06.09.06
Posted in Life at 10:25 am by Craig
Jeremy Zawodny has been
discussing his diet both during his recent weight-loss period and going forward, and mentioned that he’s now become more interested in cooking more. I wrote a comment on that post which ended up being fairly long and I thought worth reposting here. So here it is:
Good cook books can make a huge difference in confidence in cooking at home (and better confidence I think is one of the biggest differentiators between bad cooks and good cooks). Most cook books in the US focus on the recipe — that is the list of ingredients and then a dry set of instructions on how to combine them and cook them.
Here is a list of fantastic books that I have on my cookbook shelf which teach methods & concepts and not just recipes. They include recipes too, but those recipes are used as the shadows to the platonic form of the underlying technique or ingredient combination. The books help you learn how to not need a recipe in order to cook. Amazon URLs included for convenience:
- Julia and Jacques cooking at homeJulia Child and Jacques Pepin each cook each recipe, and discuss how their solutions differ from each other, and why each one does it the way they do. A cookbook with a perl-like “TIMTOWTDI” approach.
- I’m just here for the food
Alton Brown breaks cooking down into basic categories of methods (pancakes are just a special case of muffin). He discusses at a high level some of the science going on when cooking happens, in a way which lets you better understand why you’re cooking things the way you are. If you’ve seen the show, the book is similar, but more in depth.
- On food and cooking: the science and lore of the kitchenHarold McGee takes the scientific explanation of what’s going on when you cook to the next level. Not really a recipe book at all, but rather a bedtime reading book about the science and history of cooking.
- The Saucier’s ApprenticeRaymond Sokolov explains the 5 mother sauces, and their descendants. There is no dish which is not improved by the right sauce, and understanding how to create a sauce for a given dish is rooted in understanding the lessons of this book. Warning: Butter content of some sauces in this book may throw you a few sigma off your mean caloric intake.
I also own a number of the standard recipe cookbooks (joy of cooking, gourmet cookbook, etc) but find that I rarely crack them open unless I’m looking up something like the flour-to-liquid ratio for waffle batter. When I’m looking for inspiration for how to cook a piece of meat or a veg that I have in the fridge, I generally start with a web search, then use the methods learned in the 4 books above to combine the information I find online into something new.
A recommendation for bachelor/busy schedule cooks: get a crockpot. This will not necessarily save you a lot of time cooking, but makes for much more reliable and time-predictable results than some other cooking methods, which can help you schedule cooking into your hectic day. Preparing food properly (including chopping, browning ingredients before putting them in the pot, etc) will be no less complicated nor time consuming than if you stuck the dish in the oven instead of the crockpot, but with a slow cooker, you can do the prep hours ahead of time and program the cooker to have the meal ready at whatever time you want it to be ready. I have 2 cookbooks which include some fancier-end crockpot recipe concepts which I do go to ahead of an internet search when I’m crockpotting, of which I can only remember one title while sitting here:
- The Gourmet Slow Cooker
One final tip: when cooking meat, do not cook based on time. Get a probe thermometer, and cook until the meat reaches the correct temperature, whether you’re cooking it on the BBQ, in the oven, on the stovetop. You can skip this for slow-cooker cooking since the crockpot will control temp for you, but cooking meat based on temperature rather than time is probably the single biggest difference you can make to improve your cooking results. I use one of those digital probe thermometers with an extension cable which plugs into a display/timer base, and has a “beep when temperature reached” feature which is very handy.
Permalink
01.09.06
Posted in Life at 10:51 pm by Craig
Jack was born last night at 7:10. 7lbs 8oz. Mom and baby are both doing great and back home now, settling in finally able to rest in a real bed without being prodded every couple of hours by a nurse.
Permalink
10.15.05
Posted in Life at 5:24 pm by Craig
So it’s that time of year again. How much flu vaccine can the manufacturers shift this year? And how much can they get away with charging for it?
This year, there’s a slight shift in the Hughes household’s interaction with the influenza vaccine pushers. This year, Mrs Craigalog is pregnant during flu season. How does pregnancy interact with the evil influenze virus? And are you more or less likely to get the asian bird flu, which in 3 years has infected a whopping 60 people worldwide (but could of course mutate at any moment, any day now, no really, it might even happen before the big west coast earthquake) and could wipe out awhopping 0.1% of the world population according to the most pessimistic estimates if it went pandemic. And of course like in most pandemics, the vaste vaste majority of those who died would be the malnurished and the elderly and the otherwise-frail.
