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!

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.

I Needed a Kick...

...to get back in the habit of posting, and this is it: In the process of following up a lead related to local politics, I stumbled over the fact that I'd missed National Grilled Cheese Day... even after promising (here) to take up the quest for the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich!

Interestingly, just a couple days ago, I went back to the Goodwill Store were I found my vacuum sealer and stick blender, and purchased (for the princely sum of $3 plus tax!) a waffle iron... for the specific purpose of recreating the waffle-grilled cheese sandwiches my mother used to make for me! How could I not have known it was National Grilled Cheese Day?

Ah, well... it's apparently still National Grilled Cheese Month, so I've got a little time to make amends. Question is, should I get this grilled cheese cookbook, or would that threaten the purity of my quest to create the Great American Sandwich® on my own?

Apres Soup

So, even though I tried to halve the recipe, the batch of butternut squash soup I made yesterday was vastly more than my Lovely Bride® could possibly eat. Even after I gave a bunch to the very helpful neighbor who helped dig me out of the snowpocalypse, and accounting for the pint I plan to take to work for lunch tomorrow, there was still plenty left over.

So naturally I fired up the thrift-shop Seal-a-Meal, and sealed up and froze three pint bags, each of which should be one full meal or two side portions. It feels good to be filling the chest freezer with home-cooked meals for the future!

In addition, while seeding and scraping the butternut squash yesterday, I noticed that the seeds looked like slightly smaller pumpkin seeds. This should've been no surprise to me; butternuts are so similar to pumpkins that Alton Brown suggested them as a potential main ingredient for pumpkin pie on a recent episode of Good Eats. So I reserved the seeds and toasted them (~25 minutes @325°F), tossed in a tiny bit of canola oil, some curry powder, pepper, and kosher salt. Just like pumpkin seeds, they make a great snack... and just like pumpkin seeds, I couldn't stop myself from eating them all!

We Have Liftoff!

Just a quick post to note that I actually fired up the new mixer and made something this evening: chocolate buttercream frosting for the wheatless cake the Lovely Bride© made for guests who are on their way over.


It was overkill, I admit, sort of like driving to the end of the driveway to get the mail: The frosting could've easily been made by hand or with our old hand mixer... but I really wanted to play with the new toy. Can you blame me?

Gear Hunter

Yesterday I posted about the goodies I received as Christmas gifts, including the New England Soup Factory cookbook I bought. Well, it occurred to me almost immediately that cooking soups (esp. in large batches) would mean yet another piece of kit I'd need: an immersion (aka stick) blender.

In addition, the project that drove me to put Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food on my wishlist — DIY sous vide — requires a hackable slow cooker.

Feeling a bit tapped out, it occurred to me that these are precisely the sort of gadgets that show up in thrift shops, so I trundled off to my favorite local Goodwill store, just beyond the town line in Manchester, CT.

I didn't find a slow cooker, but I did find a stick blender (for $4.00!), and I also came across a truly serendipitous find: A Seal-a-Meal VS120 vacuum food sealing system... for only $8.00 !!. Not only will this be useful for the sous vide project, once I scrounge up a slow cooker, but it will also come in handy for the soups: As I mentioned yesterday, the NESF soup recipes are for larger quantities of soup than the Lovely Bride® and I can possibly eat at one — or even two — sittings... but the vac sealer will allow me to portion out the leftovers into single- or double-serving portions and seal and freeze them. Before long, we'll have a freezer full of homemade soup!

Tonight I tested the Seal-a-Meal on some frozen strawberries, just to make sure it worked (Goodwill has a 10-day return policy on electrics), and... reeee-sult!¹




¹ Note extra-classy thrift-shop pricetags!

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.