Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Citizen's Arrest

Singapore's crappy 'Singapore Straits Times' newspaper ran a story sometime during the last few days (can't find/link to it because their shitty website is subscription-only -- I already pay once for the printed copy of their toilet paper, I'm not paying a second time) that cracked me up.

A government organ added a homosexual website to its list of 100 banned websites that Singaporeans cannot surf to. The best part of the article was about how concerned citizen Ricky Lee "had stumbled onto" the site which among other things "provided listings of public swimming pools without shower doors and pickup places for casual sex, information about mass orgies and explicit personal advertisements recruiting underage boys for sex or nude photography."

Apparently Ricky did quite a bit of "stumbling" because the "banned site's registered members grew from 60,000 last year, when Lee stumbled upon it, to more than 330,000 this year."

Thanks for keeping help Singapore safe, Ricky.

Pie Sunday

While I was visiting my parents last week, I learned how to roll a pie crust. This weekend I made a pie for myself.

Saturday afternoon I planned on making a dutch apple pie and two recipes from Jamie's Italy -- Pasta with Sardines and Grilled Porkchops with sage, apricots, and prosciutto stuffing. I started the pie first so that it would have time to cool before dinner.

The crustS were a total disaster. I'd cut them to the proper composition, but every time I rolled them they'd rip when I moved them to the pie pan. I tried to vary the composition, water, shortening. I even tried cooling the dough in the refrigerator and freezer. All failed.

I consulted the Art of French Cooking and noticed they called for twisting the crust as you rolled it. So this morning as I rolled out another crust I constantly kept lifting the edges and tossing more flour under. This worked. On my first attempt I pulled the crust onto the pan with no tearing. The crust no longer stuck to the wax paper. That was the trick. The composition had been fine all along.

I hurried up with the rest of the pie, dumping in the mix of apples, raisins, and sugar. (Yeah, I forgot to add the cinnamon) I used a combination of gala, granny smith, and tiny indonesian crab apples. I left them cut pretty large, quartered or halved. I thought this might keep them less mushy and dissolved.

Final step was to hurry up a batch of the dutch crumble tossing. 3/4c flour 1/4 sugar, 6 tablespoons butter. It formed into beautiful, natural oatmeal-flake sized bits of dough that were easy to sprinkle onto the top of the pie.

In the oven it went at 350F (175c) for about an hour, and then sat out for the afternoon while Ling and I ran errands. The pie had a very strong smell, it seemed to be the butter from the crumble. Should be a rich pie I told myself.

This afternoon Ling washed Mister and Mona while I prepared slices of pie and vanilla ice cream. After their baths, the dogs always go nuts wrestling and chasing each other through the yard. Nice excuse to watch and eat a dessert. Although the apples held together well because they were large, it's not ideal for keeping a solid pie. Trying to cut through the thick apples winds up savaging the crust, so you get an apple pie wreck that isn't very pleasing to look at.

The pie, however, tasted pretty good. The crust was decent I think, the apples were tasty and just sweet enough. The only weird thing was that the butter of the dutch crumble kept drawing my attention. Why would this butter be so rich and have such a distinctive tone?

I ate two thirds of my slice before I had an epiphany. When I grabbed that half-used stick of butter I failed to notice that it was the "Garlic Butter" I accidentally bought several weeks ago! I made the dutch crumble topping with garlic-flavored butter! I kept this realization to myself and tried to get Ling to guess what the "mystery flavoring" was. For some reason she couldn't and when I revealed the answer, she insisted it was fine anyway. She definitely played Nanny's role. I abandoned my pie, while she carried on eating hers, saying it was great, and then took my crumble topping and ate it too!

God and to think I almost invited over some of our friends to help us eat that thing!

As a followup, tonight, before I made vignole ('spring vegetable stew'), I made a very attractive, tasty mushroom quiche. The crust was nice and crispy. I'm quite pleased with its success, as I love to eat quiches and they are infinitely storable and reheatable.

Carlos the Luke

Carlos the Luke
Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Three-day weekend means I cook

Having a kid precludes us going out at night for the time being. Consequently I cook dinner most weekends. Sunday was a six-sigma disaster. Monday was a fantastic success.

DISGUSTING PEAR LASAGNA
On sunday I attempted to make a recipe for a pear/cheese lasagna. The recipe was xeroxed from a magazine, contributed by the Italian chef of one of my most favorite restaurants. The recipe read funny, as if it was transcribed by someone who doesn't understand cooking, or worse details filled in by someone who doesn't understand cooking. Maybe the chef's idea was right, but the recipe was poorly written.

