Wok This Way

For my first birthday that I lived on my own in Boston, my sister gave me a Joyce Chen wok. I have since lost, a) the chattie (the little ring that the wok is supposed to sit on to disperse the heat evenly) b) the little wire platform for steaming and c) the lid, which would have probably saved me from burning myself quite a few times with spattering oil.

While I'm nothing close to the masters you see at the Kowloon's Thai Grille, casually discoursing on the merits of various Red Sox pitchers while tending to giant woks that spout 2 foot sheets of flame, I am capable of producing edible meals from a simple rounded-bottom pan. Here's a recipe for yellow curry that makes real use of the time-honored technique of stir-frying tofu and vegetables in stages.

The ingredients:



Basically, a half package of firm or extra firm tofu cut into 1 x 2" slices and drained on some paper towels and whatever vegetables you'd like to stir-fry.

Here, I used 1 red pepper cut into strips, 1 medium sized sweet potato, some pineapple chunks, and some corn left over from a cookout (cut down the length of the cob to strip off the kernels).

For the sauce I used 1/2 can coconut milk, some natural peanut butter (about 1 tablespoon) and about a tablespoon and a half of Patak's Curry Paste.

The best practice is to assemble all the ingredients before you even start the wok, because once you get going, things need to be added fairly quickly.

Once the oil has heated to the point that it starts to smoke (over medium heat) add the tofu and stir fry until both sides are a nice golden brown. Then, using a wooden spoon or spatula, push the tofu up the sides of the wok and make a nice opening in the center. Add the sweet potato and let it get crispy on all sides. It's best to add the densest vegetables first as they will need the longest cooking time.



Once the potatoes have cooked, add the peppers and stir fry until cooked. Then add the corn and pineapple. Remember, you can add whatever vegetables you want, just be sure to cook them in succession, from hardest to softest, pushing each up the sides of the wok as they cook to make room for the next.



After all the vegetables and tofu (or meat) have cooked, make another clearing in the center and add the coconut milk, the curry paste and the peanut butter. Gently stir them together to make a rich, silky sauce and then stir the cooked tofu and vegetables in. Lower the heat and allow everything to simmer together for about 10 minutes. Add to rice or noodles and enjoy!

Wok This Way

Ice Box Cook'n: White Trash Key Lime Pie

The past few days may have been hot, but thank your god(s) that at least it's a dry heat. Below the Mason-Dixon line this is what's considered "mild" (spoken with 2 syllables of course). Hence the need for the Icebox recipes in Ernest Matthew Mickler's classic, "White Trash Cooking". I found this recipe in the "Sweet 'Pones, Puddins 'n Pies" section and it's been a hit at a few barbeques up here. All the ingredients y'all need are pictured up above.

Take the can of sweetened condensed milk and combine it with the large container of "dairy" topping and the thawed Limeade. Beat it at high speed for about a minute and then pour the mixture into 2 graham-cracker pie shells. Cover the pies and place in the freezer for at least 5 hours until thoroughly frozen.

Note: Whenever I tried to make this in the past I always ended up with way too much filling left over for one pie. So, make 2 and then fill in the gap between the top of the filling and the top of the crust with whipped cream if company's coming.

Ice Box Cook'n: White Trash Key Lime Pie

Work-At-Home Mom Survival Guide

So I lifted my nose up from my keyboard the other day and realized that I've been a WAHM for 2 and a half years now! How did I do it with out going crazy? Just loosen the straps across this canvas jacket and I'll show you.

Confession time, I read a couple of articles here and there about how to work from home before setting up my business, but found them hard to relate to. Basically the assumption is that you have a loving supportive spouse who works nice steady hours and LOVES to distract the kids when they get home and a small gang of relatives and friends who like nothing more than looking after your child because you need the house quiet when a client calls.

My reality consisted of a spouse that never knew when they were going to be hired for their next freelance gig from one day (sometimes one minute) to the next. The (sort-of) discussed plan was that he would take our daughter out for an outing during the day and that's when I could have meetings, take business calls and get work done. In practice, this made every day a delicate touch-and-go. Turns out that trying get a small child with the attention span of a mosquito to commit to some sort of plan for the upcoming 8 hours is surprisingly difficult. Several times I had to run upstairs clutching the phone to my ear as a co-tantrum erupted over exactly which Elmo pullover was to be worn for the aforementioned outing.
The always offered help from friends and family was greatly appreciated, but somehow I could (almost) never quite bring myself to call up out of the blue and "drop-off" a somewhat-pottytrained toddler for more than 20 minutes. Relatives had either lives of their own or had become Snowbirds, so I had to adapt to the actual having-the-kid around part of being a WAHM.

