A sweet room

Where do you think I found this sweet room?

Magentic Field

Happy New Year

I saw this sign yesterday afternoon:

It should actually read "(said millions of people, every year for the last century)".

Sous vide duck

I recently upgraded from my DIY sous vide controller to a Anova One sous immersion circulator. While my old rig was good, it was too much hassle to set it up every time so I wasn't cooking sous vide as often as I would have liked. Since getting the Anova I've been cooking sous vide way more often. Most recently, I cooked duck sous vide (for why, see Stacy's blog post here).

Unfortunately, I'm low on pictures, but in short, I broke down the duck into parts and cooked each part differently. Stacy made a soup with the bones. I sous vided the breast, skin on, to medium rare (54C/129F), then seared it skin-side-down in a pan to crisp the skin. No pictures of this, since we ate it Friday night. I served it with an orange sauce made with reduced orange juice, orange rind, sugar and triple sec.

I deskinned and cured the legs and thighs overnight using a dry cure of salt, coriander, black pepper, and dried thyme. Then, I cut up the skin and rendered out the fat, and made gribenes from the skin. After the overnight cure (~10hrs), I rinsed off the cure and vacuum bagged the legs and thighs with some rendered duck fat, fresh thyme and orange zest, and cooked them sous vide for approximately 25 hours at 65C/149F.

I pulled it off the bone, and served it warm, on a salad of arugula, red onion, and mandarin oranges, with a dressing made with the orange sauce from the previous night, rice wine vinegar and olive oil, and topped with gribenes "croutons":

Flowchart for dealing with stress

Taipei

I borrowed one of the actual hats the street sweepers use here. Its like a squashed traffic cone. I wish it could be a bike helmet.

Received with no explanation

Jonathan/Yoni, who is traveling for LoudBicycle, asked me to post this picture with no explanation:

Oddly specific

I've started seeing these signs in NYC subway cars:

The thing I don't understand about it is the use of "over". Had it said "over 1,400" that would make sense -- it's a round number. But "over 1,438" -- are there 1,439? According to two Google results [1] [2], New York State has exactly 1,438 family vineyards. Or at least, had in 2013. Perhaps NY State's Marketing Legal Team figured that there has been at least one additional family-owned vineyard founded since 2013, but didn't know precisely how many, so they went with "over".

China and Mass MOCA

I'm off to China for three weeks to do some Loud Bicycle Horn work. But before I go, here is a picture I took at Mass MOCA that I really like.