NOVEMBER 2011
Wednesday 2011.11.30
Oral Surgery Again
Yesterday morning I sat through the final phase of oral surgery for the implant to replace a lower front tooth. This time the surgeon removed the screws that had been holding the bone graft in place for the past few months. He kept saying, "Perfect." He then implanted the titanium post into my jaw. I didn't even need stitches, except to close the incision where the screws were removed. Such surgery fascinates me.
I asked him how the bone graft looked. We were hoping it would fuse well. He said, "We couldn't ask for better. It's solid, so there is a very high probability that the implant will succeed."
Once again I went through it almost effortlessly. Dentistry doesn't bother me as it does some people. The only pain was when he was pinching my lower lip to hold it down while he worked on me. He really pinched it hard. That hurt. Afterward, the only issue, which I always hate, is waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. I hadn't slept well during the night; so after the surgery I went to bed and slept for over an hour. That really helped. I woke up feeling fine. As for my mouth, there was a little discomfort yesterday, for which I took some naproxen. Today I'm feeling very little pain.
The post needs three months to cement into my jaw. Then I'll be ready for the final crown that will put an end to this ordeal that began back in January. Meanwhile, I can still wear the flipper that holds a prosthetic tooth to fill the gap, which means I can still do videos.
Movies
I have of late been enjoying more time for watching movies. It is embarrassing to admit that I have many films on DVD, Blu-Ray, or downloaded that I have not yet watched. The number totals nearly 200.
One of the programs I use for this web site is an application that converts my cooking videos to XviD format for uploading to YouTube. The software has settings for other conversions, such as the MP4 format that is compatible with my NookColor. One of my many projects, now that I am retired, is to convert those unwatched films, a few at a time, and put them on my Nook. I've been watching one film per day. Some are awful, puerile, sophomoric attempts at making a movie with no-talent actors, writers, and directors. Some, however, are fairly good.
I don't mind spending money on a DVD or Blu-Ray that I will watch again and again, but I hate wasting money on junk. So I often download a copy first, view it, and if I really like the film I order it on disk, if it is available. A Korean film I looked for was not available in any format here in the USA. I was, however, able to find it in DVD NTSC format for download.
So, while I am recovering from the oral surgery, I will use the time to catch up on some of my unwatched movies.
Sunday 2011.11.27
A Thanksgiving for Which to be Thankful
I am very pleased that this past Thursday was one of the most enjoyable Thanksgiving holidays I have experienced in a long time. Every year I am usually called upon to cook something. I enjoy cooking; so sometimes I don't wait to be asked, I volunteer. Nonetheless, this year I didn't particularly feel like cooking. I was worn out.
I had bought two turkeys—they were, after all, only 89¢ per pound at the warehouse store. I filleted all the meat, roasted it, portioned it, and packaged it for my Minute Meals. I put more than 90 servings in the freezer. All the trim was simmered in a stock pot with a mirapoix of onion, carrots, and celery, then strained and portioned for freezing. It was a lot of cooking, but I won't need to cook like that again for many months. With all the lamb and chicken I also have put away, I might not need to cook again for six months—except when making videos for this web site, of course.
Another Thanksgiving issue, that I'm sure is common for many, is having to sit for hours with some persons whose company we'd just as soon avoid. It's civil, pretending to enjoy their presence, but it is always with a great feeling of relief when we get into the car and drive away. Last year I really enjoyed the hostess. She's a sweetheart. But there was that other individual whose company I have thankfully been spared for more than a year.
I really enjoyed my day at home. At this time of year my antivirus software always expires. The vendor inundates me with daily reminders of the need to renew, wanting me to pay them for another year of service. However, every year I buy a new version at the warehouse store, using a coupon to get a newer disk at a lower price than the cost of renewing the subscription.
I have three computers, which I built myself, two of which are connected to the Internet. (The third, my test rig, has never been connected—I keep that one perfectly safe.) One of the problems when installing the new antivirus software is that it always forces me to uninstall a firewall program that is crucial to the maintenance of some software. No antivirus/firewall program is perfect. They all have weaknesses, and therefore they might have back doors that could be exploited by unscrupulous programmers. I believe having duplicate, redundant protection is better than relying on only one piece of software for protection.
So I installed the antivirus software, let it uninstall my firewall program, and then I reinstalled the firewall after the antivirus software finished installing. I do it every year and everything continues to work harmoniously. Of course, I then need to reconfigure the firewall, but I have a system to do that fairly easily. I did all this on Thursday, getting both computers updated and safe again—another reason to be thankful. I don't need to sit through a Thanksgiving dinner, itching to get home and solve the software problems that need my attention.
I still have to get through Christmas. Last year I escaped having to cook something. Hopefully this year's Christmas holiday will be as relaxing and enjoyable—and less technical in nature.
