Eric – Page 6 – Thwarted Again

breakfast

I’ve been busy stocking my kitchen with silly things. I bought a cream whipper from iSi (pron. “Easy”). I got one that I can use with hot and cold preparations which will allow me to do things like custard foam / whips and so on. It’s very well made. One of the recipes on their website is Belgian waffles. However their recipe calls for a pre-made waffle mix plus wet ingredients and I ain’t about that so I just made the basic waffle recipe in The Joy of Cooking. They came out tasty but I don’t know that it’s worth the trouble to run them though the whipper. I’m thinking that in the future, it would be better to just do the yeast leavened waffles and change the butter ratio to try to get them to be a little more crispy. The whipper could then be used to make sweetened whipped cream to put on top instead of syrup which is pretty much what you’re supposed to do anyway. Also, I need a funnel for it because I got batter everywhere trying to fill the thing and I suspect that will not be the last time that happens trying to put stuff into the cannister.

Done cooking. Look at the ring of browning. I know where the heating elements are now I suppose.

The sourdough starter is a weird thing. I didn’t feed it last night. I’d like to get on a once per day schedule so I thought I’d see how it did. When I checked it last night it was a little bubbly but not as much even as the first day. This morning when I checked it it was fairly liquid and not really visibly bubbly at all. Upon opening it was less sour smelling and when I scooped out my reserve it had clearly been bubbly. I think this is the result of the additional hydration. Anyway, I fed it again this morning and I’m going to check on it at the two hour mark to see if I can smell the “sweet” smell that Robertson describes in his book. After that I suppose I need to get on with the rest of my day.

The waffle making takes a long time if you’re not in practice.

sourdough starter day 3

I decided to make a couple of changes in the starter this morning based on what I’d been reading in the Tartine Bread book last night. I did find a brief mention of what the starter smells like and the sour vinegary smell is because the culture is leaning toward acetic acid production rather than lactic acid. He says that a warmer, wetter starter will move toward lactic acid production and smell more sweet and less sour.

Previously my process looked like this:
Every 12hrs:
30g reserved starter +
30g rye flour +
30g water =
90g (30% starter)

This morning I did this
20g reserved starter +
20g rye flour +
20g KA bread flour +
45g water =
105g (≈20% starter)

This is more like the 50/50 white/wheat mix he was talking about and is ≈110% hydration rather than 100%. It’s Friday so I’m probably getting home later than usual so we’ll see how the starter gets along with an extra three hours or so of fermentation time. If everything goes ok after a day or two of this I may just go ahead and switch to the default feeding schedule in the book.

Also, in the interests of science. The house, in A/C mode, is allowed to get to 80°F and probably has the last few days.

dinner

I’ve made three meals using my fancy-ass Nomiku now. Tonight’s was the second batch of Jerk chicken. I did it at 63°C for 70 min where last night I did 64°C for 45 minutes. I also did not dredge them in flour and fry them this time, opting to just put them in a lightly oiled skillet. I should have used the non-stick skillet because they did stick pretty badly. The longer time and slightly lower temperature made the chicken come out more like a piece of fish. It was very good. I mixed it with penne pasta, a Kalamata olive pesto I made and steamed broccoli.

Jerk chicken with penne, olive pesto and broccoli

Jerk chicken with roasted Brussels sprouts

Also my sourdough starter is going ok. I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to smell like but it’s kinda unpleasant and vinegary at feeding time so I think maybe it’s going to fast. I don’t really have a way to keep it at 65°F – 70°F though so I guess that’s just how it goes.

Cooking

A while back (*cough* a year ago *cough*) I participated in the Kickstarter for a home immersion circulator for cooking sous vide called “Nomiku”. It finally showed up this week so I’ve been playing with it. I cooked a steak, broccoli and rice on Monday night and I did Jerk chicken a roasted Brussels sprouts tonight. The meats come out perfectly done. The steak was on the medium side of medium-rare all the way through and the chicken was what I would call medium/medium-well and probably could have been done a two or three degrees cooler with an extra half hour on the clock and would have been even juicier. I’ve been pretty happy with it but I have a way to go. I have learned that it is worth seasoning your meat before you bag and cook it. The steak was lacking something which I attribute to it not being salted and peppered before sous vide where I usually season the meat and let it rest for an hour or so before I grill it. The chicken marinated all day in the fridge and tasted wonderful.

Also, I got the Tartine Bread book for my birthday and it is all about the sourdough starter so I started one of those and it’s going pretty good. The dude is super serious about his bread though and it basically takes more than an entire day to go from a piece of starter to a baked loaf you can eat so it’s the kind of thing where, at best, I’d get one loaf a week for seven days of twice daily feeding. It’s worth a try though and maybe the rhythm will stick with me.

