Fun with Power Tools

I'm getting up early tomorrow so I probably shouldn't be writing this, but I told some people that I'd be posting soon, so now I feel obligated.

First of all, the blog is all shiny and new. It may not look like it, but it is. Trust me on this. I've upgraded to blogger beta in the hopes that I can take advantage of some of its new features. I haven't explored yet. Anyway, on to the interesting stuff...

I'm taking only one computer science course this semester: Algorithm Design and Analysis, better known as 15-451 or Algo. It's a neat course that focuses on the problem solving aspects of computer science. It's also quite difficult, as 400 level classes tend to be. Fortunately, some of the assignments are designed to be group projects. In addition to the obvious benefit of extra brain power, this gives me the excuse to make something good for dinner and have a few friends over. My co-conspirators are M1 and M2 (not the Sri Lankan M's... different M's) and lucky me, M1 likes to cook as much as I do. Even better, he likes to cook meat, which means we get to fire up the grill. He's damn good at grilling. I don't have much practice in this area. My (dad's) burgers go unmatched, but beyond that I am inexperienced. M1 is getting into it though, and he's really having fun with rubs and marinades, both of which try my patience.

As you can probably guess, we had a group assignment due recently. Yesterday, in fact. So Saturday night became "Grilling and Algo" day. M1 brought over some gorgeous pork loin which he proceeded to massage with brown sugar, chili powder, and paprika. I was messing around with some sweet potatoes (recipe appears at the end of the post) and lighting the grill.

Through all of this, Chris had been upstairs plowing through work. All damn day, in fact. He is generally the go-to guy for fire, but he was busy. I didn't want to disturb him, so I embarked upon the task of actually lighting the grill.

Our grill is of the charcoal variety. Nothing fancy. Basically, a small enclosed fire pit that we keep on our front porch. It's great out there. We've got a really comfortable couch, and we've discovered (through exhaustive research, I assure you) that the height of the grill is perfect for someone sitting on the couch with their feet up on the makeshift foot rest. Don't you wish you were still in college?

We use match light charcoal because no one really wants to deal with anything else, and since the departure of our more alternative housemate, we haven't had a plumber's torch at our disposal. Now, I'd seen Chris do this many times, so I knew the theory behind lighting the charcoal. I diligently grabbed some old paper to use as starters, distributed them carefully within the briquets, and busted out the matches. Things were looking promising there for a while, but I hadn't counted on wind to make life difficult. It kept blowing out the fire.

I started messing around with the lid, trying to shield the coals well enough to get them lit. I didn't want to put the lid on all the way for fear of suffocating the fire, so I propped it up in front of the grill, hoping to protect my little sparks from the worst of the wind. Meanwhile, I grabbed a few more starters and repeated the fire distribution ritual. After 20 minutes of this, I had part of one side of the coals going, the rest were flat out refusing to consider ignition, and I reeked of smoke and lighter fluid. I gave up, moved around some of the more actively incendiary elements, and put the lid on.

I returned to my sweet potatoes. They had already baked for an hour and were destined to become a silky vanilla puree. Really, they were glorified mashed potatoes.

There's some back story here. I like to cook, and I have some practice at it. Chris is less experienced in the kitchen. I think he'd probably really like cooking, but the introductory process is difficult. I try to find recipes that involve something fun and interesting. The prime example that I use to describe "fun and interesting" was a mashed potato incident. I wasn't entirely clear on the definition of "fork tender" and when I went to mash them, they were... a bit firm. We didn't own a masher or an electric hand mixer, so I told Chris to get a hammer, cover it with a plastic bag, and mash up the potatoes. Which he did with great glee.

We both get a fair amount of mileage out of telling this story, and the best reactions came from our sets of parents.

My dad's immediate response was to look very pointedly at my mom and say, "So... you undercooked the potatoes, did you?" It seemed I'd unwittingly gotten myself in the middle of a 35 year debate about vegetable preparation. My mom treats cooking vegetables the way most people treat using vermouth in martinis (or so I've heard): whisper "fire" nearby and call it done. Maybe she'll wave a match nearby. If we're having company, she might even light it. Apparently my dad isn't the biggest fan.

I wasn't around to hear Chris tell the story to his parents, but after Christmas that year, he arrived back in Pittsburgh with a shiny new electric hand mixer.

I'm sure most of you are convinced that I've completely lost the thread of where ever I was going with this post, but I haven't. The important part is that last Saturday, approximately 2 years after the hammered potatoes, Chris had yet to use his hand mixer. He knew about my plan for the potatoes and had been very excited earlier in the day at the prospect of finally getting to try the thing out.

I decided it was time to drag Chris away from his work so he could wreak havoc in the kitchen. First, though, we had to have a conversation about the fire, which went approximately like this:
"Why do you smell like smoke?"
"...I had a little trouble lighting the coals. I've never done it before."
"Well why didn't you ask me for help?"
"You were busy studying. I didn't want to bother you."

...ahem... you may want to brace yourselves for the little beauty of a response he offered up....

"If there is ever a time when I can take 5 minutes to show you up and do something better than you, I'll do it. It doesn't matter how much work I have. Just ask." And just to clarify, he was joking, and we all had a good laugh.

Chris' parents were smart about the hand mixer. It's Black & Decker and 200 watts and does a fairly good job of masquerading as a power tool. I think they had guys in mind when they designed it. This thing is a beast. Chris was quite excited to plug it in for the first time.

For those unfamiliar with a hand mixer, this model had 3 controls, all within thumb range. There's a dial to control speed, a "turbo" button (not actually what it's called, but that's the idea), and a button to eject the mixer blades so that they can be cleaned.

There is a rookie mistake that everyone makes with these hand mixers. Proper use involves not turning the mixer on until it is fully immersed in whatever you're mixing, and turning the mixer off completely before removing the blades from the food. As anyone who has ever used a hand mixer knows, failure to comply results in food all over everything. It's almost tempting to dive right in to the beet mash and deliberately experiment with this property, just so you can get the experience of cleaning beets off the walls, the ceiling, out of the spice rack, and everywhere else you can think of. It's going to happen no matter what, so just get it over with.

I know you're all just aching with sadistic glee to hear about sweet potatoes in my hair and the exposed ceiling light fixture and the computer that was near by to provide the recipe. Sorry to disappoint. Potatoes did not, in fact, go everywhere, because Chris avoided the rookie mistake.

Instead, he made a different, and far more entertaining one. From a prudent, responsible perspective, Chris felt it necessary to methodically test all of the controls first, far away from the food. He wanted to get a feel for how to work it so that he could operate it in a safe, controlled manner. If you'd actually been there, you'd have understood immediately (the maniacal laughter was a good clue) that 200 watts is 200 watts and whether it comes in the form of a power drill, a circular saw, or a hand mixer, it's really fun to play with. His first order of business upon plugging the thing in was to turn the speed dial as high as it would go.

I was standing well back, watching him play. And then the laughing turned to panicked yelling as Chris, trying to eke out the last little bit of power, went blindly searching for the turbo and found "eject" instead. The folks at Black & Decker deserve praise for steadfastly avoiding the extreme temptation to model the mixer after a nail gun. And for that reason, the mixing blades did not go spinning into the wall. Instead, although they came unseated, they stayed in the mixer and continued to spin at an alarming rate. Chris quickly realized what happened and turned the mixer off, but there were about 2 seconds between hitting eject and regaining composure where I was watching the very odd tableau of my boyfriend yelling in abject terror at the spinning blades of death in his hand, all the while flailing and panicking and generally creating a spectacle.

Mercifully, after a second or two, he turned the thing off. I say mercifully, because at this point, I was on the floor laughing myself to tears. It had never occurred to me to fear a hand mixer. They've always seemed pretty benign. I used to use one at home to make whipped cream occasionally and I'd never felt threatened. The image of a full grown man being terrorized by a cream whipping piece of machinery is so ludicrous, I'd never considered it.

