After spending a week in Israel eating nothing but the best, I came back feeling inspired and motivated to eat better and work towards being healthier overall. So, I stopped shopping for food at Meijer and started shopping at the local Westborne Market. I picked up a few cooking magazines (the books would come a little later). And I was off to the races. It started out pretty simple – basic chicken and veggie recipes, steak and potatoes, etc. – but it didn’t take long before I was trying new things and getting creative.

Now, eight months later, I have a growing collection of over 20 cookbooks and magazines. And in the last few months, I’ve been getting more and more into international cuisine – as you all know by now. With the new year comes new resolutions, and so it was decided:

My goal for 2012: One international cuisine week per month for twelve months.

As you may have guessed, this first cuisine week is Vietnamese – a cuisine I was entirely unfamiliar with. It turned out pretty well, with a few particularly awesome dishes. Read on for the deets… (and to find out what cuisine weeks are coming up next!)

Dinner No. 1: Thịt Bò Xào Bông Cải
Beef Stir-fried with Cauliflower

Not a bad first dish, pretty basic – flank steak and cauliflower stir-fried in garlic and fish sauce with a bit of onion. I served this up with kasmati rice and some lightly dressed spinach. Solid flavors overall.

Rating: 4/5

Dinner No. 2: Canh Riêu Cá và Chả Bắp Rán
Salmon with Tomato, Dill & Garlic Soup and Corn & Coconut Fritters

In this case, I’m going to have to rate the two parts of the dinner separately because the soup was okay, but the fritters were pretty freaking awesome! The soup probably would have been better if I had used fresh dill, however the market was out that day. Oh well, it was good for what it was – very salmony.

The fritters though, wow. Tasty fried sweet corn bundles of joy. And dipped in a sweetened Sriracha sauce for some serious kick. SOOOO good. I will be making these again – and will probably double the batch!

Soup Rating: 3.5/5
Fritter Rating: 5/5

Dinner No. 3: Gà Kho Gừng
Chicken and Ginger Simmered in Caramel Sauce

If you recall, I said Vietnamese week had some particularly awesome victories – the fritters were the first, and this chicken was the second. First of all, I made the caramel sauce myself – just a) boiled sugar in water until it smoked, b) took it off the heat and swirled it around until it blacked, c) submerged the bottom of the pot in cold water to stop it from cooking, d) poured additional cold water into the caramel (this extra water is what made it into a liquid sauce), e) returned it to the heat and stirred until the water was mixed in well with the caramel. Bam. Caramel sauce.

The rest was pretty straight forward – place boneless, skinless chicken thighs chopped up with some ginger in a sauce pan, add the caramel sauce and some fish sauce and simmer for 15~ minutes. Viola, you have the most amazingly tasty chicken ever.

Rating: 5/5

Dinner No. 4: Bí Đỏ Hầm Dừa
Winter Squash Simmered in Coconut Milk

This one turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I used acorn squash instead of the recipes banana squash or butternut squash. I don’t think that was the problem. It really just lacked strong flavor.

The recipe called for raw peanuts, winter squash, sweet potato, a bit of sugar, and of course the coconut milk – simmered until the veggies had cooked and the coconut milk had thickened into a sauce. The best part in my opinion was the peanuts! If the recipe had has some kick to it, maybe a bit of curry, more of a Thai spice flavor – it probably would have been pretty good.

Rating: 3/5

Dinner No. 5: Trứng Chiên Tôm
Egg, Shrimp, and Scallion Pancakes

These were sort of like an egg foo young, but better. They were also extremely simple to make – just mix a few beaten eggs with shrimp and scallions and ladle about 2 tbsp. at a time into a 1/4″ of oil. Flip when the edges start to brown. On their own, they were pretty good – but dipped in a tiny bit of fish sauce, they were epic.

Rating: 4.5/5

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And so that was Vietnamese Week! Pretty good, I’d say! There are definitely a few things I’ll be cooking again. Now it’s time to prepare for next month – FRENCH!! And what better cookbook to refer to for French cuisine than Mastering the Art of French Cooking?! So if you have any favorite recipes from the book that I should consider for next month – let me know in the comments!!

1. Vietnamese – DONE!
2. French – NEXT!
3. Irish
4. Indian
5. Jamaican
6. Ethiopian
7. Greek
8. Cuban
9. Moroccan
10. Thai
11. Polish
12. Japanese

2011 was phenomenal. Insane. Exhilarating. Awesome. Joyful. Busy. Just all around generally incredible.

