Heroes and Zatzeeky

I, like most young bachelors, do not fancy myself to be a master chef. In general, I'd rather bum some leftovers from Jamie Thompson (she's a killer cook) than prepare something for myself. Cooking for one is a drag anyway- you can either spend a lot of time preparing small portions, or cook a normal-sized meal and eat the same thing for a week and a half. Sure, there are ways around this- many turn to Ramen or Easy Mac, or eating out for every meal. I object to those alternatives for health and cost reasons. While it is true that I don't like to cook every night, I do find myself feeling culinarily adventurous from time to time. I've been known to prepare meals from time to time that deviate from the normal bachelor fare. Way back in the summer of 2008 I made fancy chicken parmesan for one just out of boredom- both time-boredom and palate boredom. I was impressed enough with myself that I took a cameraphone picture:

 
How bad is it that I'm reaching back to 2008 for examples of decent cooking? After all, I am also responsible for this mug-o-oatmeal microwave disaster:

Little cooking anomalies like the chicken do happen from time to time. I find it much more fun to make a dish for a potluck (pitch-in, midwesterners) rather than just cooking for an hour or two and sitting down alone to enjoy it- for me, the return on investment isn't there. If I'm cooking a dish for a group, though, it's much more worth it to me. I've been known to bring a mean pot of chili to a barbecue, and better-than-expected-of-a-bachelor food to gatherings.

The hallmark of my potluck contributions, though, is a recipe for which I can take no credit, but for which I have a great deal of respect- my grandmother Whittingham's cornbread, passed down to me by my father. Many a Saturday morning was spent in the Funnell house eating cornbread made by my dad with whole wheat flour, corn meal, and love. I have lots of memories of spreading molasses or honey on my split-apart slice of cornbread with the rest of my family around our wooden kitchen table. Good times. This cornbread is always made in a cast iron skillet, any other vessel is strictly barred. I made it on a semi-regular basis, and so I found myself creatively borrowing Jamie's skillet to make it, as I had no skillet of my own. Perhaps you'll remember that Jamie got me a skillet of my own for Christmas, and perhaps that is the best testament for my affinity for this cornbread:

I also made a sweet awesome apple pie a few months ago that I almost forgot about:

Alright, alright, Ned makes food sometimes. Big whoop. He has to or he'd die. What's the big deal? And who is Zatzeeky, and why is he hanging out with heroes?

Let me explain- 'hero' is one phonetic pronunciation of the Greek word 'gyro', which is a sick-awesome dish made with pita bread, chicken/pork, and a fantastic sauce called 'tzatziki'. Recently, Sarah and I returned from a two-week trip, which meant we both had to restock our fridges. I was lamenting this task aloud and Sarah convinced me to prepare something called a 'meal plan'. I usually just go to the store, grab some staple foods or whatever is on sale, then come back home and say, with a tone of incredulity, "what the heck am I supposed to make with all this stuff?!"

Well, the meal plan turned out to be a good idea but making it meant I had to decide ahead of time what I wanted to make and eat so I could buy the stuff. (How 'bout that) I was trying to think of things more exciting than spaghetti or various soups, when I remembered a meal I'd had, of all places, at Saga, the official cafeteria  of LeTourneau University. (Okay, it's not official, it's a nickname from the 70's that the administration has been trying to defeat for years) This wasn't the new and vastly improved Saga in the new building, no, this is old-building Saga. Now, if you're a LeTourneau student, you think I'm insane, I'm sure, for wanting to reproduce a Saga dish. This was after the Bon Appetit takeover, though, and that makes a difference. The new chef made gyros with tzatziki sauce, and it was quite good. Intriguing, even, as a foreign dish. I liked it, and when making my meal plan, I remembered it.

So gyros it was. What is a gyro? It's a pita (which is a round flatbread) topped with chicken or pork, vegatables of choice (e.g. tomatoes, onions, lettuce), and often tzatziki sauce. You fold it up and eat it like a taco.The sauce is a cool sauce made of yogurt, cucumber, and seasonings/herbs. Sounds kind of complex, eh? It was, especially considering that I couldn't find pita bread at Walmart. I did have tortillas, but I thought that'd be a travesty of a hybrid- Mexican/Greek? No thanks. So get this- I made my own pita bread. DADGUM! That took a while. I won't bore you with the cooking details, but I'll tell you that it still involved some bachelor moves, like using a crock pot as a mixing bowl and substituting pancake mix for flour when I ran out and the dough was super sticky.

