Tram to Work

I have been biking to work for a year and a half now. It's 7 miles a day -- 2 miles from our house to downtown where I catch the bus. I put my bike on the front of the bus since there is a giant hill separating me and work. I am not a morning person and I am lazy. The chances of me riding up that hill are slim to none. However, I will ride down the giant hill at the end of the day (super fun) and ride the 5 miles home.

Between waiting for the bus and the time riding the bus, I've gotten in a rhythym where I can drink my coffee and read the morning paper. It takes a while. The coffee/paper part is fun, but the waiting sucks. And if the two bike slots on the front of the bus are already taken, you're SOL and forced to wait for the next bus.

But they just opened the tram to employees last week -- meaning I now get to ride the tram to the top of the hill instead of the bus. Plus it cuts 10-15 minutes off my morning commute. So now I ride the 2 miles downtown and take the scenic (but empty in the morning) downtown esplenade along the river. It's flat the whole way and leads me directly to the tram; which runs every 3 minutes. They let me take my bike inside and I get to start my day by flying over I-5 with awesome views of the city, Mt. St. Helens and Mt Hood (shown in the picture above).

Volcanos and Earthquakes

Mt. St. Helens is having a minor eruption now. I can see it from my building, 60 miles away. Pretty cool.




Also, there have been a series of minor earthquakes around here lately. Including a couple happening in the past 2 days -- one of them (seen below) occurred along the same fault near Molalla/Woodburn that caused 30 million in damage back in 1993 following a magnitude 5.6 quake. I went to look up the recent ones on a map (see below) and found an article saying:

Nearly 17,000 earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 to 6.0 have been recorded in Oregon and Washington since 1970. About 15-20 quakes a year are felt in the Northwest. Earthquakes are usually felt if they are at least magnitude 3 to 4.

Here's the recent quakes around here. You can even see the seismic activity on Mt. St. Helens in this picture.





Here's direct access to the volcanocam here as well as a link to the interactive earthquake map.

Before and After

Before:
Ken running up to the line to grab a ball in the dodgeball holiday charity tournament.



After:
And Ken after the tournament at the bar. They have a giant Hamm's costume there, which he decided to put on. Apparently, it's a bar rule that if you put the costume on, you have to go outside and wave at cars. What they didn't think he'd do is take a bunch of empty cans as his ducklings. Or would they be Hammlings?

Dyson Love

Our house has been covered in animal hair. We've been using a shop vac to clean. It works, but not great. Especially on the carpet. Despite sweeping the stairs constantly and doing our best to stay on top of it, our house was disgusting. You couldn't sit on the floor without getting covered.

Ken apparently had enough and told me yesterday that he was going to get a vacuum cleaner. Here's our conversation:

L: "Um, wait. I think I'd like to splurge on a Dyson"
K: "That's what I was planning on getting"
L: "Oh yea! They have one that works for animal hair"
K: "Really? Great!"

That was how we picked our vacuum cleaner. No huss, no fuss. He checked it out online and then went to a big box store that has 20% off coupons all the time. It was already 10% off, so we ended up getting a total of 30% off and no sales tax (thanks Oregon). We saved $100 which is nice since those suckers are so expensive.

And it worked like nothing I'd seen before. I've never seen the rugs so clean. The vacuum also has a SEVENTEEN foot long extension so you can keep the vacuum at the bottom of the stairs and still reach all the way up. And you can see the nasty dust and hair collect in the see-through container. Gross, but effective in that it makes you want to clean more often.

Which is good since we'll probably need to re-clean in about two days. I recommend their vacuums to anybody.

What's for dinner: Spaghetti Carbonara

With all the bacon in the house right now (see posts below), it is understandable that we made bacon and eggs for breakfast yesterday. We had about a piece and 3/4 left over, which Ken crumbled into a bowl and saved in the fridge. (Note: I later found out that he was saving it to, ahem, feed to the dog. Are you kidding me? I spend days making bacon and you're planning on feeding it to the dog? He's just like Rachel's mom who used to grate fresh parmesan on the family dog's food when he got older. Only Kinley is 1. And Ken is a sucker.)

Once his guilt set in that there is no way in fiery hell that I was allowing him to feed my vittles to the dog, I got to decide what I wanted to make for dinner. I had 1/8 of a cup of crumbled bacon. And then I remember Ruth Reichl's version of Spaghetti Carbonara.

