AUGUST 2011
Wednesday 2011.8.31
Lots of Little Things This Week
Big Cooking Day:
Monday was Lamb Day. I bought $70 of lamb at the warehouse store, the two largest legs in the meat display case. I had already prepared the pesto. The meat was trimmed and coated, inside and out, with pesto, wrapped and stored in the refrigerator overnight. Yesterday I roasted it. I put 40 servings in the freezer for my Minute Meals. If you want a recipe for my Pesto Lamb, click the link or look in the Recipe Archive.
I also bought some "fresh wild New Zealand ling - top loin cut" (I'm assuming that is ling cod) at the warehouse store for an experiment. I bought the smallest piece (1.5 pound) and cut it into about ten little steaks. I used the coating mix for my Finger Lickin' Chicken and coated the fish the same way I would the chicken before frying it in oil. It was delicious. The ling is a flaky fish that requires gentle handling, but none broke apart in the process.
Disruption of Service:
I got word from my hosting service, a local provider here in the same town as I live in, letting me know that they were planning to move my site to a new server. I don't know why, but I'd like to think it is because my site is so special that they wanted to give it the benefit of a newer, faster, better server. Hopefully no one was inconvenienced by the change.
Putting On the Teacher's Cap:
I also got a request this week to teach someone to cook. I'm hoping we can do a video of the process. It will be interesting/amusing because my video guy broke a finger in his martial arts class and his right hand is in a cast, but he wants to run two cameras to video the teaching. Interesting/amusing might be an understatement. I've never edited two video streams, so that will also be interesting/amusing, especially because his camera is 720p and mine is 1080p.
Lunch With My Friends Today:
Today I met with former workmates for lunch. It's always fun catching up with what's happening around the office. Then I walked around and met with other friends, sitting with two for an hour and a half. It's amazing the things we can find to talk about. Next week I'll be doing it again.
So, to sum it all up, I am still very much enjoying retirement.
Sunday 2011.8.28
New England Weather
I was born in Webster, Massachusetts and I grew up in Mystic, Connecticut. I've been through a few hurricanes, but not as serous as the storm they experienced overnight. Mystic is on the coast, not quite on Long Island Sound, but well within the danger zone.
My father liked to drive around after a hurricane and look at the damage. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Dad liked things to be sensational. Maybe he needed that in his life. I remember approaching the beaches in Rhode Island in the family car and being stopped by water in the road for a long distance in front of us. Rather than risk it, Dad turned the car around.
California has its earthquakes, and now so does the East Coast. I don't know which I'd rather go through. With hurricanes, at least you get plenty of advance warning and therefore you have time to prepare. However, they damage such wide areas compared to earthquakes. They also have such long duration, lasting for hours. Earthquakes last only a matter of seconds. I think I prefer earthquakes.
As for cooking, we're almost in September. The weather will start to cool and that means soup weather. Pasta fagioli, chicken soup, clam chowder. It's also the time of year to make Real Texas Chili. I'm looking forward to it. And now that I am retired, I am really looking forward to staying home on a cold, rainy day and enjoying a good bowl of warm soup and a good book.
On days like today I look forward to the cooling weather. Today is a bread day and I don't relish the idea of the oven being on.
I've also been experimenting with a recipe I'm creating. Something easy for pasta. I've made it twice already, but I don't have it perfected yet. Nonetheless, even at this early stage, it has been delicious. I'll go shopping again for the ingredients to prepare it yet again. Someone at the farmers' market sells some of the most delicious basil I've tasted. And I need to drive down into the city to get my favorite olives—sun dried olives sold at the Italian Grocery. They are extremely good.
Wednesday 2011.8.24
TV
Now that I am home more I have time to watch television, not that there is very much daytime television worth viewing....
I was watching the food channel and found a show that I think was called Restaurant Impossible. If you're not familiar with it, this guy goes around the country helping failing restaurants fix their problems to become profitable again. If I watch the cooking channel at all, it is usually to learn something about food or cooking. This show, however, caught my attention because the restaurant he visited was the Flood Tide in Mystic, Connecticut.
I grew up in Mystic and I knew the Flood Tide. I ate there once with a woman I was dating at the time. I left Mystic permanently in 1975. So it had been a long time ago. On one hand, it was good to see that the Flood Tide was still there. Some continuity with the past. On the other hand, it was a little discouraging to know they were failing. With $10K and two days, he fixed the problems with the restaurant and at the end of the show there was a message that said five months later the restauraunt was still flourishing.
I am not given to nostalgia. I rarely think about the past. I'll never return to Mystic, not even to visit. It's not an awful place. Quite the opposite. Situated near the Atlantic coast on the Mystic River—which is not a river at all, but a salt water tidal basin—it is very picturesque and quaint. However, I am no fan of New England's winter snows or summer humidity.
Maybe you are familiar with the movie Mystic Pizza. Two of the scenes were filmed in Mystic. The rest of the movie was shot in the Borough of Stonington. Talk about a picturesque village! Stonington goes back to the Colonial days. It was once the USA's largest seaport, like back in the 1700s or so. I can't be sure, but the entire village, everything south of the viaduct, would probably fit inside New York City's Central Park. I loved the Borough. I would never live there though. The streets are painfully narrow. In summer, when the tourist trade is in full swing, the streets are so jammed with cars that the only way to move around is on foot.
No, California is the place for me. As an adolescent I dreamed of moving to the West Coast. College was my ticket. I went to a community college in Connecticut and then transferred to the University of California Santa Barbara. I never looked back. I did return to Mystic one time to visit. That visit provided confirmation that my move to California was the right decision. Other than one additional trip to New England when my mother died, I haven't been back and I have no plans. There is a small inventory of distant relatives there, but no one to be nostalgic about. Other than the fun of seeing it on TV and recognizing locations I knew as a child, there is no appeal.
Sunday 2011.8.21
Commercialism
I received one positive feedback message on my web site recently. I actually read a lot of positive comments and I respond to as many as I can, but this one in particular stood out because it touched upon a subject that I've been focusing on recently—commercialism.
The writer complimented me on my dedication to producing recipes and videos without any commercial incentive. I pay an annual fee for the hosting service and I pay to keep my domain name active. However, there are no advertisements on my web site, nor on my videos. This site does not generate any revenue.
Google approached me lately, inviting me to enter their monetization program in which I would give Google permission to attach advertisements to my videos and they would pay me when viewers clicked on those advertisements. Click-through advertising does not appeal to me. The reason is simple enough. Say only 3% of viewers click on ads. That would mean that 97% of the time the videos are providing free advertising. Imagine what television would be like if advertisers paid the TV stations a few pennies only when a viewer ordered a pizza during a pizza commercial. Broadcast television would become extinct. Currently the click-through rate on banner ads is well below 1%.
I printed the agreement from the monetization program. It is 13 pages long. I tried to read it (lest I sign up to be part of a human centipede experiment). I read as far as page 6 and then started skimming for dollar amounts. Nowhere does the agreement specify how much revenue is paid per click-through. I had lunch with a friend whose son signed up for the program. His son was earning pennies per month.
Another issue is that I have no control over the ads attached to my videos. Many years ago I wrote and published a couple books and I was interviewed on radio. It was fun, but during the hour of short interviews between songs and commercials one of the advertisements was for penis enlargement. Some friends who listened to the interview joked with me about that.
I am not totally immune to commercialization. I've joked about wishing All-Clad would recognize my brilliance and send me a set of their best pots and pans to be used in my videos. In truth, I'd rather some French company send me a full set of their best solid copper cookware instead.
I do monitor my site's traffic. I've written about statistics before. So far the most popular recipe this year has been Chinese Dumplings (Pot Stickers) with 1,669 downloads. Mascarpone is second (1,577) and Finger Lickin' Chicken is gaining fast—1,549 downloads since it was posted 4 weeks ago. Yesterday's hot item was Pesto with 49 downloads in 24 hours. Outside the USA my site is most popular in Russia, with 552 hits so far this month. Of my 56 videos on YouTube the most popular has been Mascarpone with 4,571 views as of this morning. Those numbers are minuscule compared to what the big sites do PER DAY.
I don't have a mission statement for my web site. If I did, it would be fairly simple. "Have fun." I'm having fun. Yes, it costs money, but a lot less than a day of skiing. So far I have even resisted my friends' recommendations to put a "Contribute" button on my web site. Do they really generate enough revenue to pay the site's expenses? If I were as large as Google or Microsoft maybe the revenue would be worth it. However, I'm a tiny fish in a very humongous ocean and, personally, I kind of like it that way.
Wednesday 2011.8.17
Fun With Computers
As I've mentioned before, I have three computers, which I built myself. Now that I am home most of the time, I've been playing with Windows 7. I bought the Home Premium edition, but I doubt I'll ever use it much. I am too dependent on XP. Most of my software, utilities, and hardware are old. For example, I have a beautiful office laser printer that does not have a USB connection. It uses the old parallel port, which isn't standard on today's motherboards. (I had to buy a parallel port card to attach my printer.) I spent almost $1,500 when I bought that printer many years ago. Although the printer is old, it is only on its second toner cartridge. In terms of usage, it's still almost new.
