2009
- What is your favorite color?
- What is your favorite food?
- Who are your best friends?
- What is your favorite thing to do?
-
I love to see that we in the upper-midwest have a real leadership position in organic farming. California and the Northeast are strong as well.
-
This is a great infographic. It tells a story with nearly no words.
- Something to block direct flame and sit right on the coals. This is going to get very hot so pick your tool right. The small Big Green Egg plate setter works perfect!
- You will need a seriously robust skewer. The one we used was 1/4" steel rod that was enameled. It was custom made for the tandoor in an a restaurant. It was also 4 feet or more long. You’ll need a lot of space.
- You will need gloves that can deal with 700 °F. I used very serious gloves put they still let heat through when holding the skewer after it came out. Be prepared to deal with a very hot item.
Happy birthday to not you. — Mazie
Peppa Pig DVD Covers
I find it frustrating when I cannot find good quality, high-resolution album or DVD cover art on the Internet. So, when I have to resort to scanning I like to post it to share the effort with others. Here are the scans to two Peppa Pig DVD’s: Cold Winter Day and Stars.
Learning to Make Sausage
A couple of weekends ago we all loaded up into the car and drove up to Grand Marais to spend a wonderful weekend with our friends the Tangen’s. As is often the case when going “up north”, it was really crazy cold. It was the end of May and on our last day it was barely above freezing.
Anyway, the main attraction of the trip was a class that Tammy had signed Kent and I up for at the North House Folk School. North House is a very cool place where you can go and learn hundreds of skills. While we were learning the in’s and out’s of sausage making, another group of people were learning how to build a brick oven.
Back to the sausage. Another friend, Kevin Dotzenrod, makes the most amazing sausage I’ve ever eaten. I’ve got a few feet of it left in the freezer that I’m coveting from everyone else. I really only like lean sausage with a lot of flavor. Tammy thought it would be fun for me to learn how to make it myself and that’s how Kent and I found ourselves elbow deep in meat.
The experience was captured best with video. Since I was running the camera this video is all Kent. I am excited to try my hand at making some of my own sausage just the way I like it.
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL. — Comment by Jordan Young on TechCrunch
Flank steak off the Big Green Egg for lunch today.
Unordered Lists to Comma Separated List
I was tweaking some layout in Tumblr today and I really wanted to take a list of tags and display them with proper grammar. For example, I wanted to have commas in the right places and to use the proper singular and plural forms as needed. My goal was something like.
At 9pm with tags Mazie, Baseball and St. Paul Saints.
Or, if there was only one tag.
At 9pm with tag Mazie.
The trick is that Tumblr only provides a way to iterate through the list of tags and you can’t do any funky logic in there. This is actually a benefit, since it forced me to figure out the right way to do this with CSS. After a little searching I found a really old post from 2005 explaining comma-separated list elements that was pretty close to what I wanted. I did some tweaking on it and came up with the following CSS block to do exactly what I wanted.
/* Styling for a comma separated list of values from a ul */
ul.comma-separated { display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
ul.comma-separated li { display: inline; }
/* Put the correct label in front, this should be plural for multiple tags */
ul.comma-separated li:first-child:before { content:"tags "; }
/* The comma we are looking for. */
ul.comma-separated li:before { content: ", "; white-space: pre;}
/* The last element should not have a comma and should be followed with a period. */
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:before { content:" and "; white-space: pre;}
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:after { content: "."; }
/* Special case required to handle a ul with only one item. */
ul.comma-separated li:only-child:before { content:"tag "; }
This will take a block of HTML like this
<ul class="comma-separated">
<li>Mazie</li>
<li>Baseball</li>
<li>St. Paul Saints</li>
</ul>
and display it exactly how I want.
This was a great exercise. I’m not a CSS guru and I don’t tend to look to CSS to solve this type of problem. I immediately wanted to start working some magic inside of a loop in the code and handle the logic there. This is much simpler, and has the huge benefit of being able to modify the contents after page load with Javascript and have the formatting dynamically adjust as needed.
Now I just need to move this super smart CSS into my WordPress site as well.
Interviewing Your Kid?
Mazie is about to turn 4 years old and she is bubbling with excitement about it. She tells me regularly how many days until her birthday, and that she will be able to jump higher and possibly grow several inches when she turns 4.
I’ve been thinking that it would be really fun to setup the video camera and ask her some questions. Essentially an interview. My idea is to put together a set of questions that would stay pretty constant and to do a video like this on her birthday each year, until she tells me to bugger off. :-)
I love the idea of capturing this, and capturing how things change over time. It’s obvious to me that simple questions should be included, like…
I’d like to get this right though and I’m positive that there are several questions that I’m not thinking of. That’s the reason for this post…
what would you ask your kid?
I would really like to get the perspective of those much wiser than me, so please chime in.
Update (June 9, 2011): I’ve started to maintain a list of questions that I ask Mazie on these videos.
