the whole way down, the weather people said it would rain.
"oh, that's just for LA, redlands, beaumont, and sich," i said. "it never rains in palm springs, and when it does, it's just for a couple minutes."
bleh. it's downright soggy out there and we both left all our bike foulies at home. well, hops brought her long gloves and forgot the knuckle scrapers, so i guess that worked out for her. me, i coulda used my booties. alas: cold feets await me.
didnt i already admit to not being able to properly employ baseball analogies? whelp, anyhow, i had a barbecue disappointment last night. i adapted a babyback rib recipe to use short ribs. i don't think i care much for the rub (too much celery seed) and i cooked at too low a temp for not enough time. additionally, i mopped, which i think is not really what i want for dry ribs.
the ribs came out edible but mediocre, which is frustrating after so much anticipation, prep, and work. but from frustration comes learning. and i hope i learned something: i have promised to make the same ribs for a whole lot of people in just a couple more days. yikes!
it's Frobuary 3, YOMHC 0x35!
clippers: best thing i ever bought, even though i have personally never used them.
the weirdest thing about shaving off a non-trivial beard (and i've done it enough times to speak with some authority) is looking at yourself in the mirror and not recognizing your chin.
"hey, what the heck is that thing there under my mouth?"
"oh, my chin."
or, if you've recently begun barbecuing and going to weekly beer festivals,
"oh, my chins."
bah. i knew i had a spare one there some place, i just didn't realize how well the beards hid it.
the memphis-style dry ribs: WIN. sauce was provided but untouched. the ribs were tender, juicy, bacony, and chewy. burnt in some areas where they were not over a water pan. easy fix for that: bigger water pan.
the cornbread: the canned trader joe's corns were not so great. i thought the recipe needed honey. room for improvement but still very, very good.
the greens: meh. my own improvised recipe was better. these needed more hot sauce. i have a leftover portion of ham hock which i can use for next attempt, but i also have a ton of leftovers to defer me.
fried pickles: sliced too thick as per recipe. needed to be thinner slices and maybe a milder pickle.
anyhow, next time i make ribs we'll have a simpler menu. even with two hungry large guys we didn't finish a single slab of spareribs.
the real deal:
mint juleps
skillet cornbread
fried pickles
southern greens
memphis style hickory smoked "dry" ribs
if it all works out: hell yeah!
if it doesn't: the cornbread will, the juleps are already downed, oh well.
i found out that in california, they call a ham hock a ham shank. i also found out that a smoked ham shank is one ugly sonofabitch.
i'm not really "smoking" the ribs. i'm using a hybrid recipe out of my weber book that calls for heat quite a lot higher than "smoking" temps, with a whole lot of hickory, which is smoking nicely.
the recipe called for indirect medium but the spareribs are so huge (i was planning 2 slabs until i saw what a sparerib slab was...) i can't really do indirect medium -- part of the slab is over the flame. so i'm more like indirect low. also, i may not have enough water pan coverage. meh.
we'll see!
to my mohawk! in honor of its one year birthday, i convinced hops to spike it. in honor of my coworkers, i cut the styling session short so i wouldn't miss lunch. hence, 4 liberty spikes instead of 5. still, a most excellent and impressive job for her first spiking:
secret ingredient: egg whites.
we did it with my shirt off, so i was forced to wear a collared shirt. with a collared shirt on, i figured i may as well wear my tie. so i did.
coworkers took more pics, and some of my coworkers are tall enough that you can't see my double chin. i'll post those when i get them.
the pics, not my chins.
due to time constraints, i took a short ride today. now, by short, i don't mean easy: i picked a reasonably tough stretch of road, about 5km, and did a nice little time trial, wherein i found that my LT is about 5-7bpm higher than it was (or i thought it was): bottom of crystal springs all the way to the speed bump at the golf course. on the way back i took a couple nice hills at (my) full speed, and took an out-of-the-saddle ride up ascension drive (which, as usual, drove my HR up to 173, yow!)
anyhow, at the bottom of bunker hill i reached down to enjoy a swig from my 2nd water bottle and was greeted with an unspeakable horror from beyond. i don't know what in the world was in that bottle, but it was uncouth. was it remnants of one of hops' girly sports drinks? was it chain lube? was it wild yeast? i don't know, but it was one of the most awful things i've tasted all day.
bllllleeeeeaaaaagh.
fortunately, the other water bottle, while low, was clean. hooray for redundancy.
last night i was tormented in my sleep by a demon. he masqueraded as a french language professor, kidnapped me, my wife, a whole group of friends and strangers, and spirited us away to be captives in his farming complex deep beneath the dirtiest streets of san francisco.