RUTH REICHL’S SPAGHETTI CARBONARA
1 pound spaghetti
¼ to ½ pound thickly sliced good-quality bacon
2 cloves garlic, peeled
2 large eggs
Freshly ground black pepper
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra for the table

Boil a pot of salted water. Throw in the spaghetti. Cut the bacon cross-wise into pieces. Cook in a skillet for two minutes, until the fat begins to render. Add whole cloves of garlic and cook another five minutes, until the edges of the bacon just begin to get crisp. Do not overcook, or it won’t meld with the pasta. Meanwhile, break the eggs into the bowl youwill serve the pasta in, beat them with a fork. Add pepper. Remove the garlic from the bacon pan. If it looks like too much fat to you, discard some, but you’re going to toss the bacon with most of its fat into the pasta. When the pasta is done, drain it and immediately throw it into the beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly. The heat of the spaghetti will cook the eggs and turn them into a sauce. Add the bacon and its fat, add cheese and serve.

So that's the recipe, but I'm lazy and neither of us wanted to eat a lot of fat. So here's my altered version:

Fill pot with salted water and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, throw 6 unpeeled garlic cloves in the toaster oven at 350 and start chopping an onion. Melt a little bit of fat in a pan (used leftover bacon grease but butter or oil would also work). Add the chopped onion and saute until soft. Add pasta to the boiling water and pull out garlic cloves, which have steamed a bit. The skins will easily slide off. Mince finely and add to the onions, cook on low. Beat two eggs in a bowl. Drain cooked pasta and return to pot (with heat off). Dump the eggs over and mix well. Add the onion/garlic mixture, remaining bacon and as much/little parmesan cheese as you want. I used about 1/4-1/2 cup. Add pepper and serve hot.

Wow. It turned out amazing. The eggs make such a creamy and rich sauce without any added cream and not a lot of fat. The above recipe made dinner and lunch for both of us. Not bad for a 79 cent pack of spaghetti and two eggs. The 1/8 cup of bacon was enough for flavor but not overpowering. Plus, it made me realize that this recipe is easily adapatable to whatever you have on hand. Mushrooms. Artichoke hearts. Smoked salmon. Not that I have those things on hand very often, but I sure like eating them. What is more likely is turkey carbonara... especially given the SEVEN 2-cup-bags of pulled turkey that are currently in the freezer.

My Lamp

...the one that I made in February, broke.



Not a huge break, just one piece that's barely noticeable. But still, it cracked. I don't know how it happened since the lamp hasn't moved since I made it. Ken pointed the crack out to me last weekend and I have been trying to decide whether I should attempt to fix it. To fix it, the soldering iron is held on the piece of glass until it breaks even more, then the pieces are pulled out with pliers. After the glass is removed, the old copper foil and solder are removed with more heat. Then the new piece is cut to fit, foiled and soldered back in place. In theory, it is very easy to fix a broken piece. But this lamp is my favorite. And if I get the neighboring pieces too hot, they break too.

I put it off all week and this weekend, but I finally got up enough nerve to attempt it last night. It took me about 45 minutes, but it is now finished and I am relieved. Phew.

Bacon, bacon, bacon... BACON!

While Ken was at Santacon, I spent Saturday smoking bacon! The smoker worked, thanks to an appliance extension cord (15') that connected the washing machine hookup in the basement to the smoker outside. I used my favorite cast iron skillet to hold the wet hickory chips. Brought out the fire extinquisher -- just in case -- and then I plugged it in.

Super hot, super fast.

But it worked. I added a water pan to cool the internal temperature of the smoker and used my external read thermometer to monitor the internal temperature of the bacon. Since bacon isn't supposed to get too hot (I read 85 degrees online), else the bacon fat with liquify, I was careful to check the temperature often. My first time checking it (30 minutes after plugging it in), the bacon internal temperature was 115 degrees. Ooops.

I unplugged it and put the pork bellies in the freezer for 20 min to cool them down. Then back in the plugged-in smoker for 20 min, followed by 20 min in the UN-plugged smoker (still smoke though). Then freezer, repeat ad nauseum. It was a long day but I passed the time transplanting the grapevine in the backyard and finishing some stained glass pieces.

After 7 hours of painful rotations, it was done. Or at least I was calling it done. I put the bacon slabs in the fridge and went to meet Ken and 7 other santas at a bar down the street. (Note: a red room + black light makes a room full of santas look SUPER creepy).

When we came home at midnight, Ken was supportive of me wanting to slice bacon. I pulled Rachel's blind grandmother's deli slicer from the basement and went to work.



Close-up of starting to slice the bacon. You can see the cured, smoked, unsliced bacon in the bottom right of the picture:


Happy that bacon is almost finished:


And the finished sliced bacon!


Another reason why I love Ken is because he was game enough to heat up, not one, but two frying pans to cook both types at 12:30 am while I continued to slice. Although, I'd probably want to eat bacon, too, if I were drinking for 12 hours. The molasses cure turned out amazing. Ken called it the best bacon he ever had in his life. The other one (the honey cure) was inedible due to salt. Seriously, it was terrible. I remember reading in Salt that people who used salt as a preservative would usually briefly soak their food in water to remove the salt. I tried soaking it this morning for 30 min and it totally worked. It tasted like normal bacon, nothing special, but at least it was edible bacon. I'm currently post-curing it in maple syrup to see if that might bring out some flavor and will likely give it a 30 min smoke tomorrow night to dry it out. Pretty exciting that such different flavors can come from such subtle variations in sugar and salt.

Short version: making bacon is a pain in the ass but not that hard and I'd totally do it again.

Bacon Update 2

I couldn't stand it any longer and scraped all of the honey/sugar/salt cure from pork belly #1 and cooked it to get a homogenous syrup/cure. It was super-saturated though so not all the salt went into solution, but at least the honey dissolved. When it cooled, I poured it back over the meat and stashed it back in the fridge.

Also found out that the smoker works when it is plugged into the big washer/dryer outlet in the basement. Now it's just a matter of seeing whether the extension cord can support it so I can use the smoker, um, outside.

Bacon Update

I started curing the 6.36 lbs of pork bellies last friday (12/1). The butcher sawed the frozen bellies into two slabs of roughly 3 lbs each. I put each in a gallon-sized reclosable plastic bag and added the cures.

Pork Belly #1: Honey cure, very similar to Emeril's recipe
3 cups salt
1 cup honey
1 cup sugar

Pork Belly #2: Brown sugar cure
3 cups salt
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup molasses
2 bay leaves
1 T ground black pepper

The bags of pork bellies were placed in a 13x9" pan to catch any errant drips and put in the fridge, turned once or twice a day for even marinating. It is now Tuesday, so beginning the 5th day of curing. The brown sugar-cured belly is getting quite hard and lots of juices have been pulled from the meat and mixed with the sugar/salt. It actually looks quite beautiful, especially with the specks of black pepper. In contrast, the meat in the honey cure is much softer when you press on it and a lot less juice has been pulled off -- despite it being a slightly bigger piece. I added a bit more salt to the honey cure bag this morning before work and placed it back in the fridge. Perhaps there just wasn't enough salt to cure it. In hindsight, I should have put the cure ingredients in two pans and heated them to form a solution, then cooled them before pouring over the meat. Instead, I have a gritty heterogenous mess. Apparently clumps of honey do not mix well with sugar or salt when they are cold, FYI.

I bought a smoker over the weekend for $25. It is an electric one and the guy from whom I bought it cured all of his salmon in it. He owned two of the same kind. I trust him -- just look at all of his fishing gear in the picture! Anyway, most of my experience is with the vertical water smokers so I am a little skeptical about the electric kind. But if Alton Brown can make a smoker out of a cardboard box and a fan, how difficult can electric smoking really be. (Side note: when I was searching for the link of his smoker contraption, I found his recipe for making bacon that uses a cure similar to the brown sugar one above.)

When I got the smoker home, I was excited to smoke some meatballs for dinner that night. I plugged it in but it wouldn't work. Instead it just tripped every fuse it came in contact with. I was very sad. I called the guy from whom I bought it to ask if he knew what to do. No answer. Grrrr. Did I get ripped off? It was only $25, but still. The next day he called me back -- turns out he left his phone in the car that night and was very apologetic. He told me that it needs to be plugged in to a high voltage outlet (think washer/dryer) for it to work. Kind of a pain in the ass, but I'll try it. Then he said if it doesn't work for any reason, he'll mail me my money back -- no problem. So that's what I'm going to try next. I wonder if this is why electric smokers aren't more popular... they need all sorts of fancy outlets? Either that, or the fact that vertical water smokers are cheaper and under $50. Plus, it seems most folks who want to smoke food also like tending the fire. Me, I'd rather make more food while I smoke food. Anyway, this is where I am now. I figure I'll start the smoking on Saturday, if I can stand waiting that long. According to most websites, the meat needs to sit out an hour under a fan for a pellicle to form (that's fancy speak for a "skin", like on the top of pudding when it cools). The meat then needs to smoke for 4-6 hours (the internal temperature shouldn't get higher than 80 degrees). Then cool for an hour and slice. Put it in the fridge/freezer, cook and eat.