Probably my favorite year in my <27 years of existence.

Here’s just a few reasons why:

• Marriage – Best day of my life. We did it!! And it was wonderful!! Everything was perfect and beautiful, and everyone had a wonderful time. It couldn’t possibly have been much better. Not to mention our awesome honeymoon in Toronto (blog post coming soon, seriously)!!!!
• Israel – Best week of my life. Adam’s family, the sites, the history, the people, the FOOD!!! Such an amazing experience and SO thankful to have had it!
• Cooking – After returning from Israel and the week long experience of exquisite cuisine, I came back yearning for a healthier, more enjoyable lifestyle. And for me, that started with the abandonment of frozen bag dinners and the purchase of several great cookbooks (which eventually lead to Cuisine Week)!
• Genealogy – In between wedding planning and traveling, I was able to break through a few brick walls, connect with some distant cousins, and I even managed to win the GRAND freaking PRIZE in the Ancestry.com 15 Days of Discovery sweepstakes!! The trip to LA is in just a few weeks!!
• RootsTech – And going along with the genealogy stuff, I had the opportunity to attend the first ever RootsTech conference in February which was an awesome mashup of genealogy and technology. I’m already all booked for the second conference in Feb. 2012!
• CodeMash & An Event Apart (San Francisco) – My first two real web / developer conferences – all thanks to my new(ish) work home – Quicken Loans! These were a lot of fun, a lot to take in, and certainly reinvigorated my profession.

So much awesomesauce in 2011. It’s actually pretty hard for me to imagine 2012 being better than that.

No big life events planned and no super huge crazy travel plans. Just the Ancestry.com trip in January and RootsTech in February – which will both be awesome. After that I’ll be able to actually start conserving my time-off. Maybe towards the end of the year we’ll plan a bigger vacation, who knows what 2012 will bring?!

Time to go work on my list of New Years resolutions!

A good friend of mine is going through a very rough time and could use some help paying off her medical bills, please help if you can.

You can submit your donations to: GoFundMe

It would be the best Christmas gift she could ever receive.

For more on her story, visit: Living Incidentally

Here for you now are some of my favorite photos from the trip, followed the itinerary and some of the highlights.

For more photos (especially the ones with people), check out my special Israel Edition of Jarchiver.

Day 1: Welcome to Israel

Arrival in Tel Aviv

After a 12 hour flight, we were all happy to be on land again and ecstatic to meet our totally awesome tour guide, Beni.

Bus Tour to Jerusalem

No time to waste, it was off to Jerusalem via the official Bellinson Family tour bus! Beni introduced us to the land, culture, politics, and more along the way.

Touring the Old City and Holy Sepulcher

A stroll through the bustling markets and then to the supposed place of Christ’s death.

Day 2: Discovering Jerusalem and Digging up the Past

Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with survivor Eliezer Ayalon

As you can imagine, Eli’s story was heartbreaking and the Holocaust Museum was an experience which you could call “rough.” It was an amazing experience to meet a man of such strong will and graciousness.

Beit Guvrin Caves – Dig For A Day

Here we were able to participate in an ongoing archeological dig, something I’ve always wanted to do. Most of us found at least one or two bits of 2000 year old antiquities – mostly shards of pottery, small bits of coal and long petrified animal bones.

Western Wall Tunnels

In the tunnels, we were the closest one can get to the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments was kept according to the Hebrew Bible.

Day 3: Bar Mitzvah Day!

Cooper’s Bar Mitzvah

This was my first experience of the Jewish religion and it was a lovely ceremony.

Israel Museum

Here we had a chance to see some of the art and traditions of the Israeli culture, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Day 4: Heading South – Dead Sea and Masada

Masada

This mountain top was once the home to a group of Jewish extremists, but when troops from the Roman Empire threatened their livelihood they turned to mass suicide rather than give themselves up as slaves to the Romans.

The Dead Sea

It’s true!! You totally float in the Dead Sea! Quite a strange experience, indeed, but very cool.

Dinner in a Bedouin Tent

After visiting a botanical garden and seeking out some wild ibexes, we headed up into the mountains to a remote bedouin camp for an absolutely wonderful dinner.

Day 5: Heading North – Galilee

Central Galilee Partnership 2000 English Program

The Jewish Federation of Detroit is partnered with an Israeli elementary school which we visited and learned a bit about the students and their lives.

Ayelet Hashahar Shooting Range

Time to shoot some uzis!! My first gun shooting almost went out without a hitch – right after instructing us on safety, the teacher shot a live round off right across me while showing me how to pull the trigger. Nice.

