Chris Hennes

Nope, this is the only place I've posted about it.

Baby Bok Choy in Superior Stock shang tang bai cai miao Stir-Fried Green Pepper with Pork Slivers qing jiao rou si The bok choy was excellent, and could hardly be simpler to make. You blanch the bok choy, then serve it in a stock. The green pepper was good, but unremarkable. It wasn't until I'd already gone shopping that I read the sidebar about using slightly spicy peppers. I think I'll try it with poblanos later on this summer.

Sichuanese Wontons in Chilli Oil Sauce hong you chao shou To kick the night off we had these fantastic wontons. They are made with store-bought wrappers, and my "water caltrop" folding technique leaves something to be desired, but they were delicious nevertheless. I was surprised at how liquidy the filling was before cooking, but after cooking the egg held everything together with no problem and they were very moist. The sauce is chilli oil, "sweet aromatic soy sauce" (the recipe is in the book), and garlic. The chilli oil I made yesterday is excellent, and obviously features prominently in this dish. I thought the cooking technique was a bit strange, but it worked fine, so I guess Dunlop knows what she is talking about .

Yeah, the mess of that Arduino code is my fault: I prefer to work from a command line interface, which the baseline Arduino IDE does not provide. So I used one someone else had rolled together, and it's not actually very good. If I was you I would just pull the source files out of the directory structure I set up and create a new, normal Arduino sketch. I've only got one fan, I didn't see any reason to add more. Right now things are still in prototype stage, so the sensor wire is simply run through the fridge door. Everything else is outside the refrigerator compartment. I cut my fan hole off-center to make sure I avoided anything that might be in the way of the hole. There are no coils up there, so it's just the wiring for the light as far as I know.

Comments in-line for convenience...

Thanks for the photo, very interesting. I like cilantro, but only in limited quantities, so for me that style of salad is too much. I had some leftover noodles from tonight's dinner, so as a snack I just had Mrs. Yu's Sweet and Spicy Cold Noodles yu lao shi liang mian As you can see, I skipped the optional chicken (since it was a snack). I did include the optional sesame paste, however. These were delicious, and I'm looking forward to trying them both with the chicken as well as without the sesame paste to see how the dish changes. I think it's probably also even better with a thicker noodle than the one I used.

Here's a great article on breadboards: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-use-a-breadboard And to get started with Arduino, you might check out this guide: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/sik-experiment-guide-for-arduino---v32?_ga=1.75953877.1118589479.1398115576

Tiger Salad lao hu cai Shanghai Noodles with Dried Shrimp and Spring Onion Oil kai yang cong you mian Chilli Oil hong you Tonight's dinner was not what I was planning, since I was unexpectedly out of chilli oil, which is called for in about 80% of the recipes in this book. So the first order of business was to get started on another batch of that. I'm using Korean ground chiles for this, as Dunlop suggests. It smells fantastic, but is supposed to settle overnight before use, which is how I wound up making the Shanghai Noodles, which is one of the few main-dish recipes that doesn't call for the oil. They were really simple and delicious, and will definitely get added to my regular quick-dinner list. The sauce only has a few ingredients (spring onions and dried shrimp gently fried in oil, plus soy sauce added directly to the dish), but they work beautifully. The Tiger Salad was less successful due to the overwhelming amount of cilantro. The recipe calls for "a good handful", which left too much up to interpretation. Next time I'll go with "a bit" I think.

General Tso's Chicken zuo zong tang ji Spinach with Sesame Sauce ma jiang bo cai I do love deep frying in a wok. It addresses basically all of the things I hate about deep frying on my regular stove: quick heat-up, quick recovery time, the wok contains the splattering for the most part, and the smell stays outside where the wok burner is. So while normally I avoid deep frying things, I make exceptions here. This recipe for General Tso's chicken is good: not mind-blowing, but worth the effort, I think. It's not at all sweet or gloppy (unlike its take-out cousin here in the US), but rather has a clean flavor profile that winds up still tasting like chicken. What a concept! I was less fond of the spinach. Even using less than the total amount of sauce called for in the recipe, I still found the texture and flavor of this intensely sesame-y dish lackluster. I wonder if the sauce could be thinned with something to improve its texture and let the flavor of the spinach through a bit more.

Xie Loban's Dan Dan Noodles niu rou dan dan mian Radishes in Chilli Oil Sauce qiang luo bo The Dan Dan recipe is again a repeat from Land of Plenty (which honestly I find a little annoying: I already own LoP, I wanted new recipes when I bought this!). However, it is one of the best recipes in that book. It was made even better by me actually reading the book this time around, so I knew that the sesame paste called for here is not, in fact, tahini. The sesame paste actually called for has a much stronger flavor, so is far more noticeable in the dish. This time I also used a homemade chilli oil, which had a more manageable heat level than the commercial stuff I used when I was cooking from LoP. The radishes were good, but there was a lot of chilli oil left in the bottom of the bowl when we were done eating. I think next time I am going to smash the radishes into chunks so that more of the sauce sticks to them.

We received the sad news today that long-time Society member moosnsqrl has passed away. I met her in Kansas City during my first eG Heartland Gathering, which was a great experience thanks in large part to her graciousness and management skills.

