JUNE 2013
Sunday 2013.6.30
Computer Work Complete
It has been a good week. Since last Saturday I have been working on a computer project to restore my system for backing up my cooking videos and TV shows. Read Wednesday's blog if you want all the technological particulars. I finished the project at 5:00pm on Thursday.
I keep two backups—one on a hard disk in an external enclosure and one burned to DVD blanks. The DVDs were the blessing this week.
To explain: I use an archive program that collects everything in a directory (or whatever I choose) and then re-assembles all the files into archives for storage. I set each archive to have a maximum size of 4.65 gigabytes (GB). That is just large enough to fill 99% of a blank DVD. It's also convenient. Consider my recent Beef Tenderloin with Mushroom Sauce video. It consists of 15.6GB in 362 files in 87 folders. When archived, it was only four files stored on four DVDs. Simple.
These were important this week because I sometimes forget stuff. Who doesn't? While I was copying my cooking videos onto my new 4TB hard disk, I checked each one for completion. When I off-load my camera files, I do a backup immediately. Then, when I edit my video, I back up the project. In a few cases I had never backed up the project. Enter the archive.
By copying the archives back onto my computer and extracting the files, I could recover the missing project files. The archive is always the final version. I make certain of that. I'm also organized. My backup DVDs are currently nearing 600 in number. How do you search through 600 DVDs to find the four you need? I created a database. Each file box is numbered and each disk envelope is numbered. The Beef Tenderloin archives are on Discs 143 through 146 in Box 3. A quick search of my database told me exactly where to look. No searching necessary.
Most importantly, it works! In the nearly three years I've been maintaining this web site and making cooking videos, I never needed to refer back to my archives. This week I did, and I was able to recover my missing project files without a single incident.
I told a friend, who is very disorganized, about my computer endeavors this week. He wants to see how I organize my stuff. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it works in the opposite direction. A database isn't going to change a disorganized person into an organized person. It helps, but it really doesn't work that way. An organized person invents ways of keeping stuff organized—he creates archives, he catalogs them in a database, he prints reports he can refer to when needed, he stores his archives in a logically organized way.
I know people who, if they have a camera that consists of five parts—body, lens, flash, battery, and charger—the five parts could be in any of five different locations. Just finding the spare car keys can take all day (mine are in a wooden box on top of my TV). And I know one person who has half of one important piece of audio equipment here in Southern California. The other half is at his parents' home up in Oregon.
And so I completed my major computer project this week, early enough to start watching the Tour de France. I watch it every year. I was looking forward to yesterday's opening day—the first time in 46 years that a sprinter could put on the yellow jersey.
And, finally, what an opening day for the Tour de France yesterday! If you missed it, one of the team buses jammed under the steel framework gantry supporting the finish line banner. The buses are allowed under the banner, but the steelwork was erected too low. The leaders of the race were only 20 minutes from the finish as the minutes ticked by and the ground crew couldn't dislodge the bus. The finish line was hastily moved to the 3km flag before the finish. Then they freed the bus and during the last few minutes the finish line was restored to its original place. Then a major bike crash near the finish took out two of the sprint stage favorites, Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan. André Greipel's bicycle lost its rear derailer in the crash, taking out another sprint hopeful. (He caused the pileup by touching wheels with Tony Martin, taking him out too.) Marcel Kittel survived to be the first cyclist over the line and into the yellow jersey. (He'll lose it today—it's a mountain stage and he is a sprinter, not a climber.) The bus destroyed the electronics for the finish line equipment. The team organizers gave everyone the same finishing time because of all the chaos.
Wednesday 2013.6.26
Computer Work
As many of you know, I don't just cook. I work on my computers—sometimes more than I cook. Since Saturday I have done almost nothing else. Where a sandwich can be made, I won't perish.
