11/14/2008

Bacon Tasting Part IV

I admit I had high hopes for this next bacon, "Tripp Country Ham-Country Bacon Brown Sugar Cured" as it's description intrigued me:

Tasting Notes: Brown-sugar cured, with a mysterious secret recipe that includes red pepper and cinnamon. Thick cut. Meaty, complex flavors. Juicy. Great intensity with a slight spice. Fantastic!

This was a thick cut bacon, but for some reason it looks like the slab was cut in half as the pieces were shorter than the others. This bacon had much more fat than the other ones, as a result it curled the most out of all of the bacon's I have tried so far. This bacon is a bit on the salty side, and it has a taste I would describe as kind of sour. I could taste nothing of the red pepper and cinnamon. This could be because I eat some pretty spicy food and would not notice it. My wife however does not like spicy foods and did not report it as being spicy. As I said before this bacon had the most fat of any of the bacon's, in fact a couple of pieces were about 95% fat. This bacon had a light but pleasing amount of smokiness about it. The sour taste I mentioned above reminded me of "Farmer John Ends & Pieces", which this bacon taste almost exactly like. Once again there was very little if any sweet taste about this bacon. The bacon was definitely juicy. An OK bacon.

11/13/2008

Bacon Tasting Part III

The verdict is in on "Dan Philips Special Brown Sugar Hickory Smoked Country Bacon" it is too salty and not hickory flavored enough.

Today I tried the "J. Samuel Whiting Bacon" here is The Grateful Palates" Description:

Sweet aroma, thin and crunchy. Perfect balance like a fine cut diamond. Sweet and powerful, almost fruity. Addictive, soft, lush, judicious use of fat and sublimely balanced. AWESOME and hedonistic. Very unique, sweet, yet savory bacon. Kids love all bacon, but they will especially love this bacon made by J. Samuel Whiting Meats in Pennsylvania.

I find this description interesting as it does not exactly describe this bacon. The Bacon I got was wide, and very thick. On the label it said it was cured with maple syrup and brown sugar, as well as hickory smoked. I found it had practically no hickory flavor or smell at all. I believe that when the bacon was being made a truck load of hickory wood drove by, but that was about the closest this comes to being hickory smoked. It is definitely sweet, but not too much. This bacon taste more like ham than any of the others. The bacon was tender and not at all salty. When they say that Kids will love this bacon they would be correct. This is not a bacon for the adult palate, unless your "milk toast". I could not detect any flavor reminiscent of maple syrup in this bacon. The bacon does have a sweet smell when cooking, there is a bit more fat on this bacon, and it did curl more than the others, but by "curl" I mean it barely curled. This bacon is on par with what is available in your local grocery store. Final verdict... Meh!

11/11/2008

Bacon Tasting Part II

Sunday I cooked up a slice of the "Newsom's Old Mill Store Hickory Smoked Country Bacon" for Chris who promptly swooned under it's influence. He even went so far as to try and lock me in my shed so as to get the rest of the bacon. I served the rest as a desert after dinner to several members of my family. all who tried it liked it (yes some people refused to try it).

This morning I cooked up a batch of "Dan Philips Special Brown Sugar Hickory Smoked Country Bacon". My initial reaction was one of a let down. I may have over cooked it a little, and mixed with eggs and toast, didn't allow the full flavor to come through.. Kathi reported it wasn't her favorite, and tasted sour. I thought it was very salty. However just a few minutes ago I cooked up a small batch for tasting purposes.

Here is The grateful palates description:
Artisan: Gatton Farms
Tasting Notes: This is my own, secret, private cure. Only Charlie Gatton and I know the recipe. I set out to custom design the perfect bacon and I think this is it. It has an incredible balance between sweet, hammy pork flavors and salty, savory flavors. The flavors are intense and the meat is succulent. A bold new bacon that stands up and says 'Eat me!'

My review:
This bacon is not as heavily smoked as the previous review, but it is definitely more smoked than your run-o-the mill bacon. one thing I have noticed with these Bacon's (so far) is that when cooked they shrink but they do not curl. Thus making for even cooking. anyways... This bacon has a nice smoked flavor, the ham flavor is more apparent then the previous bacon. The bacon is sweeter than the previous but I would not be able to identify the sweetness as coming from brown sugar. The bacon is salty and the saltiness varies with the width of the bacon. The narrow sections of the bacon are very salty and the wider ends are more sweat. This bacon is slightly more chewy than the first one. Personally I would expect a bacon with the words "Brown Sugar" to have a prevalent brown sugar/molasses taste which it does not. At times the hickory flavor explodes from the bacon and other times it is not as strong. All in all a good bacon.

