Friday, December 5, 2014

sous-vide experiment 真空低溫烹調法


I have a few pieces of NY strip steak. This morning I have an idea what to do with them other than the usually ways. I decided to give sous-vide a try. Sous-vide has been in rage in recent years, started with restaurant chefs. Now there are specialty equipment for sous vide that comes in all price points, complexity, and quality.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

docsis 3.0 cable modem + gateway


It all started with I noticing the intermittent degradation of video quality when watching Netflix. There are so many variables and sorting out where the problem is/are can be taxing even with someone who's career has been in the technology field.

kitchen thermometer 廚房溫度計 - updated



For a very long time, I have been wanting a decent cooking thermometer for checking doneness of food like meat or chicken. However I know all too well that good electronic thermometer generally very hard to find. The only one that I had considered buying is the one by Thermoworks. It is the first with excellent design as well as accuracy. The other very important characteristic is very low thermal mass. A lot of electronic thermometers have very large thermal mass. This is because thee use of cheap solid state sensor that is large. On top of that the metal casing itself is typically designed or simply large to make it cheap to produce. High thermal mass has a lot of problem. It can significantly skew the measurement due to heat conduction, especially if the sample being measured has low heat energy (e.g. a loaf of bread, or a cake). High thermal mass also requires very long time for the temperature to stabilized.

Monday, December 1, 2014

haute cuisine 高級菜餚 - the movie

There are not a whole lot of good movies about food and food preparation. By these I don't mean to include food related documentaries. One that I really like is Eat Drink Man Woman, which inspired the name of my blog. I just finished watching this French movie Haute Cuisine.


Sunday, November 30, 2014

led lighting for brunnhilde

Good things come to those who waited. Sometime very small things make me happy and this modest investment and minor elbow grease is one.

By a large part, I refraint from jumping onto the early LED lighting bandwagon. For me it is not so much about the expense but the timing of the technology progression. In architecture and interior design, lighting is one of the least recognized aspects, at least in the non-participants. There is a lot more than what first meets the eyes in lighting design. Color temperature, light spectrum, direction, diffused verse direct, shadows, ambient versus task - to name a few. In fact lighting will give you the biggest bang for the buck in improving an interior through careful chosen product and installation, and placements. Lighting alone is one special profession in movie making and it continues to amazed me how often a movie or TV series is short changed by poor lighting not because of budget limitation, but simply the failure to harness the right professional.