1. Learn to love distraction.


Meet my admin assistant

I worked in a fairly busy office for a while and if there was one thing that I had a love/hate relationship with, it was the constant kibbitzing with co-workers. Sometimes I welcomed the distraction of a juicy tidbit from TMZ.com as relayed by my office neighbor, other times I didn't want to be bothered unless we were under definite terrorist attack. For some reason, I thought I would leave that all behind by working at home. There may be times when I just need to barricade the door, but most of the time I find that turning away from the screen for 5 minutes to play soccer or admire a crayon rendering of a skyscraper, saves me a half hour of arguing and yelling. Sometimes taking that mini-break re-sets my mind and an issue I was stuck on before playing Barbie for a few minutes, magically acquires a solution when I come back.

2. Fight distraction with distraction


The Distraction Bucket

Find a basket or box that will hold a good amount of small, interactive toys and leave it right by the door of your office or near your desk. This is where the majority of Happy Meal doodads end up in our house. When your kid(s) see the bucket, they can't resist its many charms and may actually leave you alone.

3. Learn to use your time wisely.


This is, of course, the main piece of advice most home-office dwellers hear. It's also the hardest to get used to, mainly because everyone's definition of time well-spent is a little different. Give me 3 or 4 hours of "free time" and I'd probably waste the first one trying to figure out what to do first. So, hopefully I've saved the best for last and by doing so, will save you some of your valuable time.

My main rule-of-thumb when faced with a (finally!) empty house and a large to-do list is to take a few seconds and prioritize what needs to happen. I find the whiteboard above the monitor in the photo above to be a huge help. If I have 3-5 clients that all need small housekeeping tasks done, I write down each task according to its priority level. Sounds dorky, but it does feel good to stand up, stretch, and erase a completed task off the list. The left side of the board is for long-term or on-going projects and the right side is the day-to-day list.

But wait! In the photo, the right side is almost blank! That's because I make it a priority to take care of clients' needs before doing things for my own little online world. Some other things that keep me on-target are not having the TV on and not "surfing around". When I am working, I'm working because when you are your own boss, you are constantly looking over your own shoulders right?

Also, forget housework. At least try to. If I need to go upstairs to get food, I do one or two little tasks that need doing, like sorting a load of laundry or washing a few dishes. The big stuff can wait until I'm done for the day with actual paying work.

In the foreground of the photo, you can see two things in front of the keyboard. One is a spiral bound notebook where I take notes as I work or talk to clients on the phone. There are times where it's invaluable to have a log of what happened during the day especially when kid-induced chaos returns to the house. The other thing is a green hand-held grip strengthener. This is great for when you have to wait for a lengthy download/upload since it helps reduce stress too.

Overall, the main thing to bear in mind is that even though you may want to plan your day like Patton planned the landing at Normandy, you can't control everything in your environment, but it's best to let go and focus on what you CAN get done instead of what you can't!

Work-At-Home Mom Survival Guide

A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

Think about it, does your mom's ex-hairdresser's cousin's lifecoach need to know everything about you? Besides, what if you are sitting across from them right now in a job interview? Then read and bookmark this helpful guide from the NYT to sorting out your friends on a need-to-know basis on Facebook.

A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

We've Moved!

Only down to about 12 square feet of boxes and a mysterious amount of space left over which I think is a good sign that we got rid of just the right amount of stuff.

We've Moved!

Rebirth of the Cool

I don't know why this title jumped into my head. I've always associated with some half-remembered/half-imagined photo of Miles Davis. Plus, I found some interesting results when I searched the title one of which you can see here. (bonus points if you can actually navigate this site)

Anyway, I've been busy, really busy, but still kind of freaked out when I saw the date of my last post on this blog. Around mid-March, I started to really experience the trickle-down effect of the current economic cluster-F*%k and every day became a dogged hustle for new business. I learned a lot and have tried to keep a positive spin on things. Clients dropped off the radar due to being downsized, others became so pre-occupied with trying to keep their business afloat that they didn't respond to emails asking for feedback on projects. What's a good way to cope with MIA clients? Keep trying to contact them. I kind of feel like a cyber-stalker sometimes, but it's worth it when someone compliments you on being proactive.

