Frank Dellario I'm a DIYer trapped in a nerds body. Follow me as I rediscover the simple, functional methods of the past, explore a preference for the DIY lifestyle, and expand my reference for nature, good food and comic books.
Roots of Rock Radio My current fav internet radio station is Harold Levine's Roots of Rock Radio. He plays Pop / R&B / Country from that often ignored post-WWII, pre-Rock 'n Roll era from 1944-1955. It's like I discovered a hidden trove of records in my dad's attic, many tunes I've rarely if ever heard before (Jo Strafford "Stanley Steamer," Guy Mitchell "She Wore Red Fathers," Davis Sisters "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know"). I especially love his tag line: "If Elvis had an iPod, this is the stuff he would've had on it."
You can find Roots of Rock in the iTunes Library Radio tag under category Eclectic (Wha?) or find them at Loud City.
Information is Beautiful I'm a visual person (no really, I am) so I foam at the mouth when I peruse David McCandless's blog Information is Beautiful: Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! He puts it best:
"I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing that, it can just look cool"!
Though I've been cooking farm raised turkeys for years, this was the first time I had a true heritage breed and it blew everybody away. We had a 19 lb. Standard Bronze, the predominate bird on the table for over 100 yrs. (1830's to 1940's) until the Broad Breasted White took over (the big white birds that can't walk, can't fly and can't even mate they're so huge).
Carved and plated to perfection by our guest and friend Chris from the Silver Moon Creperie
Though the Bronze gets its name from an iridescent bronze-like sheen of its plumage, it was also a beautiful bronze when we picked it up. I hoped that was a hint at the flavor to come (it was!). It's much lower in fat then today's turkeys which meant it had to be cooked at a lower temp, 325, but it cooked in 4 hrs flat. I'm used to less drippings because I brine my turkeys (all that juice stays in the bird) but low fat here meant virtually no drippings at all. But not a problem, there was enough dried drippings in the pan to pull out via deglazing and I had made stock for the gravy from the turkey neck and heart.
A Bonze male, or Bronze tom. You can see the bronze-like sheen of its plumage on the breast.
A side view of a bronze tom.
Now the real surprise, and a pleasant one, was the first taste of the white meat right off the turkey; no gravy, no nothing. It was amazing. It tasted like white meat with 1/4 dark meat thrown in. Everyone at the table stopped at the first bite, marveling at what real turkey tastes like, and must have tasted like for decades before factory farming sucked the flavor out. Here's a bird that can walk on its on legs, can fly, and forages for part of its meal. A great thanksgiving bird.
Now the cost. This bird was about $4.20 lb.- total= $80. My first thought at hearing that price was wow, but this bird fed 11 people with a 3rd of it left over. That's $7.27 per serving. It made the broth for the gravy and afterwards I used the carcass to make 3 quarts of awesome turkey stock. You could say this turkey had legs but the truth is, I cook a turkey once a year and that's on thanksgiving. A perfect time to splurge on a wonderful bird, raised well, to be enjoyed with friends and family.
don't want to worry about overcooking your bird and checking its temp constantly
are tired of having to pour gallons of gravy on dry meat hoping to make it taste better
then trust me, you want to brine your turkey this year.
Here's the basics. You're cooking a turkey, a large bird, in an oven. It cooks from the outside in, which means it doesn't cook evenly. In other words, once you get the right temperature inside the turkey, you've over cooked the outside layers.
So brining, which I first discovered a decade ago via Cooks Illustrated, is a godsend. Outside of pouring gravy onto a slice of turkey, there really isn't anything else you as a cook can do to make it taste better except brining (and buying a damn good, well raised turkey).
Basically, what brining does is it helps keep the turkey moist during the cooking process. Heat releases moisture, period, so anything you can do that can help keep it in is good. And I've found it hard to over cook and dry out my bird. Trust me, I've tried, by accident of course.
How does brining do it?
Salt unravels the proteins in the muscles so they can fit more water into them
Regardless of how it works, it works and it's simple to do. Basic recipe below but you can google and find quite a few others with more ingredients then just salt. Some brining recipes I find a bit too complicated for my taste though, as I have enough to do in the kitchen around thanksgiving, I don't need more work to do.
Simple Brining Recipe
The Day Before Brine your turkey during the day. You can do it in the fridge but some of us, that fridge isn't big enough for a turkey and a couple of gallons of water. One solution is to use a 5 gallon bucket or large cooler with ice to keep your bird below 40 degrees.
Two different brine solutions below. Some say slower is better (more moisture retention)
1 cup table salt to 1 gallon iced water = brine for 6 hrs
or
1/2 cup table salt to 1 gallon iced water = brine for 12 hrs
The Night Before Now we keep the turkey in the ridge, but uncovered. Hard to do if your fridge is packed for the holiday meal with provisions but this is important. That brined turkey skin is moist. You want it to dry out a bit in the fridge (your fridge is a dehumidifier by the way) so it cooks up nice and crisp the next day.
Thanksgiving Day Cook your brined turkey like you normally would and enjoy its juicy goodness.
In addition to salt you can add other ingredients to the brine solution like peppercorns, sugar, rosemary. There are tons of brining recipe online but I like to keep it simple.