I carried on anyway, and made this lasagna, which was nominally a lasagne with layers of gorgonzola, parmesan, and pear slices. I'm partially to blame. The lasagna pasta I'd bought was some sort of "ready-for-oven" crap that didn't need to be preboiled before baking. Makes it easier to assemble the lasagna but the pasta itself is crap. The pasta wasn't able to absorb enough liquid from the surrounding cheese and butter (there is not tomato sauce in this recipe) so it came out terribly hard and brittle. It was like eating plexiglass layers glued together with bland cheeses that leak too much oil. It was inedible. Ling did the honors and threw it in the trash. I watched her pick up the entire 12"x16" sheet of lasagna with a single spatula. The shit was so stiff and brittle it didn't collapse!

This recipe probably could be good, but I hated the whole experience and won't bother to retry it.

INCREDIBLE NEW JAMIE OLIVER COOKBOOK -- ITALY
Picked up Jamie Oliver's Italy this weekend. Phenomenal book. Made 'le migliore polpette di tonno' (the best tuna meatballs). and 'pasta con acciughe e pomodoro' (anchovies in tomato sauce with pasta)

They both turned out just totally fantastic. The recipes were well-written plus I followed them with enormous care, getting every detail right. This two recipes really made up for the shit I made sunday night.

As a side note, using fresh tuna for this meatball recipe was inappropriate in our circumstances. I needed 400g of fresh tuna. I'm shopping at a Japanese grocery store. All their tuna was sushi-grade. 200g bricks going for $60, etc. To use that for a meatball would have been a travesty. So instead I bought the fish whose meat looked most similar to tuna, some sole! It cost 10% of the tuna and turned out quite well. I think the only thing I'd do next time would be to add more egg to the meatball mix. It didn't have enough adhesion. They sell smallish eggs in Singapore.

If you are inclined to do any sort of recipe-based home cooking of western food, you should buy Jamie Oliver books -- excellent, feasible, great-tasting recipes.

Most interesting QSO of the week

k7hi/maritimeMobile on a a 30kt container ship returning to the US after maintenance overhaul in China. When I spoke to Howard he was near Korea. I guess ships follow great circle routes as well. His was my first /MaritimeMobile QSO. Nearly didn't happen, the band dropped to RS52 conditions and varied quite a lot but come to life long enough for me to ask a lot of questions before it faded out again.

Raid Woes...... stas? warez? 31die?

My PC has regular failures of the nVidia nvRaid onboard raid system.

Several months ago I had the problem intermittently. Perhaps once in six weeks. Recently the time between raid failures (nvRaid saying, "raid degraded") has fallen to as little as one day between failure.

I'm not sure what the problem is. Stupid nVidia/MSI provide zero troubleshooting support, and in fact as someone points out, the documentation for their windows based raid support software doesn't even mention the "array degraded" state.

I upgraded the BIOS to the latest version. This didn't help.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the pc seemed fairly hot. I wondered if the whole thing was overheating? The MSI temperature utility doesn't work. It regularly says the system temperature is 0 degrees C. The CPU ranges as high as 56c, but I don't think that is unusual. As I felt around, though, I could feel that the hardrive enclosure felt damn hot -- hot enough that it was quite uncomfortable to hold my fingers against the hard drive. Ooops....did my harddrives critically overheat?

My investigations showed that the Nexus Breeze case has pretty poor airflow. The intake port is nearly choked off. So I raised the case off the ground a few inches so that it can inhale air a bit easier. I also removed the plates and the noise-blocking foam inserts covering the harddrives on the front of the computer. I bought a cheap indoor/outdoor thermometer and began monitoring the temperature of the harddrive enclosure. I also didn't let the sytem run 24/7 like I have for the past many months. It runs little more than twelve hours daily now.

The highest recorded temperature has been 43.8c or 110F. I don't know what the error range of this cheap thermometer is, perhaps 10%, giving me temperatures as high as 120F. Is that too hot for a harddrive? I'm not sure. I checked the Seagate documentation and it says the operating temperature range is 0-60c and that actual drive case temperature should not exceed 69C (156F).

So current temperatures appear to be ok. But possibly the drives were suffocated and overheated in the past, and now they are unstable? Did they fail for other reasons and in the RAID trying to repair them they are used so heavily that they overheated? Or this is all absolutely unrelated to temperature?

I would like to run one of the low-level diagnostic programs provided by Seagate to analyze these Seagate 300gb SATA 7200+8mb NCQ drives, however they won't function because the drives are hidden behind the nVidia raid controller. To test them I will need to remove the drive, stick it in an external drive enclosure on another computer, and then run the diagnostic from there. It's looking like this is becoming unavoidable. Maybe one/both of them truly is failing. ugh.

If I do find that the drives are unstable and dying, then I need to replace them. I keep hearing about "ghosting" programs. Is there some way I can duplicate these drives (remembering that they hold my OS, etc) as I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate reinstalling a PC.