A morning of cooking gets you this for lunch:

And these are the pitas, which I thought I could make without a rolling pin:

Sarah enjoys pitas.

What does this mean for my future? Will this progress in culinary skill and interest continue until I'm an accomplished chef, and turn out to be one of my life's defining features?

Hmmm.... nope. Gyros are good though.

Apparently, hard drives can survive a trip through the washing machine

Last Christmas, I was toting a laptop hard drive around with me during the Very Thompson Christmas. I had just got my laptop back from the repair center and installed an upgraded hard drive, so the stock one was out of the machine. I had it in a protective anti-static back, a little bit of foam, and just because, I put the whole shebang in a sock. Well, during the Christmas visit, all my stuff was sort of piled in a corner because there were so many people all in one house. I had the opportunity to wash clothes, and scooped up all my laundry... including an errant sock containing the hard drive. When I got my laundry out of the washer and heard the distinctive crinkle sound of antistatic, I immediately knew my error. I was SURE that the drive was ruined. Just in case, I stuck it in some rice. Four months later, I pull it out just for giggles to see if it works. Sure enough, when I plugged it into a machine, Windows recognized the drive. It's running a drive integrity test now. If that passes, we'll know that there's something miraculous about this drive.

Edit: it made it for sure.

Hold the presses. I forgot about induction.

In my last post, I lambasted electric stoves as the worst cooking device in the history of the western world. This is true- but only for electric resistance stoves. That is- the normal kind with the coils that get red hot. There is another kind of electric stove that is actually pretty sweet- the electric induction stove. It uses the principle of electromagnetic induction to make the pan itself get hot instead of having a burner. Neat, right? Here's how it works- skip this part if you hate me.

There are two basic kinds of electricity- direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The stuff coming out of your house's outlets is AC, the kind from batteries is DC. AC is called alternating because the polarity- the plus and minus- of the electricity is actually switching back and forth. In household electricity, this happens 60 times per second- 60 Hertz. However, when you boost the frequency up a lot, an interesting phenomenon exhibits itself- electromagnetic induction. A changing magnet field will induce (hence induction) electricity to flow in nearby conductors. This is how generators work- a magnet spinning inside of some carefully-placed coils of wire makes electricity flow in the wires. The back-and-forth changing of the polarity of the AC electricity in the induction cooktop does the same thing! It's switching makes the magnetic field's north and south reverse every time it changes. Now, if you bring something electrically conductive near- like the bottom of your steel pot- it will make electricity flow in it. What happens when you have electricity flowing in the bottom of your pot, though? It's the same thing as goes on in your toaster. In your toaster, electricity is flowing through the wires inside- the ones that glow red in there- and it makes them get hot because the wire's resistance to the flow of electricity is having to absorb all that power- it gets converted to heat. So the bottom of your pot is having this electricity induced to flow in the bottom of it, but it's not a complex set of wires- it's just a piece of metal. The electricity then is essentially just a short circuit through the bottom of the pot- but because the pot has resistance, the power gets converted to heat for you to cook with.

(Haters, you can start reading here) The beauty of this is that electromagnetic waves travel across distance. So instead of your pot needing to be perfectly flat on the bottom, it only needs to be reasonably flat enough to stay close to the induction surface and it will still heat up. Now, it can't be inches away- in fact, magnetic waves lose power with distance to a factor cubed (or to the fourth power, I can't remember)- so if you get your pot too far away it won't work. That's fine, though, and good- because your pot is sitting right on the thing, and your metal spoons sitting next to the cooktop are far enough away to stay cool.

So all that means that induction cooktops are incredibly slick. They don't have the primary disadvantage of electric resistance stoves, which is that pots that aren't perfectly flat only heat up in the one spot they make contact. They still have one of the advantages, which is that it's a lot easier to install an electric wire for your stove in your house than it is to run a pipe for a natural gas stove. They also can pump a whole lot more power into your pot, which means you can boil water so quickly that it creates problems with making hard boiled eggs because it heats too fast. However, the primary benefit of electric stoves is lost- initial cost. Electric resistance stoves are cheap, but induction cooktops can't be had for under two grand. That's just the cooktop too- no stove involved.

