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Laser Brain


Laser Brain, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Here’s Lester, one of the resident cats here at Casa Jaquandor. The reason he looks all blurry is because he’s chasing a laser pointer. He just loves the laser pointer. I used to have one that I kept on a keychain, and he got to the point where he recognized the sound that particular keychain made when I picked it up, so he’d come running whenever he heard it because he knew he’d get to chase that bright red dot across the floor. Sometimes, of course, I was just picking up the keychain to get at something underneath it (I just kept it right out on my desk), so I’d look down and see Lester staring up at me, all wide-eyed.

The current laser pointer is actually embedded in a LED flashlight which has three settings: flashlight, laser pointer, and flashlight with laser pointer at the same time. Lester doesn’t yet recognize the sound of the flashlight as I pull it from my laptop bag, so I have to wave the laser around until it catches his eye.

Once I get him chasing the laser throughout the apartment, I like to get him in an open spot in the floor and then spin the laser around him, so he chases it in tight circles as though he’s chasing his tail. That’s what’s happening here. Cats plus Lasers equals FUN!

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Poppity pop pop pop!

I love popcorn.

Love it.

Popcorn is one of my favorite foods, and I’m simply incapable of seeing a movie at the theater without popcorn. If I’ve just come from a big dinner, as part of a “dinner and a movie” type thing, I’ll still buy a small popcorn. I consumed popcorn whilst watching Schindler’s List, which is as un-popcorn a movie as has ever been made.

At home, I love popcorn a lot too. For years we’ve used microwave popcorn exclusively — usually a “light” version of a “Movie Theater Butter” flavor. Not the healthiest alternative, obviously, but we don’t indulge in popcorn all that frequently; once a week, at most. But the trouble with the microwave stuff is that it’s full of chemicals and that butter flavor is pretty fake. (Yeah, so’s the “buttery topping” they put on the stuff at the theater.)

Part of our general approach toward food in 2010 is to rely less on processed, chemical-laden food products. This, we quickly realized, could also include popcorn. So, we bought ourselves a popcorn popper.

The Popcorn Popper I

It’s a StirCrazy, which we chose because that’s what we had when I was a kid. That old version worked wonders, and I realized that I missed that old, clean flavor of popcorn a great deal. The ingredients no longer include whatever chemicals and artificial flavorings go into the microwave stuff; now the ingredients are merely these: popcorn, oil, butter, and salt.

With the StirCrazy, you pour a few tablespoons of oil into the base, and then measure out your corn:

The Popcorn Popper II

Measuring is very important. Must always measure!

Then you pour that onto the hot plate as well and put the dome cover on top. The cover doubles as a serving bowl later on, but for now, it’s a cover and a butter-melter. Here it is:

The Popcorn Popper III

There’s an armature (basically a steel rod) that rotates at the bottom of the heat plate, constantly stirring the popcorn and oil. At the top of the dome cover is a well with holes in it; that’s where you put your butter. As the heat rise, it melts the butter, which then drips through the holes onto the corn. This arrangement works surprisingly well at getting butter all over the popcorn. (We use unsalted butter exclusively.)

Of course, one can attempt to help the process along by using heat vision, but success will be hard to come by:

The Popcorn Popper IV

In time the corn starts popping, slowly at first, but quickly filling up the entire dome cover:

The Popcorn Popper V

A minute later:

The Popcorn Popper VI

Once the popping slows, you unplug the popper, grab the handles, invert it, remove the hot plate, and voila! A beautiful bowl of popcorn. Salt, stir, and consume.

We’ll still keep microwave stuff around, because sometimes it’s just plain convenient to be able to nuke a bag as opposed to dragging the popper out. But generally, this stuff tastes so much better, with just good old unsalted butter, Kosher salt, and peanut oil. (I may try doing it with coconut oil sometime, just to see if coconut oil’s effect on popcorn is as pronounced as I’ve heard over the years.) The flavor was not only wonderfully clean and “unprocessed”, it took me back to my youth when we’d have a bowl of popcorn prepared just this way (using an earlier model of the same popper) during Family Teevee Night.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. If you have any love of popcorn at all, get a good popper. (And not an air popper, either. Those things result in crappy popcorn!)

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Porky Goodness

I decided, kinda-sorta on a whim, to make some pulled pork the other day.

Now, in the past when I’ve had the taste for pulled pork, I’ve bought it already-made at The Store, either our own make of it or a brand like Lloyd’s, which comes in a tub and just needs to be heated up. But while I used to love Lloyd’s products, over time I’ve come to find them too saucy and too sweet, and I’ve further learned that pulled pork is basically a very cheap hunk of meat, cooked until it shreds, and then simmered a bit in sauce. More or less.

