I clean

Here are some power cleans I filmed a couple of weeks ago:

Heather Cleans.

Back again

Well, I’ve been busy lately–or, I suppose not really, just busier than I was.  I’ve been teaching, it’s three hours at a go most weeknights, and with both the preparation I have to do beforehand and the high energy level I have to maintain while in the classroom, it’s enough to fill my days.

To catch up a bit, Brian and I spent Christmas in Weed, California with his family. Here are a few pic, unfortunately it seems like I never remember to take enough of them…

OK, well Sumi wasn’t really there, but she sure looks cute in the presents, no?

Anyway, to move on to more current news… Lately I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve read Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, and Anna Karenina…all good books, though some more enjoyable for me personally than others. Presently I’m reading Middlemarch, which I’m enjoying immensely. But the most important books I’m reading are of a different kind entirely. They are Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training and Practical Programming for Strength Training, both by Mark Rippetoe. Brian ordered these for me for Christmas, but I just got them last week. And wow, did I ever need these books! Starting Strength is geared towards the novice lifter, which I am not, but it covers the basic movements so thoroughly and well it’s like, well, it’s like what the Joy of Cooking is for all things culinary. The bible, if you will. It’s embarrasing to say, but I have never power cleaned–and now I’m going to learn, because the book tells me how. If I had read Starting Strength four years ago when I started weightlifting, I would be a veritable brute by now, and I probably wouldn’t have lost so much time to injuries either. Sigh.

Practical Programming, though, is what is really going to change my life. I have come to a place in training some of the basic compound movements where I just can’t seem to make progress, and I know exactly why. It’s because I’ve never paid much attention to my programming. I just went to the gym, and worked hard at whatever I felt like doing, and that was enough to make me stronger, because that’s how it works for pretty much everyone at the outset. If you’re weak, any kind of physical work will make you stronger. However, after a while it gets a lot harder to make progress–once you’re strong, getting even stronger requires more than just random effort. It requires planning, and to plan properly you need an understanding of why and how the body gets stronger in the first place. That’s what this book is about. Me, I want a 1.5x bodyweight squat, and this book is gonna tell me how to get it. And believe me you, you all will hear about it when it happens.

The Great Brittle Experiment

Introduction

Lately people have been coming to my blog by running a search for “undercooked peanut brittle”. Having made some myself recently, and not knowing what to do with the stuff, I undertook the experiment that answers the question we all have: is it possible to salvage undercooked peanut brittle?My hypothesis was that while the candy part would return to a syrup that I could heat to the necessary temperature to make the brittle crispy (rather than sticky, as undercooked brittle is), the peanuts might burn in the process. I thought this because in my recipe, I add the peanuts last, just before pouring the brittle out of the pan. I know that recipes exist in which the peanuts are cooked in the syrup to some degree, but my peanuts are already roasted, so I thought that cooking them more might not do good things. And how prescient that thought was…

Procedure

Fig. 1: Large bowl, small microwave

I began by placing the undercooked peanut brittle into a microwave safe bowl, that, unfortunately, was too large for the microwave. After moving the brittle to a smaller bowl, I zapped it until it was syrupy again–this worked pretty well. I moved the goo into a sauce pan, thinking I’d heat to to a bit above 300 degrees–enough to bring it to “hard crack” stage here in the ever-damp Pacific Northwest–and see what happened.

Well, it went along fine for a while. I had the heat up pretty high (as one generally does for brittle), and the temperature rose linearly instead of pausing every ten degrees or so like usual. Around 290 degrees, though, it started to smell burn-y and smoke. Now, normally I can smell a burning-esque smell from the hot butter when I cook brittle, so I held off a bit on pouring it out. However, after about thirty seconds, it became clear to me that something in there really was burning, and I poured it out. Indeed, it was the peanuts.

