Smoked Italian Sausage Hoagie

Key info

• Difficulty 
  › Intermediate
• Prep time 
  › 25 min
• Cook time 
  › 1 hr 10 min
• Serves 
  › 8 sandwiches

Ingredients

About 2 cups applewood chips for smoking, soaked in water for at least 30 minutes
8 links sweet Italian sausage
1 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
4 red bell peppers
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 fresh sub rolls 
1 cup grated ricotta salata cheese
4 pepperoncini, sliced

Method

Special equipment: A smoker box and metal or wooden skewers

1. Heat a grill to medium-low heat. 
2. Use a 2-stage fire or indirect heat setup on your gas grill. 
3. Add the soaked applewood chips to a smoker box and place the box directly onto the heating element or coals. 
4. Once plumes of smoke appear, place the sausage links over the indirectly heated side of the grill and smoke for about 1 hour, flipping halfway through. 
5. The internal temperature of the sausages when tested with a meat thermometer should read 160 degrees F at this point. 
6. Move the sausages to the hot side of the grill and give them a char on the outside for 3 to 5 minutes per side.
7. Meanwhile, skewer the onion quarters on metal or wooden skewers. Place the bell peppers and onions on the hot side of the grill and cook until charred on all sides, 20 to 30 minutes. Set aside until cool enough to handle.
8. Remove the majority of the skin and all of the seeds and stems of the peppers and give them a rough chop along with the charred onions. 
9. Place both into a food processor along with the olive oil and garlic and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.
10. Top a roll with a hot sausage followed by a nice smear of the smoked pepper spread, a sprinkle of ricotta salata and a couple of slices of pepperoncini. Serve immediately.

Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies

                                                                                                                       

                                                                        

Method

1. Line a brownie tin 22x29cm, 8 ½" x 11" with baking parchment. Heat your oven to 170°C.

2. Break 225g of chocolate into small chunks and place in a heatproof bowl with the butter. Place over a pan of simmering water and heat until melted. Leave to cool.

3. Beat the eggs and sugar together until pale and the mixture has thickened. Add the melted chocolate and butter mixture to the eggs and stir until thoroughly combined. Fold in the flour, salt, chocolate chunks and vanilla extract. Pour into the prepared in.

4. Using an electric whisk on a slow speed, beat the cream cheese with the custard powder, sugar, vanilla extract and cream. Mix until smooth and all the ingredients are combine.

5. Drop spoonfuls of cheesecake mix onto the brownie then using a spatula fold through the brownie to create swirls. Bake for 25-30minutes. Check after this time as ovens vary, it may need a little longer. A little mixture should still stick to a skewer when inserted in the middle of the brownie.

6. Leave to cool completely before cutting into squares.

                                                                             Key info

• Difficulty 
  › Easy
• Prep time 
  › N/A
• Cook time 
  › 1/2 hr
• Serves 
  › 12

Ingredients

• 225g plain chocolate, 45% cocoa solids
  225g unsalted butter
  3 large eggs
  225g caster sugar
  75g self-raising flour
  1/2 tsp salt
  175g plain chocolate, chopped into small chunks
  1 tsp vanilla extract
• For the cheesecake mix :
• 200g full fat cream cheese
  1½ tsp custard powder
  15g caster sugar
  1 medium egg
  ½ tsp vanilla extract
  60ml double cream

Initiation By Life

Is initiation by Life superior to parental guidance?

Insightful story of a painter who refused to ordain his own son in his ways.

Was the experiment successful?

“Sir,” said Suman. “Feel like hearing something from you!”

“What?” asked Rosh.

He was sitting on the lawn outside the Engineering College with some First Year Juniors, who had arrived from Bihar. These boys got along very well with him, ever since he had saved them from ragging.

“Narrate anything you wish,” Suman insisted.

“Wanna hear a story?” Rosh smiled and asked.

All the boys gathered around him immediately. He laughed at their eagerness. Intimacy swelled up in his heart, and began to choke his throat.

The sun was setting. An invisible painter was creating new pictures every moment, on the canvas of the sky. A thought transformed into words and came up to his lips. He felt like voicing it out.

