Twofer Tuesday: Kimchi Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Chipotle Mayo

 

So now that I have my homemade Kimchi recipe down I've been enjoying it much more frequently than I had been before. I liked Kimchi, but the stuff I had been buying was downright ......effervescent? The brand I had bought (as recently just tossed) is actually a little carbonated because it was fermented so long.

Since I now had stuff I liked I decided I'd brush off my version of the best grilled cheese sandwich that I ever had, courtesy of a little grilled cheese shop in the Columbus OH, North Market that (IIRC) was called The Best of the Wurst.

I think there are other, more successful places with the same name, but if you're in Columbus and have the opportunity to go to the North Market.....hit this place up. I loved everything I've had there, but the Kimchi Grilled Cheese sandwich rocked my world, for more than one reason. It's great, obviously, but this sandwich introduced me to not just one knew flavor, but two. Because of this, consider this post a bit of a twofer.

The Kimchi Grilled Cheese Sandwich is pretty easy:

• Sourdough Bread
• Gruyère Cheese
• Chipotle Mayo
• Kimchi

Now the hard part for me is the cheese.....it's kind of pricey and usually only available in a small wedge, but I lucked out and found one market in town that had it not only at a decent price, but available sliced as thick as you like at the deli.

Lay down your bread, lay down some Chipotle Mayo....what, you don't have Chipotle Mayo? That's the twofer and the best DIY condiment you NEED to be making, so I'll loop around to making that at the end of this post. Anyway, Sourdough Bread & Chipotle Mayo go on first, followed by sliced Gruyère Cheese. Put those identical halves together with a little Kimchi in the middle and grill. I grill mine for about 6 minutes dry (i.e. no butter) on my George Forman grill.

Soooooo good.

OK, so this fancy Chipotle Mayo is the best stuff, but also the easiest thing to make. All you need to do is take one of those little cans of Chipotle in Adobo Sauce and toss it in your blender. Blend until smooth and add a little (like start off with a 1/2 tsp to a couple cups) to some mayo. The color should be a pinkish-orange, but go by taste. I make a small jar of Chipotle Mayo and keep it in the fridge and usually I end up having to throw out the majority of the blended Chipotle in Adobo Sauce because so little goes in the mayo.

I do consider Chipotle Mayo to be actual awesomesauce.

Pickled Red Onions

 

Listen....I know I've been on this food kick, more like a pickle kick, lately. I'm rounding the turn to the end goal here and to be honest all this stuff has been spread out over nearly three months....it's just that I have been shitty about documenting it all, which is partly why I've been blogging in the first place.

Not so much "something to do" as "where can I find my notes to do this again?" If someone else gleans some good details from here, so be it....a twofer.

Now I may have started with the pickled veggies as whole pickles, but the next thing I tried my hand at were some simple pickled red onions. This was so easy to do and a lot of bang-for-your-buck. These make a great condiment you can put on just about anything. I did two batches and gave a buddy one and he happily reports they go great on his morning eggs.

Now I didn't just make this up out of thin air, but stumbled across it on YouTube, specifically Ethan Chlebowski's channel. He's not my favorite YouTuber.......I haven't really thought about why or why not, but I suspect that a lot of his content just doesn't hit home with me (sorry Ethan....keep up the good work though!), but his video on Pickled Onions....is some good content.

Easy to follow along and right off the bat he pitches why you should have pickled onions in your fridge....and I have to agree.

Pickled Red Onions

• Red Onions
• Water
• Vinegar
• Salt

Thinly slice the red onion and pack into jar. Boil equal amounts water and vinegar and add a good pinch of salt. Bring liquid to boil and add to onions. Seal jar and place in fridge.

I used one of those fancy-schmancy flip-top jars, IIRC a liter jar, and one bag of four red onions filled it damned near perfectly. I found letting the jar cool down to room temp before placing in the fridge helped the onions "pink up" much faster. I tend to let my pickles stay at room temp for a couple days before refrigerating, but that's how I roll.

More Pickles! Condiment Pickles

 

I've clearly been doing a lot of pickles lately. I do like cooking, but big meals....they can be expensive and a lot of work....and if you need to experiment and tweak, that's a lot more money and time and....you can only eat this big meal so often.

