Weather |
Tuesday, September 21. 2010Bread Last week, when I wanted that Reuben, I purchased a loaf of rye bread. That was the first loaf of bread I've purchased in probably two years. Maybe more.I've been baking my own bread for that long. A loaf a week. Me. The laziest man on Earth bakes a loaf of bread every week. "How can that be?" you ask. "Baking bread is a lot of work." Not really. I've got two staples: No Knead Sourdough and Bread Machine. First the No Knead. This one's a real gem. I forgot exactly where I found it, but it's all over the Internet. 4 cups flour ¼ tsp active dry yeast 1 ½ tsp kosher salt 2 cups water That's it. Just mix everything up in a bowl that's at least twice as big as it needs to be and set aside for 18 hours. I slide the whole bowl into a two gallon zipper top plastic bag. Don't seal the bag, the dough needs to breath. Just slide the bowl in and set it aside in a warm place. Pretty much anywhere indoors is fine. If you don't have a big zipper top plastic bag, drape a tea towel over the bowl. Or some plastic wrap. You'll note that the dough is pretty wet. Don't worry, it's supposed to be. I use all purpose or bread flour. Sometimes, I substitute one cup for whole wheat flour. If I can find a local supplier of rye flour, I'll give that a try some day. After 18 hours, you'll note that the dough has about doubled in size. It'll look very wet and spongy. Liberally flour your work area. And I do mean liberally. And pour the dough out onto it. You'll probably need a rubber spatula to do this. Just scrape and pour, scrape and pour. It'll be sitting there like a big wet blob. Sprinkle some flower over the top and fold it in on itself a few times. You're not kneading it here, or even punching it down. It's kind of hard to describe. Just fold it in half, turn it a quarter turn and fold it again. Three or four times. You'll pop any giant bubbles that may have formed, which is fine, but you don't want to pop all the bubbles. Be gentle with it. Or, if you want to punch it down and knead it, go ahead. The bread will have a much finer consistency and be a bit denser, but it will still be good. At this point, I wash and dry the bowl it was in, then spray it with non stick spray and sprinkle in a bit of corn meal. Plop the dough into the bowl, cover with a towel and set aside for another hour or two. If you kneaded the dough, stick to the higher end of that range, or even longer. Towards the end of that couple hours, put your cast iron dutch oven into the oven and set the temp for 450 ( gas mark 8 ). Once the oven reaches temperature, remove the dutch oven, sprinkle some corn meal into it and plop the dough into it. Lid the dutch oven and pop it into the oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and let it bake another 15 minutes. Then remove from the oven, put your loaf on a cooling rack and give it at least 10-15 minutes before you hack into it. It'll likely be the best bread you've ever had. To store it, I wrap it in a paper towel and put it in a big zipper top bag. I don't seal the bag, I just fold the open end under. The only real problem with this is that the crust becomes chewy rather than crunchy. A minute or two under the broiler takes care of that. If I had a toaster oven, I'd use that. You could probably use a regular toaster. The Bread Machine bread is even easier. This is for a two pound loaf. If your bread machine does not accommodate two pound loaves, too bad. Put the following ingredients into your bread machine in the order listed: 1 cup milk 2 eggs + milk to make ½ cup 3 Tbs butter 1 ½ tsp salt 1 Tbs sugar 4 ¼ cups flour 1 ¼ tsp active dry yeast Again, use all purpose or bread flour. You can substitute one cup of regular flour for whole wheat if you like. Push the “go” button on your bread machine and wait. On my machine, I use the “2lb White – Dark” setting. This is some really good bread. Perfect for PB&J or smothered in sausage gravy. Monday, September 13. 2010Saturday, June 19. 2010A New Car! Here she is: My new car.A 2008 Kia Optima. 40k miles, 2.4L four, $11k with a decent interest rate. Lots of electronical stuff and I can change the radio station right from the steering wheel. I installed the water spots myself. I think they help it go faster. (Do you see that little square thing towards the back? That's where I insert money.) Tuesday, January 26. 2010Friday, September 11. 2009Which Survivor of the Impending Nuclear Apocalypse Are You? Which Survivor of the Impending Nuclear Apocalypse Are You? A Rum and Monkey joint. This one didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I'm motherfucking Tom Jones, baby! Saturday, December 13. 2008Thursday, November 20. 2008England
I recently visited a good friend in England. He lives in a little town called Ely about 10-15 miles north of Cambridge. Ely is famous for having a really big cathedral.
 Here it is. If you look closely, you can see Tarak sitting on the stone bench to the left.We took a couple of tours. One of them, you get to climb all the way to the top of the cathedral tower (not the one you can see, there's another behind it) and walk out on the roof.  Here I am at Stonehenge. From this proximity, I can all but sense the psychic emanations from the ancient alien spaceship from the future that is buried beneath...We also visited some other standing stones at Avebury. They were kinda crappy so I didn't take any pictures of them. It was like someone took a bunch of random boulders and stood them up on end. Also, I detected no ancient alien spaceship from the future there. Based on the arrangement of the stones, I would guess that they had no ancient alien spaceship to guide them at all. Much less one from the future. There was, however, a very nice pub right nearby. I believe I had some kind of ale.  Here's one of England's famous "mad cows". I think she's getting ready to pounce.On the Brian scale of goodness ( 1 being good, 0 being not good ), I'm going to rate this trip a 1. Good company, good food, good beer. I'll be back. PS: I would like to thank my darling sister for the fine coat you see me wearing. It's the perfect coat for a world traveler such as myself. Further, I would like the thank that guy on eBay who sold me the hat. Tuesday, November 4. 2008Election
I voted for Bob Barr.