“I haven’t got anything written up,” he said, “but a story emerges in me as I witness this colorful evening. Let me try and bind it in words.”

The boys were listening to him with rapt attention. He broke-off a grass shoot, bit it between his teeth, and started speaking:

Whenever the child entered his father’s room while playing around, he was awed at seeing his father paint. Forgetting his play, he would long gaze upon the pictures.

He was amazed how different brush strokes gradually transformed into shapes. Observing the child’s curiosity, the painter invited the creator within him one day.

As the little boy sat silent and surprised, admiring his father’s latest work of art, the painter got up and put a paintbrush, colors, palette and a blank page in his little hands.

The lad looked up at his father, a question rooted in his look.

The painter smiled. “Create!” he said.

Confidence and hope lit up the child’s eyes with joy. He was delighted and thrilled.

The painter smiled. “Begin!” he said.

The child looked fervently at those items. But suddenly, he sobered. Silently, with his father’s gifts clenched in both his hands, his quiet look queried his father again.

The painter smiled. “Yourself!” he said.

The child’s lips moved finally. His voice chimed, “Ordination?”

“Not mine!” the father replied seriously, “Life’s! My teaching is nothing compared to your initiation by Life. And, it will leave my mark on your work.”

The child bowed his head, respectfully touched the creative materials to his forehead, but did not move. The painter understood his hesitation. He pointed a finger at the horizon, and said, “Study!”

Holding everything with great care in his tiny palms, the child returned. Days passed. And weeks. Then months.

One day, the father saw his son trying to mix colors. The painter became a silent spectator.

The child was excited. It was his first effort. But inadvertently, the paint spread everywhere.

The child was shocked. Lifting his head, when he found his father observing him, helpless tears rolled off his eyes.

“Analyze!” the painter said. He gave the child a blank new sheet, and retired.

A while later, the little boy tried again. His brush gave birth to some scribbles on the page. With curiosity and enthusiasm, the child brought the sheet to his father.

The painter looked at the artwork. Unaffectedly, he returned it to the child, and said, “Decide!”

The kid looked at the picture for a long time, then let it drop. His entreating eyes petitioned silently again. Compassion swelled up in the father. He gave a new leaf to the potential artist.

The child returned again. He placed the new sheet carefully. After much contemplation, he set his brush free again one day. A different shape surfaced on the paper.

The child looked at his work with pride and affection. Satisfied, he went back to his father with the painting. The painter looked at the new creation. Returned it to the boy, he said, “Redo!”

The child was surprised, but he became an examiner. He checked and examined the image from different angles. Eventually, he slowly dropped it there. Eyes bowed in mute solicitation.

The father smiled, and gave a new sheet to the young painter.

Days passed. Seasons passed. Years passed. The painter grew old. The son became an eminent painter. Nature presented the new painter with a son.

The old painter used to wonder, how his grandson twittered and played like his son had done. Time held his grandson’s hand and guided him through childhood to puberty.

One day, as he did every day, the grandson was sitting alone, beholding nature.

‘It’s time for his education,’ thought the old man.

Bracing against the armrest of his chair, he stood up, and with the help of his walking stick, walked near his grandson. The youth was imploring the sky:

“O Life! Even if I am unable to color your pages the best, please give me a new leaf to try again.”

A spontaneous smile flashed on the elder’s face. Inspiration is but a sign. The eternal teacher Life had accepted his grandson as student.

Breathing a contented sigh, he returned and sank back into his chair again. The education had begun. Today had been the first lesson.

2016 Tech Trends

Insightful story with Leo’s reflections on 2016 Tech Trends.

Technological progress was revolutionizing his world but Leo was excited most by virtual reality.

Replies started arriving soon after Leo had sent his New Year message.

As he read the humbling replies, he marveled at how the pace of technology had changed over the years, allowing him to communicate instantaneously via a many to many social networking platform like WhatsApp.

It was such a useful technology, and yet so disruptive at the same time. Since the advent of texting, kids had fast been losing vocabulary, as well as their ability and focus required to read or write even a few paragraphs at a time.

By carrying their cellphones everywhere, and stopping whatever they were doing to check their messages, communication and inter-connectivity had blossomed, but literacy and numeracy skills had suffered.