Condiments on the other hand. Relatively cheap & easy. Sure some might take a lot of effort, but then I get to use those condiments a lot more often than I would for any individual meal. Condiments get a lot more mileage and can lift up a lot of other meals.

After doing some vegetables, eggs, onions, cucumbers, and even Kimchi I figured I was done, well maybe not done....done, but not really branching out any more. I'm going to go back and tweak my basic vegetable pickles and I have a crapload of other pickles to eat up.

Then I watched this video about food prep. I'm not planning on doing any fancy food prep, but I like the channel and I'm already watching YouTube.....

Hmm......I like the idea of a simple vegetable pickle as an ingredient. My earlier vegetable pickles were to enjoy on their own. This is much closer to the red onion pickles, which are awesome btw (I'll post about that later) and outside of carrots & potatoes.....I really haven't done diddly squat with root vegetables, well maybe Daikon, but that's something I should have totally included....note to self.

Quick Vegetable Pickle Condiment

• Rutabagas
• Parsnips
• Turnips
• Carrots

Notice I didn't add quantities here.....I got one big rutabaga and one bag each of parsnips, turnips, and julienned carrots. Peel and julienne all the vegetables and mix well. Pack into jars and fill with brine. Seal and leave to pickle for three days then refrigerate.

• 2 cups Water
• 1.5 cups Vinegar
• 3 Tablespoons Salt
• 3 Tablespoons Sugar
• 2 Dried Chile de Arbol
• 4 Allspice

This is the basic brine........I ended up needing 3x the quantity above, so if following along I'd start with a triple batch of brine. Mix everything together and bring to a boil.

As mentioned before, I could see adding Diakon, but radishes in general would work and if you could get some other colored versions of these vegetables, the final product would look a lit nicer.

Initial Cooking Fail Fixed on a Second Pass: Kimchi

 

Spending too much time at home usually leads to just a couple options for me: eat too much, watch too much, or do too much.

I figure why do anything half-assed? I can try to do all three.

My attempt for this is largely to try cooking/kitchen stuff while watching TV (well, more YouTube than anything) and then eating said results. Win/Win/Win....right?

Well except for when my kitchen projects result in failure, or at least partial failures.

After doing all kinds of pickles, a bunch of which I haven't even posted about yet, I decided I wanted to try me some Kimchi. I found a cooking YouTube channel that I adore....one of several, that had a Kimchi recipe. I tried following it as close to the letter as I could and....it did NOT work out. I'd love to blame the video, but there was a warning embedded and I can be an idiot....

Too salty and weak colored

Now I couldn't find an asian pear, so I used some regular pears, which worked fine. Two things I think did not work out, well one definitely didn't work out: I did not get my cabbage rinsed well enough. The end result tasted decent enough, save for the fact it was way too salty.

Ugh.

I had to try again and this time fix that error and one more: I used some Chinese Red Pepper flakes. Nope, you really should use the Korean Red Pepper flakes. Nothing else will work as well, at least according to some other Kimchi videos I watched. I went ahead and stopped by my favorite Korean Market and picked up the good pepper and a way-too-expensive (but so tasty) Asian Pear. As luck would have it I found some cheaper Diakon there and chatted up the owner. He doesn't eat Kimchi, but he makes the stuff they sold there and he told me that he salts his cabbage for 24 hours and rinses it excessively and drains it for a couple of hours.

Kimchi

• 1 Nappa Cabbage
• 1 Diakon
• 2 bunches Green Onion
• 1 Package Julienne Carrots

Quarter & core the cabbage then cut into 1 inch strips. Heavily salt the cabbage, massaging the salt into the cabbage and allow to sweat out all the water possible. Set aside in an appropriate container for 24 hours. Rinse multiple times and squeeze out as much water as possible. Soak, rinse & repeat until the cabbage is not very salty. When squeezing the cabbage, pretend it owes you money or wronged you in a past life!

Cut the onions into half-inch to one inch pieces, and the Diakon into desired slices and toss all the vegetables with the wilted cabbage.

• 2" Peeled Ginger
• 1 Asian Pear (or a couple regular pears), peeled/cored & chopped
• 6 cloves peeled garlic
• 1/4 cup Fish Sauce
• 1/4 to 1/3 cup Korean Red Pepper Flakes

Better color and flavor

Place all the ingredients (just the 5 listed above) in a blender or food processor and blend as finely as possible.

