Propagation Nation

The willows I propagated a couple of days ago seem to be off to a good start.  The leaves aren't all shriveling up, so that would seem to say that the shoots aren't drying up.  Emboldened, I grabbed my trusty Felco pruners after work today and collected a few more samples from the trees around work.  I grabbed a few from a gorgeous, monstrous willow near the entrance to our parking lot.  This baby is probably 45' in diameter, and it is the tree that I'm targeting to be the feature tree in our front yard.  Then I collected some samples from a blue honeysuckle near where I park my vehicle.  This good sized shrub features fruit that ripen in June that taste a bit like a sour blueberry.  The fruit sort of looks like a blueberry as well, only it is more oval shaped.  I'm not sure how well the blue honeysuckle will propagate: the stem is more woody than the willows.  I guess I'll soon find out.  Roots are supposed to establish themselves after two to six weeks.

I've constructed a kind of mini-greenhouse to keep the humidity up around the shoots.  A planting tray sits in a box lined with a garbage bag to keep the cardboard dry.  A bunch of sticks about a foot long are taped all along the outside of the box, and a clear plastic drop-cloth used to keep paint off your carpet is draped over the whole thing.  It is working nicely.  Just hope it holds up over the next couple months.

A long weekend is coming up and the plan will be to propagate more of the acute willows I will use as my shelter belt.  My little planting tray will hold something like 171 shoots, so I have a long way to go before I fill it up.  But fill it up, I shall.

The Great Landscape Redesign - 2010 Edition

We had a professional come in some years ago to design a landscape for our acreage.  That was a mistake.  This person did not appreciate the issues when planning a landscape in the country.  Trees were selected that were borderline hardy for our zone (Zone 2).  Some plants happened to be a deer's most favorite food in the whole wide world.  But the biggest problem was the importance of a windbreak was totally ignored.  So I've got to fix this.

Today I tried propagating some acute willows based on this technique.  They are a beautiful tree, very hardy, and work well as a windbreak.  I've started off with about a dozen and I'll watch them over the next few days.  If it seems like they are taking, I'll go into production and do about 50 more.  I've also got my eye on a bunch of other trees in the area around where I work.

The idea is to eventually fill in the yard with all kinds of trees and flowerbeds.  It is way too open right now.  The wind gets in and whips around and tears stuff up.  If I can get enough stuff planted, I should be able to create my own micro-climate and do some interesting things out here.  At the same time, that will cut down on the amount of grass / weeds around this place that I need to mow. 

I've started a layout using Google Sketchup to help visualize how this will all look in the end.  Naturally.

Sous Vide Ultimate Challenge

It is time to really test my Sous Vide setup.  My lovely wife was talking about cooking an outside round roast the way we had usually done it before: in the slow cooker.  Now the thing about a roast like this is that it is very lean.  While healthy, this translates into a meat that often ends up on the plate as tough and dry.

I would have none of this.  I have the technology, and I'm going to make use of it.  So we began by taking the roast and cutting the fat away from it.  After that we sliced it in half to give us a couple of very thick 2" steaks.  Those were patted down with a paper towel and then coated with just a sheen of vegetable oil.  To each we applied a different rub.  One was a fabulous homemade rub that you can get here.  The other was a "Tuscan" style rub given to me by my mom on a recent trip she made.  It is mostly fennel, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

The two steaks were each put into a quart-sized zip-loc bag.  I sucked the air out of them with a straw and dropped them into my rig set to 56.5C.  They'll cook at this temperature for over 24 hours, after which I'll bump up the temperature a bit to 61C for a perfect medium.  I'm expecting this to turn out pretty good.  We'll see...

Home time.

As I write this, I'm somewhere around 30,000 feet and heading home.  It is about 9:00 pm local time and we're heading west.  The setting sun lights up the clouds I look down upon in oranges and reds.  The green of the land below comes up at me through the haze.  It is a spectacular view.

Today has been a pretty good day.  The course I was giving wrapped up early so we went out for a long lunch at a noisy but tasty Mexican place.  They paid.  I got out of there and hit the airport with tons of time to spare.  As I was waiting in a long line in security, a new scanner opened up right in front of me and I was in and through in no time.  After that I was hungry so I stopped off in Terminal A for a Five Guys burger: I was pleased to learn that they have a well deserved reputation for making a mean set of patties.  Flew in to my first stop with a business lounge pass in hand, so I could hang out until the next flight in comfort.  On the flight home, I scan through the list of movies on the screen in front of me and Fight Club is on.  I had forgotten just how excellent this movie is.  I really enjoyed it the first time, but it is even better the second time.  If you haven't watched it twice, do yourself the favor.

My checked bag contains a razor sharp knife, a blowtorch, three bottles of booze, and $20 dollars worth of squeaky toys for the dog.  I'll land while it is still light outside.  Tomorrow the weekend starts.  Life is good.

Bad food is bad.

I like food.

And I travel now and then for work.  Like right now.  That usually means having to eat out.  But on my last couple of trips, I've been traveling solo.  So the first order of business after arriving has been to hit a local grocery store and get a bit of food.  This time round I got myself a BBQ chicken, some cottage cheese, and some fruit and vegetables.  All that went into the fridge in my room, and I was a happy camper.

As often as not, I'll eat out someplace and be pretty disappointed by the quality of the food.  A couple nights ago I went to a mall to hit up a Williams Sonoma (don't have one back home) to pick up two things: a blowtorch for my Sous Vide cooking and a Global boning knife for, well, its general awesomeness.  I was starving by the time I got my gear so I hit a restaurant in the mall.  My spidey senses were tingling, trying to tell me that this place didn't hold a lot of promise.  But I needed to eat.  I ordered up a sirloin steak.  They were out, so I went with the New York Strip instead.

Bad move.  The steak I got was a mass of gristle.  There didn't seem to be a single spot on it that didn't have the consistency of silicone rubber.  I couldn't even cut through the garbage in front of me.  I called the waiter over and asked for another steak.  The manager came by a few minutes later and at least apologized, saying they had never seen such a bad steak come out of their kitchen.

The next one came out.  It had a big clump of fat on either end that I cut away.  It was also cut unevenly and overcooked in the thin part.  I paid $22 for this?  I was beyond caring at this point and ate it anyway.  It was a 12oz steak and I was still hungry after finishing it.  I was signing my bill when one guy comes along and asks if they can offer me a free desert. 

Boy, let me think.  I didn't want a desert.  In fact, I rarely eat desert.  I wanted a decent steak.  And what were the odds that their crappy kitchen would have the capacity to put out an awesome desert worth pounding back 500 calories and making up for a shitty meal?  About zero, so no thanks.  I left, yearning for that hour of my life back.

So: Norton's American Grill and Pub in Tyson Center Mall: Piss On You.

Food page up

I've started a food page to collect some Sous Vide stuff I've been playing with. This is a method of cooking where you put food in a plastic bag, suck the air out, and cook it in a carefully regulated temperature bath. I've had a few phenomenal meals out of the rig I built so far, with the best by far being a batch of ribs I cooked for 72 (!) hours.

A lot of people consider cooking to be an art. I disagree: it is a science. Guys like Alton Brown and Heston Blumenthal have got it right. If you know how food works and you've got the right gear, you're golden. The interesting thing is that you usually don't need to spend big bucks on the gear. A few years ago, a proper Sous Vide setup ran you into the thousands. Now you can buy a controller that runs a slow cooker or rice cooker for less than a couple hundred. My DIY box was maybe $60 or $70.

Expect me to beef up (HA!) the food page in the near future with more on the design, useful links, etc.

First Post!

The title of my first blog post is in honor of /.