Baby Technologies

Below is a post I wrote on Facebook when we had baby #1 and certain biological and technological situations going on. Baby #2 is here and I am glad to say we have not had any weevils, however, I have a renewed appreciation for foundational technology: dishwashers, washer-dryer and microwave! My hands would be sore without them.

===

(2017 post below)

Two technologies I was thankful for today

Or: why my wife is having a long nap and will wake to the kitchen smelling of bleach

As I was starting to mix some baby formula today, I noticed a weird bug crawling around in the kitchen. I had seen a few of these things before over the past weeks, and though I’d thought before that maybe I should call the landlord, it occurred to me to try to learn more.

These weird bugs were not ones I was familiar with. They looked like tiny horned beetles. Somehow however the word “weevil” just popped into my head as le mot juste for the creepers. I remember this word from before but couldn’t tell you anything but that they were small bugs. I suspect though that I successfully identified them sight unseen because they looked like wee evils.

Anyway the first technology to do its magic was a Google search. I looked up weevil and the first picture didn’t match, but the second one, “wheat weevil,” sure did. And lo and behold when I picked up the bag where I’d stored whole grain wheat, the little wee evils were all over the place. Apparently they lay eggs in the grain.

Thus began the industrial cleanup phase of my story. Some good non-bug-related things came out of this, e.g. I found a rotten potato before it could spoil the rest, and I threw out some rice in a container I didn’t feel was trustworthy. But it was when I was standing on a stool with my hands full of Raid that my newborn daughter, formerly asleep in her crib, decided to let out a bloodcurdling scream.

So I washed my hands and tried the usual tricks: diaper, feeding, burping, but to no avail. This brings me to the other key piece of technology, a swinging chair. Once I put her in it she decided the world was a happy place and I was able to continue my weevil murdering operation.

Lessons learned:

1. now that I make altonbrown.com/dutch-baby-pancake-recipe instead of whole grain pancakes, I shouldn’t leave piles of unused grain around the house

2. it’s never too early to set up your child’s swing

My Food Rotation

Last year as a part of moving into our place, I got a barbecue (and if you don’t count a pizza delivery, it was the genesis of the first meals we had here). The model I liked was a Napoleon and the model so happened to come with a couple of extra features:

• A side sear station. Still have no clue how this can be useful without making a giant mess
• A rotisserie rod and infrared horizontal burner to match.

Rotisserie is something I haven’t done in 40 years and so I didn’t have specific expectations, but after taking it for a spin, 2 out of 3 meals were super tasty.

• 👍 Gyros. Here I don’t mean the meatloaf-style gyros I fondly remember from the University of Waterloo plaza suite of pita restaurants, but rather the chunks-of-meat kind I fondly remember from my short time in Greece. I followed the spices here and the construction here. I couldn’t find a large whole lamb shoulder chunk, but instead deboned some lamb shoulder steaks, pounded large chunks of them to ~5mm thin, then spiced away. A couple hours later, I trimmed the crispy outer bits, let the new exposed edges get golden brown, and repeated until all gone. They were amazing fresh but also tasty for several days of leftovers.
• 👍 Ribs. I would definitely also recommend this. My notes on this are spotty… did I use an Alton Brown rib rub? did I just eyeball it with Montreal steak spice and brown sugar? who knows. I do remember it was important to accordion them on to the skewer axle. These were also super good as leftovers.
• 🆗 Rotisserie chicken. I think I have been spoiled by whatever weird laws of economics make it possible for every grocery store to sell whole pre-roasted rotisserie birds for less than a whole raw bird. I didn’t have a specific problem with the one I made, but it didn’t seem to have any appreciable oomph. Maybe I should try again with… maple syrup and mustard? Who knows

So far my next planned revolution in rotisserie cooking is to try making tacos al pastor. But for dessert: Kürtőskalács?

