FEBRUARY 2011
Sunday 2011.2.27
Statistics Revisited
It will come as no suprise to those who regularly read my blog that I enjoy stats. They provide useful information. Even more enjoyable: They offer surprises.
Who knew that my French Bread recipe was going to be popular? It was, more or less, a "filler" recipe because I felt like baking bread, but I didn't think there would be much interest. There is already a basic bread recipe in the archive. However, by Wednesday the recipe was downloaded 682 times. As of yesterday the number had reached 870. Even more amazing, the number of hits on that recipe is higher than the number of hits on my home page. What does that tell you? The recipe was evidently cross-listed on other sites (content farms?), which is what raises my Google ranking.
Speaking of Google rankings, many of you might have heard that Google altered their algorithm to move content farms lower down in the rankings so that more original content ranks higher. Look up "content farm" on Wikipedia for a full explanaltion. Basically, content farm web sites offer lots of nearly useless information, but they are designed to get a lot of traffic, which raises the amount they can charge for advertising. They are revenue generators. I was invited to submit content to a content farm, but I turned it down. As for White-Trash-Cooking, this site continues to do well on Google, the content being all original material written and photographed by me. This site also continues to be non-commercial (but I am still hoping All-Clad will see an opportunity and send me a full set of their best pots and pans to be used in my videos—c'mon guys, I can work wonders for you!)
Speaking of original, today's recipe is a doozie. I hardly expect even the bravest cooks out there to attempt Roast Stuffed Boneless Chicken, but for those intrepid kitchen enthusiasts willing to try, the rewards are well worth the work. Since making the video, which was my first attempt at this unusual chicken, I have prepared this recipe addiitional times and it is always amazing when I bring a stuffed boneless chicken to the table and slice it like a meatloaf. If anything, watch the video. I find it fascinating.
In the works are an Italian recipe that layers cooked Arborio rice and eggplant, an exploration of different kinds of pesto, and pistachio nut biscotti.
Wednesday 2011.2.23
Moroccan Cooking
Always ready for the new adventure, Moroccan cooking was something new, something outside my comfort zone. And I must admit, I had my doubts. Those of you who have looked through my recipes and videos no doubt noticed I go light on the spices. One of the skills for which I am known among my friends is the way I balance the flavors. One friend hates garlic and he always watches me dubiously when he sees me adding garlic to something I am cooking. When he tastes my food, he loves it. Partly it's because of the balance of flavors—no flavor stands out as predominant except that of the main ingredient, such as lamb when I am using lamb. Partly it's because he isn't offended by the garlic. It is barely detectable. The garlic adds a little complexity, but it doesn't overpower any other flavor.
Sunday I made lamb briouats, which look a lot like Chinese egg rolls or spring rolls, but they are more slender. I had to make my own harissa, which is a spice blend paste, for which I had to grind some of my spices. I think I might have mentioned in an earlier blog that I had purchased fresh mint and hung it by a string in my kitchen to dry because I could not find ground dry mint leaves in the spice section at the grocery store. Neither could I find ground caraway seed. I keep a second coffee mill (for grinding whole coffee beans) in the cupboard where I keep my spices. That mill is only used for grinding herbs and spices.
The harissa surprised me. I was expecting to be attacked by a mob of powerful spices when I first tasted a little sample. However, it tasted good and I began to see why it was popular, and ideas came to mind as to where I might use it. To be honest, I made a very mild harissa. Typically it is blazing hot with chilies.
Then I made the briouats. The lamb is spiced, and additional spices are added when stirring in a spoonful of harissa. I really wondered if I might have wasted some good lamb. Onions were cooked, the lamb and spices were added, and then when the mixture was cooled it was rolled in phyllo dough to look like an egg roll. These were baked until lightly browned, and then we tasted them.
I invited a friend for the experiment. My friends don't mind being used as guinea pig lab subjects by me because they are rarely disappointed. The flavor was magnificent. They were spicy, as expected, but the spice was not overwhelming. It was exotic, aromatic, and just downright delicious.
I made them again the following day for a friend who is familiar with Moroccan cooking. When he tasted them his comment was, "These taste exactly as I expected them to taste. They taste Moroccan." I showed him the Moroccan cookbook from which I got the idea (and made a few modifications). He was not surprised.
So I am delighted with the results and I look forward to sharing the recipe with you. I'll post the recipe PDF and the video on this web site some time in the near future.
