Snowfall in the north-east of the US has subsided, forecasters say, but there are now warnings of flooding as the snow melts.
When I saw this BBC News headline and opening graf just now, I made a Scooby-Doo “Hmmm?” sound and went to the window to see if my mind was going or indeed that there has been no snow that’s stuck here yet.
First of all, it’s usually referred to as the Northeast US without either the “ern” or the hyphen. That’s just a minor quibble. However, the overseas over-generalisation often featured in the news on both sides of the Atlantic is more severe than usual in this case, so someone should at least mention it, and offer the perspective that ought to be provided by…oh, I don’t know, let’s say journalists. I’m volunteering.
The counties in bright green in the centre of the map below are the only places that have flood warnings right now. The blue are just high wind warnings. The light green counties have special weather statements from the National Weather Service in effect, with most of those for expected light rain that might freeze on roads in some places.
For comparison, those green counties around Buffalo, the quite narrow actual focus of that BBC News article, have an area perhaps 50% larger than metropolitan London, as demonstrated here, but with several million fewer people than metro London.
The current snow depth map shows why those counties may have some flooding as the weather warms:
Finally, for the wider and long-term perspective, here are the areas in the US and Canada that get lake effect snow – every year, and frequently.
I roast turkeys throughout the year, so I’ve learned a thing or two about those birds. The best trick I’ve come up with is a method of simultaneously roasting a turkey and preparing a quart of the finest turkey stock I’ve ever seen right underneath it – no four or five hours of simmering and reduction on the stovetop needed.
Outside of Thanksgiving, I often roast a turkey one night, allow it to cool somewhat, cover and refrigerate the whole bird – except for Quality Assurance slices, of course – and then get the meat off the next night for use in turkey sandwiches and sometimes for turkey tetrazzini*. In the past, each time I stripped the carcass, I’d notice the sizeable quantity of jelly that always covered the bottom of the bird. It’s a thick layer of well-set jelly, maybe a third of a cup’s worth. I knew that jelly was collagen melted from the connective tissue and bones – the source of gelatin – and that collagen is one of the keys to a fine stock, and wondered just how much was being evaporated away and wasted from the bottom of a dry pan. And so, I came up with this recipe to find out. The answer was “quite a bit.”
Recipe
To adjust for evaporation that will occur during roasting and basting, start with 5 cups/1.1 litre of water in the bottom of a roasting pan along with a bunch of roughly-chopped root vegetables and other stock components – in this photo, half a bag of baby carrots, a few celery stalks with their leaves, a few onions cut in quarters, several unpeeled cloves of garlic crushed with the flat of a chef’s knife, a few bay leaves, a small handful of whole black peppercorns, and some thyme:
Roast the turkey as normal on a rack above those – I often use Alton Brown’s 500F/260C for 30 minutes and the remainder at 350F/175C method – adding a little more water every now and then during roasting to keep the level of liquid to a quart or so, basting the turkey every twenty minutes. The basting is not to keep the turkey moist – because it doesn’t, really – but mainly to wash more collagen into the pan below, and it does also help crisp the skin. The only thing not to do is add more water to the pan in the last half-hour of roasting, when it dilutes the stock too much. At the end, you’ll have your turkey:
And this liquid gold in the pan:
Strain the contents of the pan through a close-mesh strainer into a bowl, squeezing all the juices out of the veg with the back of a spoon or ladle, strain the resulting liquid once more through some cheesecloth into a quart container, then store that in the fridge overnight – or, if you want to use some or all of it immediately for gravy, use a fat separator such as this one and off you go.
If you go the chilling route, there will be a set layer of turkey fat on top, and, after you lift that off, you’ll find that the rest is a highly concentrated and gelled stock, shown below, that I think would make even a dour French chef secretly smile.
*My turkey tetrazzini is chunks of white and dark meat with herbed sautéed mushrooms in a turkey velouté-based sauce Parisienne with Gruyère cheese added, served with freshly-made egg noodles in a casserole, an enhanced version of Tyler Florence’s recipe. Speaking of which, separately try that sautéed mushroom mixture made in the first part of his recipe on some sourdough toast. Delicious.
