Last Night's Dinner

One of my favorite blogs is Last Night's Dinner. Reading this blog (along with living in the same house as Megan and watching Good Eats) has significantly improved my cooking. What's amazing is that the author gives no recipes. It's really more of a log of their (her and her husband's) cooking and eating. She will say that she had something in the fridge that needed to be used and she felt like something or other and decided to throw stuff together into her own creations. Then there are the photos, which are usually very good and make my mouth water. I've become much better at using leftovers and partial ingredients and turning them into really quite good meals.

I started taking pictures of the food 1. because sometimes they look really beautiful, and 2. because I want to remember what I've cooked in the past so I'll have something to look at when I have no idea what to cook.

So, I've decided to blog about these meals. It's mostly to remind myself what I did but maybe it will inspire meals of your own from time to time.

Here are some of the meals I've made in the last month or so.



Broiled salmon with a mustard vinaigrette (olive oil, pomegranate vinegar, mustard), roasted russian banana potatoes with thyme over baby greens. I think that this may have been the first time I'd ever had Russian Banana potatoes. They are now by far my favorite potatoes. They're expensive so I've buried a few in my garden, hopefully they grow. I've also recently mastered perfectly roasted potatoes. I coat them in oil oil or duck fat and put them in the oven for 30-45 minutes until the skins look perfect. Also, I almost always make my own dressing since it's so easy and I always forget to buy it. My stuff is better anyways.



This is mostly a recipe from a book about southern cooking that I have but I changed it a lot. It's braised lamb shanks with blanched carrots, roasted red potatoes, and an amazing sauce. It's the first time I had ever blanched vegetables and I really liked the way the carrots tasted and felt in my mouth. I normally hate cooked carrots, but these still had a crunch. I'm definitely going to continue blanching my carrots. Also, the sauce was out of this world. I braised the lamb in duck stock and wine, so it's a reduced mixture of that and whatever seeped out of the lamb bones.



This was the first time I had ever cooked rabbit. It showed up in my southern cooking book but when it came time to cook the rabbit I got annoyed at the complicated recipe and instead found something on the internet. It was rabbit with honey/chili sauce and of course my normal bread pan fried in butter and arugula. I didn't really like the recipe. Too much chili pepper and I think that maybe braised rabbit with lots of other flavors would be a much better way to be introduced to the rabbit flavors. I'm still not sure I like it.



This was trout broiled over russian banana potatoes topped with a vinaigrette made from sherry vinegar over arugula. I got the inspiration from Last Night's Dinner. But I couldn't find mackerel or fresh wild sardines so I went with trout which the fish monger butterflied for me. The sherry vinegar was great.



The same trout from the night before grilled outside with red potatoes over romaine. Not as tasty. I tried to get my alderwood smoke going but I forgot about it and thus didn't have enough time to get it going.



I made this meal for lunch today. It's week-old day-old stale bread from Macrina's (that is, I bought it from Macrina's as day old bread, 50% off, a week ago) pan fried in butter with arugula and canned tuna. I buy the cook albacore canned tuna. It's about a dollar a can, which is expensive for canned tuna but when compared to other ingredients it's amazingly cheap.

The Duck Cycle

Those who I talk to on a regular basis know how much I've fallen in love with duck. It's so much more flavorful than chicken and it's a regular ingredient in Charcuterie. Buying whole ducks is very economical and provides a lot of variety in dishes. This weekend I went through my third duck cycle, this time with three ducks from Milford, Indiana. I paid an average of $15 for each duck and out of those three ducks I got:

• 6 legs for confit
• 6 breasts for duck prosciutto, alderwood smoked duck ham, or a thousand other uses
  
• 33 cups of duck stock
• Several cups of duck fat (first used for the confit, then used in place of other fats for various dishes)
• 3 livers for a whimpy fois-gras-like snack
  
• Some cracklins that I haven't yet figured out how to use

This is my second confit attempt and I can confidently say that it takes a good two days to finish. It takes two days whether you do 1 duck or 10. I decided to try it with three ducks this time. It cost me $45 for the three ducks. I spent just about an hour butchering them (I'm still very slow, and scared to wield the cleaver).







Before I started the butchering I made the brine and placed it outside to cool. When I was done butchering, I submerged the breasts into the brine and placed it into the refrigerator. I then rubbed the legs with the dry cure and placed them into the refrigerator.



Now it was time for the fat and the bits and pieces. I put the fat into a pot with a half cup of water and put it on low heat for ~4 hours to render the fat. I also filled two large stockpots with the bits and pieces from the carcass and water and simmered them for ~4 hours. In the end I had several cups of duck fat and 33 cups of duck stock (enough for 15 two-person soups)!

