A seemingly impossible feat, building and maintaining a campfire in the middle of a lake is not overly complex (as long as its frozen).
Also it makes for a great picturesque scene.
Campfire In The Middle Of A Lake
Category: General
General
Enchiladas
I got a new Staub baking dish for Christmas and it was finally time to break it in with no other dish than enchiladas.
I made 2 varieties, the first a little bit more authentic with seasoned chicken thighs with queso fresco the other a bit more American with pulled pork. Both gently drizzled with a nice enchilada sauce. May not be the most visually appealing dish but had a phenomenal taste.
New Shrimp
A recent addition to my aquarium are 3 new shrimp which just so happen to match with the Pokemon gen1 Pokemon legendary birds.
Spherification and food Chemistry
I have been playing around with more advanced food chemistry and have started to get into spherification. The theory behind it is fairly simple sodium alignate is dissolved in whatever liquid you want to spherify and this is then bubbled into a calcium ion bath (calcium lactate in my case) which causes the alignate to polymerize and make pearls.
For now I am still playing around but I have some plans for the future with actual dishes using this.
Pasta “Volcano” (AKA Cool Spaghetti and Meat Balls)
This has been a fun idea to make a “volcano” spaghetti and meat balls where a volcano would be made from black pasta, a bright red vodka sauce as the lava and meatballs as exploded rocks.
The idea I think is really good but I have issues with giving the volcano height and so it just looks a bit flat… Tasted really good so I guess the rest doesn’t matter.
Homemade Pasta
Though saying “handmade pasta” brings to mind exclusivity and perfection I personally find dried pasta to be more than good enough. The only 2 considerations are that handmade pasta taste like “Angle hair” and is much softer (and therefore lacks the Al-Dente feel) which can be a plus or negative depending on the dish and the other consideration being you can add additional ingredients such as spinach or ink to color the pasta.
It is relatively easy to make just takes time and effort which may be hard to justify when dried pasta is just a couple dollars.
Below is my squid ink pasta used in a separate dish where I use cuttlefish ink to dye to pasta black.
Avocado Salad and Salmon Risotto
A Valentines classic, my avocado salad followed by salmon risotto never fail to impress.
Not much to note but rolling up avocado slices and making tomato roses give a wow factor. I also add a garlic dill sauce that amps it up. Seared salmon on a seafood risotto is classic.
3 Course Birthday Meal
A birthday classic, I started 2023 with my classic bacon wrapped Filet mignon with a foie gras toast starter and a espresso chocolate mouse desert.
Amarone wine to match. Definitely the perfect choice to such a meal.
House Water Temperature Profile
I have noticed that my water appears to run hotter in the morning when I get up vs later on in the day. In truth this is probably due to relative temperature where in the morning I am colder and so things appear warmed but I still wanted to find out how much my water temperature changed throughout the day if at all.
Looking at the temperature profile throughout the day I saw some interesting spikes that occurred like clockwork at 5am. Breaking this into minitab and looking at the temperature intervals vs hour we find that there is indeed a statistically significant difference in the morning at 5-6am vs later on.
The cause is most likely that I have my heating turn on at this time and this is likely heating up the water in the pipes leading to this rise in temperature and thus leading some credence to my theory that the water is warmer in the morning. Of note the temperature sensor is on the outside of the pipe so potentially I am seeing the warm air heat up the sensor rather than the actual water but I used thermal compound to make good contact with the pipe and it is copper after all so thermal conductivity should be good.
Incoming Water Mains Water Temperature
6 months ago I came along the desire to understand what my incoming water temperature is and how it varies over the day. As a part of this I have mounted a temperature sensor to the outside of my incoming mains water pipe and found some interesting results. Now though I understand that I am not measuring the actual internal water temperature being that this is a copper pipe I am getting a fairly close approximation.
A big result of this was my post http://192.168.2.65/data-analytics-and-finding-out-when-you-shower/ in which I investigated my ability to find when I shower based on water temperature. This is a quintessential process engineering/controls engineering problem where my desired measurable is unable to be measure and so I have to measure a separate variable that is “joined” to my required measurable and go based off that. Granted, in a big company you can buy a sensor for anything given you have the money but this is a good example for the process control on a budget.
