April 29, 2008
Electric Lotusland
No, not the Tesla Roadster (though I did see one in the wild, with manufacturers license plates, a couple of days ago). This is the ThoRR, an all-electric Lotus Super Seven replica. The motor is said to have 272 bhp, which means the 755 kg car will probably move out quite fast. 120 miles on a charge, depending on driving style of course.
WANT!
Posted by Berry at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2008
Sorghum Bread
This is my wife's recipe for gluten-free sorghum bread, based on Bette
Hagman's recipe for "Basic Sorghum Bread" and incorporating Jen's
bread machine programming instructions from the Delphi Celiac forum.
It produces a bread with a nice crust and a fine, firm crumb that even
I like. (I'm not a celiac, but I play one at home to avoid
contaminating the kitchen).
We use a Zojirushi BBCC-X20 bread machine, which makes a two pound
loaf, so all measurements are for that size. The machine itself
should be set to a custom program as follows:
Preheat: 10m
Knead: 20m
Rise 1: off
Rise 2: off
Rise 3: 1h5m
Bake: 1h10m
Keep Warm: off
Since there's a ten minute preheat, we use whole grain flours straight
from the freezer, where they're kept to avoid bugs and weevils and
other nasties that can crop up in older flour. Also, the eggs can
come straight from the fridge without warming up.
Most flours come from Trader Joe's or Bob's Red Mill. Whole Foods' GF
mixes tend to have potato starch in them, which Alene is allergic to.
On to the recipe. Dry ingredients:
Sorghum Flour 2 cups
Sweet Rice Flour 1 cup
Cornstarch 1 cup
3tsp Xanthan Gum
2/3 cup almond meal
1-1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp egg white powder
1/4 cup golden brown sugar
2 tsp powdered gelatin
Mix together well. We dump it all into a plastic bag and mix it
around, but whisking in a bowl or sifting it all together should work
too.
If you're comparing this to Bette's recipe, there are some
differences. we use the sweet rice flour instead of tapioca flour
because it makes the bread less gummy. We use almond meal instead of
dry milk powder because Catherine is lactose intolerant. Why almond
meal? If you'ce ever done medieval cooking, you'll remember almond
milk. What can I say, it works. We use egg white powder instead of
egg replacer because egg replacer contains potato starch. We find
using brown sugar gives a better taste. The gelatin is optional,
depending on whether we can find it or not; but don't leave out BOTH
the gelatin AND egg white powder. And we use kosher salt because
that's what we have in the kitchen. Michael Ruhlman counts it
the most important tool in his kitchen.
With the dry ingredients taken care of, on to the wet. In a bowl mix:
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 extra large eggs (or four large)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
You can use melted butter instead of olive oil, or a lighter vegetable
oil. We use whole eggs; Bette had a cholesterol problem and cut down
the yolks. The vinegar is for "dough enhancer". It works just as well and we always have it around.
Now comes assembly and cooking. By all means follow your bread
machine's instructions here; this works for our Zojirushi.
Assemble the machine, pour the wet ingredients in, and add the dry
ingredients on top. You want to cover the wet stuff up with the flour
so the yeast can stay dry during the preheat; this is very important.
Make a well in the dry flour mixture and add one envelope of regular
dry yeast. Now press start.
Only two things left: when it starts kneading after about 10 minutes,
use a plastic spatula to scrape the sides of the baking container to
ensure complete mixing. Then wait a couple hours and turn out your
tasty loaf!
Posted by Berry at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2008
Subway Monster
Below the cut, a Youtube video of a "Sea Monster" on the sidewalk that inflates when a subway train comes by and pushes air ahead and up the vents. Cool!
Posted by Berry at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2008
Comment Approval needed again
So some botnet found my blog and is posting zillions of spam comments. For a while, comments will be moderated. Don't worry, because for one, legitimate comments will get through, and two, there's not that much traffic here anyway,
Posted by Berry at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2008
First Sign of the End Times
Posted by Berry at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2008
Made of Awesome!
The wonderful Computer History Museum, just down the road from me in the old SGI HQ building, has just received a difference engine.
