how to determine the weight. The issue of individual taste is also another matter. The best way to solve this would be to further constrain the search parameters based on those tastes, weeding out the stuff you don’t like while placing greater emphasis on what you do like.
In short, it’s hard to know if your best search results are really what you are looking for. Often, the best choice for you is buried deep somewhere and will never be found.
OMG! Spring Break! Woooo! … not
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on March 2, 2008
Invariably, after any period off from school longer than a weekend, torrents of the same inquisition echo across campus:
How was your break?
Was it a good break?
Where did you go on your break?
What did you do on your break?
Everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off screaming these same irritating questions at each other. “Blah blah blah break blah blah blah.” I would venture to say that 95% of the students do the same thing as I do: go home and do nothing. I ran into a bunch of teammates on Friday before I left as most were heading to practice for a workout. They all seemed jealous that I got to go home while they all had to stay at school for most of the week to practice and get ready for IC4As. I consider them to be the lucky ones. They get to blaze around the track in tough workouts and head to Boston for one of the meets I’ve enjoyed the most. Plenty of times this semester I’ve walked by the track on the way to the UC for dinner and seen everyone working out. It leaves me feeling sad that I’m not a part of that anymore. I would feel a lot better if I could run again normally and I could join them again at least one or two days a week.
Sarah has an elliptical machine at her house so I went over there yesterday and did that while she did some homework. It was better than the rec center since we put on Animal House and I had to strain to see the only clock in the room. The machine was a lot different than the ones at school — the school ellipticals are more like those nordic trac skiing machines and don’t make you cycle your knee through much of a range of motion. This one was more aggressive and its resistance was also greater, which probably put more pressure on my IT band. It didn’t hurt, but it seemed a little tight afterwards. I’ll try some running today to see how it goes (a couple loops around the block) and maybe head over there for some more elliptical. I don’t enjoy it that much, as I’ve said, but it’s better than sitting around and being a bum.
I do have some work to do over the next week. First, I’ve got to typeset and turn in the Theory of Computation homework that my professor has been so lenient about. I’ve done the actual work on paper, but now I’ve got to typeset it, and I feel really lazy and don’t want to do anything school related. I’ve also got to start on the design overview for the sensor network project I’m working on. As it turns out, my Theory of Computation professor said most Master’s students who do a project just write a paper based on a proposed system but don’t actually implement anything. If I can convince my adviser to finalize our design as quickly as possible (we’ve been screwing around a bit and changing things), then I might actually be able to get the paper done by the end of March. If I do that, then I’ll make the deadline for the Master’s project and get my degree in May. That would be nice, but I’m not betting the farm on it. This week I should also modify my TA lab grading script to handle infinite loops when running students’ code.
My dad has a trip to San Francisco this week, so that would be cool to go out there and come back, but I doubt there will be empty seats on the plane. Since I’m hurt, worrying about having to run hasn’t been bothering me as much, so I can be more flexible about stuff like that. Unfortunately, I’ll probably just be stuck here.
Screwing around on the Internet as I do nearly every day, I came across something interesting: a maple-flavored pie that someone had found at some restaurant in Vermont. The pictures and testimonial made it sound really good, so I scoured the Internet for recipes. I found one that appeared on several sites, which took maple sugar. Since you can’t really get that in a store around here, I ordered some from Vermont and made the recipe with the help of my mom (with the crust). It wasn’t all that great and didn’t look like anything in the pictures. It came out more like a maple flavored quiche — very eggy. Later, I found the recipe that was probably the one in the pictures and variations of it. Basically, just condensed milk or cream, maple syrup, and some versions have flour, but no eggs. I could try making that one.
Being able to eat decent food and sleep in my own bed are two great things about being at home this week. Since the first day of my freshman year, I’ve never slept well at school, but as soon as I’m home, I’m out like a rock every night. I don’t know what gives. Also, the UC food has been really crappy and repetitive as of late, especially with regards to having some kind of vegan patty just about every night as the main attraction. Being able to eat good stuff again has improved my mood.
So, that pretty much sums it up for the next week or so. I guess now it’s off to see how my IT band does today.
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