As for the software and utilities, they do everything I want to do and I therefore don't want to move up to Win7 compatible stuff. Oh, I know the OS is supposed to be backwards compatible, but have you ever found that to be 100% true? I don't even want to think about it. XP does everything I need. So unless I am forced to make a change, I will keep my XP boot disk and return to it when I need to.
This one computer is set up really well to make that easy. I blogged about the fan and frame I fabricated for it. I can pop out the XP hard disk and pop in the Win7 hard disk and boot up. It's convenient having two OSs within arm's length.
All this comes to the fore because yesterday I tried to assemble a video that was too long. My video software seems to dislike anything longer than about 25 minutes. It gets through most of the encoding, which takes nearly two hours, then around the time when I am tasting the food in the video the program crashes. Two hours wasted. I can encode the video as two half-sized sequences and join them later, but that's a nuisance. So, I'm installing the video software on Win7 at this very moment to test it with this long video. (I'm writing my blog because I need something to keep me busy while I'm waiting for the installation to complete.)
I'll try encoding the video using the same software in Win7 and hopefully it won't crash before the final credits. I'll let you know what happens.
Later That Same Day...
It worked! (Congratulations Dennis! You da MAN!!!) While I went shopping down in the city the two-hour encode went perfectly. I just generated the VOB files I need and then the AVI that I will post to YouTube. I tested the AVI and it looks fine. Now I can sit and enjoy my coffee.
Sunday 2011.8.14
First Anniversary (or is it a Birthday?)
This week marks a milestone: One year this site has been on the Internet.
Positives:
I never missed an upload. Every Sunday, without fail, I succeeded in posting my new, featured recipe for the week.
I never missed a blog entry.
Every recipe has its own video. I have 55 videos on YouTube (53 recipes, one video on sharpening knives, and one video about my Minute Meals).
Early obstacles were overcome quickly. I learned a lot about the software I use to create the web site and the videos. I also learned more about photography and videography. I still do both all my myself. In fact, everything about this site is a one-man-show. I run the video camera, take the still photos, write the recipes, edit everything, create the HTML pages, and post everything to my web site. For being accomplished entirely by one person, it ain't bad.
I got some new hardware. I bought a 50mm lens for my digital camera. That makes it possible to do the final food shots with the depth of field I want. Special thanks to professional photographer Rob Rolle for that excellent tip. Then I spent a lot of money on a professional video camera, tripod, SxS memory cards, and an extra battery. You wouldn't believe how expensive all that stuff was! However, I retired with over 420 hours of vacation and compensatory time on the books, all of which had to be paid out to me. That windfall paid for the video equipment.
Negatives:
Hmm. I can't think of any. This has been a lot of fun and I plan to continue having fun. Other than a former friend who had nothing postive to say about my site, every comment from visitors has been positive and encouraging. (Well, there was that one fringe dweller who made strange comments about my French bread video....)
Looking forward:
I love being retired. I can't say it enough. I am having so much fun experimenting with food, solving problems and perfecting techniques, in preparation for the video session. I still keep up my routines. I still bake bread every other weekend. Yesterday was a bread day.
Unfortunately, I do waste a lot of food. I could probably feed the city's homeless people on the mistakes I throw in the trash. I've made some dishes as many as 10 times before I got things right. My Genovese Savory Pastries (to be posted this fall) is a perfect example.
How am I celebrating my one-year anniversary? I bought a goose ($45!!!) and I will be experimenting with a very unusual recipe. I'll let you know how it turns out. If it tastes good, I'll post the recipe and video for Christmas.
Wednesday 2011.8.10
Having Time
I hate to keep bragging about it, but retirement is just plain wonderful. I have time to do so much more. There is plenty of time to cook and do videos. Back when I had only Saturday and Sunday, there was pressure to get a recipe right the first time so that I wouldn't waste a cooking day fixing mistakes. When everything went perfectly, which was rare, I might do two videos in one weekend. Sometimes I had to do pick-up shots after work in the evenings to complete a video. In one of such shot, I needed to do the "tasting" clip at the end of the video in which I make Chinese dumplings (pot stickers). Dumplings are a lot of work to make and I didn't want to go through all the effort to replace one clip. So I wrapped a piece of bread in some raw dough, boiled it, and turned on the camera. Pretending I was tasting a delicious dumpling, I ate the hunk of bread and created the shot I needed to finish the video.