Gougères with Gruyère for an appetizer – see the Petits Choux au Fromage link on this page
Roast turkey – with instant stock for gravy and, later, tetrazzini
Cornbread and slow-cooked bacon stuffing
Sweet potato “soufflé” (not really a soufflé, but quite light and fluffy…no, there’s no marshmallow)
Creamed corn or maybe something lighter, with Trader Joe’s pretty decent frozen corn
Something chocolate – maybe mousse, but my daydreaming right now features something I would be most thankful for: a from-scratch devil’s food cake with chocolate buttercream
Sir: You ask me for a sentiment which shall state how much I have to be thankful for this time. For years it has been a rule with me not to expose my gratitude in print on Thanksgiving Day, but I wish to break the rule now and pour out my thankfulness; for there is more of it than I can contain without straining myself. I am thankful – thankful beyond words – that I had only $51,000 on deposit in the Knickerbocker Trust, instead of a million; for if I had had a million in that bucket shop, I should be nineteen times as sorry as I am now.
Trusting that this paean of joy will satisfy your requirement, I am
Who woulda thunk that? Not me before yesterday. I got these accessories for the Dimplex fireplace in the mail and they’re making me grin. The item on the right is a USB-rechargeable speaker into which you can plug an SD card. Onto that card, I put a 250MB MP3 of the audio I extracted from this ten-hour YouTube video, so now I have actual and non-repeating fireplace sounds. The speaker’s been playing that MP3 for twelve hours now and it’s still going strong, so the battery time is outstanding – but I also found that you can simply leave its USB adapter plugged in all the time while it’s running.
The other item is real wood incense blocks from Santa Fe. I got the sampler of seven – Piñon pine, cedar, juniper, hickory, alder, mesquite, and balsam fir – so I can decide which ones I like best and will purchase just those later. To burn the incense, I’m using a tiny novelty ashtray a friend brought me from Mexico a couple years ago. The clay holder included with the bricks is a little small – the ashes dropped off to its side when I tried the first block, which seemed a bit unsafe.
I can’t wait to get the media console where the fireplace will eventually reside, but wait I must.
“I’m feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap…”
This infantalising of spaceflight really doesn’t work for me, nor am I a big fan of journalists pretending spacecraft have Fnooter accounts and feelings and such. Instead of playing along and thereby helping to downplay serious problems, why not report the facts: a committee of four or five people decides what the fnoots will say in general, with the focus on minimising the negative and maximising the positive; the Assistant to the Director for Cutesy Talk and Multiple Exclamation Points then dumbs it down; then the antisocial media drone pastes it in. Document that process and then maybe – maybe – you can legitimately call yourself a journalist.
I haven’t made sourdough in quite a while, so I started re-energising my starter Thursday night and finally baked this boule today. I love returning to sourdough because it’s always quite pleasant, even a bit of a rush, to find that I haven’t lost my touch – or my starter, for that matter.
It’s been about ten years now since my boss – two bosses ago, that is – brought me a pint of live sourdough starter dough from a San Francisco bakery on his return from a California trip. It’s hardy stuff. It survived its initial mistreatment in the cold baggage hold of an airliner, where it burst its plastic container but was held by the first of two layers of freezer bags, and seems to laugh off my periodic neglect, when I’ve forgotten the starter’s in the back of the fridge and didn’t feed it for a month. Or two. Or…well, never you mind how many months it was that one year. As you can see, Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis and Candida humilis have both forgiven me, and that’s all that really matters. We three get along just fine.
Keeping a sourdough starter alive for ten years is pretty good, but it’s just a couple of ticks compared to some. King Arthur Flour sells a sourdough starter of a New England variety with a lineage back to the mid-1700s. I used their starter before I got my San Francisco nugget of gold. The San Francisco variant has a tangier taste and produces a slightly creamy texture that adds another element to the crunchy crust and chewy crumb. I’ve found the San Francisco sourdough is slightly less active than the New England variant, which adds time to the feeding and proofing cycles, but it’s worth the wait. As I am sometimes wont to say when pressed, “I can do it quickly or I can do it right. Which would you prefer?”
The only thing I don’t like about the web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is that I’ve never heard Seinfeld mention Robert Llewellyn’s Carpool once. It’s not just that he doesn’t mention it, it’s that when I’ve seen him interviewed about CiCGC, he accepts compliments on his great idea for a show in a manner that at the least heavily implies that it was his idea. A simple one-time, ten-second nod to the UK show that predated his by more than three years would do.
Anyway, this week’s episode features the delightful Amy Schumer. The show usually features some good coffee shots, so here’s one of mine:
Today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12. Despite the fact that the launch vehicle was struck not once, but twice, by lightning, at thirty-six and fifty-two seconds after launch, it was possibly the most fun manned spaceflight ever undertaken. Here’s an excerpt of the launch:
Mission Commander Pete Conrad flew a precision approach to their landing site, something absolutely required in the trickier later missions that landed near or in mountains, rilles, and valleys. His target was the Surveyor 3 lander, which had arrived in the Ocean of Storms two-and-a-half years earlier as part of NASA’s programme to reconnoiter Apollo landing sites. He touched down within 300 metres of the spacecraft, proving it could be done and paving the way for the next eight moonwalkers. The Surveyor 3 TV camera Bean and Conrad retrieved with the aid of a bolt cutter now resides in the National Air & Space Museum’s Exploring the Planets gallery.
