The Test of Taste

While I wasn't particularly intending to eat the daikon radish I've been growing, I figured it'd be a waste if I didn't at least try one to see if perhaps they'd surprise me with some amazing explosion of home-grown flavour.

With that in mind, I picked two samples that had gone to seed, figuring that they weren't going to grow anymore so there was little harm in pulling them up.

As I suspected, they aren't very big. One of them is at least plausibly radish shaped, despite the worm hole half way down, but that's about the most I can give them.

They cleaned up ok, sort of. But, ugly or not, the real question is: how do they taste?

The answer is: kinda bad. Mostly they taste like dirt, with a little hint of radish. Really they mostly just don't taste like much of anything. And, as I suspected, the texture is just awful, very woody. I suspect that perhaps one of the radishes that hasn't gone to seed might have a better texture, but given this experience I'm not really all that interested in finding out.

On the bright side, this week's batch of par-baked bread turned out quite nice.

I turned the temperature down to 300f and put the loaves in the middle rack, but I'm still getting more browning than I'd like. I think it might just be unavoidable for loaves this size, and it didn't seem to have any negative impact on the twice-baked result last week, so I'm not going to worry about it.

I Need To Get A Grip

When I rebuilt Blackbirb, one thing I didn't change was the grips. They were the original grips that came on the bike, and for the most part they did their job and weren't overly worn out or damaged.

However, I recently started to feel like they might be a bit on the small size. I could grip them with my fingers and leave a little gap in my palm, or I could grip them with my palm and thumb and leave a little gap with my fingers. Neither position resulted in the grips really filling my hands.

Luckily for me, grips are cheap and easy to swap.

These new grips are quite a bit chunkier than the old ones, as well as being a lock-on style, meaning that rather than the grip being slightly undersized and holding onto the bar by the friction of the rubber, it instead has a collar with a bolt that tightens down and clamps onto the bar. This makes the grips much easier to install and remove, and also makes them much less susceptible to dirt and grime working their way under the grip and compromising that friction fit.

So, it's out with the old grips.

And in with the new.

These are definitely chunkier, and hopefully they'll be grippy and comfortable when I'm riding.

Brain Surgery

Well, it's not rocket science, at least.

Recently I got curious about using a security camera software package that leverages AI for object detection. To do this, it taps into a Coral accelerator and it just so happened that Tyler had one of the USB ones just kicking around collecting dust, and he leant it to me to try it out.

The Coral USB stick, however, uses USB 3.1 gen 1, for 5Gb/s data transfers. My server, on the other hand, is running on a hand-me-down motherboard from the Core2 Duo epoch, and most certainly does not have any sort of USB3 ports.

So, time to upgrade.

Tyler again managed to come to the rescue here, as he had a spare motherboard laying about. Not a particularly new one, mind you. I mean it was new as in unused, but it's an LGA1151 board which puts it in the 2016-ish era. Still kind of old, but a good decade jump from the previous gubbins.

So that just left me to pick up a CPU, a cooler, some RAM and an extra network card, since my server needs 2 ethernet ports and the card I had been using was PCI (not PCI-E). The new board does not have PCI.

You can read over the parts list if you're interested.

Anyway, the first step before upgrading my server is to put these bits together on the bench to make sure that everything works. I had some minor doubts, as the board might have needed a bios upgrade to be able to work with the CPU I got, and the CPU itself was "refurbished", whatever that means. (I mean it apparently means it comes at a 50% discount, so ok I'll roll that dice).

I borrowed a spare graphics card out of my junk pile for this quick test, and didn't bother hooking up the ethernet card just yet as I had no reason to doubt that it would work just fine.

All the parts seemed to fit together without protest, including the giant AIO water cooler that I got because it was the same price as a regular CPU cooler, and because this server runs in my office all day, and because honestly I just wanted to experiment with a water cooler.

So with that out of the way, the next step is to apply power.

The power supply and monitor were also fished out of my junk pile. It's good to have a junk pile.

But something doesn't seem right, though.

Ah yes, that colour is much faster.

Moving on, it's time to dig the old guts out of the server.

Out with the old.

And in with the new.

So now comes the painful part. I've got to boot up, re-activate my operating system, deal with driver hell, and then...

Wait, no, it's Linux not Windows. I just boot up and it works flawlessly without changing a single damn thing.

So how does the security cam software work? I dunno, I'll install it later and find out then.

Not A Failure, But Far From Success

Daikon radish is supposed to, if you believe the literature, mature in 2 months. It's been over 2 months now, and my patch looks like this.

It's leafy and green, but that's kind of the end of the good news.

Only the strip down the middle seemed to grow at a decent rate, the stuff around the edges is still quite small. Given that the sunniest spot corresponds to the best growth, I'd say that overall this patch didn't have enough light for these plants, and if I wanted a proper crop I'd have to set up a patch in full sun.

A few radishes did form some decent looking taproots.

But only maybe 4 or 5 out of the whole plot, and even then they're pretty tiny compared to what daikon is supposed to look like.

Mostly the rest of them look like this.

I have a hard time even calling this a taproot.

I might try pulling one or two out of the ground to taste, but there's not really much here to get excited about on that front. That said, the main goal here was to fix some nitrogen in the soil and try to break up the clay a bit with organic matter, and to that end the seeds I bought were ones marketed for that purpose rather than being a cultivar specifically aimed at producing a food-grade crop. I was planning from the start to just leave these in the ground to decompose and enrich the soil.

Anyway, a lot of the plants are going to seed now which basically signals the end of their growth, so it's not like much is going to improve just by waiting longer.

It was a useful experiment at least.

They Don't Pay Rent

So just outside of my back door, there's an extra paving stone nestled into the mulch.