Sunday 2011.2.20
French Bread
Yesterday it was supposed to rain (and finally did rain toward evening), a perfect day for baking. I've been trying to master the art of perfect French bread for a while. That crisp crackly crust. That delicate and tender crumb. There are so many factors to consider. The type of flour. The ratio of flour to water. The temperature and humidity of the oven. The baking time. The internal temperature of the bread. Yesterday, finally, I got it all right, as can be seen in this week's video.
There's another reason to be happy. It was just plain fun. The more I work in front of the camera, the more I enjoy it.
This was an exceptionally good week in yet another way. It turns out there is this "policy" at work that says we have no choice but to take sick leave when we are not well enough to come into the office. We cannot work from home. Of course, they are still going to pay us the same salary. So Wednesday, down with a mild cold (we cannot go into the office with an infectious illness, even if we feel well enough to work), I made two kinds of Italian ragu—beef ragu and sausage ragu. I also made an Italian sausage flavored marinara sauce. I photographed all the steps, as I usually do, for my PDF recipes. I also videoed everything. On Thursday, still infectious with the cold, I edited all the photos. I wrote the recipe and included all the photographs before encoding to PDF. I also edited all the video clips into a finished video that was then encoded to high definition AVI for uploading to YouTube. Before noon I drove down to the city to do some shopping at the Italian Grocery, buying some things for this web site. And during the afternoon there was still plenty of time to assemble and encode Volume 3 of the DVDs I'm making of my cooking videos.
Mind you, it is "paid sick leave," and I work for a publicly funded institution. So, in compliance with "policy," I was paid to work on my web site rather than do my job. I call that: "Your tax dollars at work for you." Aren't you glad? I'm delighted.
As for the ragu: Everything is ready to publish, but I was planning French bread for today. I'm not sure when the ragu recipe and video will be published. Definitely some time during the next few months.
Wednesday 2011.2.16
Better Videos
Why I didn't think of this before is beyond me. I can think, but sometimes it takes a while.
As has already been stated, the videos are originally recorded in 720p widescreen. After editing the raw clips into a finished video, I first encode it to pre-DVD format, create the DVD, and then encode the .VOB file to the XviD (AVI) format that is uploaded to YouTube. Although the option has been right in front of me for 28 videos, I never thought to change the video resolution to the highest setting before doing the XviD encoding. Starting with the Minute Meals video, I am using the higher setting. The size of the final file is larger, but it is still well below the 2GB limit imposed by YouTube.
I asked a few people to look at the improved format and the response has been mostly positive. One recommendation is that I might want to look into makeup, as in face paint, to hide some blemishes. They're not that bad, are they? Age adds character, so maybe I'll skip the makeup for now.
Somewhat unrelated, I did the Minute Meals video (embedded on the Minute Meals page) because I was recently offered my first public speaking engagement as the owner of this web site. It's not as prestigious as it might sound. I will be speaking before a throng of...ones. I was told to expect maybe 8 to 10 people to attend. Hardly Carnegie Hall. And what are they interest in? Gourmet cooking? My Pesto Lamb recipe, which was published in a cookbook by America's Test Kitchen? No. My Minute Meals. Oh well, you take your fame wherever you can find it. It's a beginning.
As for the DVD project mentioned a while ago: I have four DVDs compiled now. They were burned to disks that are currently circulating among people I know, gathering responses. So far the responses have been positive. Whether or not I will ever offer them for sale on this web site depends on the popularity of this site and the existence, if any, of demand or interest. So far there has been very little of either. That's okay. My recipe PDFs with their step-by-step photographs are really the most useful.
Not much else going on. Today I am exploring the topic of ragu. It's not the spaghetti sauce that is found in a jar in many grocery stores. I'm talking about real ragu, the chunky sauce—as opposed to marinara, the smooth spaghetti sauce. As usual, inconsistencies arise. One book refers to them as ragù or ragoût, which another book says are stews, unrelated to pasta sauce. Whatever. A recipe will appear on this web site some time in the future.
Sunday 2011.2.13
Another Strange Dream
I had another of those dreams again. It is 5:30 in the morning. I just woke up. I decided to write about the dream at my computer rather than scribble a few notes on a pad I keep on the bureau next to my bed. The dream went thus:
The two men looked up at the little tree, pruning shears in their hands. One held a flat box in his other hand and the second man carried a small step ladder. A woman, of advanced years, sat on a bench nearby. She, too, looked up into the branches. One of the men was a little overweight. The other, in fitter form, looked older than his age. Neither was handsome.
