Tonights dinner was a old standby something I borrowed from Michael Smith and messed with a bit. It’s a simple chicken breast butterflied open and then stuffed with pesto and provolone (only pesto in the original) then wrapped in a couple slices of prosciutto and baked in the oven (350F for about 30 minutes). Server along with it is some simple steamed asparagus (tossed with butter and kosher salt) and over roasted potatoes (seasoned with salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne and granulate garlic).

All in all a super tasty dinner and start to finish done in 1 hour could be a half if you did boiled potatoes since the potatoes take about an hour in the oven.

Categories: Culinary Experiments, Photography
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This evening for dinner since we had some left over veggies in the fridge I decided that it would be a good night to make pizza. I started with making the dough this afternoon after work, when starting any new project (not that pizza is new to me) I tend to got Alton Brown for recipes. They tend to be well researched and usually require little if any tuning. My pizza dough recipe is a derivative of this recipe from the Flat is Beautiful episode of Good Eats. The few modifications that I make are

• I dissolve half the sugar and all the yeast in the water before adding to the mixer
• I added about a half of a cup more flour as the dough tends to be too sticky
• I add only 1.5 teaspoons of salt instead of 1 tablespoon

After mixing and kneading I also deviate from the recipe, I tend to want pizza now instead of tomorrow so the dough just rises on the counter for a couple hours before I use it.

I then split the dough and round it out with some flour into a pizza shape and lay it out on the peel ready for topping.

Todays pizza was going to be mixed veggies so I just cut them all up to relatively equal pieces and sauteed them quickly to free some of the moisture and pre-cook them a bit since the pizza bakes hot and fast.

Then it’s a simple as laying out the toppings
Sauce first (less is more here one or two spoonfuls tops)

Then the toppings (veggies in this case)

Finally the cheese (I was being lazy today and just bought a package of pre-grated pizza cheese)

While all this is happening I have my oven getting roaring hot (500˚F with the convection fan on) with my pizza stone on the rack

Pizza goes on to the stone,

and bakes for 5-7 minutes once the cheese is melted and browned on the top and the crust is a nice golden brown it’s ready to go.

Let the pizza rest for 3-5 minutes to let the cheese set up a bit and then slice and consume.

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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I’ve released 1.0.2 of BlahzDNS just to get versioning correct in the source repository along with the tag and the app.

Source tarball is available here http://github.com/msroest/BlahzDNS/tarball/1.0.2

Categories: BlahzDNS
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Saturday evening a group of us headed out to Dorothy AB which is a bit of a “Ghost Town”. Although not really a ghost town since there are still people living there (plus what looked like a fairly new B & B). There was still some cool stuff to photograph, there are a couple of old churches and a grain elevator. To make it extra exciting we rented a 2500 W generator and brought out the studio lights to see what kind of mayhem we could get into. It turns out quite a bit, to start we setup the lights on the side of the highway and were able to completely light up the grain elevator

Which is cool but I think the best shot of the night with the lights turned out to be this one:

My favorite shot of the whole day I think would have to be this one:

The reflection of the sunset in the church window plus the golden light of the sunset lighting up the building really does it for me.
The rest of the images are available in this set: Dorothy AB – Jan 16 2010

Categories: Photography
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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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