Now I don’t mean to be dismissive of the poor folks who’s contracted this and died (all 30-40 of them in the last 3 years), and nor do I mean to be dismissive of those who would die if this did become a pandemic (if). But the question on the household table is: should Mrs Craigalog get the vaccine now that she’s in her third trimester, or should we exercise our capito-democratic power and *not* have our insurance company buy a dose for her?
We will recall the statistics that I dug up
last time this subject arose. But those were talking about the population as a whole. Certainly, I am prepared to consider the hypothesis that pregnancy might affect influenza morbidity. Mrs Craigalog’s obstetrician highly recommended that she get the kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvaccine, because
Pregnant women are just as likely to have serious complications from influenza as the elderly
Ok, now that’s a medical statement which is surely based on hard research, right? Uh, yeah right. Research into how much the flu vaccine company sales rep is going to pay for your steak dinner next time he takes you out. Or maybe research into how much the hospital is going to bonus you up for every vaccine you sell (and you thought the commission-comped sales reps at Circuit City was hard-sell!). Ok, so let’s find some research on this.
The CDC (immune to pressure from politicians/drug companies as they are there),
recommends that pregnant women bevaccinated:
Additional Information Regarding Vaccination of Specific Populations
Pregnant Women
Influenza-associated excess deaths among pregnant women were documented during the pandemics of 1918–1919 and 1957–1958 (99–102). Case reports and limited studies also indicate that pregnancy can increase the risk for serious medical complications of influenza as a result of increases in heart rate, stroke volume, and oxygen consumption; decreases in lung capacity; and changes in immunologic function (103–106). A study of the impact of influenza during 17 interpandemic influenza seasons demonstrated that the relative risk for hospitalization for selected cardiorespiratory conditions among pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid increased from 1.4 during weeks 14–20 of gestation to 4.7 during weeks 37–42 in comparison with women who were 1–6 months postpartum (107). Women in their third trimester of pregnancy were hospitalized at a rate (i.e., 250/100,000 pregnant women) comparable with that of nonpregnant women who had high-risk medical conditions. By using data from this study, researchers estimated that an average of 1–2 hospitalizations could be prevented for every 1,000 pregnant women vaccinated.
Because of the increased risk for influenza-related complications, women who will be beyond the first trimester of pregnancy (>14 weeks of gestation) during the influenza season should be vaccinated. Certain providers prefer to administer influenza vaccine during the second trimester to avoid a coincidental association with spontaneous abortion, which is common in the first trimester, and because exposures to vaccines traditionally have been avoided during the first trimester (108). Pregnant women who have medical conditions that increase their risk for complications from influenza should be vaccinated before the influenza season, regardless of the stage of pregnancy. A study of influenza vaccination of >2,000 pregnant women demonstrated no adverse fetal effects associated with influenza vaccine (109). However, additional data are needed to confirm the safety of vaccination during pregnancy.
Let’s, for now, set aside the pandemic years, and consider the Medicaid (ie more likely poor and otherwise less healthy) study, which certainly has extensive data behind it. 4.7 times the risk of hospitalization in weeks 37-42 sure sounds dangerous to me! From the abstract of the report from this study:
Women in their third trimester without other identified risk factors for influenza morbidity had an event rate of 21.7 per 10,000 women-months during influenza season. Approximately half of this morbidity, 10.5 (95% CI 6.7-14.3) events per 10,000 women-months, was attributable to influenza.
