Boston Restaurant and Food Blog » Food

How to Make Apple Pie For the First Time

Lingbo Li — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:36:58 +0000

When I do something for the first time, I usually do a bit of research to make sure I’m doing it right. My first foray in pie-making – hell, baking in general – was great because I realized that baking isn’t some scary, landmine-ridden challenge. Somehow, people build it up to be a lot more intimidating than it actually is.

Making a pie is fairly involved (a lot of letting things chill in the fridge), but if you follow a few basic tricks and rules of thumb, the end product ends up totally agreeable. The most important is to keep the butter and/or shortening cold, and to not overwork the dough. This is to preserve those little lumps of fat streaked throughout, which will melt in the oven and result in that coveted tender/flaky pie crust.

I left California earlier this week, and am cooking in my friend’s mom’s kitchen out in the ‘burbs of Buffalo, NY. It is a somewhat improbable place to go on my year off, but has done wonders for skills cooking American classics (my friend Nick is wary of Asian dishes) and maintaining my San Francisco time difference. I just took a pie out of the oven at 2:30am and am blogging this at 3:15 am.

I had dinner at Nick’s friend’s house tonight. She served us a lovely California Cabernet and beef bourguignon over egg white noodles with freshly baked popovers. Her mother was a whippersnapper of an 81 year old who still ran her own business and gave many tips on baking the perfect pie.

I used a vodka pie crust recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, using a pastry cutter rather than a food processor. (Check out their new blog, America’s Test Kitchen Feed!) I precooked the filling (recipe) based on the pie expert’s advice, since the apples were a bit tart, but wished I had cooked them a few minutes less. I threw in brown sugar and extra cinnamon, just because. The filling ended up very soft while the crust browned too fast on top and remained a tad undercooked.

Still, I’m pretty proud of the finished product. The kitchen smells delicious, my friend Jason gave it his programmer’s grunt of approval from behind his setup of monitors, and it’s not bad for Pie Numero Uno.

Should Cafes Ask Customers to Leave?

Lingbo Li — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:04:28 +0000

My favorite cafe asked me to leave last week. For the second time.

I’ll tell you why I feel sad: when I first found Crema Cafe two years ago, I fell in love. I spent so much time there, my sweaters absorbed its scent, an inexorable melange of lattes, carbs, and indie-pop Pandora playlists. The owners described it as a place between home and work; I took that quite literally. I proudly told my friends I was considering moving in.

Over the past two years, I’ve spent so many happy hours in that cafe. I love bringing my laptop to do work on the upstairs level. I’ve forcibly dragged friends there and bought them my favorites, just so they could be converted. I’ve blogged about them, plugged them on Serious Eats, posted photos to various food sites. When I signed up for Mint.com, I budgeted a very liberal portion for “coffee.”

If you ask me for restaurant recommendations, you’ll likely hear raves about their turkey-avocado-jicama-slaw sandwich or their baked-fresh-from-scratch pastries.

So I disappointed when I was asked to leave during a busy Saturday afternoon to make room for other customers. I’d been there for a little over 2 hours with my laptop, and had planned on taking a seat closer to a wall outlet when one of the owners stepped in. (I had polished off a medium coffee and a chicken sandwich.) He had promised that table to another customer; since I had headphones on, I hadn’t seen the line forming behind me.

He was apologetic. As I was leaving, he apologized again. And this was the second time – a month before, a different owner had asked me to leave, but relented when I bought another sandwich. I’ve generally tried to share my table or buy another pastry during marathon study sessions, but I know I’ve overstayed my welcome in the past.

And I understand why they’re taking a more aggressive tack. Mostly. They charge reasonable prices for freshly made food. They have high labor costs and rent; they depend on table turnover and volume to pay the bills. I ended up chatting that owner for about an hour about the trials of the business world and how to solve the problem of being too popular.

I’m happy Crema has done well. It clearly has no problem attracting loyal customers and long lines. But I’m disappointed that the same place that I cheered for and championed feels that its success is dependent on asking me to leave. Are the two really at odds?

Perhaps this Seth Godin (a well-known marketer) post about “best customers” summarizes some of how I’m feeling:

If you define “best customer” as the customer who pays you the most, then I guess it’s not surprising that the reflex instinct is to charge them more. After all, they’re happy to pay.

