Selective Hearing

The upside of having bad hearing is that I often now just hear what I want to. At tonight's big fireworks display in Victoria Park (flamethrowers, loud music, explodey fireworks, I loved it!), the announcer might have given credit to the Tower Hamlets Arts & Events Team, but I swear she said "Arson Events Team".

Ice Cream w/o Sugar

A few weeks ago I made another variation on hyperlipid's optimal ice cream. Over the summer I'd tried maple walnut. This time I tried chocolate sour cream: 1 cup heavy cream, 1 cup sour cream, 1 tsp vanilla, 6 egg yolks, pinch of salt, and a bit over 4 oz. 70% chocolate. No sugar other than what was in the chocolate, which wasn't much. It was good. "Normal" people liked it a lot, but with sweet chocolate sauce or on chocolate cake. I liked it as is. It was not sweet at all. I have a great weakness for ice cream -- I can eat huge amounts when it's available, and if it's in the house, I pretty much have to eat it until it's gone. But takeaway the sugar and suddenly I can't eat as much. Very interesting. I could never eat the whole batch of the chocolate sour cream ice cream as it was. If I'd added a cup of sugar (yes, a cup! that's what an average chocolate ice cream recipe for my maker calls for), I bet I could've eaten a lot more.

Inadvertant Salami Taste Test For Mice

Accidentally left the stash of salami from the market where mice could get them. Evidence suggests mice love garlic salami and wild boar salami, but do not care for either duck salami or venison salami.

Running

Please check out the PaNu blog I've added to the left. Dr. Harris has a fantastic recent post about "cardio" and heart disease. It's long, but filled with good info and well worth a read. The upshot is that serious recreational marathon runners (minimum 5 marathons in past 3 years) don't fare well compared to sedentary age-matched peers in terms of heart disease. The implication is that obsessive mileage is bad for your heart. I find this entirely believable. (Marathoners never look all that healthy or robust to me -- Paula Radcliffe looks like she could be done in by a bad sneeze.) That said, I'm not going to stop running, because I enjoy it. I run 2-3 times a week, between 25 and 90 minutes per session, less than half the weekly mileage of the runners in the study, and no plans or amibitions to do a marathon. The people who especially should take not are the ones running because they think it's healthy, even though they don't enjoy it. I've known people who've told me flat out, "I hate running", but do it anyway. For me, running helps with stress, anxiety, mood -- I enjoy it in and of itself, even though I'm a bit of a plodder. If I hated it, I would never do it. A modicum of weight-bearing exercise -- walk, stress your arms out sometimes, add the occasional sprint -- is helpful for just about everyone, even people who can't stand to get off the sofa. Beyond that, don't obsess over "cardio" unless you enjoy it.

Ceremony

This is the kind of thing the natives may take for granted but as an expat I love about the UK: they do ceremony right. I've turned into a closet monarchist and I do find something worthwhile in the old traditions, rituals, and pomp. Americans are often at a loss when a ceremony or ritual is called for. In the aftermath of the sep-11, congress singing "God Bless America" on the steps seemed bizarre and feeble. Across the pond, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace was altered, once, with the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. It was dignified, poignant, deeply grounded in historical context... I found it indescribably moving.

A few days ago I enjoyed a much more mundane but personally relevant ceremony, the Lord Mayor of London's prize giving ceremony for the City of London School for Boys, presided over by The Right Honourable Lord Mayor of London himself. There were sherriffs and aldermen and cloaks and capes and staffs and a couple guys with swords and some big freakin' medallions and music and processionals and this is like nothing a midwesterner would ever see growing up. The esteemed participants had that perfect balance you find in here: it was a ritual to be approached in good humor without being camp, taken seriously -- enough-- to give it meaning without being overly pompous or ludicrous. It was really well done.

The other astonishing thing? The ceremony included a speech by one of the students, praising an early benefactor of the school. I was astonished enough to find that such a speech has been given every year for more than 150 years, but even more delighted to find the benefactor -- John Carpenter -- who has been yearly praised since Victoria was a young queen died 567 years ago! Yes, a guy who died in 1442 that most people never heard of has been annually praised by a teenager in front of the Lord Mayor of London for generations now. How cool is that?

