On the weekend I baked some bread for a friend of Shannon’s who has just had a baby.  On the way to deliver it we made a few stops and so were tortured by the smell of fresh baked bread in the car for a couple of hours, so I decided last night that I should make some bread for us as well.  I made my standard batch of dough based on the Black Canyon Sourdough from sourdoughhome.com, which is quite a good source of sourdough baking information.  My only change is to reduce the amount of white flour to 500g from 750g, and to up the whole wheat to 380g to make up the difference.  I find that the bread comes out nicer with more whole wheat.  For the flours I use standard Robin Hood white bread flour, my whole wheat however I get fresh ground from Prairie Mill Bread Co. they mill it fresh and you can just waltz in whenever and pick up a 5lb bag.

I split my batch of dough into 2, the first I formed into a traditional boule and proofed it in my reed proofing basket that I dusted with wheat bran.  The second I rolled out into a 9”x12” rectangle, and coated with grated cheddar. I rolled it into a log and proofed it in a standard loaf pan (I don’t have any pictures of the building stages cause I was in a hurry).  Once all the dough was proofed (about 2.5 hours later) I baked the cheese loaf off at 375 for 30 minutes.  The boule I baked a bit differently, it went into my La Cloche clay baker that had been pre-heated to 450.  The boule baked for 20 minutes with the lid on and then another 10 with the lid off to develop the crust. 

Everything turned out pretty decent (in my humble opinion):

I had a couple pieces of the cheddar bread this morning for breakfast toasted and I have to say they turned out really good for a first experiment.

Categories: Culinary Experiments, Photography
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Last night Shannon, Sarah, and I went out to do some field work for the girls company.  I was tasked to come along cause they had heard that there was possibly some squatters on the land and they wanted to have someone big along to look scary.  I’m not really sure that I it the scary part of that but I am big.  I brought the camera along since they were going to be doing the work around sunset I figured I could get some good “Magic Hour” light to shoot.  Since I’ve been wanting to try out my old GPS as a track logger for Geo Tagging my pictures I made sure it was charged up and ready to go.  The shooting went well and this morning I took to the task of importing and trying to get the shots geo-tagged.

I followed my normal routine of importing the pictures into Aperture, the next step was to get the track log off the GPS and into the standard GPX format.  The Magellan eXplorist 500 that I was using, has it’s own track format that is luckily enough just a standard text file.  I could have written a program to do the conversion but being the lazy bastard I am instead of engaging my brain I used the Google brain instead and found a nice free app for Mac/Windows/Linux called GPS Babel that supports conversion to & from a metric fuck ton of formats for GPS data.

After the conversion step was handled it was as simple as pulling the file into the software I found to do the tagging.  It’s called GPS Photo Linker a free piece of software from a company called Early Innovations. It’s totally free and seems to work really good.

The only gotcha I found is because we weren’t always moving around some of the GPS track log points were more then 2 minutes apart and this caused the default settings of the program to miss some of the tags on the first pass.  I just upped the limit to 5 minutes and everything worked perfectly.

All the gooders from last night are in this flickr set: Sunset Owl Survey to checkout the location you can hit the view map button on the right hand menu in each picture.

Categories: Photography
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It’s my fiancée’s birthday today so last night I made her birthday cake.  It’s a traditional southern coconut cake, I used Alton Brown’s recipe from his Coconut Cake Revival episode of Good Eats.  It turned out pretty awesome, it was a lot of work though so I wouldn’t suggest making this for an everyday thing but a birthday or some other special occasion this would be a good choice for a coconut lover.

One note, buying coconuts at the grocery store is full of dragons, I got 1 completely rotten one, and a couple that had some black sections but were mostly fine.  So be careful.

Full Set of images are on Flickr

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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One night last week I decided to make burgers for dinner, since I didn’t feel like making plain old burgers I decided to make blue cheese stuffed bison burgers.

• .5 kg ground bison
• 1 large egg
• 2 tbs sweet chili sauce
• 1 tbs dijon mustard
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 onion (diced small & caramelized)
• 1/2 package cream cheese (4 ounces)
• 4 ounces blue cheese
• 1-2 ounces panko bread crumbs

The process is simple enough I started by dicing and caramelizing 1/2 a sweet onion

Once the onions were caramelized I moved them to a bowl to cool so that they wouldn’t start cooking the meat once I started mixing the burgers.  Next I mixed the cream and blue cheeses together into a paste, at first I tried doing this with them at room temperature but to make it easier I heated it a bit in the microwave for about 15 seconds to loosen it up a bit.

Setting aside the cheese mixture it was time to make the burger mix

After mixing this with a wooden spoon I added the bread crumbs a bit at a time until I had the consistency I wanted.

I then formed thin patties out of the burger mixture, I made the patties extra thin since we will be sandwiching 2 together around the filling to make the final burger.

I ended up with enough meat to make 3 of the filled patties and one non filled patty that was a bit on the small side.  Next I put about a tablespoon and a half (give or take) of the cheese filling on half the patties.

