I've been wanting to move away from all processed foods and one thing I've been eating for 20 years is frozen burritos for breakfast. It might be weird to think of burritos as breakfast food but I've always liked them and they're convenient. Once I became poor (my current income category) I started looking at making my own burritos for cost reasons but it's really really hard to make them less than 30 cents each which is what I buy them for. Granted they'd be better for me and taste better but oh the agony of labor.

A few weeks ago I boiled about 5 lbs of pork loin with onion, garlic and some other stuff. Once it was just falling apart I shredded it, seared it along with some onion, added pureed roast tomatoes, chilis and garlic then Mexican tomato rice and black beans and wrapped them in a large tortilla. These were surprisingly good and have convinced me that it's worth the effort.

I'm not satisfied with the flavor of the poached pork so this time since I was home working anyway I put the loin in the smoker. It was also an experiment in how long many hours I can get out of it on each chimney of charcoal. I placed bricks from the front yard in the belly of the smoker, started a charcoal chimney of lump charcoal and using the minion method dumped it over a layer of unburned charcoal. I apparently choked the air down too much because 4 hrs later the temp had dropped below 200 degrees.  Lump charcoal seems to want more air than brickettes as the firebox was half full of unburned charcoal. I started a half chimney of brickettes to throw on top of the unburned lump and let it go. I returned from the concert tonight to find my smoker still at 200 degrees! Not bad, I replenished once in 11 hrs and the temperature never fluctuated more than 50 degrees always staying between 200 and 250. Next time I'll give the lump more air to keep it alive and see how long I can go without replenishing. Keep in mind this is all being done with a $99 offset smoker picked up from Wallmart. Ok so it has a few modifications but still.

Tomorrow I'll shred it, combine it with grilled onion, a little sauce, my black beans I cooked today, some roasted tomato and pasilla salsa, my classic tomato Mexican rice and maybe some cheese and throw it in a burrito. I'll let you know how it turns out. The smell is awesome so far.

 

So I was just walking through H-mart my local asian grocery and I saw Fennel (Anise) for $.89 ea which is cheap so I bought a bulb. What do I use it for you ask? I have a Fennel, quince and Butternut squash bake that is real nice but tonight I thought about something different. After last weekends BBQ several friends left some Chardonnay and since I didn't want to waste it I decided to braise the Fennel in it.  The Fennel went into a pan with some butter, sugar and salt and I seared it then added broth, thyme and Chardonnay and braised it for about 20 minutes. This works OK as a side dish but I wanted it as the main dish so I boiled some Herb Pierogies and threw them in and dinner was done. Not bad. The strangest thing though was 3 out of 4 of us thought the braised Fennel tasted like Pepperoni pizza. It really did! Maybe it was the thyme but the flavor was strong enough when I was cooking that I could smell it and everyone but Piper tasted it. Piper's so visual I didn't think she can taste anything but what she sees and what she saw was onion.

This was shown in Linux Journal 2 years ago but I just ran across it a second time. I think this is a very cool use of a very cool device. The Nokia n800 has a decent cpu, a decent screen and a webcam built in so why not use it works great as a robot head.

 

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkV4kMBUVjw 400 283]

 

Been in a bit of a Thai mood lately. I've always liked Thai food but haven't had the money to go out so I'm working on getting down a few recipes as well as the restaurants so I can eat it at home. I like Phad Thai for the most part but can't justify buying it in a restaurant because 10 minutes after I eat I'm starving again. Credit the rice noodles for that I think.

Phad Thai isn't really an authentic dish just like Chicken Tikki Masala didn't come from India and fortune cookies didn't come from China. Phad Thai translates as Thai Style noodles and from the name you'd realize that if it's Thai Style it isn't Thai.. Because of the popularity of the dish I've heard that it's made it's way to Thailand and you can actually buy it there now.

Anyway it's a staple at American Thai shops so off I go to make it. In my previous post about Thai Red Curry I mentioned that I was searching for one particular brand of Red Curry paste - Mae Ploy. In my search I also found Mae Ploy brand Phad Thai sauce and they only wanted $1.67 at 99 Ranch Market so I picked some up. Mae Ploy Pad Thai sauce has the following ingredients in it.

• Palm Sugar
• Shallot
• Water
• Fish Sauce
• Soy Bean Oil
• Vinegar
• Tamerind
• Red Chili
• Salted Radish
• Dried Shrimp
• Salt

Since I have 8 of those ingredients already in the garage I may see how much it would cost to make this. You might be thinking that at $1.69/jar it's not worth it but I had to use two jars for my 16 oz of noodles making 50% of the cost of the meal the sauce. The flavor of the sauce was good enought that I also wondered if Thai shops were just using this with some additions of their own instead of fashioning their own sauce but it seemed cost prohibitive. We got probably two orders of Pad Thai out of two jars so maybe they do. I still think they make their own or buy it in bulk.