So I bought two items the other day. I bought a small roasting pan, with rack; this is to supplement our larger roasting pan, which is big enough to roast a nice-sized turkey, but is a bit cumbersome when one wants to roast a six-to-eight pound cut of meat or a chicken or a game hen or…you get the picture.

The other item I bought was, obviously, the meat. I bought an eight-pound shoulder butt pork roast, which I laid out on the rack of my new roasting pan and seasoned on both sides with a rub:

Pulled Pork - before baking

Then I covered the roast with foil and put it into the oven at 375 degrees, where it remained for the next four hours. It was about an hour into this process that I discovered a flaw in the Homemade Pulled Pork Plan: even though the cooking time is six hours, your home smells like wonderful pulled pork after just one. Talk about hunger being the best sauce, and smells stoking the hunger….

After four hours, I removed the foil and popped the roast right back into the oven, for another ninety minutes or so. At this point I was checking the roast’s temperature every twenty minutes or so, aiming for about 175 degrees; when I finally reached that point, I took the roast out of the oven and let it “rest” on top of the stove for ten or fifteen minutes. (Believe me, folks, allowing cooked meat to “rest” before doing anything else is so essential to good cooking that, well, it’s almost a deal-breaker; cutting meat just after removing from the heat will pretty much destroy any effect you have from your careful preparation. Trust me on this.)

Pulled Pork - resting

Then it was time to shred and simmer a bit in sauce. I grabbed a couple of forks and shredded away, dropping the hunks of meat into my trusty crockpot. This took a lot longer than I had originally thought it would; even as tender as the meat was after that long in the oven, it still takes a while to physically shred eight pounds of the stuff by hand. Once I had it all shredded (except for a couple of large hunks of fat, which I removed), I poured in most of a bottle of barbecue sauce (a “Kansas City” style recipe sauce, although not the stuff that my good friend Mark likes to recommend because he knows the people who make it, but next time, that’s what I’m using because trust me folks, it’s good sauce), and then ran the crockpot on high for about half an hour, just to bring everything to a nice piping-hot temperature.

The final result? Utter sandwich heaven:

Pulled Pork - the end product!

Of course, being that our household is just the three of us, this process yielded an enormous amount of pulled pork for us. We each ate two sandwiches that night; The Wife and The Daughter had some more for lunch the next day; I had it for lunch yesterday and will have more today; and yet, as of this writing, there is still a huge container of it in our fridge. So far we’ve got seven meals’ worth of meat out of that roast, and we’re not close to done yet. Total cost will be under a buck a meal for each serving we end up getting out of it. That rocks.

My process here wasn’t any kind of “official” method for making pulled pork, but I put it together from reading some recipes online and looking at the shredded pork recipe in Emeril Lagasse’s cookbook devoted to pot-luck dishes. It’s as easy a cooking process as I’ve encountered. If you’ve never made your own pulled pork, give it a shot. It’s easy!

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Get the crash cart!


My home away from home!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Well, it’s not a crash cart, obviously, but it’s my tool cart at work. If Batman had to push around his best weapons in a Rubbermaid cart, maybe it would look like this. Or something like that. OK, the Batman thing’s a bad metaphor, but this is the cart I use at The Store as I roam around, fixing stuff. Most of the tools I tend to use on a daily basis are here, plus some I use a bit less frequently.

On the top shelf, there are three main items. First, and most obviously, is the case for my DeWalt 18-volt cordless drill. That’s the only power tool I tend to wheel about as a matter of course; I do have others at my disposal, but I use none of them frequently enough to elevate to “Cart” status. Beneath the drill case, not really visible, is a flat box that is separated into a bunch of small compartments. This box contains screws and fasteners of different sizes and types.

In front of the drill case is my main tool bag. It’s an electrician’s bag by Husky, and this one contains the hand tools that I use most frequently. Here are all of my screwdrivers, nut drivers, lineman’s pliers, diagonal pliers (sometimes called “dikes” for short), tongue-and-groove pliers, locking pliers, hammer, combination square, torpedo level, probes, inspection mirror, Allen wrenches, digital multimeter, and so on. The tape measure you can see there is my backup; my main tape is always on my belt.

On the bottom shelf of the cart I keep things I use less frequently. Way at the front, tucked near the corner, is a box of electrical repair supplies: wire, wire connectors and nuts, cable ties, fuses, and the like. Behind that is a second tool bag in which I keep things like crescent wrenches, a socket set, chisels and files, a flashlight on a folding tripod, Torx drivers, and most of my drill bits.

