Travis Pettijohn: Blog

Anthony Bourdain

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:27:40 GMT

Quotes from Kitchen Confidential:

"Saving for well-done" is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisine's earliest days. ... What happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin that's been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that's a total loss. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can "save for well-done"—serve it to some rube who prefers his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam. Ordinarily, a proud chef would hate this customer, hold him in contempt for destroying his fine food. But not in this case. The dumb bastard is paying for the privilege of eating his garbage! What's not to like?

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

Packing Peanuts

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:44:44 GMT

I was cleaning up some old packaging (as well as taking down the Christmas tree) when I noticed that this box full of packing peanuts had a note in it that the peanuts were made of cornstarch. Intrigued, I got one wet and it melted away. So I dumped the whole box in the sink and stirred it in hot water until they dissolved. They washed right away. I wonder if I could thicken a sauce with them, too?

The quest for the perfect cup of coffee

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:10:01 GMT

I enjoy coffee, and am stuck on the quest for the perfect cup. There are so many variables: the quality and temperature of the water, the origin and processing of the coffee beans, the freshness of the coffee roast, the freshness of the coffee grind, the evenness of the grind, the time the grounds spend in the hot water. And of course, how those variables are combined: in an espresso machine, in a French press, in an automatic drip machine or—in my latest and best experiment—a vacuum pot.

French presses have two main flaws: they make too muddy of a cup, and they are prone to over-extraction (if the coffee and hot water are in contact for too long, the beans are over-extracted and bitter compounds are released—most cheap coffee we drink in America is made from too little coffee brewed for too long, resulting in a weak and bitter cup) as you tend to press the plunger and drink off of the still-extracting, slowly-bittering brew as you go (you can fix that by pouring the pot into a thermos immediately after plunging, but who does that?). That just leaves the muddy cup issue.

Most automatic drip machines (the typical American way of drinking coffee) don't get the water to the proper temperature and/or dump the water unevenly on the grounds and/or let the water and grounds commingle for the wrong amount of time and/or lose some of the flavorful oils to the paper filter. The fact is, once you surrender control of so many variables to an "automatic" process, you also surrender the ultimate quality of the final product.

To fix the drawbacks of the auto-drip process, I have been, for the past year or two, using a manual pour-over process. With a filter cone, a permanent gold filter and a tea kettle, you can make a damn good cup of coffee. But the gold filter does leave a little mud in the very last cup.

And then of course there is espresso—the magnifying-glass-on-your-flaws method of brewing coffee. Using a very fine grind, densely packed, being extracted by hot water forced through it under high pressure, the slightest flaw (such as an uneven tamp of the grounds) can produce a worthless shot of espresso. But with such high demands comes a high reward: a perfect shot of espresso is a dense and intense bit of coffee flavor. Like a beautiful piece of dark chocolate, there is nothing quite like it.

Today I tried out the latest method of making coffee: a manual vacuum pot. (I have since stopped using the automatic vacuum pot as I didn't like surrendering control to the automatic process.) My latest and greatest coffee gadget is a Yama 20oz stove-top coffee siphon. I also picked up a used Cory glass rod filter (search on eBay for it; it's a contraption from 1933 that'll run you $5) so that I would never have to replace the cloth filter that came with the Yama.

Vacuum pots are probably the "coolest" way to brew coffee. As boiling water causes steam pressure to build in the bottom chamber, water is forced up the tube into the top chamber, where it is now slightly below boiling temperature; when removed from heat, the decreasing temperature in the bottom creates a vacuum, pulling the coffee from the top back down and filtering it (search YouTube for an example video). Vacuum pots produce an exceptionally clean cup of coffee—even though it's just the friction of a glass rod resting in a tube holding back the grounds. The pressure from the vacuum actually packs the grounds together and pulls the liquid through it, further filtering out the fine sediment.

All things considered, this new brewer has amazing potential. I need some practice to tweak the variables that I control (size of grind, amount of grind, and extraction time), but the beautifully clean cup of coffee and the simplicity of operation will keep me happy for a while...at least until the next cool gadget comes along!

New CFL Light Bulbs

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:40:15 GMT

It's more popular than ever to be green. GE today unveiled a new compact fluorescent light bulb that is the size and shape of a traditional incandescent light bulb. Click through for a picture.

