DIY Sweetened condensed milk

Cleaning out my old drafts.

Some time ago I read an article on Lifehacker about Diy sweetented condensed milk.  It's semi rare that you need this stuff (really only for the holidays) so I don't keep it around, but it is extremely useful stuff if you have an inclination for making deserts.  Sure, you can just go buy it, but where's the fun in that?

The one linked by lifehacker on Dish-away.com used powdered milk, and that's just offensive on it's face. I don't keep it around as much now that we have kids because we buy milk by the gallon weekly, so I looked for a version that uses the milk I keep around to make the sweetened condensed milk.  This version from kitchensteardship.com seems like a winner, using butter raw sugar and whole milk, plus her method is about as lazy as you can get.  Dissolve the sugar in the milk and keep turning the stove down until you don't have to stir the milk while it cooks down.

Killer Carrot-Ginger Superfood Salad

If you're new the internet you'll know that it has a peculiar habit of falling apart as time goes on.  There's a bizarre kind of kill or be killed entropy to the web that causes many websites to fall off the internet, and others to live on forever( do yourself a favor and go relive the awesomeness of that old website). In this edition I'm perserving for posterity a recipe that I found on a tumblr blog. The original website the recipe came from and the original tumblr that posted it have all gone dark. To make it easier to find when I want to make it later I'm posting it here on my bloggy blog. I claim no credit for photos or recipe. I'm linking via the wayback machine and to the tumblr I found to give as much credit to where I found it as I can.

So credit to Chompandthrive.com for photos.

Ingredients:

Dressing:

1.5 cups of carrots, peeled and roughly chopped (about 3 large carrots)

1.5 cups of water

1/3 peeled and chopped ginger

1 clove of garlic

1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar

1.5 tablespoons of honey

juice from 1 medium lemon

1 cup of olive oil

Salad:

2 heads of broccoli, chopped

3 ounces of shiitake mushrooms

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of pepper

6 cups of red organic kale

5 cups of shredded red cabbage

2 cups of edamame

2 medium avocados

1 pint of blueberries ( 2 of the smallest boxes)

1 cup of pepitas (pumpkin seeds without the shell)

Directions: 

Killer Carrot-Ginger Dressing:

Add the water and carrot to a saucepan and boil for 7-10 minutes, or until the carrot is able to be pierced with a fork. Remove from heat and let cool, about 10 minutes. Reserve all of the cooking liquid and add it to a food processor with the carrots, chopped ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar, honey, and juice from 1 lemon. Blend until contents are smooth. Drizzle in the olive oil last until an emulsion forms.

Superfood Salad:

On low heat, in a saute pan, add the shiitake mushrooms and chopped broccoli pieces. Season with garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil. Cook over low heat (2 out of 10) for about 10 minutes, just until the vegetables are no longer raw. Set aside. Chop the organic red kale and add it to a bowl. Layer on the shredded red cabbage, broccoli and shiitakes mushrooms, edamame, avocados, blueberries, and pepitas. Top with the carrot-ginger dressing and serve.

Nvidia shield

I've been thinking about getting one of the Nvidia shield consoles for a while now.  The little console that could if you will, the home media server version has my eye because I can run plex on it and 500gb of storage gives you room for quite a few movies (assuming you've optimized them a bit), and from what I'm reading the newest version of shield experience lets you add libraries from SMB network shares, usb drives and micro sd cards.  This is great news and I'm saving my bloggy dollars as we speak to get one (half way there!).

That was enough to get my interest for sure, I've been running kodi via the Openelec on an old Acer Aspire revo r1600 (it's a ridiculous product name). It's a crappy nettop atom based pc with the one redeeming quality of having the nvidia ion chipset on it. Nvidia ion was h264 (the standard for .mp4 video) processing.  Meaning the dual core atom processor circa 2009 is able to playback 1080p video without stuttering.  The cpu alone wouldn't be up to the task, and topping out at like 19w it is tiny and only needs an hdmi to be a full featured media center.  Out of the box openelec supported my Media Center usb ir adapter and I can run it with the Logitech Harmony remote and from the xbox 360.  Keeping a keyboard handy is still worth the effort as I've been having some trouble with my usb wifi adapter lately, but otherwise it runs easily.  Kodi doesn't support streaming and transcoding out of the box and doesn't have the fit and polish of Plex, so I've been wanting to jump to that as my full time media player.  Simplifies all kinds of tasks for content on the go and for kids in the house on tablets. 

