Coca-Cola Chicken

This recipe was an inspired by a post on egullet.org I made it with a few modifications and turned out be a decent recipe.

Recipe:
2 lbs chicken - thighs and drumsticks
1 liter of CocaCola
1 onion medium size
4 cloves of garlic
1-2 inches of ginger
4 small green chillies

Start by reducing a liter of coke on medium heat to half in volume. Should take about 20-30 min. Now slice the onion lengthwise and chop the garlic, ginger and green chillies. Add a couple of tablespoons of oil and with the burner at medium high add the onions, garlic, ginger & chillies. After the onions are translucent add the chicken (I removed the skin from the thighs but left it on on the drumsticks). Brown the chicken for about 10 min and then add the reduced coke syrup along with 2 tablespoons of soy sauce (The original recipe called for half cup of soy sauce which is a lot!!). Bring the liquid to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium and partially cover the vessel and wait for the liquid to reduce more for about 20min. Now would be good time to get some rice ready - Cook rice in the rice cooker :-). Taste the sauce and add some pepper, pinch of salt and some tobasco sauce. Serve hot and enjoy. Worth making again, I might try it to make some wings. I took some pictures of the leftovers and will post them soon.

Colorado Ski Trip Report

This is my second trip to Colorado for a ski trip(Feb15-19). Last time we stayed at Winter Park and skiied at Winter Park(2days) and Brekenridge(2days). This trip we decided to make Summit county our base and ski as many different resorts as possible. We stayed at Gateway Condos in Keystone(found through vrbo.com). We were 2 skiers and 1 snowboarder(me) and we ended up skiing Keystone(2days), Vail(2days) & Breckenridge(1day).

The best thing we did was stay outside the Eisenhower Tunnel - this helped a lot because the tunnel & Loveland Pass were closed for a couple of days because of snow, bad visibility & road conditions. This resulted in less Denver crowds which was great. The ski resorts got about 20" of snow over the first 3 days of the trip and then it was bright and sunny the rest of the time.

Powder boarding is a completly different ballgame compared to the groomed and icy trails of the northeast. I took an all day lesson at Vail on my second day, and this was one of the days with bad conditions. The instructor was great and though it was a group lesson there were only 2 people in the group. Because of the bad conditions most of the back bowls and lifts wer closed, but the instructor did take us through tress etc which was fun. The trick was to ski as close to the trees as possible to avoid the wind. The ski school is worth the money for the shorter lines.

We went back to Vail for a 2nd time when it was sunny and for my money Vail is the best ski area for a advanced skier. We started at 9am and till 2pm in the back bowls and they were awesome! The crowds are very thin in the back bowls and you can most of the time make a track and check it out from the lift. Also the blue sky basin was fun for glade skiing. I think Vail is one of the few places that I think comes close to Whistler for size and variety of skiing.

Keystone and Breck were good too, esp Breck because we went there after they had about 12" of fresh powder. For Breck I highly recomment Peaks 7 & 10 because they are not accessible by car and they crowds are lesser. The T-bar to the top was very chilly and windy and we found out about the new lift to the top bowls only later. But the bowls weren't as much fun as Vail. My friend took a all day skiing lesson at Keystone and had the instructor all himself after lunch. Breck I think gets more crowds from Denver than Vail.

Overall we had a great trip and my body is still a long way from recovering from the 30+ hrs of skiing. Also I have a new tree friend that I met on the last day at Keystone, when it got a but icy and I missed a turn. Thank god for all the snow on the previous days :-)

SuperBowl Menu

Spinach Artichoke Dip
Hummus
- Tomato Basil hummus
- Lemon Parlsey hummus
Quesadilla
- Chicken
- Shrimp
Brownies with white chocolate & Walnuts
Irish Cheesecake

Ideas & Earnings Evaluations

1. Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 from HBR Hat-tip to MarginalRevolution
2. Matrix USA LLC Independent Stcok Analysis Firm - Quantitative but pick what you use for data.
3. SternStewart The reasearch firm Matrix(see above) is based. They have some good reading material on their site. This is a story based on the SternStewart work.

Snowboard Racing Wk5

44.6s & 44.28s
Today was a frustrating day of Racing. I thought I would improve on my unofficial 42s from last week. I fixed a bunch of things - got my board waxed, got rid of my jacket and raced hard and low. But both my races were ugly, I bailed out of my turns to hit the gates and never got a good flow going. I think my mistake was not boarding on Tuesday. I thought the weekend Sunday River trip gave me overconfidence about my turns and I couldn't replicate that today. My runs after the race were much cleaner.