Another factor though is safety. If your four-year-old flips on the induction cooktop, there won't be an element getting hot for little Bobby to burn himself on, because the stove itself doesn't get hot- the bottom of the pot does. No pot, no hot. It's all metal, though, not just pots- so if little Bobby wears a ring on his finger and sticks it on the turned-on cooktop, that ring's going to heat up something fierce. Check this out:

That's in induction cooktop, and notice the egg in the bottom left. It's half on the skillet and half off- the half on the skillet is cooking, but the half on the cooktop stays perfectly cold because it's only the metal skillet that gets hot.

Now, you have to beware of fakers. There are a lot of glass/ceramic surface cooktops out there, but that doesn't mean they're all sweet, sweet induction cooking power. A lot are just electric resistance cooktops in disguise. That's not to say that it's not an improvement- the ceramic top is always going to stay flat, and that will help your pots and pans from distorting as well. Ceramic cooktops are also about a thousand times easier to clean than a coil-based electric stove. I'd take a ceramic surface electric cooktop over a coil-based one any day- but I still wouldn't prefer either to gas. Ceramic cooktops tend to scratch like a son of a gun, and I'd be constantly petrified that I'd drop my cast iron pan on it and break it. How are you supposed to make Real Popcorn on a ceramic surface cooktop? You have to be shaking that pot back and forth like crazy to keep the popcorn moving, and what is that going to to do to your pretty ceramic surface? It's going to kick its trash, that's what its going to do.

So, gas is cheaper to operate, better for cooking on all counts, cheaper than induction, and you can make popcorn. Electric resistance is cheap but bad in all other respects. Electric induction is neat but way expensive and scratch-prone. I'll take the gas stove, please.

Cheese. Stoves. Saunas and rally racing.

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will never buy American cheese. It is an abomination to mankind as a  processed food product, and it is a crying shame that America wasted our one shot that we got as a nation at naming cheese on a half-plastic 'processed cheese food product'. The Swiss have a good cheese. The French have like twenty. We wasted our cheese name on something that I wonder doesn't come out of an oil well.

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will never buy an electric stove. Thermal transfer between the heating element and your pan depends on the two surfaces remaining perfectly flat. Of course, the two things that need to remain perfectly flat are two pieces of metal that have a high coefficient of thermal expansion, are likely to see disproportionate heating, and go through several cycles of heating/cooling a day through a delta-T of several hundred degrees. GENIUS! If it doesn't stay flat (every aluminum non-stick pan in the world), then one spot on the pan makes honest-to-goodness contact with the element and the rest has to try and conduct that heat through several millimeters or more of air through radiant and convection heating. Bad news.

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will spend at least 75% of the rest of my life in a sauna. The Finns are, as a race, the most brilliant people in the world. They're number 1 in sauna use- in fact, in WWII, if you left Finnish troops alone for as little as sixteen hours, they would have cut down some trees, made a sauna, heated it, and all had a steambath by the time you came back. Sixteen hours in the forest. The Finns also produce more winning auto race drivers than any other country in the world. Why wasn't I born finnish? Sauna and rally cars? Who can't love that? Oh, and they check out more library books per capita than any other country and they have sisu.

In conclusion, here is Kimi Räikkönen blasting a Citroën through a rally course.

Image credit: mirror.co.uk

Okay, so I just installed an electronically-checkable mousetrap

I've got a little critter living in my ceiling. For the past couple days, I've heard him skitter around up there at night. Kim mentioned it after hearing it in the floor of the bathroom upstairs, which is over the same space. It was time for a mouse hunt. The problem, though, is that the mouse is in the ceiling, which is an inconvenient place to have to check a mouse trap frequently. (If you've ever failed to check a mouse trap for a day or two and had a mouse in it, you know why it's important to check. BARF.) This brought to mind a project I'd seen on The Internet- a guy wired up a mousetrap so that he could check the status by a light. It's not hard, actually- it took me less than an hour to replicate. The basics are this- when the mouse trap is set and ready for a mouse- that is, not tripped- the bait holder and the little bar that holds back mouse death are touching. When a mouse springs the trap, these two break contact. They are also copper-coated metal, so they are electrically conductive and solderable. One can wire these two pieces as a switch between a power source and a little light, and then when the mousetrap is set off, the light will turn off. Ta-da!

