Mmm... Cooking Is Good
Jan. 8th, 2009 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsGetting my head back on straight has been a fun little experience. I've been working from home today, and despite myself I actually got quite a bit done. At work I laid out a very precise to-do list, one of those true GTD "next possible action" lists and worked my way through it. It didn't matter that I got sidetracked about halfway through it, when the parallel server backup team announced a small change to the API that would put me back three or four days, because the serial server backup team had a spec change I could implement in four hours or so regarding the way logs were handled. No problems there.
After the girls came back from school, I set to work cooking steak sous-vide, along with two real baked potatoes, zucchini medallions sautee'd in butter, and home-made miso soup. The girls got pizza fresh from the oven, and they didn't complain. The real meal was for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lisakit and I, because I don't get to cook for friends as often as I'd like. I managed the temperature even better this time than last, mostly by using a bigger pot and more water, which makes temperature variation slow and easy to compensate for. I seared the outside of the steak on a very hot iron skillet to make sure any exterior bacteria were dead and to carmelize the surface proteins which gives steak it's "meaty" flavor.
For the soup I used four cups of thin chicken broth, two tablespoons of real miso paste (bought from the Asian grocery hidden in a little strip mall), diced sautee'd mushrooms and fresh chopped scallions. Perfect. Mark Bittman has some great comments on cooking miso (and other stuff) that's a must-read.
After the girls were in bed and Lisa had gone back home, I settled down and hacked for another two hours or so on a coding problem that Omaha had set for me. It's in a language and framework I just do not know (ruby and rails), and yet by the time I was done I had a foreign database imported into the application parallel with the native one, had them talking to each other, had some interesting relationships going on, and even wrote one find_by_sql with an INNER JOIN that made me feel all dirty. Omaha's main coder is a pretty good guy, keeps a working subversion code repository, and knows what he's doing.
One of the things I did about two weeks before Omaha's trip was to buy myself that damned Caterpillar. That thing is huge. I figured I would have something to keep myself occupied, figuratively and literally, while she was down in California. But after yesterday, I just haven't had the time, energy, or heart for it.
I'm off to bed.
After the girls came back from school, I set to work cooking steak sous-vide, along with two real baked potatoes, zucchini medallions sautee'd in butter, and home-made miso soup. The girls got pizza fresh from the oven, and they didn't complain. The real meal was for
lisakit and I, because I don't get to cook for friends as often as I'd like. I managed the temperature even better this time than last, mostly by using a bigger pot and more water, which makes temperature variation slow and easy to compensate for. I seared the outside of the steak on a very hot iron skillet to make sure any exterior bacteria were dead and to carmelize the surface proteins which gives steak it's "meaty" flavor. For the soup I used four cups of thin chicken broth, two tablespoons of real miso paste (bought from the Asian grocery hidden in a little strip mall), diced sautee'd mushrooms and fresh chopped scallions. Perfect. Mark Bittman has some great comments on cooking miso (and other stuff) that's a must-read.
After the girls were in bed and Lisa had gone back home, I settled down and hacked for another two hours or so on a coding problem that Omaha had set for me. It's in a language and framework I just do not know (ruby and rails), and yet by the time I was done I had a foreign database imported into the application parallel with the native one, had them talking to each other, had some interesting relationships going on, and even wrote one find_by_sql with an INNER JOIN that made me feel all dirty. Omaha's main coder is a pretty good guy, keeps a working subversion code repository, and knows what he's doing.
One of the things I did about two weeks before Omaha's trip was to buy myself that damned Caterpillar. That thing is huge. I figured I would have something to keep myself occupied, figuratively and literally, while she was down in California. But after yesterday, I just haven't had the time, energy, or heart for it.
I'm off to bed.
