This recipe is easy and quick, and a good way to feed a pile of people.
Ingredients
1 lb. boneless skinless chicken breast
1 bunch asparagus
1 lb. penne pasta
1 cup flour
1 tbsp. black pepper
1 tsp. salt
1 lemon, juiced
2 tbsp. capers
1 cup white wine
1 cup chicken stock
1 stick butter (8 tbsp.)
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 onion or 2 shallots diced
Grated parmesan cheese to taste
Directions
Fill a large pot halfway up with water. Add salt to taste. Cover and bring to a boil. Add penne and cook al dente.
Cut or break off tough ends of asparagus. Cut into angled slices, 3 or 4 per stalk, so they are shaped like the penne.
Dice up the onion.
Cut the chicken breast into thin, flat pieces. Try to cut crossways as many times as you can to get wide, long but thin slices. I can usually get at least five from each breast. It helps if the chicken is partially frozen.
Add 1/2 cup flour, salt and pepper to a large bowl and stir.
Dredge chicken slices in flour mixture until coated.
In a large pan, turn to medium-high and add olive oil. Once that’s hot, swirl in 2 tbsp. butter.
When butter is melted, add chicken slices in a single layer, covering the entire surface of the pan.
Brown for 3-4 minutes, turn and repeat.
Set aside browned slices and repeat until all chicken has been nicely browned.
Add 2 tbsp. butter to pan. Add onions/shallots and saute until soft. The pan should be really hot.
Pour in white wine to deglaze pan, scraping browned bits up.
Add the chicken broth and remaining butter.
Whisk in remaining flour. Add water/wine/butter/broth to build up a nice sauce.
Stir in the chicken, asparagus, and capers. Whisk remaining flour into chicken broth and remaining flour. Cover and turn heat to low.
Check occasionally. It’s done when the asparagus is bright, green and tender.
Serve with grated parm. I like red pepper flakes as well.
The dashicons font created for the mp6 plugin has pretty much taken up all of my time the last few weeks. This even with help from Mel Choyce, Joen Asmussen and the rest of the WP design team.
There are quite a few resources on how to do this, but most of the ones I’ve read, although I’m sure worked for some, went against a few of my own design principals. So I set out to find the perfect workflow for me, and here it is.
When I design icons in Photoshop (AP), the end goal is a png sprite. Using a split window, I can zoom in on one window and see the actual size icon in the other. I can click on an anchor point and nudge it with the arrow keys, getting sub-pixel placement just right and having absolute control over the end product.
The move to vector as the final source has been really weird and challenging. In Illustrator, vectors don’t anti-alias the same was as they do in Photoshop. That is, if you draw a rectangle with the edges half-way between the edges of a pixel, in Photoshop, you might get a different grey value than if you did that in Illustrator (AI). And pixel snapping is inconsistent. I would copy/paste a shape from AP to AI, and my perfectly sharp edges would become fuzzy, even though the paths were exactly in the same place. If I click/dragged an anchor over a pixel, then dragged it back, it would become sharp again. Very weird.
The tutorials I read through, https://github.com/blog/1135-the-making-of-octicons and http://glyphsapp.com/blog/importing-from-illustrator/ were really helpful, but as I said earlier, there are fundamental flaws with those workflows, at least as far as I’m able to incorporate them into mine. For some reason, 16×16 is this imposing number that icon designers hold sacred. It’s a good target, but it really does overly constrain design. I decided 20×20 was a much easier canvas to work within, and as long as I left a pixel or two breathing room around the icons, they look great in a 16×16 space-not too big, but not leaving out important details in the name of absolute limits. I also got nervous when scanning through the article at all the weird numbers: 2048, 2052, -17something. Do we really need all those complex numbers? As for the glyphsapp.com article, while trying to draw directly in Glyphs may be the best way, it’s gonna be tough to put aside my AI experience to learn a new method for drawing vectors until I have lots of time on my hands.
After trying all sorts of settings, I came to the conclusion that 20x20pixel icons should be designed in a 2000×2000 upm font. The glyphs article points out that 1 ai point=1 glyphs unit. So I worked in points.
Another oddity was the Glyphs vs Glyphs Mini (GM) inconstancies. Joen Asmussen, who I can’t thank enough for all his help on this, designed the icon font you see at WordPress.com, using GM and following the octicons article pretty closely. I had a trial version of Glyphs, but decided to spring for GM for the sake of consistency. Although I started the font in Glyphs, bringing it into GM was an eye opener. The major issue was that GM doesn’t allow you to change the font’s UPM settings; so when I opened the .glyphs file I created in Glyphs, I was stuck with the 1000 upm I was originally working with. When I decided to try 2000 upm, so that it mapped more (theoretically) naturally with the 20pt x 20pt AI designs, my glyphs all got cut to 50% of their size. Resizing in glyphs was not something I wanted to learn how to do, so I returned my workflow to Glyphs.
Screenshots:
New AI file, 20pt x 20pt with points as units Keyboard increment set to 1/8th of a point, so I can nudge vectors between pixel edges as needed. Gridline every 10pt, with 10 subdivisions Snap to grid as needed Select all your glyphs in Glyphs mini, set widths to 2000 upm Choose font info in glyphs mini Ascender/caps height to 2000, giving you a perfect square for each glyph Icon drawn in AI, with a 20pt by 20pt box drawn around it as a bounding box Scale it up to 2000x 2000, note the little chain lock ensuring proportional scaling Copy the icon, Double-click a glyph in Glyphs Mini, Paste into the glyph window. Make sure the x/y/w/h are exactly as shown Double-click on the “bounding box” and delete it.
Great show. Loved the sax, and seeing it live made me realize how hard it is to pull off solos like they did in the 80s. Not enough people there, which is a shame. We’re lucky they keep coming back and should support one of the most notable, iconic sounds out of that era.
Well there’s nothing like spending a 90º summer afternoon in a cool lake with your three kids, all under the age of 12 mind you (that’s key), wrestling and throwing them around in the waves, with high winds whipping up one-footers. Of course it ain’t the Atlantic, but whatryagonnado. We followed it up with some Pad Thai a-la-cart which I’ll post recipe for asap. Altogether an epic day!
Good day, classes were unstructured but engaging ( I hope)
Morning saw us getting passports for the kids. I wish it had been fun, but it wasn’t, because of the tide of grumpiness that gradually enveloped us.
Afternoon was great, a quiet time teaching the intern and students.
It’s the one-on-one interactions that make it fun. It’s the best way to teach.
Now I’m at snyder bar getting some wings, having a Guinness. All ok