Behind that tool bag is a plastic tote that contains my kneepads, an extension cord, two kinds of Velcro, WD-40, air duster, wipes, and fishing line. (This is for hanging signs at work, which is a big part of what I do.) There’s also a canvas pouch teetering there which contains my safety glasses, earplugs (essential for me when I’m using the table saw), a knit hat, and two pairs of work gloves.

Up top, by the handle where I push the cart, are several small compartments where all manner of stuff tends to accumulate: screws of odd sizes for which I have no assigned space in my fastener box, note pads, pens, and various other little things that pile up in the course of the job. Throw in a cup holder, and there you have it: my Cart of Infinite Repair. All I’m lacking are missiles with which I might target and destroy my foes!

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Straw and Hay


Straw and Hay, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I made this dish for dinner a couple of nights ago, using a recipe from a Christmas-themed cookbook by the Frugal Gourmet. I’d always wanted to make it, but I always forgot about the recipe when not in the Holiday season, because that’s the only time I tend to peruse this particular cookbook. (He gives the Straw and Hay recipe in honor of the donkey ridden by Mary to Bethlehem.) It’s called “Straw and Hay” (Paglia e Fieno in Italian) by virtue of the two colors of pasta involved. I served it with a crusty garlic bread from The Store, and we loved it, although The Wife and I agree that next time, I should add shrimp.

Since I’m sure this cookbook is long out print, here’s the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/4 cup olive oil
4 cloves minced garlic (or more, to taste — I used more)
1/2 pound spinach linguine
1/2 pound regular linguine
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Salt, Pepper, and additional cheese to taste, when served

Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain (but do not rinse) and pour into large bowl.

While the pasta cooks: In a small frying pan, melt the butter, and then add in the olive oil. In this mixture saute the garlic for just a minute or so, until it’s barely browned and the mixture becomes deeply fragrant. Pour the garlic mixture over the pasta in the serving bowl and add the 1/3 cup grated Parmesan. Toss to combine, and serve hot.

I added a small pinch of kosher salt to my own serving, plus quite a lot of black pepper. Next time, I’ll add shrimp; what I suppose I’ll do is throw in some cooked shrimp to saute when I add the garlic, which should just bring the shrimp up to a serving temperature. Diced Italian sausage might also be a good addition to this.

What I loved most about the dish was how simple and easy it is. I usually take my time cooking recipes that are new to me, and even so, from the time I put the pot of water on the stove to boil to the time we sat down to eat, about twenty minutes elapsed. That rocks!

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The Year of the Dark Side!

On New Year’s Eve, we decided to do something we’d never done before: we went to downtown Buffalo for the annual Ball Drop and the ringing in of the New Year. Now, we’ve watched the Ball Drop on teevee a lot over the years; here in Buffalo, Channel 7 (our ABC affiliate) airs split-screen coverage of Buffalo’s Ball Drop with the big one at Times Square, as part of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

Now, I can’t lie — judging by what we’ve seen on teevee, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about being downtown for our Ball Drop. For one thing, it involves being pack in with lots of people. For another, we’d been out very late the night before (for our TSO concert) and I’d then had to get up very early the next morning for a project at The Store, with the Ball Drop obviously keeping us up past midnight. But the biggest factor in my ambivalence was the fact that the teevee coverage always makes the Ball Drop look, well, lame. As in, “serving platter covered with Christmas lights being lowered out an office building window on a string and an extension cord” lame. So I figured I’d be freakishly tired while I froze my arse off standing around a huge crush of people waiting to watch a chintzy ball of lights come down a building before shoving my way through the crowds to get home. Luckily I was off the next day, but still.

Well, wouldn’t you know it — the Ball Drop was a terrific time.

Our parking strategy was a good starting point. Instead of trying to park close to the event, we decided to park in a lot down at the foot of Main Street, right outside the vacant-for-the-night HSBC Arena, and then ride the Metro Rail to the Ball Drop location. The Ball drops down the front face of the Electric Tower, a beautiful old building in downtown whose top tiers are always illuminated white except for the holiday season when they’re lit green, red, gold. This is what we saw as soon as we got off the Metro Rail train:

First glimpse of the Ball

Swirling spotlights kept arcing over the building and into the air, sending those wonderful blue shafts of light into the winter sky. The snow was falling, but the flakes were big and fluffy, there was no breeze to speak of, and the temperature was just cold enough that we could stand there for a little over an hour without wanting to kill ourselves. (Still, a roving hot chocolate vendor or two wouldn’t have been a bad idea.)

