Category: Projects

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Sweet, Savory, and Bitter

There’s a balance to cuisine.  I say that simply, not in the way Zen philosophers obsess eternally to achieve celebrity validation when Halle Berry, the guest judge on Iron Chef, says: “I like this.”…do.  No, it’s far simpler.  Foods have 3 properties: sweet, savory (salty/acidic), and bitter.  And it’s this last category that I had failed to consider.

I need to use these up before the new harvest

I’ve been on  a quest to make tomato sauce, but they always come up short, probably because I’m neither Italian nor have access to the list of unpronounceable Monsanto-patented ingredients (nor wish to).

My initial troubles involved flavor-enhancement.  An acid-base is common in sauces for the kick, but tomatoes, already being acidic, couldn’t handle the addition well, as the resultant sauce had an extreme sour bite.  I tried wine, vinegar, lemons, and most recently-powdered citric acid.  Then, to balance the sour, I added sugar for sweetness, but this only created a sweet/sour tomato sauce.

Fortunately, the Internet came to my rescue, and I discovered that cocoa powder would balance things out.  I was skeptical, since my sauce already had sugar, so it seemed that I would be adding a chocolate taste.  But I was wrong.

Bitterness–the oft-overlooked basic human taste, essential in this case.  And my sauce was good enough that Liz took more in for lunch the next day.  Now that’s a true culinary win!

–Chef Simon

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Laminate

Carpet–I know not whence this diabolical invention first saw universal fruition, but I rue that day.

The Internet was of little help, spouting the usual assortment of trendy anti-(insert whatever’s popular here) sentiments.  And I, one of these confrontational assholes, would agree.  I hate it, and whoever invented it should spend eternity in a vat of histamine, forever sneezing and itching in anaphylaxis, yet never able to escape the ailment.

Compounding the misery was the result of a whippet’s predilection for misidentification, for so readily does carpet endlessly absorb the liquified proteins of urinary putrification.

And further compounding the problem is a human female’s oversensitivity to olfactorial displeasure.

So it was that I found myself ripping up the carpet in the hallway.  The late whippets, always naughty and leaking, favored this spot as a preferable alternative to the bitter cold of Ohio winters, despite the physical punishments that would ensue from such transgressions.

Another futile attempt at deodorizing the carpet

What I found beneath was sheer horror.  Over the decades, dirt had sifted its way through until a fine layer of soil covered the sub-flooring.  Extensive vacuuming and Lestoil-scrubbing later, the floor appeared to be painted white–at least what the floor cleaner didn’t strip.

Liz scrubbed the floor with baking soda and vinegar, then let it dry until the next weekend.

And so began the hard part.  The hallway, being narrower than the boards were long, required that I had to cut every single piece to fit.  Adding to the complexity was the oddly-shaped linen closet.  Fortunately I had watched enough preparatory YouTube videos that I knew how to hammer segments into connecting, even when wedged around tight corners.

Then there was the problem of the end strips not locking to the floor properly, but a few hammer blows and swear words and emergency runs to the hardware store fixed that problem.  The end result was never in question.

An afternoon was required to dismantle the existing flooring, and 11 hours of straight labor to install the new.  But like all things in life worth having, it wasn’t supposed to be easy–yes, that’s right, philosophical reaffirmations from flooring installations.

Then I had to install new moulding, which was equally as bad as the flooring.  My supply of finishing nails dwindled, and I bought a box at Home Depot.  But the nails lacked the head notch, so my driver continually slipped and punctured the moulding.  A return visit yielded no better alternative, for the associate stared blankly when asked if they stocked another brand of nails.  I made due with what I had.

I estimate this project to have taken 30 hours of work.  It sucked, but I have to admit: it is better than a cesspit corridor.  The kid seems to agree:

–Simon

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Steam Power

I’ve been known to play games.

…but usually not seriously, unless it’s by Bethesda or Bungie.  But let’s back up…

The family computer was originally some variant of the Macintosh Classic–an all-in-one machine with a black and white display.  The first game I played, and one my mother was obsessed with, was Crystal Quest.

Of course everyone else had Windows machines, and so knew nothing about the games I played.  They played Doom, Fallout, and Quake; I played Marathon, Myth, and Avernum.  Consequently, I learned that my gaming background would simply be forever different than that of most peoples’.

