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📺 “Blue Bloods” School of Hard Knocks | CBS

Watched "Blue Bloods" School of Hard Knocks (Season 8, Episode 14) from CBS
Directed by Alex Zakrzewski. With Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou. A student is shot bu a rival gang member in his high school courtyard; Danny and Baez try to prevent further violence, the principal recklessly takes matters into his own hands.
Great little turn by Ernie Hudson in here, though his character’s motivation given a lengthy career didn’t seem realistic to me.

📖 Read pages 75-103 of Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary

📖 Read pages 75-103, Chapter 3: The Untraining of Ribsy, of Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary (William Morrow & Company, , ISBN: 978-0062652362)

In the days of home newspaper delivery this is just awesome. A dog so good at fetching newspapers, he collects them from the entire neighborhood! What a good belly laugh at the childishness of it all.

📖 Read pages 127-162 of Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

📖 Read pages 127-162, Part 3: Meat: Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios, of Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (Scribner, , ISBN: 978-1-4165-661-3)

I like the idea of considering the traditional American hamburger as a special kind of sausage. This general abstraction appeals to the mathematician in me. It also encourages one to be geared toward the closer end of 70/30 meat/fat ratio when making hamburgers! Too often I’ve had people’s homemade burgers made with 92/8 ratios and they’re just dreadful. However, he does stop short and doesn’t encourage one to use pork fat in their burgers…

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Part 3: Meat: Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios

There is no such thing as a good, lean sausage.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 132

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

The fat of choice is pork back fat, […] it’s better for you than the more saturated fat from beef or lamb.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Indeed, the word sausage derives from the Latin for salt.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Never use iodized salt, which adds an acrid chemical flavor to food. Use kosher or sea salt only.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Morton’s kosher is the closest to an even volume-to-weight ratio (a cup of Morton’s weighs about 8 ounces).

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Pork sausages should be cooked to 150 deg F before being removed from the heat, and poultry-based sausages should be cooked to 160 deg F.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 134

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

I make sausage in 5-pound batches, since that’s the maximum that will fit in the 5- or 6-quart mixing bowl standard for most standing mixers;

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 135

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

[When making] Fry a bit-sized portion of the sausage and taste…

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 136

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

One secondary and salutary effect of a brine is that it can actually carry flavors into muscle, …

Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 154

For those watching closely, he’s made a pun on the word salutary whose Latin root is also the word for salt.
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Sodium nitrite, often simply referred to as pink salt (it’s dyed pink), is a curing salt that’s inexpensive and available from www.butcher-packer.com, which sells pink salt under the name DQ Cure.

Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 158

Oddly this line is repeated twice in the footnotes on opposite pages, but provides a useful link for ordering supplies for making Canadian bacon and Corned Beef
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

📺 Sherlock, Season 3 Episodes 1-3

Watched Sherlock, Season 3 Episodes 1-3 from BBC
The Empty Hearse; The Sign of Three; His Last Vow
Re-watched the three episodes of season 3

It’s apparently been a while, but I’d apparently seen all three of these when they were initially released in the US. It is nice prep for season 4 which is also available. I’ve forgotten enough bits and the series is rich enough that watching it all again is still very engaging.

Watched on Netflix streaming via Chromecast to Television

Dear DoorDash, refunding only a fraction of the cost for an undelivered item is a brilliant way to discourage people from becoming repeat customers.

I had to dig through the app to find the way to register the issue and then got screwed on a refund that is really just a credit on my next order.

It should have been:

  • Easier to find the means to register the issue
  • Credited in full, including tax and a percentage of any tips, etc.
  • Credited back to me directly instead of a credit for next time, since there might not be a next time.

https://youtu.be/lWfaiTLPUKQ?t=49s

📖 Read pages 39-74 of Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary

📖 Read pages 39-74, Chapter 2: Henry Gets Rich, of Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary (William Morrow & Company, , ISBN: 978-0062652362)

Henry could have done far better here, but apparently his business acumen and concept of economics was just dreadful. Still in all, an entertaining chapter where everything that could go wrong in selling found bubblegum does. As always, Ramona steals the show for laughs with the gum in her hair.

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 8: Breadbox

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 8: Breadbox from Heritage Radio Network
Bread is immeasurable, no longer bound by precepts. The new dictum of baking bread is built on shapes and sizes we haven’t even dreamt of. This episode, the proverbial breadbox of the series, will hold all the bits of bread we haven’t gotten to yet, or have yet to be made.

This episode did a bit too much waxing poetic on bread. As a result, it probably would have done a far better job of having been episode one of the series instead of the last and instead edited to provide an introduction to bread and its importance. Even more so when I recall how dreadfully put together episode one of the series was.

On the science/tech front there were only one or two vignette’s here that were worth catching. The rest was just bread poetry.

One interesting aside was a short discussion about the “free” bread that restaurants often put out. Sadly, while still all-too-common, most places really put out bad bread instead of good bread. I often think how much I’d rather actually pay for such a product at a restaurant, particularly if it’s good. Perhaps I just need to leave more restaurants when they put out bad bread knowing that things probably aren’t going to improve?

Summary of the series: It wasn’t horrible, but it also wasn’t as great as I would have hoped. The primary hosts always sounded a bit too commercial and I felt like anytime I heard them I was about to hear a bumper commercial instead of the next part of the story. Somehow it always felt like the interviewer and the interviewee were never in the same room together and that it was all just cut together in post. It was painful to follow the first episode, but things smoothed out quickly thereafter and the production quality was generally very high. Sadly the editorial didn’t seem to be as good as the production value. I almost wonder if the book went out and hired a network to produce this for them, but just found the wrong team to do the execution.

Too often I found myself wishing that Jeremy Cherfas had been picked up to give the subject a proper 10+ episode treatment. I suspect he’d have done a more interesting in-depth bunch of interviews and managed to weave a more coherent story out of the whole. Alas, twas never thus.