Toss all ingredients together (best wear gloves!) and pack tightly into jars. Cap loosely and use an airlock if you have one. Set aside for a few days (I prefer about 6), up to a week. When the Kimchi is fermented enough, it'll get a little "fizzy" as it ages, cap tightly and refrigerate.

I could easily see adding other vegetables or ratio of vegetables to customize your Kimchi mix. 

Bread & Butter Pickles

 

Since I've been spending a lot of time home alone trying not to spend money, I've needed something to do. In the last couple weeks I've done a LOT of pickles. 

Yes, started with vegetables, and then I went to eggs (which I haven't posted yet), then I went to salt-cured eggs (again, future post) and then pickled onions (OMG, amazing and I'll post that one next). Basically I've been fiddle-farting around with a bunch of new pickles and ferments.........oh yeah, getting back into my Sourdough as well, but the one thing I haven't done is straight up "regular" pickles.

I do have two recipes for pickles from one of my Grandmothers and one of them I've actually been wanting to eat for some time, so today was the day to make some Bread & Butter Pickles....but I couldn't find my cookbook where I recorded the recipe!

^%!$@

Luckily I managed to figure out that I had typed it up on an online Google Document, so I was good to go...after getting supplies from the store. The recipe I had written down was for twice the amount that I ended up making, but the brine/syrup/liquid listed was good for the half batch I made tonight, so lucky me. A big bonus was that I picked up my cucumbers at Walmart where they had smaller cucumbers in 2# bags, which was convenient.

Bread & Butter Pickles

2 qts                Thick sliced cucumbers (about 4 pounds)

2 medium        Sliced onions

1/2 cup            Pickling Salt

 

Combine and let stand in ice water for 2 to 3 hours.  Drain well

 

5 cups            Sugar

3 cups            Vinegar

1 tsp                Celery Seed

1 tsp                Mustard Seed

1/2 tsp             Ground Tumeric

Combine mixture with cucumbers and onions.  Bring to boil and pack into sterilized jars.  Cover with liquid and seal.

Notes: The cucumbers and onions look like they were way too much for the liquid, but they cooked down some as everything heated up. I just packed into clean jars and did not seal, since I just put them into the fridge. I was able to get one half-gallon jar and three pint jars of pickles from all this.

Vegetable Pickle Experimentation

 

Yep, this is not only my second post this month, but my second cooking post in a row.......strap in, 'cause I have a few more cooking posts coming up, because I'm stuck at home and haven't got that much better to be doing other than working on projects of one sort or another.

Now that I have some peppered vinegar I decided I should try to use some to make pickled vegetables. While I'm at it I figured I'd also try to make some lacto-acid fermented pickled veggies as well.

I started by gathering a bunch of veggies, mostly cauliflower, carrots, green beans, daikon, and green onions. I did also chop up some peppers (serrano, jalapeno, and thai), but they weren't in each batch of pickles.

I broke out a set of six half-gallon mason jars and filled them about 3/4 of the way with a mix of veggies. Half of the jars were filled with the seasoned vinegar and the other half were filled with a mix of Apple Cider and White Vinegar (roughly 2/3 & 1/3).....I wanted just Apple Cider Vinegar, but I didn't have enough.

Some spices went into every jar, some additional just in the "regular" set, and from there three additional spice mixtures were made so I could compare similar spices in vegetables with the differing vinegar bases. 

It gets confusing quick, so I had to make a little chart. Instead of posting that  I'll just put down each jar and everything that isn't the veggies:

Jar A : Seasoned Vinegar/Water (50/50), 2-3 whole cloves Garlic, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 1t whole Black Peppercorns, 1t Celery Salt (04Mar21 Notes: Hot & Spicy with strong after-taste 2nd best of the lot)

Jar B : Apple Cider/White Vinegar mix/Water (50/50), 4 whole cloves Garlic, 3-4 whole Thai Chilis, 2 thick-sliced Serrano Chilies, 2 thick-sliced Jalapeno Chilies, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 1t whole Black Peppercorns, 1t Celery Salt (04Mar21 Notes: Not as hot & spicy as Jar A, but sharper "pickle" taste/sensation; best pickle of the group)

