Say you made widgets. While other widget makers appealed to inactive boys and adult men living in their parents basement, you have a wonderful idea. What if you made a widget that appealed to everyone, men, women, kids and adults alike? You would be rich, that's what you would be! And you would want to make enough of them to ensure that everyone who wanted one could buy one, right?

Well, apparently not if your company's name is Nintendo.

You see, Nintendo shook the gaming world up something fierce in 2006 when it introduced its Wii. By simply changing the way you control videogames with the Wiimote, Nintendo brought console gaming out of the basement, and into the family room. And despite early reports of people throwing their wiimotes through the TV, prompting the company to add a lanyard, the console was a massive success.

Sounds wonderful doesn't it? The only problem was that Nintendo didn't make enough of them.

During the entire life of the Wii, demand has greatly outstripped supply. Need an example? Last week the Futureshop near my house got six in a shipment. They were all gone within 24 hours, and the salesperson said it surprised him that they lasted that long.

Why, when you have a hit on your hands, would you not make as many as possible to satisfy demand? Enzo Ferrari always said that he would make one car less than he could sell, effectively keeping demand higher than supply, and creating an air of exclusivity for which his customers paid for. But that's a Ferrari, this is a gaming console.

It makes little sense, and is frustrating, considering I promised my wife a Wii for valentines day. Nintendo claims there have been supplier problems, but this makes no sense, when you consider that Nintendo actually told suppliers to slow down in late 2009.

So here is my ultimatum Nintendo. Fix this Wii supply issue before Xbox comes out with their "project natal" motion capture controller, and you will have a sale. Fail to do so, and you'll be left looking rather silly.

Since the people who hold the licenses to all my childhood television memories have decided to release as many DVDs as possible, I have made several excursions into 1980s television as of late.

Perhaps the show that has stood up the best is Fraggle Rock. While I'm sure some would call it "hippy drivel," since a majority of the episodes theme's have to do with living peacefully, it still rings true today. Perhaps the best indicator of its timelessness is that my daughter loves it as much as I did/do.

Maybe the worst, or one that hasn't stood up to the test of time as well is the Frugal Gourmet. Given the smoothly run, and organized cooking shows on TV today, the Frugal Gourmet just seems haphazard and hard to follow. Perhaps my biggest disappointment is that he doesn't cook anything! Michael Smith, Jamie Oliver and Alton Brown — my current trifecta of TV chef idols — really cook things, and demonstrate the steps. All too often Jeff Smith — the Frugal Gourmet — throws some things in a bowl, says "here's one I made earlier" and pulls a completed dish out from behind the counter.

I remember this being common place on older cooking shows, but it is something that was left in the 80s and 90s, and cooking shows are better for it, in my opinion.

Ginger + beer = awesome

While it nearly killed me, the pretzel adventure did set off something deep and primal inside me; a desire to stop buying what I can make.

This isn't the first time I have gone down this road. As soon as I moved from an apartment downtown into a house in the "burbs" I bought myself a box of beer, grabbed my yard tools, and built a vegetable garden. We didn't grow much that year, probably only enough for a few salads and a pot of French Onion soup, but I tells ya what, that was the best soup I have ever had. It tasted fresh, it tasted clean, it tasted like an accomplishment.

My most recent adventure into the world of DIY food began during a trip to the grocery store. As I bent down to grab a six-pack of my favorite ginger beer, I noticed something strange, the price had jumped up by almost three dollars! It was then and there that I decided I could make my own. Next stop, the produce department!

The principals behind beer aren't really that complex if we're honest. Take liquid, add yeast, add a source of food for the yeast, add flavour, wait. I had the liquid, in the form of distilled water at home, I had yeast, I had sugar, all I needed was some flavour, and since I was set on making ginger beer, that flavour would have to be ginger. lucky for me I live in the 21st century, and ginger is everywhere, including my grocery store.

Upon arriving home with my 800g "hand" of ginger, I put a pot of water on the stove, filled it with water and sugar and turned the heat up to fill whack, with the intention of making a simple syrup of course. The few sites I had consulted during past, when the urge to make ginger beer had taken hold recommended "steeping" the ginger in the syrup to extract the flavour, something that required turing my hand of ginger into many many small pieces of ginger. A task easier said than done.

If you have ever worked with ginger before, you probably know that it is a fibrous mass of watery pulp, and is not very conducive the normal methods of dispatching a rhizome. I tried grating, I tried chopping, I tried pounding, I even cried a little, but nothing seemed to work well. chopping left the pieces too big, grating too small, pounding really only gave me a store arm. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have elected to freeze the ginger, then grate it on the largest part of a box grater.

Following the fiasco that was reducing the ginger into a workable form I threw it into the pot with the syrup, slapped on the lid and let it sit for an hour. After a couple episodes of Alton Brown's Good Eats, which admittedly is where I got the majority of my ginger beer recipe, and once the child was down for a nap, I decided that the syrup had cooled enough to meet the rest of the ingredients.

Into a 2L pop bottle went the filtered syrup — nobody likes floating pieces of ginger in their ginger beer, especially considering the fact that most of the flavour had been extracted — a dime of yeast, some lemon juice, and enough filtered water — tap water contains chlorine, which kills yeast — to bring the level of liquid to the top, and on went the lid.