Notes
For more detail on how brining works, check out this great article by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on Serious Eats, that goes into the series and also argues for a lower then 160 temp bird.
If you like to get more complicated, Alton Brown's recipe uses stock and various other ingredients.
If you brine and like it, note that you can also brine chickens and pork, which generally only take an hour to brine. A brined 2" thick pork chop is heaven.
If you brine outside the fridge using ice water, don't sweat "how much water do I leave out because I'm adding a bag or two of of ice" issue. Just fill your container with the right amount of water (usually 2 gallons) and mark that fill line. Now empty it out, fill with bag or two of ice, and add water till it hits that fill line mark.
Take the giblets and neck out! Why are you leaving then in there! Make stock with them and then use that for either your gravy or your stuffing. Good thing I was watching you.
Yes, dissolving lots of salt in cold water can be hard. Some recipes call for heating some of the water to dissolve the salt. I find using some hot tap water is more then hot enough. The stir. Faster!
It's that time of year, when I dig out the insides of a pumpkin to make a jack-o-lantern and hate myself for wasting the seeds. But I figured it's a lot of work and besides I don't like cracking that little shell to get to that even smaller seed. Well, this year, I found a better solution. Boil, roast and then eat them whole. I love em, can't put them down and best of all, so simple to do.
Toasted Pumpkin Seeds
Recipe notes: - Don't over salt the water, will make it too salty. - Don't go crazy on the olive oil. It isn't absorbed by seeds as much as other foods, and will just make your toasted seeds overly oily. - Don't worry about getting every bit of the stringy stuff out of the seeds, they'll boil away in the water. - Once seeds are close to being done in oven, about 10 minutes, check them every minute, as they can burn quickly at a certain point.
1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
2. Separate and rinse the seeds from the stringy core.
3. Add seeds to salted water: - 2 cups water for every 1/2 cup of seeds - 1 tablespoon table salt per 2 cups of water.
4. Bring to boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Drain.
5. Oil roasting pan with tablespoon of olive oil, spread seeds onto pan in one layer so they cook evenly.
6. Place on top oven rack and after 10 minutes just checking the seeds every minute or so until they are browned to your satisfaction.
7. Remove and let the pan and seeds cool. Then enjoy.
If you'ld like to get more adventurous, here are 3 spicy variations from Heidi Swanson at her 101 Cookbooks blog.
Chris Kimball, editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine and host of America's Test Kitchen, has a new one hour special and book coming up called Fannie's Last Supper, where Chris and team recreate an 1896 era 12-course christmas dinner based on Fannie Farmer's cookbooks of that era. That in itself would be interesting except they create the dinner using the cooking tools and setting of the time. Wood stove, historic dinning room and classic dress. Think 1900 House meets Dinner: Impossible. It looks awesome, was filmed in Chris' historic 1859 Boston townhouse and I can't wait to see it.
Last night's episode of Foodography on the Cooking Channel was on street food and covered something really cool. If you think everything's been done, someone comes along with something new. Holy Cocoa (pronounced Ka-Cow), a gourmet street dessert trailer in Austin, TX has done that with their "Cake Ball on a Stick."
I rarely have room for dessert after dinner, and most servings are too large to finish anyways, but the Cake Ball looks just perfect, especially as street food. The owners said they cook up a layer cake, crumble it up, mix it with icing, shape onto a stick and dip into chocolate. I love this idea, especially because if you have the room, you can try more then just one flavor. I gotta try to figure out how to do this home. Till then, time to visit Austin. Hat's off to owners Ellen Kinsey and John Spillyards for a great idea and what sounds like a wonderful place.
This type of story gets my goat. Laws that don't make sense and the officials that enforce them to the letter without thinking. Steve Miller, resident of Dekalb County in Georgia, is a landscaper by trade who loves to grow organic vegetables on his 2 acres at home. He's been tending his garden for 15 years, but it seems maybe a bit too well: the county is suing him for growing too many vegetables.
It seems Miller was zoned to grow the apparently excessive amount of veggies he was growing. But even after he successfully rezoned his property, the county still decided to sue him. The guys growing on 2 acres for cryin' out loud, that's nothing. So why penalize him for being a successful "hobbyist." How many veggies is too much anyways? All I can say is that something smells rotten in Dekalb County and it's not coming from Steve Miller's backyard.
A new trend in gaming that I just love, releasing alphas of a game, instead of just the later betas, to the public. Alpha's are very early versions of a game that are generally determined not ready for the public, and may still be in production. Which means it's not finished, may be buggy and could crash. It may have updates put out weekly that change and build up the game a little over time or drastically, sometimes breaking the game all together. The idea of giving players access to alphas is ballsy and not for everyone, but when it works it's awesome, like Minecraft.
What Minecraft is a sandbox building game currently in development by Markus Persson, also known as "Notch." The game involves players creating and destroying various types of blocks in a three dimensional environment. The player takes an avatar that can destroy or create blocks, forming fantastic structures, creations and artwork across the various multiplayer servers in multiple game modes. The game is written in Java, using the LWJGL game library and can be played either in a web browser or via download.
