Archive for December, 2009
Building A Chest For The Porch
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading on December 8th, 2009
Issa and I wanted a chest to put on the porch, to keep things like umbrellas, work gloves, and other such items. Always eager to justify my “investment” in power tools, I made one.
Total cost was about $200 in materials and probably about 20-40 hours of work, spread out over several weeks.
The plans came from the book, “2×4 Furniture,” which I recommend for amateur carpenters who desire to make furniture. I’m not going to be documenting the build here, but you can go view the album on my Fotki site if you’d like more information. Each of the pictures has a description that will give a little more detail.
Making Good Coffee On The Cheap
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on December 5th, 2009
Making good coffee is easy. Get good beans, the definition of “good” depending entirely on your tastes. Grind the beans immediately before brewing, for maximum freshness. Steep the beans in water between 190 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Steep the beans for about 4-5 minutes, so as to avoid extracting bitter flavors from them. Done.
Coffee purists will note about a million little quirks of the brewing process that I have omitted, each one they consider essential. More power to them. Perhaps they’re extracting an additional 5% of pure deliciousness from their coffee, but they’re doing five times as much work and spending twenty times as much money in order to get it, so I’ll just pass. I’ve found that the basic steps listed above give me an excellent cup of coffee with very little investment in time and money.
Drip-style coffee makers are the most popular ones in America, by far. The problem with these devices is that they typically do not get the water hot enough to fully extract the good flavors in the oils. The acids in coffee beans are extracted at lower temperatures than the other flavor compounds, which means that cool water produces a sour-tasting cup.
The two simplest and cheapest ways of making a great cup of coffee are the French press and the manual drip method. With the French press, you pour the ground coffee and the hot water into a container, stir it, let it steep, and then separate the grounds from the brew by means of a metal plunger with a mesh screen on it. French press is my favorite way of making several cups of coffee at once. Once the coffee is brewed, you can leave it in the press or, if you have a thermos or thermal carafe, you can pour it into that to keep it hot and fresh. Some people claim that leaving the coffee in the press with the grounds makes it bitter, but that hasn’t been my experience.
One thing I don’t like about the French press is the cleanup. Because I compost, I can’t just swirl the grounds in water and dump them out. That would make the compost too wet. Getting the grounds out is a bit of a pain. And sometimes, I just want a single cup of coffee. They do make single-cup presses, but I don’t have one.
The manual drip coffee method works just like an automatic drip machine, except you manually boil the water and pour it over the grounds. Because you’ve boiled the water before-hand, you know it’s above 190. Technically, you should not brew with water above 200, but I just take the pot off the heat and pour it on. I’ve found that the room-temperature grounds immediately bring the water down below 200, and I don’t taste a difference with water that has cooled to 200 and water that is just off the boil.
If you are a fancy-schmancy-pants, you can buy a Chemex Drip Coffee Carafe
May I point out that glass containers are actually not so great for storing coffee, because they don’t hold the heat well. A thermos or thermal carafe is a better choice for storing coffee you don’t intend to drink immediately.
If the price of the Chemex puts you off, you can spend about $12 to get a manual drip pot
But I’m a cheapskate. If, like me, you have perfectly good funnels sitting around your kitchen, you might consider my method, documented here for all posterity.
And if there is anything to those high-falutin’ Chemex coffee filters, I bet they still work just as good in a $2 plastic funnel as a $40 glass pot. I think that Alton Brown would be proud.
Grinding Up Salsa
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on December 2nd, 2009
I love salsa. My favorite is the fresh stuff, pico de gallo, basically just chopped-up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and jalapenos with a little salt, lime, and cilantro. My sister once pointed out how easy it was to make, and it was like a light-bulb going off. Of course I can make my own salsa!
I’ve made pico by hand. It’s a lot of work cutting up all those veggies, but good practice at knife skills, I suppose.
I’ve made it in a blender too, but blenders are really made for mixing liquids. They don’t move mostly-solid mixtures around enough to bring new material into contact with the blades. They just end up puree’ing whatever is at the bottom of the blender, and then, hey, you’ve probably got enough liquid to blend, but you’ve also got a puree. Not good salsa.
I’ve made it in a food processor. That’s pretty good, but the art of getting just the right chunkiness without having big chunks left over and without crossing the line to soupy is a little tricky. And the work bowl of a food processor typically only makes a pint or two of salsa. Not nearly enough for my tastes.
Then my step-mom mentioned to me that she had the food grinder attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. It had come as a set with the mixer, and she never used it, so she offered it to me. Of course, I had to make salsa!
The grinder produced a little less-chunky salsa than I normally would prefer, but it was still recognizably “salsa” and not “tomato and onion juice-drink”. One thing that I really liked was how consistent the product was.
The ground up tomatoes in the photo above are sitting in a colander, which is placed in a bowl. This is to allow some of the extra liquid to drain out, and reduce the wateriness of the salsa. I still have yet to find a way to produce salsa without it being watery, short of cooking it to simmer off the liquid, but that produces cooked salsa, which is wonderful, but not my favorite. It tends to end up tasting more like spaghetti sauce than salsa.
Everything went into the grinder: tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, cilantro, and garlic.
Issa prepped the veggies by cutting them down to sizes small enough to go into the grinder. This was some work, but not near as much as cutting it all up by hand. We had 15 lbs of tomatoes!
When we were done, there was about two gallons of salsa.
We put about five pints of it in the freezer…
We put about a quart in the fridge for later, and we dug into the rest.
I woke up the next morning with garlic taste still in my mouth. I am vampire-safe.
In case you’re interested, here is the recipe we used. Honestly, you can hardly go wrong.
- Some tomatoes
- Maybe half that much onion, or more if you like onion
- A whole bunch of cilantro, except if you hate cilantro, in which case you can leave it out. Did you know that there’s a bitter flavor compound in cilantro that some people can’t taste? That’s why some people hate cilantro so much and others love it. The ones who hate it have the gene that allows them to fully taste it. The rest of us literally can’t taste that bitterness you hate so much.
- Juice of one lime, or more if you’re making a really big batch
- As much garlic as you can stand to peel, but probably not more than a head. Or three cloves if you don’t want to vampire-proof everybody who eats it.
- About two jalapenos, seeds included. More if you like hot food. Or mix in other types of peppers if the jalapeno’s burn is not exactly what you want.
- Salt to taste. Don’t over-do it!
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