Crowdsourcing a "Perfect" Hack

My sister likes gadgets, so when it came time to go Christmas shopping for her, I naturally wandered into Brookstone, and she likes to entertain in her beautiful Florida home, so in Brookstone my eyes naturally wandered to the Perfect Drink app-controlled bartending set.

Actually, on my first foray into the store, I passed this gadget by, not quite getting that this wasn't just another electric shaker or some other such I-don't-really-need-a-machine-to-do-that sort of tool. But on the next trip, when I was starting to get desperate, I happened to be in the store when someone was doing a live demo (similar to this video), and I saw what a truly cool thing this was: An app-controlled smart scale that tracks the pour of each ingredient, including scaling for multiple servings and correcting for overpours by proportionally scaling the other ingredients. It even senses when you pick the shaker up from the scale and starts a timer to ensure you shake long enough!

 

It's just cool.

 

But it didn't take me long to realize that the concept would be equally useful for all recipes; not just cocktails. Alton Brown made a point, throughout the run of Good Eats, of basing his "applications" on weights, and I can imagine a Perfect Drink-like gadget/app that would work for complex, multistage dishes just as well as for a three- or four-ingredient mixed drink. The hardware — the smart scale itself — is right there; all that's needed is the app.

 

Surely, I thought, such an app had already been produced... but if so, my poor searching skills haven't been up to finding it. This prototype seems more focused on homebrew hardware; the Prep Pad from Orange Chef seems more focused on precision and nutritional analysis than on reecipe process management (and besides, it costs more than twice as much as the Perfect Drink hardware).

 

So I have to ask all my geeky, software inclined friends: How hard would it be to write a full-featured cooking app that would use the Perfect Drink smart scale hardware as approachably and effectively as the original cocktail set does?

 

Enquiring minds want to know!

New Year, New Toys

This will be brief, because it's already 11:00 pm EST as I begin, and I want to publish before the end of New Year's Day.

By now, I know better than to promise any particularly consistency of blogging in 2014: It is, in fact, my goal to write here regularly, but if past is prologue, it's likely that the new year will include, as have years past, long hiatuses (hiati?), dropped projects, and all manner of broken promises with regard to my writing in this space.

One promise I mean to keep, though, is to cook more. I have been putting cookbooks at the top of my birthday, Fathers' Day, and Christmas wish lists for several years, now, and between gifts and my own packratacquisitional nature, I've acquired quite a library of them... of cookbooks, that is, that I've hardly cooked out of at all. My resolution for the coming year is to correct that, and to that end, I didn't put any cookbooks on my wish list this holiday season.

So instead of books, I got a food processor and a deep fryer. My plan is to try to cook a new recipe from my library at least once each week, and to report on it here.

Watch this space!

The Lazy Blogging Timewarp: Happy Foodie Father's Day

Now that I've thrown another log on the Emerging Foodie fire, I'll be reaching into the (more or less recent) past to post about things I didn't get around to posting about when they actually happened.

First up: A quick post of belated praise and gratitude to my family for some delicious Father's Day presents. My daughter got me Bacon Nation: 125 Irresistible Recipes, by Peter Kaminsky and Marie Rama. This is not just a bunch of bizarre, bacon-obsessed stunts: It appears to be a serious, thoughtful cookbook whose recipes use bacon in well considered, balanced ways. I can't wait to try some out! (Actually, it was this book that inspired me to think about bacon chipotle sweet potato salad, even though I didn't use a recipe from the book.)

In addition, my wonderful wife got me tickets to see Alton Brown's live Edible Inevitable Tour when it comes to the Bushnell in Hartford (sadly, not 'til next February... hmm, Valentine's Day, actually...). Even with the videos on his site, I'm having trouble imagining what a live Alton Brown show will be like... but I'm having no trouble imagining that it'll be great: I can't wait!

More timewarping to come! I'll get my promised post about our post-Tanglewood dinner at Chez Nous up in the next day or two, then I'll reach back to May for several posts about a trip I took to the Northern VA/DC area and to Alton's hometown of Atlanta!

A Slow Start After a Nice Christmas

Notwithstanding my dire expectations, my computer upgrade went well, but even so I'm already getting behind on my intended blog reboot(s), as I've lamented elsewhere. To try to ramp up, I'll review the foodie portion of my Christmas.

First, the gifts: In addition to the cool molecular mixology kit I already mentioned, I got as gifts...

• Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher. When I launched this blog, I intended to devote some of it to writing about beers... and I did so, but I quickly realized I didn't have the knowledge or vocabulary to comment usefully. So I put this on my wish list to edumacate myself. Look for a review when I'm done reading.

• A beer (as a stocking stuffer!) called Criminally Bad Elf. I had intended to save it 'til I could apply my new expertise, but... nah; "It's dead, Jim!"


• The promise of a fine-dining outing, most likely at the Copper Beech Inn's Brasserie Pip, whose chef, Tyler Anderson, is a Chopped champion. (Count on a review when the time comes.)
  
  
• A vegetable slicerfrench fry cutter, which I actually intend to use to try to make fried yucca like we used to get at the late, lamented (in CT, at least) Pollo Tropical.

In addition, I cooked our Christmas dinner, making (at the request of my family) Korean pulled pork lettuce wraps with kimchi slaw and sesame-garlic mayo, according to the recipe my buddy Andy published. I sense a brand new holiday tradition in the making!