Recently I filled my two 1.5TB hard dives (HDDs) used for backing up my cooking videos and TV shows. I also have everything archived onto DVD blanks (currently nearing 300) as a second method of backups. The 1.5TB HDDs are in external enclosures, making them easy to use. I simply plug them into a USB port and attach the power supply. When I'm done copying files, I disengage them and store them on the shelf. I have eight of them that I use for different backups.
I needed to do something to recover more disk space. So I ordered a 4TB HDD. First of all, it wouldn't work in the enclosures. The problem probably has something to do with the electronics not recognizing a drive that large. I can, however, direct-wire the drive to my computer, which I did. Since Saturday morning the covers have been off this computer, with wires dangling out and the new hard disk sitting on my desk. To keep it cool, I attached a spare case fan to a Molex power supply connector and taped it to my desk, such that it blows directly onto the HDD. The temperature, when checked with my laser thermometer gun, dropped 25 degrees (Fahrenheit).
Windows 7 gave me an opportunity to initialize the drive and it offered me options for declaring the device. It turned out that the computer made the HDD an MBR drive and only half the drive space was available. All the rest was "unallocated" space, with no way to use it. That was likely my fault because I didn't select the correct options for intializing the drive. I don't know everything—only enough to make mistakes.
I needed to do some research. It's amazing how much you can learn from YouTube. I learned that MBR stands for Master Boot Record and that it is one way of defining how a hard disk will store files. Quite a few years ago the engineerings who give us all this computer technology knew that MBR was limited to 2 terabytes. Larger hard disks were on their way; so a better system was needed.
They came up with the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme for larger storage devices. The YouTube video I watched showed how easy it is to change an HDD from MBR to GPT. Of course, I lost any data I had stored already, but that was okay because I hadn't deleted any files yet.
Now, I had a hard disk with the recordable space extended to the full size of the disk. Because the 4TB HDD won't work in an enclosure, I decided to transfer all the videos from my smaller 1.5s to the new one. It took two days. Video files are huge, especially because mine are 1080p. Plus there are the encodes I do for YouTube and the TV station. It all adds up. And that's why I filled those two drives in the first place.
After everything was transferred, I cleaned up the 1.5TB drives to be uses again for backups. There is still plenty of space on the 4TB drive; I used about two thirds of the available space. When it is full, I'll seal it in its anti-static envelope again and shelve it. One of these days I'll sign up for one of those safety deposit boxes at the bank and store the disk there, keeping one safe copy off site, just in case.
Then it was on to the next project. My latest 22 videos were never recorded onto DVDs. On my multmedia shelf I have a collection of DVDs—my entire library of cooking videos. There are currently 27 DVDs. Starting yesterday, I began assembling more DVDs to bring the library up to date. I must finish this project before Sunday because that is when the Tour de France begins and I don't want any distractions. It's going to be a good Tour this year. Maybe I'll blog about it next week.
Sunday 2013.6.23
What Do You Crave?
Cravings interest me, because everyone feels them differently, and they differ among everyone.
Do you crave chocolate? Last weekend I made a triple chocolate pound cake, made with cocoa powder, chocolate syrup, and semi-sweet dark chocolate—those were the three. I bought slightly more semi-sweet chocolate than I needed. Three pieces sat in the refrigerator for several days before I finally ate them. I saw them whenever I opened the door, and I wondered if I would ever eat them, or toss them into the trash. I finally ate them after a meal, when I wanted a little something sweet to nibble.
I don't crave chocolate. I like it. I'll eat it, sometimes, but it doesn't send chills all over my body when I think about it. As for the cake, I only ate half of one slice. I used half the cake for a second recipe, and after all the preparation, photography, and videoing was done, I tossed everything into the trash.
I know. Some of you are already framing a letter to the Pope, seeking a way to have me banished to hell before I live out the remainder of my life here on earth. And his Pontificateness, if he also craves chocolate, would probably comply, willingly.
