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Here’s the sample of today’s chili sin carne which I pulled for purposes of “testing” to be sure the whole pot is ready for eating. It was made as follows:

1) Sautee a chopped sweet onion and bulb of garlic in ~3 TBSP of butter with three whole Kung Pao chilis until brown.
2) Add a bottle of barely carbonated Rochefort 10 Clone and reduce.
3) Add one 28oz can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatos, one container Garden Fresh Jack’s Special Medium Salsa, one 6oz small can of Meijer tomato paste, and one 7oz can of Empacadora San Marcos Chipotle Sauce.
4) Remove chilis and add rehydrated beans, one bag of Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Grillers™ Recipe Crumbles™, and about half a bag of Trader Joes Fire Roasted Corn. Bring to simmer.
5) Notice that the mixture is getting dry. Add another bottle of Rochefort 10 Clone, about 3oz of chili powder, and about 1 Tsp of fresh ground black pepper.
6) Simmer for about 2.5 hours, stirring every 15 - 20 minutes.

Suddenly waking up at 6:45am made it possible to eat this for lunch. Now I have to decide if I make rice and have it that way, or with chips and cheese. Or maybe I could make up some pasta for a better-than-authentic Skyline-esque experience.

It’s cold out, I’ve got some sort of UK-ian cold / sinus infection, and I’m wanting to eat at home as much as possible while on vacation. While at Meijer and picking up milk I decided to make up a pot of chili sin carne using my standard method, except with dried beans. Normally I use canned beans, but dried are cheaper and better tasting. Hopefully I’ll be using these 1.5 pounds (dried) of beans along with a clove of garlic, large sweet onion, container of Garden Fresh Salsa, a bag of Morningstar Farms beefy TVP stuff, failed-to-carbonate home-made Rochefort 10 Clone, Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Corn, and random other things to make something which is hopefully tasty and sustaining.

It will likely be eaten one of two ways:

· Over rice cooked in an Indian style, as demonstrated here by the wonderful Manjula on her YouTube channel.
· With Garden Fresh Tortilla Chips and smothered in sharp cheddar.

This has been an interesting, and good week. Danielle and I just finished up eating piles of curry and onion bhaji and we’re now watching the original version of The Italian Job from a PAL VHS tape in Dominic’s living room.

I’ll write more about this past week later, along with photos not taken with my cell phone, but I will give one preview: I have pooped in one of the same places as Alan Turing.

Here’s a portion of the 2/3 cup of Lemon Drop Chile Peppers which I cut up tonight for use in my multi-year hot sauce project. These were grown on my front porch, planted along with the flowers grown here in 2008.

I’ve done a bunch of stuff since cutting them up and washed my hands a few times, but I’m still too scared to use the bathroom and touch particularly sensitive bits. These are very, very hot; just below habanero according to descriptions I’ve read online. When I tried to eat one slice this size in the past, the first initial bite sent my mouth into alternating numbness and horrible pain.

Here’s a photo of tonight’s dinner, a masala dosa from Rangoli Express in Sterling Heights, MI. It was served with sambar and coconut and tomato chutney. I stopped here for dinner after swinging by the ATM. Food is always good and the people working there are quite friendly. It’s one of my two favorite places in the Detroit area for getting Indian food.

This morning Danielle made pancakes for breakfast. Mmm.

Here is the recipe, although you may wish to cut back on the amount of baking powder in them.

Today was a good day. After fitting a new set of Avid FR-5 levers on my bike to replacement the one I snapped in a rock garden I put my bike on the car and headed over to Stony Creek. A bit under an hour later I left, having covered all the single track and a second go through The Pines.

The trails were in excellent shape, as many of the freshly fallen leaves have begun breaking down which both keeps them from being as slippery and reveals the roots and rocks they had obscured for the last couple of weeks. This made for a very nice ride, and I felt like I was able to push myself a bit harder than normal and right to the edge of my ability quite a few times.

Danielle had been hoping to ride the paved areas while I did the XC trails, but a really bad headache kept her back at my house. Normally her and I would split up for some riding then I’d join her for another lap around the park, but that just didn’t work out this time.

After getting back here and showering we headed out to replika’s Halloween party meeting up with a bunch of nifty people, but Danielle’s headache came back pretty fiercely while we were there. We ended up leaving then making a quick appearance at IPM as promised before Danielle’s headache got even worse, then we headed back here. To be honest, I’m not feeling too hot myself either, but I think my problems are related to all of the candy and chips that I ate while out and about today.

Now I think it’s time for bed, then tomorrow will be a birthday party, some cleaning up around the house, returning a few unwanted things to REI, and likely some other, unforeseen things.

Oh, and here’s two photos:

· Looking down a short piece of single track, past some old fence posts, at Stony Creek on a very nice autumn day. (As Seen Above - Full Res)
· Part of the single track in the first third of the Roller Coaster at Stony Creek. (Full Res)

I’ve mentioned before that I’d been logging how many cups of coffee were made, how many grind cycles executed, and how many coffee filters consumed in my daily coffee making. This was done so that I could determine just how cost effective it is for me to make coffee at home each morning versus stopping to get coffee.