It looks a little out of place, but I put it there for a good reason.

Yes, rats again. The little shits chewed their way into my drain pipes. This hole was actually quite a bit smaller when I put the paver on top of it, so they're definitely still active.

So, it's time to fix this problem properly.

This is maybe a little excessive for just catching a bit of runoff from a small awning, but I wasn't the one who installed it, so whatever I guess. It's here and it works, and it's gonna get fixed.

And to fix this, I'll be installing some hardware cloth under the grating. So, that means the grating is coming off. Also the dirt is being cleaned out, while I'm in here.

Cutting the hardware cloth to shape was incredibly easy with these offset shears. They're from Midwest Tools, in case you want a pair of your own.

The first piece was a nice easy rectangle, but for the second piece I wanted to feed the end into the pipe a little ways since the rats were chewing on the fitting at the end as well.

Obviously I slid it in further than that, this is just for illustrative purposes.

With that taken care of, we can reinstall the grating on top, trapping the hardware cloth beneath it.

I switched the chewed up grate to be closer to the house so that I'm less likely to step on that part.

Finally, I replaced the landscape fabric with a new piece, since along with having a hole chewed it in, it had also got some UV damage and was breaking down a bit. Then it was just a matter of raking the mulch back into place.

Good as new, and much more rat-proof.

Chicken and Egg

Hmm, I wonder what would be a good tool to cut these zip ties with?

Gonna have to put my thinking cap on.

Bread so nice I gotta bake it twice

So when we last left off, our par-baked bread experiment was looking a little like this.

Since today is Monday, I thawed out one of the loaves and second-baked it at 375 degrees freedom for 20 minutes above a water bath, resulting in a nice dark, shiny loaf.

The crust is a little on the crunchy side judging by the poke test, but that's fairly normal for bread fresh out of the oven. I expect that as it sits for a while it'll re-soften.

The fresh-from-the-oven taste test reveals that the flavour is divine, as expected. The crust is indeed a little on the crunchy side, but the crumb is pillowy soft. I expect these traits to even out a little as the crumb ages throughout the week and the crust reabsorbs some of the water it lost.

A Half-Baked Plan

So I'm continuing to experiment with how best to deal with the second loaf of my bi-weekly bread baking. Stored on the counter, it's a bit susceptible to mold after the first week, even when using chemical preservatives, and it tends to get a wee bit stale in that time as well.

Putting it in the fridge results in it nearly instantly going stale, due to the temperature sensitivity of the starch crystallization. It still toasts up nicely, with the heat at least partially reversing the staleing, but it's not quite the same as when it's fresh baked. Using the freezer instead prevents the bread from going stale or moldy, but again requires toasting to revive it.

So this week I'm experimenting with par-baking the bread.

The goal is to get the internal temperature of the bread up to 190 degrees freedom without significant browning of the outside. I didn't manage to completely avoid the browning here, though I had the bread in the top rack rather than the middle.

There's some conflicting information about what time and temperature to bake at, and I ended up going with 325 degrees freedom, and it took roughly 30 minutes to bake through. I did add a tray of water to the oven to try to prevent too much dehydration during this step.

The next step is to let this bread cool off and then stick it in the freezer. Then on Monday I'll pull one of them out to thaw it at probably around lunch time, after which I'll bake it at a higher temperature to heat it through and brown the outside (brown the outside, brown the outside). Ideally they should come out with the same texture, flavour and browning as my usual loaves, which look more like this.

I sure hope this works.

Life Begins Anew

Last winter saw an unfortunate number of hard overnight frosts up here in the hills where I live. This resulted primarily in my lantana dying, despite me trying to keep them covered overnight to prevent the worst of the frost from getting to them.

However, by some miracle, one of them actually managed to survive, and sent up new growth from the bare stump that remained this spring.

It's not exactly looking amazing, but it ain't nothing, at least.

Speaking of things coming back from the dead, my supposedly annual mexican heather has managed to pop up again, after spending quite some time showing no signs of life.

It's also maybe not looking too amazing, but I guess green is green.

I'm not sure how long I'll continue to torture these two plants before I rip them out and replace them with something a bit more frost-tolerant.

Galoshes

I just like saying that word. It's such a lovely onomatopoeia.

I got myself a pair of boots, primarily in anticipation of doing a little bit of concrete work around the house. Having footwear that can be hosed off is very convenient for such tasks.

These boots, however, have a secret: they're actually steel-toed. I'm not terribly worried about lower extremity crush injuries, but what's nice is that it makes it a lot easier to kick stuff around without bruising your toes.

And, well, occasionally you will stub a toe on something.

Fasciating Foods

So it's plum season, which basically means that the plum tree in my back yard decided that it's time to eat exactly as many plums as it deems necessary to ripen on any given day. Owning a fruit tree seems to be one of those things that's a lot more awesome in theory than in practice.

Anyway, it does occasionally entertain me with weirdly malformed fruit.

How oddly fasciating.

Then, not a day later, I find this suspiciously cancerous lump

Do trees get cancer? Is that a thing? Also what am I supposed to do when only one of these conjoined twins ripens and the other still needs some time?

Mysteries of the universe.

In other food news, I figured I'd share some photos of last weekend's food prep. First off, a fresh batch of bread posing with some brining giardiniera.

And the giardiniera post-canning.

It was shortly after canning that I realized I had accidentally doubled the salt in the pickling juice. I'm not too sure how this is going to turn out, but I figure if things go poorly then I can just pour off half the liquid and top it back up with some unsalted pickling juice and let it sit for a while to osmos back to equilibrium, and hopefully that'll rescue it.

It'll take a few weeks before I get to that, though, as I still have a few jars left from the last batch I made in February.