Day 6: North to Tel Aviv

Golan Heights Jeep Ride

Off-roading through the cattle fields up to Golan Heights where we met with former colonel, Kobi Marom, to talk politics and relationships with neighboring Syria and Lebanon.

Army Base Security Tour with Kobi Marom

Next, we headed to an Israeli Defense Force base and met with a few soldiers, saw a bunch of missile launchers and ate a bit of Bar Mitzvah cake.

Tel Aviv Tour

And lastly, it was back to Tel Aviv for a few hours of touring and our final Israeli dinner before embarking on the incredible 25 hour journey back home (ouch).

…

So As you can see, it was a fully loaded week – and that flickr set doesn’t even begin to cover it. For more photos (especially the ones with people), check out my special Israel Edition of Jarchiver.

If you’re unfamiliar with RootsTech 2011, it was an inaugural conference event at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, that aimed at bringing together professional and amateur genealogists, technology creators, and technology users with the goal of reducing friction and generating stronger ties between the two fields of genealogy and technology.

A side note on Utah, Mormons and Family History

I’ve never been to Utah before, nor did I prepare by doing any sort of research on the city of Salt Lake, so I really had very little idea what to expect. I did know it was a genealogy hub because of the Family History Library, but I had completely forgotten about the massive Mormon population and never really bothered looking into the connection between family history and the Latter Day Saints.

As I quickly learned, Mormon’s are such avid family historians because they hold the belief that people who have died before them can be baptized into the church by proxy, allowing ancestors who weren’t living church members to join them in the afterlife. This essentially means that if your grandfather was a serial killer or baptized Catholic, for example, you could be baptized by the church of Latter Day Saints on their behalf, thereby allowing them to leave their “spirit prison” and join you in the heavenly afterlife. Apparently, people like Adolf Hitler and the Pope have been baptized vicariously in this way. From what I can tell, Mormons base this belief on a single New Testament scripture line:

“Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?” — 1 Corinthians 15:29

For more on this controversial concept of baptism for the dead, there’s a great article on Wikipedia.

That all being said, I found Salt Lake to be a very strange city – comprised mostly of white folk, most of whom seemed to be Mormon, and many of which were recruiters. While this population did seem to contribute to the overall sense of safety and order of the town, it definitely left something to be desired. I can’t say I’ll ever go back to Salt Lake except for the next RootsTech conference which is already scheduled for February 2-4, 2012.

Back to the conference! Between the keynotes, sessions, nightly events and vendor exhibits – there wasn’t any time to waste. So, let’s get to the highlights!

Sessions

Digital Images for Genealogists & Technologists

Lead by Geoffrey Rasmussen of Legacy Family Tree, this session looked at tools and techniques to help with digital image cleanup, preservation and organization. Geoffrey focused primarily on using Photoshop Elements and Picasa for both manipulation and organization, but touched on a few other services as well. Both PhotoShop Elements and Picasa offer offline photo organization as well as online backups (for a fee, of course). And since both services offer slightly different features, Geoffrey suggested using the combination for ultimate organization and meta tagging assistance.

This was a very interesting session for me personally, as I recently developed my own DIY photo archiving solution: jarchiver.com. At the time of development, I had avoided services like Picasa as I felt they were too detached from other aspects of genealogy and in the case of sites like Flickr, required hefty monthly payments. While I’m still not sure what my ultimate photo organization solution is, a lot of good ideas definitely came out of this session. I discovered another interesting option from one of the vendors called PhotoLoom, which ties your tree into your photo storage – so I’ll definitely be looking at this service in the future.

Systems and Methods for Geospatial and Temporal Interpretation of Genealogical Data

Bernie Gracie lead this session which went over using his site, AncestralHunt.com, to break down brick walls by looking in depth at the geographical locations and migrations of your ancestors and their communities. Most of the session was a demo of the service, which made it clear that there’s a lot of potential for this kind of research – especially since a large part of what the site offers is community collaboration.

Since the nature of family tree research is so fluid, Bernie suggested using the site as a tool for ideation and theorizing, rather than a place to keep verified data. This concept in itself is worth noting. A related idea was presented by Jimmy Zimmerman in an Unconferencing session: since our trees are ever changing and since we often encourage collaboration, while simultaneously fearing the inadvertent destruction of all our hard work, why not implement a kind of version control system for family trees?! Think github for your ancestry! You want to invite your cousin to work on your tree, but you don’t want her going in and tearing shtuff up – create a “branch” of your tree that see can work in! When she’s done she can submit her changes back to you and it will ultimately be your decision whether or not to include them in the main trunk.