11/06/2008

Bacon Tasting Part I

Having become disenchanted with the bacon I can buy from the store, and accidentally stumbling on the website www.gratefulpalate.com while checking out an article listed on www.fark.com, I decided to check out some of the bacon's listed in the article. The bacon I ordered were rather pricey, ranging from $10.00 to $15.00 per pound. I ordered the following bacon:

Dan Philips Special Brown Sugar Hickory Smoked Country Bacon
Newsom's Old Mill Store Hickory Smoked Country Bacon
Tripp Country Ham-Country Bacon Brown Sugar Cured
Nodine's Smokehouse Double Smoked Bacon
J. Samuel Whiting Bacon

I received the Bacon in 2 days, it came in a silver pouch made of padded bubble wrap and a single Ice pack. I was a little worried as it arrived at room temerature, a quick email to The grateful palate confirmed what I pretty much knew. Since the bacon is cured and smoked it would be fine.

The First bacon I tried was "Newsom's Old Mill Store Hickory Smoked Country Bacon".

The websites description is as follows...
"Tasting Notes: Sweet, salty, lovely, delicate powerful like an iron fist in a velvet glove, the kind of bacon to write odes and sonnets about. Silk, silk, silk. Like a virgin bacon eater, touched for the very first time. Life begins with Newsome's bacon."

At the time I tried this bacon I did not know which one it was (no label), I had to contact the The Grateful Palate to get a list of what I ordered.

Upon opening the package the smell of hickory smoke wafted over me, encircling me like an anaconda ready to constrict. I cooked the bacon as recommended, on low heat in a frying pan. The hickory smoke smell was absolutely intoxicating. I am a big fan of smoked meats and barbecue (I have a smoker), so I knew I would be in for a treat. The bacon wasn't as wide as most bacon and cut to about 1/8 inch thick. I noticed that unlike cheap bacon there was no buildup of water on the uncooked side of the bacon, as a result when the bacon was turned over it did not splatter and throw grease everywhere. The bacon cooked up golden brown. I took my first bite and was nearly overcome with a feeling of pure smoked bacon ecstasy (I think I saw God), each bite invoked an image of camping. The smoke flavor was very strong, the bacon was salty and tender, with just a hint of creosote (not always a bad thing). I detected only a slight hint of sweetness. The smoke flavor lingered for a long time after eating it. WOW, I can never go back to the cheap stuff again.

continued in part II

11/02/2008

Kathi Carpe Cyprinus carpio

Back in October Kathi and I were going to take a weeks vacation at Woods Canyon Lake. Due to her Mothers illness, that didn't happen (I'm not bitter). In preparation for this, (among other things) Kathi bought a state fishing license, so she could try fishing, and help me catch some crayfish, (must have a state license for this) on the trip we didn't take (I'm not bitter).

Now that summer is FINALLY coming to an end. We have had a couple of weekends that were rather cool. The first weekend we went out Kathi (who hasn't fished in almost 20 years) in her excitement at getting a bite, either nearly ripped the fishes lips off, or (if she had hooked one) would have launched it across the park. So needless to say (though she got some bites) she did not succeed in her efforts to land a fish. On that Trip I caught 3 Carp. I do not remember if Chris caught anything.

The next trip was not much better, I think I caught one, and Kathi caught none. I think Chris caught one.

On this trip I caught a small Bass using a rattle trap (on my second cast) which I released.
Kathi insisted on taking my picture with it.

The real fun began when after about an hour of waiting, Kathi got a bite, I could tell right away it was a pretty good sized one. At first she started to panic because it was putting up quite a fight, I told her to set the hook and she did without hurling it's lips across the park. Then she said "aren't you going to help me?", no! (if you want credit for it you have to reel it in). Her drag wasn't set quite right so I reached over and modified it so the fish could get some slack without getting off the hook. The fight only lasted a few minutes with Kathi saying "I don't want it to be mad at me" (she feared it would come out of the water cussing and bite her). Once she got it close to shore, Chris was able to get it in a net. It weighed 7.5 pounds. In order to get a picture of it and her, I gave her some rubberized gloved and she went to pick it up, causing it to start flapping about, which caused Kathi to make a weird freakout noise. I took her picture,
and she released it (again making a weird scream). We stayed for about another hour, we would have stayed longer but it started getting hot. No one else caught anything.

