Sep 05
I’ve made this a few times now and it’s been well received, so here’s the recipe for those who want it.
Pasta Sauce with Shrimp & Sundried Tomatoes
What you need:
Shrimp – peeled, deveined and uncooked
Sundried Tomatoes in oil
Fresh Basil
Cilantro
Garlic
Fish Bullion (This has been impossible for me to find here in the US of A. I’ve had to use vegetable bullion sometimes)
Heavy Cream
Instructions:
Dice the garlic into tiny little bits. Use the oil from the sun dried tomatoes to cook the garlic in a large skillet. Slice the sun dried tomatoes into smaller bits and put in the skillet with the garlic.
In the meantime, in a separate pan, broil the shrimp until done.
Add heavy cream & bullion to the skillet with the sun dried tomatoes and garlic. Let it sit for a bit, then add cilantro and basil (save some basil for decoration later). The sauce should be a light red/brown color by now. Add more basil if needed. Cilantro gives it a little bit stronger taste, so don’t use too much if you’re Swedish.
Add salt and pepper to taste, then add in the shrimp you’ve broiled and lower the heat on the skillet. (I sometimes have to add some flour at this point to make the sauce thicker).
Serve with Angel Hair pasta and a nice bottle of wine.
Enjoy 
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Aug 13
I may be hunted down and shot for posting this. It’s a Swedish National secret that’s been guarded for years at an unknown location in Sweden. If I don’t post any more after this post, you’ll know what happened.
Here’s what you’ll need.
Ground Beef. Good quality. Not the 80/20 crap.
Tomatoes. Fresh.
Shredded Cheese.
Sliced Olives.
Corn.
Taco Shells.
Taco Sauce.
Chili Seasoning Mix.
Taco Seasoning Mix.
Sour Cream
A Swedish Person
Optional: Lettuce
Optional: Diced Onions
Instructions: Brown ground beef. Add some water and the taco seasoning mix and chili seasoning mix to taste. Leave it on low to medium while you set up the rest of the ingredients and put them in nice little bowls with spoons. Heat up the Taco Shells in the microwave. Heating them in the oven takes too much time and makes them too crispy so they’ll break.
Secret Ingredient: Have a Swedish person do the above
Note: If you use anything stronger than Mild Taco / Chili Seasoning, the Swedish person might pass out
Edit: The importance of how you dice the tomatoes can not be understated. Use the sharpest knife you have.
Coming up next: Swedish Frozen Pizza
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Aug 09
I just made a batch of this to put in the freezer, and it turned out great, so figured I’d post the “recipe” here. Recipe within quotes, because I never use the same amount of ingredients and often add or remove ingredients. Farfar = Grandpa in Swedish, hence the name of it, because Dad gave me his basic ingredients and I added to that.
What you need:
Yellow Onion
Ground Beef
Beef Bouillon
Heavy Cream
Flour
Soy Sauce
Ketchup
Garlic (Fresh)
Oregano
Start by dicing the onion and throw it in a small pan. Saute meat in a large pan until fully cooked. Add diced onions and mix together. Add chopped garlic. Lower to medium to high heat and add the heavy cream. Then add beef bouillon, soy sauce and ketchup (more than you think, this is what gets the sauce a dark brown to red color) and stir. Let it cook for a bit, then add some flour to thicken the sauce. I have no idea how much, I just wing it. Once the sauce is somewhat thick, top it off with Oregano and let it sit on low heat for a while. It should look something like this when done:
Yum.
Quick & easy, serve with spaghetti and a side salad.
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Aug 08
Me in front of the large video screen
Playing Madden 10 on the BIG screen
This is what you'll see as you first walk in
Windows Error Message
This is what you'll see as you first walk in
I’m selling the tickets to the first game on eBay, in case you’re interested.
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Jul 02
My 2.5 year old daughter found this game while we were at Sam’s Club. She loves Diego, but hasn’t shown much interest in video games, but given the low price tag ($19.99), I picked it up thinking we’d have fun with it for a little while before she got bored with it.