I woke up earlier the next morning realizing that I had forgotten to remove the brining breasts at midnight. Damn! Well, they'll probably be a little saltier that I'd like, but oh well. So I washed them off, patted them dry and placed them on a drying rack in the refrigerator. Now it was time for the confit. I washed off the cure, patted them dry, and placed them in a dutch oven with the fat that I had rendered the previous night. I try to give the legs 12 hours to poach in their own fat, they are still there in the oven as I type. After 4 hours of drying I removed the duck breasts from the refrigerator, started some coals on my regular Weber grill, added some waterlogged alterwood chips to the coals (for the smoke), and hot smoked the breasts until they reached an internal temperature of 160 degrees (I love probe thermometers). OMG, it turned out great.



I'm not really sure how to calculate the total cost of each meal so let's do the simple thing and make each meal equal in cost. The ducks were $45. The energy and water used couldn't have been more than a couple dollars and it might be about the same cost for the spices (probably a lot less). So let's say it was $50 for the entire duck cycle (I'm not counting the cost of my time). From that I have the base for 21 two-person dinners (3 duck confit, 3 duck ham, 15 soup). That comes out to $2.38 per meal, a tad over a dollar per person! To be fare, these aren't full meals, but they should be the most expensive component of each meal.

Creating great looking ebooks for the Kindle

The Kindle has finally launched. While most people have been focusing on the 80,000 books available at the Kindle Store and bitching about the price, I've been focusing on free content from the web. There are tens of thousands of free books at Project Gutenberg alone. I've never been able to read through a novel from there in the past because it's just not that comfortable to read 300 pages of text on a computer, even a laptop. Now that I own an ebook reader (the Kindle), I can finally take advantage of the plethora of free content out there.

The easiest way to get one of these free ebooks onto your Kindle is to email the html file to your Kindle. You'll have to pay Amazon ten cents for this privilege, but it's still much cheaper than the several dollars you'd have to pay for the same book, with the same content on the Kindle store. If you don't mind doing a little more you can email it to you@free.kindle.com and get the Kindle version emailed back to you for free. Then you only need to connect your Kindle up to your computer and copy the file over into the documents directory.

There are also websites out there that have already converted these books to MobiPocket files (which you can just copy over to your Kindle). ManyBooks is where I generally go.

The problem with all of these is that the books come out as one long file with no table of contents, no easy way to jump around the book, and worst of all: no title and author metadata so the only thing that shows up on your Kindle content page is the name of the file. This is perfectly fine if you don't have much content, but the whole reason I wanted a Kindle is so I could walk around with hundreds of books and read what I felt like at the time. It's difficult to find the book you want without this metadata.

Fortunately, it's not that difficult to create a nice looking, high quality mobi file with a table of contents and proper metadata using wine and mobigen. The following is the process that I used to create a high quality ebook for Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

First get the software

1. Go get mobigen and put it in your working directory.
2. Install either Wine or Darwine (assuming you don't use Windows).
3. Go get msvcr71.dll and put it in your working directory.
   

Now make sure that mobigen works:

% export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin
% export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/lib
% cd /var/tmp/working-directory
% wine mobigen.exe

Now get the content.

We'll use Gibbon as an example. I got the html files from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is dedicated to plain text files, but a lot of books are also available in html which makes our job a lot easier. You can get a working example of gibbon here.

After downloading them I noticed that there were some really weird characters, so I wrote an emacs macro and cleaned up the text. I also didn't like how the text was divided up into 6 massive volumes. I would much prefer to have smaller chapters with a table of contents. So I wrote another emacs macro to break the 6 html files (1 per volume) into 71 html files (1 per chapter).

I then created the opf file. This is an xml file that describes how to bind all of these html files into the MobiPocket ebook. The opf structure is just the Open eBook Publication Structure with some MobiPocket specific extensions. A simple (but nicely formatted) opf file has the following:

• metadata: Includes the title, author, subjects, ISBN, description, and sources. This is what makes the ebook look better on the main Kindle screen.
  
• manifest: Lists and names the content files, both html and images.
• spine: Adds order to the content.
• guide: Defines the pages that show up on the menu.