What work I did get tended to be labor-intensive and a real exercise in customer service. An email at 6am frantically asking for help in figuring out a webmail dilemma? I'm on it! Wordpress-based site that needed to have 8 mini-sites all utilizing the same stylesheet? No problem, just let me brew another pot of coffee.

So why go back to this now? I guess the main reason is that I felt like I was starting to get stale. Even when the client is a company that makes low-impact stress gaskets for the aluminum packaging industry, I hate to feel like I'm just "phoning it in". Of course, surfing around the web for the latest design news is easy, but unfortunately I suffer from a deep-seated uncertainty of the line between "inspired by" and "slavish ripoff". So, I have been trying to turn away from the monitor and find inspiration elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when I did turn away, what I saw was a big alcove crammed with all kinds of clutter: programming books, cd-holders, project notebooks, binders full of downloaded articles and about 20 different varieties of kids' art supplies. The visual impact was one of messy, paint-splattered, stuff-I-wish-I-had-time-for, chaos.



So, after a week of 14-16 hour workdays, my husband knew it his turn to occupy Chloe for a few hours before mommy started buying Vicodin by the metric ton. I took a good long look at the disaster area and started to do triage. What was going to stay? What needed to be easily accessible? What was unused and creating clutter? I waded in. There was a deep bookshelf that held all my design books, cds and notes. That could go up to Chloe's room to hold toys and games and the contents could go in the shelves on top of the fishtank. The only problem was that removing the shelf exposed a big gap between the tank shelf and the wall that had been hiding 4 boxes of boxing videos (I'm not kidding). Luckily, I had some composite boards from an old enlarger stand that had been dis-assembled and between the boxes and one of the sides, I was able to create a little shelf-table that fit perfectly under the tank and could function as a holder for paint supplies and play-do. I pulled a couple of baskets of toys from upstairs to fill up the gaps and there it was, a bright corner for my daughter to play in that could also hold some non-essentials without clutter!

Rebirth of the Cool

A Jennsweb Girly-Girl Moment

Found via Artfire on Twitter. Neon-hued vegan eyeshadow! Finally, a reason to stop smearing on that mixture of butter and food-coloring! (oh c'mon like you've never considered that while making xmas cookies)

A Jennsweb Girly-Girl Moment

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

My latest client wanted to have some RSS feed buttons in a sidebar of their company blog. Turns out, chicklets come in all shapes and sizes and they wanted everything to line up in a nice little grid. What to do?


Step 1. Get your chicklets

I found two good places to get feed chicklets. The client had a Feedburner account, so I signed in, and went to the feed I wanted to connect the chicklets to and then clicked on Publicize > Chicklet Chooser. Then, it was simply a matter of selecting the Feed Reader icons that I wanted to use and copying and pasting the code into a text file.

Another method for grabbing chicklets is to try Top Rank's chicklet chooser service. It offers a slightly different range of chicklets and helps you cover the bases.

Step 2. Put the chicklets on your blog.

The Wordpress blog I was working with had a widgetized right sidebar so I took all the various chicklet code snippets and added them into a widget, then wrapped them in a Div entitled "Chicklets". (Jenn Tip: Tables only work in certain browsers, Safari freaks out over tables and CSS mixing)



Then, since the chicklets were going to be in 2 columns, I created two divs inside the first one. Chickletsleft and Chickletsright. Then, it was simply a matter of assigning floats, widths and text-align.




Step 3. Customize your chicklets

Take a look at your blog and see how the chicklets look. Most chicklets are 16-17 pixels high, but the width can vary by 10 pixels or more. If you look at the code for each chicklet you will notice that some actually contain the image dimensions in the img src tag and you can change the width there. This works if you are only shortening it by about 3 pixels or so. Some chicklet code snippets only give you the image and no way to manipulate the size. Never fear, you can substitute your own custom-sized chicklet! Simply take a screenshot of the chicklet you need to resize and then create a new file in your image-editing program that is the "standard" size you want. In my case, 90 by 17 pixels worked. Then, copy and paste the screenshot of the chicklet into the new image file and save it. Now, you can modify it to your heart's content and then upload the optimized jpg, gif or png to your web site's images folder.

Step 4. Upload your custom chicklet

Using your FTP program, upload the image to your website in the images directory. If you have lots of images, you may find it worth your while to create a sub-directory called Chicklets.

Step 5. Customize your code snippet.

Now, all you need to do is replace the current img src file path with one that points to the custom chicklet image on your server.

