What Doesn't Taste Good Grilled?

Tonight we were having grilled hot dogs for dinner.

My wife was making a broccoli salad to go with it, so we fried up some bacon for the salad (any salad with bacon in it is a good idea in my book).


As I was standing there, thinking about hot dogs and bacon, an idea struck me...

...what if bacon + hot dog...?

Yes, I did - with the help of some toothpicks.

Look at it there, the king of the grill. The other hot dogs are ashamed to be so naked in its presence.

What's that? You don't think a normal bun will lend it the air of distinction it deserves?

Hmm, you could be on to something. It's a good thing I have this butter and this grill...

Now, there's nothing shameful about that bun, is there?

Add some barbeque sauce (Sweet Baby Ray's, if you please) and mustard to the top and I think that'll do it

Yeah, that'll make em jealous for sure.

Eat your heart out, kid.

The Bakery Strikes Back

I haven't really been holding out on you. I really haven't done anything very interesting or nerdy. I have spent a lot of time working in my backyard, but it's all been pulling weeds and digging holes - not very photogenic. But I did make this loaf of bread.

I used the recipe in the comments of my last post and I didn't let it rise too much. I baked it at 350F for 30 minutes and, I flatter myself, it turned out awesome! It's nice and soft and slices very easily. I ended up slicing the whole thing and storing it in an old bread bag. It tastes good too. I win.

The Enlightened Baker

I have recently been fascinated by bread. While cooking is something I enjoy and happen to feel pretty confident in, I consider it to be merely mixing up flavors and developing textures. Baking, on the other hand, is a whole different branch of chemistry. The different ingredients react together, and unless you understand what is going on, it's usually best to follow the recipe so you don't screw something up. After spending hours in the kitchen, it really is a shame to have an inedible lump to show for your work.

I have a wonderful cookbook, "The Joy of Cooking," that is full of cool recipes. What I like best about this book, though, is that at the beginning of each section, the author explains the theory behind whatever kind of food he is discussing. For example, in the section about pies, he explains that a flaky crust is formed when the gluten forms bonds in the dough and is rolled out, The layers of gluten are separated by the fat in the dough (butter, shortening, lard, etc). Thus, it is important not to overwork your pie crust, or the gluten will form throughout and you will have stiff crust. Cool, huh? You'd be surprised how much theory there actually is in the recipes you use. What I like to know is which parts of the recipe are the important ones and which ones I can play around with.

Back to bread: Let me preface this by saying that I do not drive a Prius. No offense intended to those who do, but I don't want you to think that I have any agenda in what I'm about to tell you. I don't like for there to be things in my food that I don't understand. I don't really like for there to be anything but, well, food, in my food. If you look in my grocery cart, you are going to find mostly basic whole foods like milk, cheese, vegetables, rice, fruit, and root beer - you know, things that don't have a list of ingredients because they are the ingredient. I don't want you to feel like I'm missing out on good stuff, I just make my own good stuff. And if I can't, I'll just buy it, because I'm not trying to be healthy, per se, I just think food tastes better that way.

My wife, on the other hand, is trying to be healthy, so she takes this stuff a bit more seriously than I do. Thus, she wants to be able to make her own bread. She starts with wheat. We recently got a wheat grinder so that we could make flour. The problem is that most bread recipes don't work very well with whole wheat flour. The bread comes out all dense and crumbly. In discussing this problem (yes, all our conversations are this interesting) I remarked that a whole wheat roll recipe we have turns out marvelously soft and fluffy rolls. I wondered what the difference was between the bread recipes and the roll recipe. I considered making an excel spreadsheet listing all of the ingredients of the many different recipes, normalizing around something like flour content so that I could make direct comparisons (You were wondering when I was going to do something nerdy, weren't you?). It turned out to be much easier than that. Instead of figuring out what was wrong with all of the other recipes, my wife suggested that we just use the recipe that we know works - and make bread loaves instead of rolls.

It worked, too well. The dough didn't rise - it exploded! I went outside for two seconds and my bread got a big head.