The future had approached faster than he had imagined. On many fronts, and for many, it had approached faster than they could even handle. This had been his recurrent observation now for many years, yet each year this insight still managed to catch him by surprise.

He thought of names like Kodak, Xerox, Polaroid. In 1998, Kodak had been a worldwide name. It had been one of the largest US stocks at the time, with 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. In just three years, it had gone bankrupt. Kodak moments were still being captured, but not on Kodak film.

Digital cameras had been around since 1975, yet who in 1998 could have thought that just three years later no one would be taking pictures on photo film again?

Digital age had well and truly arrived in the new millennium. Digital automation was conquering the world, in his lifetime, and before his very own eyes – as the next Industrial Revolution.

He had been born in the exponential age, where technological progress followed Moore’s law, halving computing costs every few years. Yet, exponentiation could not continue forever. It had its mathematical limits.

Still, the practical benefits from this rapid change, however fleeting it may be on the scale of life on earth, promised to empower and enrich the common man’s life like nothing had ever done before in human history. Also, it was happening on a scale grander than ever before.

What had happened to Kodak, was soon to happen to many others advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, cashless societies, automated bio sensing, health diagnosis via cellphones, autonomous or self-driving electric cars, online education, virtual reality, augmented reality, space travel, stem cell breakthroughs and 3D printing etc.

The price of a 3D printer had fallen from $18,000 down to $400 in the last decade. In the same time, it had become a hundred times faster.

Last year, Leo had wanted to buy a 3D printer, but Leo and Dan had talked him out of buying one, citing their experience of having bought a $2,000 LCD LED Smart TV, which had turned out to be not so smart after all. Wait, they had both cautioned.

In 2012, they had bought an LG 55" Full HD (1920x1080 pixel), 3D, Wi Fi compatible TV with 4 HDMI and 3 USB2.0 ports, which used a dongle to get online but could rarely stream a YouTube video efficiently despite a VDSL modem in-house. Its 2D to 3D conversion experience had been unsatisfactory too. Besides, 3D Blu rays and DVDs were still fewer and comparatively expensive.

So, last year, for just 200 NZD, they had picked up a good wireless multi-function Mono Laser Printer instead, which could print, copy, scan & fax double-sided, and came with a 3-year onsite warranty.

Leo had by now, been using multi-function laser printers for over a decade, but like with wireless telephony, when wireless printing made his life simpler and uncluttered space in his multi-storey home, he had been openly pleased.

Interestingly, Leo’s school had also bought their first 3D printer last year, so Leo had been able to see it in action from up close. What he had seen, hadn’t impressed him much, but then it usually took a lot to impress Leo.

The plastic raw materials required by the school 3D printer weren’t really cheap, and the end products it spewed out proved to be costlier than buying them retail. Yet, the novel new technology had attracted huge interest from all students throughout the year.

There had been a lot of progress in the 3D field since then. Smart phones with 3D-scanners were expected later this year. You could then 3D scan your feet, for example, and print your perfect shoes at home, instead of having to buy them from Puma. Many major shoe manufacturers were already 3D printing shoes.

By the end of the next decade, 10% of everything produced was expected to be 3D-printed. In China, they had already built a complete 6-storey office building using 3D-printing.

In remote airports, some spare aero plane parts had been 3D-printed. Even the space station had a 3D printer now, eliminating the need to transport or store large spare parts inventories in space, which had been necessary in the past.

Facebook now had a pattern-recognition software that recognized faces better than humans. Artificially intelligent computers had already beaten chess grand-masters and the best Go-players of the world. Watson had beaten the best of us at Jeopardy.

IBM’s software Watson, also already gave fast, basic legal advice with 90% accuracy, much more than the 70% accuracy from young US lawyers.

With its superior data discovery, analytics and cognitive computing skills, it was also transforming healthcare and revolutionizing personalized medicine by giving guidance and helping diagnose cancer, for instance, four times more accurately than human nurses.

But the technology that excited Leo most, was virtual reality. It was going to revolutionize learning and teaching, but for Leo, the intrepid traveler, virtual reality offered safe inexpensive travel, from the comfort of his home, regardless of the state of his health, to destinations where no man had ever gone before.

