Category: Weblog

Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr. Bond, I expect to drink you.


Yes, even here on vacation in Kauai, I keep my eyes open for good stuff. Loyal Cruft readers know me penchant for Asian iced coffee.
We found this can of Mr. Bond iced coffee, from the Taiwanese company Want Want, at the local Foodland in Kapaa.
I drank it last night while I prepared the charcoal for the barbeque. The flavor wasn’t bad, not too sweet. You could taste the coffee, but it was a bit watery. Not as creamy as some of the Boss coffees I’ve had in the past. Overall, a typical Asian iced coffee, nothing special but the cool name.

How to make home made pastrami and corned beef

A few months ago, I tried making my own pastrami, starting from some pre-corned beef. I was OK, but not great, I decided to try again, this time, making everything from scratch.
As I mentioned before, the difference between corned beef and pastrami is subtle. In both cases, a beef brisket is ‘corned’ by curing it in a salt brine for a couple weeks. This comes from the days before refrigeration, where the use of salt and sugar to preserve meat for a long time was common. The term ‘corn’ comes from the fact that long ago, the salt used to preserve beef was roughly the shape of a corn kernel.
To turn the corned brisket into a corned beef, you boil the meat.
To turn the corned brisket into pastrami, you smoke the meat.


First I bought a large brisket. I cut the brisket in half, one half to make into pastrami and one half to make into corned beef. Now I had to corn the beef.

The recipe I used was:
2 quarts water
3/4 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
10 whole cloves
1 tablespoon pickling spices
2 tablespoons saltpeter (potassium nitrate)
The saltpeter is not essential, but it acts as a preservative and keeps the red color of the meat. I want the meat to look authentic and red, so I order saltpeter, since you really can’t buy it in a store these days.

I placed the beef in large bags with the corning brine. I doubled the bags up just in case of leakage.

The bags were then placed in the bottom of the fridge for two weeks. Thanks to my wife, Michele, for putting up with a drawer full of corning beef for two weeks.

After two long weeks, I pulled the bags out the fridge.

Out of the bag, the outside looked a little gray and I had my concerns about the effectiveness of the saltpeter. The meat smelled fresh. I guess this preserving thing really does work.

For the pastrami, I used the same rub from my previous pastrami cooking. I felt the flavor was good, so why mess with it.

Here it it going into the smoker. I smoked it for about 6 hours, changing the chips once, to give it a little extra smokiness.

After resting, this is the pastrami. It smelled pretty damn good, and I was anxious to give it a try.

The color was great. The saltpeter worked!
Alas, the meat was a bit tough. The flavor was good, but the toughness was a problem. Also, it was quite salty.
My friend Ken came over and we discussed it. There are a couple possibilities as to why it didn’t come out as good as I had hoped.
The main mistake was leaving it open in the smoker too long. When I make a brisket, I usually smoke it for 2 hours, then wrap it up in aluminum foil to seal in the moisture. I should have done that in this case. Also, several pastrami recipes recommend soaking the corned beef in water for an hour or so to pull out some of the salt. Next time, I’ll give this a try.

Now it was time to make the corned beef. The meat looked good and was even still red on the outside.

I wanted authentic corned beef, so that means corned beef and cabbage.
I modified this recipe a bit, dropping the butter, bay leaves, and carrots. Here’s the meat starting to cook with the whole onion keeping it company.

After 3 hours on the stove, I pulled the meat out and let it rest. Then I sliced it up, hoping for the best.
The meat was fantastic. The color was great, once again proving the value of the saltpeter. The flavor was perfect and the mouth feel was wonderful. Rich and flavorful, while melting in the mouth. I am very happy with the results.

Of course, it wouldn’t be traditional corned beef without the cabbage and potatoes. It all tasted great together.
While it took some time to make, i definitely recommend trying this yourself. The corned beef especially, as it was much simpler than the pastrami. I need to keep trying to perfect my pastrami though. Stay tuned.

No caffeine for two months

Two months ago, I stopped drinking caffiene. I’ve stopped in the past, mainly due to my belief that caffeine over the long term is bad for you. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good caffeine buzz, but I feel that when you are under stress or at risk of being ill, it’s the makes matters worse.
The basic mechanism of caffeine is to block one of the chemicals that tells your brain that you are tired. Caffeine fills the receptor and so you brain stops getting the tired signals. If you take caffeine for a long time, you body responds by making more and more sleepy chemicals (adenosine). This leads to caffeine tolerance where you need more and more to stay alert and feel terrible if you aren’t drinking caffeine.
I’ve never been a huge coffee drinker, usually having a cup in the morning and sometimes a cup in the afternoon. Never the less, after a while, I notice an bad effects from caffeine. So I stop for a while.
Good things about not drinking caffeine:

  1. I don’t feel drowsy in the morning
  2. I sleep better
  3. I have dreams. I can’t remember them, but I notice that I have them
  4. I don’t have to go to the bathroom as often
  5. No coffee breath
  6. Less money spent on drinks

Bad things about not drinking caffeine:

  1. The 2PM food coma
  2. Decaf coffee does not taste as good as regular coffee
  3. Finding diet, caffeine free soda is difficult
  4. I eat more

Overall, I feel better, but at the same time, I do want the cool buzz in the morning again. Also, caffeine has a postive effect on asthma, acting as a mild bronchodilator. In fact, a couple cups of coffee is a effective backup treatment for an asthma attack when an inhaler is not available.
So no simple answer about if I should stay caffeine free or not…

Making ice cream in a plastic bag

A while I ago I saw a Howtoon in Make Magazine about making ice cream in a plastic bag by Saul Griffith. I met Saul at Foo Camp a few years ago and had heard of about Howtoons then.
Yesterday, the girls had some friends over and I wanted something for them to do that didn’t involve watching a screen. So I decided to make ice cream in a bag.


