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Sous vide is a cooking style where one brings the food to the appropriate temperature in a water bath while it is in a vacuum-sealed bag. It allows for ridiculous cooking times like say 32 hours to prepare short ribs allowing even tough meats to become buttery. Sous vide equipment can be quite expensive but if something has a short cooking time (less than six hours) one can get close with a cooler, thermometer, and a vacuum food preserving rig.

Today was my first try with sous vide steak and the cut was an inexpensive chuck steak that were thin and bathed for four hours.

Thoughts:

  • Igloo cooler lost four degrees an hour.  Far too fast for long cook times without a lot of water changes.
  • Chuck steak is a tougher cut compared to most steak cuts.  It needs either a marinade or longer cooking time.
  • Water at 140 degrees was too high, shoot for 125 to get a proper medium rare.
  • Cut was too thin to get a proper sear without also overcooking the inside.
  • When one consumes edamame, do not eat the pods.

Hobo sous vide has potential.  I look forward to trying it again with a slightly better cut.

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Mike: I see on Facebook you’ve been running 5ks. What’s your time down to?
Me: Around 24 minutes is my best time. Nothing crazy.
Mike: Still better than me, which is annoying.
Me: Why? I am nearly half your age.
Mike: Yes, you may have youth but I have a personal trainer and very expensive running shoes. What do you have?
Me: A treadmill with over a thousand miles on it and shoes I got for $40.00 on Amazon.

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Cultural Infiltration

Suzie was in Philadelphia and we visited the Italian Market, an area around 9th Street that is the oldest continuously operating outdoor fresh market in America. Philadelphia has an idiosyncratic foodie scene and the degree of specialization isn’t quite that of New York as you can get caviar and Mac n’ Cheese in the same store:
Caviar over Easy Mac

I felt peckish and purchased a 1/2 lb of dried peaches which I devoured before we stopped in to DiBruno’s, the most famous cheesemonger in Philadelphia. Our attendant, no monger, NO guide knew his cheeses but was skeptical of my dislike of goat cheese. He gave us an array of four and I was able to pick out the goaty infiltrator. For a moment, he gazed into my eyes and he saw me as the cheese journeyman I am.
Infinite Cheeses
DiBruno’s will give you a free sample of damn near anything and Suzie and I consumed about thirty 1/4 oz samples but there was one case where you didn’t get it free: Jabon Iberico. It’s a cured meat that clocks in at $129.99 a lb and is produced on a single Spanish farm by two brothers whose pigs eat nothing but acorns for the last six years of their lives. Each slice is like consuming a $2.00 bill. It wasn’t bad, but won’t make the charcuterie board at my next party any time soon.
Obscenely Expensive Meat
After DiBruno’s, we visited the Magic Garden on South Street which is a single giant mural created by Isaiah Zanger over 14 years. It opened in 2008 and re-defines mixed media.
Pathway
The Magic Garden seems like it’d be very dangerous after it rained but has a bunch of Easter Eggs in it like book passages and famous quotes spelled out in ceramic tiles in places one wouldn’t expect. Indoors, there was a children’s art area where a kid had indicated that he wanted his superpower to be to summon a herd of beavers.
Beavers
On the way back the car, we found the Philadelphia exit to the Bat Cave.
Bat Door

Philadelphia is a place I want to walk around more, but right now don’t have the time. I’m slowly learning its neighborhoods and what I consider to be the corridors of interesting. There are streets you can walk down that have a flavor to them but others that due to serendipity and zoning are quite boring. They probably have their own secrets and their own stories but they are not as obvious or yielded as easily. I’ve skimmed the cream off and drank of Center City and the Old City. Now I need to get to know Boathouse Row, the revitalizing Fishtown, as well as some of the areas yet to be touched by revival. Unless I move there, I feel I’ll always be a guest rather than a native. Maybe that will change. There’s always something interesting there.
One Stop Accordian Shop

A final note: Never eat a half pound of dried fruit and then drink a lot later. Your colon will be replaced with a gatling gun. I have a more involved metaphor for this but few are as comfortable with the human colon as I.

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During a presentation on new software, Joe pointed out to me that the syntax they used was allowing wildcards of a type that suggested that inputs weren’t being sanitized. With a little poking, we determined that we could execute queries that could be harmful. I brought this up to the IT head that I had previously sought a job from.

Me: I think there could be a security hole in this.
Him: Hm… good observation. I think we have everything left open for now but I’ll make a note to make sure we lock everything back up when we’re done. You know, we’re looking for a security guy.
Me: Good to know, I’ll shoot you my resume, again.

I probably said one word too many.

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Tonight was a meeting of the Bucks County Council Technology Committee and at its end we discussed when to reconvene.

Leader: So when do we want to meet here again?
Me: We’re the technology committee and there are five of us, can’t we use a conference call, or Skype?
Leader: But I like seeing people’s faces.
Me: How about we do a monthly conference call but have a physical get together every quarter when we start forgetting what people look like?
Leader: I like it.

Compromise!

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One of our products at work is designed to be taken rectally but only after a healthy slathering of lubricant has been applied. The videos of that product in action in a faux-butt required several takes and I went through almost a pound of lube. By my calculations, that’d be enough to get a 200 person key party going. Finally, something that brings together my analytical background and my failure at dating.

