Roasted Salt and Vinegar Baby Potatoes

I'm sure this would work with other vinegars as well, and I'll definitely give it a try with balsamic, but the rice vinegar worked well for this.

Ingredients
Baby potatoes, sliced in half
Olive oil
Rice vinegar
Salt and pepper

1. Put enough olive oil in a skillet to cover the bottom, and put the heat on medium.
   
2. Place the potatoes sliced side up in the skillet (you don't have to be that precise, but it does help them come out more even).
3. When the potatoes have browned a bit, which will take 3-4 minutes, flip them so they're sliced face down.
4. Wait another 3-4 minutes for that side to brown lightly.
   
5. Hold the cover to the skillet in one hand and the rice vinegar in the other and splash the vinegar over the potatoes until the bottom of is lightly covered in vinegar.
   
6. Then put the top down to hold in the steam (and the burning vinegar smell) and let that sit for about a minute.
7. Turn the heat off and transfer the potatoes to a baking pan or cookie sheet.
8. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
9. Bake in the oven 20-30 minutes (I honestly don't remember, but it will vary based on the size of the potatoes).
   

Garlic-Lime Breaded Chicken Wings

These came out like fried wings even though they were baked, so it's relatively healthy. You don't taste the lime too much, it just gives it a little zest.


Ingredients
1 1/2 lbs chicken wings
1 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 grated parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon of garlic salt
Pepper
1/8 of a cup of lime (or lemon) juice
1 egg
2 teaspoons corn oil

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Mix the breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, pepper (to taste) and garlic salt in a large bowl.
3. In another bowl, beat the egg with the lime juice and just 1 teaspoon of olive oil (this helps crisp the skin of the wings).
4. Put the wings in the egg mixture and coat them.
5. Grease a baking pan with the remaining 1 teaspoon of oil.
6. One or two at a time, coat the wings with breading and place in in the baking pan.
7. Bake for 45 minutes for smaller wings, or 1 hour for larger wings.
   

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

These are amazing and are baked regularly, often with variations. It's loosely based on the Vanishing Oatmeal Cookie recipe on the top of the Quaker Oats container. To vary, use half chocolate chips, half dried cranberries (I highly recommend this) OR half chocolate chips, half raisins (we call these Raisinoats) OR go traditional and use all raisins. This recipe makes 2 dozen cookies.



Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick butter)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups oatmeal
1/2 bag chocolate chips

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix butter and sugar until creamy.
3. Add eggs and vanilla.
4. Mix in combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt.
5. Mix in the oats and then the chocolate chips / cranberries / raisins.
6. Optionally, refrigerate the dough for about half an hour to make it firm. The cookies will come out a little chewier this way, otherwise they'll be thinner and crispier.
   
7. Tablespoon the dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
8. Bake for 8-10 minutes if you didn't refrigerate the dough, or 10-12 minutes if you did refrigerate it.
   

Eggplant Smoked Goudagiana

I made this one night when I was making eggplant and happened to have some smoked gouda, and was quite pleased with the results. It includes my standard tomato sauce recipe as well and makes enough sauce for 3/4 to 1 lb of pasta.

Ingredients
1 eggplant
Olive Oil
1/2 a medium onion, diced
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 medium tomatoes, diced
1 small can of tomato paste
Wine or vodka
Salt
Pepper
Basil (fresh if you have it)
Pasta, your preference
Smoke gouda sliced- depends on how thick you want the slices, I used about 1/8 lb

1. Slice up eggplant about 1/2" thick and fry in a pan with olive oil over medium heat until both sides are browned.
2. Place them on a cookie sheet in the oven 325 degrees.
3. Put the diced onion and chopped clove of garlic in the pan, cook until soft.
4. Add diced tomatoes, a small can of tomato paste, enough wine (or vodka) to make it saucy, salt, pepper and basil (if it's fresh basil, don't add it until the pasta is done).
5. When you're ready to cook the pasta, spoon a little sauce on each eggplant slice and cover with thin sliced smoked gouda.
6. Put the eggplant back in the oven, start cooking the pasta and it will be ready when the pasta is done.

To Visualforce or not to Visualforce

Visualforce is a wonderful thing. User interface requests that used to be impossible or at the least very complex to implement in Salesforce are now quite do-able. The end users at my organization look at my latest Visualforce creations with eyes wide and mouths agape, dreaming of the new world of possibilities open to them. But with great power comes great responsibility, and I feel it my duty to caution people of the disadvantages of Visualforce.

There are two major down-sides to replacing standard Salesforce page layouts with Visualforce pages to be aware of going in. These don't apply to VF pages created to supplement the standard SF pages, which have no down-side that I can think of and I'll soon post about some rather nifty pages my developer-in-training and I have come up with. The first is the loss of on-demand configuration. The days of calling your SF admin, requesting a new field and having it magically appear 5 minutes later are over once you become dependent on VF for creating/editing records. Gone also are the days of non-technical power users being able to go in and quickly add or change fields. Adding new and changing existing fields, as in olden times (e.g. 10 years ago), will require a developer to make the changes in the Visualforce page, possibly in a related controller/extension as well, in the development environment, test the changes and then deploy those changes to production. If any development is already ongoing in that page, you may find yourself having to wait for that development to be completed before the developer is willing to make and deploy the change you want. Companies with larger Salesforce implementations are no doubt employing development best practices and scheduling releases of new code into production. This also applies to changes in the VF page layout; there is no dragging and dropping of elements on a VF page around as you please (not yet, anyway!).

The second down-side is that end users will become detached from the design of Salesforce objects, which is going to make report creation more difficult. As much as my users have complained that they've been forced to enter data for 3 different objects into 3 separate forms, it has at least forced them to gain a certain understanding of how all of those objects are related. That understanding is invaluable when creating SF reports. Users that are presented with a single, wondrous VF page that allows them to create and edit records across two or more objects may not even realize which objects they're interacting with, and therefore won't know where to start to create a report on that information.

The point is, Visualforce pages will make users more dependent on developers. Often, the benefits of a slick VF page far outweigh that cost, just be sure to understand that it is a cost when deciding whether or not to implement a new VF page.