Theme for this season: 40sec or Bust :-)

AA Changes - 2

My first AA change was a minor change which resulted in an 1% increase to my Commodities exposure. My second change that I performed in the last week of Jan'07 was one with more impact on my AA. I think I violated some of the principles of AA in doing this change. First the details of the change.

I exchanged 1/3rd of my REIT's(VGSIX) allocation into Domestic Large Value(VIVAX). I have to accept the fact that this is dirty market timing. The exchange resulted in my moving away for my AA targets but the fundamentals behind REITs looked really poor. Also the following factors convinced me that REITs were due for a correction:

1. REIT yields compared to Treasuries. Right now REITs are yielding less than treasuries, which means that all the returns from thsi asset class have to come from price, P/E increases. This after REITs returned 35% in 2006 and 22% annualized over the last 5yrs, which leads me to believe that a price or P/E expansion is really difficult.
2. Also there is a lot of activity in the REIT market. Private Equity groups and other REITs are looking into a $40billion buyout/takeover. There is still a lot of money looking to invest in REITs when at the same time the individual home sales are crashing and bubble blogs are getting record number of hits.

AA Changes - 1

I sold MSFT in the 1st week of Jan'07. I bought MSFT in Aug'06 after they announced disapponting quaterly results and the stock has a 5% drop in the price after the earnings announcement. I reasoned that the price drop was an overkill and bought the stock for a tiny % of my portfolio.(This is my speculative money!) By Jan'07 the stock had nicely recovered and the general stock market was doing great. The Dow Jones Index was hitting record highs every other day and MSFT had returned close to 20% for me. Also I wanted to diversify away from MSFT to commodities. So I decided to sell MSFT and along with some cash invested the money in DBC (Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity index).

I wanted to increase my Commoidities allocation and was looking at various options. My first option was PCRIX(PIMCO CommodityRealRet Strategy), but Ameritrade had increased the price for Mutual Fund trades to $49, which would have made my Expense ratio for getting into the fund prohibitively high. I started looking for alternatives and boiled them down to DBC & DJP.

I will add more details here on the decision between DBC & DJP but for now a simple explanation lies in the link I added about alternatives to PCRIX.

Asset Allocation, Part 1

I will start the process of documenting my asset allocation plan with my AA at the beginning of 2007. I have made some changes to it since then and I will try to explain my thought process behind the changes and the things that are on my mind right now. First the AA at the start of 2007:

#	Asset Class	Current	Target
1	US Total Market	18%	15%
2	US Small Value	11%	12%
3	Intl Larget Market	15%	15%
4	Intl Value (Hedged)	13%	12%
5	Emerging Market	10%	12%
6	Total US Bond	4%	4%
7	TIPS	5%	5%
8	Short Term Bond	5%	5%
9	REITS	10%	10%
10	Alternative	10%	10%

At the start of 2007, my alternative asset class was invested in the following:
BRK-B : 6%; Commodities - 3%; MSFT - 1%;

Milton Friedman

Yesterday, Jan 29th was Milton Friedman day. I think California and Illinios called it that but in general that was the day to honor a great economist. PBS had a new show on him called the Power of Choice. It was a 90min show, and was a basic overview of Friedman's life and contributions. Interestingly Gary Becker was on the show and had lots of great commentary on Friedman.

Becker I think is one of the sharpest economists around - and writes a great blog.

Snowboard Racing

I started racing this season. I think I stagnated in my boarding last season and I think racing would help me get more focused.I have been improving over the last few weeks and the results from all the races till now are below:

Wk1 - 54.28s
Wk2 - cancelled for lack of snow
Wk3 - 51.05s
Wk4 - 48.74s & 45.32s & unoffical 3rd time of 42.6s

The first few weeks because of the lack of snow in the northeast, we race the course only once. Normally you get 2 races and you race side by side with another racer. My 3rd unofficial time was the first time I raced with a snowboarder and I think having a pace setter helped me a lot. Hopefully I will improve more but now it will get tougher to do so.

The course is more suited to skiers and the Nastar offical pace setter comes in around 26sec.

Why not mee?

The blog address is a tribute to the 2004 Boston RedSox. Curt Schilling, a premier pitcher the RedSox signed at the start of the season got t-shirts made for spring training which said "Why not us?" The Redsox came back from a 0-3 deficit against the Yankees in the ALCS and went on to win the World Series. I saw Game5 of this ALCS at Fenway and it was a 14 inning thrill ride.