ALTERNATIVE BURRITOS AND BUILDING

2008-07-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

Some great new articles on food and cooking that I have been busy with:

Sticky rice with mango

Beef and Broccoli - Thai Style!

Making Sticky Rice at Home

How to toast nuts

No Canning Raspberry Jam

Gluten Free Cheesecake

Understanding grades of beef

Creme Brulee - you won't beleive how easy

Rhubarb Jam

Addiciton topics

2007-09-20T05:17:00.000-07:00

Some great articles on addiction and treatment:
http://hubpages.com/hub/The_costs_of_drug_rehab_How_to_pay_for_drug_rehab

http://hubpages.com/hub/What_is_sober_living_housinga_safe_place_to_stay_after_rehab

http://hubpages.com/hub/What_is_executive_rehab_Rehab_for_professionals

http://hubpages.com/hub/The_symptoms_of_alcohol_detox

http://hubpages.com/hub/The_dangers_of_acetaminophen_in_Vicodin_

http://hubpages.com/hub/How_to_plan_a_family_intervention_for_drug_or_alcohol_abuse

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-advantages-of-a-family-teen-drug-testing-policy

http://hubpages.com/hub/3-serious-problems-with-home-drug-tests-for-teens

Easy Confit Recipe. Lard it Up and Love It!

2007-04-14T06:17:00.001-07:00

Confit, something you'd enjoy at a fine restaurant; and not for the home cook, right?

Wrong. Confit is so easy to make and it will be delicious every time. A weekend confit will give you enough meat for many mouthwatering easy weeknight meals, and everyone will rave at your cooking prowess!

Both pork and duck are commonly confited, but as pork is easier to find, and a lot cheaper than duck; these directions are geared towards cooking with pork.

A confit is a meat that is cooked slowly, submerged in its own fat. You probably don't have any extra lard lying about, so, to get started, visit your local butcher or supermarket meat counter and ask for 5lbs of pig fat. They should have lots of extra trimmings and will either give it away, or charge next to nothing. While you're there, pick up a pork butt roast. Any cut will make a delicious confit, but the shoulder butt is especially delicious.

The night before you plan to cook your confit, cut the meat into 2 inch cubes and generously coat the meat with salt, spices and herbs. A 5lb roast will use about 2tbls of salt and 2tbls of pepper, 5-10 finely chopped cloves of garlic, 3 or 4 torn bay leaves and fresh sage or thyme (It's OK to use dried sage or thyme, but use sparingly, about a teaspoon should be enough). Cover and refrigerate.

To make the lard, cut up the pork fat into 1 inch cubes and add to a heavy bottomed pot set over medium low heat. Stir occasionally until the fat has all rendered (about 1 hour) and take off the heat.

You now have the liquid lard that you need--and a lovely roasted pork aroma in your kitchen--to make your confit. Take the pork cubes that have been marinating over night, and rinse off all the salt and spices. Pat dry and add to an oven safe casserole dish. Add enough pork fat to cover the meat and place uncovered into a preheated 225 degree oven. After 4 hours the meat will be ready; and tender enough to pull with a fork!

Enjoy the same night, although the meat, refrigerated submerged in fat, will only get better as it ages!

Lovely served with fruit chutneys, a pork confit dinner will always satisfy, and the leftovers make weeknight meals a snap. Try a confit tonight!

5 easty steak house recipe secrets

2007-04-13T00:11:00.000-07:00

Nothing beats a great steak. Celebrity chef steak houses are the hottest new restaurant trend; but you don’t need to spend a fortune at a steakhouse. Follow these 5 easy tips, and make great steak at home every time.

1. Leave your steak in the fridge for a couple of days before you cook it. Steak houses brag about dry aging their beef, why can’t you do the same? Unwrap the plastic from the meat and leave it exposed to the air for a couple of days. Naturally occurring enzymes will tenderize the meat and impart a great beefy flavor.

2. Want a medium rare steak. Cook it from frozen. Now you don’t want to plunk a solid ice cube of steak on the grill, but if you leave your steak partially frozen, you’ll end up with a deep brown caramelized crust and a juicy medium rare inside. Steak houses have grills that get a lot hotter than yours does. So keeping the meat a little frozen gives the steak time to develop that deep flavorful brown, before overcooking the inside.

