The sugar and partners make for a insanely tasty crust when some high heat comes into the mix.

Korean Taco Marinade
(adapted from Americas Test Kitchen recipe)

• 5 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
• 1.5 teaspoons lime juice
  (about a whole lime worth)
• 3 tablespoons sugar (brown if you have it)
• 2 tablespoons gochujang
  (Korean fermented hot pepper paste)
• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons mirin
• 4 garlic cloves, minced

The Korean Taco is a delicious food that started on the streets of the West Coast and has made its way onto the plates of diners further east quite quickly. Even America’s Test Kitchen recently published a recipe for these delicious if unconventional tacos in one of their 30-Minutes-Suppers collection. Anybody can follow this recipe on a hot summer night when you you don’t feel like spending a lot of time in a hot kitchen.

The hot pepper paste drives this flavor bus; the rest of the ingredients are friendly passengers. Mirin, rice vinegar and lime juice get mixed in with a lot of sugar, but some soy sauce keeps the sugar from overpowering the combination and making it a pure syrup. The heat from the pepper paste combined with the acidic sweetness of the rice vinegar and the other ingredients creates an explosive flavor combination. This party is completed with the heat of the grill, which caramelizes everything and leaves behind an awesome crust.

Do you ever get frustrated that it is so difficult to recreate some Asian foods at home? Pepper paste is what you’re missing.

This is a simple, fast summer dinner. Tons of flavor and a huge crowd pleaser for all ages. The leftovers are just perfect in an omelette for breakfast or a salad at lunch,

Parenting tip: if you have a picky eater, you can separate one piece of meat from the rest and just dust it with Adobo seasoning. The meat is so tender that it doesn’t require all the seasoning to make it delcious (it’s just a really nice bonus for the more adventurous).

I remember the original ABC news app. It had each tile of news as an image wrapped around a sphere that was to represent the glob/abc logo. It was fun for about 30 seconds, and then I closed the app and deleted it. This was a case when light gamification of the news app didn’t add to the experience. In an information centric app (which is really anything that isn’t a game) you can add some sparkle around the edges to help tell the story, but don’t get in the way of smoothly getting the user to what they want.

This is another pet peeve of mine as a user. If there is a task that I have to do more then 3 or four times then the app is missing a chance to delight the user. I don’t know how something like this gets through even one round of user testing…even by the designers that built it.

I really like this article since it focuses on some very basic concepts (all very user centric) that can greatly improve the experience of using and app no matter what platform.

Things started with a one day sale on whole chickens at the local Whole Foods. The labor to flavor ratio on a whole roasted chicken is off the charts, and I wanted to see if I could get some others to cook a whole chicken for the first time as I had two days prior. I got Chef Tom of White Oak Gourmet on the blower and asked him how busy his week was.

Hight-Tech lighting system. Sheet of cardboard + packing tissue = Shop Light ++

Turns out he had the time, WAHOO! I had picked up a new iPhone 4s for my UnPrepared Meals project, so I had a way to record, but without a paying client my budget was a bit thin. The two things I was most concerned about were lighting and sound. I didn’t have the cash to rent a light kit from Helix like I wanted, so I had to manufacture one. The videos over at Vimeo’s Video School were a good starting point, and my goal was to diffuse the light and try to bounce some off the ceiling to fill things in. I didn’t have a diffuser, so I held different materials in front of my garage shop light until I got a decently warm color. The winner was the natural colored tissue paper I use to ship out most of my spice rub orders. The second light was tilt-able and seemed like it just might work.

I shouldn't have spent all my lotto winnings on this bangin' sound studio.

I had no money for a remote mic, and even if I did, I didn’t have Final Cut to automatically synch the audio and video. I had built a recording studio under my desk for my Korean taco voiceover work, but I now needed to be mobile. Empty box + leftover fleece material + staple gun = Abbey on the Road studios. I would use this for the voice work later, but for now my goal was to capture footage.

I didn’t have time for a script so my plan was to cook two chickens, one shot from far away and another shot close up to capture some of the culinary techniques. My guess is that within 23 seconds of trying to just ad-lib things I realized that I needed a script. Ad libbing for the camera is more difficult than ad libbing in front of a live audience. I immediately changed the plan to shooting the footage as best I could and I would edit and write the script later.

The audio side of things was a total bust during the shoot, but I was really happy with what I was capturing in the video department. The lighting worked really well, and the window behind Chef Tom wasn’t messing things up too badly. The mounting adapter I used to mount my phone to the tri-pod worked perfectly, and I was really excited to see what the footage looked like when pulled to the computer. Total shooting time was a couple of hours and then Tom was off to cook some more and I began work on editing.

I pulled in all the footage and things looked pretty good. I arranged the clips into a loose timeline and started to write the script to match the action. I then read through the script out loud to make sure the words and footage were in the same ballpark and then called it a day.

The next morning I went to Tom’s house (which contains far fewer children than mine) and started on voiceover work. We spent a couple of hours revising my script and doing read throughs to make sure the words could be said not just read. I captured all 5 takes on a portable USB hard drive for editing back at West 3 World HQ.

I mashed those 5 takes into 1 decent read through in Garage Band, and then brought it into iMovie with the video clips. Then I began the painful process of matching the two up. Getting the trussing bit to match the audio was an oil and water adventure, ugh. I drank a beer while the project finalized, and then pushed the file up to vimeo.com and went to bed.

How about a recipe and cooking video with your whole chicken purchase?

When I got up in the morning I write the recipe and instructions and set the thumbnail for vimeo. Then I had people spell check and give things a run through on other machines to make sure the video hosted at vimeo worked for them. I designed some recipe cards that had the recipe ingredients (and in-store location!) that the butchers could hand out with each whole chicken they sold. Tom brought the file over to Kinko’s and then hustled to Whole Foods to see if we could actually pull this off.

No Dice!

There was no chance they were going to hand out anything that wasn’t corporate approved, plus there was a disturbing lack of food safety education/warning in the video. I knew that it was a 1:100 shot that they would use this, but it was a great project to have done. Tom and I had a silly blast doing the campy voiceover work, and I was able to shoot my first cooking video, AND PUT IT ON THE INTERNET!

Things I learned

Good

• The iphone 4s has a great camera. The footage was really good to my amateur eyes, and most people were really surprised when I told them I shot it on my phone. The mounting adapter work really well with the tripod.
• The modified shop light more than pulled its weight. I know some of the detail was blown out in the whites, but overall the food and ingredients looked good. That was my major focus.
• Doing campy voice-over work for 3 hours straight in a tiny back office makes your brain a little silly by the end.