Wednesday 2011.11.23
I Am Not a Doctor
Other than knowing how to put a band-aid (plaster) on a cut, I have no medical knowledge whatsoever. Nonetheless, I might go down in history with Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Florence Nightingale, and Joyce Brothers.
About once every few years I get a cold sore on my upper lip. This is something that really pisses me off, especially when one erupts when I am planning to do an important video. They are caused by the herpes simplex virus, which supposedly most of us carry and pass on to our children by kissing them too much when they are babies. Thank you mom and dad.
Late last week I felt that tingling sensation on my lip that usually precedes a sore. I looked in the mirror and, sure enough, a bump was forming. That leads to the blister that bursts, etc. If you get cold sores you know the routine.
Another issue I've had since childhood is canker sores. I rarely get them now, but many years ago a dentist saw that I was recovering from a large one on the roof of my mouth. He gave me a prescription for Kenalog-orabase. The generic name is triamcinolone 0.1% paste. A little dab on the canker sore two or three times a day usually clears it up in 48 to 72 hours. Even though I rarely use the stuff now, I regularly request a new prescription when the old one expires. I got a new tube yesterday, prescribed by the oral surgeon who is doing the dental implant. (I go in next week to get the titanium post put in, wait three months for that to cement, and then get the final crown some time in February/March, 14 months after the initial problem—it has been a long haul.)
What the hell? What have I got to lose? My upper lip? I put a little dab of triamcinolone on a small band-aid, moistened it with a couple drops of hydrogen peroxide (3% solution), and stuck it onto the bump. Nothing happened. And by nothing I mean the cold sore never appeared. I kept up the treatments, two or three times a day, for several days. The tingling sensation was there, but no cold sore. Relief! I was able to do two videos this week.
Of course, my single self-experimentation trial is hardly the kind of laboratory-controlled double-blind study that would get me published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Nonetheless, if this stuff really works, I feel like I have a better weapon than patience to deal with the sore when it occasionally ruins my plans.
If you start seeing reports next year about a radical new cold sore cure involving triamcinolone and hydrogen peroxide you'll know some laboratory scientist wastes his time reading this blog.
Sunday 2011.11.20
Chef's Reward
Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA. This is the time of year when the warehouse store stocks turkeys at 89¢ per pound. The grocery store has turkeys that cost less, but they are an unknown brand and frozen. I don't want to wait for the bird to thaw. The warehouse turkeys are a well-known brand name that I know and trust and they are fresh, not frozen. I bought a 22-pound bird for my Minute Meals.
Everyone probably already knows about my Minute Meals. There is a button on the left that will take you to the page. Briefly, they are my way of eating healthy meals of balanced nutrition without all the labor of prepping, cooking, and washing up. I cook a lot of food in one day, portion everything into little pouches, and store them in the freezer. When I am hungry I put a portion of meat along with two portions of vegetables on a paper plate, heat them in the microwave, and eat. When I am done, I have nothing to wash but a fork.
So yesterday I deboned the entire turkey. I seasoned and roasted the boneless breast, thigh, and drumstick meat. After letting them cool for a while I portioned them for the freezer. I put away a total of 46 servings. That's less than 50¢ per serving. Other than cooking for this web site, I shouldn't need to cook like this until maybe February or March. I have chicken and lamb in the freezer as well.
The trim—bones, skin, neck, and wing tips—went into the refrigerator. Later today I'll simmer them in water with a mirepoix of carrots, onions, celery, and herbs to make turkey stock, which I'll use for soup.
The wings were divided into drumettes and wingettes, which were sautéed in butter until cooked. That was my lunch. I refer to that as the Chef's Reward, my wages for all the hard work or preparing and roasting the turkey meat.
Wednesday 2011.11.16
Can I Brag a Little?
Or How to Fool a Nikon Digital SLR…
Without any good reason I was gifted with really good color vision. I have a 16-square-foot oil painting of an Italian (Umbria) villa in my living room, which I painted using only four colors of paint—red, yellow, blue, and green, which is not a primary of pigment, but a primary of light; so I gave it a place of honor in my painting—and, of course, a huge tube of white. I mixed all my own colors. It took five months to complete the painting.
I have issues with my Nikon Digital SLR when taking photographs for my recipe PDFs. The photographs all have an unnaturally saturated yellowish hue. When I write the recipes for this web site I first need to post-process all the photographs, increasing the cyan and blue hues until the wood counter top looks like natural wood. When I get the wood right, all the other colors balance properly.
I think the problem is that I am using a flash at the same time as my halogen studio lights in the kitchen. I simply can't get a proper white balance with a proper white card. Setting the white balance with studio lights and no flash doesn't help. However, when I work with natural lighting at the window or outdoors, a white card gives me excellent white balance. Ergo, it must be my lighting and not my camera.
