Before buying my pizza steel I would make pizza in a preheated cast iron pan. Preheating to 450F for ~45min allows me to get a great bottom as well as a beautiful charred top.
Cast Iron Pizza
Category: General
General
Restaurant vs At Home
As a follow up to my recent post about making braised short rib I wanted to change my typical outlook on restaurants. I have always been fairly adamant that I will not go out to eat at a restaurant if I know I can make it better at home. The major amendment I have to this is that for dishes like braised short ribs, pulled pork or duck confit that require hours to prepare, it is more efficient for me to just go to a restaurant and have them there. These dishes scale very well where making 10 braised short ribs takes the same effort as 1 and so it is terribly inefficient to work on an individual scale. Additionally cost wise a local restaurant has a braised short rib recipe priced at 38$ which when comparing to the ingredient costs for me to make 1 short rib is very comparable unfortunately.
Bacon Wrapped Filet Mignon
A bit of a classic but I find that the filet mignon and bacon go together perfectly. Filet mignon has 10/10 texture but lacks on flavour while the bacon has 10/10 flavour and poor texture. Both fill each others gaps and create a great heterogeneous eating experience. Classic pairing of mashed potatoes and grilled carrots.
Baked Alaska
I wouldn’t call it my favourite but Baked Alaska has always been viewed as a finer level desert and I wanted to take a crack at it.
It wasn’t to complicated to make but I did need to improvise a form to hold it all together. Then just a couples passes with my kitchen torch and I have a nice clean design.
Macaron With Raspberry Filling
They make not look good but they tasted amazing. I went a bit over temp and the I started to get some browning. The benefit on doing it yourself is being able to do what you want so I was able to make a hand sized macron.
Square Sushi
A interesting sushi roll presentation I picked up from a great cookbook “Dinner With Friends” is the square sushi. It was deceptively easy to make and adding the wasabi ginger rose on top create a great cohesive image.
Fancy Trout
A go to classic is a grilled trout fillet on a bed of risotto.There is nothing to note and no real difficulties but a tomato rose garnish with a bit of dill makes this a visually appealing dish.
Mont-Tremblant
We had 2 great days at Mont Tremblant. One with clear skies and beautiful views and the other with perfect snowfall and skiing conditions, a perfect weekend combination.
My Homelab
This will be a quick overview of my current homelab after some of the recent consolidation and upgrades.
To start off I have a custom (handmade) server rack made to hold all of the equipment. I use trays to hold auxiliary equipment such as keyboards, spare disk for quick replacement and other hardware. Plan is to move my desktop to one of these shelves on my next upgrade.
I have a 1500VA UPS https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/BX1500M/apc-back-ups-1500-compact-tower-1500va-120v-avr-lcd-10-nema-outlets-5-surge/ that meets my needs and covers any power disruptions. I have a RJ45 data-cable connected to my server to auto email on any outages and initiate shutdowns if needed.
For my main workhorse I have a DELL R530 server with 8 3.5 inch bays and a 10G nic. This handles a bulk of my file store, database and processing needs. I run Proxmox as my host and various debain based distributions on my VMs.
Lastly for my switch I have a Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+ which has 2 SFP+ ports that can handle 10Gbps which I use for my server and workstation. For the server I use a cat 6 patch cable and for my workstation I use a fibre optic cable as cat 6 can’t handle the distance. The remaining 24 1Gbps ports are used for various devices.
Adding Cooling Fans on a Passively Cooled Mikrotik Switch
I have recently installed a CSS326-24G-2S+ Mikrotik switch. The problem is that it is a passively cooled switch and runs at 68F in my setup causing intermittent network stutters. To combat this I have added 2 actively cooled fans to the switch. After some poking around with a multi meter I found a stable 24V source beside the power supply. I think this is a common motherboard and the source is used on other models but not on mine.
I added a couple of ~1W fans off of this 24v source to improve cooling. 1 fan is to exhaust hot air and the other is a blower style fan directed at the 2 SFP+ ports that are the most prone to overheating.
After this modification I was able to drop the temperature down to 36C. A simple 2W solution to a comical problem.
