This weekend Michelle and I attempted making Polish dark rye bread and failed miserably. Making this bread requires a two-pass rising with the yeast; however, it doesn’t look like the yeast had much in it for the second round so it came out fairly dense. Ended up throwing out the two loafs after just having a couple slices. We’ll probably try again in a week. Polish bread is too good and we’ll keep on trying until we get close enough to what we had in Poland.
“Stuff I Make” is now “Hacks”
Couple weeks ago I was looking at the Y Combinator application form and one of the questions was “Please tell us about the time you, Skierkowski, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.” This made me realize that I don’t have any grand hacks I’ve recently pulled off; however, I have many little examples of things I’ve hacked together.
As such, I’ve renamed the category “Stuff I Make” to “Hacks” and I took out all the stuff I cook into it’s own category. I think this is a far more accurate taxonomy for much of what I post.
Here are a just a few recent example of some of my non-computer hacks… though my high school years of computer hacks could filled up countless editions of Phrack and 2600.
Lamp: A while ago I saw a fancy designer lamp made by some famous designer in the Netherlands for some thousands of dollars. I liked the lamp but wanted my own, so instead, with a trip to home depot I made my own for ~$60.
Coasters: Sure I could go and buy some tacky coasters, but I have a number of cardboard boxes I keep throwing out to recycle which could be prime material for coasters. Hence these little cut-outs.
Business Cards: Well, I just recently posted about that. Point being, I hacked together something out of spare materials.
Chicken and Leek Quiche
After work I had a box of vegetables from the Full Circles Farm delivery, chicken and a shiny KitchenAid mixer that I wanted to make.
For the Pie Crust I used a recipe from allrecipes.com which has worked pretty well in the past.
The filling was a hybrid of a couple recipes I found, it goes something like this…
- 1 cup of leeks and 1/4 cup onions chopped and sauted for 7ish minutes with 1 tblspn of butter
- 1 chicken breast also sauted on on the same butter plus some olive oil and a mix of spices.
- 1 1/4 cups of shredded cheeses, mostly gruyer and beechers flagship (i.e. leftovers)
- 4 eggs, 1 1/4 cups milk a pinch of nutmeg, salt, and pepper all beaten together to be slightly frothy.
- All of the above were poured into the pie crust in that order (1,2,3,4) and baked at 350 for 50 minutes.
The key ingredients were top notch, local and organic. That includes the chicken, eggs, leeks, cheese and onion. The eggs are especially impressive: clover pasture raised chickens and unwashed (i.e. not chemically washed like most eggs).
Zucchini-tini
It’s a Zucchini Martini. Grated one Zucchini, sprinkled some salt and then used a cheese cloth to squeeze out the juice. Only about 2-4 tablespoons came out, which is all you need for two martinis. Mixed with Gin, Sake, and simple syrup.
New Business Cards
I needed some business cards for personal/entrepreneurial purposes therefore I couldn’t use my standard Microsoft business cards. I also wanted something non-standard. This is the net result:
