Monthly Archives: July 2011

Oil-poached turbot

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The completed dish.

Setting up the turbot, parsley and lemon in a cast-iron pan

The oil shimmers ominously as it heats. It will need to reach 300 degrees.

The oil poured over the fish, lemon and parsley. Next, it goes in the oven to bake for a few minutes.

There’s a technique that’s been on my list for quite a while to try – oil poaching. Poaching generally means just simmering something in a liquid. Poached eggs are one example; eggs are simmered gently in water and a little vinegar until they are cooked through. You can also poach in white wine, or in stock, or in other liquids. The general idea is a gentle, slow cooking, sort of like a fast braise.

So, when I came across this olive-oil poached flounder recipe, it seemed like a good opportunity to try this technique out. (Whole Foods was out of flounder, so I used turbot. The point was to get another fish with a mild taste that would stand up to the hot oil).

Here’s how the recipe works. First of all, note that oil poaching is not to be confused with frying, which would mean cooking food rather quickly in hot oil. Instead, the technique is as follows. You put whatever is to be poached in a pan, ideally an oven-safe one. (I used my cast iron pan, which I’d estimate I use for 90% of my cooking tasks these days).

This recipe calls for a layer of parsley and thin lemon slices on the bottom, then the fish, then more parsley and thin lemon slices on the top. It’s good to have these extra flavor components, since they’ll infuse the oil, and therefore your fish, with extra flavor.

The oil is then heated in a separate pan, up to about 300 degrees. Obviously, it’s important not to hit the smoke point, since then you’ll burn your oil and have to start again. That would be an expensive mistake given how much oil you’re using! The oil will just sit there as it heats, no bubbling or anything. This is why a good thermometer is important.

You then pour the very, very, very hot oil carefully into your prepared pan, and stick it in an oven heated to about 350. After it cooks for ten minutes, you’re done; pour off the extra oil and serve out of the pan.

If you are like me, this recipe sounds kind of dangerous. You’re going to heat 3 cups of oil to 300 degrees, then try to do things with it? While the oil quietly heats up and starts to shimmer, you’ll envision it spontaneously exploding, getting hot oil all over you and generally wrecking your day. You will ask everyone to else to leave the kitchen, and you’ll don what protective gear you have (a welding helmet and gloves). It was like that scene in Back to the Future when Doc was dropping the plutonium rods into the DeLorean.

Look, I’m not sure how to reassure you other than to say that I did it once and I seem to be OK. Also… totally worth it, because:

  • Fish is delicious, especially when cooked through perfectly so that it is flaky but not mushy. It is almost impossible to achieve any other result by using this recipe.
  • Olive oil is also delicious, and its unctuous, savory sweetness is a perfect complement to the similar textures and tastes of the fish.
  • Parsley and lemon aren’t too bad a combo, either. And when you poach everything together, the essential oils from the lemon and parsley also flood into the olive oil, and from there into the fish. So you get a burst of full flavor from those ingredients in every bite.

I served it with some mashed potatoes with sour cream. This dish gets even better as it ages in your fridge and the flavors meld.

Building a vacuum forming machine

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The entire apparatus. The frame, which is on top, has a sheet of plastic in it. It's put in the oven (just like an oven shelf - the balsa wood on the top and bottom hooks into the ledges inside the oven). It will then be brought down on top of the parts you see in the picture, and air will be sucked through the hole in the middle of the plate.

Here you can see some hot plastic being molded over a couple of bananas. It's actually hard to notice because the plastic has conformed so well to their shape.

You end up with a perfectly-molded plastic tray...

...which can serve as packaging for what you molded.

The first time I ever ordered a set of RepRap parts, they came in a plastic bag. I was a little surprised, since part of the appeal of the RepRap is that it’s high technology, no? I also think that getting the packaging and design right will be a major part of earning RepRap (and DIY 3D printing) more widespread acceptance – something which companies like Makerbot are working on now, though I don’t totally agree with their design direction.