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Me: Hey, look what I go this weekend. *Holds mustache to face*
Coworker #1: Wow, that’s pretty BA. Can I see it?
Me: Yes *hands him fake mustache*
Coworker #1: It even smells like wood.
Coworker #2: You should wear that with your tiny cowboy hat.
Coworker #3: You’d be like a superhero!
Coworker #2: But with Down Syndrome!

So maybe I don’t wear the mustache and hat together in public.

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We left Chicago after breakfast and headed South through an area with a lot of wind turbines which seemed out of place. When we got out for lunch and were nearly blown away, the windmills suddenly made sense. We had stopped at a Dairy Queen in no-place-special America and I felt there should have been a sign saying “you must have at least four tattoos to operate the deep fryer” somewhere. I tried the items from their local menu and learned that veal cutlet when deep-fried tastes similar to pork cutlet and that fried cheese curds are essentially mozzarella sticks but in sphere form.

I dropped of the last person at around 5 PM and for the dozenth time in my life braced to get home from Cincinnati at 2 AM.

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DC Panel

I am interested in DC’s New 52 reboot.  There, a Red Shirt Guy asked: “So, you indicated that with the new 52 there would be a rewrite of backstories yet Redcliff is still destroyed as is was in the previous continuity.  Are we to believe that both redcliff’s are destroyed by coincidence?”

Another person asked “Will the Joker return?” to which the panelists responded “While I can’t divulge the full line, there will be a character noted for a purple suit that smiles a lot”.  Looks like Batmat is going to fight Barney.

The Hall

The artist alley was interesting enough that I felt compelled to buy a fake mustache.  It was well made and well sold with a pitch of “does himself the modern man find in frantic pace of modernity situations in which he finds himself undermustachioed?  This contrivance of small size and great utility will help the otherwise dapper man fill this hole in his presence thusly. *Holds fake mustache to nose*

The costumes were mixed in quality, but I got to see the cutest little Jedi.

Littlest Padawan

My favorite was the Dr. Who puppet. I’m a sucker for puppets.
Dr. Who Puppeteer

I had to jump out in the middle to go meet a high school friend.

Here are the other shots:
[flickr album=72157630428390626 num=20 size=Thumbnail]

Meeting Erin

Erin is a friend of mine from high school who thought I was a drinker because my Facebook profile picture at the time was me with my head under a tap. Nope. We’ve not talked in a decade and she described me to her fiance as follows: He’ll be wearing a t-shirt with another t-shirt over it and a vest. Shorts, white socks, and functional yet dressy shoes.

I asked her about her work in Modern art, a topic I enjoy and as the conversation continued and the beers kept coming she realized I was genuinely interested in her field and not just making polite conversation. After the 6th beer, she was having trouble making a sentence about some intellectual and shouted at the ceiling “why did I start drinking at 10?!” Erin’s not a lush but has a longstanding beer passion and supported herself as a beer blogger for a while. Saturday is her unwind day.

Parting Thoughts

Me: Brad.
Brad: Yes, Terry?
Me: What does it mean that at this point in my life I’m fine with seeing two dudes kiss, but I am very bothered by couples who are dressed as characters that aren’t from the same fictional universe?
Brad: It means you have your priorities in order.

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For once, me and my cadre arrived in Chicago while the sun was still up we had a chance to take a walking tour of Chicago. We were armed.
Camera Fight

The tour was led by a docent from the Chicago Architecture Foundation who knew his tour but was much more an enthusiast rather than an expert. He covered the high points and my shutter flew. Chicago is architecturally unique because it needed office space at a time when modern building techniques were being developed. The skyscraper was possible but hadn’t been commodified and land was relatively cheap after the Chicago Fire. This led to frenzied building and a nearly unrivaled mix of styles.

Pylon
The above building I think holds up the sky.

Chicago buildings also have amazing lobbies as they tend to be more mixed use than say NYC skyscrapers. A Chicago large building will have multiple shops and restaurants or a grand foyer and the actual usage of the building may not be apparent at first blush.
Marquette Building Foyer
The above is the foyer of the Marquette Building.

I love Art Deco and am curious to know what would have happened to the developing style if WWII hadn’t gotten in the way. Here is an interior that conveys space and a feeling that everything’s worth a million bucks.
Grand Goldness

The same treatment for a simple hallway:
Highway of Light

At the end of the tour, I circled back to get a picture of a Winged Nike of Samothrace replica that had been treated in gold leaf that was inside the lobby of a building. An argument followed with the guard where I claimed as an invitee to do business with the first floor shops I could take a picture. He contented that I couldn’t as there was a sign that said “No Photography Allowed”. I eventually acquiesced and was harangued by Michael and Brad about what I had done. Suzie just smiled.

We met up with Peter, Audrey, and a TI friend and his girlfriend for dinner and the turn around he had made in a year was amazing. A year ago he was bragging about how he was kicked out of military training and how much he could drink and now was leaving dinner early to get to a jazz concert. I hope I can be as nimble when needed.

We returned to Peter and Audrey’s, drank (but me) and called it a night.