First, the stats:

Two Pounds of Kirkland-brand (Costco) Coffee Beans, whole: $11.99
Mr. Coffee-brand burr grinder, grind set half-way between C and D, timer set to 7 or 8: ~$35
Aerobie AeroPress Coffee Maker: ~$30

Servings Produced: 25
Grind Cycles: 21
Filters Used: 4
Water Used: 2 Cups (Per Serving)

As the AeroPress and grinder are more than two years old, I will consider these sunk costs and not take them into account in these figures. I am also still working through the original set of filters which came with the AeroPress, so I do not need to take filter cost into account yet. Once I do, typical cost is $3.99 - $5.99 for 350 filters and I normally use a single filter for around five servings, adding $0.00228 to $0.00342 to each serving of coffee.

Electricity will be particularly hard to quantify with the challenges of metering a hard-wired appliance, so I will assume the microwave consumes 1000W peak, which is typical for a microwave of this size. My most recent electrical bill was charged at just under $0.12/kWh. At 3:30 of usage per serving of coffee, this is around $0.007 of electricity.

The two pounds of coffee were ground into just a bit more than was needed to make 25 servings. The measurement for this was not particularly accurate, but as I use the same technique for scooping each morning so this shall be assumed to be a consistent measurement. With the $11.99 price for the two pounds of coffee, this results in a cost of $0.48 per serving for each cup of coffee. It must be noted that the coffee used in this study was a bit more costly than typical Kirkland-brand coffee. The three pound bag I purchased to use after this one also cost $11.99. It can then be expected that this bag of coffee will cost 50% less per serving ($0.3197).

Now, the figures:

Tall Black Coffee from Starbucks: $1.64 (incl. tax)
Medium Black Coffee from Beaners / Biggby: $1.79 (incl. tax)
One Serving (~16oz) of Coffee From Home: $0.487 (at $11.99 for 2 lb)
Daily Savings: ~$1.25 - ~$1.40

Sure, there’s also a time cost, but preparing this coffee takes around five minutes per morning, which is a bit less than the amount of time it would take to stop at a coffee shop and pick up coffee. It’s also more convenient to not have to stop somewhere every day. With the cheaper current bag of coffee, the daily savings will increase by around $0.15 per serving.

I could save even more by waiting until I get to work and drinking the coffee there, but it’s really awful quality Aramark-branded crap which has a persistent smell and taste of burnt brush. There is a Flavia machine in one of the buildings at work which I could use, but the layered plastic and foil packet discarded with each serving is horribly wasteful and I prefer not to use this for the exact same reason why I eschew home-use single serving coffee packages.

Speaking of single-serving coffee makers and waste, making coffee at home produces far less waste. While I do throw out coffee grounds every day and the inevitable bag it is all packed in, these would be discarded by the coffee shop. What I do not dispose of is the paper cup, jacket, and plastic lid provided with each cup, and I hope that the grounds contribute (in some small way) to a landfill decomposing just a little bit faster.

For completeness sake, here’s the process I follow to make coffee each morning:

· Run a grind cycle.
· Microwave two cups of water for 3:30.
· Fit the AeroPress with a filter, selecting a new one if the current one is clogged or old, setting the AeroPress on a pint glass to catch the coffee.
· Put three measures of ground coffee into the AeroPress, measured with the scoop provided with the AeroPress.
· Pour enough water (about one cup) into the AeroPress to fill it, then stir with the paddle until all grounds are suspended (about 10 seconds).
· Push the brewed coffee out through the filter with the plunger.
· Remove the filter retainer, rinse and save the filter if it isn’t too clogged nor old.
· Discard the used grounds into the trash can^†.
· Pour coffee from the pint glass into the Bodum Travel Mug that I use daily.
· Pour remaining hot water into travel mug until it is full. Stir briefly with paddle to mix.
· Rinse all parts and stack them to dry for the next use.

^† Yes, I know that I should be composting these, but living in a condo makes composting prohibitively difficult.

While at Vince & Joe’s Gourmet Market at 25 Mile and VanDyke this past weekend Danielle and I spotted this giant 5 kg jar of Nutella. The price was somewhere in the $50 range. I wish I had checked out the nutritional info for specifics, but per this a 15g serving has 4.7g of fat and 80 kcal (Calories, for us Americans).

That means that this whole jar would contain 1567g of fat and 26667 kcal. Yes, that’s about 3.5 pounds of pure fat and the one day nutritional requirements for over 10 average, healthy males.

Here, have some more moblog photos:

· Today while at Circuit City purchasing headphones I was given a Spore t-shirt.
· Danielle and I sitting at a Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor waiting for game day traffic to clear.
· The plastic tub which contained the chipotle hot wings Danielle ate for dinner.
· Fifth Third’s new ATM graphics include an image of someone standing at a drive-up ATM.
· Someone at Stony Creek High School parked very close behind me while I was off on a bike ride.
· Bolle Sports Google

In anticipation of our forthcoming vacation to the UK I’ve begun a thorough cleaning of the house. I really like going on vacation and coming back home to a nice, clean house. As part of this I spent a few hours today cleaning the bathrooms resulting in things like this very shiny faucet.

I also started doing all the outstanding laundry and did a bunch of dishes. Part of the dishes was cleaning off the Aerobie AeroPress which builds up some rather interesting residue on the rubber plunger and flat stirring paddle. Tonight before washing it I partially scraped it off and took that photo above. As you can see it’s a very fine, oily residue.