The idea of cravings comes to mind because this past week, once again, I had that familiar, gnawing craving for clam chowder. I have a recipe from Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the two stars in the British TV cooking series, Two Fat Ladies. I love her clam chowder. And so I made it again. When I finished the cooking—it was exactly 12:00 noon—it needed to sit for one hour to let the flavors develop. That one hour is a long wait when I am craving clam chowder and there is a pot of it on the stove.
I waited 20 minutes. I was hungry. Then I waited the additional 40 minutes before I ate my second bowl. After that, let it cool down completely, and then refrigerate. It tastes even better reheated the next day, and the day after that, if it lasts that long. In my case, it didn't. I ate it all before the end of the second day.
I do a lot of cooking, as should be evident by the Recipe Archive on this web site. There are more than 150 recipe PDFs in the archive, all of which I prepared myself, in my own kitchen, and then wrote up the final recipe. Most of them I will never prepare again. It isn't because they're not good. They're delicious. I simply don't crave them. Some I'll prepare for guests when they come to dinner, such as my Stuffed Jumbo Pasta Shells. For myself, however, I repeat only the recipes I crave most, such as clam chowder.
Or Finger Lickin' Chicken. How many times have I made that? I made it again last week, twice, but with a twist. Rather than using whole milk as part of the coating ingredients, I used buttermilk. I have since added this option to the recipe and uploaded it to the Recipe Archive. It was so good, in the future I'll probably only crave Finger Lickin' Chicken made with buttermilk.
There is one more thing about cravings that is worth mentioning. Satisfying those cravings is a wonderful experience. But then, I probably don't need to tell you that.
Wednesday 2013.6.19
Waste
One of the problems associated with cooking for this web site and my YouTube channel is that I often make more food than I can possibly consume or give away. It is an issue I've wrestled with for nearly 3 years.
I used to give more food to my neighbors. However, it didn't take long for them to develop an entitlement attitude. They might be standing at the barbecue grill in their driveway and see me stepping outdoors to check the mail box while wearing my apron and my microphone. "What are you cooking today?" "A triple chocolate pound cake." "Ooo, I'd sure like to get some of that!" Meanwhile, they happily grill away and never send over so much as a chicken wing. It disturbs me.
Of course, there are neighbors who cannot afford to share. One of my friends here in the park barely scrapes by on her Social Security benefit each month. I sometimes wonder how she manages to feed herself. I don't expect her to share with me. So I occasionally bring food to her home.
A lot of the food, if it cannot be double purposed, simply goes into the trash. The triple chocolate pound cake is the most recent example. The cake came out perfect. That was due to the bundt pan more than to me. A good quality pan can make a big difference. I bought the "anniversary" 15-cup Original bundt pan made by Nordic Ware. It is cast aluminum with a glossy non-stick coating. It turns out perfect cakes. However, when I off-loaded the video camera files, I had only seven gigs of video. I need at least nine for a TV show. Ten is comfortable.
Then I remembered a dessert my mother made when her cakes fell. This was back when she tried baking scratch cakes. She eventually turned to boxed mixes. She would yell at us when we ran around in the house when a cake was in the oven. "Stop making so much noise! The cake will fall!" Sometimes it did fall. Sometimes it wasn't our fault. She didn't throw a failed cake into the trash. She mixed up some pudding and crumbled the cake into it. It was good.
I re-purposed my triple chocolate pound cake. I cut off all the glaze and then chopped up the perfect cake. I made my own chocolate pudding from scratch, not from a box, and then combined everything for a cake pudding. I also whipped some heavy cream to stiff peaks for a topping. The result was a dessert very much like the one my mom made when her cakes fell. I ended up with 12.6GB of video—enough for a half-hour TV show.
And then I threw everything into the trash.
I know. I know. I was one of those kids who was raised never to waste food. "Eat everything on your plate. Children in other countries (usually China) are starving." And so we ate everything on our plates and the children in other countries continued to starve.
There is no way to reconcile the waste. I can only think of restaurants and grocery stores. Many items have an expiration date. The food is discarded when it expires. That's wasteful, but waste happens. It happens in my kitchen too.