3. Salt your steak. Use a little more salt than you think you need. It won’t taste too salty, it will taste wonderful. Salting prior to cooking extracts some of the amino acids in the meat and these, when heated, will brown up and help you get that great steak house crust.

4. Dry the surface of the meat before cooking. Again, you want to get that deep brown crust, and the drier the meat surface the better the crust.

5. A dry steak is disappointing, so let the meat rest for a few minutes before serving. You don’t want to cut into your beautiful steak and have all the juices run out. The juices during cooking rush towards the hotter exterior. Letting the meat rest for 5-10 minutes before cutting into it lets the juices get reabsorbed throughout the steak.

That’s all there is to it. Follow these 5 easy steps before your next steak dinner and taste the difference.

SAVE THE PLANET WITH YOUR YAMAHA

2007-04-09T22:03:00.000-07:00

SAVE THE PLANET WITH YOUR YAMAHA

Why are there no motor scooters in North America? Small motorcycles (120ccs or less) are used the world over as cheap, reliable transportation over short distances.

Motorcycles being the domain of speed freaks or burly men with lots of facial hair, these little bikes would provoke latte spilling, crotch burning hilarity, as Lincoln Navigators drivers and their ilk laughed these responsible alternatives off the road.

Testosterone deficient, these motorbikes don't aim to impress or make a statement, but they will get you where you're going faster than a car, and will burn only pennies of gas in the process.They are cheap, starting brand new from only about 1000$, reliable, easy to maintain, use minimal gas and above all are fun and quick to drive.

They may not be the answer for the family road trip, but why, in these green conscious times, are they never touted as a responsible alternative to the SUV?

Eartbag Bathtubs SUCK (the heat out)

2007-04-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

In my continuing quest to keep costs down on my earthbag home I decided to forgo tradition and construct my own bathtub as an extension of the earthbag walls.

Friends advised against the idea, but they had also questioned the whole earthbag house concept, so what did they know?I wanted something fun for the kids to use, and big enough for my oversized frame. I laid down some bags in a rough approximation of the shape I wanted and invested a lot of testing time ( time spent reclining against the sand bag walls of the tub with my eyes closed) to ensure good ergonomics. Ultimately being too lazy to move the bags around again, I just went with the first and only design.

I had thankfully remembered to place inlet and outlet piping into the base of the walls, and so after attaching a drain to the tub outlet, I filled the base with rocks excavated from the foundation, laid down concrete for the floor and covered the bag walls. Finished with a coat of white lime it didn't even look half bad.

At long last the house was done, and after a sweaty day's work moving in... it was BATHTIME.

Although the weather in Thailand is usually hot hot hot, there are a few months of the year when the evenings cool off considerably. Night fell, and brought a chill to the air, and I eagerly anticipated a hot soak with a book as reward for my long labors.

It wasn't meant to be. No matter how hot the water going in was, by the time the tub had filled, the cool mass of the bags of sand had robbed the water of it's warmth. I fumed angrily in my cool tub for a while before conceding defeat and accepting that baths would have to be saved for the summer months (everyone loves a hot bath when the temp climbs over 40c, don't they?).

Earthbag bathtubs could work if either an airspace between the bags were used, or the concrete was placed over an insulating layer, but I also think that this is maybe just one application not suited to earthbags.

SAVE MONEY WITH A CHEAP MASONRY OVEN

2007-04-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

Running a restaurant in Thailand has required ingenuity to source or substitute unavailable ingredients, and often equipment. The currency strength and total bill per customer can mean that even a successful restaurant, while providing a good local income, won't likely earn the revenues needed to buy new the types of restaurant equipment deemed essential in western countries. Here, you either do without, or develop a locally made substitute.

A case in point is the masonry/pizza oven. Standard pricing for a pre-fabricated or imported oven begins in the thousands of dollars.

I'd been wanting one for ages. We do good artisan sourdough breads and lots of slow cooked meats, so I new we (kneaded, haha) one. After a lot of research, I understood the fundamentals of masonry oven design, and decided we could build one ourselves for a fraction of the cost.