Yeah. I've never heard of him either. I'm a little pissed at Ron Paul. Being as he was a write in candidate in California, he split the Libertarian vote, thus eliminating any chance they had at winning the state. Prop 8 should have been for ALL marriages, not just disgusting fags and hot lesbabes. Marriage is not a government institution, thus, no marriage should be recognized by the state. I would have voted Yes on that. No. No. No. No. What's that? Electric cars? For a billion dollars? No. No. No. That about sums up my day today. Tuesday, November 4. 200818AL + 18GA 18AL First, I printed out the trains, stocks, stock markets, initial offerings, tiles, etc., on 65lb cover stock. I have an HP Photosmart D7160 ink jet printer that supports up to 72lb stock. I think just about any home printer can handle that weight. I printed the tiles in black and white on colored stock. Since the Assorted Colors Cover Stock Variety Pack from Staples didn't have any brown sheets, I printed the brown tiles on pink (it was closest to brown). I used the "color" tiles PDF for the gray tiles. I printed the maps using the "Map in Parts" PDFs on plain white 8 1/2 x 14 paper. I printed the tokens on Avery 8165 full sheet labels. A few of the sheets for private companies and trains have info on both sides. For this reason, I do not recommend plain paper. Even with the 65lb stock, you can still see through it a little bit. On plain paper, it would be very distracting. I'm sure anyone with a home printer knows how to coax it to print to two sides. I printed the rule books at work because we have a printer there that does two sides automatically. Plus, there's a triple hole punch and free binders (don't tell my boss). I took all the stuff on cover stock plus the four pages of maps down to FedEx Kinko's for lamination. They have a hot laminator and let you run it yourself. I don't know what the thickness is, but it's pretty thick. Even the map (which is on plain paper) came out very sturdy. I imagined using the arm / guillotine style paper cutter at work to cut everything out and was dreading it. The one at the office is kind of crappy and it's impossible to do precision cuts. Turns out that Kinko's has a nifty table size rotary paper cutter that is a dream to use and very easy to do precision cuts. I spent about two hours there all told. I didn't cut the tiles all they way. Since many of the cuts are at an angle it seemed a little awkward to cut them on the paper cutter. Instead, I cut them into strips and finished the job at home with scissors. For the tokens, I ordered a bunch of wooden bits from boardgamebits.com. They seem to be perpetually out of many colors, so I had to get creative. I used plain wood color to fill in for the missing colors. In retrospect, I should have used white as the plain wood disks were quite brown. I cut the tokens from the label sheet and stuck them on the wooden bits – a very tedious, boring process. I didn't print out the money as I already have a set of high quality poker chips I use for many games. Alternately, the money from Power Grid (which I don't use because of the poker chips) would be fine. Likewise, the money from the Cheapass ultimate bit set. Or Monopoly money. I would say coins (I used coins for many games before I got the poker chips), but that's $80 in change. Take that $80 and buy Power Grid, Monopoly, and a Cheapass bit set. I should have kept track of the costs, but I'll try now to estimate. Surely, the lamination was the most expensive. Kinko's charges $1.99 per sheet. I had a total of 35 sheets including the maps. I told the guy at the counter how many I made and he kindly only charged me for 24 laminations. That's about $50 after taxes. Between the two games, there are many duplicated components. Many of the trains, for example, are the same between them. I probably could have saved a couple sheets if I'd had an eye for duplicates. Further, the tile sheets give you lots of extras. It's offered in Corel Draw format, and if I'd had Corel Draw, I probably could have saved a couple more sheets. I forgot how much the cover stock cost, so I'll just call it $10. It's 125 sheets and I used 31 I think. Still, I have no current use for multi colored cover stock. Likewise with the 8 ½ x 14 paper. I used four sheets of 500. I doubt I'll use the rest, so another $10. The labels? Again, I forgot the actual cost so, $10. I used two sheets from a 25 pack and I've got enough for four more copies of each game. The bits were $15 after shipping. So, let's see. That's about $95 total for the two games. Well over $100 if the guy at Kinko's did not give me the discount on lamination. If I amortize the cost of the unused paper, closer to $75. The end result is a professional quality game that I am quite proud to claim I made myself. Everything except the tokens is superior in quality to pretty much any component I've seen in any professionally produced game. I'm not trying to brag, I'm just extremely pleased with the result. I do have two concerns. First, I'm worried about color bleeding under the lamination. I've seen it before with dye sublimation and wax printers. We'll see how the ink jet stuff holds up. Second is the lamination itself. Since it is all cut, I'm concerned that it may begin to peel over time. Right now, they seem very durable. I am very picky about food at my game table. Nothing is allowed that will leave any kind of residue on your fingers. That leaves pretty much everything out except pretzels and roasted peanuts in the shell. And I'm not real happy about the peanuts. My roommate commented that we could eat ribs while we played this game. Anyways, this weekend it's buffalo wings, corn on the cob, and 18AL at my house! Tuesday, November 4. 2008Tuesday, October 21. 2008Which X are you?
I took one of those "Which X are you?" tests. I took it three times. Why does this guy keep coming up? And, yes, I would kill you if it would make me immortal.
Tuesday, September 30. 2008 |
Calendar
QuicksearchArchivesSyndicate This BlogStatisticsLast entry: 2010-09-21 14:30
27 entries written
10 comments have been made
Blog AdministrationPowered by
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