Now it is much easier.
On Monday I made shrimp crêpes, something I whipped together many months ago when a friend asked me to teach him how to make crêpes. When trying to assemble the clips into a video, I discovered an important clip was missing. I remember doing the step. I must have mistakenly believed I had turned on the camera when in fact I hadn't. Rather that do a pick-up, I simply shot the whole video again yesterday. I can always find room to eat more shrimp crêpes.
I don't even feel pressured to do two videos each week. I have eight videos "in the vault" for future use. That's two months of videos, assuming a publish one each week. No pressure.
I also came up with a new idea for my videos. YouTube insight statistics showed that many people watch the beginning of my videos, but they don't finish them. That's understood. After watching once, they only need to see the beginning again to write the ingredients down, which I explain at the beginning of each video. In the latest videos I am providing a text list of the ingredients at the end of each video. I still cover the formula in the beginning, but the added list it to make it easier to write things down.
So there is even time to go back into the older videos that are in the vault and add the ingredient list. Yep, being retired sure takes the pressure off.
Sunday 2011.8.7
Home Projects
Yesterday I mentioned one of my home projects this week: Making curtains for the living room. A lot of people think it's unusual that I know how to run a sewing machine. "Does that make you a seamstress?" "No, a tailor."
As I mentioned yesterday, I got involved with theatre for a while in college and had to work part of the time in the three technical areas: Scene shop, costume shop, and lighting. I think I was also supposed to work in run crew, but I never signed up for it. In the first play I was in I was on stage for a good minute. The rest of the time I worked backstage with the crew shifting scenery and props. So I did my part.
My favorite area was the scenery shop. I was also good at drafting and scene design. One of my instructors wanted me to go into scene design as a profession. One of my more memorable experiences was when I started an upper-division scene design class. The instructor told us to bring our portfolios to class and we were to put them out on display for the rest of the class to view. "You'll need to learn how to present your portfolio if you want to work in theatre." Then he said he would present his portfolio to show us how it is really supposed to be done. It was decided to proceed alphabetically according to last name. My last name begins with a "V" and I was therefore the last student to present. There were only eight people in the class, but the presentations took all week.
I knew my portfolio was hot because I had already won an American College Theatre Festival award for my costume designs for Edward Albee's play, Seascape. I did all my scene designs and lighting plots on expensive vellum using ink and Rapidographs. I still have my original three Rapidograph Technical Fountain Pens. They are beautiful drawing pens.
When my time came to present, I filled several large tables with my drafting, water color renderings, and my award. The students pored over them for most of the class. Finally the instructor brought the class back to order. When asked about his portfolio, he wouldn't display it. "You've already seen enough." I dropped the class.
As for sewing machines, I have two very old machines—one is a domestic (model 15) and the other is an industrial (31-15). Both are Singer. They were built back in the 1930s or 40s—black enamel with gold decals. The domestic was found in an attic and given to me. It needed a few parts, but I fixed it up. The industrial had been sitting upstairs in storage at the theatre for years. The staff needed me to work during the summer to build a show, but there was no money in the budget. I suggested working for the industrial sewing machine. They agreed. We built the show in six weeks and I got to take the machine home. I still use it.
Wednesday 2011.8.3
Verbosity
Sometimes I think I might talk too much.
In a recent email message I learned that another person had subscribed to my YouTube channel. I looked at his page and saw that he subscribed to a few other cooking channels. When I looked at one of the cooking videos, it only ran for about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The chef prepared a dish, but he only gave the most minimal directions, like what you might see in a printed recipe. Part of the video was a static list of the ingredients, which took up the last 30 seconds.
I'd been working on the Lamb and Sausage Pie video, which will be posted on Sunday, and it ran for well over 22 minutes. I decided it was too long. So I went through it and cut it down to the basic instructions and just a few explanations of things. It got it down to just over 17 minutes and 47 seconds. I timed myself while just reading the recipe, ingredients and preparation, and it came to 4 minutes 35 seconds.
I should try talking in sentence fragments.
Just to prove to myself I could do a video in under 10 minutes, I did Lamb and Pappardelle, a dish that is very quick to make (but it tastes like you've been cooking all day). The finished video was just under seven minutes. Not bad.
The Lamb and Pappardelle, by the way, was delicious, as it always is. I've made it many times. The recipe and video will be posted on the site in the next few weeks.