The rest of dinner progressed without incident. The pork was good, the potatoes were good, and we made s'mores over the leftover coals in the grill. And then we did a bunch of homework.

You can find the sweet potato puree recipe here: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/000589.html

Everyone loved it. And M1 had mentioned that he wanted more practice with non-meat recipes, so I sent him the link, along with the following annotations and notes. I swear, I didn't know I knew this much about potatoes:

OVERLY WORDY RECIPE NOTES (mistakes you don't have to make, because I've already done it):

When you're shopping for sweet potatoes, you'll probably be confronted with a choice between "sweet potatoes" and "yams". The correct, technical term for what you want is "sweet potato" but grocers can get confused. I bought the things labeled yams because all the sweet potatoes were plastic wrapped and seemed destined for a different purpose. The point is, you want the thing with the *orange* flesh. Bright orange. Pumpkin orange. Doesn't really matter what it's called as long as it sort of looks like a potato and fits the orange requirement. 2 small sweet potatoes are probably about a pound and a half.

Cleaning the potatoes means scrubbing off the skin with a vegetable brush or your hands or a paper towel. This removes excess dirt. Leave the skin on the potatoes for the baking part. It keeps the moisture in. (I don't know if you know how to clean vegetables or not. Not trying to insult you here, just being paranoid. I came back to school this year to find that people had been using my vegetable brush to scrub dishes...)

"Fork tender" means that if you stab the potato with a fork, it will slide off *immediately*. The flesh should be tender enough that you could do the whole mashing process with a fork. The real reason I had Chris beating on the potatoes with a hammer is because I didn't used to know all of this, and then the potatoes were undercooked. :P

Heavy cream (also called "whipping cream" or "heavy whipping cream") is used primarily for texture. It is the thickest of any milk type dairy product, even richer than half and half. The high fat content makes for a very smooth, silky puree. You would notice this more if you prepared it in a blender, instead of with a hand mixer the way we did. There's no chemical reaction going on, so if you want to use something with less fat, you probably can. You might be sacrificing a bit of richness and texture, but I doubt most people will notice. Don't use fake butter though. Stick to the real stuff.

If you don't have a vanilla bean (and I didn't), you can substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract. If you use the extract, you can also skip the simmering step. The simmering is done specifically to leech the flavor out of the vanilla bean.

I left out the orange zest because I'm not an orange person. Your call. ...However, do *not* add any sort of acid to this. This means no vinegar, orange juice, lemon juice, etc. It will curdle the milk. (For great fun with intentional milk curdling, see the Joy of Cooking's Saag Paneer recipe).

I also left out the salt and pepper, although I added some later to my own portion. It's worth trying.

This is basically a recipe for mashed potatoes. If you decide you want a thinner or "looser" texture when you're mixing stuff, you can start adding more liquid, a few tablespoons at a time, until you get what you want. It can be more cream, or you could try some sort of broth, or gravy, or something else exotic if you want to play with flavoring. I added a bit of extra cream for texture reasons. Chances are, you'll find yourself adding less liquid if you're actually using a blender, and more liquid if you're using something else.

When mashing regular white potatoes with a hand mixture, there's danger of overmixing. You'll know when you've done it because the potatoes start to develop an elastic property. This is the result of the starches doing their thing. It's the same thing that happens when you knead pizza dough. I don't know if this is a property inherent in sweet potatoes, but if you notice it starting to happen, stop mixing. It takes a while for this to happen, and you only really need to worry if you spend a lot of time messing with liquid levels, because that usually results in a lot more mixing than normal.

Reheating: Ideally, this is served hot. You can reheat it in the microwave on medium heat, stirring every 90 seconds or so, until desired temp has been reached.

