I was at a Scout meeting today being hosted by an adult leader who turned out be an excellent entertainer. Â As the meeting progressed, new munchies were brought out every 45 minutes or so and after 3 hours I was in the fork of a dilemma. Â The next item up looked like pepperoni, crackers, and water melon slices but I didn’t really want to stay another 45 minutes talking about a troop’s difficulty packing from summer camp. Â Salvation came when someone brought up the aims and methods of Scouting, a topic that I could easily drown an evening with and before I knew it we received the watermelon and pepperoni as well as grapes and cheese.
Tag: food
Cheesecake Compromise
I plot desserts along three axes: ease of preparation, joy of consumption, and appearance. I focus heavily on the ratio of joy of consumption to ease of preparation as that maximizes the brownie points I receive from my coworkers. For instance, truffles are fantastically easy to prepare and quite tasty but ugly. A ganache coating increases appearance but at the cost of difficulty. Anything with a homemade crust is low on prep ease and medium in consumption so I generally don’t bother.
Cheesecake with a topping or filling sits at the apex of the three, being difficult to prepare well, pretty, and makes one feel like one’s tongue were being hugged. The difficulty comes from handling as cheesecakes will crumble and crack if you look at them funny. Additionally, they involve making a separate crust and blank-baking it and require a setting period that alternates between hot and cold and can take in excess of six hours. So, what if I simply sacrificed appearance and slashed out much of the coddling? I was going to find out.
One tactic to ensure even heating is to bake the cake in a hot water bath. F that. Another is to leave the oven door open a crack while leaving the oven at a low temperature for six hours. F that as well. I went for the much simpler “remove it from the oven and put it in the fridge” tactic and was rightly punished. What emerged looked like the lid of a mason jar. The cake had rose jack-straight about 3/4″ above the rim of the pan and then caved in like someone had put a belt around it only to return to its original width before flattening to a plateau evoking the cracked surface of a dessicated flood plain. Hm…
Only in one other case had I refused to serve something because it looked hideous and that was because I literally dropped it. I think my solution was somewhat clever: I popped the cheesecake in the freezer, firmed it up a bit, sawed the top off and glazed the remaining cake with cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate. The best part was having an excuse to have a breakfast consisting of the top of a cheesecake.
2010 Chicago, Day 4
My departure from Chicago was like my departure from my host: icy. Peter made the outrageous claim that seasons I & II of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the best. I recognize I’m sometimes viewed as an iconoclast for my love of DS9 but claiming that the repurposed tripe that was the detritus of Star Trek: Phase II represented the pinnacle of writing in Trekdom is heresy bordering on treason.  Were I not so tired, that claim could have sent me into a paroxysmal rage that would have taken out a 1/3 of Team Interobang’s SAs.
I had a chance to calm down later and Kyle and I proceeded to FermiLab… which was closed. I’d registered for a presentation there but was waitlisted by a school group. We drove about the complex a bit including driving down some sort of access road where pi-shaped power supports stretched to infinity.
I pulled that from Flickr but the area around was blanketed in snow. The site’s pristine status as a well maintained but forgotten site was reinforced by 1960s industrial design coupled with a emptiness that I’ve only seen in the works of De Chirico.
I regret not being a bit more ballsy in exploring the site as I’m sure they get their fare share of curious nerds. This was the place that discovered the bottom Omega baryon on a continuously diminishing budget and is a testament to America’s dedication to being on the frontier of discovery0, and they have the bison to prove it.
We drove homeward and due to the vicissitudes of Garmin’s pathfinding our path jumped from I-94 to Rt 30; the way I’d gone out and back to Chicago on my previous visit. Kyle found its barrenness as enchanting as I did but this time we had the additional dampener of uniform snow. Stopping in Fort Wayne to take up someone on an offer of pizza provided a change of company and temperament that was refreshing. The combination of brick oven pizza and Caesar salad purged me of Chicago’s taste in more than a figurative sense. I used our temporary host’s bathroom and was able to clog it with droppings no larger than Vienna sausages.  I asked for a plunger and received the quizzical response I often get from people whose bowel functions make clogged toilets more of a theoretical concern than a fact of reality. I’ve gotten quite good at the art of the silent plunge and the issue was quickly put down the drain… or toilet trap.
The final stretch back included a stop over at which Kyle first lived. I’m glad we were fully stopped as he was hit by waves of mental calibration as his internal image of his old house was reconciled with reality. I was lucky; my old home was replaced by the fruit section of a Superfresh before I encountered such cognitive dissonance. The rest of the turnpike welcomed us home in the manner it often does: with just enough hill to trigger a gear change using cruise control but not enough to complete the upshift. I missed you, Pennsylvania.