Results

Fig. 2: The re-cooked (previously undercooked) peanut brittle

Discussion

Now, here’s the thing: I didn’t stir the mixture, and obviously I should have. I was treating it like a standard sugar syrup, which you don’t mess with at all. As you can see, though, the peanuts only burned where they were in contact with the bottom of the pan, not in a general fashion. Also, the candy part of the brittle did crisp up. Thus, my initial hypothesis seems correct, though the experiment failed to produce a terribly tasty result. To improve this procedure, I would recommend stirring the mixture while re-cooking it; if you did that, I believe that it would be possible to salvage an undercooked peanut brittle.

Cold Thursday

calluses

It thawed a bit today, so I took advantage of the non-frozen roads by going to the gym. I set a new squat PR, at 155 lbs. I probably could have done more, but I was working without a spotter, so I left it at that. It’s moving forward, slowly, but forward nevertheless.

Last night I made more peanut brittle again–this was the third batch. It was over 90% humidity, so I cooked it to about 308 degrees (instead of to 300 as the recipe instructed). It makes me nervous, because it always seems like the butter in the recipe is burning when it gets that hot, but it came out perfect. Nice and crunchy, and good color too. I am also starting to get the hang of testing the sugar syrup by hand using the cold water method. I tested at the “soft crack” stage last night (which is when I add the baking soda and butter), and it separated into pliable threads, exactly like Joy said it would. However, when I tried testing the finished candy at the “hard crack” stage, it just dripped into the water in little gooey droplets and didn’t separate into threads at all. Alas, you win some and you lose some. Nevertheless, the brittle came out great, so now I have some to bring to Christmas, as the previous batch was happily hoovered up by Dave’s party guests.

Brittle number three.

It’s still cold

Today I walked to the DMV to renew my license. It’s about two miles from my  house; the walk is mostly along the Willamette river.

Icicles on the carport. Tomorrow it's supposed to warm up to above freezing, rain and snow some, and then get really cold again. Last night it got down to 11 degrees.

My snow boots have pretty good traction.

This is my street--you can see how icy the roads are. Quite a few people are out there trying to drive, and it's a bit nuts.

The bike path along the river was actually plowed, but I only saw three people on bikes, and three other pedestrians the whole time I was out.

I walked there in the late afternoon. Yesterday's snow hasn't melted at all, the river is pretty with snow covered banks.

I saw the sun set over the water...

...and I walked home in the late dusk. Pretty, no?

Snow

The front yard this morning.

Last night it snowed here in Eugene. By morning we had about four inches on the ground, and it’s so cold it’s even stuck. And it looks like it’s going to be here all week too, as it’s going to stay cold. This much snow is no big deal for many places, but when a town has no plows and won’t salt the roads, well, things get messy. I drove to campus today, to go to the post office and the gym, and it’s not real nice on the roads. The cars pack the snow into ice, which then freezes hard, and voila, you’ve got a skating rink.

The current hummingbird rig. The lamps sit about eight inches from the glass bottle of the feeder. The hummingbirds don't seem to be bothered by the lights at all, they've been out there fighting over the feeder all day as usual.

I was up all night writing my OHSU essays; I peeked out the window at four-something to check the hummingbird feeder, and it was frozen solid–and there was a poor hummingbird just sitting there, trying to have some breakfast. I don’t know what he was doing up hours before dawn, but I took the feeder in and thawed it in the microwave.

When Brian got up we found the worklights and rigged up a more permanent solution, since it’ll be so cold all week, and hummingbird juice freezes at around 27 or 28 degrees. Now that I know they’re up so early, I’ll probably just leave the lights on tonight so they can snack when they need to in the morning. They go into such a deep torpor in this kind of weather, I bet breakfast really is the most important meal of the day when you’re trying to wake up from that.

Sumi keeping an eye on the hummingbird battles.

Dave’s Holiday Party

Fun was had by all…

Candy, take 2

My camera is back in my possession, so I continue with the sugar saga…

You can tell this is better brittle just from the color.

Next up I made more peanut brittle. I figured I better get it right before moving on to more difficult and/or expensive confections. And get it right I did. It’s so damp here I have to cook all my sugar to 5-10 degrees hotter than the recipes want. If it’s a hard candy, it has to be cooked very hot–to over 300 degrees–and this means toeing the line on burning the butter in the mixture, since I have to cook it even hotter. The brittle, however, is exactly right. I added more peanuts to the recipe too, because I have no interest in getting a peanut-free bite of brittle. Too bad I only made a half batch.