After dinner, she saw the game on the kitchen table and wanted to play, so we popped it in and started it up. And played for 2 hours. There are two game modes, one is simply racing with animals, cars, and other items from Diego’s rescue pack. The game mode says racing, but it’s really just controlling your character trying to avoid obstacles. You hold the controller sideways and just go left and right, she picked up real fast how to do it. The only negative was that the view is from far up top, so she couldn’t actually see Diego and asked several times where Diego was.
Go Diego Go, Safari Rescue
The other game mode is a side-scroller (Think Mario) where you control a character and go left and right with some jumping involved. That one was a little bit more challenging for her, so we used the same controller and she did the jumping (by pressing the “2″ button). The cut scenes are a little long for an inpatient 2.5 year old, but you can skip them if you manage to wrestle the controller out of their hands.
We had a great time with it and we’re looking forward to playing some more this weekend. Great way to get your child introduced to video games and interact, talking about the different items in the game.
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Jun 25
I was going to write a post here about why you should watch Friday Night Lights, but Sara Mosle over at Slate already wrote it much better than I could:
In one scene, Julie comes home from her boyfriend’s house, where she’s witnessed a scene of family chaos, and announces to her Mom and Dad: “I love you. … You guys are the best parents in the world.” Eric gives his wife a smug, clueless look, as in “Aren’t we great?” But Tami’s face is a mask of horror: “No, honey!” she says. “Something terrible must have happened!”
So if you’re not watching the show, go buy season 1 right now.
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Jun 22
What it is:
An IM client that supports AIM/Google Talk/ICQ/Jabber/MSN/mySpace IM/Yahoo & Facebook IM on your iPhone. The version that got published live today to the iPhone App store includes Push Notification. I.e. when you get a new IM, you’ll get an SMS/Text-like notification on your iPhone screen telling you who sent the message and the content of the message. You have the option to either close the message box or view, which automatically opens the application and opens a chat box in which you can chat with your buddies.
The good:
-Nice UI.
-Easier to chat on the iPhone than I thought it would be.
-Error correction works great and once you get used to typing, you’ll be chatting away fast on it.
-Supports landscape view.
-Push notification is very nicely implemented, although logging off before you go to sleep is recommended.
The bad:
-Yahoo IM doesn’t work. Every time I attempt to log in, I get the error message “Connection failed on all fallback ports”. Not sure if this is temporary or not, looks like it’s not specific to this version of Beejive based on a quick Google search.
-Frequent crashes. I’ve had it for less than a day and it has crashed 3 times on me back to the home screen.
-The cost. $9.99 for an IM app? If it had been $4.99 I wouldn’t have complained, but $9.99 is more than this app is worth right now given the issues above.
Recommend that you wait and see what Meebo is up to or for Beejive to drop the price.
Update: Now getting “error: received invalid data” when trying to log in to Yahoo
Update: June 24th – looks like Yahoo is working now, at least somewhat. I could log in to one Yahoo account, but not two at the same time. Log out of all accounts and log back in.
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Jun 19
I was going to write a post about midsummer here, but TexasSwede beat me to it. (Although he conveniently forgot to mention the excessive drinking that Swedes do on this day)
So anyway…Happy Midsummer everyone!
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Jun 16
Verizon FIOS, I love you. You’ve changed my life. The speed you give me is unlike anything I’ve ever had on this side of the Atlantic. I have yet to have any network related downtime from you. (Now watch the service go down this week, just because I wrote that…)
Now fix your damn DNS servers, would ya?
(For the non-techies, DNS is what looks up the name of the web site you want to visit and translates it so that your computer knows what to download.)
If you’re on FIOS, simply switch to OpenDNS or the other Verizon DNS servers and you’ll get rid of those pesky error messages saying you can’t load certain web sites. It’s easy. Just do it. You’ll thank me later.
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