"Can I ask you something?" The heavier man asked. His name was Walter and the other man was named Ken.
"Certainly," Ken said, reaching up with his shears and lopping of a small branch that had been leafless for many years.
"Your family had money, didn't it?"
"What makes you say that?" Ken said, paying little attention to the question. A fourth person, an elderly man dressed against the cold, arrived and sat with the woman.
The woman looked at the two men more closely. Neither of them were smartly dressed. They had clothed themselves in preparation for some manual labor, but an oddity was apparent. Their blue coveralls, meager protection against the cold, looked new. The creases where they had been folded in their package stood out in sharp contrast to the smooth, unfaded and unsoiled cotton with which they had been constructed.
"You come from a good education," Walter said.
It was true, Ken thought. He had been to an expensive college. It was a small school, but one well known for the quality of education it offered to those who could afford it. He had been hired to write copy for advertisements and the web site for the small dot-com where he and Walter worked. The company sold expensive cookware over the Internet. It was the kind of small company that hired workers who would willingly lend a hand when something outside their job description needed doing. A recent downturn in the nation's economy meant the workers were called upon more often, such as for pruning a small tree that had been neglected for too many years when the company could not afford to pay an arborist.
"My dad was successful, I guess you could say. He never graduated from high school, but he owns his own barber shop."
A few more dead branches fell to the ground.
"I find that amusing," Walter said as he picked up some of the cut branches and put them in the box. "My father went to a university and now he sells cars. Used cars." He sort of chuckled to himself in a way that left Ken to understand that money was never abundant when Walter was growing up.
"It just goes to show you," Ken said. He wasn't sure what it showed, but it seemed appropriate to say. He climbed down from the stepladder and helped Walter pick up the loose branches.
The woman stood up and walked to the box, opening her purse. She took out a small change purse and dropped some coins into the box. It was understood that the men would give the money to some local charity. It was a time for donations, being a few days before Christmas. The elderly man also opened his wallet and dropped in a few small bills.
"Thank you kindly," Ken said. Walter nodded his appreciation.
Between them they carried the box back to the office as the woman and elderly man walked away, arm in arm.
And now I am going back to bed, it being the weekend and an opportunity to sleep late.
Interpretation: All-Clad will gladly send me a full set of their Copper Core cookware to feature in my PDFs and videos when they see how hard I work on this web site without earning any money from it. (In my next dream Viking or Wolfe will ship me a new stove.)
I can dream, can't I?
Wednesday 2011.2.9
DVDs
I am still moving forward with the DVD project. There seems to be very little, if any, interest in them among the fans, but as I mentioned in an earlier blog, the DVDs are more for creating a business that will give me a tax write-off, should I buy that expensive professional video camera. The Volume 1 DVD is done and it is floating out among my friends and other associates, generating criticism. It is a compilation of the first six videos uploaded to YouTube, but some have been restored to their former longer length.
There is another reason for making the DVDs: They are just plain fun, to make and to watch. The videos you see on YouTube are compressed AVIs (actually XviD). I don't know how much YouTube compresses them beyond the initial compression I do before uploading them. They look good—very good, as many of the YouTube fans have commented to me. They are, however, compressed. The DVDs, on the other hand, look fantastic.
If you've been following these blogs you know that the original video clips are shot in 720p. For those who might not know, 720p is the high definition video you see when a television signal is broadcast in high-def. I do not have a Blu-ray burner on any of my computers. So there is no point in recording video in 1080p, although the camera is capable of it. My first encode is to the MPEG2 format for building DVDs (.m2v and .wav).
That's a lot of techy stuff, but the upshot of it all is that the DVDs look really good. Too good, in fact. The first DVD has some of the oldest videos we did. In the Texas Chili video the background is all lit up because sunlight was streaming through the windows. Suddenly the background goes dark. During the two hours the chili simmered on the stove the sun went down and evening set in. We took steps to control the background lighting better.
Some of the earliest videos were so bad, there was no alternative but to shoot new ones. The Mascarpone Cheese video is new. The Chinese Dumplings video uploaded recently was a new shoot. The old one was so bad it was downright hilarious.
As for cooking, other than putting up new Minute Meals packets for the freezer, the kitchen has been blissfully quiet. A friend visited from Spokane and I only cooked breakfast. We ate out. When I can borrow the camera again I'll continue experimenting with Moroccan cooking.