So when I sold my own RepRap parts, I decided to look for a way to make the packaging a little nicer. Ideally, I wanted the parts to come in some kind of molded plastic packaging, so that they look like a complete, professional set that’s inviting to use. An example of the effect I wanted was a tray of chocolates – how when you get a box from Godiva, each piece has its own predetermined place. There’s something about the packaging that unifies the customer experience.

After some research, I learned that this type of packaging is made by “vacuum forming”. To vacuum form, you start with a wooden plate with some holes in the bottom. You put your object on top of that, and a heated, flexible plastic sheet on top of that. By sucking the air out through the holes in the wooden plate, the plastic sheet is sucked down and ends up becoming a perfect mold for your object or set of objects. Once the plastic cools, you’ve got a shaped piece of plastic that is fairly durable and conforms to whatever you were molding.

The basic concept has lots of applications, from plastic packaging (the plastic trays that chocolates sometimes come in), to hobbyists manufacturing cheap plastic objects such as RC car chassis, to props, to masks – you could even make your own ice cube trays this way, if the plastic holds up in the freezer. There are a few different plastics you can use, by the way; the one I prefer is called PETG, and is used in soft drink bottles.

The next question was how I’d actually get vacuum forming done. I mean, a machine to professionally mold plastic would cost thousands of dollars, right? Thanks to the magic of Instructables, I found that I could build one for about $100 in materials.

The basic concept is that you hook your vacuum cleaner up to a piece of fiberboard with a hole in it. The vacuum cleaner will then suck the air through the board. On top of the board, you do what I described above – put your object on the board, and put your hot plastic over the object. Most vacuum cleaners are powerful enough to pull the plastic tightly around whatever object you’re molding.

There are a few additional steps to ensure good airflow around your object, and minimal gaps through which air can be sucked in from the surrounding environment.

One is to use weatherstripping as a sealant. This is really smart, and while weatherstripping isn’t made to handle the melting temperature of the plastic, it holds up well enough. Another is to put a nozzle on the board you’re using, around which the vacuum cleaner hose goes. This makes sure that there’s a tight seal between the vacuum cleaner and the hole through which the air will be sucked. There are quite a few other additions as well, which in the end give a fairly good product, especially for the price.

I made some changes, too. Here are Justin’s addenda to the Instructables vacuum former instructions.

  • The instructions call for you to “put some things in the oven which we can support the plastic-holding frames on”, because the plastic will droop in the oven as it melts. Instead of doing this, we clamped some long pieces of balsa wood on top of the frames. This allowed our frame to rest on the already existing shelf holders in the oven.
  • The instructions call for “aluminum 3/8″ or 7/16″ windowscreen frame material that goes with… aluminum frame corners”. I found that 5/16″ windowscreen material was much easier to obtain, and worked fine. I also used plastic frame corners with no (apparent) problems.
  • The ingredients say that “Some aluminum window screen material is also nice to have, but optional.” This is so that the plastic doesn’t get sucked into the airflow hole, thus blocking it and preventing the vacuum cleaner from doing its job. We found this was necessary, and we were able to use embroidery backing, which may be cheaper. You can get this at most craft stores.

Why I dropped Pligg for Drupal’s Drigg

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In this post, I talked about the idea of an open-source business plan website.

I’m planning to set it up with a few components: a Digg-like voting system for entering ideas and voting on them, a random idea generator along the lines of my cheese plate generator, and possibly a Wiki for writing more detailed notes, which is tied in with the voting system (e.g. each idea has a Wiki page assigned to it upon creation). All of this will be public-accessible so other people can use this repository if they want.

The only piece I wasn’t sure about how to do was the Digg-like system. There are quite a few CMSes out there for this, including Pligg and Hotaru (a Pligg fork, as it turns out). Pligg seemed like the right thing to use – the default install looks great, and it’s set up to do exactly what I want out of the box. There didn’t seem to be too much flexibility beyond that, but I thought that was probably OK.

I thought I’d write up the rather frustrating resulting experiences I had so that others can take them into account when making the same decision I did. Note that I’m certainly not a PHP genius, though I do know enough about it to write functional hacks to do pretty much whatever I want. That will be the perspective of this article – smart hackers may not be too sympathetic to my complaints!