But what if you define “best customer” as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin? That customer, I think, is worth far more than what she might pay you in any one transaction. In fact, if you think of that customer as your best marketer instead, it might change everything.

If you’re a cafe lover, do you think cafe owners should ask customers who have finished eating to leave?

Cafe owners, how do you deal with slow table turnover?

This is the Pancake of Your Wet Dreams.

Lingbo Li — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:56:31 +0000

Google “pancake recipe” and you get nearly 3 million results. How do you sort through the mess, if you’re just lusting after a syrup-sodden flapjack of joy?

Enter MyStack. This is an entirely fictional Pancake Search Engine – the Google of pancake recipes – that allows you to delicately tweak ingredients, mix-ins, calories, and costs. It even calculates whether a pancake is qualitatively “sweet” “hearty” or “fluffy” using ingredient ratios.

Its backend, if it were ever built, would feature a hell of a lot of data parsing, web scraping, and hopefully tap into existing recipe database APIs, should they be made available.

Again, this website does not actually exist. I drew up this mockup in Photoshop (in a record 1.5 hours) for my CS171 Data Visualization class.

The Pancake Challenge prompt:

Mon Feb 7 – The Pancake Recipe Challenge

Google the words “pancake recipe,” and you will get more than 1 million hits. Looking more closely, there are actually many ways to make such a simple thing as pancakes.

In this exercise, we want each breakout group to pick some tasks that have to do with the variety of pancake recipes and to sketch a visualization that supports as many of these tasks as possible. The list of possible tasks includes, among others:

I have some ingredients at home, which pancake recipe can I make?

Which is the most diet friendly recipe?

What recipe will require the least amount of money?

How will pancakes turn out for the difference recipes? Taste? Texture?

To what extent do recipes vary? How much deviation is in the various quantities?

I am making pancakes — I wonder what recipe my friends recommend?

You can also come up with your own tasks. Note that the data is many pancake recipes and not just one, so your interface should scale to billions of pancake recipes (just kidding – but you get the point). At the end, you will present your design to the class and explain how the visual elements and possible user interactions are supporting the tasks you chose.

Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town on Monday when the project is due.

This probably the one time I’ve ever wanted to present my homework… but I figured I’d let it into the wilds of the Internet, in case anyone wants to build the mythical MyStack and turn it into syrupy reality. (Slice and dice the full size mockup here.) What the hell, let’s throw in a handful of blueberries and add “tortilla” to the database.

1am at IHOP in Harvard Square

Pardon the dust – we’re redesigning!

Lingbo Li — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:55:25 +0000

If you’ve seen this site going through more makeovers than Madonna on fast forward, it’s because I’ve been experimenting with the layout for the past week. To go magazine style or not magazine style? Slideshow feature box or no slideshow feature box? These are the kinds of questions that occupy my mind.

Not to fret, we’ll be back to regular functioning capacity as soon as my mind does. Which is no real guarantee of anything. But you wouldn’t be reading my blog if you were looking for that. Because you know, it’s not happening. Anyway – I have a lot of food photos to share. So how about it:

My new obsession: Dorado Tacos‘ (in Brookline, on Harvard Ave) fish taco. This is their fried fish taco, holding a tender, golden-crisp core of Atlantic pollock set off with salsa fresca and Baja crema. Did I mention it’s very pretty, too?

Give it a good squirt of lime, pair it with some chicken tortilla soup, and you’re ready to GO PUBLIC. Er. I mean. CONQUER THE WORLD.

That would be this.

Here’s the pho from Xinh Xinh in Chinatown. I was more taken with their “goi du du” – papaya salad with shrimp – that came with three shrimp chips (those things that look like delicious disks of styrofoam) and chopped peanuts. But the pho made for a more sensual viewing experience.

More pics from Davis Square’s Journeyman if I muster up the energy later (no guarantees!!!) but here’s a sneak peek anyway – an endive, black rice, and steak from a 5 course meal at the unusual restaurant. It’s located in an an alley. It’s started by food industry n00bs. (Adorable n00bs!) And you can only order 3 to 7 course set menus. Dat’s right.