Jar C : Seasoned Vinegar/Water (50/50), 2-3 whole cloves Garlic, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 1t Cumin, 1 dried Bay Leaf, 1/2t Oregano (04Mar21 Notes: Kind of a savory [?] compared to others, with hot & spicy undertones; just "OK")

Jar D : Apple Cider/White Vinegar mix/Water (50/50), 4 whole cloves Garlic, 3-4 whole Thai Chilis, 2 thick-sliced Serrano Chilies, 2 thick-sliced Jalapeno Chilies, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 1t Cumin, 1 dried Bay Leaf, 1/2t Oregano (04Mar21 Notes: Very "meh", closest to what I would think of as a grocery store weak pickle; worst of the lot)

Jar E : Seasoned Vinegar/Water (50/50), 2-3 whole cloves Garlic, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 2 Allspice berries, 3 Cardamom pods, 2 whole cloves (04Mar21 Notes: Hot & spicy with "interesting" notes I cannot quite place)

Jar F : Apple Cider/White Vinegar mix/Water (50/50), 4 whole cloves Garlic, 3-4 whole Thai Chilis, 2 thick-sliced Serrano Chilies, 2 thick-sliced Jalapeno Chilies, 1T Coriander, 1t Mustard Seed, 2 Allspice berries, 3 Cardamom pods, 2 whole cloves (04Mar21 Notes: Not as hot & spicy as Jar "E", but weird after-taste that is definitely from the cardamom and maybe the cloves interaction; don't add cardamom again!)

The lacto-fermented pickled vegetables.....evidently I failed to right down what spices I used. Ugh. Looking at the jar I can see Corriander, Black Peppercorns, and I think some Mustard Seeds. I know I didn't measure. Instead of vinegar, a simple brine is used (1T salt per cup of water) along with a couple packets of Starter Culture from Cutting Edge Cultures. These pickles are going to take a while to ferment, probably at least 10 days.

I'll update this post when I get some taste-testing in......

Making Some Peppered Vinegar

 

This last Christmas I made my fermented hot sauce again. As part of that "build" I decided to go ahead and make some spiced vinegar instead of using just plain vinegar in the hot sauce. One of my recipients has a wife who's very allergic to one of the ingredients, so I figured the spiced vinegar would have to do for them as a gift.......also, I like the stuff so good enough reason.

The spiced vinegar is essentially a "tea" made from white vinegar, dried peppers, and some garlic. That's it. Everything was placed in a clean 5 gallon bucket with a gamma lid and left to rest for a month. The initial "pull" of vinegar was just what I could draw off the top using a big ladle and a filtered funnel to keep out the inevitable pepper that got into the ladle. I'm not sure how much vinegar was left when I was done, but I essentially had a half-full bucket of wet peppers.

I knew there is a LOT of goodness still left in the bucket, so I went ahead and filled it back up with white vinegar and left it to steep for two months. I only got a gallon and a half or so out of the second steeping, but they peppers still looked good so I'm going for another batch of spiced vinegar. This time though I went ahead and ran all the vinegar-sogged peppers through a food processor, which shredded it quite a bit and compacted the lot quite a bit. I added a couple more heads of garlic, sliced roughly, and almost a pound of red pepper powder from the Korean Store here in town. I was able to get somewhere between three and four gallons of white vinegar into the bucket and I'll let this last bit steep for several months for a final batch.

One thing I did do though is reserve a good bit of the pepper mash, about 2 1/2 pints worth, added two heads of garlic and a little bit of the seasoned pepper and 1.6% salt. Blended well and packed into jars I now have some Garlic Chilli paste for cooking with.

Ok....I'm sure you've gotten to this point and have been thinking...."That's nice Chris, but you haven't really given me much to go on....."

True, but while the reason I was even screwing around with this second and then potential third batch is because one of my brothers asked me if I had any more of the vinegar because he was almost out, and another had asked me how I made it. I figured I'd go ahead and hook the former up with his own setup using a 2 gallon dispenser I literally had laying around:

Pepper Seasoned Vinegar

Ingredients

Dried Peppers

     1/3# Chile de Arbol

     1/3# Chile Puya

     1/3# Chile Guajillo 

4 Heads Garlic

1C Korean Powdered Pepper Flakes

2 gallons White Vinegar

2 Gallon Vessel (Bucket, Dispenser, etc)

The dried chilies, and the garlic, were purchased from the local Mexican food market and the dried pepper flakes were from the Korean market. The weights for the dried peppers are just approximate, but by in-the-bag volume I went with a ratio of equal amounts the larger Guajillo peppers and a combo of smaller Puya and Arbol peppers.  Do you need to use those exact peppers? Heck no. Grab what looks good, get extra, and just go nuts. These peppers and the garlic came out to $6.35. Now the powdered pepper flakes were $4.50 for a 1# bag and might be a bit much since I only used a cup. You could easily just grab some more/different dried peppers in its place....again, go nuts.