Sunday 2013.6.16—Happy Fathers' Day
Measuring Popularity
Since Wednesday's blog about the world's most popular foods, I've been doing some thinking. As I had said, I researched the Internet for the world's most popular foods in the hope of finding recipes that might increase the traffic to this web site. I wasn't thinking of the query properly.
The most popular foods are not necessarily the most popular recipes. Case in point: Ice cream is in the top five most popular foods. I've done three homemade ice cream recipes and videos. None of them drew much attention, which was odd because one of them is chocolate ice cream. Chocolate is also listed among the world's most popular foods.
Pizza is on the list too. So are hamburgers. I've written recipes and videoed both. Neither garnered much attention.
What are my most popular recipes? French bread is at the top of the list. It is joined by mascarpone cheese and, of all things, smoked salmon jerky. Really? I appeal to the world. Do you really enjoy eating smoked salmon jerky more than ice cream? No, there I go again. Said more accurately, do you really enjoy making smoked salmon jerky more than ice cream? Evidently so.
There is another issue working here as well. Recipes cannot be ranked only by the popularity of making the food. Some of my recipes gained attention because "I didn't know you could do that" was the all-important factor. My mascarpone cheese recipe is in second place because most people did not realize they could make it themselves, and at a substantially lower cost.
I receive emails from people who make their own French bread now and they write to tell me how wonderful the bread tastes, having followed my recipe. I also hear from people who now make their own mascarpone cheese. They write to tell me that the recipe really works. You really can make your own mascarpone. It's a different wow factor. One tastes good. The other is a surprising possibility.
Just recently I experimented with making my own crème fraîche. (Remember Randy Marsh on South Park?) It works, and it's easy. I have a bowl of it in the refrigerator now. I bought some fresh berries and assembled a little dessert for myself. The flavor is somewhere between plain yogurt and sour cream. To be honest, I can't see the attraction. Nonetheless, with the popularity of my mascarpone recipe, I think a crème fraîche video is a good idea. It wouldn't be long enough to fill a TV show, but combined with a recipe that uses crème fraîche, it might be enough.
If you feel compelled to amuse yourself for a while, try Googling "world's most popular recipes." Although lasagna appears occasionally, there is virtually no consensus on popularity. Each site lists their own. Chicken alfredo rice casserole. Beef and bean taco casserole. Pastrami kabob sandwiches. (I try not to laugh.) Look at enough of them and you begin to see the factors that rank these among the top recipes—quick, easy, and cheap. (My mind suddenly wanders…)
And so I leave behind the idea of popularity. Cooking is not about winning contests. It's about sharing the foods you love with the people you love. I love to cook. If I must choose, I'll pursue my passion, not popularity.
Wednesday 2013.6.12
Classic Recipes
Research brings up some interesting discoveries. Recently I decided I wanted to add more popular recipes to my web site, with the hope that they might attract more traffic to my site. The stats for this web site have been flat for almost a year. All the real activity is on my YouTube channel. I Googled (actually Binged) the most popular foods in the world. At the top of the list were the foods you would probably expect to see there—ice cream, pizza, hamburgers, chocolate, etc. I was surprised, however, to see chicken tikka masala. I'd heard of the dish, but I never tried it, neither in a restaurant nor by cooking it. I was intrigued.
First off, I am not drawn to Indian foods (although most sources claim chicken tikka masala was created in a curry house in London, England, not India). Words like Thai and curry cause me to look for the nearest exit. I don't care for spicy foods. We do have Indian restaurants in the city. I checked their menu on line (if available) and chicken tikka masala is listed. I should try it at least once. But being intrigued, I decided to make it myself.
Unlike a dish like tiramisu, which seems to have a fairly traditional method of preparation that every recipe follows with only slight variations, chicken tikka masala appears to be a free-for-all cooking adventure. Almost anything goes.