It almost makes me not want to use the RAID system at all, since it prevents me from running harddrive diagnostic software to see how the drives are performing anyway. Ugh. Bite me.

Monster Update

I figure a few of you might wonder what Luke's been up to.

As impatient and ferocious and mercurial as ever.

He's learned to imitate bats' echo-location. He emits an incredibly loud, incredibly high-pitched, joyful screetch as a new technique. He contineus all the gutteral spittle-based babble noises as well.

He's starting to roll his hips. I would think it's not long till he can roll over. That's going to be a bad day for everyone, as he becomes irate when we lay him on his stomach. So when little Turtle Luke flips himself over the first time he's going to be in for a rude shock.

He was trying to grasp the bottle a lot, so Ling put little handles on the bottle to make them easy to grasp. Within a day he was able to stuff the botle in his mouth and drink. I lost count of how many times he stabbed himself in the eye with the nipple, but he seemed to be having fun.

Luke turns four months today, so that means RICE CEREAL. Why does that matter? Because we hope solid food == sleep through the night. We briefly experimented with solid food a month ago, but it was a bad experiment. It was too early, didn't agree with him, and gave him a terrible stomach ache. Doctor said wait till four months.

He's stronger than ever. He's got a ferocious grip and can pull the hair out of Ling's head.

He just got his first high chair.

And lastly.... more photos available on Flickr.

Revenge of Nigella

During my parents' visit a few weeks ago I bought several cookbooks by Nigella Lawson. I knew nothing about her but the recipes sounded good and the pictures (most important) looked terrific.

We enjoyed an infamous weekend where a few of her recipes were good and a few were real duds. We're used to Jamie Oliver recipes which any of which can be prepared in less than twenty minutes, often less than ten. Nigella's are much more ornate and detailed, making them impossible during the week when we don't have two hours to prepare dinner.

We enjoyed the chilli, and we enjoyed the thai salad, but after a deadly-dry pork roast and hard, flavorless "hot cross buns" we abandoned Nigella and her three (ugh) cookbooks for the rest of their stay.

Today I revisited a recipe I originally planned to make but never found the time.

I made the Chocolate Gingerbread cake.

Today was the first time I've made a cake from scratch and it largely turned out very good. It consumed an enormous amount of molasses, brown sugar, and cane syrup (frightening in fact!) but had a really good, authentic taste. The first time I made the icing was surreal. I was whisking confectioner's sugar into the butter, everythign was going swimmingly, and then suddenly the mess had some sort of flash state change where it went from liquid to crystallized solid fudge in less than 30 seconds. I have no idea what happened there. I had reduced the heat for a moment. Perhaps that set it off, or perhaps I'd been whisking for too long. Anyway, I tossed it out and made another batch, this time hurrying to avoid the crystallization flash point.

Anyway, the cake turned out well and I have to admit it was a good recipe.

Top Gear -- still original, still the best

I thought that I'd already written an article on the BBC motorcar program 'Top Gear.' Checking my archives, though, I actually didn't. It's far and away the best car program ever.

I remember years ago watching a program called, I think, "Motorweek," in the US. Hideous. Totally boring. Every dull car run through the same dull tests by the same dull hosts. The high point might be when they read the skid pad results. Imagine "The Computer Chronicles" for cars.

BBC on the other hand broadcasts "Top Gear" which is just terrific. They test a huge gamut of great cars, from everday high performance BMW-type things to over-the-top Bugattis to bizarre specialities like the Atom. They could test rubbish and it wouldn't matter though, because more importantly they put a huge emphasis on keeping the show fresh and entertaining.

Up until today I thought one of the funniest segments was when they pitted one host sitting in a bobsled with the Finnish national team versus the other host riding alongside a top Finnish rally car driver. Racing down the mountain the bobsled going 90mph and the insane Finn driving his car down icy roads at similar speeds, they finished very close to a tie.

Today's episode grabbed the mantle. They were trying to decide which was better, a Porsche Boxter S converible or a 5.5l Mercedes SLK AMG. How did they decide? They went to an English training ground that was built near the end of the cold war to simulate a German town that migh be invaded by the Russians. They were met by a sniper platoon of the Irish Guards who fired laser sniper rifles at the host, who was racing his convertibles, top-down, through the town while wearing a target vest.

It was absolutely hilarious seeing these snipers in ghilli suits firing off rounds almost at full-automatic as the Mercedes blasted around corners, fully-smoking tires like Japanese D1.

For the record he was shot 6 times in the Porsche (first car) and 13 time in Mercedes. But then, who really cares, this is just entertainment, something the turds at Motorweek apparently never figured out.