Oh. So in the third trimester, 10 hospitalizations occur per 10,000 women-months. So if the influenza season is 3 months long, that equates to about 1 in 333 women being hospitalized during the final 3 weeks of pregnancy, or the 2 weeks past their due date. Women, of course, who are probably exhausted from carrying about 30 pounds or more of excess baby weight, and would be quite likely to think any excuse to sit in bed for a couple weeks until the baby comes would probably be a good idea. Let’s take the cost of a vaccination as $10 for the vaccine, plus $5 for the marginal cost of the slightly-longer office visit (pregnant women who are getting vaccinated are likely already paying for an office visit anyway). That’s $5000 for the vaccination of all 333 women. That’s one expensive hospital-stay avoidance, even if the vaccine completely prevents the hospital admissions (remember that the vaccine is only about 50% effective in an average year at preventing influenza; and that these women are likely in at least some cases choosing hospitalization because they’re 37+ weeks pregnant as much as because they have the flu). So economically, it seems the flu vaccination of 3rd trimester woman is a waste of money. Actually, there is a chance that those women who spend the last couple weeks of their pregnancies in hospital have a higher rate of interventions & complications while they’re subsequently giving birth, so there might be some increased costs there which make the $5k seem less high. But I doubt there’s much data there.
And now I’ve been writing for too long, so I’ll put off till later doing a bit more looking into this. For now though, the indication seems to be that this is yet another case of vaccinating people who really don’t need it, at a cost which is unjustifiable.
Permalink
10.25.04
Posted in Life at 8:31 pm by Craig
The only way I can currently easily turn on my bedside light is to send an IM message to my house. I have a lamp which though screwed into the wall, is plugged into a wall outlet. It used to have a little pull-chain switch on it, but back when it was Erica’s bedside light (before she switched for mine), she broke the chain. So the only way to switch it is to either plug/unplug it from the wall (which is logistically tricky because the socket is under the bed), or to get an X10 controller and plug the lamp into the wall through that. I chose option 2, selecting a radio-controllable module so that I can have the on/off button located on my bedside table. Great. Except that the batteries just died in the remote. Luckily though, I have an alternate control system set up — a server written in perl which parses input from a variety of sources, and then sends out X10 control signals throughout the house. One interface I have hooked up is an IM-based one. I can send IM messages to my house, and it’ll take actions based on what I tell it to do. So as of right now, the only way I can switch my bedside light on and off is to send an IM to craiglog on AIM, with the message “turn on bedroom light” or “turn off bedroom light”.
It’s especially lucky that I’m such a geek I normally bring my laptop to bed with me anyway…
Permalink
04.18.04
Posted in Remodel at 4:34 pm by Craig
Ok, so yet another new category has been added. This time, it’s the house remodel. The part that starts tomorrow isn’t actually construction or anything yet – just the architect is going to begin drawing the structure of the existing house. It’s built on a core that dates from about 1927, which probably included a stable or something downstairs, and what’s now the living room, upstairs bathroom, and two bedrooms, plus probably part of the kitchen. Over the years, pieces have been added on – the master bedroom and dining room, as well as a kitchen extension, and the downstairs areas have been semi-built out as livable space. I say semi because there are some walls in odd places. To get from one side of the downstairs to the other, you have to walk through the boiler room. The bathroom is on the far side of the house from the downstairs bedroom. It’s very odd indeed.
So the basic project will be:
- Rationalize the downstairs area
- Move the front entrance from what was the front of the house in 1927 to what’s now the front of the house, which is more of the side of the house at the moment (but faces the driveway); probably move the carport as well to make the new front of the house more visible and elegant
- Raise ceilings, add skylights
- Increase the size of all the windows
- Upgrade plumbing, electric, etc
- New kitchen
Additionally, we might do some landscaping on the hillside above the house – introduce some terraced veggie beds, possibly a path up the hill to the fire road so one can go up there without having to battle the poison oak. There’s a gate at the top of the property, and it looks like there might be some vestiges of previous terracing under the poison oak, brambles and periwinkle, so part of this work might be done already and it might be mostly just a matter of ripping out some of the greenery. Then we might do something with the “hottub” deck too.
So anyway, the architect comes in the morning, to do a detailed drawing of the existing stuff, and to start sketching out ideas for what the new stuff might look like.
Should be fun, at least until the actual construction gets started!