Peel and slice the garlic, and layer what you can in your vessel. I used an extra 2 gallon dispenser I had previously used for making Kombucha (which I learned I don't care for that much). Fill that bad boy up with your dry ingredients and then fill in the rest with vinegar. You should easily get a gallon in and probably more.

Total cost, including the jar and the extra vinegar that didn't go into the jar.....$24....and half the cost was the jar! If you want to be pessimistic and assume we only got in one gallon of white vinegar and were only able to get one infusion's worth of vinegar, then you get a cost of $12 a gallon, or roughly 10¢ an ounce. 

When you figure the cheapest peppered vinegar (only one type of pepper) runs 30¢ an ounce and the high-end stuff runs $3.00 an ounce, doing a little kitchen work not only pays off, but gets you some fancy-schmancy dividends, er vinegar.

Umm.....There's Some Freedom in my Coffee!

First off, I know.....two posts in as many days. Well, don't get your knickers in a knot, I just had something worth posting about.

Last Christmas the Mrs. wanted a Keurig coffee maker. We aren't that big on coffee, or even tea for that matter, but every once in a while....

I bought what I thought was a reasonable machine...not a Keurig, but something I thought would work reasonably well. It could easily brew into travel mug, didn't take up too much space, and didn't come with the dreaded Keurig 2.0 DRM...or at least I didn't think it did.

I never got to find out because my wife wanted to return it and get an "actual" Keurig. Didn't hurt my feelings any....that's the nature of gifts. Luckily there was a pretty good deal going on at Fred Meyer and by the time everything was said and done, the Keurig only costs about 2x what I had spent on the "lesser" machine (my emphasis, not hers). She had the money for the "upgrade", and the coffee, so go for it!

My only real problem at that point was that some of the other gifts I had gotten her, namely some coffee and some reusable cups wouldn't work with the new machine because of that pesky DRM. Now I know it isn't hard to get the Keurigs to recognize the "ordinary" cups, hardly even considered a hack, but my tinkering with the machine was verboten......

.....but not for long!

Making "Wild" Cherry Plum Jelly

Last weekend my In-Laws called and asked if we wanted any cantaloupe because they had several nice-sized melons mature at the same time and it was too much for them. Since we were actually at the grocery store buying cantaloupe the answer was a no-brainer.

When my wife and I headed over there we, well I, wanted to take a look at their yard & garden since we hadn't been in the back yard for months. A surprising discovery was a small fruit tree they weren't aware they had. Now if this was my parents property I could understand because they have hundreds of acres and an actual orchard, but a surprise fruit tree in a small quarter-acre lot (I have no idea how big it is...but they live in town so....) when you've lived in the home for 30+ years.....

Homemade Pineapple Vinegar

It has only taken about two months, but I have finally finished making pineapple vinegar.

Fred Meyer had a big sale on pineapple a couple months ago. They were $1 a piece and of course I stocked up. Fresh pineapple is fricken awesome and I made a HUGE batch of pineapple jam.

I'm always up for trying new food projects and after reading a copy of Wild Fermentation I decided I really needed to try pineapple vinegar from the huge amount of pineapple scraps I had. Of course I didn't use all the scraps I had, but I did this on a large scale, making almost 2 1/2 gallons.

I didn't quite follow the Wild Fermentation book to the letter, nor did I really follow any specific directions. After looking at a lot of slight different "recipes" online I just went with the general summation I mentally made. The variations were pretty wide, ranging from one pineapple skin good for one quart to one skin good for a gallon. The amount of brown sugar seemed reasonably static around 1/4 cup per pineapple skin.

Return to Garweeze Wurld

My posts, at least for the last week, have been kind of light because I was putting a little bit (ok, probably too much) of time into a new blog.