I bought a pallet of pure cement sacks, a load of sand and crushed stone, some fire bricks (for the hearth floor) and had a load of rice hulls (a natural, very fire resistant insulation) delivered from a local farm. Total cost:200$!

Here's a quick synopsis of the building steps involved:

*Using some old cinder blocks, I made the exterior frame.

*I mixed a low density 1/5 cement and rice hull mixture (no sand or gravel) and poured a 6 inch insulated hearth sub floor.

*I mixed a homemade refractory concrete of cement/crushed stone/sand and lime about 2/3/3/1, and poured a 4 inch hearth slab on top of the almost dry insulated sub floor.

*When the hearth slab had cured for a few days, I dusted on about 1 inch of sand and laid out the fire bricks for the hearth floor. I chose to make a quite large 42 inch in diameter oven and so laid out the bricks to a diameter of about 46 inches; Allowing a couple of inches of overlap between the brick hearth floor and the concrete walls.

*I had previously built an earthen oven, and decided that the technique of building a sand interior molding on which to construct the oven shell would also work with concrete. I molded a circular damp sand mound of about 19 inches high by 42 inches in diameter and covered it in damp newspaper.

*The door should be about 63% of the height of the oven dome interior to ensure good combustion, so I marked a doorway outline of about 12 inches in height by 16 inches in width onto the newspaper.

*I mixed more masonry concrete (the same proportions as for the hearth slab), but kept the mix quite thick so I could pat it onto the sand molding without it falling off, and covered the sand mound in a 1-2 inch layer of concrete. Don't forget to leave the doorway free of concrete!

* When the concrete had cured for about 12 hours, I repeated the process. I continued applying concrete layers until I had reached an oven shell thickness of about 9 inches.

* After a few days, when the concrete was good and firm I dug the sand out and admired the beautiful arched oven interior!

*I then mixed more insulative concrete, a mixture of as much rice hull to a little cement as possible, and slathered on layers in the same manner as I had when building the refractory oven shell. I continued until I had added about 8 inches of insulation all around the exterior.

*After adding a brick platform in front of the door, for easy oven loading the project was complete!

The oven was designed for retained heat baking, with bread and pizza in mind, and works great (crunchy hearth baked loaves and pizzas ready in a couple of minutes), but has also performed surprisingly well for all our everyday oven needs.

We had previously used a standard gas pizza oven, and were paying about 120$ a month for the gas. We now use only our masonry oven and use only about 50$ a month in gas. By inserting a heating blow torch into the oven mouth, the oven temperature can be instantly raised to 400-500 degrees; Thus we are only heating the oven when we need to put something into it! It's also nice to keep the gas off in tropical Thailand as our kitchen can get pretty warm!

Our masonry oven performs much better than our old conventional oven, and saves us more than 1000$ a year in operating costs.

Advice on oven building can be found at
http://www.ovencrafters.net/

Please contact me if you'd like to know more about what we did.
johnny_lee15@yahoo.com

Earthbag Building

2007-04-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

SAND CASTLES FOR "GROWNUPS"

1300 rice sacks + 60 000lbs of sand + some barbed wire + A few extra odds and ends = 1 house.

Superadobe, or earthbag building, simply uses compacted earth (sand in my case) in feed or ice sacks as the structural and load bearing walls. The technique is not complicated and does not require any special expertise to construct, can be erected quickly and the materials needed to build the walls can usually be acquired at a very low cost.

How low?

I built our 600 sq foot earthbag house for just over 1000$ U.S. funds.

I had the land available for free (an unused snake of land beside my restaurant) and scavenged some of the materials from other buildings (toilets and sinks), but the rest of the materials I bought new, although at low cost, as I am in Thailand where things don't tend to cost as much as they do elsewhere.

The house is about 20 meters long, and a varied 4-5 meters in width, is made entirely from sandbags from foundation to wall tops and is covered with a sod and flower planted living roof.

I have never been considered handy- the go to guy for a "fix it" job, and as such encountered a lot of skepticism, some outright laughter and the occasional threat of divorce as I explained my plan and the benefits of living in "the mud hut" as my family had so kindly christened the earthbag project.