Beginner's Guide to Opera: Leoncavallo's Pagliacci

Chris and I aren't serious opera buffs, but we do enjoy it occasionally, and if something interesting is playing, we'll usually try to make a night of it with opera and a really good dinner afterwards. This isn't precisely why we chose to go to Pagliacci. The Pagliacci decision was more along the lines of a "best of the worst" scenario, as the current opera season doesn't look too promising. Mozart's Magic Flute is playing in March, but that's a long time from now, and the other three shows aren't really piquing our interest.

For us, opera is always a very last minute decision, an attitude encouraged but not entirely inspired by the way the Pittsburgh Opera Company handles student tickets. They have a program called "Student Rush" which is basically a fire sale of every seat still available. Two hours before the show, college students can get any unfilled seat for 50% of the original ticket price. Since we generally don't know if we can go until about 2 hours before the show, this is quite convenient.

Last night was a near thing. Chris and I both have lots of school work to do, so we almost didn't go. Fortunately, we made it, and through some stroke of luck we got first row seats for about $40 each. Traditionally, we've been in the balcony somewhere.

We found our seats and indulged in a bit of unadulterated amazement at our good fortune: "You can see the harps! You can see the harps!" "I've got leg room!"

The actual show was quite nice. The plot is simple, and Pagliacci is mercifully short. The whole thing was about 1:35 including a 25 minute intermission. I do enjoy opera, but I've always felt it's supposed to be a mix of theatre and music, and often the composers will sacrifice the visual for the auditory, resulting in 10 minute death scenes and endings that add whole additional acts to the production. There are no surprises in opera. Not for the American opera crowd anyway. No one actually speaks enough Italian to be able to understand the actual dialogue, so everyone has read the plot beforehand and is diligently watching the subtitle screen. And even when there is supposed to be a genuine surprise, like when the husband storms in on his wife and her lover, the whole suspenseful vibe is lost because the soprano has to finish her aria before her husband can start yelling. So the point is that watching opera isn't like watching a play, and you shouldn't go into it expecting such.

After the show we headed down the street to ELEVEN, a classy American restaurant, for a late dinner. ELEVEN is a part of Big Burrito, a company that owns many restaurants including Mad Mex, a very popular chain of Mexican bars. And it's really really good. With excellent service. I highly recommend it.

I've been playing poker for a good long while. I don't remember when I first learned to play, but I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6. I like to imagine that sometime in preschool (I was still in preschool at age 5) my parents sat me down to teach me some life skills, like not to draw to an inside straight. I suspect that the truth is much more boring. I probably got jealous of all the adults staying up late and decided to crash the party.

It should be noted that my whole family plays poker. Both my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents when they were still around. They used to have a pretty good tradition of starting up games at family gatherings after dinner, and sometimes they'd play for hours. My mom will tell stories of her mother yelling down the stairs to her father that it was dawn and he should stop playing cards and go to bed. So I know where my mom and my uncle get it from. I don't know what's going on with my dad, but he's got a very weird set of "bar skills" (poker, pool, and a really neat trick for opening up jars that he got from a bar tender somewhere). I suspect my mom had a hand in most of this.

My family taught me well enough that I could probably sit down to a game in the 1840's and not get shot. I might even win some money. And all of this might give the reader the impression that "we take cards seriously in this household, and don't you forget it!"

This is not, in fact, the case. We are not serious about poker. We are anti-serious about poker. And in the event that someone forgets and starts spouting out nonsense about 5 card draw nothing wild, we have an arsenal of obscure, arcane poker games that are generally pretty effective at defying any sort of real poker strategy that people might try to come up with.

I was very glad, then, to find out that I had a set of like-minded friends in Pittsburgh. Last Friday night, 6 of us got together and sat down to some of the strangest poker I've played in a while. At the table were myself, Chris, Big J, Little J, S, and B. The mood for the night was pretty much set when we realized that no one had anything resembling chips, so we made do with colored zip ties, which for mysterious reasons B had in abundance. Chris hasn't played much poker before and he was kind of afraid of it, so my first goal was to help Chris get over this fear with a game that is entirely out of the players' control, known as Night Baseball. 7 cards, face down, and no looking. And things went down hill from there. I don't remember all of the variants we played, but here are a few. Some are probably familiar to people reading this, and some...probably aren't.