Here’s the view from the vantage point we set up for ourselves:

Getting ready....

The Ball itself was a lot nicer looking than what we see on teevee: a glittering globe, completely covered with lights that were swirling and spiraling and generally looking all, well, glittery. We got there at about 11:00, so we had to stand in one place for the remaining hour. But that hour went pretty quickly, because there was a lot of entertainment on the stage there, at the foot of the building: trivia contests, appearances by Buffalo Sabres, the Mayor receiving what I couldn’t discern to be either a cheer or a lusty boo, more trivia, lots of fun music, and then the final song of 2009. It was “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey, which is, frankly, a song I could live without hearing again for a good long time.

But anyway, the final minute of 2009 came at last, and during the last fifteen seconds of the year, the Ball began to descend:

The Ball, dropping

And at last, we were into 2010!

2010 !!!

More music, lots of cheering and kissing. The third song of 2010 the deejays of the night chose was “ABC” by the Jackson Five (at which every single black person around us started dancing). Then we followed some of the dispersing crowd out of the area, walking down Main Street until we got to the next Metro Rail station, where we caught the next train and rode it back down to our parking spot. It took us half as much time to get home from the Ball Drop as it had the night before from the TSO concert.

One final postscript. The Daughter loves stuff that either glows or lights up, so whenever we’re at a function that takes place at night, we’ll almost always have to go to one of the inevitable street vendors who are selling such wares — glow necklaces, glow sticks, light-up hats, et cetera — and get something. She chose this thing that was clearly a knock-off of a lightsaber, even though it’s incredibly chintzy and cheaply made, so much so that the guy could have hawked them for two bucks and made a profit. (Which is no doubt why he was hawking them for eight bucks each. I’m so easy.)

So The Kid came from from New Year’s with a toy lightsaber, whose siren call I managed to disregard for over a week. Yup, I made it a week.

Until last night, when I finally gave into the temptation.

Anger...fear...aggression....

Wow, the Dark Side is more seductive!

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A Walk in the Woods

Up the ravine

Yesterday I had several hours in the afternoon during which I was alone: The Daughter was elsewhere, and The Wife was at work. So I decided to go back to Chestnut Ridge Park, where we spent some time last week. It’s a place that deserves to be nearer and dearer to my heart than it is, because it’s so beautiful and close and yet I don’t get there all that often.

Chestnut Ridge is a park run by Erie County in the “Southtowns” region, where the terrain starts becoming more hilly as one moves away from the flatlands that surround Lake Erie. The most famous feature of Chestnut Ridge is its giant sledding hill, but it’s a very beautiful natural place, with lots of hiking, riding, Nordic skiing, and snowmobiling trails. Somewhere within its boundaries there is a natural “eternal flame”; that’s high on my list of things to see next year when it starts getting warmer.

Yesterday, I went to a part of the park I’d never been in before. The road follows a ravine to the left, although the ravine is behind a ridge and can’t really be seen from the road. I came to a parking area, where another road split off to the left and went down toward that ravine. The road was gated shut, although quite a few folks were walking past the barries anyway; I suppose the road was only closed to motor vehicles so that the park people could save money by not having to plow it.

That road dropped down to a steel-deck bridge that spanned the ravine. The view above is the upstream side of the bridge; here’s the downstream view.

Just downstream of the bridge

One thing that always amazes are the signs of life, even in the midst of a wintry forest. Such as this sapling:

Sapling - Chestnut Ridge

I was only out there for about an hour, but what a wonderful hour it was!

Eyes forward!

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Western New York in Winter


Chestnut Ridge (5), originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

The other day we took a trek up to Chestnut Ridge Park, a county-run preserve in the hills south of Buffalo. We don’t get there all that often, for reasons passing understanding, since the park is about fifteen minutes from Casa Jaquandor, and that’s if you hit all the red lights. The place is gorgeous in winter, and was the scene last weekend for an annual Christmas-themed event, with crafts and cookies and hot chocolate and Santa and sledding and “hayrides” (involving a big passenger wagon pulled by a big pickup truck).

After we completed our run through the activities in the big building (called the Casino) at the main gate of the park, we took a quick drive up into the park and back, and as we did so, I rolled down my window and snapped a bunch of photos. This one was taken as we approached a bridge over one of the streams that runs through the park. It was a really beautiful winter day.

(The rest of the photos are on my Flickr stream.)

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