You can see interviews with the three crew members in this documentary. However, be aware that the video footage it shows of astronauts on the moon is from later missions. While setting up the color TV camera early in their first EVA, Al Bean inadvertently pointed the camera lens at the sun, killing its vidicon tube, so there’s no such footage from Apollo 12.
Mission Commander Pete Conrad, pictured below in one of his finest moments, sadly died in a motorcycle accident in 1999.
I’m thinking it may have occurred on the coast of Maine, where I took these photos last month when I visited York Beach for my company’s annual user group conference. Click any of these for a 1024×768 version.
Five years ago, the first night in York featured a beautiful moonlit salmon sky, and I took this picture:
I had consistently good food while there this year, most notably at the Union Bluff Hotel. At the scheduled dinner for all, the choices were filet mignon, lobster, and baked chicken. I had the filet since I was planning lobster and fried clams at other places, and the steak was perfectly rare and buttery tender, with well-made garlic mashed potatoes whose garlic had obviously been roasted or braised – a pleasant surprise for me, since most restaurants simply toss in a handful of chopped raw garlic and call it a day.
The restaurant also had a tasty self-serve appetizer table at the dinner that featured several types of crackers with real and quite delicious charcuterie and what I think were locally made cheeses. Even the baked goods the hotel provided for breaks during the conference were of surprisingly high quality, including real butter croissants and two varieties of cookies still warm from the oven (!).
I went to St. Joe’s Coffee a few miles from the hotel for Americanos and breakfast the two mornings I was there. I like that place because they keep the lighting dim, perfect for 6:30 in the morning when you haven’t yet had any coffee, and you can watch them preparing the folded mini-omelette for the breakfast sandwich. Dunkin’ Donuts execs would probably say, “What? We’re pretty sure that’s not how you make an egg sandwich.”
The last night I was there, I visited this place in Ogunquit for dinner in the bar. I had clam chowder, fried oysters, truffled lobster en croute, and a sparkling pear martini. It wasn’t all that expensive; I think I would have paid about 50% more for this south of the Massachusetts border.
Next day, I paused on the way back to the office to take a few pictures of Nubble Light, then stopped for fried clams at Bob’s Clam Hut at the border in Kittery. Delicious.
Note: In an effort to keep this post about Maine entirely positive, I decided not to mention this recent story at all.
Shall we ever have a Congress a majority of whose members are hopelessly insane? Probably not. But it is possible – unquestionably such a thing is possible.
The coffee, espresso, and tea corner of my kitchen is now complete after I replaced my older model Cusinart Grind & Brew drip coffeemaker with a fancy-schmancy Breville version that does an even better job – plus, it can do single cups of whatever size I want. I’d been using the Cuisinart for about fifteen years, keeping a US$40 refurb or two in the wings throughout that time to immediately replace units when they’d inevitably die after about 750 cycles – usually a failure of the warming plate. My best mate got me my first one for my birthday around 1999, something I will be eternally grateful for. I’ve enjoyed a lot of damned good coffee thanks to her.
The initial incarnation of the Breville YouBrew released several years ago had a metal thermal carafe, but I wasn’t all that interested due to many reviews complaining of weak and lukewarm coffee. The machine had a ceramic burr grinder, generally considered to be the best sort, but wasn’t grinding the beans fine enough, and the carafe required preheating in order for coffee to stay warm. The latter is an un-feature for me since I program my drip maker to start at 6am weekdays. I’m not going to get up fifteen minutes before that to warm a carafe.
A couple years ago, finally they did something about both problems: They released a different model with a more traditional glass carafe and warming plate and improved the grinder on both models to produce a finer grind. The chief complaint one reads about nearly all grind & brew machines from all manufacturers is dishwater-weak coffee because the grinders most often are blade grinders and produce a coarse grind more suitable for French press coffee than drip.
The Cuisinart I used didn’t have that problem even though it had a cheaper blade grinder, and always produced nicely strong coffee. I once foolishly replaced it with a Mellita Grind & Brew machine and was stuck with dishwater coffee for a week or two until I could find another refurbed Cuisinart. Later Cusinart grind & brew models did suffer from the feeble strength syndrome, so I always stuck with the original DGB-300 model. Over the years, Cusinart-refurbished ones eventually dropped to as low as US$35-40 on Amazon, but started becoming scarce once Cusinart stopped making this model four or five years ago and are now gone altogether. I knew I’d eventually have to come up with a replacement.
