Making smoked foods Mock bacon

Im not really sure how to make bacon, but I can now smoke stuff, and bacon is smoked pork, so I should be able to get it half right at least.

Hope I dont die!

Actually Ive read a lot of safety info, and it seems I can cold smoke stuff at dangerous, bacteria breeding temperatures for less than four hours, without killing myself.

I think.

Dont try this at home.

Ahgggeh...

Go on.

Youll be fine.

Ahgggeh isnt a word in Australia or anything. Thats just the sound I made.

I type it as I hear it. And I hear it as I say it.

I have no idea what Im talking about.

So...

I brined two completely different looking cuts of pork that both claimed to be pork belly.

I added around a 1/2 cup of sea salt, and a half cup of brown(ish) sugar, to a squirt of honey, and some fresh ground black pepper. I also threw in three bay leaves, and Im pretty sure there was something else as well.

Its late here.

And the people next door have had enough smoke for the day so Im about to retrieve my smoked stuff.

It looks kind of pallid.

But it has an interesting scent, that might be a little promising.

Whatever happens, this will not be the kind of bacon-like substance that you might be able to put in your cellar for a few weeks. This will be the kind of thing Ill be freezing, then making sure I cook it.

A lot.

Before eating.

Which is fine by me, because I think bacon should be crunchy.

I also smoked some jalapeños in there.

Im off to retrieve it all now.

Ill let you know if it kills me.





 

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Stirling engines A complete history of Engines

Some time ago, somebody invented the steam engine. The steam engine works by heating water in an airtight container to make steam. The steam is massively expanded water, and the result is lots of pressure.  Once you have lots of pressure you bleed a bit of that pressure intermittently into a piston, and the piston gets pushed. Connect that to a crank, and you have rotational motion, and an industrial revolution. You also have lots of factory workers being blown up in hideous, explosive  accidents, with all the screaming, and loss of productivity that goes with being killed.

Later someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the turbine engine. These run on fossil fuel. They had a pretty good run until somebody discovered it was making us sick and killing everyone.

The turbine engine is a big thing you tend to stick to the ground in a power plant and make electricity. That way the factories could all have much safer working conditions where hardly anyone ever got blown up, but it also kills the earth a bit. Just a little every day. And sometimes some of them explode anyway. Thats not so good, because some use uranium to make the heat, and that never ends well.

Anyway...

The internal combustion engine tends to be used in portable things like cars, because they pack such a lot of punch for such a small weight in fuel. They also kill the world, just a little bit each day, and sometimes explode, and sometimes just mash into each other, and mash into other things that tend to be near roads. They do a lot of mashing.

The main advantage with the turbine, and internal combustion engines, is that they spread out the damage. Just one or two people from any given factory at any given time get killed by them rather than taking out half the factorys workforce all in one go like a steam engine disaster might. The mayhem and disaster is spread out so that each factory takes just a small share of the disruption to productivity. Except perhaps with the uranium stuff. I think thats why Australia is shipping all our uranium to distant countries. To move it as far away as possible.

Anyway...

A Stirling engine on the other hand is a slightly more peaceful beast that doesnt really do a lot, but what it does, it does pretty thoughtfully. Historically it fits between the steam engine and the stuff we use today (2013, just in case someone reads this in 40 years). The Stirling engine is an engine that uses the difference in heat between two of its bits of kit, to make stuff spin around without all the explosions.

There.

Thats the design description out of the way.

Its very safe, because it doesnt have a pressurised container. It needs a source of heat, but that can be solar, or waste heat from something else. Rotting compost, your wireless router, whatever. They are not a very powerful engine, which is why the internal combustion engine took over, and they are not very responsive to sudden changes in desired power output. Thats also why the internal combustion engine took over. And they are not very powerful... Internal combustion engine blah blah blah.

So...

The most beneficial thing as far as Im concerned is that they wont blow up and kill me.

Theyre not very useful. But thats not going to stop me making one.

The kind of thing that will stop me making one, is more likely to be that I have no idea how.

Ive never made an engine before, and have also never met anyone who has, but it turns out they are a pretty simple kind of beast, and with a bit of luck, wire, string, and the total combined wealth of human knowledge stored on the Internet, I might be able to make one.

People are very clever, and there are some really helpful ones out there that are willing to help me.

