Illustrated Cooking News

[desperance]

learnteach has invited us to a maker dinner on Sunday, and as it's his machine I currently have in-house, he asked me to make something sous-vide. So I forayed to the Chinese supermarket today and came home with ten pounds of beef rib: half of which is currently in the pot, where if all goes well it will be bubbling for the next three days at a temperature barely hotter than tapwater, in a sauce of butter and bourbon, largely. We are promised extraordinary results, like no way you've ever eaten rib before.



For contrast and comparison - which is to say, for science! - I'm going to do the same thing with the other half in the slow cooker at its very lowest setting, but that's forty degrees F higher than I have the sous-vide set, so I won't start that until tomorrow. At a brutal 175 degrees (I'm relying on my notorious memory here, but I do think that's what I measured the slow cooker at, on warm when it was full of water), a mere forty-eight hours should be plenty. Actually, it might be too much. Maybe I'll wait till Saturday morning...

In other news, this is the vehicle our new neighbour two doors down has just parked in his front yard:



Also, I may have heard my first Californian thunder this afternoon. Gladly, it came with rain. Quite a lot of rain. We put out buckets and everything.

Comments

[movingfinger]

They just tore down the house across the street from us. I hate this megamcmansion building craze. Square feet are not happiness.

[desperance]

I'm not too troubled this time, because the extant building is little more than a shack, and we knew it would be razed and new-built. The guy is planning a two-storey house, which is unusual but not unique on this street; basically this is a street of old workers' cottages, elevated into highly-desirable plots by the proximity of all the big tech companies ever. I am hoping that he is actually planning to live in it once it's built, rather than selling it on - but that's probably recidivist of me. I like "I built this for myself!" far more than "I built this for profit!" even though it makes small difference in the long run. (And he paid $600K for the privilege of knocking down the shack, so who knows? A neighbour the other side has his house on the market for a million...)