Yes, I think tapered is probably it . I tried both a tapered and a straight and settled on the straight one for mine, though the preference wasn't that strong. Tonight's dinner was Smacked Cucumber in Garlicky Sauce suan ni pai huang gua Buckwheat Noodles with Red-Braised Beef niu rou qiao mian The cucumbers quickly became a staple in our house, they are a very quick, easy, delicious side that complement pretty much everything we've eaten them with. The cool crunch is a great foil for a rich noodle dish like this one. I actually made the red-braised beef specifically for this dish, rather than using leftovers here. Although I only made a half batch, it was probably more than a "good ladleful" as the recipe calls for. I actually had about a cup of cooking liquid left from that recipe, so I basically used that as the broth (I did add the chilli oil, though). The celery leaves were a great touch, they added a fantastic herbal/vegetal note to a very rich, earthy broth. The quality of this dish depends very much on the quality of your broth, so don't skimp! Made well this dish is superb.

Right, this particular style of dumpling is open-ended. I'm not sure how much flavor escapes, but some definitely does. The only way to really find out would be to make a batch closed and compare.

Her instructions for making the wrappers have you cut individual dough balls for each, then roll them into small circles with a small rolling pin. The procedure seems sound, I was starting to get the hang of it towards the end, I think I just need to make a few hundred more potstickers. Which is not such a terrible fate.

And as a snack this evening... Xi'an Pot-Sticker Dumplings xi'an guo tie This is the first time I've made the wrappers myself, so that was a new experience. They wound up a bit thicker than I would have liked, and I had a hard time getting a uniform size, but overall they were successful. Obviously some more practice is in order. The flavoring was a bit bland, especially once they were dipped in the Chinkiang vinegar. This may be at least partially due to the use of "regular" chives (which are abundant in my garden) instead of Chinese chives, which I don't have at the moment.

Sorry, I hit post too soon. Clarified now. It's ma po dou fu.

Many of these dishes reheat well, so today I made a couple to take in for lunch this week. Sichuanese "Send-the-rice-down" Chopped Celery with Ground Beef jia chang rou mo qin cai This one was very fast and easy to make. I used Chinese celery, which seems struck me as more assertive than the thicker stuff we get in normal supermarkets in the US. Since the seasonings in the dish are relatively light (chilli bean paste, ginger, and Chinkiang) the flavor from the celery was still dominant in the dish. These are the leftovers from that meal, minus the smacked cucumber (there are never leftovers of that), ready for lunch tomorrow. Next up: Pock-Marked Old Woman's Tofu (Vegetarian Version) ma po dou fu Not actually vegetarian in this case, since I used chicken stock, this dish reheats beautifully. Which is good, since my wife doesn't like tofu so I can't make it for dinner! I love this version, it's got a great level of spice and tons of flavor.

Now that the weather has warmed here I've been doing a lot of cooking from Every Grain of Rice (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). Tonight I finally pulled out the camera, here was dinner: Gong Bao Chicken with Peanuts (recipe here) gong bao ji ding (宮爆鷄丁) Sichuanese Green Soy Bean Salad xiang you qing dou This is the same Gong Bao recipe she included in Land of Plenty. I thought I'd go ahead and make it again. My overall impression of the dish is that the ratios are off, and that there are too many peanuts in it. You could almost call it Peanuts with Chicken instead of the reverse. I'm not crazy about peanuts as a star attraction, so I'd be inclined to tweak the recipe to decrease that quantity. Otherwise the dish is very good. The soybeans were very simple and delicious, and provided a nice foil to the chicken.

I think rotuts is not counting the time in warm water as ... time.

No wiring diagram, it wasn't complicated enough to bother with. I've just got two Tails right now, I don't have a heat lamp installed at the moment, and the dehumidification is just a CPU fan so I didn't need one for that. The transistor is an IRF520 I had laying around, it's not controlling a whole lot of power so you could probably any just about anything.

The AC relay is a PowerSwitch Tail (I bought the kit version because it's cheaper). I have no idea which LCD panel I used, it's a generic 16x2 I had laying around. The temperature and humidity control is very well dialed in now, I was really happy with the performance over the last couple months. The long-term averages are basically exactly on my targets.

We received word today of the death of longtime Society member Karen Chin ("I Call the Duck"). This from member Katie Loeb... Dear friends: Please celebrate the life and memory of: Karen Chin -with her husband Carl Kabat-Realtor and family. Saturday, Feb 7 at 12:30 at the Lutheran Church -2110 Chestnut St. -please use the entrance at 2111 Sansom St. Philadelphia, Pa. 19103 Then, at 5:00 join us in Chinatown: “I Call The Duck” celebration and dinner Please contact: Susan Gish - susangish@me.com for details about restaurant, location and to RSVP. If you like, bring a photo and/or a story/memory... Donations can be made to: WWF - Panda Nation wwf.worldwildlife.org or call: 1-800-CALL-WWF

I've been meaning to post a shot of the bacon for months now. This was cured according to the Modernist Cuisine recipe, but the ribs were taken off. The amount of fat in the belly is amazing. The bacon is fantastic, of course.

The control code is available at github.

Info on the PowerSwitch tail here. Crowding can pose a problem if you have inadequate airflow or no good way to reduce the humidity in the chamber. In my climate the fan works very well as a dehumidifier, but that may not be true for you. I don't yet know the full capacity of the fridge, I've only got about 4kg of product curing right now. I am hoping to be able to do nine soppressata at a time in this installation, but won't know how well that works for a while yet, I've got other projects lined up before it. This fridge has coils in the sides, but not the bottom, so cutting out the bottom was no big deal. It's a Danby Designer DAR044A1BDD Compact All Refrigerator, 4.4 Cubic Feet.