After getting each patty filled to about a centimeter from the edge Take the other patty half and place it on top lightly pinching to seal the outside edge.

  All ready to go on the grill

I threw the burgers on the grill for about 6 minutes a side until they looked done to me.

My bun all ready for consumption after a light buttering and toasting

The final dinner with kernel corn as a side

Over all they turned out really good, except for the mouth burning of the hot cheese when biting into the burgers.  All the photos are available in this flickr set.

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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On Sunday morning Shannon and I went down to SunnySide Garden Center to pickup a birthday gift for Janine.  While we were there we picked up a small 3” pot of Venus Fly Traps.  I thought they’d look really cool macro’d up so I pulled out the strobes and took a few shots today after dinner.

This guy is my personal favorite, I think I’m going to get it printed up and hang it somewhere in the house:

The rest of the shots are available in this set: 2009-04-20 – Venus Fly Trap Macro or you can just check the previews in the slide show.

Categories: Macro, Photography
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Tuesday night Wes and I got together and did some shooting for some new company pictures.  Wes had this cool idea that we should be breaking through a white seamless backdrop and it worked even better then I had envisioned they would turn out.

The lighting setup was fairly simple:

I really like the results we got, they almost look like they were done in photoshop.

PS: Leaning over to get through the tear while holding a D3+70-200 VR is hard on the back, that combo is heavy.

Categories: Photography
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Last night’s dinner was a fairly simple affair but I thought I’d share it since it looked pretty good and tasted even better.  It consisted of a grill steamed salmon filet with lemon and dill, roasted garlic brown and wild rice (packaged), lightly steamed broccoli with grated Balderson 3 year old white cheddar.

The salmon is super easy to make.

• Lay down a double layer of foil
• lightly oil the foil with olive oil
• lay the salmon filet down and season with salt, pepper, and dill  (fresh or dried)
• Slice 1/2 an onion into rings and lay the onion rings on top of the filet.
• Thinly slice a lemon and lay the slices on top of the onions
• Put a single layer of foil on top and crimp the sides up tightly
• Cook on the top rack in a 400 F grill for 20-25 minutes.

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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The Monday Treat for the office this week was Baklava, unlike previous attempts this one was made using Alton Brown’s recipe from Good Eats.

The recipe is available here: Good Eats Baklava.

I had to make some slight deviations from the recipe, I couldn’t find any shelled/unsalted pistachio’s so I just used almonds and walnuts only.  I also forgot to pickup all spice so it was just completely omitted.   The recipe still turned out much better then the 2 alternate recipes I’ve tried from Allrecipes.com. I do however have a couple of comments, firstly Alton’s suggestion to thaw the phylo pastry in the microwave was a disaster, it got all gooey and I had to throw a whole box away so I would suggest thawing in the fridge.  Secondly there seems to be slightly too much syrup as my 9×13 had a good half cm of syrup left after all the baklava was consumed, but I suppose it’s better to have too much rather then too little.

Here’s a snap I took of the 2 I kept back at home for us.

Overall it went over well with everyone at work and there were no leftovers for the vultures once I had passed them out.

Now to decide what to bring for next week, hopefully the new pantry will be done this weekend so I can have some time to bake something.  Perhaps I’ll pull something random out of the Cookies and Squares book I got for christmas.

Categories: Culinary Experiments, Monday Treat
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I lurk on the DPReview forums quite a bit and there have been some questions as to whether or not the Phottix Kosmo replacement battery for the Nikon MB-D10 battery grip allows the D700 (and  D300) to get the full 8 fps (without the need to buy the stupid expensive EN-EL4a+charger+end cap).  I finally got around to testing it this morning and I can confirm that it works just fine and does allow for the full 8fps (in fact I got what appears to be 9fps).

Here’s the recorded waveform from Audacity:

And for anyone interested here is the actual MP3

Phottix Kosmo D700.mp3

I used the following settings on my D700:

D700 + MB-D10 with Phottix Kosmo
14-Bit Lossless Compressed RAW
Active D-Lighting Off
High ISO NR Normal
Long Exp NR Off
Vignette Control Normal

Categories: Photography
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I made a lovely little steak dinner for Shannon and myself this evening.

I started with a nicely marbled Ribeye I picked up from Sobey’s on my way home from work.  I lightly lubed it up with canola oil and then liberally applied kosher salt and finely ground fresh black pepper.

While I was doing this, my large cast iron skillet was heating up to sun like temperatures (also known as 500F) in the oven.  Once it reached heat I put it over high flame on my largest burner to get it as hot as possible.

The steak was seared on each side for 1 minute then fired into the oven for 3 minutes on each side to hit a nice medium rare (my steak was still a bit chilly from the fridge if I had let it actually hit room temp it would have probably been more like 2 minutes a side for medium rare).

To serve alongside I cooked up some frozen corn, and balsamic glazed fried mushrooms. To finish off the steaks they were topped with a healthy dose of English Stilton.

Final results are presented below.

Categories: Culinary Experiments, Photography
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