Installation and initial testing

Pligg has a fairly slick install script so getting it on the server, and setting it up, was easy. I submitted a test story; so far, so good.

Next, I attempted to modify the default layout so that I could exclude some of the default items that Pligg wants to show on every page (Top News, Top Comments, things like that). These aren’t appropriate for what I’m trying to do, which is create a news voting site with encyclopedic elements.

Pligg’s templating system

In Drupal and WordPress, you can literally use checkboxes for this sort of thing. If worse comes to worst, it’s pretty easy to find the code that generates the offending elements, and change it or switch it off.

No checkboxes in Pligg. So I looked for ways to simply comment out the appropriate PHP and HTML for the page elements I didn’t want. But… where do I find the file that controls this? Ah, templates? Yes. OK. Which one? I’ll guess “sidebar.tpl”. Not that one. Alright, maybe “sidebar2.tpl”. Something like this looks promising…

<div id=”navcontainer”> <ul id=”navlist”> {checkActionsTpl location=”tpl_pligg_profile_sort_start”} <li><a href=”{$user_url_personal_data}”><span>{#PLIGG_Visual_User_PersonalData#}</span></a></li>

The {bracketed stuff} in the code is the result of the templating system that Pligg uses, called Smarty. Actually, to be more specific, it uses a Smarty variant called “Template Lite” which as of this writing has a non-functional site. The idea behind Smarty is that it makes the template layouts more versatile and easier to use.

And yet you’ll notice that in this case, the bracketed tag takes the place of text like “Top Users” or “Top Comments” in the HTML, which means that I can’t figure out what to comment out of a file like this. Instead, you have to find a different file that contains the definitions for these tags.

I could see how this would be very useful if you are running a site in several languages. All the text is centralized in one file, so you just translate it, and you’re set.

But if you are running a huge, multilingual site, are you really using Pligg as your CMS? And if, on the other hand, you are just starting out, do you need this additional complexity? Here’s what Smarty says about when it should be used:

Smarty is commonly a good fit when the roles of developers and designers are separated.

I would be interested to know how often this happens in Pligg’s target market. And why WordPress (for example), doesn’t work the same way. As for for me, I found constantly switching between PHP files to make edits incredibly painful.

The same problems happen with what are called “hooks” that let you make Pligg do certain things when particular events are triggered (say, a story is submitted). They look like this:

{checkActionsTpl location=”tpl_pligg_sidebar_end”}

But where do you find the code that gets executed at this location? Well, first you have to find what .php file corresponds with the “tpl_pligg_sidebar_end” location, and that list of indices may not all be stored in one place – I resorted to searching the entire code tree each time. Then you have to open the correct file, whichever one that may be, and start editing.

This is not the first time I’ve seen a templating system; I know how to deal with Drupal and I’ve written (very simple) modules for WordPress. But there is something about the way Pligg implements this that is frustrating to use. The amount of work, to make even simple changes, seems high. And the system for doing it is weirdly proprietary, which means very little support is out there.

Changing site mechanics

I moved on to trying to tweak the submit process to my liking. Basically, what I wanted to do is have a one-step submit in which a URL is submitted together with everything else. (I didn’t want to turn the URL submission off completely, which is an option provided in the settings).

I mean, this shouldn’t be too hard, right? I can just move the URL input to the page with all the other inputs, and modify the code to look for that form input during submit step 2 instead of submit step 1.

I couldn’t figure this one out either. For some reason, Pligg won’t let you move the URL acceptance and validation code to the do_submit2() function. Compounding the problem was that the templating engine seems to do some fairly aggressive input / output filtering, or is perhaps just broken, so I couldn’t reliably get debugging information (such as variable values) out of my scripts while I was working on them.

I was defeated, I am guessing, by not following the correct templating syntax, or by re-instantiations of the Link or Smarty objects in between submission steps. But in Drupal, I’ve done things like this by moving a few lines of code around. Not ideal, probably, but it works. And that’s all I need it to do – work.