i was able to break free, find out his name (it was not azazel, but it was close), free some of the surviving captives, and recover my stolen bike.
when i got back to my home, i was distraught to find that the fackin demon had removed my curly handlebars and given me straight ones.
aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!
still batting... uh... a thousand? or something. i don't know baseball. i know how to follow a grill recipe.
anyhow, made mojo marinated chicken and acorn squash. hops made sweet potato biscuits and though they didn't rise, they were still quite tasty. the chicken and squash recipes were from weber's book and they both came out excellent. i dont think i've ever cooked chicken so nicely on my own.
i played around and figured out some more things about smoking. that's good, because i'll be grill-smoking some ribs this weekend and i need to get the routine down. it turns out i dont need to put the smoker box/packet under the grates, they'll smoke just fine from above. which is good, since i'll need changes of wood when i'm smoking for a really long time.
anyhow: it occurred to me that i didn't get such great results on my previous gas grill, so maybe the difference is in the grill or the recipe. nothing to brag about then, but at least i get tasty dinners. yum!
i leave itunes on all the time but turn the speakers off. then when i am in the mood for tunes, i turn on the speakers and find out what in my collection is playing, usually it is something unexpected.
tonight i endured 10 minutes of lameness as i prepped a sauce, then finally looked at what was playing. yngwie malmsteen. that explains it.
it's Frobuary 1+N, YOMHC 0x34!
i got the haircut a couple days ago but I don't remember the value of N. so sorry.
hops and i smoked a salmon fillet on the grill tonight.
yep, smoked it. low and slow for over an hour. i was able, with the help of a thermocouple probe, to get a region of my grill down to 200F. the front burner had to be on its lowest setting, which caused a problem: i didn't get the wood chips really smoking until after i'd lowered the grill temp -- meaning that it wasn't properly smoky in there when i put the fish on.
that's a lesson learned. next time, it'll be smoke city before i drop the temps and put the meat on. one other thing to figure out will be how to change the chips part way through a long smoking session. the chips were set under the grill grates, making them inaccessible once the food is on. putting them above the grates may make them too cold to smoke.
anyhow, the salmon. it had a jamaican jerk rub (which was entirely different than the jerk flavor we've gotten used to at our jamaican place) and a jerk sauce. the sauce was tamarind heavy, which was good for a change, but maybe a little too intense on the tamarind/honey.
i've got all sorts of improvements in mind for the rub/sauce, but really, i think next time i'll use a totally different jerk recipe. the one at our local jamaican place is way better (though again, not really in the same sauce universe).
my place now smells like NORML WHQ.
you know what's tasty, lean, and much cheaper than steak? no, not the baby white girls that obama eats for breakfast. pork chops!
i've never really been a big eater of pork. well, that's not true. when i was saying that 2 years ago that was true. but that was before i discovered carnitas at chuck's. so now i eat lots of pork. also i ate pork in georgia. did i mention i liked it?
anyhow, despite increasing my pork intake lately, i have not ever cooked much pork. i think i pan seared a pork chop once right out of college. pretty sure i never ever grilled any pork.
until last night. three pork chops (mixup at the grocery store, my fault. meant to get two, went a little hypoglycemic, ended up with three) with rub and sauce straight out of one of weber's grilling books.
weber's grilling books: i think i have to recommend them. the sauce was freakin great (side note: we used annie's organic ketchup. not because i'm pro-organic or enjoy paying 4 bucks for a small amount of ketchup, but because i'm sick and tired of getting HFCS not only in places where it's unhealthy, but in places where it's simply not necessary. it's a cheap filler and it's a clear message from heinz and hunts that we don't care about you even remotely, so we'll replace real food with this industrial byproduct. anyhow, that was yesterday's reason for buying annie's: it was the only one with no hfcs (well, heinz' organic also had no hfcs, but annie's is made relatively locally). today's reason for buying annie's ketchup: it tastes fuckin' awesome. guess what happens when you can no longer fill bottle volume with HFCS? that's right: you have to use real tomato to get your bottle volume. so, to the extent that the sauce was great last night, i think i have annie's to thank, in large part.). the rub was pretty good though the chop didn't come out as pretty as the picture (close!). i overcooked it a little but i am entirely unsurprised: grilling is an art not a science and i need to get my skills down.
speaking of art and skills, i learned something last night: the only thing i was grilling was my three pork chops. i have a huge amount of grill space. i got really nice grill marks on side #1, but side #2 was lackluster. why? because i flipped them in place. i could have flipped them to a hotter part of the grill and gotten nice sear marks on both sides. lesson learned.
however, this raises a question: how would i get good sear marks in a crowded grill? e.g., there is no hotter place to flip them to, because there's ribs or squash in the way?
