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“Monitor altitude and distance? Surely you jest.”

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has released its final report on the Air Canada, um, pre-runway excursion in Halifax two years ago. The fifteen findings are not surprising. They start with the three below and get only a bit more depressing from there. It’s disconcerting to read phrases such as “the flight crew did not monitor the aircraft’s altitude and distance…”, but only because that’s a flight crew’s actual job.

3.0 Findings
3.1 Findings as to causes and contributing factors

1. Air Canada’s standard operating procedure (SOP) and practice when flying in flight path angle guidance mode was that, once the aircraft was past the final approach fix, the flight crews were not required to monitor the aircraft’s altitude and distance from the threshold or to make any adjustments to the flight path angle. This practice was not in accordance with the flight crew operating manuals of Air Canada or Airbus.
2. As per Air Canada’s practice, once the flight path angle was selected and the aircraft began to descend, the flight crew did not monitor the altitude and distance from the threshold, nor did they make any adjustments to the flight path angle.
3. The flight crew did not notice that the aircraft had drifted below and diverged from the planned vertical descent angle flight profile, nor were they aware that the aircraft had crossed the minimum descent altitude further back from the threshold.

It is at least good to see “Collision with terrain” right there on the cover of the report and the “Damage to aircraft” section’s perfectly succinct “The aircraft was destroyed.” Honesty is the best policy…even if it is only at the investigating agency.

Did not buff out

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“Now let ‘er go, you got a good aim.”

I followed W.C. Fields’s advice to his niece in the clip above just now before sending the email quoted below to customer service at a site. There’s a new trend of harassing people via email to buy items they’ve looked at in the last twenty-four hours, no doubt the product of some fevered MBA’s gin-soaked nightmares. To date, I’ve had three sites start doing this over the last several months. One of them is eBay, but I believe I found their account setting to shut these off. The site I wrote to has no such setting; in fact, I opted out of all emails from them many moons ago and verified that’s still set.

Can you tell me how to opt out of the emails haranguing me to buy items that I viewed on your site within the last 24 hours? These automated emails started just a few months ago and occur even when I’m not logged in, thanks to cookies I allow you to create on my system because I’m a registered user.

I do not wish to receive emails simply because I looked at an item, because they’re intrusive and, frankly, annoying to such a high degree that I can only compare them to a car salesman following me out of his lot and knocking on my door several hours later to ask why I didn’t buy anything. If they’re not curtailed I’ll be compelled to visit any competitor’s site rather than yours when I want to look at something.

I see no account setting that allows me to stop these emails from being auto-generated. Can you help? Thank you for your assistance in resolving this matter.

Had I not counted to ten before writing the above, I feel certain I would have included the phrase chuckleheaded Goddamned emails. A cooler head has prevailed, but I retain the satisfaction of having typed that anyway.

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GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper

Thirty-six hours of lightning in the severe storms over the Eastern US a week ago, captured by the new GOES-16 NOAA satellite, which launched last November. It was known as GOES-R before launch.

Summarizing the satellite’s capabilities:

GOES-R will scan the skies five times faster than today’s GOES spacecraft, with four times greater image resolution and three times the spectral channels. It will provide high-resolution, rapid-refresh satellite imagery as often as every 30 seconds, allowing for a more detailed look at a storm to determine whether it is growing or decaying.

This image demonstrates the vast increase in resolution from GOES-13 (r) to GOES-16 (l). It’s 4572 x 2252 and 7.3MB:

Click for a much larger version

Hey, I can nearly see my house from here in this medium resolution image of the Northeast US taken in January:

Click for a larger version

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“Adam and Eve off the raft, sweep the kitchen!”

I was thinking this morning of stepping out to try a diner that’s down the road and quickly questioned that idea as possibly a bit rash: “But why?” They seem to have mixed reviews, so there’s a good possibility that I make better versions of their breakfast fare, and I’ll wager their eggs weren’t laid approximately Wednesday like mine. Plus, a month ago, I finally got around to buying a few of the true diner plates I was eyeing some years back – and I’m talking about real diner plates, 13″ ovals weighing 2½ pounds each – so now I even have the proper ambience. To wit:

Click for a larger version – but maybe you should eat something first

The title – or something like that, anyway – is diner lingo for corned beef hash (sweep the kitchen) with poached eggs (Adam and Eve) on the hash, not the toast (raft).

