Culinary Capers: African Chicken Peanut Stew (Week 1)

In week 1, I tried African Chicken Peanut Stew.   I think I bit off more than I could chew, literally.    The recipe seemed straightforward enough, but it was the first time I'd used canned tomatoes, ginger root, and peanut butter in a dish.

The dish called for browning the chicken legs in oil in a skillet before adding it to the stew ingredients.  I browned about 5 drumsticks for this purpose, but I wasn't confident that they were done all the way through.  While the dish called for adding the chicken to the stew bone-in, I opted to remove the chicken from the bone before adding to the stew, so I could inspect that the chicken was thoroughly cooked.  And sure enough, one of the five drumsticks was undercooked with blood at the bone.  Would the chicken have finished cooking in the stew?  In hindsight, probably so, but I threw the bloody piece out.

I like to think I have an adventurous palette, but the finished dish, which I served in a bowl with jasmine rice, made me a little nauseous. I couldn't quite put my finger on the culprit. I tried the dish again as leftovers the next day and still had the same feeling.  Then, I went back and reviewed the recipe, which called for cooking for 1 hour and 55 minutes--except I only cooked it for 55 minutes.  I suppose that's what puts the stew in stew!  I'm thinking that the ingredients didn't have a chance to fully combine together because I removed the heat too early.  Reading is fundamental.

I'll try this dish again in April, but I learned a couple of things here:

1. When browning the chicken legs in the skillet, I'll cook them longer and leave the bone-in.
2. I would've preferred more bites of chicken in the stew.  Next time, I'll add a couple of more drumsticks next time.
3. Knives!  In removing the fat from the chicken, I realized my knife game sucks!  I need to invest in some proper knives.
4. I didn't thoroughly peel the skin off of the onion and the ginger root, which left annoying bits of skin in bites of the stew.  I'll be more meticulous about peeling them in the future.
5. While I've always hated seeing people post pictures of plates, I need to take pictures.

On to week 2!

Culinary Capers: Black Man Cooking (Week 0)

SO, I'M A BLACK MAN FROM the South who grew up in a family with very "traditional," i.e. sexist, gender roles where, on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, men refined their jive-talking and armchair quarterbacking in the den around the TV and women spun their stories and generational recipes around the stove in the kitchen.  I remember the rare occasion as a boy where I'd cross the imaginary lines into what in my family was considered the "woman's domain." The way my entrance into the kitchen would stop time and stop conversations made me feel like a White man who'd accidentally entered into a Black club.  I may as well had stumbled into the jungles of Thailand or the countryside of Poland; it was that bewildering and strange.

As I got older, I learned that there were many Southern men who, on the contrary, were rather good cooks.  And as I became a young adult, I marveled at the new wave of male TV chefs--Emeril Lagasse and Justin "ga-ron-tee" Wilson.  And despite my otherwise progressive and feminist leanings, it took decades for me to undo the mental shackles that stood between me and having the confidence to consistently work a stove to do something beyond boiling an egg.  So, for 2015, I'm committing to become a "better" cook, by cooking at least one dish per week, and blogging about it.

To baseline expectations, I'm starting out having never worked an outdoor grill and my idea of spaghetti is, much to my embarrassment, taking store-bought Ragu, mixing in some ground meat, and pouring it over the noodles.  I eat out--a lot.   I have a few recipes I've followed over the years to create edible meals, but not in a way where I'm confident in cooking for company.  So, to build suspense, I'll put a challenge out to myself.  Can I become a good enough cook in time to host Christmas dinner?  Only time will tell!

ITIL v3 (Foundation) - Continual Service Improvement

IF YOU'VE EVER WORKED IN AN ORGANIZATION that uses Lean Methodology, then you've got a running start into the Continual Service Improvement (CSI) phase.  CSI concerns itself with:

• measuring and analyzing service level achievements by comparing them to the requirements in SLAs (Service Level Agreements)
• Recommending improvements in all phases of the life cycle.
• Introducing activities which will increase the quality, efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction of the services and the IT service management processes.
• Operating more cost effective IT services without sacrificing customer satisfaction
• Using suitable quality management methods for improvement activities.

CSI accomplishes this via measuring and monitoring;

• Process Compliance
• Quality
• Performance
• Business value of a process

Key Concepts/Methods/Tools:

• Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle: Deming's 4 steps which guide process improvement.
• Metrics: Measurable attributes which determine whether a variable meets its target.
• CSFs (Critical Success Factors): high-level objectives essential to meeting a business mission
• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be qualitative or quantitative and help to define whether the CSFs are being met.
• Benchmark: An agreed upon metric which is considered a baseline (may be determined from industry standards/best-practices)
• Gap analysis - Determines where the organization is now and the size of the gap of where it wants to be.
• Balanced scorecard - includes different perspectives on organizational performance - customer, internal processes, learning and growth, financial, etc.
• SWOT Analysis - Looks at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of an organization/component.
• Swim-lane diagram - Visualizes relationships between process and organizations
• 7-step Improvement process:
  

ITIL v3 (Foundation) - Service Design

THE GOAL OF SERVICE DESIGN IS TO PROVIDE the design and development of services and their related processes.   If you work in IT project management, this typically encompasses everything from after the signing of the contract thru the just before deployment into production.  In SDLC terms, this encompasses Analysis, Design, and Build.  (Testing and deployment activities would generally fall in Service Transition.)

Whereas Service Strategy typically dealt with what would go into the portfolio of offerings to a customer, Design begins with the demand for new or changed requirements for the customer which would typically fall within the pre-defined portfolio of service offerings.  The Four (4) P's of People, Products, Process, and Partners define how the what gets delivered, including:

• Design of Service Solutions
• Design of the Service Portfolio
• Design of the Architecture
• Design of Processes
• Design of Measurement Systems and Metrics

Service Design also concerns itself with:

• Development approaches - waterfall versus Agile (incremental and iterative)
• Service Delivery Model (insourcing vs. outsourcing vs. co-sourcing, etc.)

As with PMBOK, the ITIL Body of Knowledge structures itself around processes.  In the Service Design phase, the corresponding processes are:

• Service Catalogue Management
• Service Level Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• IT Service Continuity Management
• Information security management
• Supplier Management

For in-depth explanations on the processes, I suggest this link.

Help Us, Make It Stop

FOR THOSE WHO ARE GROWING TIRED of hearing Black people cry about being oppressed, I have a challenge for you: Help us. Make it stop.

The American Civil Rights movement was successful, not only because of the protests and outrage of those whose rights were abused, but also because of allies in majority communities who used their power and influence to help bring about revolutionary change. Help us. Make it stop.

You hear ignorance in your circles, make it stop. You learn of abuses of power, make it stop. You see police brutality in Ferguson and Staten Island, make it stop. We are grieving. Our blood is in the streets. If you really believe in Black humanity, if you really believe that your rights are our rights, if you believe in America, speak out, rally, protest, hold this system accountable. Help us. Make it stop.
#HelpUsMakeItStop