The ingredients are fairly simple, and I picked them up at the supermarket. (Full recipe at the bottom)

In it’s simplest from, ice cream is just basically milk/cream, sugar, and vanilla flavor. For the first run, I tried using half & half. The trick is freezing it while all mixed up.

After mixing the ingredients, I poured them into a quart sized bag. Once the mixture was sealed, I put it in yet another quart bag for security. Then I put a bunch of ice into a gallon sized bag, added about a cup of rock salt, and placed the ice cream mixture bag inside.

Next, I had the girls go outside and make the ice cream. I have to admit, they enjoyed it for a few minutes, but shortly lost their enthusiasm and I ended up doing the majority of the shaking.

After about 15 minutes, we gave it a try. The consistency was like soft serve ice cream. I was able to simply pour it out of the bag and into small bowls for testing.

The ice cream met with great enthusiasm and was quickly devoured by the four girls. It was not as creamy as traditional ice cream. Tasty, but not exactly what I think of as ice cream.

Of course, Cruft Labs didn’t stop there. The next attempt was with making chocolate ice cream. I used Ovaltine as the flavoring, hoping to get a little more creamy mouthfeel.

After a good deal more shaking of a plastic bag, out came chocolate! It looked better than that previous vanilla, but stuff had a slightly watery feel. The girls didn’t care, they ate every bit.

Not satisfied with the previous attempts, I ran out and picked up the real deal, Heavy Whipping Cream. If this didn’t taste creamy, nothing would.
Sure enough, the whipping cream made all the difference in flavor. The texture was smooth and the girls ate most of the bag immediately, commenting that it was an improvement. Success at last.

I took the remaining ice cream and froze it overnight. The result was amazingly good. Everything was perfect after a full freeze. The flavor, the texture, and the mouthfeel were all outstanding.
Here is the final recipe:
Homemade Ice Cream in a Bag
2 cups Heavy Whipping Cream
1/2 cup Sugar
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
Large bag of ice
Box of rack salt
Several Quart sized plastic bags
Several Gallon sized plastic bags
Combine Cream, Sugar, and Vanilla. Put mixture in quart sized bag. Partially fill gallon sized bag with ice. Add about 1 cup of rock salt. Place bag of ice cream mixture in ice bag. Shake vigorously for 15 minutes. Enjoy.
For extra goodness, freeze over night.
Of course, this is just the beginning of my ice cream experimentation. I see possibilites in both making an automatic shaker and different flavor combinations.
Good luck in your own dessert making!

Things I learned in New York City

1) The Shake Shack is a good hamburger joint, but the true appeal is sitting in the park, not the food.
2) Dave Winer is a tragic figure out of Shakespeare that would make a great documentary.
3) Dunkin Donuts are just donuts, nothing special.
4) Not having an umbrella with you in Manhattan in October is a bad idea
5) You can take refuge from heavy rain in a Borders, but your wet wool suit will smell bad, making people move away.
6) The movie I watched on the plane, The Namesake, was really good. Now I need to read Gogol’s Overcoat. Rent the DVD if you get the chance.
I was in New York for a few meetings and spoke at HD World.
This is what the audience looked like.


Notice that no one has a laptop, there’s a chance they actually listen to the speakers…

The Long, Long Arm of Google

Just over five years ago, the web hosting service provider I was using, went out of business in a bad way. In such a bad way, that there was no notice. The sites were simply gone.
I had to track down the reseller that Binaryblocks had used and pay them to get all my data off the server. Not cheap and not easy. Many people lost everything. The owner of Binaryblocks was a guy named Jason Piercy. It was all his fault. He cost me time, money, and effort due to his failure.
I was upset over this and posted about here and here. I even made a site called binaryblockssucks.com for people to discuss the problem.
By posting on the internet, Googlebot took notice. Currently, my site has a pagerank of 6, meaning that search results on Google show my site fairly high.
Fast forward five years. Imagine that you are Jason Piercy, the villain of this story. When you Google your own name, you find my post about you as the first hit. Take a look at Jason Piercy or Binaryblocks. How much does that suck?
Well, in my book that’s the effect of the long, long arm of Google. Google doesn’t forget things like this. And because Google doesn’t forget, people can find out what happened in the past.
So Jason Piercy sends me an email that explains what happened to Binaryblocks and asked me to post it.
I had to think about this for a while. He’s still a jerk and that hasn’t changed. He still screwed me over, and I really don’t care why. Rather than telling his customers what was going on and finding a way for us not to get screwed, he simply disappeared. The coward’s way out. He literally took my money and ran.
I decided that I would post his letter. I consider myself a fair person and I think it’s fair to let him say his peace. You can read it in the extended entry.
But this should serve as a reminder of the long arm of Google and how what you do will end up online. Even years later, you won’t be able to escape it.

Continue reading “The Long, Long Arm of Google”