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“The one the front fell off?”

I just found out that satirist John Clarke died on 9 April. I loved his style, possibly the driest straight-faced humour I’ve ever seen. When I watch his weekly 3-minute bits with Bryan Dawe on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I’m usually grinning widely by the end, having sniggered the whole way through.

This was the first of their segments I ever saw. It’s from 1991:

A few years ago, I bought a boxed set of seven of their DVDs, which consist primarily of hundreds of these short interview segments from a 25-year span, great fun to dip into at random, plus the boxed set of “The Games”, a two-series, twenty-six episode mockumentary made prior to the Sydney Olympics, written by Clarke and Ross Stevenson and starring Clarke, Dawe, Gina Riley, and Nicolas Bell.

It is suggested that the BBC may have lifted the concept and many ideas from “The Games” for their later rather similar series, “Twenty Twelve”, though they deny it. On that topic, Clarke said in this article, “The BBC have investigated themselves and found the accusation of copying doesn’t hold. Well, we’ve investigated it, too, and found it’s very sound.” I know who I believed. Clarke provided the sordid details in this article: How television works: a heart-warming story for all the family

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5TewuwFkUo

You can see an archive of the last few years of ABC Clarke & Dawe segments here. His last taped segment is listed there but doesn’t seem to be working. A working copy can be found here.

Here’s the ABC’s tribute to Clarke on 17 April:

“All right, let’s go and stick some ferrets down some trousers.”
– John Clarke

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The Butterfly Place

My friend and I visited The Butterfly Place on Monday and left with a boatload of photos after wandering around in a leisurely fashion for 90 minutes. They have butterflies from every continent except the obvious one – a mite too chilly there. The best of my photos are below, presented in the order I took them. I’ve identified a few of the butterflies in the captions, and you can find many of the other names on their web site here.

All of these photos are 1920 x 1440, about half their original resolution. The only editing other than resizing that I did was some cropping on a handful and Photoshop’s auto-tone on most. Auto-tone automatically adjusts exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks, and it’s usually the first thing I do to photos imported from my camera. It’s almost never a bad idea.

Click on any thumbnail below to enter the gallery, where you’ll see medium-sized images. To see or save any particular image in full size, click on this at the lower right – you may need to scroll down to see it:

A brief panoramic video of the flight area is at the end of this post.

Overview of the flight area
The manic Graphium agamemnon eluded me entirely; the only time one sat still – for all of two seconds – auto-focus failed
White button quails were toodling all over
First blue morpho to land on my friend
They have beautiful sky blue uppersides, but they fold their wings as soon as they land
Blue morphos feasting on bananas; you can see some of that blue on the one at left
A second blue morpho stayed on my friend for about ten minutes
Female zebra finch
We thought the most interesting butterfly was the glasswing Greta oto
The chrysalis hatching booth
Emerged in the previous hour or so

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The doctor is in (5¢)

My best mate had a pretty bad week last week, so I suggested she take a couple days off and visit – for the cure. Part of that was her first visit to The Butterfly Place, where I took plenty of photos yesterday that’ll be in my next post (update: it’s here), and then the delectable popcorn shrimp and catfish at Border Cafe, a small chain that first opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Another part was a delicious dessert we hadn’t made for years, James Martin’s Croissant Butter Pudding with white chocolate and bourbon. Costco had a great deal on their high-quality all-butter croissants a couple weeks ago – their “let’s clear just 3 or 4 cents per croissant” price was US$4.99 a dozen – so I had those in the freezer and brought four out for this. Like most breads, croissants freeze and thaw beautifully.

Post-blowtorch with a bruléed crust; click for a larger version

This is how Martin serves it in a restaurant setting; click for a larger version

I first saw Martin make this in his BBC “Sweet Baby James” series in 2007, so we reviewed episode 4 last night and I dug out his Desserts cookbook for the weights and measures. The croissant portion of that episode happens to be on YouTube:

He hasn’t changed it much over the years – here he is making it again in his 2013 series “United Cakes of America” on the Good Food Channel:

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Refreshing the spice rack

My herb and spice drawer; click to see a larger version

Twelve years ago, I found nifty food-safe, windowed storage tins at Specialty Bottle at a great price and started storing my dried herbs and spices in them. I recently replaced the tins – the reason detailed below – and was happy to see the price had risen little in twelve years, so I sent a note to the company:

I just placed an order to replace the square tins I bought from you in August of 2005 – quantities exactly the same, forty large and ten small – and was pleased to find that the price went up just $7, from $53 to $60, so I’m writing to say thanks for keeping prices reasonable – it’s much appreciated.

