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.

Jon Krakauer

I few years ago I'd read Into The Wild, and really liked it. It's a moving and sympathetic portrait of a young man whose story would have been easy to dismiss or scoff at in a less understanding treatment. Now I've just (finally) read Into Thin Air, which is moving, harrowing, and heartbreaking well beyond my expectations. Strongly recommended.

Chevy Aveo

I had the misfortune to rent one. Based on the relatively decent rankings on edmunds, I'd say American expectations of small cars are completely out of whack. It was crap. Handled poorly, slow, worryingly mushy brakes. How could anyone think it's fun to drive? Cheap inside and out, fairly expansive dashboard for no apparent reason. The only pluses: it's cute, and the mileage, for an american petrol car, was not bad. But why anyone would buy this is a mystery to me. Small Fords or VWs are miles better. A Fiat 500 puts it to shame. I'd take my beaten-up, 8-yr-old A2 over a new Aveo any day.

Pageants == Creepy

A couple of weeks ago I spent a night in the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near the Atlanta airport. After 10pm one night, and the next morning as well, I encountered young girls, approx age 5-9, running around with full and heavy makeup on. Mums were tromping in tow with plastic containers filled with sparkly outfits. I assume it was some sort of pageanty thing. It was deeply unsettling. Is this a weird southern thing, or a weird american thing, or just a weird subculture?

cooking notes: mayo, nut bars

Homemade mayo still going well. I did, against better judgment, try a batch with very good mayo (but not the great stuff), and it was way too bitter. The last batch was much better: I dropped a couple of garlic cloves into the whirring blades to start, and went heavy on the lemon juice, to end up with a really excellent garlic mayo (not aioli).

I also had a first attempt at homemade low-carb nut bars. I'd like a portable snack, something like these from Jordan's, which are the best I've found -- about half the carbs of comparable crunchy granola bar -- but still way too much sugar. Took 150g pecans, 100g walnuts, 100g brazil nuts, 100g hazelnuts, 100g almonds, 50g sesame seeds, toasted them, chopped them pretty finely, added 2 T maple syrup and a hearty amount of salt, beat 3 egg whites then folded the egg whites and the nut mixture togethers, pressed into a greased pan and baked at 165C for about 25 minutes. Verdict: not bad, not exactly right. Crispy at the edges but not in the middle. Next time bake longer.

Low & Slow

Low and slow seems all the culinary rage these days. BBQ has gained a lot of traction in non-traditional places in the US and elsewhere. I even saw a magazine piece about Jamie Oliver planning barbecue restaurants in the UK. This is the American definition of barbecue (meat cooked slowly with smoke involved) rather than the UK definition of barbecue (which, as far as I can tell, means anything involving a hamburger or a grill). And now I've seen sous vide popping up everywhere. [I'd love to have Nexis just to do useless things such as a hit count by month of "sous vide" over the past year or so.] Drs. Eades are even bringing to market a home appliance, which looks interesting. There's a definite geeky appeal to the precision of sous vide cookery. I've considered getting a clifton setup if for no other reason than to precisely cook eggs (which would not actually be sous vide). I would endlessly do 64C, 65C, 66C, 63C, 67C eggs until my wife made me stop. It would be worth a good dozen or so blog posts. At this point, though, if I ponied up for a new piece of slow-cooking kit, I'd still have to go with a smoker.

Hunger, "Fueling", and Exercise

Since generally going low-carb, I've noticed a huge difference in quantity and quality of hunger; namely, greatly reduced, and a more gradual ramp-up when it does strike. I'm often not hungry in the morning and thus don't eat. The advice to constantly snack to keep your blood sugar "level" is the perfectly logical, if absurd, result of the flawed premises of the high-carb, low-fat diet. The alternative -- eat high-fat, low-carb, and you don't need to snack because you're not hungry all the time -- seems better to me.

As I've added more exercise, I've also questioned the conventional wisdom of needing to "fuel" for workouts, and usually run mornings on an empty stomach. A couple weeks ago I went for a 9 1/2 mile run after not having eaten for 18 hours prior (excepting coffee, no sugar). I didn't drink anything during the run. It wasn't hot at all, which made it easier. Last week I did a 10+ mile run later in the day than usual, but after having almost nothing to eat (coffee w/ double cream, maybe half a cup of full-fat unsweetened yogurt a couple hours earlier). No drinks during the run. Water and (real) food afterwards. Seems to work ok.