But I also learned that games are diabolical abominations of coding, and that the mere effort to get them to even operate on a computer was, if not a feat of engineering, then one of extreme patience.

So after years of gaming on computers and their multitude of problems, I bought an Xbox–a machine designed for the sole purpose of gaming (despite Microsoft’s ongoing attempts to make it a social platform).  But some games simply cannot be played effectively on a console, and as I’m completely unwilling to use Windows unless I have to, I’ve been eying Valve’s Steam.

For those who don’t know, Steam is an online distribution and DRM platform.  I hadn’t considered computer gaming in years, due to my lack of a dedicated machine and desk (and the lingering memories of technical difficulties), but with the completion of my recent command center, and with the Ubuntu computer working admirably, it seemed like a good time to try.

I visited their website, found the Linux installer, and completed the installation.  And it didn’t work.  Turns out that Ubuntu has its own distro of Steam, which I was able to install rather simply from the command line.  It lacks the happy GUI, but that was of minor consequence.  I created an account, found a free game, and downloaded it.  And it worked!

The downside of attempting to turn a Linux machine into a gaming platform was the obvious lack of game choices available.  I had hoped they’d be more prevalent, but a cursory preview only yielded a handful of anime adventures (most of which turned out to be pornography).  So it’s a success in that it works, but a failure in that its catalog so far contains nothing of interest.

Ah well, it’s not like I need to spend more time gaming anyway.  I guess that, for now, I’ll have to game socially in my living room like a normal person.

–Simon

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Strawberry Garden Upgrade

Last summer, we constructed a strawberry garden out of old wooden boxes.  It worked, but it was quaint, and Liz wanted a real strawberry garden.  And I like strawberries and gardens, and I was itching to finally use that saw that’s been sitting in a box in my garage since we bought the house, so this seemed like as good a reason as any.

So after procuring some 2x8s and a work table from Lowe’s, I had a perfectly respectable setup, ready to butcher some lumber:

My blood coursed with suburban manliness (and histamine–Spring allergies that did not appreciate the sawdust)!  I really only needed to cut a single board in half, but it was the manliest single cut I could make!

The majority of the work was far less creative and primarily involved grunt labor: digging trenches and hammering stakes.  But I had no intention of installing a garden that would shift and become unsightly, so all boards were carefully leveled and secured with corrosion-resistant deck screws:

Okay, it just looks like a box (because it is), but soon it’ll be growing delicious fruit and look way cooler.

–Simon

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Pizza Pizza

I like making homemade pizza, and it’s especially gratifying when I make the dough.  But dough from scratch is difficult to cook, as it tends to dry at the edges and remain gooey in the center.  But then I considered that the baking sheet upon which I normally cook is designed to buffer temperature changes and shield the food from direct heat (having an air pocket).  This works well for cookies, but undermines the nature of pizza dough–which is why pizza stones and sheets are specifically designed to transfer this heat.  It was a lingering thought–one that stalks the mental periphery, waiting for the appropriate trigger.

And such a trigger came when we revisited Mendelsons.  Pilfered from some industrial kitchen somewhere, a stack of bread racks sat ignored, until I gazed upon them and my memory engaged.  They were large aluminum sheets, regularly perforated.  For $8, it would serve my needs.  I bought one.

Back at home, it seemed larger than it was in the store, and I shoved it alongside the refrigerator–out of the way and forgotten for the moment.  Then, some days later, Liz suggested we make pizza…if the pizza sheet would fit.  I balked.  I hadn’t thought to check that it actually fit into the oven.  I tried.

It did not.

Dammit.

But I didn’t come all this way to have heterogeneously-cooked pizza crust.  Off to the garage!

Fortunately, the aluminum was soft, and after some patience and a couple replacement carbon cutting blades for the Dremel, I had a crudely chopped pizza sheet.

Obviously that wouldn’t do.  Sharp edges would scratch the oven, not to mention my hands.  But the grinder and my kitchen steel polished it down to a smooth edge without problem.

Huzzah!

Evenly cooked pizza, and I didn’t need a $100 pizza stone.  And who else can say they have a custom-made pizza sheet?  Frugal, and nerdy.

–Simon