Sunday 2011.2.6
Revisiting Mascarpone
At 1,080 views and still growing, Mascarpone is by far my most popular video on YouTube. All other videos (26) combined only total 1,779. I do know I mispronounce the name in my video. It is not mahs-kar-PONE; it is mahs-kar-POH-nay*. However, like phyllo, which I usually mispronounce as FIE-loh rather than FEE-loh, it is one of those habits that is difficult to break.
Nonetheless, I did a new video for Mascarpone. I did this for several reasons, not the least of which was the mispronunciation issue. Shortly after I did the original video, that computer (I have three—some people have cats, I have computers) suffered a virus attack and there was no alternative but to format the hard disk drive and start with a fresh installation of my OS, software, and utilities. Unfortunately, when I pulled the SATA cables to make certain I formatted only the C: drive, I accidentally pulled the C: drive cable and formatted my D: drive, which was where the video files were stored. Although I do regular backups, the Mascarpone video had not yet been backed up. (Now I back up the raw video files as soon as I offload them from the camera.)
Another reason for a new Mascarpone video is the new kitchen counter that allows me to face the video camera directly. The video is much better when I can do a direct demonstration of the procedure in front of the camera.
Yet another reason for a new video is that I wanted to show how to correct a problem if the cream does not set up the way it should. I purposely made a 1-quart rather than a 1-pint batch, confident it would end up "soupy" in the center after 24 hours, which it was. I did a second setup of filter and sieve, spooned the soupy stuff into the new filter, and let it drain for another 24 hours. It all turned out properly.
And still another reason for a new video is that I needed that video to encode onto DVDs. I am still going ahead with that project. The first DVD will have Trout With Tomatoes and Mascarpone, How to Bone a Chicken (with the White Trash Martini clip restored), Texas Chili, Mascarpone Cheese, and Salmon Jerky. I might have enough room to squeeze Tuscan Meatloaf onto the disc. I'm still encoding and testing.
Unfortunately, there is no provision on YouTube to replace an existing video with a newer version. The former video would need to be deleted and the new video uploaded as a different file. I would lose all the Insight data connected to the original. I don't mind losing the viewing statistics, but I can't lose all the connections. My Mascarpone video is cross-listed on several other web sites and that is what helps my web site have a good listing on the search engines.
*Splitting hairs: Some books say mah-skar-POH-nay, putting the S in the second pronounced syllable, while other sources divide the syllables as mas•car•po•ne. Does it matter?
Wednesday 2011.2.2
The Wheels Are Turning
Not long ago I mentioned my plans to purchase my own professional video camera. It's a doozie. It's expensive. So I've been trying to think up a way of turning this web site into a business that would allow me some write-offs. I don't have any advertisements yet, and if any potential advertisers were interested I could probably get, oh, I don't know, a buck fifty-five per month, what with the few page views this site gets each month. After all, this web site is still in its infancy.
So here's an idea: Offer my videos as fully encoded DVDs. They wouldn't cost much because they would literally be burned on DVD blanks using this computer. Without a CD/DVD printer they would likely have no better than a hand-written label. It's possible. The video is originally shot in 720p wide screen and they are easily encoded to the ".m2v" and ".wav" files that are the resources for making DVDs. In fact, when I make my AVI files for uploading to YouTube I encode them to DVD first and then encode the VOB file to AVI. I get the most economical file sizes that way.
The trick, as I see it, is to have a business selling DVDs of my own videos. The business doesn't need to be profitable. Most businesses operate in the red their first few years anyway. I just need to show income and outgo. I could probably just buy a book to show me how. Heck, this web site was built with a book open on my desk. Such a thing is possible.
If any of you might be interested in such DVDs, even if you have no intention of ever ordering one, let me know via the Contact page. If you're shy about giving out your email address, make one up. The code only checks to make sure the email field isn't blank. It doesn't validate the address. I make up phony email addresses all the time. who.me@whowhere.org. Go ahead, email address seeking spiders, spam that one!
Here's the thing: I get great ideas. I've been getting great ideas all my life. I think this web site is a great idea. It's a fantastic idea! But I never get profitable ideas. That is why I live in a mobile home and my brother and sister each live in expensive houses in ritzy parts of town. But you know what? I'm happier because I don't need to deal with the guilt. Nuff said.
Anyway, so much for my wheels turning. They might be spinning in the sand, but they're turning.