A Tale of Two Boxes

Back in New Jersey, we subscribed to the Great Road Farm CSA service for a year. Since we were basically in the middle of a bunch of farmland, it worked out great and I got some keeper recipes out of it like this Kale and White Bean soup. Moving forward a couple of years and on the one hand we currently live in the concrete jungle of Santa Monica, but on the other hand it’s California which is well-known for its produce.

I eventually got my vegetable game together and signed up for two CSAs here:

1. Out Of The Box Collective, which came to Google Earth Day a couple of years ago
2. Good Life Organics, which I found on Yelp

Though we cancelled these during our trip to Canada this year, when we came back I thought to take a more careful look at these. I remember some high and low points from the past:

• Good Life Organics gave me an awesome fresh herb bundle just before thanksgiving last year: sage, bay, rosemary and thyme. That ended up used in the turkey, the stuffing, the soup and in other goodies, which was great since buying them individually is usually an expensive waste.
• On the other hand, Good Life Organics also gave me a huge daikon radish back in February. Like, a one-pounder. Wasn’t very useful; one person can only eat so many bitter daikon pickles.

I’d signed up for the smallest box each service has to offer. With Out Of The Box this is $49, plus a $5 delivery fee, and with Good Life, it is $27, and we pick it up at a nearby address. In order to decide which one to stick with, I took some photos to document our most recent pair of boxes.

Out Of The Box

For my delivery this month, I got:

• a few things that I grilled: 1 cantaloupe, 3 shishito peppers, 2 zucchini
• ~2 lbs tomatoes, some of which I grilled, and the rest of which became persian omelette
• the world’s saddest head of butter lettuce and mini-herb bundles
• a package of watercress and a box of grapes, mislabeled as seedless
• some staples: avocado, cucumber, garlic, lime, onion

Overall, they’ve had better boxes. When I tried to estimate the total cost compared to buying individually, it was a pretty high price.

Good Life Organics

This box contained:

• 2 each of pluots, plums and nectarines
• a canary melon and a box of seedless grapes
• roma tomatoes and onion that became part of a pasta sauce
• a whole box of shishito peppers which were awesome sauteed
• an avocado which Hanna ate whole over the course of several meals
• a bunch of rainbow carrots

Drumroll please… we ended up cancelling our Out Of The Box subscription and decided to go with just Good Life Organics. I’m still not convinced it’s much cheaper than buying à la carte but at least it gets us eating more fruits + veggies and gives us some variety. I’ll have to try harder to find a good application for the next daikon they send me.

Cinnamon Cocoa Coffee Cake

Coffee cake is one of my favourite foods to bake: it’s simple and delicious, and beats paying big bucks per slice at cafes. I had some cocoa lying around in my pantry and decided I should figure out a way to get it into a coffee cake.

However, recipes for this sort of thing seem to be sort of rare. So, I hodge-podged together these three recipes: 1 with cocoa filling, 1 with cocoa-walnut filling, and 1 with cocoa-walnut topping; this resulted in a cake with walnuts, cocoa and cinnamon both in the middle and on top. (Note: all those recipes are for a full bundt-sized cake. The one I made was for a simple ~9″-by-5″ loaf pan.)

Topping/filling:

• 2/3c brown sugar
• 3 tbsp dutch-process cocoa
• 2 tbsp cinnamon
• 1 cup walnuts, chopped
• heavy pinch of salt

Cakey goodness:

• 3/2c flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3/8c butter, at room temperature
• 3/4c sugar
• 2 eggs
• splash of vanilla
• 3/4c whole-milk yogurt

Recipe:

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Mix the topping/filling ingredients all together.
• Mix the cake’s dry ingredients (flour, baking powder + soda, cinnamon, salt).
• Cream the butter and the sugar in a stand mixer. Once uniform, add the eggs one a time, then finally the vanilla.
• Add the dry mix and the yogurt in alternate batches to the stand mixer.
• Grease a loaf pan.
• Pour half the batter evenly in the pan, then half the topping/filling.
• Pour the rest of the batter on top, then the other half of the topping/filling.
• Bake for about 50 minutes.
• Cool about 15 minutes in the pan, then carefully remove and cool more. Put in on its side or on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t get full of moisture.