9/08/2008

Aspersing Asparagus

Some of you may or may not know that Kathi was recently diagnosed "Insulin resistant". She was told to eat healthier and exercise. So in an attempt at expanding our diet and to eat "healthier" we have been experimenting with Asparagus.

Mind you this was not something we were looking forward to as we both had experiences with this so called vegetable when we were younger and neither of us has really touched it since. In my case my mother made me eat it when I was very young and I nearly barfed. Several months ago while at Karen's house she served Asparagus, and taking a "no thank you" serving I tried it and pronounced it "edible" (this had nothing to do with Karen or her recipe).

To ease us into this I looked up some recipes that we might possibly be able to tolerate.

First up was Rachel Ray's Bacon Wrapped Asparagus (what can go wrong with a recipe that includes BACON).

This is pretty simple, coat several sprigs of asparagus with extra virgin olive oil and pepper, wrap with bacon and bake or grill.

First impression:
There was practically no flavor from the asparagus. The asparagus did not taste like bacon, and the bacon did not taste like asparagus. Asparagus taste like.... asparagus. The closest thing to it would be a mixture of grass and very, very, very...... very mild broccoli.

Next up Alton Browns asparagus and mushroom risotto.

I never had risotto before, it takes a rather long time to make.

First Impression:
Once again "is there asparagus in this?" The risotto was pretty good but next time I will leave out the white wine, asparagus, and lemon zest. The portobello mushrooms were extremely good.

and finally pasta salad with portobello mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and asparagus. This is a Paula Dean recipe.

First impression:
What's the point of putting asparagus in this? The recipe as written was pretty bland. I had to spice it up with some zesty Italian dressing and extra red wine vinegar. The salad otherwise was very good, next time I will add some red bell peppers, cucumber and feta cheese (leaving out the asparagus).

Conclusions:

If asparagus is put in front of me in the future I will eat it, but I won't go out of my way to use it. It's relatively expensive and brings nothing to the recipes it is put in. Asparagus is boring and bland. How my mother made it taste terrible I will never know. Like zucchini recipes, asparagus recipes were invented to dispose of the offending item with out actually throwing it away.

It does have one interesting side effect....

9/04/2008

Time to Photoshop

I'm bored....
So it's time to photoshop.
Today's Victim is Eric.
Eric's Shop of Horrors.
Hey... What do you want for 20 minutes of work.

Eric and the holy Grail!
Yeah... Yeah... Another 20 minutes.
American Pie anyone?

OK, I'll stop now.

8/29/2008

THE GREAT STORM OF 2008

Queue ominous music....

Last night here in Phoenix at about 21:30 a couple of huge storm rolled through the valley. Winds were measured at 85 to 90 miles per hour (officially) and at 100 mph (unofficially). The first storm passed just barely to the south of us and dropped 1/2 inch hail. It also knocked several branches off of our pine tree in the front yard.
Our power went out for about a half an hour. When power came back on I checked out the Weather channel and found that another storm was heading right for us. We went to bed and the second storm hit some time after I went to sleep. It knocked out power again at some point. I got up arround 00:00 and called SRP they were aware of the outage. I went back to bed. I had a 700 watt inverter connected to a truck battery to power a fan so I could sleep. At around 05:00 I woke up again and power was still out. I called SRP again and they said power would be out until about noon. I got up and deployed my 3000 watt Coleman generator (you do have one as well, right???). I used it to keep our Refrigerator and freezer working. I also broke out the new 1200 watt 2 stroke camping generator and used that to power our TV so I could see what was going on in the world.

I drove around to see some of the damage. I found trees down everywhere.
7th street between Oak and Camelback was hit the hardest with multiple poles down in the street.
Plus all the signs over the suicide lane were blown at a 45 degree angle.
Some time around 9:30 the power came back on.

Kill ominous music...

8/19/2008

Boring

Nothing going on... Sorry.

7/29/2008

SuperStars! (in HDR)

Last weekend was Karen's Birthday. She had her birthday up at Juniper Well Ranch near Prescott. Kathi and I went up Saturday morning and got there about 10:00. First thing we did was walk up and down the train tracks that run by the ranch.
We did not see any trains. It was very warm up there and for most of the day we did not do much. I went around and took some pictures of the horses.
Karen wanted me to take pictures of her and Alyssa, so I did, Here are some of the Cheesier ones:

SUPERSTARS!