I want. 😊
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. — Thomas Jefferson
Up
Mazie was ecstatic to see Up. She was giddy running to the theater to see it. We all really enjoyed it.
Learning to make sausage with Craig from the North House Folk School.
Freezer full of over 30 pounds of sausage from the sausage making class at the North House Folk School.
Ya know what Dad? I actually don’t care. — Mazie (almost 4)
The Hot Spots for Organic Food. This is a very interesting graphic for two reasons.
Racks on the Big Green Egg.
The Gang at the Saints Game! ⚾️
Now Reading for Wordpress 2.7+, a “more updated” version of the Now Reading plugin for WordPress.
Big Green Egg Tandoor!
About a week ago I stumbled upon a blog post from a fellow Big Green Egg enthusiast that explained how he had attempted to do tandoor style cooking using his Big Green Egg. If your unfamiliar with a Tandoor there is a good write-up on Wikipedia, but the essence of it is captured as:
The food is cooked over a hot charcoal fire or wooden fire . Temperatures in a tandoor can approach 480 °C (900 °F), and it is common for tandoor ovens to remain lit for long periods of time to maintain the high cooking temperature. The tandoor design is something of a transitional form between a makeshift earth oven and the horizontal-plan masonry oven, and is used almost exclusively for live-fire, radiant heat cooking.
If you’ve ever had Tandoori Chicken at an Indian restaurant you’ve eaten food from a tandoor. It has a very distinctive flavor, and is not easily reproduced at home.
I read this other guys first try “Big Green Egg as a Tandoor Oven?” as well as his second try “Tandoori Experiment 2”. I sent these links to my friend Senthil who is from India. He’s from southern India and tandoor cooking is a northern India thing so he was as unfamiliar with a tandoor as I was! He has a connection with Taste of India and we were able to secure some of uncooked Tandoori Chicken from them. This was important since we would be able to isolate the taste based on cooking method, rather than the marinade and preparation.
Preparation
Preparing the Big Green Egg to be used as a Tandoor was simple. I topped off the firebox as I would with any high heat preparation. Getting that hot uses a lot of charcoal. I let the fire get going with the top completely uncovered and the bottom vent fully open. Once we got to 400 °F we quickly climbed all the way to 600 °F.
There was flame in the Big Green Egg with that much air going through. Very, very hot blue flames. We needed to make sure the chicken wasn’t torched in the flames so I took the plate setter from my small Big Green Egg and put it upside down, straight on the charcoal, in the large Big Green Egg. This worked great. It pushed the open flame to the sides and still allowed plenty of air for high heat cooking. It also gave us a stable, flat surface on the bottom to hold the skewer in place.
Putting the plate on the charcoal stunted the temperature momentarily but it quickly regained its footing until we reached a roaring 680 °F. Now, that’s not the 900 °F that a true tandoor may reach, but it’s plenty hot enough.
Cooking
We placed the chicken on a skewer that was about four feet long and placed the hook down so that it could not slide off. We then simply slid the entire thing through the top of the Big Green Egg, never opening it. It is important at this point to make sure that you skewer the chicken in a manner that will allow it to fit through the top. We had to do some maneuvering for some of our pieces but it worked fine.
After 8 minutes we pulled it and checked the for temperature but it wasn’t done. We put it in for about 5 more minutes. Ultimately, we probably could have pulled it 2 minutes earlier.
Results
Oh my! The results were amazing! The thing that hit both Senthil and I was how incredibly juicy the chicken was. It was cooked in an inferno but the meat was incredibly succulent. It had that wonderful red color that you get from tandoor cooking. It absolutely looked and tasted like the real deal. In fact we both felt that it tasted better than the Tandoori Chicken we’ve had at most Indian restaurants.
This is really easy to do and I encourage Big Green Egg owners to give it a try. Equipment wise you will need some specific items:
Other than that, just enjoy some amazing tandoor cooking at home. We want to try cooking bread next!
ColdSnap Garden Photography Workshop
This weekend, thanks to my awesome wife, I got to spend Saturday and Sunday at a photography workshop. The workshop was led by John Gregor of ColdSnap Photography. It was a two day workshop focused on composition as well as technique. We started both days shooting over by Lake Harriet in the Peace Garden and Rose Garden and finished the second half of the day with seminars held at the REI in Bloomington.
I enjoyed the class a lot. John is a talented photographer and importantly a good teacher. Our first day of shooting was miserably cold, cloudy and windy. A difficult combination. The second day saved it all though with beautiful sun and still skies. John had a deep understanding of some technical areas of photography that few people appreciate, notably color spaces.
Here are the photos that I picked as my favorites from the two days of shooting.
Yesterday our neighbors across the street daughter had found a batch of very small baby kittens. There were four kittens, and Mazie took a turn holding each and every one. She loved it.
No, we didn’t keep any of them.