Sous Vide Hanger Steak
In my previous post, I discussed some of the merits of sous vide cooking, using a medium rare steak as the most demonstrative example of the properties of this method. The proof is, of course, in the pictures and I think this picture of a hanger steak cooked medium rare(55C/130F) shows off sous vide cooking well:
Sous Vide Fennel Garlic Pork Tenderloin
Now that my kitchen is unpacked, cooking seems like the natural next step(as opposed to unpacking the rest of my belongings). Living in an apartment means that I do have some limitations with regards to how many random, expensive, but ultimately useless kitchen gadgets I should possess. Luckily I one of the main “gadgets” that I do own is a SousVide Supreme.
What is sous vide cooking? My friends may ask. Muffin(being full of bullshit) might try to convince you that the french means “under armpit” which hardly sounds like a delicious way to cook. In reality it means “under vacuum”, which is a bit of a misnomer. While vacuum sealing the food is part of cooking sous vide, the most important part of cooking sous vide is the temperature controlled water bath.
Just a teaser, here’s a picture of a pork tenderloin that I cooked sous vide recently:
More restaurants
And just like every other blog of mine, I’ve fallen into my typical habits of not posting for months. But here’s the latest in my long string of restaurants for the past month. Total puts me up to 97 since I’ve moved to Seattle. Not too shabby for 58 days.
My pacing should hopefully slow down as I unpack my kitchen and actually start to cook meals rather than eating out every day.
Completing the Housing Circle
To finish up my 3rd week in Seattle, I’ve finally put down a deposit for an apartment in Capitol Hill that seems to have a nice view. Originally I really wanted a loft, but the ones that I’ve seen in Seattle seemed fairly half-assed. Also managed to sign the lease to rent out my townhome too, so there’s a nice completion of the circle there.
But what people really care about is all the restaurants that I’ve hit this week:
Read the rest of this entry »
365 Dining
Not only have I been slacking on posting to this blog about my journey to Seattle, I’ve just been slacking about posting to this blog in general. Being in a new city is fun for exploration, and food is always the way that I tend to connect with new places, whether it be while traveling or living. Since my friends seem to enjoy doing 365 games, my current goal is to visit 365 different restaurants by the time that I’ve been in Seattle for a year(plus this will give me a reason to post about them more often). And being part of the twitter generation, I’ll do mini-reviews with each restaurant which hopefully clock in under 160 characters.
Panorama
Posted by Lee in Photography on November 11, 2009
Panoramic photo stitching used to be the realm of proprietary bundled software that came with various cameras that always seemed to generate horrible seams. Today there’s a wealth of packages of all shapes and sizes. On my trip to China in 2008, I took a few sets of photos expecting to run through the paces. The following example is some more fall foliage from Jiuzhaiguo.
But it’s really a far more exiting in a Google Maps Viewer form.
Using Photomatix with Picasa
Posted by Lee in Photography on November 5, 2009
Suddenly 2 months go by and I don’t have any posts to show for it. For shame.
My current project is to finally sort through all of the photos that I’ve taken over the years. The side benefit(even if I don’t finish) would be to have a few images with getting a print of to decorate my house. I also had the foresight(or pure masochistic desire) to take many multiple image sets for future postprocessing via HDR or panoramic stitching. Using Google’s Picasa for a cross platform management software, the most notable limitation was that I couldn’t easily pass sets of photos to Photomatix. A bit of research on Google’s API enabled me to create a button that will automagically open Photomatix with the files in my Picasa tray.
You can install my little button using this link(assuming that you have Picasa installed). Ironically the link doesn’t actually work with Google’s Chrome browser.
But since no one actually cares about my ramblings, here’s a nice HDR photo from my trip to Jiuzhaiguo in 2008:
Housewarming party
People are always polite and won’t say to the host that they didn’t enjoy a party, so I’ll delude myself into thinking that I did a good first attempt. Living in a tiny apartment has made me develop a massive hosting debt which I shall have to struggle to work off. Regardless there’s always room to improve. Read the rest of this entry »
Food storage model
Stove/Oven = Register
Countertip = L1 cache
Pantry/Refrigerator = L2 cache
Wegmans = Virtual memory
Home online
Took a couple of days to get a Verizon FIOS tech over to my new place to get my service installed. I opted for one of their bundles, which was probably more service than I need, but they were giving away netbooks alongside them. Even after the tech supposedly got it installed, I had to spend 2 days on and off the phone with Verizon tech support to clear up some issues on their end before I could finally get the following results:
Decent speeds right?
BogoPhoto
