Hidden cubby on Ikea bed

A while ago we bought an ikea bed. It's kinda huge and has drawers which was pretty important for our old house as the closet space is very limited. When I finished assembling the thing I was really struck by the huge dead space left between the drawer and the head board.

I thought to myself what a perfect place to install a hidden chubby for those things you hope the children never find. I'm a huge fan of Make magazine and various Hackaday kind of sites that have projects of hidden storage and rooms in everyday objects. It's from reading about these projects that I was aware of hidden/invisible hinge setups. I carefully measured the board that I was going to replace and ordered a hinge that would fit into the that space. I was going for a completely hidden finished product, and since the Fjell was a pine bed finding stock that would match wasn't hard, nor was the painting of it.  I installed it on the side of the bed that is closer to a wall so you cannot see it from far away, and used a magnetic child latch to keep it from swinging open. 





Score one for the hidden sex toy storage cabinet.

True Blood and junk

So many things I don't even know where to begin.

I've started on a rhubarb wine, that will take something like 2 months to finish up and is the reason that I'm going to buy another couple of carboys. It takes 20 lbs of rhubarb to make 5 gallons of the stuff, but I think it's going to be above average awesome.

The specific recipe and directions can be found in this PDF. I added about 6oz of thistle honey to it, and found that 10lbs of corn sugar only had me at 17 or 18 balling which is ~1.080OG so get 12 or even 13 lbs of corn sugar if you follow this recipe.

Next up, True Blood started and I still haven't finished watching last season. I think I have 3 episodes left and cannot find time for that, not to mention I'd like to watch the Game of Thrones season if I could get the time.

Oh sleep you cruel mistress.

The crud, and other crust

It's stunning how quick and slow things seem to go.  Nothing really to report on any front, I've been wrapping up this and that but mostly moving chairs around on the titanic.  I bottled the side batch of the American Strong, that is really just a pale ale,  I've made arrangements for a guest brewer to host a beer in my barrel, secured enough bottles to get the full batch of the American strong bottled (though I'm going to need more caps and other bits), cleaned up the beer storage area where one of my containers of Starsan leaked nearly a gallon of water inside of a cabinet.  Unplugged my kegorator and am working on a rust and moisture problem that you get from running a chest freezer as a fridge.  Dug out the Navel Jelly to address said rust problem just waiting for the last of the moisture to dry up before I attack the rust and them seal up the seam that's letting water leak.  Finished up my rocket Stove and the stand for placing things above the stove, I just need to run a test burn to verify that the airflow is good and see how well my pots fit on my stand.

Otherwise, I'm getting over some cold thing and getting back into the gym.  It's my first full week back at lifting so I'm sore and hungry and cranky.  In short yeah, just living.


I'll leave you with this gem from Modest Mouse, Heart cooks brain. The years go fast and the days go slow.

Sweet mother of beer

I was a very busy brewing bee over the weekend knocking out a solid American Strong Ale with 6 gallons looking to be 8.1% abv 3 gallons around 4.5% abv (it's a blended og, with so many assumptions in there my head hurts) and 1 gallon at around 1.5% abv.  Pictured here, my keggorator, super sweet cooler mash tun, 6 gallon primary fermenter, 3 gallon fermenter. and a 1 gallon glass jug playing as fermenter all happily bubbling along and inexpensive vodka for topping up the airlocks.

Assuming everything goes to plan I should be able to get the big bucket transferred into the barrel sometime next week, I cannot make up my mind if I want to put the beer in the glass fermenter for a few days before sot that it is more fully attenuated

Battery Powered chainsaws are garbage

Yeah, so I've been working on this chair for kind of a little while now and I can categorically say that electric battery powered chainsaws are a terrible idea.  I won't comment on ones that plug into the mains as I don't know how those would work, but lord I pray that they work better than what I've been working with.

The top three most annoying thing about this chainsaw?  1. It has a 10inch bar.  2. Batteries are a terrible, awful way to power it. 3. Batteries are a terrible, really awful way to power it.  I get about 30-40 minutes of work in with 3 batteries, but really its 5-10 minutes of good work then 30 minutes of shitty work.  Now I will say that the chain could probably use a sharpening, and I know that tightening the chain up made the process less awful.  All of that aside, really what it needs is some damn horsepower.  Really.