The Results

It came out pretty good overall, with some caveats about the topping. The nuts on top over-toasted a bit, becoming very roasty-tasting, though not burnt. Furthermore, the spices on top didn’t really have a way to fully adhere to the cake, and partially fell off at the end. Next time I would either add some more traditional stuff to the topping (butter, flour) to make it stick better, or smash the topping into the top of the batter. I’d also like to try using sour cream or buttermilk instead of yogurt, for extra tang (yogurt was the laziest option, as I had some already).

 

The Lazy Gourmet, Part 2

This year hasn’t been the first that I discovered the joy of lazy recipes — I posted about cold brew coffee and no-knead bread a while back. However, I’ve made more additions to my slacker recipe collection since then.

1. Breakfast is a glorious thing and pancakes are delicious. But I have to admit that even with a relatively simple recipe, there’s still the extra work of getting buttermilk, and the time it takes to babysit the pancakes, pouring them out in batches and watching them for the right time to flip. Because of this, I felt relieved when I started making dutch babies instead, which are basically one giant pancake you cook in the oven and slice up to share. Plus, they are a lot more fluffy than any pancake I’ve ever made, and taste great even with just a simple topping of lemon juice and berries.
2. I own a pie bird, I’ll admit it. I think I’ve used it exactly once. And the apple pie that contained it was pretty delicious, but it was an awful lot of work. There’s the fact that you need two crusts for top and bottom (or if you’re masochist, a lattice crust on top). There’s the need for a starch in the filling so that it properly gels. There’s pre-baking the bottom crust. The egg wash. And, that bird. So from these over-engineered origins I recently switched to making galettes instead. This still has the crust, but only on the bottom, with the sides folded up on the edges to prevent leakage, or as someone in my family observed, it’s kind of an apple pizza. And, I was happy to find a recipe by Jacques Pépin that doesn’t need any fancy stuff. (Alton Brown’s apple pie recipe, by way of contrast, uses a half-dozen things I never have bought other than to make a pie.)
3. Back in the day, I liked to make fajitas. These are pretty delicious, but require a ton of time spent in front of the stovetop, checking on the meat, peppers, onions, mushrooms and sauteeing them all in batches, only to have them get cold by the time you eat anyway. I switched this out for a shredded chicken recipe, which braises the meat in some simple ingredients and gives you a tasty sauce at the same time.

The recipes all use a food processor/stick blender, so I guess I have to recommend them to achieve optimal laziness. Here are the basic recipes.