Changing the front page around

I was frustrated that I had now accomplished very little. But I wanted to get the project done, so I lowered my expectations and moved on. One other thing I wanted was a front page “tag cloud”, like the “ingredient tags” entry I have on this blog. There is a “tag cloud” sidebar item, but it’s just a link as far as I can tell.

Well, I thought, I ought to be able to modify the full-page tag cloud so that it just produces tag cloud content – a few words in varying sizes, with no additional HTML surrounding them. Should be OK, right? By this time I had learned that Smarty has an {include_php} directive that ought to allow me to run the output for that page.

Nope. No matter what I did, “tag cloud” was just a plain link to the tag cloud page. I tried taking out lots of code, putting it back in, echoing and var_dumping for hours. Pligg didn’t want to deal with it. Again, in Drupal and WordPress I’ve never had a problem moving code around and having it work well enough. But there is something going on with Pligg that doesn’t allow you to deviate from what’s already set up.

Conclusion

At this point, I figured it was time to cut my losses and walk away. I did some research and found that someone had actually written a social voting module for Drupal, called Drigg. While I’m not sure how actively it’s maintained, it seems to work just fine for now.

Being based on Drupal has immense advantages – much larger community (I never did find anybody else who was trying to do what I was trying to do with Pligg), free (rather than paid) modules, and of course I already knew my way around Drupal.

Three hours later, I had a fully-functioning prototype of my site, with everything (almost) just as I wanted it. Thank goodness I gave up on Pligg when I did; I saved myself hours of frustration by doing so.

I think what was so frustrating about Pligg was that all of this complexity seems…  completely unnecessary. I just couldn’t see what all of the extra work gives you that compensates for the extremely difficulty modifying and understanding the code. WordPress is arguably much more capable overall than Pligg, even though the feature set doesn’t overlap, and yet it’s pretty darn easy to write modules for it, move things around, etc. Same with Drupal, for sure.

 

What’s the difference between curly and flat parsley?

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Parsley. From flickr user brucegilbert

Mmm, parsley. Every time I smell it, I’m reminded of being about 5 and running around on the lawn behind my grandmother’s apartment building in London. I have no idea whether parsley actually grew there, and yet I remember it very well…

These days, I have occasion to relive that memory often since I constantly use parsley in one dish or another. Potatoes, fish, mussels, soup, and lots of other things. I learned the hard way that apparently all recipes calling for “parsley” mean flat parsley – curly parsley has always seemed, to me, fairly bland in comparison. But what are the differences, and does curly parsley serve any culinary purpose whatsoever?

First, the basics. There’s curly (French) and flat (Italian) parsley, each of which are varieties of petroselinum crispum. There’s also another variety that’s grown as a root (Hamburg parsley), which according to Wikipedia gets used mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a tuber, just like potatoes, carrots, and parsnips.

Parsley’s part of the Umbellifera (“umbel-bearing”) family, which also includes chervil, cilantro, dill, fennel, and carrots. You may ask what an “umbel” is; in short, it is an arrangement of flowers such that they all grow from the same place on the stem in a cluster, with the youngest flowers at the center. You and I are unlikely to see a parsley flower in person, since the plants are picked before they flower; the flowers upset the flavor of the parsley leaves.

Do we care about curly parsley, then? Well, as I said I’ve always found curly parsley to be somewhat bland, and on top of that, unpleasantly chewy.

A quick search on epicurious also suggests that it’s rarely used in recipes. Total results for a recipe search on “curly parsley” or “French parsley”? Seven. There are over 500 for “Italian parsley”, and about 3,000 if you just search “parsley” by itself.

On the other hand, some people claim it has a strongly bitter flavor that actually makes it useful for recipes where flat-leaf parsley would blend in too well. And Mark Bittman, the well-known author of “How to Cook Everything”, actually rather likes curly parsley. At the very least, “it’s not worth making a big deal” about the differences. I guess I’ll have to give it another shot.

PS: I didn’t talk about the stems at all in this entry. They’re great to use in stocks and braises, but ideally you’d take them out before serving. There doesn’t appear to be a flavor difference in the stems of curly and flat parsley varieties.