Cutting and wrapping the chocolate caramels.

Next I tried classic cream caramels. These are easier because there’s a wide range of textures that are acceptable for caramels. I knew these would be good, but I had no conception of how good. The butter flavor is very intense, and the texture is perfect–a bit firm and chewy, but not too sticky. I wrapped them in wax paper twists and stashed them away, out of my line of sight.

Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and made salted buter chocolate caramels. I got this recipe online, as the one in Joy called for a cup and a half of heavy cream, and I only had one cup on hand, but I had plenty of butter. I will confess, I added more chocolate than called for too–which probably is the reason these turned out sooooo tender, despite having cooked them a fair bit hotter than the recipe wanted. I don’t regret it.

Sweets for the sweet

A candy making spree? Why yes, I did say that, didn’t I…

So the holidays have been coming, and I was feeling a bit sad because Brian and I have very limited means this year with which to celebrate or buy gifts for the various people in our lives. I was picking up a few items at the dollar store the other day when I saw these cute metal tins in holiday colors, and I thought, hey, I could make candy, and wrapped up in the tins it could make for nice (and affordable) little gifts. Also, I have a particular fondness for confectionery work–not that I’ve made much candy, and not that I have much of a sweet tooth either–it’s more the technical kitchen chemistry element of it all that appeals. And so it began, with…

Batch number one--the recipe was for a "pulled" brittle, hence the reason it's all stretched out on the counter.

Peanut brittle!

I figured I ought to start with a candy that’s cheap to make, in case I screwed it up.  Which I did.  Like I said, I haven’t made much candy, so I didn’t think too much about the weather. The Joy of Cooking says don’t make hard candies on humid days, and to me it seemed like a perfectly dry, sunny day here in Eugene Oregon. I mean, if it’s not raining, it’s dry, right? Wrong. Peanut brittle doesn’t find 80% humidity dry, even if that’s about the best we get here in the winter. So, despite following the recipe, it turned out undercooked, which makes it technically peanut toffee–and very, very sticky. Eating this stuff just makes me fear for my fillings. I haven’t thrown it out yet, but I think I will. It’s not what I wanted at all.

Umm, truffles...?

Next, I fell back on something familiar–truffles. I ground up some of my peanut toffee in the food processor, and made ganache truffles.  Then I decided to get fancy and dip them in more chocolate. Again, harder that it seemed from the recipe. Tempering the coating chocolate is fussy, and then when I dipped them… well, see the results for yourself. This was not easy. However, they did clean up decently, but I have a newfound respect for chocolatiers–hand dipping chocolates, and making them look all fancy and nice requires considerable technical skill. Which I don’t have.

Putting anything in these little paper cups makes it look better.

So, while there have been further sugar and corn syrup based adventures since, Brian took off to Portland with my camera, so I’ll stop here but there’s more to come–and practice is definitely helping.

A bad blogger

Yes, that’s me. I have been willfully ignoring my blog all these weeks. And it’s not that I haven’t been doing anything. I have sent in ten applications (and thus have written like 30 essays…), I’ve begun a candy making spree, been hiking, and gotten my squat pretty solidly into the advanced category. (And speaking of strength standards, gubernatrix published her own set…yay for strong (and articulate) ladies!) Oh, and I got a job, teaching MCAT prep courses. I’ve finished training, and will get my first classes about a week into the new year. A bit frightening, having to teach physics and organic chemistry, but they tell me I’m qualified…

Heading up Mt. Pisgah in the late afternoon...

The day before yesterday I hiked up Mt. Pisgah. This was a hike that Tirza and I started when she visited, but we never got to the top, as the twenty pound baby she was lugging about was quite intent on NOT being carried up the mountain. It’s not a long way up; it takes a little over half an hour to get to the top when unencumbered by flailing infants. Brian wouldn’t go, as he said his “belly hurt”–which I understand to be the natural outcome of drinking the WHOLE pot of espresso yourself, but anyway…

...and down in the evening.