Ill be trying to make a very small Stirling engine that runs on the power of a small candle, that will do no work, but will hopefully work.



120 Things in 20 years - Stirling engine - It might go round and round.

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Aquaponics Cucumber

Cucumber.

Strange word.

Anyway, Ive been getting good results with hand pollination. For some reason the female flowers (the ones with the fruit attached to the back of them, open well, but the males dont.

I thought bees were supposed to do this work. There are no bees anywhere doing anything. Is there a strike or something. Perhaps people are talking about it on TV. Maybe there is a reason to watch TV after all.

I planted my four cucumber plants in the corner of the growbed nearest the door. The door stays open for summer, so I trained the plants to grow outside.

Actually it doesnt really matter if the door was open or closed, they could be made to grow under the door with a little pruning.






Ive been using a small, soft artists paint brush to tickle all the flowers on my plants and do the bees work for them.

Every female flower Ive hand pollinated has produced a very tasty fruit, but none of those that I left for the bees have manage to set fruit.

There seems to be a lot of fruit. More than we could use, but they are finding good homes with friends and relatives.

One even went to a friendly relative.





120 Things in 20 years - Cucumber is still a funny word.

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Making smoked foods Mixed mock bacon results

I made some mock bacon the other day.

Mixed results.

Some of worked really well, and tastes like bacon. The other bit smells like bacon, and tastes like bacon, but it chews like a really thick rubber band.

And the jalapenos that I also smoked were kind of pointless. I think they needed a LOT more smoke.

I think Im going to have to learn a lot more before trying bacon again.

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Thinking Starbuck

Im going to try to work the word "**systemically" into more conversations from now on.

Sometimes I marvel at the total awesomeness of the net. As long as I have a net connection, I effectively know everything you humans have ever worked out.

Unless there is a coffee house or a 1978 sifi* TV series, or worse yet, a naughties remake of said 70s TV series with the same name.

Then Im doomed.

I wanted to know about someone called "Starbuck", and more specifically, I waned to find out what all the fuss was about, and why everyone called everything "Starbuck(s)".

Sometimes its simply too hard and you have to wade through too much crud.

What I need is either a thing that just adds a few different suffixes to everything, or a special "I want the thing thats probably unpopular" function on google. The suffixes would probably include things like "General", "Sir" or ... well thats all I can think of really.

Just "General", and "Sir".

Perhaps I could just try those two search suffixes on my own without having to change the rest of the world.

I guess it could work.



*120 Things in 20 years - Did you know that if you do a search for sifi, you get a link to "systemically** important financial institution" but scifi gets you something that makes sense? Im guessing its actually substantially easier than I report to find the right stuff when thinking about people named "Starbuck" when you can spell.

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Thinking Bacon

I thought it was just me that was a big bacon fan, but lately Ive been seeing bacon T-shirts, bacon poems, bacon coffee mugs etc everywhere I go online. Which brings me to remind myself how the net works. If I do a search on google, I see things that google thinks Im interested in. That means that if there is even the slightest connection to bacon, I get a lot of bacon hits. Everything I search for adds to the database of things Im interested in, so google thinks that even a tenuous connection is worth reporting, because Im clearly interested in bacon AND electronics.


If I do the same search on someone elses computer, I get different results.

One of the side effects of getting good search results that are relevant to the searcher, is that there is no editor to decide on the things that everyone is interested in. That tends to mean we keep a tight lid on broadening our horizons. One role of a TV news editor was to decide that say, an impending asteroid impact about to wipe us all out, was important to even people who were only normally interested in puppies and real estate. This, because it might impact their desire to buy more puppies or real estate, or might just be worth knowing about in spite of their desire to buy more puppies and real estate.

Google never includes impending asteroid impacts in search results for "haberdashery" on your grand parents computer.

A good haberdashery magazine editor might at least mention in passing thats its worth buying some extra buttons to see you through the coming asteroid induced ice age.

Im guessing magazines are a weigh point on that path, from hearing about things to only hearing about our obsessions.

The net can be an amazing way of gaining information, but it can also be a trap, set to turn us back on ourselves, and blindly confirm that which we already believe to be unconditionally true.






120 Things in 20 years is just reminding itself to wake up and smell the bacon.

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