Caesar salad with broiled shrimp and pear

Since we ate all the leftovers last night, I was forced (forced! I tell you!) to cook something for lunch. Here's what I came up with:

• ½ bag of "spring mixed greens with spinach."
• 4 oz. shrimp, thawed and tails off
• ½ pear, diced
• 1 egg
• 1 tbs lemon juice (fresh is best, bottled is okay)
• 3 tbs the best olive oil you can afford, plus extra for cooking.
• 1 tbs anchovy paste
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
• fresh coarsely ground black pepper to taste
• Parmesan cheese

Take a cast-iron pan and put it in the oven, and preheat the broiler. Boil the egg for 90 seconds, then dunk in ice water for rapid cooling. Thaw and de-tail the shrimp, as needed, then toss with olive oil to coat. Mince the garlic. Mix the garlic, lemon, 3 tbs oil, anchovy, Worcestershire sauce in a small bowl. When the egg is cool, crack into the bowl. Mix well.

When the oven is heated, put shrimp into the pan and broil for one minute. Toss & turn shrimp, broil for another minute. Leave out to cool.

Peel and dice the pear. Dice the shrimp. Toss shrimp, pear, and greens in a large bowl. Apply dressing, top with pepper and freshly grated cheese.

Low carb, minimal dairy, some protein, lots of greens, massive flavor. Can't beat that.

Recommendation: Wrap the handle of the cast-iron skillet in aluminium foil. It transmits heat slower than iron, and will make it possible to handle the pan for a longer period of time than otherwise. When you're done, wipe the pan quickly with a damp washcloth, then let air-dry: everything on it is dead, and the olive oil will help preserve the non-stick features of the pan.

Also, I learned that you should never try to heat meat in a cold iron pan by just putting both on the stove. Micro-tears in the iron seal up if you pre-heat the pan, but grab the meat if don't and ruin the outer layer, inhibiting the Maillard reaction and changing the flavor noticably for the worse.

I are a mad scientist...

As of today, the "create a RESTful API for the human genome with proper hypermedia controls" project took its first baby step:

lynx -dump http://localhost:8000/ensembl/human/symbol/BRCA2 { "found": [ "Gene(Species='Homo sapiens';  BioType='protein_coding';  Description='breast cancer 2,...';  StableId='ENSG00000139618';  Status='KNOWN';  Symbol='BRCA2')" ] }

Pretty cool. My computer has breast cancer. And brown hair. And LDL cholesterol. And it might be a mosquito. Or yeast.

Right now, it only works with Ensembl symbol sets, but after we get a full range of targeting and addressing addresses in place (oy, the bandwidth that's gonna chew up to demo!), NCBI and KEGG are also in the pipeline.

That's the open-source stuff I'm allowed to talk about. The in-house stuff, well... *giggle* let's just say it involves a lot of Canvas. It look like that book on processing.js might turn out to be a good investment after all.

(There's something appropriate about me being all mad-sciency about the same time I'm weirdly enjoying opera.)