So at this point the chair is down to about 60lbs of wood.  It started close to 100lbs, a good deal of that was water weight so just getting it dried out will help, I pulled the bark off so the drying should be faster (if it ever stops raining here!)

Small chainsaw art project

So I apparently am the guy that stops and picks up the tree cuttings you see on the side of the road with a sign saying "Free wood".  We went to the park with my son over the weekend and I saw this little beauty of a log that I just had to make mine.  What you see here is about 6 batteries worth of 10inch bar battery powered ryobi chainsawing action.  I have 3 batteries and 1 charger so that amounts to give or take all day.

I've worked on it through two more batteries so far, and have the seat level and am working on trying to square up the sides and back.

For some reason I decided that this would make an awesome little man chair, and have been steadily working towards making this thing into a chair.  When I started it weighed between 80-100lbs and was the upper limit of what I could carry around the side of the house up a hill and into the back yard.  For those of you that have browsed deep into my archive of posts you may realize I've kind of wanted to do a chainsaw project since 2006 or so.

T is for tired

So I lost my mind and decided to destroy my backyard planter (that I apparently never uploaded a photo of).  The thing is my "backyard" is more of a 15'x20' place where the sun don't shine.  In 3 years I managed to grow lettuce, and that is about it.  In the picture below you can see my 3 strawberry plants  (I have at least 12 now) that I have yet to grow a more than 1 berry a year on, and an onion gone to bloom.

Once I finished destroying I used the lumber to create this beauty!

In the front of my house I get amazing sun for about 8 hours a day, so I'm hoping for some better growing this season.  This whole process took about 10 hours of labor, and my body is wrecked.

Micro CNC Micro update

I had a fairly productive little weekend on my CNC project, and I wanted to give an update before I forgot.  My Dad and I didn't get time to work on it together the other weekend (my younger brother is buying a house so most of the attention for the weekend was on him.)

But here is a picture of my progress.

So the things you cannot tell by the picture, Those rods are cut down from 3 foot long rods with a hack saw, and filed flat.  Prior to this weekend I had all the parts cut, but none of them where assembled so I drilled the holes for the rods as well as glued, clamped and screwed all the side pieces together.  The cutting stage and the sacrificial base are co-drilled and and screwed together.

I spent a good deal of time on the rods and the bushings making sure there where not catch points on the rods, so I had a small file and spent about an hour sliding the bushings and filing all the rough patches down.  The Z axis is drilled out, but I had a bad drill spot that I am shimming and wood gluing to fill back in.  After drilling the holes I put the rods in and realized one hole was closer to 80° than 90° so I had to clamp the holy hell out of it to get the holes to match up and correct for the poor drilling.  I have the hole shimmed with paper as filler and the wood glue is drying, but I may do a second application of glue before I epoxy it for a little more strength.  If there is a problem with torsion I will drill holes for metal bracing pins with a drill press I have access to at work.  The Z access sort of floats and is the weakest link in the setup so I may choose to  make a bracing pin.

D is for drunken grapefruit

So technically this is probably brandied grapefruit, but Gizmodo has a video post (with no way to embed sorry) for how to make a sweet brandied baked grapefruit.  Short story is below


-Cut grapefruit in half, and segment the... uh... segments, with a grapefruit knife (awesome gadget).
-Cover with 1 ounce (two tablespoons) of brown sugar.
-Pour some brandy on top until it's full and let it sit for 30 minutes.
-Put the grapefruit in a pre-heated 350-degree (F) oven for 20 minutes.
-Remove them and add enough sugar to cover.
-Turn your oven to Broil and put the pan in the broiler for about 5 minutes or until the sugar caramelizes.
-Remove from oven. Let it cool a little, and enjoy.

microrax cnc

If you didn't click through to watch that video the end of the last post this is the guy that is just boiling my blood.

Hey, I just whipped this fully functional thing cause it was interesting




He made his frame out of this stuff, which I'm thinking I need to get some of given the ease of making it square and LEGO'S FIT IN THE TRACKS OMG WTFBBQ.