None of my cookbooks contain a recipe; therefore, I did my research on line. I found ten recipes that appeared usable, eliminating "easy" recipes that call for a can of spaghetti sauce or a bottle of salad dressing. Other than a few similarities among the ingredients (they all used chicken and a garam masala spice mix), there were few consistencies. Some called for cutting up the chicken and cooking the chunks. Others said to cook the chicken pieces whole and cut them up later. Pan fry, broil, grill, you choose. Some recipes call for marinating the chicken; some don't. I began to wonder why.
Chicken tikka masala appears to be a fairly new dish on the culinary scene. That being the case, perhaps one method of preparation hasn't yet emerged as the clear winner. Then again, maybe today's cooks are more adventuresome, more willing to depart from the routine, more prone to step out of the box.
When I was a child there was very little variety in pizza—you could order cheese, pepperoni, meatball, or Italian sausage, or any combination. Mushrooms and olives were available. Anchovies were always optional, but every pizzeria had them. Some of the really old Italians from the old country liked their anchovies. I was shocked when I first heard of ham and pineapple pizza.
Recently a woman here in the trailer park asked me what the white sauce was on some pizzas. White sauce? A little research revealed it is crème fraîche. If someone had mentioned crème fraîche to me when I was a kid, I would have wondered if they were talking dirty. Now, almost anything can go on a pizza. I saw a TV show in which one of the pizzas was made with clams. Others included macaroni and cheese, yes, on a pizza. Corn and mashed potatoes. Really? Grapes and Gorgonzola cheese. What's next? Kosher pork sausage?
So maybe it's naïve of me to assume or expect a classic dish like chicken tikka masala to have a world-approved standard method of preparation. It's a new century, only 13 years old, entering its teens. (The rebellious years are just ahead.) I selected what I liked most among the 10 recipes and wrote my own, the 11th. I prepared it my own way and I was very satisfied. It was delicious, even if it was a little spicy. The recipe and video will be published here and on YouTube in coming weeks.
Sunday 2013.6.9
Making Ciabatta Bread
I love it when things turn out perfectly. Life is so devoid of perfection, we find great satisfaction when a project not only works out well but exceeds expectations.
My first attempt at the ciabatta didn't succeed the way I wanted. I made one very critical error. When shaping the dough into loaves, which were on a well floured work surface, I accidentally pulled the dough together from underneath. As soon as I did that I thought, Uh-oh. I pulled some of the bench flour up into the loaf. After they baked, they fell apart where the flour had made dry seams along the full length of each loaf. The crumb of the bread also did not have the bubbles I wanted to see. It looked, and tasted, more like a standard French bread.
Learning from this mistake, I tossed the bread in the trash and started again with another sponge to be left to ferment overnight on the kitchen counter. In the meantime I also bought a quality bread knife, my first Wusthöf. It was an excellent deal. Already discounted to $100 (from $110), they added my 15% professional discount (because I have a TV show). With tax I paid less than $92. On Amazon the same knife sells for $99, plus tax and shipping.
The following day I did things differently. After dividing the mass of dough into two loaves, I pinched them along the top, shaping each loaf, and then rolled them onto a bed of flour. Once again, parchment paper was the miracle kitchen material. When making ciabatta it is important to handle the wet dough as little as possible. By lifting the parchment and gently rolling the dough onto the baking sheet, you can move the dough without touching it at all. It worked perfectly.
The bread baked magnificently. As Paul Hollywood says at the beginning of each of his bread shows (Paul Hollywood's Bread), "Every home is improved by it." The aroma of baking bread simply adds anticipation to the air.
The second loaves turned out perfectly. They had the bubbles I wanted in the crumb. The crust was hard and crunchy. And one of the loaves was the shape I needed for one of my favorite summer sandwiches, the grinder.