I mentioned that I used two jars but that's not entirely true. I also had a jar of Por Kwan Pad Thai Sauce which I also added to my pan. This in my opinion is the correct amount of sauce for 16 oz Rice Stick noodles but flavor of the Por Kwan was so so wherease the Mae Ploy looked and smelled like great Pad Thai sauce. Mae Ploy impresses me again!

To make the dish complete I added several things.

• 1.5 lb of chicken
• 16 oz Rice Stick noodles
• 2 8 oz jars Pad Thai sauce
• Large handful of Mung Bean sprouts
• Small handfull of chopped peanuts

The results were so close to what restaurants sell that a guest wouldn't know they're not eating takeout. My next step is to do a cost analysis on the Pad Thai sauce and see how much it would cost to duplicate it.  The entire meal for 5 people cost us $7.50 (half of which is the sauce) which is a bit more expensive than our usual meals. The Thai Red Curry cost about $4.50 for the same amount so you can see my motivation to make the sauce.

 

One of my favorite (OK my favorite) thing to eat at Thai restaurants is Chicken Red Curry. For those of you that are afraid of "curry" I have one thing to say - Curry's not a spice! What goes into Thai Red Curry is

• red chillies
• galanga (or sometimes fresh ginger)
• palm sugar
• garlic
• lemon grass
• salt
• shallot
• shrimp paste
• lime peel
• ground pepper.

There's nothing in there too weird and I assure you it won't make you gag or want to hurl (both actual quotes from people who don't know what curry is but insists that it causes adverse bodily reactions).

Anyway I've been looking for a certain brand of red curry paste which would save me a bunch of time cooking Thai Red Curry and after going to just about every Asian grocery in the area I finally found it at Ranch 99 market in Shoreline. It's Mae Ploy Red Curry Paste and I think it's a head above the others. I narrowed my search to this one because I peaked into the open kitchen of 123 Thai in Port Townsend and saw them using this. Granted they don't just use it straight like an Italian chef won't use only tomatoes out of a can without doctering them up first but at least I will get closer without creating the curry paste myself.

To the Red Curry paste I added more palm sugar and Thai Basil (NOT Italian basil, these are not interchangable!), coconut milk, sweet red peppers, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and chicken. The rice is straight Jasmine rice cooked in the rice cooker. I think the flavor is fairly close but in the future I'll be experimenting with more galangal.. I added 4 cups of coconut milk and I think I've settled on Arroy-D as my preferred brand of that as well. I've used some other stuff (Chaokoh) but I ton't like it nearly as much.

 

You can always tell when I'm getting busy because the posts to my food blog get less frequent. There's another reason for the infrequency as well - practice. If I cook the same thing 5 times I'm not going to post that I cooked it 5 times. That would get very boring...

So we went to H-Mart our local Asian grocery and they had Snow Crab legs on sale for $4.99/lb so we picked up some. I'm almost ashamed to say that about once a year I go to Red Lobster. To give myself some credit though I don't eat the pastas so weighed down with cheese that you can't recognize it or the shrimp with so much breading on them that you can't actually prove their shrimp. When I go I eat Snow Crab and Chedder Bay Biscuits. I'm sure the bisquits don't quite fit into the fine food category but they're really quite good. The snow crab went in the steamer and Natalya melted some butter and added a dash of salt and some lemon juice. The biscuits are from the recipe online that is NOT exactly the same as Red Lobster's but close. I'd say it's about 80% similar and with some modifications to spices I think I can nail it in a time or two. Anyway an entire crab dinner and chedder bay biscuits for $10 for 4 people.

It seems every day some company is announcing an Electric Vehicle. The Tesla roadster has been out a while but is a very special purpose vehicle. I've driven it and it's nice but you're not taking a trip in it any time soon. Maybe you'd commute in it but probably not. More practical EVs are coming out from many companies including Tesla's own Model S sedan. The problem I see with ALL plugin EVs is the recharge time makes them impractical. I see this problem going away in the future but currently charging your EV off your home electrical plug is going to take 2 days! Drive for 3 hrs, charge for 2 days. I don't think that's realistic. By using a 240v line you can get the charging down to one day. That means if you want to go anywhere very far away you drive for 200 miles and then you rent a motel - repeat as necessary. It would take you two weeks to get across the country. Renault of France announced a new EV and they have the advantage of being from a country that takes these things serious with some of the best mass transit (electric) in the world. The press release for the Renault Kango be Bop Z.E. shows that recharge times are about 30 minutes and range is 100 miles. So range is a bit short but I'd not drive this little car across the country anyway so maybe it's fine. The recharge times are so fast (@ 400V) that if you depleted your battery you could stop at a cafe and enjoy your cafe au lait while your car recharges.