I highly recommend skipping the reservation and just sitting at the bar, where you get to directly face the open kitchen. That means the chef can literally look up and ask you, “So, any of you allergic to clams?” Priceless.

Because emotions are meant to be eaten.

Lingbo Li — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:08:52 +0000

I am happy to announce the beta launch of Shouldn’t Have Eaten, a website dedicated to …

things you shouldn’t have eaten.

The possibilites are endless.

Here are some of my favorites from real, live users so far:

the Hell Pasta with ghost chiles. Both my stomach (and my toilet) would be happier if I hadn’t.

an entire gallon of egg nog. I walked around the whole with Christmas joy and mild shame in my stomach.

One. Pound. Of. Almonds. In a day. Fucking Costco. Besides the nausea, what comes in most go out…

We’re moderating submissions for now, to keep the quality up (and spam down) so send us your best stuff.

We want this to be the pulse of America’s guilty obsession with food. To shine a light on a twisted cultural pysche. To expose guilt at the bacon-saturated grassroots.

And we want you to be a part of it.

Shouldn’t Have Eaten: what shouldn’t go in your stomach goes here.

For the nerdy: site coded from scratch in PHP and MySQL, voting and read more functions in Ajax. My partner, Shervin, did a really terrific job in the little time we had to pull this together. I did the graphic design in Photoshop and UI, so yell at me if something sucks and I’ll try to fix it. Stylistic stuff is basic HTML/CSS, a bit of Javascript. Stock photos taken from sxc.hu. Font is Museo Slab. I love me some slab serifs.

I’m very open to hearing critical feedback, since I’d love for this to take off and to improve on the original site (which was put together in 2-3 days total with a partner for my CS50 final project), so shoot me feedback!

Eating Toro’s beef hearts; Ken Oringer

The Origins of a Foodie

Lingbo Li — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:36:20 +0000

For a foodie, I had a spartan culinary upbringing.

Perhaps it began in utero, when my mother ate tomatoes by the bushel during her pregnancy, believing it’d lead to a smarter child.

Out I came, eight pounds of screaming joy, born to China’s new breed of post-Cultural Revolution, university-educated brethren. Becoming American was an unlikely reinvention for my father, whose family, up until a few years ago, lived in a two-room concrete building heated by a coal furnace. Chickens still roamed the dirt roads.

My family held onto every dollar, never forgetting how difficult they were to come by. While my father was a Ph.D. student, we rented the top floor of an old house in upstate New York, wearing jackets indoors to save money on heating and faithfully finishing the leftovers.

I didn’t feel so different from other kids back then.

In elementary school, I qualified for a free school lunch, and I ate the same food as everyone else. Later on, my mother would pack strange lunches—fried rice with oil leaking out of the takeout container—and I remember feeling ashamed as I saw how my classmates’ lunches were so sterilized and scentless, so perfectly contained and uniform.

My parents did their best, and for the most part, I was very happy with what I had to eat. I never went hungry, and I did like my mother’s unambitious but earnest Chinese home cooking. When we wanted to celebrate, we would predictably choose one of the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets nearby, no matter what the occasion. The $12.95 price tag seemed exorbitant at the time.

As I got older, the feeling of being different grew.

Read the rest on TheCrimson.com

Meet Felice, Creator of the World’s First Linux Birthday Cake

Lingbo Li — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:16:43 +0000

My roommate Felice is neither a typical Harvard student nor a typical pastry maker. When I first saw her, she was powder pale, with a green mohawk, combat boots, and no eyebrows. This will be interesting, I thought. Maybe we can do each other’s makeup.

We lived together entirely by accident – my roommate and I at the time were looking for some more people to make a room of 5. She gamely agreed.

Felice turned out to be the brainy lovechild of a punk rock Betty Page and The Odyssey’s Homer. In between translating ancient Greek texts for her senior thesis and poring over orgo homework, she watched a constant stream of L-word spinoffs and brutal slasher flicks.

One day, she’ll be a surgeon, a programmer’s wife, and proud mommy of the cutest pet rats ever.