I decided to do this, and hunted around for some parts. Two LEDs were harvested from an over-designed computer case. A few months ago I combined two broken aquarium lights into two working ones, and harvested a 5-volt power supply from that, as well as some wire I used. That got wire-nutted to a 110v power plug and after some trial-and-error soldering, an electronically-checkable mousetrap was born. Here's how I originally soldered the mousetrap up:

 The red wire seen at the back is soldered to the trip bar (I'll call it) and as you can see, black to the bait holder. The wire color is insignificant here, as really it's just a switch, and therefore, monopolar.

 Hey look, my camera takes good macro shots. This is a bad place to solder to, as the presence of the wire causes the bait holder to shift and not hold the trip bar in place at all. I removed it from here and soldered it onto the staple that holds it down, which works a treat.

Here it is installed. Argus the ever-watchful deer is playing stand for the power supply. The wires going up into the ceiling are connected to the mousetrap, and the power supply is made up of the transformer hanging behind Argus' ear and a rectifier/capacitor package shrinkwrapped inline downstream of the transformer. From there, it's just an LED/resistor package wired in series with the mousetrap. When the mouse trap is tripped, then Argus will no longer glow blue. The wires coming down from inside his ears are earbuds, not part of the project.

Now, as soon as some unfortunate mouse covets the delicious peanut butter in the trap, I will know because the blue LEDs will go out. All I have to do to check the trap is look at Argus once in a while.

I'm not sure if this even qualifies as 'electronic' rather than just plain electric- the only semiconductors in the whole thing are the diodes in the rectifier and the LEDs, and those aren't the heart of the mini-project. Maybe I can integrate the MSP430 microcontroller I just got courtesy of Texas Instruments into this somehow to make it twitter when a mouse is caught or something. (Not likely with 2k of memory)

Update: Hello hack-a-day-ers! When I got up this morning, the lights were out, and sure enough, I found a little mouse interloper in the trap. And yes, the deer head looked like that before I did this project.

Q: What is the coolest thing in the world?

A: This:

I was wrong about the cracker conspiracy. Whoops.

Faithful readers, you will recall that two weeks ago I posted a scathing exposé about a cracker scandal of epic proportions. Sadly, I must report that I was mistaken. I based my understanding of the cracker situation on a single piece of evidence which I did not verify. Although name-brand cracker prices are ridiculous at $2.25+ per box, the last piece of the puzzle- a jump in generic cracker prices- turns out to be absent. You see, I was in Walmart and saw that one of the pallet-in-the-aisle items was saltine crackers. The accompanying large-letter price sign did in fact read "2.28". However, when I was at Walmart on Tuesday, I spotted this:

Hmm... crackers for $1.28. That blows my whole theory out of the water, doesn't it? Theoretically, the cracker conspiracy could still be true, and just not deployed in its final stage yet- but I'm not going to hold my breath. What I think happened is that Walmart raised the price from $0.88 or $0.98 or whatever to $1.28- and then advertised it as if they were on sale. McDonalds did the same thing for their apple pies years ago. After they established the dollar menu, they didn't put the pies on the dollar menu because they were already much less than a dollar. They sold like stale potatoes. Later, McDonalds put them on the dollar menu- actually an increase in price, and advertised them like crazy, and they sold like hot apple pies. I speculate that Walmart did the same. So these crackers were piled up in the aisle being promoted, with the big flip-chart style price sign. Either employee error of vandal intervention changed the $1.28 to $2.28, hence my confusion. There's nothing stopping anyone from taking the sign down and changing it- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if my mischievous younger self had done so at some point in history.

I apologize, faithful readers, for my obvious failure to do due diligence in my research before wildly flinging accusations around. I endeavor to produce only accurate and meaningful posts on this blog, and I have failed you in that regard. While crackers may not be the most earth-shattering subject on the planet, it is no small thing to be starting rumors of grand-level wrongdoing- it is tantamount to libel. Once again, I am sorry for my previous post, and I will strive not to repeat this mistake.

Please, accept this picture of me on stilts as a token of my appreciation for your continued readership.

(and no, I can't walk on the stilts. To let go of the wall is to invite death)