I’ve been putting the pictures of the new cooking in here:
http://thwartedagain.com/zenphoto/cooking/

When I was on my recent diet where in I got down to 160 lbs (normal!) I actually spent a lot of time baking. I didn’t really take any pictures but I made a blueberry pie and a cherry pie from scratch, some banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, some bread and some ice cream. I plan to continue with the baking so I’ll have some pictures of that at some point.

bmi_end

I had a pretty good birthday as far as such things go. I had dinner with a small group of friends (including the charming young lady who I have been seeing :D ) at Hillside Farmacy. The food was good and I got an egg creme soda and an ice cream cookie. I got a bottle of interesting Northeastern Italian dessert wine and a package of books from the aforementioned lady. I’ve read the first one, “The Lake” by Banana Yoshimoto and I really enjoyed it. Her style reminds me of Murakami but it is less surreal and is more concise. I think it’s interesting that characters in the Japanese books I read always seem to have their whole mental state thought out and seem to kind of passively observe their own life in first person. It’s strange. She tells me that it’s part of the Ukiyo-e tradition where the world can only be observed imperfectly through this separate layer (which the Blanton exhibit dubbed “The floating world” in the print exhibit I liked from years back) and that it is extremely common in Japanese literature. The everyday occurrence and acceptance of the supernatural and surreal is another common theme and there is a little of that in the book but not as much of that as Murakami likes to use either. Next up is a thriller / horror book and then I got a couple of silly things when I exchanged After Dark which I’d already read. Plus I have the rest of my To Be Read stack on the coffee table.

I hurt my back while exercising on my diet and ended up re-injuring it several times through bad form, muscular imbalance, lack of flexibility and not enough healing time. As a result I ended up at the Orthopedist and he sent me to Physical Therapy which I finished last week. I have been given a laundry list of PT homework that I am to do from now on to maintain my core strength and posterior chain flexibility. I’m getting better at it but it’s slow. My goal now is to complete the entire set of homework three times per week for all of October. If I can stick to that I’ll allow myself the opportunity to resume lifting in a limited and cautious aspect. Also it’s time for the LiveStrong Challenge so I’ve been riding my bike again. Oddly enough I’ve been able to keep a decent pace even though I haven’t been riding much but the rides have been short so that’s not terribly surprising. I am quite a bit lighter than I was. I think this weekend I’m going to try to do 30 miles since it’s going to be nice out.

I suppose that’s it for now. There’s been more going on but I need to be better about just putting stuff in here as it happens instead of always waiting months and then trying to cram it all in at once. Anyway, so far, so good.

normal

I suspect I’ll be back up around 170 tomorrow. Today I get a taste of things to come.

the terrifying future

There are framed news paper pages from the past in the hallway up on the 20th floor of my office building. I found this today while waiting and I have to share.

The Editorial Page of the New York Journal
January 23, 1901

Dorothy Dix Says: The Outlook for Bachelors Is Gloomy.

The new century opens up with a gloomy outlook for bachelors. Their liberty is threatened on every side. It has always taken talent to enable an eligible young man to remain single. In the future nothing short of absolute diplomatic genius will keep his neck out of the matrimonial halter.

For several years the cloud has been darkening about his devoted head. Moralists have never wearied in exhorting young men to marry, whether they had anything to marry or not, on the principle, presumably, that one man had as good a right as another to starve a woman. Preachers have also discoursed on the holy estate of matrimony until one might infer that man was created and sent into the world solely to marry, and that his chief end was to glorify woman and pay her bills.

The most radical step, however, against the bachelors’ liberty has been taken by France. Alarmed at the decrease in population, a bill has been introduced into the French Senate for the purpose of levying a heavy tax on celibates. This is France’s way of fostering her infant industry. America has no such necessity. In the number, and quality, and variety of her babies, as in her other productions, she leads the world, and challenges competition. Thank heaven, we need no government subsidy there!

Still, there’s no telling what will happen, and, with such a precedent as France sets, no unmarried man is safe. The very foundation stone of our Government rests on the principle of taxing luxuries, and not necessities, and in any time of financial stress it can easily be shown that single blessedness is a luxury for which a man ought to pay.

More portentous still for the bachelor is the fact that the twentieth century woman is going to take a hand in the love making. She is going to be wooer, as well as wooed, and when one reflects on how thorough, and scientific, and determined the modern woman is in everything she undertakes, it is enough to send the cold chills down the backbone of every man who cherishes a preference for personal liberty.

There will be no dilly-dally business in her love making. He can’t work the bashful dodge then. In other days when he led the attack he could withdraw to a place of safety when the engagement threatened to get serious. It will be a different story when the besieged turns pursuer. Many an army has been captured in hurried flight.

Already a club of twentieth century young women has been organized at Binghamton, New York, with the avowed purpose of taking the initiative in love making, and overthrowing the preposing precidents of the past. They are going to put women on an equal footing with men in prosecuting affairs of the heart, and as an evidence of good faith have pledged themselves to propose matrimony to some man during the year.

Thus are the toils closing in about the hapless bachelor. He may turn a deaf ear to the moralist, he may be willing to pay a tax for the privilege of remaining single, but what is he going to do when lovely woman proposes? Suppose she weeps when he says he can only be a brother to her? What man will be able to resist when he sees himself such a good thing women cry for him?