I’m replacing my 12-year-old herb-and-spice tins because I’m putting waterproof laminated labels on the new set. I used inkjet-printed adhesive paper labels before and the ink has run on many of them, plus the adhesive is a bear to remove. For the still great price, it’s easier to replace than to spend several hours trying to clean glue off the old ones.

Thanks to you and The Spice House, I don’t have to take out a loan to have a well-stocked and perfectly organized kitchen.

I forwarded that email to The Spice House folks later, and both responded appreciatively.

Order from The Spice House; click to read the labels

To expound on the other half of this kitchen supply equation, I recently placed an order with The Spice House for eleven items, ten of which are pictured above (the ten whole nutmegs I also ordered were already in their tin). Most of these are 4 ounce/113g bags, four to eight times what’s in your typical supermarket herb/spice jar, but the price per ounce from The Spice House is perhaps a quarter to a third the per-ounce price of the McCormick, Spice Islands, and other brands typically found in US supermarkets. The bags at foreground right are 8 ounces/227g, an even better bargain. I’ll mention here that, in that bottom row, the toasted onion powder and roasted garlic powder are so far above untoasted and unroasted that they’re in an entirely different league – a fantastic one.

Here’s the bottom line: My Spice House order above (plus the nutmegs) was $75, with free shipping. A rough calculation tells me that the equivalent weights of the distinctly lower quality supermarket brands, much of which would have spent months in various warehouses and then gathering dust in the aisle, would cost at least $225 and probably closer to $300.

My ducks all in a row (you can’t easily see, but there are labels on both the covers and the fronts of all the tins); click to view a larger version

Postscript: I forgot to mention that I used the Brother PT-1230 USB label printer, small at 6 x 4 x 2″ and a relative steal at $30, to produce all those labels using their TZe231 1/2″ laminated black on white tape. However, be sure to read this Amazon reviewer’s notes on how to use it economically. You can use the printer without the (free) P-touch Editor software he discusses, but you’ll waste a lot of tape if you do.

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A visit from the family

Back in July 2013, I took this photo of a rafter of turkeys at my office:

The hen and her eight poults (Click for a larger version)

Yesterday, what might well be the same family showed up, but there were ten instead of nine ’cause Pop was there this time:

I wonder, would a sourdough, boursin, and cranberry trap work? (Click for a larger version)

He paused about every sixth step to puff up and flash this display (Click for a larger version)

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Price check

For two 5-pound/2.27-kilo bags:

King Arthur Flour at its list price of $4.95 a bag: US$9.90; King Arthur Flour online order $15.90 with shipping

Amazon (all 3rd party sellers): range from $19.46 to $34.51 with shipping

Online is obviously not a good choice, but that’s only partially due to the shipping cost, which ranges from $6 to $12 for the ten pounds. Locally the price is lower:

Stop & Shop, on sale this week for $4.53 a bag: $9.06

Walmart at its regular price of $3.47: $6.94

Market Basket at its frequently recurring sale price of $2.50 a bag (on this week): $5.00

Okay, so sometimes it’s like shopping in the 1980s.

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Cookbooks, honestly

Jasper White, in his introduction to Cooking from New England (1989):

“I typed this book, but I did not write it. I doubt if anyone has ever really written a cookbook. I believe that the creative process in cooking is a matter of transforming small parts of a much greater body of folk knowledge into new variations, however slight the differences.”