CNC Update of sorts

So all of the parts I mentioned in this post have arrived and this weekend my Father (woodworker extraordinaire) is going to be in town so I think rather than jump into my latest time sink/money waster ie CigarBox guitar, or Charcuterie.  For the curious or deranged, you can see a tiny window into my clusterfuck of a brain over at my Beer Links Page.

I need to make sure I can locate all the pieces, but it may finally be time to fire up this tiny CNC Router and get it working.  This post from a dude that had no electronics background that just whipped up a CNC router may have been some of the genesis for getting off my ass and completing this project.

Sour Raspberry Ale

So the tiny side experiment I spoke of here just got bottled.  You hear that V, one down!

I really need to work on my thought process for these types of things in the future.  I had 1/2 a gallon of sour and 1/2 a gallon of raspberry ale, so it's going to be fairly sour and took the ale's abv% from 8.8% down to 6% and I'm very concerned about the carbonation levels.  I left the sour sitting in the carboy with a cap on for 3 or so days and it was all I could do to loosen the cap, and when I did get it loose the beer exploded out!  I left double the normal headroom, and only used swingtop bottles so that will hopefully help contain the pressure, but the blend needs to be like 25% or so.  I will give until Sunday to carbonate up and then I'm going to put in in the fridge at very low temps to try and crash the yeast out and keep it from going too crazy.  As it is, I got too much oxygen in there so the yeast is going to come back with a vengence and a blended final gravity of 1.008 there is still a decent amount of sugar for that Lambic blend to work on.

The taste was really nice at blending, but once the other flavors get a chance to work on this in the bottle it isn't going to be nearly as balanced as it was right now.  The funk was there, but muted and the raspberry was very prominent in the flavor the color was a creamy red, and really nice to look at.  I'm glad that I didn't figure out hop utilization beforehand and the ale ended up as bitter as it was given that I blended with an unhopped sour.  In the future, I will definitely dry hop the small sours just to give it some aromatic qualities.  And my final though goes out to the Mad Fermentationist, I have to disagree on the smackpacks not being enough.  I fermented a 1.040 unboild wort with just six drops the liquid Wyeast Belgian Lambic Blend (3278) aka the dregs from my Sour for blending and it took it down int he 1.005 FG range in less than optimal conditions (ie I fermented in a growler with no airlock with the second wash of grains that stayed in my cooler overnight)

P.S. might be handy for others too, but I needed a weighted average calculator for figuring out my blended abv%.  This one did the trick

Gumbo

When I was in college there was a little hole in the wall Cajun place up the street from the campus called From the Bayou.  The food was pretty amazing for being right next to a college, and the flavors where just not what you would expect to find in the northwest.  Between the great flavors and the fact that my (now wife) and I had our first date there, well southern cooking has a soft spot in my heart.  They had a lovely chicken and andouille sausage gumbo that is still the best I've ever had.  We had the good fortune to get our rehearsal dinner catered by them, but sadly the restaurant has since gone out of business and I still miss having gumbo every now and again.

I'm working off of this recipe from NewOrleanscuisine because it has the things I can identify as what was in the gumbo I loved, and I felt like he had some great tips on both the roux and the rice.  It was good, but I got scared near the end of the roux and started adding broth.  My advice is go into making roux with the knowledge that you may have to throw it out and ride that train as close to burnt as you dare.

Smoker at home

A few weeks ago, I started on a really masochistic streak with my cooking and tried to smoke a Corned Beef Brisket on my barbecue on a week night.  I got it on the coals by 6pm and didn't finish until about 2 in the morning the next day.  It turned out pretty good, but still needed another few hours to be truly fall apart tender. I cheated around midnight and put it on a roasting pan in the oven at 250 so I could try to sleep rather than having to check the coals every half hour or so, but the experience got me thinking about ways to achieve that smoked flavor without all of the work.  Wouldn't you know it Saveur had my back.

Long weekend experiments

So apparently long weekends (yeah presidents day) mean that I choose to cook strange things.  First up I started a sourdough culture from Goldrush Sourdough Starter.  In the past I've tried a so called spontaneous sourdough where I tried to let wild yeast start fermenting in my kitchen, but there are two problems with this.  1 I always want to start this in the dead of winter, and 2 my wife and I don't tend to run the heat very high.  Both of these things conspire to prevent the yeast from taking off.  Having a kid now we run the house much warmer than we would if it was just us, so the yeast had a fighting chance.  It is sort of hard to tell, but that is sour fermentation going on there in the picture.

