Beer me, part 4
May 1, 2011
beer, beer me, hops, malt, yeast
[caption id="attachment_1042" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="A winning combination of solid beer + solid marketing ("Occam's Razor Ale: If this beer's no good, the simplest explanation is that we're no good")"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1043" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Action shot!"][/caption]
Note: this is a followup to this post.
Having met with little success in our last homebrewing attempt, my friend David and I tried again, with the goal of having something ready in time for a Wharton homebrewing competition.
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What is a pomelo?
April 22, 2011
grapefruit, lemons, limes, oranges, pomelo
[caption id="attachment_1021" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="A pomelo."][/caption]
Trader Joe’s sometimes has interesting things on sale - I remember one of the first times I went to a TJ’s, I bought dried rambutan.
A little while ago, they were selling pomelos, which I don’t think I had ever heard of before. Naturally, I bought one. When I was a kid, the only citrus I knew about were lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit. Later I learned about mandarins, clementines, blood oranges, tangelos, key limes, and more recently yuzu and buddha’s hand.
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Polymers are magic
April 21, 2011
calcium chloride, polymers, sodium alginate
[caption id="attachment_1033" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Chemicals."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1035" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Example spheres, made with water and blue food coloring."][/caption]
For this meal, I mentioned that I made some apple cider “caviar” to go in the soup. This is a post about how that happened.
Quite a while ago, I read this article on Instructables about how to spherify liquids. Basically, you take a fixed amount of whatever liquid you want to spherify (e.
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Pâté with balsamic onions, olive oil ice cream and polenta cake, carrot ginger soup with spheres, trout meuniere
April 17, 2011
anchovies, apple cider, arugula, balsamic vinegar, calcium chloride, capers, carrots, chicken, cream, ginger, marsala, mustard, olive oil, onions, parsley, pears, polenta, pâté, salt, sodium alginate, spheres, tomatoes, trout, white wine
[caption id="attachment_1028" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sauteeing some chicken livers with capers, anchovies and oil"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1030" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Toast components: pâté, pâté with parsley salad, pâté with salad and balsamic onions. Yum!"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1029" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Trout meuniere and salad with roasted tomatoes."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1031" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Polenta cake, olive oil ice cream, and some pears poached in marsala"][/caption]
Had some friends over for dinner last weekend. This meal was my return to serious cooking (I took a break for most of January and February), so I wanted to make it interesting.
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Eating sprouted potatoes is fine, and eating eggplant is like smoking
April 8, 2011
eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="263" caption="These look fine. From flickr user spike55151 (click picture for photo page)"][/caption]
I recently noticed that a potato in my vegetable bowl was sprouting. Quite a lot, actually.
I’ve been told all my life that once a potato has sprouted, you can’t eat it anymore. But I was ready for dinner, and I don’t like throwing food away. I also found this increasingly suspect, the more I thought about it.
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White Russian ice cream and blueberry coffee cake, trout meuniere, carrot-ginger/potato-leek harlequin soup, and other things
April 2, 2011
bacon, blueberries, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cheese, coffee cake, collard greens, cream, feta, flour, ginger, ice cream, kahlua, kale, leek, mustard, onions, potato, sole meuniere, thyme, tomatoes, trout
[caption id="attachment_1022" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Harlequin soup - right is carrot ginger, left is potato leek."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1018" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Collard green salad."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1020" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Trout meuniere with a mustard cream sauce, broccoli, and cauliflower gratin."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1023" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Blueberry coffee cake and White Russian ice cream."][/caption]
A while ago, I made a four-course dinner with the following courses: a kale salad with bacon, a harlequin soup (half carrot-ginger and half potato-leek), trout meuniere with cauliflower gratin and broccoli, and finally blueberry coffee cake with White Russian ice cream.
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Making fondant
March 27, 2011
cocoa, cream cheese, cupcakes, fondant, glycerin, lemon curd, sugar
[caption id="attachment_1014" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The completed cupcakes. Each has an orange fondant hexagon on it."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1012" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Rolling out the fondant..."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1013" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Filling the cupcakes with lemon curd. You can see I've cut a cone-shaped piece out of the top of each cupcake, which the curd goes into. The top is replaced, and the cupcake is iced."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1016" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Confectioners' sugar and cake flour.
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Building a Desktop Fabricator (3D Printer), Update
March 27, 2011
makerbot, makerbot-build
It’s been a busy couple of months on this project, and I have lots more to say, but here’s a quick summary of what ended up happening with the bot:
Where I last left off, I had physically assembled the Makerbot as well as the extruder. I ended up trying it the next day…
And it just didn’t work. I tried lots of different experiments - different software on my computer and the various hardware boards on the bot, disassembling things and reassembling them, testing circuits, etc.
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The Pepsi Challenge
January 25, 2011
coke, pepsi
[caption id="attachment_932" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The results."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_961" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="How consumers perceive tastes when they don't know what they're drinking."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_962" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="How consumers perceive tastes when they're influenced by brands."][/caption]
Remember the Pepsi Challenge? (Well, perhaps they still do it, but do you remember it?)
The deal was that people would take a blind taste test of Pepsi and Coke, and say which one they preferred. The reason this is called the Pepsi Challenge (and not the Coke Challenge) is that Pepsi promoted the results – because they often won.
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Coconut cake with hibiscus sauce, salad with pomegranate seeds, salmon and mashed potatoes, duxelles puff pastry
January 20, 2011
arugula, coconut cake, cream, dill, hibiscus, honey, lemons, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, pearl onions, peas, pistachios, pomegranates, potatoes, puff pastry, salmon, thyme, walnuts, white wine
[caption id="attachment_973" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Blanched and peeled pistachios. They look like little avocadoes..."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1007" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Cake + sauce."][/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Dried hibiscus flowers. Image by Wikimedia user Thelmadatter."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_975" align="alignleft" width="295" caption="Salad with pomegranate seeds and red onions."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_976" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Salmon with a cream sauce, over mashed potatoes and peas"][/caption]
Wow, this entry is late. Anyway, just before the holidays I had the chance to cook for some people from my class at school, which was really fun.
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