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Song of the South

Flying Biscuit with sawmill gravy and poached eggs; click for a larger version

FLYING BISCUITS

Excerpt from The Flying Biscuit Cafe Cookbook [my comments in brackets]

With some hesitation, I am revealing our greatest secret: the biscuit recipe. The hesitation comes from the fact that people will realize when they read this recipe that there really is no great secret — just a lot of patience and technique. [Well, not really…the recipe takes just six or eight minutes to prepare and twenty minutes to bake.] We make an average of 700 of these fluffy pups on a weekday at the Biscuit and 1,200 on a weekend day. Many different people have made the biscuits since the restaurant has been open. Our biscuiteers arrive before the break of dawn to produce these tender little morsels. If by chance you happen to drive by early some morning, you may catch a glimpse of them through the window, hunched over a table, flour everywhere. If you look even closer you might see the sparkle of the biscuit cutter and a little white ball of dough flying through the air and landing on a sheet pan, ready to be baked for our loving patrons.

INGREDIENTS

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour (a soft winter wheat flour, such as White Lily, works best) [White Lily is found mainly in the Southern U.S.; an all-purpose flour with a decent protein percentage is fine to use]
  • 1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons plus 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar [UK caster sugar] [I usually cut this back to 1 1/2 tablespoons]
  • 6 tablespoons [3 oz.] unsalted butter, at room temperature (it should be the consistency of shortening)
  • 2/3 cup heavy cream [UK double cream]
  • 2/3 cup half-and-half [aka light single cream in the UK, or just go wild and use single cream, which is about 18% butterfat compared to about 12% for U.S. half-and-half. For a triple recipe, one pint each of double cream and light single cream. And one big-ass bowl, of course.]
  • 2 tablespoons half-and-half for brushing on top of biscuits
  • 1 tablespoon sugar for sprinkling on top of biscuits

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 375 F [190 C]. Line a sheet pan [or insulated baking sheet] with parchment paper.

Place flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Cut softened butter into 1/2 tablespoon-sized bits and add to the flour. Using your fingertips or a pastry cutter, work the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal. [I use fingers. This takes just two or three minutes.]

Make a well in the center of the flour and pour in all of the heavy cream and the half and half. Stir the dry ingredients into the cream and mix with a wooden spoon until dough just begins to come together into a ball.

Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead 2 or 3 times to form a cohesive mass. Do not overwork the dough [always important to prevent things like biscuits, pancakes, brownies, &c. from having a specific density higher than lead’s]. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough to a 1-inch thickness. The correct thickness is the key to obtaining a stately biscuit. Dip a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter in flour, then cut the dough. [I use a 3″ cutter and get 7 or 8 biscuits.] Repeat until all the dough has been cut. Scraps can be gathered together and rerolled one more time. [She says this because two or more regatherings and rerollings can result in overworked dough, but I find that as long as you do it gently enough, you can do two rounds after the first cutting instead of just one. The last round will get you one or two more biscuits from the scraps. They might turn out a bit misshapen, but they still taste good.]

Place the biscuits on the prepared sheet pan, leaving about 1/4 inch between them. [Why so close? Well, first, these biscuits expand almost exclusively vertically. Second, they retain more moisture when they’re baked closer together, so this measure helps keep the biscuits fluffy instead of crumbly.] Brush the tops of the biscuits with 1 tablespoon of half and half and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of sugar. [That’s 1 tablespoon distributed between all the biscuits, by the way. The half-and-half here is to make the tops a little browner than they might otherwise turn out and to make the sugar stick. I usually don’t bother with the extra sugar on top, though. It really isn’t necessary because they’ve already got sugar inside.]

Bake for 20 minutes at 375 F [190 C]. Biscuits will be lightly browned on the top and flaky in the center when done. [And still almost the original colour on the sides.]

Makes 8 to 12 biscuits, depending on the size of the cutter.

SAWMILL GRAVY
By Alton Brown

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 pound bulk breakfast sausage
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 2 cups milk
  • Salt and pepper

DIRECTIONS

Cook sausage in a cast iron skillet. When done, remove sausage from pan and pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat [sometimes you’ll have very little fat, in which case add some butter to make up two tablespoons]. Whisk flour into the fat and cook over low heat for 5 minutes. Remove pan from heat and whisk in milk a little at a time. Return to medium-high heat and stir occasionally while the gravy comes to a simmer and thickens. (Be sure to scrape up any brown bits that might be stuck to the bottom of the pan, that’s where the flavor is.) Check seasoning [I use lots of freshly ground pepper], add crumbled sausage and serve over toast or biscuits.

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