I also tried the dried apples I wrote about here.  They taste good, but I think that you need a mandolin slicer to get thin enough to have a prayer of getting the store bought quality.  I sliced them as thinly as I was able by hand, but they are still too thick.

Pictures of beer

Okay so it could really be just titled picture of beer, but whatever I took a picture.

Started a brew

So I got started on my Pumpkin Cranberry Sour ale over the weekend, I started the funky beer that I will be blending with my fruit beer for the finished sour product.  You can see the recipe I worked out here, as for the beer I'm trying to clone you can find out about that here.  I need to get a picture of this beer, the combo of the Trappist High Gravity yeast and the Lambic Blend has the largest krausen I've ever had.  It's only 4 maybe 4.5 gallons in my 5 gallon carboy and it's trying to bubble out the airlock!

Cider's done

So I finally got around to bottling my hard cider and I ended up with 75 12oz bottles and 1 22oz bottle.  The OG was 1.066 and the FG was 1.004 for and ABV of 8.5%.  Due to my unfortunate acid blend additions early on I was afraid that I would have to throw it out, but after the champagne yeast got done the cider is a little tart less so than a Mikes Hard Lemonade or similar beverage.  I expect that this will be the best batch I've made.  The champagne yeast makes it so dry that most people think it tastes more like a sparkling wine than cider.  This way there is still some tartness that pairs well with the dryness.  Letting the yeast attenuate to 1.004 was not the plan, but I didn't think I had any star san to sanitize my bottles with and snowpocalypse messed with my local home brew store's supply chain.  Keep in mind that I didn't think I had any, I was cleaning my kitchen and hidden behind some spices was my star san, so I was in business this weekend.

This bottling marks the second time that I've had help bottling, my Dad was in town so the sanitizing, filling and capping only took about an hour and a half versus the normal 3 or 4 hours it takes me.  I decided that because the cider was still bubbling slowly when I bottled it to only had about 3/4 of a teaspoon of corn sugar.  The juice of apples has so much sugar in it already I didn't want to make bottle bombs

The Parsley Thief

I follow several food related blogs Saveur being one, but they sometimes link to other blogs.  The Parsley Thief was one they linked to a while ago and I've been following her ever since.  This recipe is one of the reasons you might consider following her.

Black Bean, Chicken and Rice Bowl with Apple Salsa

It sounded good to me on paper, but the Apple Salsa blew me away.  It had that quality that Pico de Gallo has where nothing in there is spicy, but it tastes spicy.  I didn't have a lime when I started this little journey but I am so glad I didn't use lemon juice, I drove to the store and bought a lime.  That flavor sealed it as far as I'm concerned.  If you look really close you will see that I clearly spent way too much time getting the apple diced finely but the texture was worth it.  Everything took a little over an hour to chop, prep and cook for me (plus driving to the store like an idiot time) and I'm fairly fast with a knife so your results will vary.  As Katie (the parsley thief) notes the apple salsa can be made ahead of time as the citrus keeps the apple from oxidizing.  Even 3 days later it still looks pretty in my fridge, so take the time to chop it down into tiny beautiful squares and just toss the bowl you make the salsa in into the fridge.

Eggs poached in Tomato Sauce aka Shakshuka

Via Joe and Jo

I cannot believe this has been sitting in my drafts for so long.  I actually made this and was super excited about it at the time too.  I looked on both cameras, looked all through Picasa, and cannot believe that I didn't take a picture of the outcome!  You will have to settle for a Flickr picture instead, but this was really good.  I served it with Naan, but it is a Jewish dish so Pita's may be more traditional.

The recipe I followed of course comes from Saveur, but they never called out the name of this dish.  It was only when I started searching for eggs poached in tomato sauce that I found out.  Another dish I found while I was looking for more information about this dish was Moroccan Ragout with poached eggs.  The Shakshuka was almost a vegetarian dish (eggs are ok with some vegetarians but cheese made with animal rennet is not)  the ragout adds a lamb sausage.  I will do the Shakshuka again, but the lamb sausage sounds pretty good too.