Google Earth for Genealogy

This session, lead by Lisa Louise Cooke, host of the Genealogy Gems Podcast, demonstrated how you can create virtual tours of your ancestry using Google Earth. These tours can help tell your family story in a very visual and engaging way, so they’re great for people don’t quite understand your obsession with genealogy.

To create a tour, you essentially plot a bunch of points on Google Earth which you can then “play” through. Each point can contain any amount HTML including embedded images, videos, and audio recordings. So as the tour plays and Google Earth pans around the globe to each point, it launches each coordinate description allowing you to effectively tell the tale of your family.

Events

Night at the Clark Planetarium

As unrelated to genealogy as astronomy is, this event was a pretty great time. Between the free food (which was pretty tasty), 3D IMAX movies, star shows in the Hansen dome theater, prize drawings, and other exhibits, there was plenty for everyone to do.

My favorite part of the night was watching Hubble 3D in the IMAX theater. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this eye-candy film documented the efforts of the seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis and their mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The whole film was full of breathtaking views of Earth, distant galaxies and other celestial presences. It was really just a pleasure to take in.

Late Night at the Family History Library

As the heading implies, the Family History Library stayed open late especially for RootsTech attendees. Genealogists were able to utilize the libraries resources and expert knowledge through midnight. There were also a few showings of the newest “Who Do You Think You Are?” episode featuring Tim McGraw, but I skipped those to see what interesting documents I could dig up.

I started in the family history book section and looked for family surnames but didn’t come across any matches. Next, I moved to the computer and began searching through all the paid databases I normally don’t have access to. I wasn’t as prepared to do research as I should have been, so I basically performed a bunch of generic surname searches with focus on a few key ancestors. I managed to come across one concrete document – a death notice from the 1943 Chicago Tribune for my great grand aunt, Marie ‘Bibs’ Schick.

I also found a few leads on my great-great-great grandfather, Christ Pagels, which could very well pan out!

Vendors

Flip-Pal

Flip-Pal definitely stole the vendor show with there amazingly awesome portable scanner. This battery-powered mobile scanner will take 300-600dpi scans and comes with an SD card that’s pre-loaded with stitching software allowing you to take multiple scans of large documents that can be seamlessly pieced together later on. And just incase you don’t have an SD card reader in your computer, they even throw in a USB adapter (seriously, awesome bonus)!

Now when I say Flip-Pal stole the show, I wasn’t kidding – they sold out of their conference stock each day and had to get more shipped in every night. There were hordes of people around their booth in awe of the nifty little device. And while I didn’t buy one on the spot (simply because I didn’t want to carry it around with me, nor was there a conference discount), I promptly ordered one online when I got back to the hotel.

Check out this glowing review of the device for more info.

GeneTree

GeneTree was the other vendor I found to be of great interest. They provide a genome mapping service similar to that of 23andMe, which I’m already participating in. Talking with the folks here definitely helped to clear up some of the confusion I have with my 23andMe results and their vendor demo session provided a lot more background on how DNA moves from parent to child and how you can begin interpreting the results. I’ll likely give their service a try as it’s focused on the genealogical aspect, rather than both health and ancestry, and includes a lot more in terms of graphing and data interpretation.

To show my support and intent, I picked up one of their very sweet t-shirts:

Salt Lake City

While I didn’t have too much free time to tour around the city, I was able to visit the LDS temple and visitor center, a few local pubs, and the infamous Salt Lake. I saw some very cool things, and many, many strange / interesting things. Here’s a sampling:

The Cool

• The art
• The lake
• The mountains
• The old architecture
• A Star Wars theme song playing bagpiper

The Weird

• Mormon recruiters
• A Mormon rave
• Adjacent wedding & nude photo shoots on the lake
• Dead birds all over the lake bed
• The lack of cultural diversity

Conclusions

All in all – RootsTech was a pretty good time and I can’t wait to see what they pull off next year! There’s already been a ton of great feedback and the blogosphere still can’t stop talking about it.

I’ve posted all of my photos over on jarchiver, my personal photo archiving app, so check those out for even more good times.

Now it’s time for me to end this novel and get back to my research – I bought three pretty awesome books on Sweden, Chicago and Google from the book vendor! See the photo for book details and to see the awesome laptop bag I got as a participant of RootsTech!

Peace.