Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Recipe: Perfect Basic Rice

Making PERFECT rice can be somewhat of a daunting task to many. Me being a college student, I've attempted MANY different ways to cook rice for many reasons, but mostly because its cheap and can be healthy. What I describe below is known as the "absorption method" and it will cook the rice almost perfectly every time(with a little fiddling at first)

  1. Measure out 1 cup of rice
  2. Measure out 2 cups of water
  3. Measure 1-2 tablespoons of oil(olive oil preferably but anything will work)
  4. Bring it to a boil then lower it till a slight simmer
  5. Cook for 12 mins WHILE keeping it covered (must be a tight fitting lid)
  6. Remove from the heat and let it stand off of the heat between 10-20 mins
  7. Fluff w/ a fork gently as to not make it into a mush.
Thats about it. There is one CARDINAL rule, DO NOT LIFT OFF the lid ANYTIME during the cooking. The rice is cooked by steaming then it absorbs the liquid while it stands. If you like your rice a little softer, add a little bit more water. If you like it a little more al dente, then add a little less water. This recipe is scalable, so you can scale up the quantity of rice depending on how much you need.

Of course you can add spices/broth/flavorings to this basic recipe to your hearts content. My personal favorite additions are garlic powder, sesame seed oil instead of olive oil, Ms. Dash Southwest Chipotle, Red Pepper flakes and soy sauce.

Enjoy :)

Monday, February 11, 2008

How To: Put HTML content into GMAIL emails

Gmail doesn't allow you to put normal html tags (img, embed, table, etc...) into its emails. This is a place where other email services excel at but Gmail is limited. This limitation can be bypassed by simply attaching the content, but not being able to put the content(image,music,video,etc...) inline in the email seriously limits creativity...

There is a VERY simple way of by passing this problem, the steps are below.

  1. Upload the media online, either to tinypic.com or use the URL where the image/video/animation is stored.
  2. Goto to pages.google.com and "add" the image to ANY webpage (can be a dummy one that is setup just for this purpose, you dont need to actually publish the page). MAKE sure you don't browse to the content that is stored on your computers harddrive. It MUST be stored somewhere accessible online.
  3. When it gets added to the page in the WYSIWYG editor, right click it and "copy" the object.
  4. Goto gmail and paste it into the email.
Voila you have just placed an image/video/animation/etc INLINE in the email instead of being limited to JUST attaching it. :)