For example:
img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif"
would become:
img src="http://jennmearswebdesign.com/wp-content/themes/anubis folder/images/chicklets/googlebutton.gif"


There you go. Pixel-precision control over your chicklets!

(if only the rest of my job were this easy)

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

Bye Bye Corner Clutter!

I could see it out of the corner of my eye when I sat at the computer: a fish tank stand/utility shelf brimming with coloring books, art supplies, old greeting cards and boxes of photos. It was the living room catchall, a place where items that either weren't immediately useful or didn't have a place to go ended up.



Finally, I couldn't take it any more. My mother-in-law had given our daughter her 30th set of magic markers and they now spilled out of the cookie tin we had been trying to contain them in. Art supplies were overflowing everywhere and more continued to pour in with every outing to the mall.

So, I did the classic "clutter buster" routine. I took everything off the shelves and took every item that wasn't kids' art stuff upstairs to a closet. All the finished artwork went upstairs too, to be put in a safe place. The only thing left was fish tank maintenance supplies, which went up on the high shelf,and then crayons, paints, chalk and markers which went into either clear plastic bins (Market Basket $3 each) or baskets from A.C Moore ($4-$7). Paper supplies tucked in between the baskets and the tank, and a vintage 45's travel box on top and finally, a little peaceful corner instead of a cluttered mess.



BTW, found a great clutter-buster site this week: Simple Productivity Blog. Good stuff!

Bye Bye Corner Clutter!

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Mashable has a really useful post about 25 Great Blogger Widgets. Stay tuned to see some of them showing up here soon!

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Jennsweb's Table-Top Photo Studio

My sister-in-law gave Chloe a present in this cute little take-out gift box. Serendipitously, I needed an image of a take-out box for a project I've been working on, so I decided to try and get an image I could easily work with in Photoshop. So I grabbed Chloe's easel paper, draped one end over the speaker, positioned the desk lamp and used a sunshield for a bounce card.


There you go, instant table-top photo studio!

Jennsweb's Table-Top Photo Studio

File Under: Wish I'd Had This 2 Years Ago

Good article on Freelance Switch by Susan Johnston about balancing freelance work with a full time job.

Lord knows I tried for about a year. It was only after trying to take care of a hosting issue for my client with a local hosting company that only had tech support during "banker's hours" (?!), that I realized that trying to cram commuting, raising a child, having a 9 hour a day office job and trying to start my own web design business required approximately 36 hours a day instead of the allotted 24. Of course the office job was the time thief, not to mention the time (2.5 hours a day) and $$ ($250 a month) it was costing me. So I started trolling Craig's List and quickly found a job in Salem that was not only "flex-time" but also required graphic/web design skills.

After a brief "honeymoon" (pot-luck lunches! kibbitzing encouraged!), I quickly realized that the term flex-time actually meant, "you can only work the hours we can afford to pay you for" so when my husband told me that the local film industry was in full swing again, I braced myself and went into work to hand in my notice. My co-worker was currently fighting being deported back to Eastern Europe and I knew that both of us vanishing from the office would leave my boss with no one else to answer the phones but her senile, but lovable, golden retriever.

Fortunately, (depending how you look at it) she had already decided that in order to afford the salary of a trainee to replace the soon-to-be-deported tech support/salesperson, she would have to let me go and that was that. I was a (guilt-free!) freelancer again.

It's been almost a year now since that day and while there are days where my husband works 18 hours and I am left at the mercy of a tiny diva-in-training, there are other days where he takes her to some indoors playground for 6 hours followed by a 2 hour grocery-shopping trip and I am free to work with no tiny hands pulling me like the Death Star's tractor beam towards the playdough table. It's not yet the ideal home office situation where I can shut the door and be in my own little Ikea-furnished kingdom, but how many companies let you watch "Oswald" while you work?

Jennsweb fun factoid: Henry the Penguin on "Oswald" is voiced by David Lander of "Laverne and Shirley" fame.

File Under: Wish I'd Had This 2 Years Ago

Follow-up

So this weekend I tried an experiment. Friday night, I stepped away from the 2 sites I'm working on for clients and the big intimidating book on Javascript purchased 2 months ago and picked up the sketchbook, ordered takeout and ignored the piles of laundry while I just relaxed and worked on drawings until it was time to get some sleep. Saturday morning, I got up with Chloe, got breakfast, and found 2 skirts and a cardigan for $37 at Modern Millie's. When I sat back down at the computer later on it felt like I had been on vacation for a couple of weeks and I swear I got more done after taking a break than if I had chained myself to the hard drive.

Follow-up