I'm not trying to be overly ambitious or anything, it is just that I needed a good way of documenting my monthly HackMaster game and a blog seemed to fit the bit quite nicely.

I had considered hosting my own site or maybe even using some content management software, but when I listed out what I really wanted & needed it was clear that Blogger could easily meet all of my needs and require far less effort than my other options.

Return to Garweeze Wurld is my campaign blog and I'm pretty much done with it for now. I might end up adding some pages or even just adding some links from the blog to specific content on my webhost. This way the blog itself can really be a useful tool for running my game.

Feel free to check it out....or not. It's really for my group and my personal GM needs, but I know a few folks who would get a kick out of reading it.

If you delve back far enough into this blog's archives you'll find a bunch of posts that I imported from my old gaming blog. This new blog isn't an attempt to replicate that old effort, but instead is strictly for use with one gaming group's adventures, and even then, only for this one campaign setting.

Sriracha-Style Hot Pepper Sauce

It many respects it is way too early to be thinking ahead to Christmas, but many of the food presents I'm planning on this year take a LOT of time.

I'll be putting up some of the projects here, spoilers-be-damned, and while I cannot put finished pictures up yet, I want to start with some homemade "Sriracha" sauce...AKA "Rooster" or, in the case of some of our friends, "Cock" sauce.

Before anyone takes offense, the most popular brand of Sririacha Sauce is made by Huy Fong Foods in LA. The label is in English and Thai, but everybody knows it by the big rooster on the front.

I did a lot of researching on the various different recipes that are out there and settled on coming up with my own version, which is a modification of Andrea Nguyen's recipe found on her blog Viet World Kitchen. I made a couple big changes, one of which I'm going to keep secret, but the recipe is otherwise quite close to the original.  If you want to make a small batch, you should just follow her recipe. Mine makes considerably more sauce.....by my reckoning 1 1/2 gallons. To make things easier I did break this down into smaller batches.

Sriracha-Style Hot Pepper Sauce
1 pound Habanero Peppers
11 pounds Bell Peppers
24 cloves Garlic
6 tablespoons & 2 teaspoons salt
1 cup brown sugar
4 cups vinegar
4 Sheets Nori

#2 Because the #1 attempt was terrible!

The instructions in a nutshell: finely chop everything except the vinegar (use a food processor), ferment for 3-4 days in glass jars, simmer for five minutes with the vinegar, cool, blend like hell, sieve, store.

I have obtained some awesome sauce bottles that will let me basically water-bath can the sauce into
appropriate bottles. When I get them put up I'll have to append this post. Until then, I want to share with you the label I made for the bottles. It took me a while to come up with the name and the general idea. I think my recipients will get it.

2013.07.07 Edit
I bottled it up last night, cleaned off the bottles and put on the shrink-wrap tops. I had 1/2 of a bottle left over. While still a bit hot for my everyday use, I mixed some with ketchup and it was great.

Shared 2013.07.08

Something for Nothing...

In going through my Twitter feed I was reminded about what I found to be a humorous, if not pathetic, attempt by someone to get some free work out of me.

Randall Milholland (@choochoobear) is a webcomic I have been following for years. At times he seems a bit "out there", but I think most of us are, some just do a worse job of hiding this fact.

This morning he went on a bit of a rant about what people expect regarding artists contributions:

Missed Opportunities for my Own Stand-Up Arcade Machine

There have been a couple of times in my life where I had the opportunity to purchase a stand-up arcade game and I didn't jump on it. Both times were for games I loved playing, but they weren't very popular, so the sale price was low, as was the wear and tear.

Of course I cannot remember the name of either game.

The first one was an odd "cartoony" game where you were a hero trying to save a damsel that had been kidnapped by a mad scientist. I want to say it had two joysticks, one for moving and one for shooting (like Robotron) and the levels were stacked vertically such that you ran from the bottom of the screen to the top and when you got there the whole thing scrolled down. I remember it was kind of campy and you could fall off the edge of the screen. When this happened your hero would grab a hold of the edge and kick like mad until he managed to pull himself up.

The second game was a top-down scroller where you were always firing your gun and never-ending hordes of enemy soldiers. As you moved along you picked up parts of a large gun. I believe after the 10th piece you'd find your self armed with a giant machine-gun bazooka of sorts and would get to absolutely annihilate everything for a short period of time before the gun exploded and you'd have to find the pieces again. I have no idea why I liked that game because it doesn't sound so exciting now.

