Cabin Cove

One day a few weeks ago I was getting hungry for some hot and spicy scallops with peppers, ginger, onion and garlic, with pea pods and celery and fresh sauteed mushrooms.

All the ingredients were set out and each looked so fresh and tasty.

After sampling the peppers in the photo above, they were deemed TOO hot and spicy for this dish, so they weren’t used after all. The remainder of the ingredients were each diced/chopped into their own little bowls.

The set up below shows the progression that the ingredients would be added to the pan, working from right to left, since the stove was on the right.

First up was to sauté the mushrooms in a little olive oil with the ginger, garlic and onions.

Sauté the mushrooms, garlic, ginger and onions until a nice golden brown. This step will take the longest, maybe 10-15 minutes. And DON’T PICK! (My own advice to myself, really.)

And, while the pan is still hot and sizzling, toss in the celery, including the greens because they add a nice flavor. Add to that the snow pea pods in a little nest in the center of the pan. In the pea pod nest, put in the scallops. Now, as a side note on the scallops: you COULD marinate/soak them in a little ale for maybe the 10-15 minutes that the mushrooms were cooking. You could do that. I did, and they were extra delicious, too. But you don’t have to.

Once all the parts are in place in the pan, turn the heat up to almost HIGH. Everything is going to start dancin’ in the pan. This is a good thing, and you want that to happen.

Everything is going to be cooking SUPER FAST now. Once the scallops are done, which takes about 3 minutes, it’s DONE. Take it from the stove NOW! You don’t want the celery and snow peas to get soggy and limp. That’s just gross and totally NOT appetizing.

And, if you had planned things out ahead of time, you could have made some steamed white rice. I didn’t. My mind was on the sauteed mushrooms and scallops, and hadn’t planned that out. Instead, they just went into a bowl, ready to eat. And, OMG, they were SO good. I made them for two people, but I ended up eating both portions. This was one of those selfishly good dishes…

©2008 David Taylar Daniels & Cabin Cove - All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce photographs or text without written permission

The letters have been pouring into Santa’s Workshop requesting the Santa’s Elf Hat Project labels. I can’t even begin to explain the emotions involved in this project. I tried to talk to my mom about it the other night, and was so choked up that I had to end the call. (The woman really needs to get to the internet to read it for herself!)

And, guess what? THE LABELS HAVE ARRIVED EARLY! They’re here in my hot little hands, and they are even more fabulous than I anticipated. I’m putting aside a few to pass on to family members in the future.

And, is it wrong to burst into tears when opening an envelope with these labels inside? Meh, I don’t care, it’s an emotional topic. But, LOOK! It’s a nicely woven label, with gold metallic thread embroidery/woven design. The pine tree is the perfect touch, and Santa’s Elf, North Pole really adds the final touch. I couldn’t be prouder of these little labels.

And, yes, the folks who’ve sent in envelopes: Yours are already in the mail!

©2008 David Taylar Daniels & Cabin Cove - All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce photographs or text without written permission

There are a few folks who were trying to access Cabin Cove yesterday and were running into a problem with connecting. My apologies for that. Over the years there have been a few changes to the site, including the location of this here blog. So, if I can ask you to take a moment and check you bookmarks, favorites and blogfeeds. The main site is at http://CabinCove.com . That’s the main place to be. At one time, it was located at /_secrets  or /journal or any number of locations. Take a moment to update that. And, if you use a blogreader, use the main feed at
http://cabincove.com/?feed=rss2 . You may have to unsubscribe to any other feeds you have in there.

The problems here stem from my moving things around from time to time, but I promise you, where this blog is now on Cabin Cove is where it will stay.

One of the problems with having a website, and a blog in particular, is that you never really know who’s reading and viewing what you’ve got to say. With an average of about 20 comments a day, it would seem that Cabin Cove is a pretty quiet place with not a whole lot going on. The flip side to that is some sophisticated back end reporting. There are an average of 1400 readers a day passing through. There are a number of regular readers who come here because they know of the site. And a large number of people also come by way of searches such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Many of those searches are for anything from Cabin Cove vacations to hand painting fiber, spinning yarns and spinning wheel reviews, sock machine interests, etc. Then, there are also people who are looking for content to copy/steal/pirate/whatever.

It’s the content and bandwidth thieves I have the problems with. There are those who take text content and post it on their sites, and pass it off as their own. There are also those who come and take photos to use as their own as well. That’s why I’ve learned to slap that copyright onto each photo I post. And, then there are the bandwidth thieves. They are the ones who will take your content in the form of links, and let YOU pay the bill for their using YOUR images. Yeah, those are the ones I seek out with a vengeance. Heh, we all need a hobby.

So, picture it, I was scrolling through the site stats last week, and I notice a large number of hits, 643 to be exact, coming from a site called Wrong Planet.net. Come to find out, someone had taken/linked to one of my images of the armadillo purse I saw at an antique store a few months back, in this post. And, yes, I know it’s not a great photo by any stretch of the imagination. It’s being linked to and each time that page loads on their site, *I* get the bill.

When I finally tracked down the site, and located the owner of the site, I sent of a rather politically correct email, asking that he please remove the linked image from his site. His response was: "Sorry but we run an Internet forum. If you don’t want people hot linking your images, you should should probably not put them on the Internet." Hmmm….that’s like saying if you don’t want your car stolen don’t park it in the parking lot.

Fine.

I replaced the image in question with this image:

And, for me, this is rather tame. Almost mellow. Dave Daniels = mellow. Don’t laugh. It could happen. Just not today.

The next step was to try and contact the person who had made the post. This involved having to register in order to contact this person. Once done, I sent the poster this message:

Again, I was faced with no response. After a few more days and mounting hits registered to my account, I took one more step and replaced the previous tame image with something much more graphic and offensive. It’s naughty and offensive, but blurred. Click only if you aren’t easily offended. Otherwise, read on.

A couple of more days of silence and still no word and the images were still there. Then, out of the blue, I saw this instead of my images:

Yay for little victories.

And, then there are the other victories, the people who take post after post, photo after photo, and change nothing. They even leave my name all over the post and images. But they post it on their site. These are the people I really enjoy when this happens:

Click to enlarge.

And this poor guy wrote me after his account was shut down: "Dude, what’s your prob? I didn’t do anything wrong. I left your stuff as it was. I could have changed the photo and taken out your name, but I didn’t. It was all on the up and up. You’re just a #^&@%#!*."

Yeah. I am. But it’s my stuff. And I happily post it HERE on MY site for MY readers.

Thanks for following along on this long post. If you notice anything funky like missing images, broken links, etc, just send me an email to my daveknits at comcast.net address.

You’ll also notice this little line tagged onto my posts going forward: ©2008 David Taylar Daniels & Cabin Cove - All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce photographs or text without written permission

This is on the wheel now, Amethyst Mist:

©2008 David Taylar Daniels & Cabin Cove - All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce photographs or text without written permission