anyhow, i'm a pork fan now. though slightly overcooked they were damned tasty (oh crap, now i'm swearing in addition to not keeping kosher!), super quick to make (the rub took me a good while to make but i'll get faster and make bigger portions of it) and the sauce hid any cooking defects.
tonight i'm smoking a salmon fillet with a jerk rub and jerk dipping sauce. it'll be my first attempt at smoking in my grill. aye, some say it can't be done but i am confident that a man of science such as myself can make it happen.
picked up a steak on the way home from work last night, and some eggplant. grilled the eggplant and topped it with a peppery soy-based sauce, straight out of one of my weber grilling books. the eggplant was slightly overcooked, or the sauce overpenetrated, or something. it was still delicious and i don't really care much for eggplant.
i haven't really been a big grocery steak purchaser. a couple weeks ago i bought a skirt steak, and then a "delmonico" steak, whatever that was. i seared both on the stove. the skirt came out most excellently, possibly the best steak (till then) that i'd cooked myself. the delmonico burned.
yesterday i got a new york strip -- holy crap is steak expensive! but i didn't want a crummy steak for my inaugural grilled steak. anyhow, it was outrageously expensive, but it came out tremendously good -- certainly better than i could have gotten for the same price at outback (sure, low bar) and nearly as good as at "san mateo prime". since i was doing onions, tomatoes, a portabello mushroom, and eggplant slices all at the same time as the steak, i had the lid open too much -- that's something that will be taken care of with more skill. as a result the grill marks on one side were slightly lackluster -- but i still got the finest steak grill marks i've ever personally made (to my memory).
also: it tasted great.
so, first grilled steak on the weber: success!
after that we grilled a can of sliced pineapples and a persimmon. the persimmon would have been really tasty had it been more ripe, or maybe it was a species issue -- persimmons tend astringe the hell out of my mouth and this one was no exception.
the pineapple came out great, if a tad undercooked. on one of them we poured a spoonful of laphroiag, which flamed up very entertainingly, and imparted a very subtle flavor. next time maybe some JD or other cheap whiskey -- laphroiag is too costly for such a treatment!
perfection
well, it'd go better with some knappogue castle.
through a series of events stemming from my inability to read a product description, i shaved today with a feather disposable blade straight razor.
it offers all the terror, inconvenience, and slowness of a real straight razor shave, without the foreplay of stropping or the tedium of honing and sharpening.
right off the bat i cut myself under the nose. score one for the feather disposable.
my normal second pass includes ear-to-nose, but that frightened me too much and i couldn't get the angle right to avoid skipping (real bad idea with a straight) so i did nose-to-ear which is also scary because although it eliminated the danger of skipping-induced face lacerations, it introduced the real danger of hearing loss by way of ear amputation.
i survived with both ears intact. it was clear from the beginning that the blade was far, far, far sharper than any of my previous straight razors. now, because of the aforementioned reading failure, i have a pack of feather blades that are slightly less sharp than the ones i used today, but really, there is no such thing that i am aware of as a dull feather.
i sliced open a helmet pimple, score two for the feather. and i missed a patch under my chin and patches near both of my ears (see above, re: fears of ear amputation). this is common with straights, in my experience. the shave feels about the same as i'd get in 2 passes from my DE feather, but the real test comes when i check myself out in the car mirror (usually while merging on to 92).
in all, i'll surely use up the 20 blades that i managed to stick myself with. at this point, i'm somewhat amenable to putting the razor up in my case after (or even before) that, but that might just be on account of i've gotten outta practice with the cutthroat.
i dont usually have much to say about politics, but here we go anyhow.
the system, at least here in california, worked. and taken from the context of the original intent of the republic of states that we live in, the entire system worked.
obama won the popular vote by a relatively small percentage, and won the electoral college by an enormous landslide.
i was thinking today (on my run, of course) that the reason folks these days don't care much for the electoral college is because most of the rest of the constitution of the US has been so trashed that it no longer makes sense. originally the EC served to prevent tyranny of populous states over small states. Now, though, we suffer from tyranny of a strongarm federal government over all the states, large and small. for this, we can thank an earlier senator from illinois.
whether one thinks a strong federal government is a good or bad thing, it is easy to see why the EC makes little sense in a system where the states have very little power. since the federal government has taken enormous powers from the people and the states to rule over each of us individually, it makes sense that each of us individually -- and not the states -- should elect the federal government. the EC makes more sense in the context of the original system.
