Ben Benner’s Blog

For the few folks that read my blog, I would like to announce that a friend of mine, Audrey Montgomery, recently asked me on Facebook to become a fan of her Pampered Chef consulting.

I did that and will do one better, I will link to her Pampered Chef site from my blog here. Yup leveraging the potentially dozens of folks that read this.

Sarcasm aside, I have been blessed with the opportunity to attend some parties where Audrey has performed her magic using the Pampered Chef accessories and her cooking skillz.

While, I tend to get my supplies from the Mission Restaurant Supply company here in town, I took a look through her wares and saw a few items that I may purchase.

Stackable Cooling Rack

Pastry Cutter

Measure-All Cup (like Alton Brown’s)

For those too lazy to click through to her site, here are some quick links.

Contact Audrey

News (recipes too)

New Products

I will go ahead and throw out my professional 2 cents (in terms of web stuff).

I think that it is very cool that The Pampered Chef company enables their agents/consultants with a relatively customizable site that they can personalize and brand a little bit. I would say that anyone doing any sort of reseller/agent type business model needs to be able to offer out that type of functionality.

That would be the good part of the critique, the bad part is that the application that their developers put together is in my opinion not ready for the ‘public web’. The URL structure that they use has query string data (being the stuff after the ‘?’). The first thing that you should learn these days about the query string is that indexing robots typically do not like URLs that have that, so using ModRewrite or what not to create clean URLs will greatly help with that kind of thing.

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=products-category&categoryId=22

With a little bit of reworking of their code they could use a structure like

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/22

or even a little bit more coding, they could give category 22 a name

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/new

Now for me. I am a HUGE fan of sub-domains. Though, I will admit the general public find these confusing, but there are tricks to get around that (little bit of header redirecting after the .com/, will make it easy for folks to be sent to the proper subdomain). The link could look like.

cookingwithaudrey.pamperedchef.biz/products/category/new

While, I am not sure if The Pampered Chef application knows to detect if it is being executed in an iframe, there are things that consultants, like Audry can do to add their own branding to these types of sites.

Register the domain ‘CookingWithAudrey.com’, setup a GoDaddy hosting account (the cheap one). Setup a simple HTML page that does an <iframe> and is set to pull up http://www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=home

That would would allow you to go to the CookingWithAudrey.com and keep her private URL in the address bar. Would have to test it to see if there are any warnings that come up from the SSL layer when you try to do a checkout. If there are, then rather than doing an <iframe> the CookingWithAudrey.com domain name can do a simple redirect to her Pampered Chef site.

I would probably say that she might want to try and do a splash page, that has some photos of some of the stuff she has cooked and then has a graphic/button/link to take the user to her Pampered Chef site.

So ends my professional 2 cents bit.

Again, congrats to Audrey on the Facebook fan stuff and The Pampered Chef site.

back to the grind.

laterz

bdbenner business, coding, friends Cooking, friend, programming

I made pizza, from scratch, recently. It was quite good.

I made the pizza dough from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes cookbook, with the exception of swapping out 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

(Before)

(After)

The last time I made this dough I followed the recipe exactly that time and in the end felt that the dough could use a bit of whole wheat. The other thing I did this time around was to roll-out the dough much thinner to get a nice crispy thin-crust pizza.

The first time, I thought I had rolled it out enough for a thin-crust, not like cracker thin, but thin. Instead, I got a much more “original” crust style. It was good, but a little too doughy for my liking.

I followed Gina’s lead of putting the toppings under the cheese, with the exception of the tomatoes, which next time I will slice thinner and put under the cheese. My thoughts at the time was that the grape tomatoes on the top of the cheese would have a chance to release their water into the heat and keep the pizza from getting soggy at all.

More of my pizza pics.

Back to the grind.
Laterz

bdbenner food, pizza Cooking, homemade pizza, pizza

I hope that everyone is having a Merry X-mas.

I helped the dogs, rabbits and bird make X-mas cards for Gina. The dogs got her a Starbucks gift card and the rabbits and bird got her an iTunes card. Lula wanted to get Gina a new car, but well Lula is a dog and in these tight economic times she just couldn’t get a loan. I mean, one of these days soon Lula’s modeling career will take off and she will be able to get herself the personal chef she has always been wanting.

Gina got me some clothes (which was cool, cuz I picked them out), she also got me CronoTrigger for the DS-Lite, and she got me a really swanky beard trimmer (my last one broke). Gina and I got t-shirts from my in-laws, Gina’s says that “Everyone loves an Italian girl.” Mine says “Italian, by marriage only.”

I also got a micro-copter (which is proving to be challenge to fly, but one I am sure I will master). Gina got a bracelet.

I got Gina an Apple AirportExpress, so that when she travels she will always be able to have wifi at the hotel. I also got her the latest book by the lady that writes the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, I believe the title is “The Tales of the Beetle Bard”. It is a small book, I think she will likely finish it in a day (if she reads it straight through).

We were going to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with Jeremy and Nichole. However, it would appear that the movie was TOO popular. For almost evey X-mas for the last 10-15 years I have seen a movie. But both Gina and myself cannot ever remember the theatre being as busy as the Cinemark on 1431 was this afternoon. Jeremy and Nichole got there earlier than us and managed to get tickets, whereas Gina and I didn’t get there in time. I called Jeremy when we got there, to see if they were already in the theatre or if they were in one of the various lines that were outside the theatre (one of which looked like it might have been coming from inside the building.

He said that they were inside already and that it was pretty full. I stood in line to buy tickets and overheard someone say with amazement “It is sold out.” I didn’t catch what movie they were referring to, when I got up to the kiosk myself, I saw the “Sold Out” label on the picture of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

I feel  bad that we were not able to catch the flick with Jeremy and Nichole. Hopefully, it is a good one. Tomorrow night Jeremy and I are going to see “The Spirit”, I am going to see if John can go tomorrow night. I think I will make sure we are there extra early, which should be easy since Jeremy and I are both taking the day off.

On a side note, it actually turned out to be a good thing that Gina and I didn’t get into the movie. Our “Rival 20 Quart (Electric) Roaster Oven” is amazing, it cooked the turkey to our amazement in about 1.5 hours. I mean it seems impossible to believe, but we reviewed various different websites to verify the necessary cooking time and temperatures (and to see if we could figure out the best place to put the meat temp probe).

The movie lasts almost 3 hours. This would have ultimately have meant that the turkey would have been way overdone.

Gina’s dad had told her earlier today that the roaster would could the turkey quickly, but he didn’t say it was going to cook it that quickly. I mean we had put the probe in about 1 hour in and it was already registering at 161 degrees.

Well, Gina just started cutting the turkey, so it is time to go.

Laterz

bdbenner Dogs, Personal, Uncategorized, food Cooking, Dogs, gifts, movies, pets, turkey, xmas