To explain: I used two different pans on which I baked the bread. One loaf went on a baking sheet and this made a flatter loaf because the soft, wet dough could spread. It wasn't completely flat, like flat bread, but it was a good shape to cut top from bottom to make a sandwich. The other loaf was baked in a baguette pan, and therefore the loaf had a more rounded shape good for slicing and dipping in extra virgin olive oil.
I wasn't sure I'd have enough video content to fill a half-hour TV show (and I didn't); so I finished the day's shooting by making a sandwich in front of the camera. I grew up in Connecticut where we had little restaurants called grinder shops. A grinder is known in most of the USA as a sub, or submarine sandwich. They are called hoagies in parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. You might know them as a hero or other regional name. The sandwich is a simple assembly of bread dressed with olive oil, topped with cotto salami, provolone cheese, sliced tomato, and shredded lettuce. Garnish with salt, pepper, and additional olive oil. Some people add sliced pickled peppers. This is just one style of many kinds of grinder.
I capped off the day by inviting a friend to dinner and I made the same grinder for him. His assessment: "This is a delicious sandwich!"
The finished video came in at 29 minutes, 31 seconds. I couldn't ask for better. I love it when a project turns out so well. This is TV show number six for the third (and possibly final) season. Nine more to go.
Wednesday 2013.6.5
Testing Recipes
It is often difficult to know whether or not a recipe will work until you actually attempt it in the kitchen. If it doesn't work, you've wasted your time, money, and ingredients. I have been frustrated enough with cookbook or Internet recipes that were obviously never tested before being published. How can you spare yourself the failures? One way is to compare recipes.
Recently I watched some BBC TV shows about baking bread, Paul Hollywood's Bread. The ciabatta bread he made looked challenging and so I wanted to attempt it soon. The day after watching the show, a fan of my YouTube channel asked me to do a video about ciabatta. That decided it for me.
The recipe is available on the BBC web site, bbc.co.uk/food, search for ciabatta. But is it any good?
I have many cookbooks—only about three dozen of which are in bound book format. There are more than 300 in digital format, EPUB, on my computer (and backed up on a CD in my home office). I like the digital ones because I can open them on my computer and quickly do a word search, "ciabatta" for example. I also go on the Interent and look for recipes from accomplished cooks, such as Alton Brown or Giada DeLaurentis. Then I list the ingredients in a spread sheet (you can write them in a column on a piece of paper) and then add the various proportions each cook uses for their ingredients. I end up with a table that makes comparison easy.
In bread baking, the most important part of the formula is the flour-to-water ratio. Too much flour and you end up with a brick. Too little, you end up with a pancake. To make it simple (or more complicated, depending on how you view it), I try to normalize my comparison to one ingredient. For the ciabatta recipe I re-calculated the proportions for 1 pound of flour. If one recipe uses 2 pounds of flour and 2 cups of water, I scale it down to 1 pound/1 cup. Then I compare.
One of my most trusted books, my Culinary Institute of America textbook, uses 1.45 cups water per pound of flour. The BBC recipe calls for just over 1½ cups (USA measure) water per pound. Other recipes use 1 cup. And one recipe, in my Baking textbook, uses less than ¾ cup. My tried and true, most trusted bread recipe uses 1¼ cups liquid (water and beer) per pound of flour. (It helps to have a plane of reference.)
Ciabatta dough is typically so wet and sticky, recipes recommend preparing the dough in a stand mixer rather than using your hands. When the dough rises, you handle it as little as possible because it will collapse under its own weight of water. So, if my best bread recipe uses 1¼ cups liquid per pound of flour, it stands to reason that 1½ cups water would be closest for a wet ciabatta dough.
By comparing recipes in a spreadsheet or table, and doing a little math, you can test various baking formulas before opening any kitchen cabinets. Catching and correcting errors before you start can spare you some unnecessary frustration and expense. As for the ciabatta, I made the sponge yesterday. Later today I'll make two loaves of bread, one of them traditional and one an experiment (which I will hopefully blog about on Sunday).