Apple Airport Acting Up

Have had really bad behavior from our airport network here at home lately. The newest laptop is constantly losing the network, using 10.5.8 and 10.6.*. The asus pc works fine and the 10.5.7 laptop worked fine on another network using a netgear router exclusively. Pretty frustrating, though, for the affected machines.

Asus

Got my oldest a cute little Asus netbook. We're pretty much all Macs at home, but his school uses windows software, so we got the Asus eee with a "starter" Windows 7 loaded. So far, so good. It's a nice little piece of kit.

Low & Slow: Low Tech + High Tech Hybrid Prediction

It's only a matter of time before we see a brisket spend a few hours in a smoker then get a long completion sous vide. Anyone with a spare smoker and sous vide cooker they want to lend me, I'd be more than happy to break new ground here and report back in detail.

Good Tools

While in the US recently, I busted out my old cuisinart food processor to make some mayo. Of the three machines I've used to make mayo in the past few months, this was hands-down the best. I don't know how old my cuisinart is, probably at least 17 or 18 years. Maybe 20. It's heavy-use days are long over, but it did do a lot of work in the 90s. Really good piece of engineering. Makes the much newer Moulinex we use in the UK look pretty crappy.

Pastrami Attempt

Tried to pastramify a brisket last week. Took a full packer-cut brisket and brined it for 5 days in salt, demera sugar, and pickling spices. The spices had things I wanted -- bay leaves, peppercorns, cloves -- along with some things I didn't really want in there -- allspice, cinammon -- but I couldn't find juniper so gave up on doing my own spice mix. Rubbed with cracked black pepper. Smoked it over hickory for 6 hours then wrapped in foil and finished in 240F oven for 4-5 hours. Let cool overnight, then fridged all morning, sliced then reheated on an on-demand basis. Was really tasty. Perfectly tender but still sliceable. The fattier part had that wonderfully buttery texture, and the leaner part was also excellent. The flavor was still closer to salt beef/corned beef than pastrami, although it was definitely on the road to pastramihood [Yes, I know that pastrami is generally cold-smoked and not hot-smoked.] It needed more smoke and less salt. Next time need to soak in in fresh water after the brining, and be more aggressive with the smoking. Also need to find juniper, and add juniper both the brine and the rub. Coriander seed would do nicely as well.

American Pale Ale

I think the American Pale Ale is its own style, the canonical example of which is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Brewers get confused about what to call this, and often end up just calling it a "Pale Ale" or an "IPA". It's certainly not an IPA. Keep in mind these are ment to be drunk cold. Pour an SNPA at cellar temperature and rack it up next to a geniune IPA and the difference will be clear. Terminal Brewhouse referred to this style as a "West Coast IPA" or "double IPA", either of which is a better description, but they miss the boat by brewing their own "American Pale Ale" which is maltier and less hoppy than what I'd call an APA.

I recently tried Budweiser's "American Ale", which I was looking forward to (seriously), and it was, perhaps predictably, a big disappointment. It has an encouraging start -- a slight hop bite, but then completely disappears in a weak and appallingly watery finish. The head brewer's proud of this? Surely not. I was hoping they were going after SNPA. The more people's standards get raised, the better it is for everyone. No dice. It's lame. I compared directly vs. Michelob Pale Ale (weak but slightly more honest than the Bud), SNPA (of course), and Sweetwater 420 Extra Pale Ale (a very nice APA out of Atlanta). The big brewers should be perfectly capable of turning out great beers (Guinness is huge and makes a fantastic beer). Wonder when they'll start.

Terminal Brewhouse, Chattanooga

Went to a relatively new brewpub in Chattanooga, this one not near the river (but a reasonable walk down Market Street south, or a free electric shuttle ride away). It was good! Service was good, menu was nice, and the beers were excellent. I was expecting the food to be a bit better, given some of the reviews I'd read. Not that the food was bad -- it was perfectly fine, just nothing special. Compared to Big River, the food was no better (but I like the food at Big River), but the Terminal's beers were much better. Definitely worth a stop if you're in town.