speaking of the original system, it's playing out right now in my home state. prop 8 appears to have passed. the whole elect-democrats-externally-but-vote-republican-internally thing has always confused me about CA, but i'm not a very bright person so a lot of things confuse me. one thing that doesn't confuse me is that prop 8 passing, as odious as i find it to be, is a prime example of the system working as the framers intended.
unfortunately, times have changed dramatically since the times of the founders. whereas in 1847 if your state outlawed your way of life, you could always go out and settle some wilderness and continue with your life undisturbed. being a blacksmith or a teacher or a farmer in one place wasn't much different from being the same elsewhere.
but now travel between states is a lot different. the barriers are much larger, the economic realities are harsher, and there isn't any wilderness to default to if you decide city B isn't better than city A.
sure, if you're gay in CA and you want to be married, you could in theory move to hawaii or mass or some such place. but the opportunities you'd find aren't the same as the ones you'd have found in 1801. maybe that's actually good. good or bad, though, the loose republic of states, where if you didn't care for the conditions in one state, you could escape their tyranny to live in the frontier, no longer really exists.
i'm also a bit pissed to see that the price of meat is going to go up in CA, just when i got my grill. sigh. CA: where we care more about our chickens than our people.
there's something i was supposed to do today but i can't quite remember what it is...
my bike's been making creaking noises from (i think) the bottom bracket for about 2 weeks.
a week or two ago i adjusted the front derailler, thinking i was getting chain hits against the FD in some gears. so now i know how to adjust the FD.
sadly, that didn't fix the problem (although i was getting some chain drag, which was then fixed). so last week i went on a bolt tightening mission, and found loose bolts on the chainring, the FD clamp, and the pedals. all tightened. did it fix the problem? no. did it send my FD slightly outta whack such that i had difficulty shifting onto my manly chainring? yep. more lessons!
so real soon now i get to re-adjust the FD limiters, and... i have another suspect for the noise, not the bottom bracket at all, but my seatpost. my knees in the neutral position are suspiciously more bent than they ought to be, which suggests a loose and slipping seat post. now, i get the creaking when pedaling out of the saddle, which suggests the problem is not the seatpost. but i think i can reproduce the sound just by seat bouncing (putting my reproductive facilities greatly at risk) but i'm not positive. it's a bit of a maddening process.
anyhoo, i'll give some more parts a well needed tightening (the bike was at the shop for a "tune up" recently, hell if i know what they did, considering how many bolts were loose right after -- maybe they went and loosened my bolts).
in other news, my staying warm strategy met with mixed results. i got myself some neoprene bike booties, and wore them today for the first time. not only were my feet nice and warm the whole ride, they were actually warmer when i finished then when i started! score for the booties.
the arm warmers kept my arms nice and warm. not too hot, not too cold, but just like the little bear's oatmeal, it was just right.
sadly, the big fail was the underarmor compression shirt. i wear those when i run and while they don't keep me particularly warm, they do keep the beer gut from slapping me in the face. i figured i could wear some UA under a bike jersey and the layering effect would keep me toasty. whelp, maybe it kept me toastier than i otherwise woulda been, but i was still chilled. only my love for the sport kept me warm today.
my arm and leg warmers have some fuzzy microfleece or something on the skinside surface. i need to find an undershirt that has the same material.
at last, i have a grill again.
after a long stretch of non-usage, i got rid of the old one, which had reached the ripe old age of 35 (dog) years and gathered a fancy coating of rust, corrosion, and burner rot. for almost a year i went without a grill at all, then hops got me a tailgate grill for 10 bucks which we used often enough to miss the even cooking of a real grill.
so yesterday the new grill arrived. it's a weber genesis. it came in a gigantic box attached to a pallet. the deliver guy (a small carrier that i'd never heard of) brought it into the garage but it clearly would not fit into the elevator, so he dumped it by the elevator and left. i can't say i blame him: the shipping paperwork said it weighed 400 pounds, so we weren't about to manhandle it into the elevator.
fortunately, hops was on the way home. she arrived about 15 minutes later and we unpacked the box right there and took the grill parts up piece by piece. assembly took a rather long time, but only because step #2 was exceptionally tough. something to do with getting bolts aligned exactly before they would go through the frame. once i got to step 4 i realized i'd used the wrong washers in step #2. doh!! had to remove all the bolts and re-washer them. fortunately step 3 had made step 2 quite simple, so it wasn't a big deal.
once over the step 2 hump the rest of the steps were pretty straightforward. with hops' help we were done... in time for dinner! i hadn't planned on that. all we had was a couple sausages, which i grilled, and they were tasty. coulda done better with the sausages, and coulda done way better with some real meat. wednesday i'll be grilling up some fish, and from there out, it's grilling all the time. i've got a whole backlog of stuff to grill.
