Back in October Joseph started a fun game he titled "Weekend Challenge". It's a kind of theoretical Iron Chef, if you will. In the second episode, I entered a recipe for stuffed tomatoes and let me tell you, they sounded good. Really good. Ever since then I've wanted to actually try it out and see if it turned out as well as I hoped. Tonight I finally had a chance to test it out. Keep in mind that the following recipe is what I did make, but not necessarily what it will become. Stay tuned for a more thorough treatment.

Cream Cheese Stuffed Tomatoes

• 4 large slicing tomotoes
• 6 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
• 4 ounces ground sausage
• 3 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
• basil
• parmesan cheese
• 1/4 cup finely diced onion
• 1/4 cup finely diced green pepper
• 2 cloves garlic, finely diced or pressed

Remove the top from each of the tomatoes. Remove the guts. Place in a non-reactive pan and roast at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, brown and drain the sausage. Saute the onion, pepper and garlic in a little of the sausage fat, if desired. Remove from heat. Add the cream cheese and mozzarella cheese and mix well. Season with basil and possibly salt to taste.

Spoon the cheese mixture into the tomato bowls. Top with generous portions of bacon bits and parmesan cheese. Return the tomatoes to the oven and cook 5 more minutes. Then crank up the broiler to put a little brown on the cheese.

Notes

1. The taste was quite good. I enjoyed it immensely. I mean, how can you go wrong with sausage, bacon and cream cheese? I'm salivating just thinking back on it.
2. I got the tomatoes roasted just about right. They should be soft but with not mushy. The crunch of the bacon and crispy parmesan contrasted nicely with the soft cheese and tomatoes.
3. The tomatoes paired well with a sun-dried tomato bread, which I also made.

And now the bad.

1. The sausage was barely noticeable. The quantity should have been at least double.
2. The cheese was delicious but maybe too soft. My wife's stuffed pepper recipe uses rice for this purpose. I think rice doesn't fit quite right for this one. She suggested bread crumbs. I'm thinking of toasting them.
3. I didn't remove enough of the tomatoes, especially along the bottom. Alton Brown recommends using a grapefruit spoon and that seems to be a pretty good idea.

I've been working on a Unified Theory of Bacon lately. I have come to realize that anything tastes better with bacon. That's not to say that bacon can make a spew-a-licious carrot salad (you know the one with shredded carrot, mayo and raisins) into an edible side dish, but it wouldn't taste nearly so vile.

To put it simply, I love bacon. I was therefore delighted when I saw a tip on America's Test Kitchen about how to store bacon for easy use. We normally buy an extra package of bacon, cut it in half and freeze each of those. What if you just need a couple slices of bacon, say for some bacon mashed potatoes (which I'm making right at this very moment)? Instead of freezing the whole slab, take each piece and roll it up like it was a cinnamon bun. Toss them into a bag and stick them in the freezer. It's then a cinch to take out exactly how many you need (do plan 20 minutes ahead so they can thaw). It does take a little time to roll up an entire package of bacon, but really not too bad. Certainly no more than it does to split a 5 pound pile of hamburger into half pound portions.

Last year we bought some Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers with a PERC 4e/DC RAID controller. It's based on the LSI MegaRAID chipset which we really liked. It's fast which is great, although so far it hasn't be entirely stable, which is greatly annoying. To that end, I was tasked with get a Nagios script in place to monitor the array and alert us if it fails (again!).

With the server came a disk with some utilities. One of those is the MegaServ and its corresponding MegaCtrl. It seems like a good idea, but the blasted thing doesn't work in any sane manner. It generates alerts for things like how many percent a rebuild is at and when the battery starts charging. It can get bad. Worse still is that it stopped sending any alerts.

But today I found another utility for Dell. It's an extension to snmpd, named percsnmp that polls a daemon for the current status of the controllers. It's great and so full of good info. For now I'm just looking at the online state, but given all these other fields I may have further uses for it. Most especially I'm interested in the settable rebuildRateInPercent field since rebuild rate can't be set through the megamgr (a copy of the BIOS-level tool).

There's a local dairy just up the road from my house, maybe a mile away. In the summer time it's quite a treat to go over there for a refreshing ice cream cone. Delicious stuff. They also, of course, have milk. I've been wanting to start getting my milk from there, for a few reasons. First, they're local and I always prefer to support that. They also don't use hormones and steroids on their cows. I prefer that as well, just like I would choose an organic apple if possible. But, as you can probably guess, their milk is more expensive than my standard Walmart brand milk. Would the switch be worth it? Scientific research to the rescue!

I acquired a gallon of 2% milk from both Reed's Dairy and Walmart. I like my milk as creamy as possible. How can I say no to cream? The answer is, I can't, of course. I poured about 2 ounces of each in small glasses each labeled on the bottom. Due to the opaqueness of the milk, I had no way to see the label. I then had my wife mix them up while I closed my eyes.

Visually I couldn't tell them apart. Both were white and milky, imagine that. They both smelled the same. It really all boiled down to taste, as you would probably expect give the extent the FDA has its fingers in the milk supply. Basically they tasted the same, but one had a creamier and richer flavor. It wasn't strong or overwhelming, but noticable. Unsurprisingly the creamier one was from Reed's Dairy.

I haven't fully contemplated the ramifications of this test. The taste was definitely enough that I could differentiate even on cereal or drinking with dinner. All things being equal, I would prefer the Reed's Dairy milk. The problem I find is that I don't really care to make a separate trip just for milk, especially considering how much milk we consume with 2 little tikes.

The solution might be home delivery. I'm just not sure how much it costs. I've asked each of the last two times I've been in for a price schedule but both times they've only had the out-of-town list, which is no help to me. Their website is a little pathetic in this regard as well. Until I find out just how much that would cost, it's a no-go for me. We'll see when I can finally find time to give a call over there during the day. Maybe Tuesday when I've got the day off. That's a good idea. Thanks, I thought so too. You're so smart. Oh, I know.

I get the infrequent comment spam posted to the site. Actually, I added the "Recent comments" box to the left side of the sight specifically so I could monitor the situation. Plus I enjoy reading what you guys have to say. In an attempt to limit the former without unnecessarily burdening the latter I have written a crontab to update all my blog posts to set comments to read-only after 4 months. I hope that's enough time for feedback from everybody. Let me know if you feel otherwise.

For the curious, here's the script:

#!/bin/sh

echo "update node set comment = '1' where comment = '2' and unix_timestamp(now()) > changed and unix_timestamp(now()) - changed > 10368000 order by from_unixtime(changed);" | mysql -u comments -ppassword blog

And I created a special user just for this task:

mysql> grant update,select on blog.node to comments@localhost identified by 'password';

And added it to the system crontab:

15 2 * * * nobody /usr/local/bin/disable-comments.sh