Night Baseball (No peeky)

7 cards dealt face down to each player (9 in some variants). No one can look at their cards. This is a "roll-your-own" game, meaning that each person turns over cards until they've beat the highest hand on the table. If you run out of cards, you're out. Otherwise, you bet. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face down. I love this game. For some reason, I do well at it.

High-Low Baseball

A 7-card stud variant. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face up. After the last card has been dealt, there's the normal round of betting, and then all players declare, and then they bet again. Declaring means announcing whether you're playing high, low, or both. A perfect low is A 2 3 4 6 of different suits. High winner and low winner split the pot. If someone goes high-low, they have to win both ways, but then they get the whole pot, all to themselves.

Classic 5 card draw

Big J brought this one in, probably to balance out the dual bad influences of B and me. 5 card draw, a pair of jacks or better to start the betting, and if no one can bet, then the hand is re-dealt. This is an ante game and the pot rides until someone wins it. If there are multiple deals, there are multiple antes. A very traditional poker game, and it was probably the seminal example of poker before all of the Texas Hold'Em craziness.

Sign of the Cross

Very similar to Texas Hold'em. Each player gets 2 cards, and there are 5 cards in the center, face down, in the shape of a cross. Cards in the center are revealed 1 by 1. Players make the best hand they can using their two hold cards and 3 in the middle. In this game, each player must pick a row of cards from the cross.

Kinky 7-stud

You can do a lot of things with wild cards to change the flavor of the game. In this variant, there are pairs of wild cards: KJ QQ 69. You have to be holding both cards of a pair, but then both are wild.

Mark Foley 7-stud

Similar to kinky 7-stud. Any pair of cards that adds up to 16 is wild. J = 11, Q = 12, etc. A = 1.

Poker Jargon 7-stud

Wild: "Deuces, aces, one-eyed faces, suicide kings, candlestick queens."

Follow the Queen

A more well known 7-stud variant. Queens are wild, and if a queen is dealt face up, then the card dealt face up immediately after the queen is also wild. Until another queen is dealt... My dad hates this game. We pull it out at home when he has too much money.

Something I made up when it was really late

Sort of like a cross between Indian Poker and Night Baseball. Each player gets 1 card face down. Without looking, they bet. Then they look at their cards and bet again.
Variant 1 After the first round of betting, but before people look at their cards, they have the option to trade in their cards. Then they look and bet again.
Variant 2 The winner is the person with the highest total of their card + the value of the card to their right.

Fark Update

I have someone to thank, and I don't know who. Either they read my blog, or they're just eerily psychic, but they posted the "brainless waste of life" comment to the fark thread. I checked out the profile, which indicated a home city (Pittsburgh) but no email.

So, FarkedInTheHead, I'm going to assume you'll see this. Thanks. :)

Nightmare Come True

Well, that didn't take long. Someone on Fark got nasty and linked to the Study Abroad section in the Inquirer, using a hideous headline. The comments section is appalling. Appalling enough that I was tempted to say something about it on the forums. Like "Read the article, you brainless waste of life."

Fortunately the Fark admins have anticipated such blinding rage, so you need an account to post, and it takes 24 hours to create an account, by which point, in all likelihood, whatever you were going to flame about has no relevance. I don't have a Fark account and I decided not to create one, but if any farkers made it here, let the following be known, please:

I made no money. (The stipend was to cover living expenses, like food and laundry).
My expenses were covered. This was an internship. (My parents didn't pay for it).
I earned no class credit. Again, this was an internship.
I did not go to Europe. Sri Lanka is in Asia.
I did not drink. Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhist, and alcohol is highly discouraged.

That is all.

Welcome, Inquirer Readers!

Glad to have you. The Sri Lanka archives are from May to August. Feel free to have a look around. Enjoy!