Felice and her boyfriend, Yuvi Masory, hacker extraordinaire

Felice ended up being my favorite roommate my strange, wild junior year. The five of us in that doomed rooming group were an unlikely melange of misfits – “a flophouse” she aptly described it – and it wasn’t long before chaos swept our cinder block duplex.

One by one, like an Agatha Christie mystery, the room fell apart.

One girl left, amidst a swirl of unanswered questions. And then there were four.

For the rest of us, latent problems became crises. Annoyances became vendettas. I was literally scared to return my room, and when I did, I locked the door and braced myself for collateral damage. By spring semester, the bickering reached a fever pitch.

I spent most of my semester either in class or hopping from one food event to another, spending more time in Boston in a month than most Harvard undergrads do in all four years.

And then there were three.

Felice ended up being the mediator; her room was the bunker, the common room was no man’s land. After she listened to everyone’s problems with saintly patience, we laughed about the black comedy unfolding. In between complaints, I wrote my anthropology essays in her room decorated with 50′s pinups and queer icons as she Skyped her long distance boyfriend.

In a school where people frequently hide their insecurity beneath a shiny veneer of ambition, Felice was refreshingly genuine about both. She didn’t dye her hair funny colors because of some calculated counter culture attempt. She just liked dying her hair.

And she understood, perhaps better than anyone else I’ve met, about what it means to feel profoundly, deeply different without apology. She was silly and joyful about her quirks and didn’t bother to hide them.

She doesn’t collect business cards. (While I have so many lining my tote bag.) She has the same insecurities like everyone else, but doesn’t fall to unwitting flashes of cruelty when she feels down. It’s refreshing.

So when she takes a stab at baking, it is infused with an equally individualistic sensibility.

Yes, that’s a birthday candle betwixt her rouged lips.

For her programmer boyfriend’s birthday, Felice made her favorite stalwart Linux enthusiast a cake shaped like the operating system’s logo. Earlier, we had dropped by IHOP for dinner while he showed me his flashcard generator program, executable via the command line interface.

Different can be beautiful, and delicious.

Harvard’s First Molecular Gastronomy Dinner

Lingbo Li — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:03:19 +0000

I got a mysterious email a few weeks back form the executive chef of Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services (HUHDS). Martin and I had met up before to talk about food events on campus, but this time, he had a different request – a special invitation to a very peculiar dinner.

Courtesy of Dara Olmstead at HUHDS.

When I met up with Martin and the director of HUHDS, Ted Mayer, they handed me a sheet of paper that had the following menu printed on it:

IVY Plus Dinner at the Faculty Club
“Science & Cooking at Harvard”

Beet & Orange Jelly
Science:- Gelatinization
***
Yogurt cheese w/ balsamic & olive oil sphere
Science:- Sperification
***
Chilled Cucumber & dill Cappuccino
Science:- colloid, foam
***
Porcini-dusted line caught Maine Cod
w/ asparagus puree & lobster foam
Science:- Dehydration
***
Pork belly w/ creamed polenta & BBQ sugar
Science:- Isomalt
***
Hot orange Sorbet w/ Campari Caviar
Science:- Methylcellulose
***
Chocolate Finale

I had to admit, I was doubtful.

But Martin and Ted were both very excited about the top secret nature of the dinner – the guests, all Ivy League (and Stanford) food service professionals in town for a conference, were going to be kept in the dark about the nature of their dinner.

My mission was to recruit a handful of students in the class to do a science-laden explanation of each dish’s more technical components.

This menu does not reveal the full ambition of the dishes, nor the meticulously thought-through inspirations behind each, which came from top-flight kitchens around the world. Both of these men had eaten some very, very nice food in their lifetimes, and I could sense they were having a lot of fun with this magical practical joke they were playing.

For example, the beet and orange jelly came in a variegated slice, one side red, the other orange. But the trickery came in the flavors – yellow beets and blood oranges created the visual illusion that they had swapped shades.

I roped 5 friends into participating and we did a tour of the kitchen where chefs were testing out their dishes. We noticed that the dill-infused foam perched atop the cucumber water in shot glasses were quickly melting from foam to liquid. My friend Amy, who’s doing a final project on stable foams, recommended adding some methocellulose (which also solidifies at high temperatures rather than low, yielding a dessert course of hot sorbet) to the mix.