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If you're moving from a real server installation to a VirtualBox virtualized configuration you may want to take your real physical disk and just turn it into a virtual disk. There are advantages to creating a new disk and rsyncing your OS into it but this tutorial will show you how to make an exact copy of it. Note the exact copy will be the same size as the real physical disk so make sure you have enough drive space. This is most useful for Operating System images with shared storage for data. I wouldn't advise anyone to make a 1TB copy of their new drive and turn it into a VDI file!

To get the image from the disk use the dd command.

1. dd if=/dev/hda of=./hda.img
2. VBoxManage convertdd hda.img hda.vdi

grant@workstation:~$ dd if=/dev/hda of=./hda.img

grant@workstation:~$ VBoxManage convertdd hda.img hda.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.0
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Converting VDI: from DD image file="hda.img" to file="hda.vdi"...
Creating fixed image with size 1024966656 bytes (978MB)...

This will make an exact copy of /dev/hda to the raw image file hda.img. Then VBoxManage will convert the raw disk hda.img to hda.vdi for use with VirtualBox.

I just went to the Ballard Farmer's Market in Seattle. I've been to quite a few other markets in the Seattle area in the past and just updated my Farmers Market list.

From this I've decided I'm just not rich enough to buy produce from farmers. It's cheaper to have it picked in some foreign country by paid workers (although probably not paid a lot), put on trucks by paid workers, driven to the coast by paid drivers, loaded on ships by paid labor, shipped halfway across the world consuming large amounts of fuel, unloaded by paid laborers (making U.S. wages), driven to warehouses by paid drivers, stocked by paid warehouse people, trucked to my local supermarket by paid teamsters, stocked by union grocery stockers and sold to me with grocery store markup. All of this is half of what the farmers want at the local farmers markets. Tell me there isn't something wrong with this model? Am I nuts to think paying 6x as much for a dozen eggs is a bit crazy?

What about collecting eggs from chickens is so difficult? We wave the organic flag but in the past all our food was organic and it didn't cost this much. You feed the chicken corn or let it dig around in the dirt outside, you pick up the eggs and you take them to market. This costs $6 a dozen, really? After reading Omnivores Dilemma I have less tolerance for the Organic farmers. You CAN farm organically and do it for near the same price as chemical farming. You really can, it's been proven. What has also been proven is if you slap the name organic on something people will pay 5x the price of normal, hence the farmer's market prices.

Another trend I noticed at the Ballard Farmer's market is all of the local cheese companies making crappy cheese for $16-$20/lb. For that I can buy a really nice imported French cheese. I saw someone making spongy parmesan (spongy parmesan? I had to do a double take) for $16/lb which  incidentally is the same price I pay for wonderful aged parmesan from Parma. We're not talking about underpaid workers in a third world country here, this stuff is from Italy! I understand that in a market economy the correct price is the one that people will pay but I hate greed with a passion. It makes me want to start a farm using George Naylers techniques and run them all out of business.

I wake up this morning with 28 new comments on my site that all say the same thing. Apparantly the spammers have found a way to enter the captcha images via a script. The standard JomComment captcha images are not that hard to read so maybe the spammers are just getting smarter. I really don't want to have to force everyone to be logged in to comment so that's my last resort.

Now I've turned off the JomComment Captcha and turned on re-captcha which distorts the words even more and has double the number of words. It also puts lines through the text etc.. The other plus is that re-captcha uses our brain power to solve words that OCR was unable to solve. Meaning there are a lot of pre-computer books that are being scanned in and there are words that the OCR can't interpret. Re-captcha pulls those words out and gives them to us as a security text. Humans then read the words, solve them (to comment in this case) and the result is sent back to re-captcha where it's used to finish the translation of an old book to digital form. Kill two birds with one stone.

Everyone wins, you get to comment, I get less spam and old books get digitilized...

I also have my site contacting wordpress and using their akismet service to detect known spammers. I think Wordpress would have a pretty big list because they're known for being a target. Also non-registered user comments are now approved by me first. If you want your comment auto-published then log in!