A modern, WORKING reconstruction of the famous Babbage Difference Engine, constructed by The Science Museum in London (who have the original, too), funded by Nathan Myrhvold of Microsoft riches. It's supposed to go on display May 10 for a year, and then will sit in Nathan's living room.
How cool is THAT?
Posted by Berry at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2008
Iron Chef Berry RIdes Again
So last night I get a SMS from my wife that she's working a bit late and I should make dinner. After a bit of a thought and remembering that we had some vacuum-packed boneless-skinless chicken breasts in the fridge, and remembering that she had said a certain recipe looked good, I settled on chile-chicken skewers. Googling to see if I could find the recipe and check what I needed to fetch on the way home, I came across Laurie Johnson's blog entry on just this recipe.
It's pretty simple, and wonderfully tasty. I cut the chicken (three breasts worth; must have been a mutant chicken) into chunks and marinated it with a bit of brown sugar, pimentón (spanish smoked paprika; substituted for chile powder) kosher salt, a bit of freshly gorund black pepper, and olive oil. Stir up well and set aside while the rest is prepared.
I set the rice cooker going, and made the cilantro-lime pesto. Three cloves of garlic, a handful of walnuts (because we don't have peanuts and I couldn't find my first choice, pinenuts) and half a pasilla pepper (since the store was out of anaheims). Buzz that in a "food processor fitted with the steel blade, or in a blender", add a bunch of cilantro and half a bunch of flat or Italian parsley, and drizzle in olive oil until the consistency is right. At this point I tasted it and corrected seasoning; it needed about half a teaspoon of salt to mute the bitter parsley taste and tranform it into bright herbal notes.
Scrape into a bowl, rinse the food processor work bowl and dump in the dishwasher.
At this point, pretty much everything was set. I peeled an onion, cut it into wedges and skewered it for grilling. About 15 minutes before the rice was done, I fired up the gas grill, and while it was heating I skewered the chicken chunks, now a nice reddish color from the pimentón, and when the grill was hot grilled them and the onions for about ten minutes, turning about every 2-3 minutes.
For plating, I chose two small fish-shaped plates (because they were clean and matched!), filled a small rice bowl with rice and inverted it onto the tail end of the fish. I put a heaping tablespoon of the cilantro pesto on the head end, spread it out a bit and put four chunks of chicken on, flanked by two wedges of the grilled onion. A parsley leaf on the rice mound completed it, and I called Alene for dinner.
It was very tasty, the herbal pesto complemented the smoky pimentón well, and the chicken was tender.
This would make a nice quick summer dinner, since the only appliances I used were the food processor, rice cooker and outdoor gas grill. No oven or stove action to heat up the house.
I recommend a nice pinot grigio with this. A light salad would work too.
I recommend NOT watching a TiVo'd episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike learns to sex chicks, since it's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. It's pretty gross, actually.
(Next time I do something like this I'll take a picture before serving. Of the plate, not the chicks.)
Posted by Berry at 02:30 PM | Comments (2)
From the same people who gave us "Tuscan Whole Milk, 128 Oz."...
We get "Penetrating Wagner's Ring", and a series of probing reviews.
(Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.)
(In a fully appropriate typo, I first put "Tuscan Hole Milk as the title...)
Posted by Berry at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)
What's Behind Door Number Three, Carol?
Writing in the New York Times, John Tierney (free registration, or use BugMeNot) had given the best summary of the winning strategy of the Monty Hall Problem I've ever seen:
This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. But when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times.
The article goes on to explain how some psych experiments fell into the same trap most of us do when thinking about this problem Interesting reading, check it out.
Posted by Berry at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2008
Best Little League Game EVAR!
Oh. My. God. Those loonies at Improv Everywhere have overdone it AGAIN, descending on the Hermosa Beach Little League with NBC Sports and the Goodyear Blimp. What a fantastic day for the kids. Check it out.
Posted by Berry at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2008
Disappointing Day
Looking through my Junk Mail folder today, I'm disappointed. Scammers only want to give me $800,000 so far. Usually by lunch it's well over five million.
Posted by Berry at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)