Food
Sunday dinner: Sous vide Arm Roast followed by Boston Cream Pie.
Easiest way to deal with (perhaps) hundreds of mandarins once ripe: juice them. These have brightened to very red-orange I wonder if they are closer to tangerines?
This morning: the most symmetrical Dutch baby we’ve ever had.
Korean cheese buldak for dinner tonight. Chicken in a hot chili sauce covered with mozzarella 🌶🌶🌶🌶 😋
I pressure checked the new hose bibb this morning; it had a slow leak at the valve threads & PVC adapter. Tightening made it worse, so after redoing the pipe thread tape with more layers, the new hose bib seems to be fine at full water pressure.
For Sunday breakfast, my partner made rösti with Swiss cheese in the middle and a sunny-side up egg on top. For Sunday dinner, my partner made Mushroom Pot Pie. She’s the best.
Beef tenderloin filets getting the royal treatment of butter basting. Cooked to medium rare.
We have a lot of citrus in the backyard: mandarins, Meyer lemons, and Valencias. This means it is time for Alton Brown’s Acid Jellies! We don’t coat them with sugar at the end of the cook as we’ve found the sugar is too hydrophilic in humid winters & the jellies get… damp. 🌱
Dutch baby for breakfast. It is really great with Meyer lemons (from the backyard tree; which is great as we can’t get Meyers in town).
My partner is making beef salami but this time with added pork fat and more spices— the last batch was too dry and too smoky (will smoke less this time).
Bibimbap!!
Installed Logitech Circle View Doorbell Chime-Kit and Hardware Doorbell Chime
Why did I decide to install the chime-kit and doorbell chime after I installed the Logitech doorbell (and it worked fine)? Netatmo released their doorbell and in their FAQ they wrote this about why a chime is required (Logitech never explained but they require it despite their doorbell seemingly working without one):
The Smart Video Doorbell was specially designed to replace your existing doorbell and, therefore, to work with an existing wired chime. This chime is required in your installation because it creates a charge in the doorbell circuit. When someone presses the doorbell button, a switch closes the doorbell circuit causing electricity to flow through the circuit to activate your chime. Without a chime, when the switch closes the circuit, a short circuit would occur and cause damage to your Smart Video Doorbell.
After reading that, I decided to protect the doorbell investment by spending a little bit more time and $15 to install the chime-kit and hardware chime.
Installing the hardware chime and then the Logitech chime-kit in the garage was easy though I accidentally cut the transformer to doorbell wire; wire nut to the rescue. I did check to see if the doorbell would work with only the chime-kit installed and its switch set to no doorbell – it did. In fact, when I cut power to it, a green LED stayed lit up in the chime-kit above the switch, suggesting it keeps a charge like a hardware doorbell chime. However I don’t know definitively if that chime-kit charge would resolve possible shorting issues on doorbell press. With the chime-kit I can toggle the hardware chime to ring or not via the Home app — I have no idea how Logitech made that work. The chime-kit has a switch for analog chime, digital hardware, no chime, and analog chime.
So far the Logitech doorbell has been great with a perfect view of the front yard and super reliable notifications with videos. Video is pretty sharp and its HDR does work — the shaded porch and bright streetscape are all well exposed. It does well at night with just the almost-bug friendly amber porch light so I’ve disabled the doorbell light to keep light pollution to a minimum. That built-in light does not illuminate far so it is only useful when someone is at the door. So I wish I could set up an automation to turn on the extra light when it detects somebody at the door. I do recommend setting up Activity Zones on an iPad (easier to draw them on a larger video feed vs iPhone) to help minimize notifications. Turns out our street has more vehicle traffic than I realized. I’m very happy I patiently waited for a HomeKit Secure Video doorbell like this. If you think activity zones might limit what the HomeKit home hub detects, it seems as if when there’s motion detected in an activity zone, the HomeKit hub analyzes the entire scene for people, animals and vehicles.
Our data usage for uploads has gone down dramatically now that our Nest Outdoor IQ no longer has Nest Aware and is only useful for on-demand delayed “live” video feeds.
Logitech Chime-Kit at the top and the new hardware chime at the bottom. The included wire splices are nice.
Logitech Circle View Doorbell installed on cement fiber board lap siding, doorbell wire routed through a security door frame and then along the foundation, tucked out of sight between cement foundation and sheathing. I used foam as a spacer behind the straight mount to create space for the wire to come in through the side of the mount. The mounts are made for doorbell wire coming out of a wall, so creative thinking was necessary. Notice how the Logitech logo at the bottom is barely visible. Compare that to a Ring doorbell or the new Netatmo! I love that Logitech decided to not make their logo stand out.
Annual chest freezer de-icing, cleaning, inventory, and organizing. This year it’s especially important since we’re about to get a 1/2 Table Mountain Ranch Beef. So excited!
We had a lot of left over brisket so some went into disco fries.
Tonight’s brisket prepared by my partner using Sous Vide for literally fork tender meat and then finished with convection bake for decadent crust/bark.
A benefit of not having anyone over for Christmas dinner is we can do wild, special food experiments. So we’re making Sous Vide Smoked Brisket for Christmas dinner. Method 1 with liquid smoke.
And here’s the final caramel. They’re perfect. 🤗
Annual caramel making. These seem 👌and perfectly plastic. Here’s a series of photos showing sugar mixture color at ~300°F, 320°F, near 340°F, after cream & butter added, and cooling to finish. Stressful making these as one errant crystal can cause it all to crystallize.
Split Pea Soup made with a ham hock! Love the cold season 🥰
Partner made Naan today (along with Turkey Tikka Masala).