Cuisinart DGB-300
After using the Breville for two weeks now, I can report that it’s terrific. I have its strength setting two marks below the maximum and the resulting brew is still slightly stronger than the old Cuisinart. The coffee is plenty hot, strong, and has the same 10-11 minute brewing time of the Cuisinart. Delightful. Some advantages over the Cuisinart are much easier cleaning – instead of thoroughly washing three fiddly components, you just rinse the basket assembly and sponge any grounds off a disc behind the basket that autorotates to seal off the grinding chute during the brew cycle – and a carafe pour spout design that doesn’t drip off to the sides and onto your countertop as you pour.
The YouBrew control panel has two variants, one for single cup mode and one for carafe:
Here’s a video showing most of the YouBrew Glass features. I think I watched this about eight times in the last couple of years in anticipation of finally owning one.
A lot of people talk about going to their happy place, but few can actually show you a photograph of it:
For a long time, I’ve had the idea of finding a place to live that has a fireplace or a wood stove, because building, tending, and gazing at fires adds up to a soothing experience for me. However, I usually and conveniently forget the fact that I did once live in a place with a fireplace. I think I used it three times over the several years I was there. The whole place smelled slightly of damp soot permanently after the first time. When I do remember that, and realise the same thing would likely happen, I then change tack and think a wood stove would be nice, so long as it had a large glass door in the front and I could see what’s going on.
In any case, what with my spiffy kitchen not yet a year old, I plan to stay where I am for now, and there won’t be any wood stove in this place, but I still have those dreams of fire. Now, I’ve done something about it. I had seen fake fireplaces in the past, most often in media consoles, and was less than impressed, to put it kindly. “That has all the appeal of a steaming cow pat” was my average review. I decided to do some serious research to see if anyone made an electric fireplace/heater that would impress me. I was surprised to find that someone does: Dimplex of Ontario. (PDF)
Problem is, the firebox model I was interested in is nowhere to be seen in New England showrooms at the moment. Their trademark application for its name, Multi-Fire XD™, is dated March of this year, and their first brochure featuring it – the PDF above – was prepared in September, so I think the product’s only been on the street for several weeks at most. So problem one was that I couldn’t even get a look at it in person. I liked what I saw in this YouTube video posted by Dimplex, and was impressed not just by the look and features, but because no other electric fireplace manufacturer will show you their flame effect close up and at great length. Only Dimplex does. Remembering the other electric fireplaces I’ve seen, I believe the reason is pretty clear.
What I want in the end is a media console much like the one I already have, except with the inbuilt fireplace. However, the model I like weighs 180 pounds with the insert firebox and would cost me a mint to ship back if I didn’t like it. Problem two. And, I could not picture myself buying a fairly big ticket item like this sight unseen. Problem three.
I eventually talked to a helpful dealer about forty miles from me. He didn’t have one of the new boxes to show me (and they have to buy what they put in the showroom), but he did help me formulate a workable plan. He said if I found an online retailer with a decent return policy, I could buy the firebox alone – weighing just 40 pounds – and see if I liked it. If I didn’t, I would be out maybe forty or fifty bucks to ship it back, but at least I wouldn’t have wasted hundreds of dollars buying the whole shootin’ match sight unseen. And if I did like it, I could keep it and buy from him just the media console without the firebox insert.
He also said I had chosen well for someone who hasn’t been able to see any of this class of products in person. He goes to all the home & hearth shows, and said that Dimplex is the manufacturer with the best looking products, every year and by far. He said they’re a pain to deal with, “but they’re the best, so I deal.” Sounded good to me, so I ordered the insert from an online shop with a fourteen-day return policy and no restocking penalties. It arrived yesterday – bearing serial number 147 – and it’s currently just sitting on top of one of my end tables.
So after all that, what do I think? I loved it instantly. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and the inbuilt heater is whisper-quiet. I think I’m going to have a pleasanter winter than usual this year. Here’s a photo I took last night – click to see a larger version:
Sometime in the next several weeks, I’ll take the next step and order the console it will fit inside from that dealer near me. Dimplex’s promo photo of their Windham Mocha console has a boring golf picture on the television and a shockingly poor representation of their nifty firebox, so I fixed it up a bit with a screenshot from last week’s HIGNFY and a photo I took of my firebox from the correct angle to paste in here.
Later updates:
How I added fireplace sound and smell to the firebox is here.
The final installation of my media console is shown here.