Here's an example opf file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE package PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.2 Package//EN" "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.2/oebpkg12.dtd">
<package unique-identifier="my-gibbon-UUID">
<metadata>
 <dc-metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:oebpackage="http://openebook.org/namespaces/oeb-package/1.0/">
    <dc:Title>The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire</dc:Title>
    <dc:Language>en</dc:Language>
    <dc:Identifier id="my-gibbon-UUID"
    scheme="ISBN">123456789X</dc:Identifier>
    <dc:Creator role="aut">Edward Gibbon</dc:Creator>
    <dc:Subject>Rome--History--Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.</dc:Subject>
    <dc:Subject>Byzantine Empire--History.</dc:Subject>
    <dc:Description>Describes the fall of the Roman Empire.</dc:Description>
    <dc:Source>http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/dfre110.htm</dc:Source>
    <dc:Source>http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/dfre210.htm</dc:Source>
    <!-- ... -->
    <dc:Rights>http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_License</dc:Rights>
 </dc-metadata>
</metadata>
<manifest>
 <item id="table-of-contents" href="table-of-contents.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" />
 <item id="introduction" href="introduction.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" />
 <item id="chapter-1" href="chapter-1.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" />
 <item id="chapter-2" href="chapter-2.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" />
 <item id="chapter-3" href="chapter-3.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" />
 <!-- ... -->
</manifest>
<spine>
 <itemref idref="table-of-contents" />
 <itemref idref="introduction" />
 <itemref idref="chapter-1" />
 <itemref idref="chapter-2" />
 <itemref idref="chapter-3" />
 <!-- ... -->
</spine>
<guide>
 <reference type="toc" title="Table of Contents" href="table-of-contents.html" />
</guide>
</package>

The metadata is in Dublin Core format which is one of the main standards, if not the standard, for digital asset metadata. I got most of this data from the Project Gutenberg website. Note the dc:Source and dc:Rights tags. These are important attributes for our purposes since we're using work created by other people. I put in links to the source html files and the Project Gutenberg license.

Also note the table of contents. Project Gutenberg texts don't come with a table of contents so you'll have to create one yourself. Within MobiPocket files a table of contents is just an html file with a tag in the "guide" that says it's of type "toc".

Since all of these source files are just html you are able to include images too. Most Project Gutenberg texts don't come with images, but I was able to find high quality scans of maps from the original printing of Gibbon. Though, remember that the Kindle's screen is only 600x800 with 2-bit pixel depth. I haven't yet found out what the ideal image size is for the Kindle, but it's definitely not 600x800 because the Kindle automatically shrinks the pictures a little bit.

Once you have all of your content you can generate the mobi file:

% export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin
% export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/lib
% cd /var/tmp/working-directory
% wine mobigen.exe gibbon/gibbon.opf

I hope that we can create a community that puts together a bunch of high quality free ebooks for the Kindle.

Renovation (Week 28, Part 2)

The house is done. It is really done. We could move in today. A detailed set of photos from this weekend can be found here.

We knocked down a couple walls, reconfigured to the space to be more useful, gutted the kitchen and bathrooms, replaced all of the electrical and plumbing, rebuilt the chimney, replaced the roof, replaced some of the hardwood floors, refinished the rest, and it only took 7 months. :-)

I'm not sure that I'll be able to accurately reflect on the process very well in this post. It's kind of overwhelming to think about. I had never been around anyone who had ever done something like this before so I didn't really know what to expect. Everyone in my family has always done their own renovation work and hired people to only do specific jobs that they didn't want to do themselves. Even my friends have been doing the same.

I'm very happy with the results but I don't yet have the perspective to tell me whether we could have gotten more for less money if we had done more ourselves. Yes, of course we could have assuming that neither Laurel nor I had jobs or could have dedicated more of our mental abilities to the job or we did it over a 15 year period of time. But would we have been happy in those situations?

It might have been much less overwhelming if we had thought of these projects in separate chunks. In fact, we had at some point, but we kept on getting back to the idea that if we do something we might as well do other things at the same time so our lives are only disrupted once. There's probably something to be said for that. We could have done the roof and the chimney completely separately, it would have cost less because we wouldn't have had to pay the general contractor's 15% overhead and profit. We could have done the front bedroom extension into the entryway by itself but we probably would have never thought of it if it wasn't for the architect. I really had no idea that knocking down non-load-baring walls wasn't that big of a deal. The kitchen would still have been a major project, I really did want to get rid of the wall between the kitchen and dining room from the beginning, but I never would have thought to close off the other entrance and shortened the hallway. I can't imagine that Laurel or I would have thought to make the built-in lighting so nice. There were a lot of little details, like the way the lines continued from the peninsula to the cabinets across the kitchen, that are nice and make the house look amazing but are things that we never ever would have thought of, or really even cared about.

A lot of people have asked me about whether the whole Architect/General Contractor thing was a good choice. I can't really answer that because the outcomes would have been completely different. I probably would have been happy with both. I am definitely happy with our current situation. Though, I did feel like at the beginning we were being whirled around into a land that we weren't completely comfortable with. I can't speak for Laurel, but I'm not used to the idea of spending lots of money thinking about the interior lighting of our house. I can appreciate the difference between nice lighting and bad lighting, but I never would have explicitly decided to pay somebody to make our house's lighting "better". At one point during the design process I felt like there was a cabal of architects and contractors who plan to make people give their money to them. I know that it's not explicit like that, but it is indeed an industry that needs to keep itself afloat.

