Food

Project Butterball

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No, I am not making a turky (hell no!) but I did just try a bit of pound cake. I started with this recipe as a base and the knowledge that the traditional pound cake is a 1:1:1:1 ratio of eggs, flour, surgar, and butter. This is my first cake ever, and more of a quest to figure it out than create a yumo confection.

My end result for test Alpha:

  • 1 cup unsifted cake flour.
    • sifting in a colander proved nuts, so I just attacked in a measuring cup.
  • 1/2 cup sugar.
  • 1.5 stick of room temp’ butter.
  • 3 eggs
    • I only failed at the first egg, and lost most of the yolk.
    • Being smarter than totally stupid, I used two containers: one to hold the eggs and one to crack/drain in.
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1.5 teaspoon pure vanilla extract, since both my other half, my mother, and Google all agreed.
    • My first go is more about science than taste!
  • 1.5 sticks of butter
    • seems excessive to me but as Paula Deen says, “Butter makes it better”, so I digress.
    • I chopped it for ease of mixing.
    • My mother suggested melting it.
  • 3 tablespoons of milk
First I washed the pan, containers, tools, etc; let the butter, eggs, and milk sit out. Then I started to measure stuff out into containers. Got my eggs together and put the milk in, mixed them up with a rubber spatula and cut the butter into slices and greased the pan with some. Then while mixing for a bit between, added each the flour, sugar, some butter (maybe 2/3 of 1/4 a stick). Than I put in the extract and more butter, mashed and mixed that and set about getting in all the butter.
After a while of doing this with the rubber spatula and a old whisk, I saw it would take forever to get the chunks out of the batter, so I just switched to a hand mixer: first at low, than for a bit at speed and throttled back to low to finish it off. Poured it in the pan, switched on the oven to 350′ F and let the batter sit in the pan for a couple minutes while I made prep to clean; then I stuck it in and cleaned up after myself. In retrospect I should have taken a picture of the batter, as a gauge for next time.
Here is how it came out:
It came out soft and tasty, not overpowering and rather close to what I wanted really. Next experiment I think, will trade some butter for vegetable oil.
Of course, the moron^H^H^H^H^Hgeek has to have a test tasting :-).
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The perfect way to control splurging at the grocery store: limit unplanned spending to <= $2.00. Of course, when the beer is two bucks cheaper than planned, of course I can add $1.50 for a small snack…. lol.

Redefining pot luck

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Tonight Food Network displayed one cracker jack of a mission, in which Robert Irvine of Dinner: Impossible was sent off to the UNC. The objective? Turn whatever he could scavenge out of the dorm rooms into a quality meal for a ~hundred students, in less then six hours!

So here Irvine is with his sous-chef, and they’re trying to figure out what the hell can you do with a barrel of cheese balls, dozens of cans of different soups, a megaton of ramen noodles, and so many other odds and ends lined up on tables. Not to mention a deep fryer that went out so many times, he had to threaten the to throw the rent-a-fryer guy in it, lol. In the end they had to raid the sonority houses just to gather enough proteins to make a decent meal. Impressively they shipped about 19 dishes, and no one died of a heart attack in the process. Battle planning went out in like the first 15-min, and they had to result to an on the fly menu plan. It was shocking that they actually came up with something edible, let along that much food lol. In response to someone saying they would make his last minute concoction for the fair, billed as “Robert’s Corn Dogs”, he quibbled something about how he would never cook like that in a sane situation.  Despite what’s probably the most ludicrous episode I’ve ever seen, somehow they pulled it off with a hair trigger.

What makes Dinner: Impossible such an enjoyable show, is watching the host stew through it… and thanking GOD that you don’t have his job, hahaha. If Guy Fieri has the best job on Food Network, Robert Irvine has the most stressful. Me, I would just like to tag along on Triple-D, and gain back my lost 40 lbs in the process xD.

the past ~48 hours

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Been quite a busy time, I guess lol.

I think I royally fragged my blood sugar; after last nights gorging on beefaroni, I’ve been pissing my brains out (every ~30min). Things are finally starting to resync with the usual input equals output style equation. I’m not diabetic (as far as I know), but many people in my family have had diabetes, most dying of heart attack, stroke, and cancer even when fully healthy. Of course, I’ve always figured it’s a case of which of the 3 will get me first…. But I expect the third, if the first permits in the long term.

I really should watch what I eat, and an extreme amount of pasta and meet is probably a bad idea. As I understand it, carbohydrates from pastas breaks down into glucose slowly over time, slower then a lot of snacks anyway. I’ve no idea whether that is good or bad thing; but I like pasta, in almost all of it’s forms ^_^. Eating a shit load of it on the other hand, is probably just as bad as eating a lot of sugar though :.

My guess is that it caused enough of a glucose spike, that my kidney’s have been workin’ overtime to deal with it. Biology (in general) was never really one of my strong points, in fact… My high school text book put me to sleep lol. The fact that searching the web and thumbing through old encyclopedias was better for passing exams, then remembering the text books contents, is besides the point :-P.

For the time being: I’ve cut the soda from my fluid intake, shit load of HFCS in that stuff… And replaced it with water, I usually drink soda during the day and bottled water at work & at night. Along with sweets, my diet usually consists of lunch, dinner, and a sweet or salty snack or two every few days (although I avoid junk food, because if I had it, I’d eat it).