The architect selection process was pretty straightforward, once we got off our butts and actually decided to get going on the project. We visited a handful of architects to browse their portofolios, and the range of skill level is quite substantial. Most, even of the more expensive architects, basically will just knock out a cookie-cutter duplicate house of whatever variety (tudor mansion, tuscan villa, french chateau, etc). All very Los Altos Hills-y. Not really our thing. But then one architect we found seemed to actually have a little more style, and seemed to try and actually do something interesting with the projects he works on. He came to our house to show us his portfolio, rather than have us come to him. Very good salemanship, plus we liked him better anyway. So we signed him up on friday last week, and he starts monday. There seem to be a couple ways architects do things in terms of contractual arrangements, etc. Stan is involved all the way through the project, doing the design and drawings, and then also helping to select a contractor, and to ensure the contractor actually builds according to the design. He works on the basis of 12% of the total project cost, which seems quite reasonable, but is another one of those odd contracts like real estate buyer’s agent contracts, where they get paid more, the more they convince you to spend – which seems like an alignment-of-interest problem. We’ll see how it goes. With buying the house, it turned out OK.
I’ll post updates on this topic from time to time, as well possibly as copies of sketches, drawings, and photos, as they become available. Actually, I didn’t check with the architect who owns the drawings he’ll be doing; the contract didn’t mention copyright of works produced, or licensing rights if he’s the one who retains copyright. Presumably it’s standard for the drawings to belong to the house, since it’d be nice for us to be able to pass them on to any buyer if we ever sell the place. Or nice for us to have them in case we do additional remodels in the future. But then you never know.
Permalink
03.24.04
Posted in Life at 1:17 am by Craig
Many of my readers probably know already that I’m leaving NAI at the end of this week. Combination of reasons, but the primary one is that it’s time to move on. I have a very exciting idea for a new company that I’ve been working on, and once I get back from the UK, I’ll be on that full time. Watch this space — I’ve been thinking pretty hard about whether on this attempt #3 it might not be amusing to blog the startup process from the very beginning (well, a little past the beginning given that I’ve already put some amount of thinking into this). The company involves many issues to do with open processes, so the visibility into the creation of the thing might be interesting. Plus I’m somewhat inspired by Jeremy’s blogging of his
house purchase process. Blogging as a tool to provide people with help and insight on processes that people don’t often go through, and which can seem otherwise daunting, is probably a fairly good use of the medium. Hopefully my prior experience will also mean that I don’t embarass myself too badly stumbling around and heading nowhere.
Permalink
11.12.03
Posted in Life at 10:43 pm by Craig
Ok, so I signed up with
Vonage just now for VoIP service for my home phone. The number was immediately active, and I now have the number forwarding to my old home number until the hardware box comes in the mail. Once it arrives, come Nov 24th I’ll switch the home phone # to my wife’s cell phone, and disconnect the POTS phone service. The best part? I get more features (voicemail, caller ID, conferencing, call forwarding, etc) for less money than I used to pay for my regular phone line
without those features. Plus my voicemail now automatically arrives in my email inbox. Of course, it’s a WAV file, not MP3 or something more sensible, but then I guess that’s what procmail is for ;)
Anyone who wants the new phone number, let me know and I’ll email it to you. If you want to sign up for Vonage too, also let me know, because they have a refer-a-friend feature which gives both referrer and referree a discount on service, so I can refer you before you sign up.
btw, I might as well blog this now to establish a datestamp (though I’ve mentioned it in other forums before this): I think VoIP is going to be bigger than the Web.
Permalink
08.28.03
Posted in Life at 7:23 pm by Craig
It just occured to me that what I’m doing right now is pretty amazing. I’m sipping coffee at
Buck’s, with my 7-month old
daughter on one knee, while answering work email (on leave, but that’s increasingly just a technical thing which means I don’t get paid), and IMing with an old business colleague who’s moved to Colorado. Ah WiFi…
Permalink
07.13.03
Posted in Life at 11:14 am by Craig
After starting to have contractions at about 7am on Friday, Erica worked and worked through friday and saturday, eventually going in to the hospital to alleviate the pain and get rehydrated when she started to get really tired out. Then, after the contractions picked up again, she popped out a very pretty girl, Evan Alice, who weighed 7lbs 4oz at πam sunday morning. Both mother and baby are now home again, and doing great, gurgling at each other on the bed behind me as I type. The paucity of bandwidth here at home has for now limited me to just one photo uploaded to our
gallery, but more will be joining that one soon.
Permalink
