Biscuits and Gravy Substitute

I was making breakfast for myself on my day off last week and I thought that it was too good for me to pass up blogging about it. 

This has been affectionately known in my family as Creamed Eggs and Ham, but for obvious purposes as you'll find out later, we're going to rename it Creamed Eggs and Whatever-sort-of-breakfast-meat-you-want. Voila´!!!

This is what we start with.

Start by boiling some eggs, and preparing your meat. I have cooked some bacon and some sausage. Don't worry, I didn't eat it all, I put the extra bacon in the fridge for BLT's some other time. Also, there is milk, salt, pepper and Coleman's Dry Mustard (the most important part). Also, drinking a cup of coffee while making this only makes the experience better. Oh, and there's a squirt bottle for misbehaving cats. 

Once you have your eggs and meat prepared, you make a rue, sort of like a white gravy that you would for biscuits and gravy or a chicken fried steak gravy. Start by melting 2 tablespoons of butter in a pot. Once it's melted, add 2 tablespoons of flour and mix. Add milk slowly so the mixture doesn't clump until you have reached the consistancy of a thick gravy. Eventually you'll develop a taste for how you like it. Once you have reached the consistency that you like, add 1 table spoon of the dry mustard, again to taste. Also, salt and pepper to taste. If you have seasoned salt, again, salt to taste. Once you have mixture the way you want, add the eggs and the meat and stir together. 

This is served over toast. Also, I have some aesthetic suggestions of how best to enjoy the meal, with a glass of orange juice, finishing your coffee, and your favorite rural Nebraska news paper; the Seward County Independent for example. Enjoy.

Wind Generator Goals

Let me just start by laying the grounds for my eventual goals for this project. 

Here is where you use your imagination. Someday, imagine you are on your back deck sitting your lawn furniture listening to a baseball game on your deck radio. You have your sunglasses on with a lemonade in one hand and a pipe in the other. The radio is powered by your homemade wind generator. I know, I have that exact same fantasy every day.

Well... that is my eventual goal. I'm going to be pretty realistic about this. I'm going to establish a mini list of checkpoints in the development of my wind generator.

Goal 1 : Create some sort of device with magnets and wire that creates a measurable amount of magnetic flux (electrical current).

Goal 2 : Create a device that uses the wires and magnets that creates a measurable amount of flux that is driven by some sort of wind collecting mechanism (a fan, pinwheel, weather station wind speed gauge).

Goal 3 : Have device from goal 1 create enough wattage that it can light a small light bulb, about 10 watts. This wattage doesn't need to be sustained. If I can just spin the shaft quick enough with my fingers or anything that creates about 10 watts.

Goal 4 : Have device from goal 3 use the wind collecting mechanism from goal 2 to create about 1.5 volts at about .2 amps on a mildly windy day. I figure this is about the amount of energy that I will need to get a very small radio to turn on and amplify a radio signal through small speakers .

Goal 5 : T0 have my wind generator hooked to my generator that create enough charge that can power the radio long enough to listen to an entire baseball game while sitting in lawn furniture, sipping lemonade, and having a pipe. 

I also plan on trying to keep some sort of records making an estimate of how much this project will cost. I hope that with these numbers I can do some sort of rough calculation that can predict how many KWH my generator would have to product in order to begin paying itself off. I understand already that you can probably buy something for cheaper that I can make that is much more efficient.

Also, keep in mind, in Nebraska the average cost of electricity is about 6.7¢ a KWh. If you run a medium sized window air conditioner for an hour that is rated at 1000W, this would consume 1KWh. If you run a 100W lightbulb for 731 hours, or a month, it would use 73.1KWh, and would cost you $4.90 at 6.7¢ a KWh.

Pizza Talk

Before

After

I only wish that I could upload a piece for you.

To be honest, this was the best pie that I've made yet. There wasn't really anything about it that I would change. Sometimes the crust can be too doughy, or too crispy, or there can be too much or too little sauce and whatnot. This one had a pretty good crust and a nice amount of sauce that you could taste is, but not burn your mouth on the sauce.

Actually, for this pie, I used a different cheese. I think that the new cheese actually had more flavor. We bought new pepperoni's. We have had the same ones for a long time because I got them from work (I worked with a company that made nutritional labels for some companies and they generally had ALOT of pepperoni to take home), so I am looking forward to making a pie with pepperoni's that aren't freezer burnt. Although, you can't tell there freezer burnt unless you eat them raw. So, we'll see if the pepperoni's are better.

Also, I generally only use all purpose flour, but we have had some whole wheat flour for some time now and I thought I would use some of it. I tried to make a crust completely out of whole wheat once, and we had a bad experience, but in actuality, it was my fault the pizza stuck to the pan, and that the crust was too heavy. So I made the dough part whole wheat, and part all purpose flour.

I'm a little nervous to use any other toppings other than pepperoni for a couple of reasons: It prevents me from taking the toppings into consideration when tasting the flavor, and I just feel like any other topping right now would adulterate such a wonderful food. For me and pizza, simpler is better.

Baseball Rant

I just have to get this off of my chest.

Watch Alex Rodriguez's interview with Peter Gammons where he admits his usage of illegal substances when he was with the Texas Rangers.

