Cooking chicken is like walking into a Jelly Belly store, you know there is potential but there are so many different choices you are not sure which one will lead you astray and that is the direction I feared I was headed tonight when I was making this chicken.  After making the wet rub, for lack of a better term, I took a taste and it was well not good.  Hoping for the best I pushed onward.  Much to my surprise the resulting chicken was not half bad, in fact I may make it again.

Now that is some good looking chicken.  Even the simplest of recipes can yield a complex result on occasion.

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
2 tbsp smoked paprika
2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp melted margarine
1 tsp garlic powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground chipotle pepper

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400ºF.  Grease a glass baking dish.  Wash chicken under cool water and pat dry with paper towels.  Set aside.  In a bowl combine all ingredients besides chicken and mix until uniform.  Spread mixture over entire surface of chicken, rubbing into the meat.  Bake for about 35-40 minutes until done.

While not my favorite chicken recipe of late, I mean its no Curried Chicken, this wasn’t half bad and we may make it again at a later date?

Why do I cook!?! I mean I could just run down to Subway or Pizza Hut and fill up on something there, buy why cook?  Or more specifically why do I cook?  Initially I started cooking because I liked to cook and it was an easy way to express myself.  Cooking is enough science that it can be replicated reasonably simply, however, it still leaves plenty of room for expression and creativity.  Later on when I moved out I started cooking because I was hungry, but creativity still found its way into dinner.  So today as a married man I cook because:

• I cook so that Vanessa, my wife, does not have to.  She is a great cook but does not enjoy cooking.
• I cook for self-defense.  How so?  Ever found a finger in your chile at Wendy’s or a clump of human hair in your hot dog?  Me neither, I plan to keep it that way.
• I cook to try new things.  Lets face it you can only get so much variety in local joints, especially in a little town.  If I want good food at a reasonable price I will have to be making it myself.
• I cook because its a challenge.  Once in a while a dish comes up or someone asks me to make something I have never made or even eaten and its a challenge to get it right.
• I cook because well fed people are happy people.
• I cook because it relaxes me.  I sit at a computer all day and think about food, when I finally get home cooking is my way to wind down and relax.
• I cook so that when I work out I have something to think about…whatever shall I have for dinner after I am finished abusing my body?
• Finally, I cook because I like to eat.

Why do you cook?  Why don’t you cook?  Let me k now I look forward to hearing from all of you!

DISCLAIMER: This will void your warranty.  You will probably lose all the data on your drive.  You might die, who knows.  Don’t try this at home.  If you do decide to do this be sure to wear latex gloves as to not mark your platters.

With that out of the way, lets get down to it, rarely do I write about anything other than food and in a strange far out way this will be related to food.  For quite sometime now my passion for technology and food have collided and I have been working on building out my Digital Cook book and working on and iPad app to accommodate it.  Recently while I was out of town the server on which the majority of this application resided bit the dust or at least the drive with the data one did.  As a person who should know better I have no excuse, but, none the less the data was not backed up.  There was one copy of the database and the data in it.  Fail.  With options running out and not wanting to pay to have the data professionally recovered I took a last ditch effort to recover the data myself.  Much to my surprise it worked.

Thankfully when I built the machine I used identical drives I had laying around.  Because of this I could swap the platters from one drive to the other and that is what I did.  I took the platter (the CD looking thing that lives inside a hard drive and holds all the data) and installed it in the working drive, after removing its platter.  I then tore into my network attached storage chassis, removed the drive in there and plugged in my Fraken-drive.  Bam, disk spun up and Windows recognized it.  Pulled my data off and let out a squeal of delight.  All of my hard work has been saved.  As a by product I have some pictures and videos of the process someone is bound to appreciate.

Moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR DATA.  I will be doing that first and foremost on my new server configuration to avoid the sense of panic upon realizing you have to start over.