“It was a nice party anyway”: the wonderful history of the Whole Earth Catalog

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The first Catalog.

I was in the library the other day doing some research for a project on small publishers. What a surprise to find, within a book called “The Do-It-Yourself Publishing Handbook”, a brief first-person history of the founding of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The Catalog, for those who don’t know, was a collection of creative and sustainable-living products, and sort of an icon of the counterculture in the late 60s and 70s. If you’ve read Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he calls it “Google in paperback form… idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Anyway, it’s a great story. I can’t reprint the entire history here, though you can buy it from Amazon, but here are a few highlights. Everything in quotes is verbatim from the book.

The beginning

Stewart Brand, the founder, says he came up with the idea for the catalog at what must have been a pretty significant moment for him – hours after the funeral of his father.

The catalog was created to solve the problem of access for counterculture projects and living. If you are running an apiary, where do you get a beekeeping manual? If you want to build a windmill, where do you buy the materials? That sort of thing. Many people at the time were trying to establish their own little civilizations, something I think we’re seeing re-emerge in some ways in the form of the Maker movement (I need a 3D printer, how can I build one?) and in the form of the increasing number of people who are trying to live “off the grid” with the help of e.g. solar power, renewed interest in small-scale animal husbandry, eating locally.

One of the things I like about Brand’s story is that in the midst of talking about this very successful idea, he also talks about the other things he was working on that didn’t work out.

I’d been desultorily working for [Dick Raymond at the Portola Institute] for about half a year, had helped instigate one costly failure (an “Education Fair” which aborted) and was partly into another doomed project I called EIEIO (“Eletronic Interconnect Educated Intellect Operation”).

I love the frank admission of failure – not only that, but “costly” failure. Sometimes I wonder if failed projects are the manure in which really great ideas grow. I anticipate more of my own failed projects, and I think that belief is probably necessary to keep going when things don’t work out. And in fact, not only had these ideas not worked out for Brand, but he didn’t even know what he was doing now. He goes on to say that the guy he was working for “listened gravely and asked a few questions I had no answers for”. What were these questions?

  • “Who do you consider to be the audience?”
  • “What kind of expenses do you think you’ll have?”
  • “How often will you publish it, and how many copies?”

In other words, some of the most basic questions that an entrepreneur or designer is supposed to answer before embarking on a new project.

Obviously, there is something romantic about this story; I am only writing about The Whole Earth Catalog because it succeeded – and inevitably, one of the millions of projects that starts out in such a haphazard way will succeed. So if you read this and want to tell me that therefore there is no lesson here, I’d understand that. Indeed, “for over a year Portola Institute had been nothing but… a few expensive projects with big ideas and little to show.”

But on the other hand, how many great projects don’t get tried out simply because the answers to these questions are unclear?

An early test

And yet the next thing we learn is that Brand took a very sensible next step. This was going to be a cheap failure, not a costly one.

“In July ’68 I printed up a mimeographed six-page ‘partial preliminary booklist’ of what I’d gathered so far (Tantra Art, Cybernetics, The Indian Tipi, Recreational Equipment, about 120 items). With samples of each in the back of our truck, Lois [Brand’s wife] and I set out to visit the market… in about a month the Whole Earth Truck Store did a stunning two hundred dollars of business. No profit, but it didn’t cost too much and was good education.”

So he did this boring thing called “market validation”, but it sounds like it was still pretty fun. Starting up, spending a couple months to get a version of the product together. Then getting in a truck and calling it a “Truck Store”, and going out to visit the communes where most of the Catalog’s customers would probably be. I guess it’s OK to be dreamy especially if it helps you develop your idea to this point.

After this, Brand hired a few more people and published the first catalog. Surprisingly, it sounds as if the initial launch of the Catalog was sort of a failure. “We sent them to the fifty or so subscribes we’d got with mailers and personal contact. We carted some around to stores, who didn’t want them, not even on consignment. (‘Too big. Too expensive. What is it?’)”.

I guess that last question was the most surprising to me. Even after doing pretty well in an initial test, suddenly they were running into the fact that people didn’t even understand what the catalog was. I wonder if they considered going back to the Truck Store idea again?