So, I didn't answer the question. Here's my one-size-fits-all answer:

1. If the project is small and not scary then do it yourself.
2. If the project is small but a little scary then hire a contractor to do the job.
3. If the project is large and overwhelming and you don't mind spending some time coordinating things then hire an architect on an hourly basis and get advice from him. A full set of drawings is probably not that important. Hire contractors to do the work as necessary.
4. If the project is large and overwhelming and you can't deal with each of the contractors or how they are going to interact with each other then hire a general contractor.
5. If the project is large and overwhelming and you can't spend any time dealing with stuff hire an architect and general contractor to do everything.

So, we're done. We are going to move back into our house this Saturday. We're both so excited.

Renovation (Week 28)

Today was a busy day. I think that it was the first day that people could go into the house after the floors were redone. I got there at 8am and the electricians were already at work finishing the trim out. Then a lady from one of the Blinds companies arrived to measure our windows. She noticed the far window in the front bedroom and immediately knew that it had used to be in the entryway. She said that she renovated a house on 4th Ave in Queen Anne that had almost exactly the same configuration.

Then the cable guy arrived to install the cable internet service. It took a lot longer than expected because he decided to replace the coaxial cable coming into the house. I wonder if that's something that would actually improve my internet connectivity or is something that allowed him to charge more to Comcast. Anyways, after an hour or so I finally had internet access at home. Now I can move in!

Right after the cable guy arrived the architect arrived for the "punch list". I guess that just means "finally review" but architects like to use fancy words. There really wasn't much to complain about. The contractor had already tagged some locations on the walls where he wanted the painters to fix a problem. He used small pieces of blue duct tape which I really really wanted to take off. I guess that was my OCD kicking in. The architect found a few issues with the places where the different pieces of wood at the bar connected. There were also some weird spots where the trim met the cabinets that need to be dealt with. The trim line on one of the cabinet sides was bored out of cherry laminated plywood instead of a solid piece of cherry so you can see the plywood part if you get on your hands and knees and look. The contractor didn't have enough nickel screws so he used brass screws in the floor electrical plates. This is the level of detail that we are at right now. Obviously, there's not much more to do.

In fact, our moving date is Saturday October 20th, so it's just a tad over a week away.

Renovation (Week 27)

It's really almost done. I promise. Laurel is shocked!



Yes, we are really closing in on being finished. Notice the color of the kitchen. It may look slightly different from before. Yeah.... that's because it is a different color. A week or so ago Laurel voiced her distaste for the kitchen color. Then the architect chimed in and said that he didn't like it either. Now, the interesting thing is that the color that it had been for a month (two months?) wasn't the color that Laurel had picked. When the painters were about to do their first coat long long ago they put in their opinion that they thought that it would be too dark. So, stressed out, Laurel drove to the paint store and bought something several shades lighter, which is what they ended up using that day. Now, (months) later we are back to the kitchen color. They put up the original color in a spot. Then mix together a few in-between shades. And which one do we choose? The original color. So that's what is in the photo above.

The gas is now hooked up.

This week they also installed the front panels.





We also now have a fancy-shmancy thermostat with working furnace. It was on when we arrived on Sunday!



We also now have a mirror in the bathroom.



Ok, now I am running out of things that are left. Let's see, the floors need their second coat of the Swedish Finish (yes, we choose the nasty-horrible-for-the-environment high-V.O.C. crap so we wouldn't have to reapply it in a few years). The sconces need to be installed in the bathroom and kitchen. The oven needs to be installed. There are some light switches that need to be installed and the wall plates for all of the outlets need to be installed. Oh yeah, and the electrical outlet in my "server room" still needs to be added. Uhhhhhhhhhhhh. I can't think of anything else. It's pretty much done. This is the last week. Then we wait a week and we will actually move on Saturday the 20th of October.

The rest of the photos from this week can be found here.

Renovation (Week 26)

The range hood finally went in last week. It looks great (man, I really do say that too much). It was another one of those things that I hadn't seen in real life until it was installed. It has a lot more power than anything else that I've ever had, and it actually vents to the outside, unlike anything else that I've had in the past.









They also put in the bar height part of the counter top. It didn't go in before because the metal brackets that were supposed to hold it up bent right away. Not good. So the contractor ordered much stronger brackets. They will eventually be hidden by some Cherry panels.



They also put in the Paradigm in-ceiling speakers next to the range hood. I've never liked in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, but I really like Paradigm, and I figure that I might as well try them out while we're at it.

All of the photos from this week can be found here.