Cocktail of the Day: The Grinch

Yes, I'm back, after way too long an absence. I'll write more about that soon, but for the moment, a quick cocktail post, based on this very cool gift I got for Christmas.

In my very first foray into molecular gastronomy¹, I have tonight made for my family...

The Grinch
Ingredients:

• 400 ml + 15 ml per drink melon liqueur (Midori, in my case)
• 2g sodium alginate
• 4 cups water
• 5g calcium lactate
• Ginger ale
• Honeydew melon (optional garnish)

Tools:

• Immersion blender (or similar)
• Plastic pipette (or syringe or similar)
• Pierced spoon

Procedure: Dissolve sodium alginate in 400 ml of melon liqueur, mix with immersion blender and set aside for 5 min.; dissolve 5g calcium lactate in water (sorry 'bout the mixed units, but that's how the kit recipe specified it); drip (from pipette or similar) liqueur mixture into calcium lactate bath to form "caviar"; put ice cubes and 15 ml melon liqueur into rocks glasses; fish out "caviar" with pierced spoon and spoon over ice; top with ginger ale. Optionally, garnish with honeydew melon slice (I didn't have a honeydew melon on hand, and couldn't wait to play with my new toy).











I actually halved the liqueur/sodium alginate mixture and still got enough yield of "caviar" for four drinks, each with the equivalent of about 2 oz of alcohol. When you see the finished drink (which I found tasty, even though Midori is not usually my thing), you'll see where the name came from:



Back soon (and often) with more; I plan to keep this blog much more active in the coming year!

¹I know, I know... that's so last year, and even the term molecular gastronomy is out of fashion; what can I say? I live on the bleedingtrailing edge!

Happy Foodie Birthday to Me!

So last Wednesday was my 51st birthday — yes, I'm officially over 50 — and because my natal day fell in the middle of the week... the last week of the school term for both my daughter and my Lovely Bride©... we didn't celebrate until Sunday, a combined birthday and Mother's Day dinner at one of our favorite local Mexican restaurants. But other than briefly mentioning a delicious blood orange margarita, it's not the meal I'm going talk about here.

Instead, it's the birthday gifts I opened before we headed out to dinner, all loaded with foodie goodness. First, the LB® got me the food grinder attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer I scored for Christmas... and then doubled down with the sausage stuffer kit! Yeah, I saw the guy on No Reservations who stuffed sausage perfectly by hand, but I'm not too proud to use any labor-saving tools I can.
I've been talking big about making my own sausage; now I'll be forced to make good. Maybe I'll start with the couple sausage recipes in Primal Cuts, which I picked up for cheap at our late, lamented Borders' liquidation sale.
But wait, there's more! Not only did I get the meat grinding tools (let's be serious here: KitchenAid may call it a food grinder, but I'm'a be grinding meat), I also got a cool rack for making grilled stuffed jalapenos from my sister, and from my loving daughter, I got a no-fry corn dog maker from ThinkGeek. Yeah, I know Alton Brown would say it's a rotten unitasker... but... but... food on a stick, dude; what's not to love? I'm imagining making sausage links with locally grown meat and homegrown herbs and hot peppers, and then turning them into homemade corn dogs with batter also incorporating homegrown herbs. Cool, eh?

Oh, yeah, one more thing: To put the very cherry on my birthday Sundaye, I also got Laura Werlin's Grilled Cheese, Please! cookbook, which should further The Quest® greatly. Look for a full post on that in the coming days.

Foodie Xmas Goodies: Cooking Subdivision

So yesterday I posted about the booze-related goodies I got for Christmas; today it's time for the cooking-related swag!


Most excitingly, my Lovely Bride© got me a KitchenAid Classic Plus stand mixer. This was No. 1 on my wish list with a bullet, and she managed to buy it right under my nose without me knowing, making up some cock-and-bull story about how they didn't have the right model in stock, and the rebate coupon she had wasn't valid, to convince me she hadn't been able to get it, when in fact it was nestled in the back of my car! Way cool! Plus which, even though an entry-level model, it represents a significant enough investment to serve as a "$100 tennis racket": a de facto commitment to actually cook. Now my big decision is whether I should paint hot-rod flames on it, like Alton Brown did his. Prolly not, I think.

But speaking of Alton, my next bit of foodie goodness under the tree was his Good Eats 2: The Middle Years.

Last under the tree — but definitely not least — was Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food, which I blogged about after following an article about DIY sous vide cooking to the author's blog. I'm only halfway through reading it (look for a detailed review in an upcoming post), but already I can tell it's so much more than a hacker's guide to homemade gear (not that that wouldn't be great). Instead, it posits a whole science-geek approach to cooking: While it's full of recipes, hints, tips, and hacks, it's really about a kind of kitchen philosophy. Great stuff.

But wait! There's more!!


In addition to all those things, I got a Barnes & Noble gift card, which I used to purchase the New England Soup Factory cookbook. I'd looked at this in the store even before Christmas, but when I went back, I found it was sold out. During after Christmas shopping at another location, I found a copy and snapped it up. All the soups sound great; the only problem is that most of the recipes are for 8-10 12 oz. servings... which is quite a lot for the two (and occasionally three) of us. Not to worry, though; I think I've got a solution... about which, more tomorrow.