WEEKEND COOKING RECAP AND OTHER MUSINGS
Holy moses! It feels like I was cooking through the entire weekend. I
was on my feet most of Saturday with groceries or food prep. Then
again in the evening and Sunday morning, finishing up recipes and
making more meals to eat in the days ahead.
My fingers smell of garlic and the fridge is bursting. My tummy makes
happy growls. It was a nice weekend for me to get back to the domestic
chores I adore and enjoy alone. (Well, not totally alone! I had nice,
brief interactions with shopkeeps, chats with the other inmates on
IRC, and a small IRL experience with a friend.)
Food aside, I also found time to faff around with some programming
projects, print more lines for my notebook, read comics, and watch
television. Below I've captured some more detail about some of these
activities: first the cookery and then the nerdery.
Ferments and other food
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I bought a box of tomatoes for five dollars. I'm not sure the weight,
but it must have contained like thirty beautiful, juicy red orbs. Five
whole doll hairs! Can you imagine? I also bought two pounds of garlic,
a bag of cucumbers, melon, some onions, and parsley. It is good to
have vegetables around! Why? They're good for me! And also: FERMENTS!
I made four ferments this weekend (five if you count the sourdough
that needed feedin'):
- Kombuncha, with ginger and lemon
- Tomato, as salsa and plain
- Cauliflower, with parsley
- Garlic, with garlic
The garlic bears mentioning first because it was a long time in the
making. The two pounds of garlic had to be separated clove from head,
then peeled, then minced, then packed into a jar with 2% salt (and
topped with 2% salt brine--this being possibly a mistake). The
separating took about 10 minutes. The peeling took about 90 minutes,
if memory serves. The mincing about an hour. The yield is a quarter of
a gallon. Not much, but it's potent stuff, so totally worth the
time. After six hours the garlic was already bubbly and frothy and
beautiful!. After 24 hours (I'm writing this on a Monday) it has
turned entirely blue! Rad! I am told this is the allicin forming in
the garlic. It looks like a blue raspberry freezie! Or maybe some
ancient blue mineral desposit!
IMG Very blue looking garlic
The salsa is entirely an experiment, and was very much a spontaneous
decision. (FIVE DOLLARS!!!) I've never fermented tomatoes before, and
I don't know what to expect in terms of time and/or
difficulties. Anyways, with the tomatoes the jar contains green onion,
long hot peppers, small green hot peppers, garlic (minced and
ferrmented), red and sweet onion, and 3% salt. I used about half of
the box of tomatoes, yielding three quarters of a gallon. Shit! What a
haul! (There's also some leftover salty tomato brine that wouldn't fit
anywhere. I expect I'll tip that into a tomato-based recipe like chili
or harira.)
IMG Soon-to-be fermented salsa
I don't have pictures of the other ferments, but I did snag a picture
of other food things for which I am proud to have cooked. The foccacia
was made Saturday. I followed the Perfect Loaf foccacia recipe, except
used 10 grams of instant yeast instead of the sourdough starter. It
was topped with tomatoes, long hot
peppers, sliced garlic, garden herbs (some of theme were bitter,
lmao), and onion. No surprises, really. It's an easy bake (though a
bit sticky to handly during the intermittent folds).
IMG Slice of foccacia
Sunday's meal was jap chae! So yummy! The recipe is dead simple: make
sweet potato noodles, set aside. Thiny slice vegetables of choice and
briefly saute in a pan with garlic, oil. Make dressing of soy sauce,
mirin/sugar, and white pepper. Combine noodles, vegetables, and sauce
in a large bowl, or briefly in a pan. Eat hot or cold. Top with an egg
if you like! Or bibimbap sauce! Whatever!
IMG Trayful of jap chae
Smart meters and usage data
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My energy utility company has gone and given everyone smart
meters. What a stupid idea! Now I need to worry about another part of
my life sucked away into some data centre god-knows-where, commodified
into consumer research and marketing insights for god-knows-what,
exfiltrated and sold in some back alley for god-knows-how much
monopoly money... And I still need to pay the damn bills! Really, is
this all necessary?
Well, at least I'm going to have my fun with it. There is an online
dashboard that shows me usage stats up to the last 48 hours (why it is
not real time I don't know). I have figured out roughly how to
automate my access from a shell to this website and its associated
APIs. The process wasn't as straight forward as using cURL's `--user'
option, but it wasn't that difficult either. There were a few gotchas
that my hem got stuck on, but the path was easy to enough follow
without a map. (The juicy details I'm witholding for another
writing). So now I have an easy way to login and download my usage
stats in JSON format. Next will be extracting and presenting the
details in a more interesting (and possibly low-energy?) interface,
just for the hell of it.
ESP8266 and why do I even
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I ploughed about six hours into an attempt at a wake timer feature for
my ESP8266 powered mailbox sensor. Basically, the device should
periodically ping the server to say it's alive. This would be in
addition to the messages triggered by hardware interrupts when the
mailbox opens and closes. Unfortunately for me, this task was way out
of my depth. First of all, I don't know the C language. Second, I
don't know the Arduino platform. (Shit, what do I know?) So, surprise:
the wake timer and hardware interrupts did not play nice
together. Fuuuuuuck it!
Well, it was not a total loss. I learned about the exception decoder
for the ESP8266. But I could have mastered that tool in 30 minutes,
and forgone the six hours of chasing my own tail. So I am left feeling
a bit sour about this project and wondering why I even bother with C
and Arduino. Yet, I know I'll hop over to another embedded project (I
have many ideas) as soon as I have time. It would probably behoove me
to soon abandon the ESP8266 for greener pastures. There's a Pico
around here somewhere that I'm sure would yield a far more
satisfactory experience for the likes of me, a programmer hack.
The end until next weekend
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Well that's about all I have to write. Now I must regroup my limbs
under the covers and sleep up for another week of work, work, work
ahead. I'll be looking forward to completing some kinetic tasks like
sewing and paper folding in my evenings. Saddly, I go tend to get sick
of computer stuff during the week. So sewing is always a nice way to
keep my brain buzzing. Anyways... thanks for reading!