They tried it, and like magic (or science), the foam remained high and frothy.

When the night of the dinner came, I was actually pretty beat – I had a computer science midterm the next day and wasn’t particularly hungry. But when I arrived in the faculty club, Martin and Ted’s enthusiasm quickly rubbed off.

The first course came, the jelly – perfectly fine. Then the yogurt cheese with sphere of dressing – beautiful to look at and even more fun to crack the sphere to eat. A cool, clean shot of something vegetal. Then one of my favorite dishes, the porcini-dusted Maine cod with asparagus puree and lobster foam, in between sips of a crisp white wine which married beautifully with each bite. Pork belly came on marscapone cheese-laden polenta and a scientifically stable sugar topping infused with barbecue spices. Hot sorbet..

Then the chocolate finale, which my friend Aaron (we met interning at Serious Eats) introduced. For each course, my friends had all prepared explanations and equations to illustrate concepts like foams and gelatin. Aaron, who is a great speaker anyway, gave one of the most authoritative and entertaining lectures on chocolate I’ve ever heard.

The “finale” was the pop rocks embedded in the chocolate, which set off near-literal fireworks, a room of pop-pop-fizz.

A pretty amazing dinner, pulled off by the same people who are behind my daily dining hall meals. Who would have thunk?

And I did fine on my computer science midterm, so I hope I made Professor David Malan and all the lolcats in the world proud.

Hot Boston Restaurant Openings

Lingbo Li — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:42:05 +0000

Eater's Heatmap Image! Grr, spicy. (Courtesy of Eater)

I was honored to throw my two cents into this incredible, multipage-feature on hot Boston restaurant openings for Eater National by Gabe Ulla. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re jonesing for some studly new place hit up.

Why There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Lingbo Li — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:53:04 +0000

By Wilson Yu for FM

While I’ve been negligent in updating the blog recently, I’ve brought some some extra hands in the form of a smart, enthusiastic fellow student to help me out with what my spare brain can’t handle. Welcome Bianca!

And don’t forget: have you read my “Lingbo Eats” columns for The Crimson’s Fifteen Minutes magazine? They’re probably amuse you:

The Fallacy of the Free Meal: I explain, in far more color than Gregory Mankiw (star Harvard economist and totally huggable prof) why there’s no such thing as a free meal. Nay, dating. Nay, chemistry camp. True story.

Don’t Eat Yet!: Why I am possibly the most annoying dinner companion alive, and more importantly, how you can be, too!

The Maine Course: I’ll eventually write a proper blog post with pictures, but I visited Maine last month. This is a fast and dirty chronicle on how I put on 5 pounds in one weekend through superhuman exertion.

Boston Food Bloggers

Lingbo Li — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 04:43:36 +0000

It’s a small world, especially when you’re all invited to a Wilson Farm extravaganza that involves a million tables of food and over 300 guests. (Female guests only. It was ladies night out.) Chef Todd told us later that he’d gotten up at 4am to start prepping for the day’s festivities which include many a case of pinot and many a pan of lobster mac’n'cheese.

Here are some of the finest females in the Boston bloggin’ biz – Liz of Free Food Boston, Christine, formerly of Citysearch, now at Urbanspoon, Michelle of Fun and Fearless, Alicia of Clean Plate Club, Yours Truly, and Robin of Doves and Figs (who generously gave Christine and me a ride out).

Boston Globe Quotes Me on Almost Getting Rejected

Lingbo Li — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:28:42 +0000

Surprise! I’m quoted in the cover story of the Boston Globe today on Harvard’s food science class. That’s me holding a steak I cooked for the purposes of the photoshoot.

What Ferran Adrià Ate at Harvard

Lingbo Li — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:10:37 +0000

What passes through the lips of legends?

For world-renowned chef Ferran Adrià, the answer tastes like some Peekytoe crab timbale and sheepsmilk ricotta, lovingly crafted and locally sourced during his trip to Harvard last month.

On the heels of recent news that yes, Harvard’s Science and Cooking class is awarding a free trip to Barcelona to its science fair winners, I’m posting the exclusive lunch menus from Ferran Adrià’s trip to Harvard in September.

Martin Breslin, the executive chef of Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services, was kind enough to pass these along.