Mediocre-mas
My brother diplomatically hosted Christmas. He prepared a spiral ham that was ok. I prepared a smore brownie that was ok. Everyone drank wine that was ok (except for me, who had sparking white grape juice that was ok). We exchanged gifts that were ok (I got a GPS that was ok) and listened to music that was ok with people that were ok. Considering my loathing of these get-togethers and how low my standards have been ground, I had an awesome Christmas.
Custom Ice Trays
There are an unusual number of silicone experts at my workplace so I asked one of them if my dream of using silicone ice trays to produce brownie-fists was reasonable. Turns out the answer is a qualified “yes”.
Coworker: Silicone is silicone. If it’s a true silicone ice cube tray it’ll take several hundred degrees C without a problem.
Me: What do you mean “true silicone”?
Coworker: Well, some just use a silicone backbone, so they’d have a low melting point.
Me: I think I’ve dealt with that before.
Coworker:Â What are you trying to do?
Me: Trying to create a silicone tray to make single server brownies.
Coworker: We could make our own. I asked Dow for some sample silicone and they sent me 70 kilos that’s body-safe. We’d just need a sample shape.
I’ve been avoiding learning our CAD design, rapid prototyping and thermal simulation software. I think I now have a reason to.
Bean Rebellion
My father and I eat very well on long weekends as I have time to prepare proper meals. I made a Santa Fe stew which takes about 10 hours to prepare, most of which is stewing, and left it in the crock pot for a self-serve dinner. I ate before my dad and came down to see him feeding a portion of his stew to the dog.
Me: Problem with the stew?
Dad: No, I just thought Max would enjoy the black beans more than I would.
Me: Traitor, I spent my youth dodging my mortal enemy, green beans forced upon me by my mother and here I see you feeding beans to the dog. Turncoat!
Dad: No, it was your mother, and I hated her beans too, but before you were born she switched from green beans to black beans if I complained. I was exchanging one thing I hated for another.
Me: Touche. If we go over mom’s for Christmas and she prepares beans and you say anything about me not eating them you’re going to have six months of black beans when I get fired.
Dad: Deal.
Hiding Food Crimes
Me: When Dave gets back, I think he’ll be miffed the mice ate into his box of mini-muffins, Pop Tarts, and Cookie Bars.
Dad: Do you think he’ll believe the mice have built an arctic outpost in the freezer?
Me: Why?
Dad: Because I’m slowly eating through all his ice cream sandwiches.
Culinary Amnesia
I’ve been doing a flurry of my regular baking plus some casseroles trying some options (I’ve yet to use Sabbath mode) but appear to have lost track. My dad informed me that he finished my pie and he thought it was delicious. When did I make a pie? I haven’t made one in weeks, and it was clearly done in one of my pie dishes. So either I’m baking with such ferocity my mind is repressing the memory or my dad just finished of a pie that saw Obama inaugurated. Hm..
Now with Flavor
One of our coworkers returned from a business trip with a local “treat” of her destination, Cherry Mashes. We were unsure of what was in them and the individual packages were devoid of an ingredients list so my boss, a former engineer for the flavors division of a food firm tried one:
Me: So what’s in it?
Him: Hm… a complex combination of grade F hazelnuts, chocolate from cocoa that may have been lit on fire and a vat of artificial flavoring that may have had a bowl of cherries next to it.
The land of Paula Dean has failed us.
abuso de azúcar
After emerging tied for victorious at today’s 5-Color event we went for Victory Food at a family-run Mexican food place where the foodstuffs were periodically labeled in English. I’m still trying to figure out what huevos estrellados are as the term literally translates to star-shaped eggs but I think it may be non-fried fried eggs based on the Spanish Wikipedia article. I was unsure of what to drink after the server told me the juices of the only three things I could identify as fruits were out when she offered me horchata. I said sure and later got back a white liquid with ice in it served in what appeared to be a flower vase. I placed my straw in, took a sip, and got punched in the tongue with Christmas. I tasted like someone had made English pudding into a drink or possibly bottled Santa’s urine but it was sweet, nutmeggy and cinnamony.
I don’t usually drink sweet beverages except for the periodic milkshake and the sounds of my Islets of Langerhans yelling “incoming!” was probably audible to the other patrons. Each sip tasted more and more like something served at a reading of A Christmas Carol and the sweetness intensified as I got further down. I could feel my brain starting to slow down and apparently my speech did as I neared the bottom and my pancreas waved the white flag of defeat. As I danced closer to a life depicted in Wilford Brimley commercials Bob Tait looks across the table at my wrecked state and asked the server for a tall cup of the stuff to go.
Afterword: I thought the server orignally said “we have rice milk or chata” not “we have rice milk horchata” so when a game mate asked what we had and I mentioned chata he picked that up as the name. He left to get some. Apparently chata is a derogatory term for someone who’s flat-chested. I wonder what he got served.