Archive for July 1st, 2010

Push my buttons some more, please.

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The French Culinary Institute has a blog, “Cooking Issues“, which they describe as a “Tech’N Stuff Blog”.

Boy howdy, they’re right. This seems to be the blog for Ferran Adrià fans.

For example, check out this post, in which the author describes the use of rotary evaporators in the kitchen.

Because rotovaps distill gently at low temperature under vacuum, they happen to also be good at preserving flavors — much better than traditional distillation.

Note that these machines were originally designed to be used in labs, for evaporating off solvents.

Fed up, I bought an early 80’s EL131 Buchi rotary evaporator on eBay the next year (they’re cheap at auction – check it out).

  1. I did check it out. The cheapest one I found was $1,500, and I’m not sure that was a complete unit. I’ll admit the 20-liter one is probably overkill for kitchen use. (Edited to add: Lawrence pointed out some cheaper ones that came up using different search terms, but many of those looked incomplete or non-functional.)
  2. I wonder if these would be legal in Texas without a permit. My reading of the DPS site suggests that these would fall under “distilling apparatus”.

Or you could make “stretchy chewy ice cream“. That actually sounds like a fun summer project for those of you who have kids.

I got a kick out of this quote:

We’ve been using our centrifuge to make cured olive oil.

Because, you know, everyone has a centrifuge in their kitchen. (But they seem to be much cheaper on eBay than rotovaps.)

TJIC actually tipped me off to this when he noted their post on using liquid nitrogen in the kitchen. Short version: be careful, this stuff will kill you dead.

Posted in Food, Geek | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#12 in a series).

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I haven’t gone fishing in a long time, so let’s dig up some stinky old bait from the cooler and see what we can catch.

Vanity Fair asked a bunch of architects (as well as some architecture critics and “deans of architecture schools”) two questions:

  • what are the five most important buildings, bridges, or monuments constructed since 1980?
  • what is the greatest work of architecture thus far in the 21st century?

Here are the answers. Here is a slideshow (Warning! Slideshow!) of the top 21 buildings. Here’s a special slideshow (Warning! Slideshow!) of the work of one architect in particular. And here’s an article about that architect and his work.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Gehry | 1 Comment »

Random notes: July 1, 2010.

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Happy Canada Day, everyone. I hope you’re able to celebrate in the traditional way, with beer and back bacon.

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has overturned the death sentence for Ronell Wilson. Mr. Wilson was convicted of shooting two NYPD detectives, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews, who were engaged in a gun purchase sting. According to the NYT, Mr. Wilson was the only defendant sentenced to death by a jury between “1988 through March 2008” (?), though prosecutors asked for the death sentence 19 times during that period.

In this case, the court just overturned the sentence, not the conviction:

The Court of Appeals’ ruling centered on two arguments that prosecutors made to the jury about Mr. Wilson’s remorse and acceptance of responsibility for the killings during the penalty phase of his trial. The judges noted that prosecutors used Mr. Wilson’s demand for a trial and his failure to plead guilty as evidence that he lacked remorse and refused to accept responsibility. The judges said prosecutors had argued to the jury that Mr. Wilson’s statement of remorse should be discredited because he failed to testify.

The WP is reporting that serious consideration is being given to awarding the Medal of Honor to a living person. That person is not named in the WP article, and the nomination is still being reviewed by the White House. This is significant because every Medal of Honor awarded since Vietnam has been posthumous.

Edited to add: Florida has banned ownership of “Burmese pythons and six other large, exotic reptile species” effective today. As noted in this space previously, the state has a bit of a python problem:

Many of the creatures have escaped or been set loose by pet owners and that’s upsetting Florida’s ecology as they prey almost unchecked on native birds and animals.

Apparently, existing owners will be able to keep their snakes. This is amusing:

The ban applies as well to reticulated, northern African, southern African and Amethystine pythons, green anacondas and Nile monitor lizards, but the main focus is on Burmese pythons.

Estimates of their presence in the wild have ranged as high as 100,000, but the state’s first python hunting season ended in April without a single snake reported caught. Conservation officials said unseasonably cold weather, instead, may have killed up to half the pythons.

No snakes caught? Darn. (I was actually discussing the possibility of getting together a python hunting expedition with some of my co-workers, but none of us owns the proper weapon.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Snakes | 1 Comment »