• Dutch Baby
  • Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F; bring 1/2 c milk and 2 eggs out of the fridge to come up to room temperature.
  • Put 1 tbsp butter in a 8-10″ cast iron skillet, and leave 10 min in the oven. Melt 2 more tbsp of butter.
  • Whiz 1/2 c flour, 3 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt in a food processor.
  • Add eggs, milk, the 2 tbsp butter, 1/2 tsp vanilla to food processor and whiz about a minute, until homogeneous and frothy.
  • Pour into pan, and bake 20 min without opening the oven.
  • Serve with: berries and lemon wedges, or maple syrup.
• Apple Galette
  • In a food processor, combine 1.5 flour, 1.5 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp salt.
  • Cut 1 stick (1/2 c) of cold butter into small pieces and put into processor. Prepare 1/3 c of vodka or rum, chilled with ice. (Or, ice water.)
  • Process the dry ingredients + butter, drizzling the cold liquid into it, for 15 seconds or less. The dough should still be a little crumbly, but stick to itself when you squish a bit by hand.
  • Form into a rough disk and refrigerate 1-24 hours. When ready to continue, take this out of the fridge to warm up a bit, to be rollable.
  • Peel 4 apples. Slice: I use a gizmo like this to get slices that cook uniformly. Take half the slices and chop into small pieces (1/2 cm).
  • Roll the dough. Avoid doing this in a hot area (i.e. right next to the oven), since you want the butter to remain solid. Aim for something like a 14″ diameter circle or a 12×14″ rectangle.
  • Layer on the tasty things, leaving a 1″ border to fold later: add the chopped apples; 1 tbsp honey; the sliced apples; 2 tbsp sugar mixed with 1/2 tsp cinnamon; and 1 tbsp butter cut into small pieces. Fold up the sides.
  • Bake 1 hour, or until browned. Let cool before slicing and serving.
• Shredded Chicken for Tacos
  • In a dutch oven or heavy pot, briefly brown 1.5 lb of boneless chicken (thighs and/or breasts) in oil.
  • Add a 14oz can of crushed tomatoes, 2 garlic cloves, 1 tsp each of oregano, cumin, and powdered onion, 4 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and salt+pepper to taste.
  • Simmer, covered, about 45 minutes. If it looks dry, add some beer.
  • Remove the chicken and shred with 2 forks.
  • Puree the cooking liquid, e.g. with a food processor or stick blender and add back to the chicken.
  • If you need to reheat, use a frying pan + oil, working in small batches.

Google Ontario Tour

This holiday, I went back to Toronto to hang out with family and friends. It was a great vacation! But I also had to work for a couple of days. I took this occasion to check out the different Google locations in Toronto and Waterloo and work from each for one day.

The Waterloo office is very new; the people working there moved in November from another location across the street. PM Justin Trudeau visited it last week for the “official opening,” to much fanfare! It’s a fairly large office, with several hundred engineers and an assortment of other Googlers. I took a couple of pictures of things that I liked there. The above picture was near one of the microkitchens, it reminded me of hipstery cafes, although pretty deserted this time of year.

The second picture, below, I can only assume is a time machine. A pretty good way to get the scoop on the competition!The Toronto location is located right downtown. It is quite a bit smaller and consists almost entirely of sales and business staff. They are the first place I’ve ever visited that had outdoor minigolf on a balcony:

Just for the record, that’s a mini-golf hole consisting of a replica of the Prince’s Gate (of CNE fame), and if you squint hard, you can see a scuplture of a polar bear in the background. Moving inside, I found this in a microkitchen:

The Tim Hortons loses some authenticity points since it’s only called “Cafe & Bake Shop” in the US as far as I know. However, I have to give them credit for the box of maple sap! Finding that for sale anywhere is a new trend to me, but it was pretty delicious!

BBB: Black Bean Burgers

A couple of years ago I got a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, a fabulous food magazine. It has a few distinctive features:

• no ads! this hugely increases my happiness in reading the magazine cover-to-cover
• the recipes are written like science experiments
• the interiors are all black-and-white, with some photos replaced by schematics or pencil-sketch-style drawings (see right)

I’ve added quite a few delicious items from the magazine to my regular rotation of dishes, including carne deshebrada and wheat berry pancakes. This month’s issue had something entirely new for me.

The recipe is for a vegetarian burger. I’ve had veggie burgers before, but they always had the look, taste and texture of hockey pucks. To the contrary, these ones are pretty satisfying on all counts. Especially if you like your burger loaded with fixin’s, you can barely notice the difference in switching from beef burgers to these beany bad boys.

The patties

Here’s the outline of the recipe. I imagine you can use whatever herbs and spices are your favourite and it will turn out great no matter what.