Earlier this week I came across another miniature stand-up arcade game that a guy built for his daughter. While it isn't as tiny as the GarBade, it is pretty fricken cool on its own. I wish I had the resources to pull off a build like this.


One of these days I might get off my duff and make something using my "old" Toshiba Thrive. I doubt I'd go into the extra effort to make a cabinet so I could instead travel with my game machine, but it might be cool to design something for home use.

If I could just figure out the names of those games I could be convinced to look for the appropriate marquee and signage from Arcade Artwork.

Hacking Together an Incubator for About $20

Last week I posted about trying to make my first batch of Tempeh, or as my wife put it, "Moldy Rice Crispy Treats". I've been having fun with a variety of fermented foods lately and this was just my latest effort.

In reading about how to make some of these foods I've found a lot of different methodologies for trying to keep the "work-in-progress" a specific temperature and to keep it from drying out. Since I'm essentially growing mold/fungus I figured what would work best is what the experts in the lab use: an incubator.

Of course I don't have the thousands of dollars for a laboratory-grade incubator that is complete overkill anyway. I am lucky in that I have a few items laying around the house that I can easily turn into an incubator, courtesy of some inspiration from Make the Best Tempeh. I ended up spening about $20, but if I had to buy everything new it would have been about $75, which still isn't terrible.

Melting Point

I realize I've been all over the place when it comes to Kickstarter, but this local project is pretty fricken cool.

Melting Point is going to be a long stop-motion animated movie with Legos, also called a Brick Movie. For me, the cool thing is the fact that the Kickstarter Appeal itself is a small brick movie, so right off the bat you get to see this guy's talent in making the very product he wants help funding.

I'm impressed not only by the quality of the appeal (which should in itself be so revealing), but the fact that he isn't asking for a butt-load of money, just what he needs for actual materials/capital to get the project completed....not "pay me to work on the project".

 I really hope he gets this movie made with the help of Kickstarter.

Let's Make Moldy Rice Crispy Treats!

....but not really.

Last week I experimented with making Tempeh, which is a fermented soybean product that is used as a meat substitute. When I pulled the finished product out of the incubator I made my wife took one look at it and said, "You're feeding me moldy rice crispy treats?"

It looks a lot better once when its finished off, but for a while there it really seems like one of those foods first eaten on a dare. Of course I say the same thing about beer, and I like beer. This tempeh was cobbled together from a series of different instructions, most notably from Betsy's Tempeh and Gem Cultures.

Fixed Something With Minimal Blood Loss

Yesterday after I mowed the lawn I went to hook up the Ghetto Sprinkler System we have for the front yard and it didn't work. At first I thought that maybe something had gotten lodged in the hose.  All I got was a weak stream.

I took everything apart, played around with it, swapped out pieces, but nothing seemed to work.  When I had the faucet on I was able to push it in a bit and a gush of water sprayed out.  My faucet (unfortunately) has always leaked a little bit, and I mean only a little bit.  It wasn't enough warrant a lot of trouble.

Water gushing all over the place....that is worth some trouble.

New Zombie Sign

Carolyn is off on a business trip tonight so I'm trying to catch up on the Walking Dead on Netflix.  The show was a little intense for her, which makes sense because it is intense.

While I'm at it I decided I needed a much better graphic for posts about zombies, so I made this sign pretty much from scratch.  The basic sign was my starting point.  I replaced all the text and added everything else.  I did use a template for the bullet holes, but even then I tweaked those parts severely.

The basic idea, of the underlying sign "Warning: We are All Infected" came from a t-shirt at Hot Topic.

90 Minutes Volunteering

Today was kind of cool because I was given the opportunity to put in a couple volunteer hours at the Idaho Food Bank as part of a drive put together by the Human Resources Association of Treasure Valley (HRATV).  I'm a member of the HRATV even though I'm not working in the field (yet).

A couple of weeks ago the HRATV sent out an email asking for volunteers to work today.  I knew I'd be free (funny how unemployment frees up your schedule) so I spoke up.  Then I found out that it was only for a two hour shift.  Two hours didn't seem like much.....and actually ended up being closer to 90 minutes.