I bought some "ultra pure white" latex paint and a tube of water mixable cadmium yellow artist color. I mixed what I thought might be the best hue to fool the digital SLR into a false white. I painted one side of a Styrofoam panel, leaving the other side, which is pure white, untouched. I took several test photographs after adjusting the white balance using each side of the foam panel. It took a couple of paint mixtures, but I finally worked it out. Using the painted side of the panel to set my camera's white balance gives me the most natural kitchen photographs.
Yesterday, just to be certain, I did the photography for an upcoming recipe, my homemade Bailey's Irish Cream. For each photo I set the white balance with the white side of the panel, shot the picture, set the white balance again using the yellow side, and shot another photo. Later, when I post-processed the photos for the recipe PDF, all the shots done with the yellow-biased white balance were superior. No need for color balance.
I don't know how I knew that very pale cadmium yellow (I looked at several tubes of artist colors at the store) would give me the best color subtraction, but it worked. That's one of the aspects of photography that I enjoy. Sometimes you need to invent your own stuff, and that can be both challenging and fun.
And Another Thing:
Each year during Thanksgiving week I usually reload one of my computers. It looks like I'll be starting a week early on Computer-1 this year. Its C drive is bluescreening.
Sunday 2011.11.13
I Love a Really Productive Day
Yesterday stands out for two reasons: 1. I made a really delicious soup, Butternut Soup (made with butternut squash), and 2. I did everything all in one day, from concept to finished files, to put the soup recipe here and the video on YouTube. But don't look for them yet. I need to proofread the recipe first.
At about 9:00 in the morning I started setting up my home for a video. I put blackout drapes over all the windows. I set up the lighting, the video camera, and my still camera. By about 10:00 I was ready to start filming.
I prepared the soup per the recipe I had planned, shooting both the video clips and all the still photography. Before 1:00 in the afternoon the soup was done, along with the video. I did the final "royal" photographs of the soup in a bowl, garnished with a few croutons.
Then it was time to move to the computer. All the photographs were edited (color, brightness, contrast) and sized for the recipe PDF. The recipe was written, with all the Step-by-Step photographs placed and exported to PDF. The video clips were imported into my editing software. The video was assembled and edited, combiled, encoded to DVD, and then encoded for upload to YouTube.
Finally, this web site was updated for Sunday's (today's) uploads, including writing this blog entry. Before 7:00 in the evening I was done. Everything, from concept to finished files, were completed in about 10 hours. I even had all the dishes washed and put away and backed up all the computer files. That is I call a really productive day!
The recipe for the Butternut Soup will be uploaded here and to YouTube in coming weeks. I pretty much have every upload covered through the end of the year and into January. Only December 25th, Christmas Day, is blank. I might need to shift a few things because I think the Butternut Soup would be a good Christmas Day meal sort of soup. Maybe I'll move 11/27's Chicken and Fettucine to a later date and upload the soup then. We'll see.
Wednesday 2011.11.9
Google+
On Monday Google+ opened up its social network site to company pages. I immediately jumped in and created one for this web site. However, since writing this blog (I'm editing it 11 years later) the site has been removed. Therefore, I removed the link from this page. The following has been kept for archival purposes.
Yesterday two sites had already added mine to their circles and so I added them to mine. Both sites are about food, which is what I wanted. The photographs are excellent. As I am trying to improve my own food photography, it is really beneficial to see their work up close. From one guy it seemed like the photographer and cook are not one and the same. They pile a plate high with food, photograph it, and then they each grab a fork and dig in. It sounds like a quality life to me. I cook it, photograph it, then give it away.
I added the Google+ badge to my home page (down at the bottom of the left panel). I had issues though. Clicking the badge directed traffic away from this site. I wanted it to behave like the Facebook badge, which opens a new window, leaving the present window still open to my site. I know a little HTML now, having built this site on my own. I added a target="_blank" tag to the href code and that solved the problem. Don't ask me questions about HTML. I know about one gazillionth of what most people know.
The Facebook fan page is a good place to announce what I'm cooking and what is coming up soon. I put a lot of photographs there. I'm not sure if a fan page can have "friends." I did get some fan requests from people who were far more interested in promoting their agenda than in participating in my page. So those went away. I really prefer Google+'s setup—separate circles for each page. Later today I'll upload photos to the Google+ page's albums.
For those of you who are wondering about my taste buds issue: Things are almost fully back to normal. I am tasting foods properly again.
For those of you who are wondering about my root canal issue: I go in this afternoon to finish the work.
For those of you who are wondering about my dental implant issue: I go in on the 21st of this month to see if the bone graft is strong enough to support the implant.
It seems like I have a lot of issues....
Sunday 2011.11.6
Down (sort of) With a Cold
This week I am inflicted with a cold. Nonetheless, I did a lot of cooking, more than I'm used to doing, but mostly for me, not for this web site. I ran low on some protein portions for my Minute Meals. I had been forcing myself to eat out of the freezer (heating items before I ate them, naturally) because the freezer was packed so full I couldn't fit anything more in there. The only new food I bought was nearly 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of chicken thighs (bone in) to restock the protein portions.