It was his ticket to Space. The final frontier!

It's A Dog's Life

It's a dog's life when you continue to exceed everyone’s expectations except your boss's.

A dog gets abused and a fail review, despite spectacular performance...

“How did it go?” asked Sam.

“Not very well,” sighed John, throwing his satchel on the dining table in disgust, and moving to the fridge to make himself a strong drink.

“Why?” Sam was surprised. John was good at almost everything he did and always gave his best to whatever he did.

To keep his depression at bay and get some exercise and income, he had recently applied for a door-to-door market research interviewer’s job at one of the companies he had worked for over a decade earlier.

He had been accepted, but the wages hadn’t moved much in over a decade. Most of Nielsen's old staff had moved on. Maybe GFC (Global Financial Crisis) had taken its toll on the company or maybe the market research industry in New Zealand just had a high turnover anyway.

John had been confident that his quality work would be recognized through swift pay reviews, and his immediate supervisor had seemed happy until today. He had been given more and more hours, and taking that as a good sign, he had requested a pay review now that he had been there three months.

It had been declined.

“A butcher was really surprised,” John was saying, “when a dog came into his shop. He shooed it away. But the Dog just wouldn’t leave. So, he went over to chase it out, and noticed a paper in its mouth.”

The dog put the note down on the ground, and pawed it repeatedly, looking at the butcher.

Curious, the butcher picked up the note. It read: Can I have a dozen sausages and a leg of lamb, please. The money is in the dog’s collar.

The butcher looked closely, and behold, a little plastic envelope was tucked inside the collar. He unbuttoned the envelope. Inside, was a twenty-dollar bill.

So, he took the money, put the sausages and lamb in a carry bag, and placed the bag’s handle around the dog’s neck. Returning the change back to the envelope, he buttoned it back to the dog’s collar.

The patiently waiting dog turned and left the shop. The butcher was very impressed, and very curious now to see what the dog did next.

Since it was about closing time, he quickly shut up shop and followed the dog. The dog walked down the street until it came to a level crossing. There it stood up on its back paws and pressed the button.

Then it waited patiently, bag in neck, for the lights to turn. When they did, he sauntered across the road, with the butcher in tow.

It came to a bus stop, where it stopped to look at the timetable. The butcher was in awe by now.

The dog checked out the bus timings, and then went and sat on an empty seat in the bus shelter.

Along came a bus. The dog walked around to the front, peered at the number, and went back to its seat. Wrong bus!

Another bus arrived. Again the dog went and looked at the number. It was the right bus. It climbed on. The astonished butcher followed it onto the bus.

The bus traveled through the town. The dog looked serenely at the scenery flashing by, its demeanor unperturbed by the weight around its neck.

Eventually it got up, and moved to the front of the bus. When it was time, it stood on its hind paws and pushed the button to stop the bus. Then it got off, the groceries still secure around its neck.

Dog and butcher walked along the road again, then turned into an alley. The dog walked up the path to a derelict house, and knocked politely. Nothing moved.

The dog woofed once. Nothing. It growled louder. Nothing. It let out a loud bark. Nothing still.

It lowered the grocery bag onto the steps, and with one paw on the bag to hold it still, wriggled its neck out of the carry bag handle. Then it trotted back down the path, turned and came racing back to the door. It hurled itself at the door. Nothing happened in response.

It did it again. Still nothing seemed to moved inside the house.

The dog went back down the path, hopped up on a narrow wall, walked over adjoining ramparts, and jumped over gaps until it finally reached a ledge outside a high window on the house wall.

It beat its head against the window several times. Then suddenly, it jumped off, walked back up the steps and waited patiently at the door.

The butcher watched as a big guy opened the door, and started abusing the dog, kicking him, punching him, and swearing at him. The horrified butcher ran up to stop the big guy.

"What in God's name are you doing?” he cried out. “This dog is a genius. He should get a medal!"

"You call this clever?” the guy barked back. “This is the second time this week the stupid bugger’s forgotten his key."

“Moral of the story,” John concluded, as he walked out to farewell the sun setting behind his porch. “You can continue to exceed the onlookers' expectations, but still fall short of your boss's expectations! It's a dog's life after all.”