The bottle sat in my cupboard for two days, and I actually forgot about it, luckily I had a dream about exploding bottles of ginger beer one night, and sat bolt upright, remembering my concoction brewing in the kitchen.

Initial investigation revealed that my little yeast friends had done their best to ferment my ginger beer, turning the sugar in the bottel into alcohol and CO₂, as evidenced by the once flimsy bottle's newfound firmness, since it was filled like a balloon with CO₂. I cautiously opened the lid, and a flood of gas came rushing out at me, had I not screwed the lid back down I'm sure most of my beer would have ended up on the floor. Note to self, next time you make ginger beer, open over the sink.

After several gas letting sessions, or "burpings", involving opening the lid ever so slightly, then tightening it before any of the elixir could escape, I was able to take the lid entirely off, and sample my concoction for the first time.

The colour was similar to what I imagine a glass of half milk, half water would look like, kind of translucent, kinda opaque. Before the burping there had been yeast floating on top of the mix, along with some ginger which had stealthily made it through the strainer, but all that sunk to the bottom. It was time for the first taste.

I carefully drew a glass, pouring ever so slowly, lest I disturb the sediment on the bottom of the bottle, and cautiously put the glass to my lips. To my surprise it tasted good. Less sweet than I imagined, which I guess is a result of the fermentation consuming some of the sugar, and there was a definite hit of alcohol; without a hygrometer I can't be sure, but based on the taste, I would put the percentage somewhere around six or seven percent, more than a can of beer, but less than a glass of wine.

Disappointments? Well, the yeast I used was "instant yeast" which is packed with acetic acid to wake it up very quickly. Were I to do this again — a definite — I think I would go with either traditional bakers yeast, or a strain of brewers yeast. Secondly I would use a lot more ginger, and maybe extract it on the stove in the water, instead of in the syrup, I think this would really bring out the flavour of the ginger. And finally, I think the beer needs some more body, something carry the aromatic flavours of the ginger and lemon. Right now, I'm maybe thinking coriander, maybe maple, star anise or perhaps something as simple as letting the sugar in the syrup caramelize a little bit.

But for now, I have 2L of tasty ginger beer, which is very drinkable. The best part? The yeast in the bottom is still alive, so the bottle never goes flat!

Whoot!

With great power . . . comes great gut-ache

Ben Parker, Peter Parker's (Spider-Man) uncle famously said that "with great power comes great responsibility." Last week I learned this lesson firsthand.

After two years of shopping at safeway, buying gas at Shell, and eating almost exclusively at Boston Pizza, my wife and I saved up enough air miles to buy ourselves a standup mixer. Oh the things I could now make, the list was surely nearly infinite. But first, before anything else, I was determined to make pretzels.

I should have been born in Philadelphia (the pretzel capitol of the US), because I love pretzels. Not those hard desiccated little things you get on airplanes mind you, no, the big, warm and soft golden "twists of bread" pretzels, which thus far have only found at carnivals and hockey games was what I was going for.

The process was surprisingly complex. First you make a dough, which needs to be kneaded for 10 minutes in a standup mixer (hence the need for the air miles), then the portioning, followed by rolling and shaping. Now at this point, logic would suggest that the proto-pretzels just need to be baked, but oh no, first thing required is a bath in a boiling bath of basic water.

Now I don't mean "basic" as in H2O, no I mean basic in the scientific sense, or "water which has an imbalance of hydroxyl groups to hydrogen atoms." To achive this I disolved 2/3 of a cup of baking soda in 10 cups of water, to obtain the desired pH of 8 or 9. Placing the pretzels in this solution has two effects. First it gelatinizes some of the starches on the outside of the pretzel, and second, it slightly cooks the outside. The former helps the baked-good brown while the latter gives the pretzel a chewy crust.

Following the bath, a quick brushing with egg-wash and a liberal salting is all they require before they go into an oven for 12 or so minutes.

When you open the oven door precisely one half of a Daily Show later, what greets you are beautifully brown twists of dough, begging to be eaten.

And eat them I did, with mustard.

Unfortunately I now know why pretzels are only sold at carnivals; in quantities of three or more, pretzels assault the lower GI tract like a SWAT team entering a building. Couple this to the fact that I'm probably slightly allergic to gluten (a protein found in wheat flour, which gives bread it's characteristic elasticity) and I was horribly ill.

Unfortunately my stomach now associates all pretzels with gut wrenching spasms, and I can't even enjoy the $5.00 pretzels sold at hockey games. But I have learned my lesson, with great power comes great responsibility, and I'm obviously not responcible enough to posess the power to make my own pretzels.

Holy crap

Nearly 1/3 of a year without a post. Too long!

I have been talking with some newspapers about applying for jobs when my time with the Manitoban is done, and the consensus seems to be that blogging is one of the new requirements that they all have.

It seems that in this "new media" world a journalist is more than someone who performs research and organizes that research into a format that can be widely consumed by an audience; we also have to be social media experts.

I recently attended a journalism conference in Edmonton, and was surprised by the lack of talks dealing with actual journalism. The majority — admittedly a slim majority, but a majority none the less — of the speakers were non-professionals, from the realm of social media. Indeed, even the final keynote speaker, was a podcaster.

So what does this mean for me? Well, I need to get more regular with my posting. I find with myself that establishing habits is the best way to do something regularly, and the best way to establish a habit — for me at least — is to do something so often that I feel weird without it.

So here I go.