Posted on 08.26.11

Lunch-N-Learn 8: Mixed Vegetable & Bacon Medley and How to Become a Gmail Ninja

by Jeff Livorsi

Mightybytes’ eighth Lunch-n-Learn grouped together a ton of vegetables & bacon with fantastic organization tools for organizing your workflow. Bill put together a mixed vegetable & bacon medley with a Cauliflower and Blue Cheese Puree, while Tai proceeded with his presentation on how to become a Gmail ninja.

As always, we purchased almost all of the ingredients from the Andersonville Farmer’s Market: green beans, dragon tongue beans, red onions, squash, a cauliflower head, and the most important ingredient ever - bacon.

Learn: How to become a Gmail Ninja

Tai, who’s known at Mightybytes for being stylish and highly organized, delivered a presentation that matched his personality. He walked us through how we as Gmail users can keep our inbox under control. We went through various tools and settings on Joy’s personal Gmail account, and enabled them to Joy and Tai’s liking. In the process, we learned about a series of tools, tips and tricks that can help make email workflow painless and efficient.

Here is what we learned:

Anyone can get their Gmail inbox under control: reducing the number of emails in your inbox, reducing the number of unread emails and general organization, are easy goals to achieve.

Learn how to manage labels.

• Create labels for each project, and labels for reference such as “Passwords” or “Instructions”
• Labels can be nested within other labels, such as Projects/School of Rock, or Reference/Passwords
• Learn more details about using labels in Gmail.

Master the Filters: Gmail can auto-label project emails based on keywords or senders.

• Set up filters for each project, then incoming emails will be automatically labeled
• Learn more about using Gmail filters

Take action immediately after reading an email.

• If the email is of high priority or requires follow up, you can label it as such and leave it in your inbox.
• If the email does not require immediate attention and contains information you will have to reference again give it a meaningful label and archive it.
• Delete the email if it does not contain any relevant information

Learn how to use search operators to find old emails.

• Search by sender (from:person@email.com)
• Search by date (before:2008/01/01 or after 2008/01/01)
• Learn advanced search operators

Explore the world of Google Labs, which enables experimental new features in your inbox.

• Smart Labels (Bulk, Notifications, Forums) Automatically filters incoming email from marketing, newsletters, notifications, etc, and optionally auto-archives them (skips the inbox) so that your inbox stays free of unimportant email. Even if they are auto-archived, messages still stay unread and you can see the unread count by their label on the left column
• Send & Archive adds a “Send & Archive” button for when you know you’re done with an email thread. When you click the button the email is sent and immediately archived, as the name implies.
• Other useful Labs include Undo Send and Unread Message Icon

Use the Priority Inbox to help you achieve a clean inbox.

• Priority Inbox, which was recently launched by Google, separates your Inbox into “Important” and “Not important”
• Gmail will try to automatically sort into one or the other
• You can train Gmail by clicking the “Mark as important” or “Mark as not important” buttons
• Some people might find this more useful than others; kind of a matter of preference

Use the Active Inbox add-on.

• Active Inbox is for advanced ninjas, according to Tai. This tool adds a new sidebar onto Gmail as well as a toolbar at the top of each email with buttons for Action, Some Day and Waiting On labels to organize your tasks.
• Active Inbox can help organize your labels into Projects and References (as described earlier)

Lunch: Mixed Vegetable & Bacon Medley w/ Cauliflower and Blue Cheese Puree

Blue Cheese Puree

• 1 cauliflower head
• 2 tbsp. crumbled blue cheese (Trader Joe’s)
• 1/4 cup milk (Trader Joe’s)

Wash cauliflower, remove stems and place into a pot of 4 cups boiling water.  Boil until cauliflower is soft.  Drain.  Add crumbled blue cheese and milk and mash (with a hand mixer) until creamy smooth (add additional milk and continue to mix as appropriate until desired consistency). Once done, scoop into a serving bowl and set aside.

Mixed Vegetable & Bacon Medley

• 1 1/2 lb green beans
• 1/2 lb dragon tongue beans
• 2 red onions
• 1 lb squash
• 3/4 lb bacon
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar (Trader Joe’s)
• 1/2 cup olive oil (Trader Joe’s)
• 2 cups sunflower seeds (Trader Joe’s)

Wash all vegetables, cut ends off green beans and dragon tongue beans, cut red onions into 1/4ths, cut squash into cubes, place all vegetables into a pot of 6 cups boiling water, turn to low, cover and steam for 4-6 minutes, once done strain vegetables and immediately rinse with cold water.  Set aside. 

Bacon:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, place bacon on a cookie sheet, turn oven off and cook bacon until crispy (about 20 minutes).  Remove from oven, dab excess grease with paper towels, and chop bacon into bits. Set aside.

Sunflower Seeds:

Pour sunflower seeds into a pan and bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. Remove and set aside.

Dressing the dish:

Grab the vegetable bowl, and pour in balsamic, olive oil and sunflower seeds and stir.  Remove coated vegetables and place into serving bowl and top with bacon bits.

Be sure to stop back next week for a new learning session and another locally sourced meal.

Lunch-N-Learn 9