I managed to download and install Virtual Box. I’ve also got PC-BSD7 in both the 3 CD and 1 DVD sets, the CD ISOs are on my laptop, and the DVD ISO on the desktop (I figured it would be easier to use with VB). When booting off the DVD ISO in VirtualBox, the boot process fails: snap shot. I intend to install it on my desktop, but after one of the posts I read on forums.pcbsd.org (by Graedus I thin), I’m not willing to let PCBSD7 touch my harddrive, until I’ve taken a full backup of my Windows install…. took to many hours to set it up the way I wanted, and I still have no wall paper lmao.

As to the image, I posted a thread on PC-BSDs support forum, not that I actually expect any help lol. In fat, one of the reasons I elected to test with VB first, is in he hopes I might be able to help some of the people having problems with PCBSD7 under VirtualBox.

I can’t make heads or tails out of the output before BTX halted. I know most of the names, corrispond to processor registers. In fact, to be more precise, I believe the ‘e’ is some extended-mnemonic from when Intel’s chips moved into the 32-Bit world. I don’t understand the output though, because I never had time to learn about assembly or dive deep into documentation on IA-32.

I managed to get a little time in, training with Jonsi on TG#1. Do to current affairs, I’ve been spending most of my server time in SWAT (PG3/TG3), but it’s nie to be reminded; I am still limber enough to put recruits through their paces :-). I need to take a look and see what’s going on these days, training wise in RvS.

I also spent sometime to help a friend with porting a page from (invalid) HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Not to hard for me, since I work with XHTML like most people I know, would use MS Word. Although, I personally prefer LaTeX for documents, for a long time; I did use XHTML+CSS as a replacement for word processors. If I had the time to learn to do as much as I can in LaTeX/TeX, I probably would prefer troff; but a more TeXuaL solution is where I ended up investing time.

Also my brain was complimented today, but despite the things I know, it doesn’t do me much good; because no one in this rats nest, will actually pay me for what I know or for using my brain lol. That’s one reason, why I try to be content with the fact, that most of what I know, I learned because I wanted to and enjoyed learning, as opposed to ever learning stuff to make money off it. Although, I do admit… getting paid for what I know, would seriously be an improvement over my current line of work lol. But I’m generally content with enjoying it on my own time.

Now, if only I could change the one point that really does bother me…

Hmm, with about 34% of battery power remaining (according to hw.acpi.battery.life), I think it is time for bed !!!

Microsoft Kicthen — I’ve never been so scared of the future

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Food Networks programming for tonight was examining the kitchen of tomorrow concept, from a time when blenders, ice makers, and dish washers were new gizmo’s… all the way to work in the present day. Ranging from some ideas that folks at MIT are ‘cooking up’, all the way down to a spoon that can taste :

But the one that really got me, was the Microsoft Kitchen. A quick look at the lock, and the person was let in — always wanted one of those retinal scanners, just like on TV! (or as my Mom put it, just like in Back To The Future II). A cook top that displays cooking advice… Recipes, even a flibbing stencil to help you cook, and a voice to give you instructions.

If you don’t know how to cook and the computer tells you to chop your fingers off, will you do it?

There was a Networked Microwave, you just scan a can of soup, and it fetches the instructions off the internet and warms it up for you. Oh, for crying out loud… Why the heck would I want a network attached Microwave? Unless I could program it in Java ? I can just imagine it, go scan a can of soup, some prankster has broken into your microwave, and it fetches instructions that makes it blow up in your face >_>

In the memory of Dr. Ian Malcom, These people must be so preoccupied with whether or they they could, that they don’t stop tot think if they _should_.

It also showed that every thing in the cabinets had a little radio tag that a computer tracked, letting you know how much Chili you had and stuff, great idea! Although I reckon any one with sufficient DIY skills could cook that up during a spell of unemployment lol. I wonder if the system is encrypted, or you neighborers can know how many bags of cookies you gnosh on before going to Weight Watchers haha. Another thing that Microsofts Kitchen had, was a computer telling you advice, put an appliance on the counter top, and it started giving you ideas to go with it.

Well hell, they can’t even create a decent search engine, so I can only hope it uses some kind of most recently used algorithm.

Not to mention a computer to provide medical advice on how much and what to take. Oy vey, I can just see that one going sour…. I dunno what is worse, having Clippy in your medicine cabinet or the probability that it will either Blue Screen of Death or suffer from a (lethal to stupid you) malware infection when someone asks a question +S

I know, having used Microsoft software for almost my entire computing life… The idea of just Microsoft reaching a cars multimedia system was scary, but this kitchen of the future, is just fucking

__S_C_A_R_Y__

.

Ya know, I generally consider myself borderline on technophilia at times… But in all honesty. I think if you just ditched the stupid sales jingles and stuff, I would much rather have the far from digital “kitchen of tomorrow” from the 1950s, or better yet fast forward to the Jetsons, with a automated food preparation system and a robot maid lol.

But then again, if the ultimate invention ever occurred inmy life time, I’d probably worry about the dang thing trying to poison me for a few decades before they became common place enough to trust <_<. But by then, they would probably be network attached without any security devices lmao. Why do I feel old? Probably because I still have need of the ol’microwave more then Microsofts networked one hehe.

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Oy…

Set to work on preparing my report, down to the AFK again the second half a butt cheek is in the chair level of interruptions as normal 8=). Finally took a break for dinner, a nice double whammy of Whoppers

BK Whopper

Crashed on the couch for awhile until Coco finally succeeded in guilting me out of my spot, jeeze it’s only been _my_ spot for the last decade ^_^.

Dropped off to bed, never made it through most of Mission To Mars and woke up ~0300 in search of some Raspberry Danish.

May as well get back to work eh?

Some times I wonder if I ever sleep without being ready to drop :