How
The basics are pretty simple and the controls very easy.
WASD / arrow keys to move
Space to jump
Mouse buttons to place or remove block right in front of you
1-9 or scroll-wheel to change type of building blocks that you place
Create a profile so you can save your stuff. You can then get a link to that saved level and other people can look around in it.
Where Check out Minecraft.net. Can be played in a web browser or via download. You can play the older, classic mode for free (no game save) or for $13 play the wonderful alpha.
Notes Alpha: The alpha phase is the first phase to begin software testing. Alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes.
Beta: Beta is the software development phase following alpha and focuses on testing to reducing impacts to users. The users of a beta version are called beta testers and are usually customers or prospective customers of the organization that develops the software, willing to test the software for free or for a reduced price.
Sandbox: A sandbox-style game is an open-ended free-from style of gameplay. The developer has given you a world with some minimal predefined rulesets and you make your own game or wold in it. Think of it as a physical sandbox, where the user is allowed to do what he or she wishes with the available game elements, the "toys" (such as build, move, create, modify, delete objects) within the boundaries of the sandbox (the available virtual world map of the game).
Just as a real-world sandbox can be smoothed out and resculpted again and again, a sandbox game can be played and explored repeatedly with or without a linear plot or a particular set of expectations. If it has a multiplayer mode, numerous players can play and manipulate the world environment at the same time.
Wrote an article about my fav used-book seller site, Abebooks.com (online listing of used-book sellers inventory from around the world--great prices, bibliophile heaven), that's live on Christina Oppold's blog StackedBlog.com. I've known Christina for years through the swing dancing community in NYC and I have enjoyed her blog since she started it (I mean, it's called stacked for crying out loud). She's terribly fun, super hot and wonderfully geeky (She reads comics. Guys, why is she single? Come on!).
She writes a great blog about how books are a stepping stone to her experiences in life. She's currently attending space camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama (recent tweet "Apparently I look like a beauty queen when riding in a centrifuge") and prepped by reading "The Space Shuttle Operators Manual," and Werner von Braun's Biography. Make sure to check her out.
Regardless of what generation we're from, we consume content. I get the news of an event via tweeter, my parents hear it on the radio. I'll check the web for more details, they'll turn on CNN. It's been said that content is king, that substance is all that matters (you know the saying, you can't polish a turd) but there are two equally important elements here; the content and the mode it's delivered by.
For example, It's not just the quality of the food that's important in a great restaurant, but the ambience, the service, and the attention that's paid to "plating" the dish, the presentation (even a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with great food has ambience, which is, a hole-in-the-wall with great food). Put green food coloring in your mash potatoes and try to enjoy them (an experiment I tried when a kid, couldn't eat them). It's clearly affects your experience when eating that dish.
The mode, or medium, colors, cultivates and advances the content by molding the experience you're having while consuming it; sitting in front of a wide screen TV with your Tivo remote, listening to a podcast on the way to work that auto downloaded and synced to your mobile device. Simple, painless and they facilitate the process of you consuming the content.
Now if we look at the wealth of content delivered to us via the internet today; the web, blogs, youtube, tweeter etc. Wonderful mediums but they hound us with choices of content. A weekly magazine, like Newsweek for example, has an editor and editorial voice funneling and filtering that week's news and views in a nice layout pushed to me once a week. They do the work for me, melding content and medium.
Online, I have to do it myself, in a crappy, scrollable layout, sifting through hundred's of tweets, browsing my blog reader, always trying to keep up. I love the amount of content but the medium is a mess. I don't want to lose access to all this content, but I miss the ease and simplicity of that magazine experience.
This is where Flipboard comes in. An amazing experience that blows my mind. Flipboard is an Ipad app that makes reading, browsing and perusing online content an enjoyable, gleeful experience (also helps that it's on a ground breaking device).
What does Flipboard do that's so genius? Think of it as a well laid out magazine, with articles, images, videos and interesting pull-quotes, except the content is pulled from your social media feeds - facebook, tweeter - as well blog and media sites of your choosing. An article I viewed on one page in Flipboard was an excerpt from my buddies blog post that he just tweeted. It's illustrated with an image from his post, has his byline with his avatar image (it feels like he just got printed in a major publication). The pull quote next to it is another friends tweet, and the video a link posted on a friends facebook wall. It looks and feels like a magazine but it's content from my social media, and a major step beyond trying to determine the noteworthiness of all those tweeted tiny urls.
What I can't convey in words is the real beauty of the experience: I'm reading a gorgeous magazine who's content and layout dynamically changes as often as my feeds do. It's amazing, flipping through stunning pages of content that fits me in an inexplicable way. Much like listened to party shuttle mode in Itunes: a master playlist of all my diverse music genres that somehow mixes amazingly well because I am the common denominator. I'm the silent editor who picked out all that music. Just like I picked out who I wanted to follow and friend in my various forms of social media. Now Flipboard acts as the enjoyable medium for all that chaotic content.
Maybe content is king but with out its queen the medium, the mode of delivery, maybe it's missing the full picture. Here's to hoping Flipboard and other apps like are that queen we need so badly.