It was a bit of a nuisance having to go shopping with a cold, but I did it on my bicycle because I need the exercise. There was way too much chicken trim already in the freezer. So that trim, combined with the trim from deboning more than 50 chicken thighs, went into a large stock pot. There is a recipe for my homemade Chicken Stock in the Recipe Archive. Look under "Basics."
All the chicken thighs were roasted, in three batches, and the stock was filtered and frozen in individual 1-cup containers. I ended up with 17 cups of concentrated stock, plenty for making chicken soup this winter. Some days I like to simply melt a cup of frozen stock in the microwave, dilute it a little if necessary, add a little salt, and sip it. Homemade stock tastes wonderful. Not everyone has the time, but for me it is worth the effort. And, of course, I cook with it a lot. I usually make vegetable stock for my Pasta Fagioli, which I make every winter, but now I have enough chicken stock to use instead.
I should have videoed the process. The day was a mass production cooking marathon: Shopping in the morning, then a dozen packages of chicken thighs deboned and trimmed, vegetables chopped, thighs roasted, stock made and filtered, cooked thigh meat portioned and frozen, stock portioned and frozen, and in between I washed dishes. I even made some mashed potatoes. It felt good getting it all done. This is what I like about my Minute Meals. I cook like a crazy man for a day (I wasn't finished until 6:30 in the evening), but then I don't need to cook for many weeks. Just heat and eat. As a reward to myself, I made Pasta Fagioli yesterday. It was yummy!
In about a week the warehouse store will stock fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving. I typically buy one, filet the whole bird, roast the meat, and make stock with the trim. The last time I did this I remember putting 42 servings of turkey in the freezer for my Minute Meals. This week I put 41 servings of boneless chicken meat in the freezer. I'll need to eat out of the freezer all this week to make room for the turkey meat and stock.
The day being done, I lied down and did some reading. I am currently working my way through all seven Harry Potter novels again. I'm nearly through the fifth book. When those are done, I'll return to some of the beloved classics I mentioned yesterday in the Diet Blog.
Wednesday 2011.11.2
A Little Light Housekeeping
As I've been announcing in the home page for the past few weeks, it was time to reorganize this web site a little. The changes were sweeping in scope, from a behind the scenes perspective, but you won't notice much difference. Mostly I updated some internal labeling, applying one convention to many files. The whole process took about an hour and a half (and I spent a good part of the day setting it up before doing the upload).
There were only a few types of changes:
- I removed the Basics page and all buttons and links pointing to it. It wasn't a popular page.
- The Recipe Archive was organized into subheadings to make it easier to find recipes. One of the headings is "Basics," which is where all the former Basics recipe PDFs and videos were relocated.
- I modified the names of most of the recipe PDFs. Some had spaces (which is bad form in HTML), some had no spaces and used "CamelCase" (AmericanChopSuey, for example), and some used underscores for spaces (American_Chop_Suey). I adopted the underscore to represent spaces as the convention for all labels.
Please do me a favor. If you find any broken links, let me know by means of the Contact page. You don't need to enter your real email address if you'd prefer not to. Just use any text that looks like an email address (test@test.com) in the field and the software will accept it. If you do choose to give me your email address, I won't do anything with it (except maybe say "Thank you"). It isn't stored anywhere. No spider or worm will find it and send you loads of spam email. It just goes into an email sent to this site's email address. Some people use conventions to sidestep the spiders, such as white(hyphen)trash(hyphen)cooking(dot)com. I don't know how effective these measures might be, but I do see them often.
As for broken links, I am fairly confident there won't be any. I did a site check by means of the software and everything checked out okay. I also viewed the site with an Internet browser on another computer and clicked every recipe PDF link to make certain it would return the proper file. Again, everything worked perfectly. However, those seem like "famous last words" to me.
For those who like the really technical stuff (all others can feel free to stop reading now) here is the method to my madness: My stats report gives me only part of the data. I currently have 65 recipe PDFs and 27 HTML pages. Then there are the two CSS files and my little favicon, plus a few other things. There is a total of 103 URLs on this site, but the stats program reports only the most popular 30. I get less than a third of my stats data.
I really like statistics. They were my favorite math courses in college. I want a complete, comprehensive report. There is this little file called "webalizer.current" that has everything, but it is cryptic. Now, with a little cleaning and manipulation, I can import the file into a spreadsheet as a "space delimited" file and all the URLs list in one column and all the hits list in another column. It is really easy to read when I am compiling my stats. October was the first month for which I compiled complete stats on all the recipes. Cats Tongues was the most popular. Chicken and Snow Peas was at the bottom of the ranking.