Ferran was feted at two lunch receptions, one on September 7th where local chefs Jody Adams (Rialto), Paul O’Connell (Chez Henri), James Hackney and Jiho Kim (L’Espalier), and Martin Breslin (Harvard) cooked hors d’oeuvres and dishes like Maine lobster fettuccine with tomato foam.

The next day, he enjoyed a locally-sourced lunch in Massachusetts Hall.

We love you Ferran! Come back soon.

Lunch Menu for Ferran Adria

Wednesday September 8th

Mass Hall 1:15 pm

Summer greens from Harvard’s Farmers market with olive oil and community garden herb
vinaigrette.

Demi tasse filled with chilled summer pea soup, crisp Berkshire apple smoked bacon

Poached Maine lobster served on buttered brioche with Boston bibb, & lemon basil aioli.

Heirloom tomato salad with baked ricotta cheese, green onions and local Massachusetts honey

Grilled peppered peaches with Great hill blue cheese MA

Early eggplant w/ red onion, caper & arugula.

Wild Maine Blueberry tart w/ lemon crème fraishe

————

Reception for Ferran Adria

September 7th 2010

Jody Adams:- Rialto

2 hors d’ oeuvres.

Fisherman’s soup, rouille, Gruyère, basil oil
Braised Octopus

Paul O Connell:- Chez Henri
I dish
•
Sheepsmilk Ricotta Cavatelli with Sweet Garlic
and Corn, Salad garnish of Amaranth Greens and
Heirloom Tomato

James Hackney & Jiho Kim:- L’ESPALIER
3 separate dishes:-
•
Bagel salmon sandwich AND Egg, cheese and
black truffle sandwich
•
Maine lobster fettuccine, mascarpone gnocchi with
tomato foam
•
Blackforest gateau

Martin Breslin: – Harvard University Hospitality & Dining
Services
3 hors d’ oeuvres.

Timbale of Maine Peekytoe crab with roasted
Massachusetts sweet corn, American caviar & chervil
Chilled Heirloom tomato soup with extra virgin olive
oil, crème fraise & basil puree
Seared Cape Cod Wellfleet oysters with Vermont
butter & shallots

Free Trip to Barcelona with Ferran Adrià for Winners of Harvard Science and Cooking Class

Lingbo Li — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:31:38 +0000

Announced just minutes ago by Professor David Weitz : the student group who wins Harvard’s Science and Cooking class‘s science fair, as judged by a panel of celebrity chefs, gets more than a “A” on their transcripts.

They earn a free trip to Ferran Adrià’s Alícia Foundation in beautiful Barcelona for a short project – plus (maybe) visiting a few high end restaurants there. The Alícia Foundation is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to food science founded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and CaixaManresa, with Adrià heading the board of trustees.

Suddenly, my final project takes on a whole new dimension of importance.

Anyone have any suggestions for a killer project? Leave me a comment!

Win Anything Your Little Heart Desires, Sponsored by CSN Stores

Lingbo Li — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:10:02 +0000

Would you like free bed sets, Kitchenaid mixers, or shoes?

Yes. Of course. CSNstores.com (whose headquarters are in Boston’s Back Bay) is sponsoring a $55 gift certificate giveaway for LingboLi.com that can be used at any of their 200 niche stores that encompass every home product imaginable, from cookware to coffee makers.

Since you’re reading a food blog, I’d suggest you spruce up your kitchen at their Cookware.com site with some fancy-schmancy spatulas or a cupcake tin to coddle your burnt cupcakes. But hey, whatever you want to spend your hard earned prize moolah on is a-ok by me.

And by hard earned, I mean: leave a comment with your name and email, and do one thing to bring the joy of my writing to more people, whether that be sharing my blog on Twitter, posting about it on a message board, or forwarding it over an email list. Your deadline is this Friday. Prize does not include shipping costs.

I will select a winner based on random whim and the creativity/scope of your promo effort.

(Now that I’ve taken a computer science course, I’m tempted say “pseudorandom number” since I realize that the program has to seed the generator with an initial value.)

He/she/ze will also receive everlasting fame, glory, and Paula Deen’s freaky white smile.

Buen suerte!