It is clearly impossible for any man to remain single much longer. A hundred years from now we may look forward to the Barnum of the future advertising, as one of the attractions of his unparalleled side show, a genuine, bald headed bachelor.

mole

I like mole. El Chile here in town does a good red Oaxacan mole (and holy crap I just learned they moved south of the river and the Manor location is closed. That is bullshit.) and Taco Deli does a good one too that they put in tacos. Both of those are red moles and there are a few other generally recognized varieties. Really though mole is from mōlli which means sauce and it encompasses and entire spectrum of sauces. So, that said, I’ve wanted to try making some for a while. I bought Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen cookbook because it has several mole recipes in it.

This weekend I made the Adobo de Ancho Chile paste and last night I used that and a bunch of other stuff to make the Simple Red Mole recipe. It came out ok but I think not as good as either of the places I mentioned above. It took about three hours all told but that included quartering and poaching a chicken which was also a first for me. I also dirties every single thing in the kitchen.

The recipe ended up making about 5.5 cups of sauce. I tallied up all the ingredients via the USDA Nutrient Database and I’ve decided that a batch is about 1300 kcal. A serving is about 1/3 cup which is about 80 kcal. That and 150g of chicken works out to around 350 kcal which isn’t too bad. With a serving of white rice that’s 500 kcal for lunch and you could add on another side for dinner to bring it into the 750 kcal range.

That brings me to another topic: calorie counting. A friend has been doing this lately and has lost about 40 lbs which puts to mind the days of 2008 / 2009 when I went from 217 to 175. When I changed jobs I put 15-20lbs back on in free office soda and eating out all the time and then I got the bicycle and got back down to the high 170s. However there I’ve stayed oscillating between 175 and 180, doing bicycles and weights.

Seeing my friend’s success I decided to take another run at getting down to “normal” BMI. People like to shit on BMI because athletes, people with metabolic disorders and people at the two sigma points on the height distribution don’t really fit into the BMI model. However, for the remaining 90% of the population it’s fairly well correlated to actual percent body fat. In particular, I’m built about as average as they come, my doctor says I’m 5’9″ (175cm). National average for over 20 males is 5’9.3″. I don’t have any metabolic disorders. I’m just a regular Joe. According to the BMI scale if I get to 168 lbs I’ll be a “normal” body weight where I am currently “overweight” and was “obese” before I started in 2008. So, as of this morning my scale says 172.2 lbs which is down 5 lbs from when I renewed my efforts. I decided that I was going to try to keep it up until my birthday in September as my gift to myself. A linear extrapolation puts me at 162 lbs by then but this is not a linear process so I think it’ll be more like 165 lbs. In the mean time I’ve continued lifting weights and occasionally doing some other work.

Ultimately I’d like to get down into “normal”, stay there and get my main lifts into a range I think is strong but reasonable. I can already bench press my body weight which was a goal for a long time. I’m at 1.32x body weight for squat and I want that to be 1.5x and I’m at 1.61x for deadlift which I would like to be 2.0x. I think for those second two I’m going to have to finish the weight loss and then eat and lift back a few pounds. It’s pretty hard getting stronger while you’re cutting back.

Ideally, I’d be able to do those lifts, 15 pullups, a muscle-up, ride 50 miles at > 17 mph, run 10k @ < 9 min/mile, and row 1000kcal in an hour on the rowing machine. That's a long, long term goal though and this is the first time I've even written those things down. The running will be hard because I hate running more than pretty much anything else. The rest is doable but all requires a fair amount of training. We'll see.

hubris

I’ve re-enabled comments. Mark the date and time and we can take a measurement of MTTF.

doublechvrches

The Austin show was sold out but my dear friends pointed out that people were selling tickets for dollars on craigslist. I found a guy that had a spare and bought it off him for the low, low price of 3x face value. Wednesday night I went down to the Mohawk and saw them perform and had a good time. Then, since I already had the ticket for Dallas and I liked the first show I drove up Thursday afternoon and saw them perform again. This time the show was indoors at the Granada Theater. The crowd was bigger and slightly younger. They have a pretty good sounds system and whoever was running it knew what they were doing. At one point I was watching Lauren sing, backlit by their bank of LED spotlights and when the bass would fire I noticed my vision blurring. You could feel it in your parts and through the floor as well. It was awesome. They put on a good show. I think Dallas was better but I had a great time both times.

I got a few pictures but I don’t have the benefit of having a camera that is good at long distances and low light so they’re pretty mediocre but I’m no artist with a camera regardless of the conditions or equiment so I’ll up them up here anyway.

CHVRCHES

Chvrches is playing in town Wednesday but it’s sold out so if I want to see them I have to drive to Dallas Thursday after work which is what I’m going to do. It’s been a long time since I drove somewhere to see a band. In fact, I can’t remember the last time. Adventure!