I think that A-Rod is handling this PED(performance enhancing drug) issue well. It's too bad it happened, but it did. The thing is baseball back then only really knew that anything with the word "Steroid" directly attached was bad, everything else was justifiable and wasn't considered wrong then. Now the rules are changing and becoming more definite about what is allowed and what isn't allowed.

The culture in baseball has changed. It is now socially unacceptable to not take medicines to enhance your game where as then it was. Now the celebrated guy in baseball isn't the guy that hit all of the home runs, but the guy that showed up every day and had good numbers and was clean to today's definition.
When somebody gets paid a 250 million dollar contract, they had better be the best player in baseball, and they need to do what it takes to have an edge. When somebody wants to be the best player in baseball that person needs to do what the best players in baseball are doing. It's basically an arms race. If you don't build up you sacrifice the shot at knowing if your numbers compete, and potentially your career as a baseball player.

Overall, this was driven by the fans that pay to see the ball games, pay for the jersies, pay for

 the baseball cards and pay for concessions. If people didn't want to spend money on the game, there would be no paid professional sports. People pay to see teams win, and lets face it, in the sports world only two things talk: Money and Stats. However, I have no intentions on giving up my love for the hollowed game, as if I had a choice, and no Yankee fan is going to not watch the next time they're in the Series. After all, my dad and I are planning our trip to Coors Field this summer as we speak.

I don't think that there should be a salary cap in baseball. The game would be completely different. There would be no Yankee dynasty or Red Sox dynasty. The offseason strategy would be much different. The teams would all be as balanced as the NFL or NHL. And on top of that, that wouldn't have allowed teams like the Rockies, Rays, Marlins, DiamondBacks, and this year's up and coming small market team to prove that money can't win games, but heart can. After all, look at the 2008 Tigers.

As fans, we can be in shock and awe, and we can deface the names of A-Rod and Bonds all we want, but they wouldn't be doing everything they can if it weren't to gain our approval. We want to see records broken. 

Baseball is going through a cleansing process, and we'll see what the next generation of ball players has in store for us learning from the past 15 years. Can the Matt Holiday's, Tim Lincecum's, Mark Teixeira's and Shane Victorino's still fill the seats? I think that baseball is better for it.  Watch out NFL, you're next.

Some Things Meaningful-Creating

This is mostly an essay. It's not meant to be a self-help truth. It isn't supposed to be a complete thought on the meaning of life by any means, as if I were capable of such a thing. It's mostly my attempt to verbalize into immortalization a few realizations that have been part of my maturation process. Wordy right? I like it. I'm no writer. You get it as it comes out of my head.

I have been struggling lately. My wife and I moved about 7 months ago and she is struggling with the job thing and we're in a pretty small apartment which creates problems for me because I'm not a clean freak (I'm not really afraid of germs and eating "safe" food), but I'm a tidy freak. Also I have a lot of hobbies. Probably better put as I would like to enjoy doing many different things. I like painting which can take up a bunch of space and be a big mess. I have a recent fascination with electromagnetics that has inspired me to make my own wind generator, I like to cook, I consider myself a musician, but I rarely am paid to do make music. I did some theater and speech in high school. I have been running lately and I love riding my bike.

Since we have moved, it has been difficult to get myself motivated to do any of these things that I love to do. I guess you could say we're in a rut. It's almost to the point that I/we feel like we need to be the person that we were when we were doing well, the musician, the artist, the baseball player or what-have-you. The problem is that we are in different situations that maybe don't allow us to be that person that we once were.

With that, I was making pizza the other night and I got to thinking,"wow, this feels good". I was really enjoying working with my hands using the tools that I had to make pizza. The best part is that I had complete control over what the pizza would eventually taste like. I got to add as much basil, oregano and cheese as I wanted. It was sort of relaxing. I even used probably the biggest clove of garlic that I have ever seen.

It just felt good creating. I got to thinking some more about the things that I have been trying to do more that have been part of my life that made me feel good: music, art and writing. I realized that these were all the same principle, they were are creating. I had explored creating art in high school, I became quite good at creating music in college, and now that I'm married and out of college out on my own with my wife, I am in a different place and am now capable of exploring creating food.

I found it pretty satisfying that when I was making the pizza I was using all of my senses while making it. I kneaded the dough until it felt right, I tasted the sauce until it tasted right, and I smelled the blend of garlic and spices in the sauce, I heard the cheese melting when I would sneak a peak, and it was all very visually stimulating when I took it out of the oven. The brown and white cheese, red sauce, red pepperoni and golden crust.

Other people may have their own thing that they like to do, but I think that my thing that I need to do to feel good is create and be creative among other things obviously.

I don't know that all of the things that I've spoken of here would have been nearly as satisfying if I wouldn't have had anybody to share these things with. I think that part of the experience is having somebody enjoy or show appreciation for what you have done.

So with that, there are going to be follow up posts on these topics and the implications they may have on my life as a Christian.

1. Creating
2. Having somebody enjoy or show appreciation for a creation.
3. The ability of one to show appreciation to others, especially loved ones based on the idea that not everybody has loved ones.
4. You don't NEED nice things, but you have to be able to appreciate and be thankful for the things that you have.