Later that night Karen and her friend prepared a dinner of ribeye steaks, potatoes cooked with bell peppers, onions, and paprika, in butter, and kabobs. Some really expensive gasoline... I mean Tequila was served as well, of which I had about 4 shots.

The next morning I got up at 6am, The Tequila from the previous night was un-naturally devoid of hangover, so I went out and took some early morning pictures.


Kathi and I went into town and had breakfast, when we returned everyone had awoke from the dead. We fed carrots to the horses one last time, said goodbye to Karen and went home.

7/09/2008

Movie Review (WALL-E)

I don't go to the movies to be preached at. So as you can guess I was not happy with the "message" being preached by this movie. I know that most movie trailers do not accurately depict a movie but I would say that the WALL-E trailer straight up lies.

While there was some funny bits in this movie, they were all served up covered in a thick tasteless gravy of "save the planet", "Stop being a consumer junky", and "get off you ass and exercise". The "love story" also got lost in all the "save the planet" BS.

This is the first Pixar movie to feature live action people in it (why??? I don't know...), there were also CG people who all looked like overstuffed gummy bears. The juxtaposition of the real people and the CG people just kind of made me go WTF?

The only redeeming thing about going to see this movie is the short film "Presto" that plays before it, Presto was extremely funny and had no heavy handed "message".

This is the first Pixar movie that I will not be buying on DVD.

As a forewarning the next Shrek movie is supposed to have a "save the planet" message in it too, (yippee).

If you must insist on making a cereal (sic) "save the planet" movie, that's fine, But call it something like "the day after tomorrow", or "an inconvenient truth", then you can jabber all you want about proving the existence of man-bear-pig, while yelling EXCELSIOR! as you leap off the stage.

I couldn't have said it better

The ultimate War Simulator.

6/30/2008

City Lights

I thought it would be interesting to go up onto South Mountain and take some night pictures of the city. This first Pic was taken with a 30 second exposure, and processed into an HDR pic.
This is also a 30 second exposure, enhanced with Photoshop.
This one is a 30 second exposure and I set off the flash in the middle of it to bring out the nearby objects.
The final picture was a 30 second exposure with the flash set to rear synch, and triggered with my wireless remote.
While up there we noticed the smell of something burning.

6/25/2008

Pinetop Lakeside (In HDR)

Recently Kathi and I wanted to take our trailer and go camping. We wanted to camp at Woods Canyon Lake, but they are booked till August. After some searching I found a campsite in Lakeside that had openings. Last Friday we went up to Lakeside and stayed at the Lakeside campground. I have no pictures of it as it was pretty boring, plus all the camp sites were crammed very close together. If we had brought a tent we would have had no place to set it up, as the space available was taken up by the picnic table, fire pit, and trees. We left town around 13:30 and arrived at around 17:30 18:00.

When planning the trip I found there were 2 routes to get to Lakeside, one went through Payson and the other went through the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. My Mapping software insisted that going through the Fort Apache Indian Reservation was the faster route, but once I told it not to use any dirt roads It gave the distance as 184.7 miles. I then had it run the route through Payson and I got a distance of 184.7 miles?! So... given the choice we went through Payson.

The trip was very hot, and climbing the 6% grades with a trailer had the engine running quite warm, however once at the top of the rim it was smooth sailing to Lakeside. As we went through Payson the temperature was 102.

This time we left with time to spare and took our time setting up camp. Because of the fire danger in Payson being Extreme I stopped at the Payosn Walmart and picked up a portable propane BBQ. I had to assemble it, and we made hamburgers for dinner. We went to sleep shortly after the sun went down. We did not light a fire as it was very warm.

The next morning we were up with the sun I made breakfast and after a quick shower in our camper we headed out to rainbow lake as I wanted to do some fishing and maybe catch Crayfish.
However Public access to the lake is mostly restricted to the north side. There was very little space to fish from and most of it was in use or the water was shallow or choked with weeds.
I looked for crayfish but only saw dead or the remains of dead crayfish. Kathi looked into renting a boat but they were not renting because of the weed problem.

So instead we went for a drive to Show Low lake, I do not have a picture of the lake but the lake is designed as reservoir and it had steep sides lined with boulders, once again access to shore fishing was very limited. So we went to see if we could find Kathi's friend Suzie's mothers cabin as it is for sale. The cabin is located in a nice little wooded neighborhood in Lakeside, I did not take a picture of it, the cabin consists of an old single wide trailer with an add on on the front. A neighbor reported that it was in need of a lot of repair.

