Thursday, November 10, 2005
I life 150lb bag of coffee at work and my back is fine. I sneeze at home and my back hurts. Go figure.
I hate those huge sneezes that make you hurt yourself. My back is fine, it just hurt right after I sneezed. I just thought it ironic that I could pick up a couple of 150lb bags of coffee and my back didn't hurt yet when I sneezed, bam, my back hurt.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
It's always a good idea to wash your pocket calendar. In the washing machine. Yep. I wonder how hard it'll be to find a 2005 pocket calendar this time of year...
Playing with flesh-eating lye can be fun!
So this past weekend I went over to the sister's house and helped paint a table and grilled dinner for the sister and her boyfriend. I followed Alton Brown's advice and used natural hardwood charcoal and a chimney starter instead of the crappy briquets that everyone uses.
A) It lights a thousand times easier. I hate dousing that crap in lighter fluid and setting it to going and coming back ten minutes later to find it's gone out and having to douse it with more fluid. And then of course there are the times when it's not REALLY out and you douse it and it flares up...
The chimney starter lights the stuff so much quicker. Just stuff a bit of newspaper under it, fill it with the charcoal and light the paper. Fifteen or so minutes later u have a mess of burning coals ready to cook on. And all this with no petrolium by-products and such involved. Great stuff.
B) It has the hardwood thing goin for it so you get that great smoked flavour in the food.
I cooked up some chicken breasts with potatoes, onion, and bell peppers. We were supposed to have corn... it fell from where I set it into the middle of the burning hot coals and died.
The food was good. Regardless of how much the sister complained about the spuds being charred on the outside.
After the food was done I tried roasting some beans on the fire. They came out pretty much burnt, the coals were a bit hot, but they weren't roasting well on the grill so i put the pan right on the coals... I don't know what happened to the beans so I haven't tried them -- I think they got left at the sister's place.
After that I added new charcoal and stoked it to make it very hot and put my badly seasoned cast iron skillets on them to burn off the seasoning. It burned some of it off but not much of it. That is the reason for playing with flesh-eating lye.
Lye eats organic matter. The seasoning on a cast iron skillet is organic matter (fat). Lye eats the seasoning off of cast iron skillets leaving you with the bare iron again.
So I got some draino and filled a large rubbermaid tub with water and lye and cast iron and am letting it soak (with a warning on the lid saying that it's lye). I wore gloves. I haven't really figured out how I'm going to safely remove the skillets from the lye bath.
After they are stripped of their old, badly done, sticky, gross, uneaven seasoning I'll re-season them.
I haven't decided where to do that, though... Neither our oven, my parents' oven, nor my sister's oven has a properly vented hood (mine having a total lack of hood, the other two having those hoods that just vend right back into the kitchen...). I think i'll do it here and open the windows in the kitchen and use a fan. And close the doors to the kitchen. Hopefuly that'll work.
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)