1. Drain two 15-ounce cans of black beans. Let sit on paper towels to dry thoroughly.
2. Weigh one ounce of tortilla chips by into a food processor. Pulverize.
3. Add the beans to the food processor and process until they have the texture of ground beef (approx 5 pulses).
4. Beat two eggs. Incorporate 2 tbsp flour; this will be the glue to keep the burgers together. Add herbs (4 green onions and a half-bunch of chopped cilantro leaves) and spices (1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp coriander, 1/4 tsp each salt and pepper, 1 tsp sriracha, 2 minced garlic cloves). Stir.
5. Combine “glue” with bean-chips mixture and stir with a spoon until uniform.
6. Important! Let the mixture rest, covered, in the fridge. Rest for at least 1 hour and at most 1 day.
7. Form about 8 patties (or 12 to 16 sliders). Fry in a generous amount of vegetable oil at medium-high heat for 5 minutes per side.

We still have a couple left (pictured above). Just to make sure I don’t forget how to be a carnivore, I’ll be eating one topped with bacon slices for dinner.

Happy Nooroz!

For the first time since living in the US, we put together a haft seen ( هفت‌ سین : seven S’s) table! It has:

• center: garlic (sir / سیر)
• left: lentil sprouts (sabzeh / سبزه)
• counterclockwise: apple (sib / سیب),
• wild olive / oleaster (senjed / سنجد),
• vinegar (serkeh / سرکه),
• wheat germ pudding (samanoo / سمنو),
• and sumac (سماق)

There are some bonus items too:

• coins / sekkeh / سکه
• wild rue incense / esfand / اسفند
• a book by Hafez / حافظ
• noon nohodchi (from Toronto; thanks Navid and Vida!) / نون نخودچی
• on sofreh termeh fabric / سفره ترمه

And not pictured, the board scraper that I used to recover the samanoo when it exploded in its bag on the bike ride home.

I hope you have a prosperous new year!

What I Ate at SIGCSE

About 2 weeks ago, I went to SIGCSE, which is the major computer science education conference. I talked about Computer Science Circles, its translations to other languages and translations of Python error messages to English; see the poster here. Like my last trip to SIGCSE, it was pretty great. I got to re-encounter previous colleagues, meet new ones, commiserate about C++, look at cool tools, learn more about pair programming, and I got to attend the famous “Nifty Assignments” session.

The food scene was also a good surprise! The event was held in Kansas City, Missouri. It turns out that not only is there a really great cafe (“The Filling Station”) tucked inside of an old gas station:

But there was also an amazing BBQ joint inside of another gas station (this one in Kansas City, Kansas):

Just to round things out and prove that there is food outside of gas stations, here are some shots from the farmer’s market in the River Market district:

Rosemary-Garlic Salmon and Cottage Fries

Yesterday I found myself face-to-face with salmon to cook for dinner. I have been lucky enough to have a certain special someone cook coriander-spiced pan-fried salmon with jalapeño-mango-pineapple pan salsa on previous occasions, but this time I was on my own.

So, what to do? The internet came to my rescue and like my previous post, I want to document it a bit for my own reference. I found an amazingly simple rosemary-garlic roasted salmon recipe; here’s the picture, taken from the recipe page itself.

The recipe was simpler than I could have imagined:

1. put salt and pepper on salmon
2. put chopped garlic and rosemary on salmon
3. roast in preheated 425-degree oven for about 10-12 minutes (I needed 15)

I was very surprised that no oil was needed! But the natural fat in the salmon is the right amount for it to conduct heat well and stay moist. It’s suggested to cook on parchment paper though to avoid stickage.

To go with the salmon I made cottage fries, thick spiced coins of potato roasted in the oven. They are also very simple: slice potatoes about 1cm thick, coat lightly with oil and heavily with spices; then roast in the same 425-degree oven (I think mine took 45 minutes), flipping occasionally. They go well with any spice or herb you can imagine: I like chili powder, oregano, herbes de provence, paprika, granulated onion or garlic, cumin, coriander… it’s pretty hard to go wrong unless you accidentally reach for the cocoa.

Today it’s time to do some wedding planning. I have to sample some Toronto poutine and pizza in advance of ordering our government-mandated late-night snack. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.