We drove around and found this
It's the "Pinetop Fire Department live Fire Trainer". Right next to
The Pinetop Fire station.

We had lunch at a restaurant whose name escapes me. It was starting to get warm and also looked like rain, so we went back to camp closed up the flaps on the trailer, then went in to town to see "Kung Fu Panda" (funny movie you should go see it). Afterwards we went back to camp and took a nap. Later on we went back to the lake where I tried to fish, but due to very high winds I only got about 45 minutes of fishing before I had to give up. We drove around some more and I took this picture:
We went back to camp I made dinner (Ribeye steaks), and we went to bed shortly after sundown.

The next morning once again up with the sun and we started packing. We had breakfast at a small restaurant called "Darbie's cafe". Where they serve breakfast big enough to choke a horse. We went back to camp finished packing, checked out and headed home. On our way through Heber we saw this:
I didn't take many pictures since when you have seen one pine tree you've seen them all, as illustrated by this picture I took at the Mogollon rim overlook just before you head down from the rim.The trip home was uneventful.

6/09/2008

Flagstaff and Route 66

This last weekend I had to go to Flagstaff on Friday June 6th for non recreational purposes. I finished setting up the kiosk at the Flagstaff mall at about 1pm, and Kathi and I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant (the name escapes me). We visited the Flagstaff train depo and did some train watching.

I estimate that in the town of Flagstaff a train goes by on average every 10 to 15 minutes. We then had a light dinner at the Village inn next to the Super 8 motel we stayed at. Here is the view of from our second story window.
The picture is fuzzy because it was taken through a screen I couldn't remove. The trains go by at night so often you have to sign a waver saying you won't ask for your money back if the trains keep you awake (I never heard them while I was sleeping). The next day we decided to drive Route 66 from Flagstaff to Kingman. Okay... we didn't decide to go to Kingman we just ended up there. When I started my car I got a check engine light, I got the diagnostic code P0455 and called my boss, The code was that my gas cap was not on or I had a severe vacuum leak. I checked the gas cap and found that it was just sitting there. I put it back on and the light didn't go out. I think someone tried to siphon my gas. I decided to get a locking gas cap when we got back into Flagstaff. On our way out of town we passed through Williams, Ash Fork, Seligman, Peach Springs (inspiration for Radiator Springs in the movie Cars), Truxton, Crozier, Valentine, and Hackberry. Except for the fact that the towns we passed through were mostly boring, and there was not much scenery, There was one nice thing about this section of route 66 there was practically no traffic. Here see for yourself:
Generally if I am driving on any highway, at least one yutz will come up behind me and ride my tail. Not only did that not happen but I never saw anyone driving behind me for the entire trip. I only saw a few people in front of me but they were locals and they got off the highway before I got anywhere near them. Until I got to Hackberry I didn't see more than 4 or 5 cars going East. So if your ever on I40 and you get to Seligman, Make sure you have a full tank of gas and take route 66. The speed limit is 65 mph, and I didn't see even one cop car the entire time. You will see several of these:
Yup that's right... Burma Shave signs.
We got to Kingman (and it was boring). We did find this small park with a Locomotive in it.

Next to the park was an old electric generating plant, now a museum. We stopped in to use their bathroom, but did not go into the museum, of course there was a train running nearby.
The ride back to Flagstaff was long and boring and we took I40 this time. We got back into Flagstaff and I got a locking gas cap. I reset the check engine light and it hasn't come on since. We had Dinner at Buster's (Kathi had Salmon and I had Prime Rib), later that night Kathi wanted to sit outside somewhere. So we went down to the train depot and sat out to watch the trains. An Amtrak train was schedule to arrive at 8:51pm, but did not arrive till about 10pm. I decided that this would be good time to get some night shots of light trails as the trains went by. I took alot of pictures but most of them looked alike. Here are the better ones:


Kathi took some video as well.

The next day we checked out and headed for Sedona We stopped at a scenic overlook, I took a picture of us and an HDR picture of the Scenery.
We passed through Oak Creek Canyon, and stopped in Sedona for about 45 minutes. We didn't stay very long. I was extremely tired and I didn't even take any pictures. The rest of the ride home was the usual heavy Sunday traffic.