I started digging anyways. It took about a week to dig the foundation trench for the wall perimeter. A not entirely even, or level trench of 30-40 Cm's deep by a half meter wide. It was hard, sweaty work, and that finished (beautiful to me) hole in the ground steeled my resolve to keep the project moving. I bought 1500 hundred new rice sacks (about 200$), ordered 5 cubic meters of sand and set to work.

I shovel filled my first 10 bags and started heaving them ( holy crap, heavy heavy heavy) down to the end of the trench. After a few days I had completed my first course of bags, wrenched my back and almost broken my spirit. Wondering how I'd ever get this thing finished I grimly began a new day's work by filling some bags (now done doggy style through the legs) and began humping the first bag down the wall. Lift and rest, lift and rest, lift and slide and rest,slide slide slide and rest. Wait a minute, this wasn't so bad, these 80 lb bags could be quite easily slid across the slick surface of the previous course of bags. Maybe there was hope after all!

I laid three times the bags I had done the previous day while uttering only a fraction of the curses and dark mutterings that had kept onlookers well away during the first course of bags. Things were looking good!

I fell into a routine: filling bags, positioning the barbed wire used to stick courses of bags together, dragging full bags down the wall until in position, folding the open bag tops over the sides of the bags, flopping them into place atop the waiting barbed wire and tamping the placed bags by jumping (with my ample 110+kg body-down to a leaner 90kg by the end of the building) barefoot on the bags until they felt pretty firm. And repeat. And repeat. I aimed for about 40 bags placed a day, which doesn't sound like a lot, but tired me out plenty!

As the weeks became months I watched my earthbag walls growing with satisfaction and pride. I began really enjoying the work. It was very physical, but also quite meditative, as my mind would alternately wander or sometimes clear completely save for the attention needed to complete the tasks at hand.

The design was a work in progress. My roofing plans changed repeatedly after numerous failed small scale experiments, and I had no idea what the damn thing would look like when finished.

I eventually finished/got tired of building the walls, left some linteled holes for high wall windows, buttressed the long outer wall and declared the wall structure complete. Yay!

Little did I know, the real work had yet to begin, but that's another story for another day.

For more information on earthbag building please visit
http://www.okokok.org/cs-alison.php
http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/QandA/earthbagQandA.htm
http://www.calearth.org/cvillage/cvillage.htm

Opening a Restaurant in Thailand

2007-04-07T04:53:00.000-07:00

I opened my first restaurant (a bagel joint) here in Chiang mai 5 years ago. I was full of trepidation, but was, and am a passionate cook, and felt that I might as well try to make a living doing what I loved. We opened with a shoestring budget of about 5000$ and threw open the doors before the menus were even printed. We actually only had 1 crudely written black marker abomination of a menu for more weeks than I care to mention! We didn't know what we were doing!!!

My wife and I threw ourselves into the work with passion and commitment, thrilled when customers actually stumbled in, and terrified when more than a few came in at once and I tried to slam out food in a reasonable period of time. We undercharged for everything, and I couldn't stop myself from including extras on the plate in a desperate attempt to impress. Our accounting system consisted of a wooden drawer full of crumpled cash, and I had no idea what our true food costs were. Needless to say, we didn't make any money for a long time!

I supported us working evenings as an English teacher; A job I began to dread going to, wanting instead to devote myself exclusively to the business. Without it we would not have survived the first year.

We had determination going for us if nothing else. I wouldn't fail. I couldn't imagine giving up on what, for all it's trials, was truly my dream come true. I loved my growing prowess as a cook. Our menu was pretty basic, but I thought we did it well. I rose at the crack of dawn daily to make the hand rolled, kettle boiled bagels we served. Everything was made to order, and while I had yet to master the essentials of mise en place (making for a very stressful kitchen) customers where loving the food, and we were getting busier!

By the end of the first year of the feedback I'd been getting (too much food, and even "you're prices are far too low") penetrated my thick skull and we began to structure our business in a quasi businesslike way. By the end of the second year we had even begun earning enough to live on, and although times were lean, I was able to quit teaching and concentrate entirely on the restaurant.

We opened the hard way. Although I wouldn't wish the trials of those first years on anyone, We learned what it was to run a restaurant as a business entity. My naivety and stubbornness insulated us from some of the pains and kept us motivated when things looked bleak.