Sunday 2013.6.2
Coq au Vin (Chicken Cooked in Wine)
If you're not familiar with coq au vin, I suggest you get acquainted. To be honest, coq au vin requires time, but it is well worth the wait. It is also a little labor intensive, but I make it more complicated than it needs to be. I sectioned and deboned my chicken (it is customary to cook the chicken pieces with the bone in) and I made my own noodles from pasta dough left over from my TV show about making pasta from scratch.
I'm not certain if the pleasure was entirely from the meal itself, or if it resulted from the fact that I invited a friend for dinner. Probably both. We hadn't seen each other for a few weeks; so the early part of the visit was for catching up on the news. We both lead busy lives and most of it is uneventful. She works at the county jail, I make cooking videos. There are, however, little details that make life interesting if not downright fun.
I showed her the strangest covers I'd ever seen for bowls and pans. I saw them in the warehouse store. As always, I looked to see where they were made—in China; so I put them back on the shelf and moved on.
China is trying to improve the quality of its goods, but they have a long way to go. Japan had a similar problem after World War II. Japan now makes some of the finest quality products in the world—cars, cameras, consumer electronics, etc. The difference, however, is in the culture. The Japanese people are devoted to their jobs. Though not perfect, they are far more scrupulous in their business practices. And they strive for excellence. In China, the current attitude is to put profit above quality. Whereas some of the early Japanese products were poorly made due to insufficient technology, many Chinese products have been proved to be downright dangerous because manufacturers substitute with prohibited ingredients or inferior materials.
Back to the covers: I returned to the warehouse store a few days later and looked at the covers again. They are made of silicone with a rigid, reinforced rim around the circumference. You simply place the lid on the bowl (it doesn't need to fit; the cover only needs to be larger than the diameter of the bowl) and then press down in the center to push out some of the air. Release and a vacuum is established, holding the lid to the bowl. I decided they were worth the purchase price—and if not, the warehouse store is good about granting refunds.
They work. I put some chopped onions in a glass bowl, sealed it with the silicone cover, and placed it in the refrigerator. The following day the cover was still vacuum-sealed in place. No air had leaked in and there was no odor of onions in my refrigerator. In fact, they work so well, if the bowl is light enough, you can lift the lid and the bowl goes up with it, still vacuum-stuck to the underside of the silicone cover.
To work properly, the bowl or pan needs to have a smooth rim all the way around. If you have a pan that has dents along the rim from banging a metal spoon against it while cooking, the dents will allow air to seep in, cancelling the vacuum. Ceramic pottery works equally well if the glaze is as smooth as glass all the way around the rim. I tested the covers on some stainless mixing bowls with smooth rims and they held well.
I am often satisfied with a product—if it works as advertised I'm okay. But I am rarely delighted with an item. These work well enough to delight me.
As for the friend I invited to dinner: There is something almost magical about watching someone really enjoy the food they are eating. She likes coq au vin. Together we are planning the next trailer park get together—a small affair for a few friends on the 4th of July. We have the advantage of living near the park where the fireworks are launched. We'll have an evening dinner of several kinds of pizza, baked in a friend's pizza oven/grill and then walk out to the front of the park at 9:00 to watch the fireworks. It should be fun. More later…
And a Little More About the Earthquake
The aftershocks were so small, I never felt any of them, except a 3.1 during the evening—just enough to get my attention and make me hope it wouldn't turn into the main event, the morning's quake just a prelude to a major shaker later. Thankfully, that didn't happen, but I was hyper-alert for about 24 hours. Every little noise or movement caught my attention.
There was one tiny bit of damage, sort of: The electricity went off for a minute or two during the morning after the quake. My computers were on. The power failure messed up the CMOS in one computer. It wouldn't boot. I build my own computers; so I know how to fix the problem. Go into the CMOS setup and tell the computer which hard disk (I have three) is the first one in the boot sequence. Save and problem solved. Everything is back to normal.