The store, and expanding readership

For some reason that I don’t completely understand, Brand’s next step was to open up a store. They signed a five-year lease at this point, and continued hiring more people to help with production and running things. Not many people actually came into the store, but at the same time the catalog was about to go what I guess we would call “viral”.

“The readership was a small sort of cult then, most of whom seemed to know each other, or wanted to. Also in January we produced our first ‘Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog’. It was a thirty-two-page newsprint collection of friends’ letters, old pamphlets like Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Fuck the System’, a solar heater, new Catalog suggestions.”

I guess this is where I wish the story had more detail. Obviously the Catalog was filling some kind of need in the counterculture community. And obviously people were hearing about it, and the “cult” was expanding through word of mouth (there’s no mention of much deliberate marketing, other than door-to-door sales in Menlo Park, in the history).

But why did it continue expanding, and why did Brand have the confidence to start making fairly serious commitments to the business despite the fact that revenues vastly outpaced expenses and “none of us knew how to run a store, and we were learning the hard way?” The catalog wasn’t even being mailed properly.

“Periodicals are mailed second class, a faster, surer and cheaper service than third class, which is junk mail. The classifications man in San Francisco said, ‘It says Catalog right here on the cover. Catalogs go third class.’ …The thing was ambled, letters to our congressman, rulings and rulings, to this result: we had to send The Last Catalog third class. When a mail truck gets stuck in the mud, third class is what they throw under the wheels.”

I just wonder what is missing from the story. All of a sudden, “We were being mentioned in a lot of underground papers… and then Nicholas von Hoffman wrote a full piece on the Catalog that got syndicated all over the United States. We were caught. We were famous.”

Why? Did they luck into it? Was the catalog such a powerful symbol of a particular way of life, or mindset, that people naturally gravitated to it? The price came down a bit, and the catalog got bigger, in the meantime. Was it just incremental growth and improvement? If so, another reason to start projects even if you don’t have a clear idea of where you are going or how you will get there. Was it having the right friends (Brand’s included Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey)? Another reason to spend more time goofing off with your buddies!

The rest of the story

Brand goes on to chronicle the growth of the catalog and his eventual boredom with the project. (Surprising for such an iconic personality and publication). Brand kept working on the Catalog, and fit some other projects in as well.

“I actually thought I could fit Liferaft Earth – which involved going foodless for a week in a crowded public place to personalize the inevitable overpopulated future – in between the September Supplement and the fall Catalog. Setting up the event was even harder than production. Then starving for a week was no way to recuperate. Dumb… Then Christmas was upon us. About this time I went over some edge.”

A few years after starting it, Brand wound the catalog down, though it appears to have been published occasionally into the 90s. He concludes by telling us that

“A lot of other stuff happened too; ask anybody who was there. Ask Bernie Sproch to show you his Whole Earth stamp collection.”

Why I wanted to write about this

I thought this was an interesting, and incredibly exciting story, for several reasons:

  • I think, being in business school, one often forgets that this type of project – a creative or intuitive one, one that pretends it doesn’t have any limits – can succeed. In fact, it can also be tremendously valuable, though perhaps not monetarily. The academic portion of business school is about learning frameworks, putting things in boxes, etc. I’ve found that somewhat useful. But I think this method of teaching almost actively obscures the fact that many truly great projects don’t make very much sense at the beginning. I worry often that business education is too much about the sensible, and easily explainable, and conservative.
  • You can see all the stages of starting a business in this story. But they’re approached somewhat wildly, and actions that make sense are combined with what appears to be pure optimism. For example, the Catalog in at least one of its incarnations was simply a listing of products along with where to get them, which is a really smart idea. And yet they couldn’t figure out how to get it delivered second-class mail.
  • There’s lots missing from the story. I would like to know more about how people heard about the Catalog, why it grew in popularity so quickly, and what purpose it served for its customers. I’d like to know why it was so ephemeral – was there really no way to turn it into an enduring cultural institution? It would even be interesting to look at their financial statements!