The final push for me to want the shield was plex had a lifetime plex pass sale recently, $75 for apps, and early access to features and the ability to back up your phones pictures to your media server was too good of a deal.  After I bought my subscription I found a video on running emulators for classic games on the Shield too. We still have our old Nintendo and Super NES, but I never got a N64 and I really miss classic Mario Kart.  The new ones don't have the same soul... So I'm not encouraging anyone to look for the app called happychick on a .hk based website that would allow you to play emulators on your android device, but if you did do those things you might look at this really cool bluetooth gaming controller that works really well with the emulator (allegedly) 

finally, full disclosure.

Well then, grinding the side hustle

I suppose it's been just over 2 years since I've posted on blogger. After the forced public G+ profile thing this space became infinitely less attractive, not that anything was ever all that personal or interesting in of itself, more it was nice to have place to write about things without having to spend so much time filtering for appropriateness.

I used to have a friendly little blogger ring. I'm not sure if any of them are still following on rss, but if you are, what have you been up to since blogger stole your adsense stream?  I've been in a number of things myself but the most profitable by far has been swagbucks(*). I usually do about $30-100 a month there depending on promotions and offers and my own shopping habits.  I don't buy thing just to get the swagbucks, but if it's something I'm going to by I do try to find a way to get swagbucks for it.  I needed some new shirts for work, they had a promotion with Khol's that took a few minutes of effort with emailing reciepts, but I got 2 shirts and about $30 bucks back for the effort. I got $250 signing up for uber and completing a minimum number of trips so if you have the time and inclination it's a decent Beermoney side hustle.  Most if not all of it goes to Amazon gift cards, but since they sell most everything it's seems like a worthwhile adventure.

For the more time wasting but in theory could be lucrative category I've been hitting up some Bitcoin and Monero Faucets.  Most are kind of garbage, but these one's are the least annoying that I've found.

First things first, you need a wallet. Bitcoin for bitcoin monero for monero.  I'm using bitcoin core on my desktop for my bitcoin wallet.  I'm not sure how I feel about a wallet in the cloud for bitcoin.  Monero being more secure and more private I'm using Freewallet on my phone.  Freewallet supports all the major cryptocurrencies, if you don't want a lot of headache, this one is probably the one for you.

I get about .0002 btc every 30 days  with the first 2 sites claiming once an hour or less during the work day. currently ~$.95. Not impressive, but just add it to the daily things you do for beer money at work and forget about it.
Moonbits.co.in - easy, uses coinpot micropayment site
Bonusbitcoin.co - easy uses coinpot micropayment site
Onewayfaucet.us - easy, uses Faucethub.io micropayment site
Luckybtcfaucet.website - easy, uses Faucethub.io micropayment site

I've done way better with monero mining, in no small part because I have access to way too much idle cpu power.  If you're interested at trying your hand at it, I've mined about 2 monero or $160 in the last 3 months using minergate.  Premise is simple your crunching hashes looking for ones that are valuable.  It's arbitrary and kinda silly, but that's the way of digital wealth creation.

I've also been trying out Alexamaster.net, I payed out a few times after a year of using the site, ($10ish dollars, but then I looked into promoting websites)  I'm not sure that it's going to shake out in the end, but I've been using it to drive traffic to this site.  I'm only on week two of trying this out, but my adsense account says my earnings have bumped up a bit.  If you do the autosurf it takes a lot babysitting (and a good antivirus because seriously they are trying to get you).  Never the less, it would be nice to see another adsense check, it's been years since the last one.

What you got for side hustle bloggy friends? I'm listening.
Full disclosure, those links are affiliate links.  I get refferal bonuses if you do sign up with those links.