Windows Mobile 6.1 SMTP Patch

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:02:58 GMT

If you ever have trouble sending messages on your IMAP or POP3 account on your Windows Mobile 6.1 device, check out this patch from Microsoft.

Farewell for now, Straw Man

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:28:00 GMT

The presidential election is over, cleanly and decisively. I tried my best this year to avoid the pundits in entirety and instead listen to the candidates themselves. I haven't watched any of the 24-hour news channels in years. Somewhere along the way I realized that the pundits create more drama and perpetuate an "us versus them" mentality. I hear it in the media and from my friends: people attack not the candidate but the caricature of the candidate. This is called the straw man logical fallacy; rather than argue against your opponent's position you state a superficially similar and easier to attack position and credit it to him. You then attack the caricature.

Two great examples are that Obama wanted to spread the wealth and that McCain was just another Bush. Neither of these statements faithfully represent either of the men, but they are widely held as truths by many.

If you only listen to the pundits of "your" side, then you come to accept their straw men as reality. I saw it today in friends' Facebook statuses: Now begins America's slide into Socialism, Welcome to the Soviet States of America, etc. This is a reflection of the caricature, not the man.

As I listened to candidates, I came to see that I liked a lot about both Obama and McCain. Either way we would have had a new, strong leader and a break from the past eight years. A chance to revitalize our country's image on the world stage. A fresh start by an intelligent, dedicated man. Sure, there were differences in how they wanted to achieve their goals, but they both wanted the best for the country.

This year I voted for Democrats, Republicans and Greens, because I listened to the candidates and not "my" side's caricature of "the opponents." I'm proud of myself for staying out of the fray and voting for the people, not their parties, and looking for the good in the individuals. It's a good day for America, and I'm looking forward to the future.

HTC Diamond

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:30:06 GMT

I just picked up an HTC Diamond from Sprint. It's by far the best mobile phone I've owned. The display is just jaw-dropping. It's pretty speedy, and the TouchFlo 3D interface is a nice step forward. It's not as good as the iPhone, and every now and then Windows Mobile 6.1 rears its ugly stylus-head, but most things tick along with just my thumb.

A few tweaks I've made:

Remove the Sprint Music link from the music player. Frees up more screen space for album art. Also while you're editing that XML file, delete the Sprint TV. There's no need for that in the quick-launch.
A few registry tweaks. Turn on a geo-tagging camera (though I've only had it report 0,0 in flickr...wonder if they turned it off for a reason?).
Of course I installed S2U2 to lock the screen. Also remapped (#31) the "Manila" (internal name for TouchFlo 3D) home key to have a "Lock" softkey.

Economics

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:19:00 GMT

From Wikipedia:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.]

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

-Marriner S. Eccles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948, detailed what he believed caused the Depression in his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).

North Shore Century

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:44:13 GMT

Yesterday I rode my first “century,” or 100-mile bike ride, on the Evanston Bike Club’s North Shore Century. Before this ride, my longest ride ever was 50 miles. As you can imagine, it was extremely challenging. We started in Evanston, IL and rode to Kenosha, WI and back. I was on the bike for 6h37m, on the course for 9 hours. My Garmin reported that I burned 5800 calories (about 2.5 days’ worth of food, or (since fat contains 3500 calories per lb) roughly 1.6 lbs of fat). My average heart rate over the time on the bike was 143bpm (excluding rest time). Average speed was 15.5 mph.

This morning when I turned on a computer the first thing I did was make a list of what hurt. For my own future reference, here is my list. An *asterisk means that the pain is more that what I’m comfortable with, i.e., it might pushing from hard use into injury.

Neck and shoulders, from supporting the posture. Especially left side between shoulder and neck.
Forearms and hands are stiff. Lower back is mildly fatigued.
Butt is very sore. Swelling at seat-contact points.
Glute is sore & fatigued.
Bottom 1/3 of quads is especially sore & fatigued. Especially medial.
Hamstrings are stiff and sore.
Right lateral knee pain from IT band. *
Both IT bands are stiff and sore.
Top-back of calves, up into the knee. Left one feels strained, especially on the medial side connecting into the tendons under the knee. Certain strains produce sharp pain. *
Knees and the muscles that move them are very fatigued. Getting into the bathtub was a challenge.
Feet and ankles are somehow okay.

Escape from Alcatrez

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:56:55 GMT

Check out this blog entry from a guy that just did the Escape from Alcatrez Triathlon. The course looks grueling.