No, it isn't supposed to get that big. If it does, it usually means that there is a big air pocket in the middle of your loaf and the top can fall off when you try to tip the thing out of your pan, like this:

Topless bread is slightly less useful than it's topful counterpart. The good news? Another loaf made it out of the pan with its head intact and the bread itself is wonderfully soft and light. Yay for beating the system! Yay for whole wheat bread! Yay for slathering the previously healthy bread with artery clogging butter!

Pi Day, Schmi Day

I feel so un-nerdful. I didn't do anything special for Pi Day. I didn't make a pie. I didn't recite pi to the 314th decimal place. I didn't even do anything irrational. I thought about celebrating, but making a pie is just so much work, and I had other not-so-nerdy things to do, like weed the rocks in the front yard so the HOA stops sending me nasty letters. In fact, at 1:59:26 this afternoon, I couldn't have cared less what the radius or circumference of the weeds were - I just wanted them out of my gravel.

I did, however, make this hamburger.

It is round. I put pickles on it. They are roundish. There are 3 slices of tomato on this burger. Can we round that to 3.14? I think we can. The tomato slices are also round. The bun? You betcha - round. The potato chips? Uh, huh. My belly afterward? Most assuredly.

Pi Day, consider yourself observed.

The Calculus of Food

I like to cook. It is my retreat from life. I shrink back and center my thoughts in my taste buds. It simplifies things and it makes me happy. It may not come as a surprise, though, when I tell you that I approach cooking a little differently than most people.

Let me explain.

When most people cook, they fix in their minds something that they have cooked or eaten before and have decided that they would like to make again. To do that, they will turn to a recipe - a step by step instruction list for re-creating a particular dish. I find this rather restrictive. That would mean that I am limited to things for which I have the instructions. What if I don't have the instructions for what I want to make? What if I've never actually had what I want to make? When I cook, I rarely have an already experienced end result in mind. Instead, I have an idea of the flavors and textures I would like in my dinner and I put ingredients together to create that.

This means that there aren't really neat labels for the foods I make. When I was growing up, we liked to eat spaghetti. When somebody requested spaghetti, everybody knew exactly what that meant - there was (and still is) only one way to make spaghetti at my family's house. When I make spaghetti now, it's not that I'm working towards any particular model of spaghetti, I've just decided that a certain blend of flavors and textures sounds good to me and the result fits under the heading of "spaghetti-like foods."

It helps that I have a very well established connection between my taste buds and my brain - or more precisely, between my taste buds and my memory. I can recall flavors very easily. I can also combine those flavors in my mind to create new and exciting possibilities. I can quite literally read a recipe and taste on my mind's tongue the final product. This can be quite helpful when I'm trying to find something that sounds good to make. It can also be a burden. Have you noticed that things you buy from the store have recipes on them? Most of those recipes don't really taste that great. How do I know? I've read and sampled them. Here's the million dollar piece of advice for the day: never make a recipe off of the mayonaise jar. Every time I accidently read a recipe for casserole off the rear of my Best Foods I gag.

Because it's Funny...

Speaking of the topics at hand, I thought these shirts were oh so appropriate:

"No really, look here, it's a number 4!"

It's never too early to start teaching binary.

To assist in the Jedi training...

Sith, the new strangers with candy.

Binary Around the Net

So, to show you that counting in binary is done by more than just nerds, (but mostly because my last two posts had no pictures) I bring you famous people counting in binary.

Condoleezza Rice wanted to let us all know how many book offers shes gotten in the last two months.

Joaquin Phoenix uses binary to let us all know what his chances of success as a pop musician are.

George Bush is flashing the secret service the sign to get him out of this boring convocation in 18 minutes.

Paula Abdul used to be able to count the number of judges on the panel, no wonder she's so upset about the addition.

Rod Blagojevich tells us how many faces he has.

And finally, the Hilton sisters flash their collective IQ.

Those numbers were 992, 0, 18, 3, 2, and 6.

I tried to find a picture of Tiger Woods calling "Four!" but the firewall at work is too good.