Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Garden Notes

One harvest of 3 so far.  This week.

Notes for next year:

  • Plant only about 4 tomato plants, not 6.

  • Same for the jalapeños.

  • MORE green peppers. Or maybe they were just shaded by the tomatoes?

  • Plant the tall things in the back. Which is to say, the tomatoes.

  • Tomato cages have very little resistance to bending from being overloaded. Stake them.

  • The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook has a trillion good ways to use all the results. (By the time I re-read this next year, I should know if they are actually yummy.)

  • I will also know if making my own crushed tomatoes worked.

  • Add snap peas, basil, cilantro and possibly watermelons.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

They'll Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chaindrives (Invention Idea #5)

Why do I have to have a job? There are basically four reasons: Food, shelter, medical care and luxuries.

Those are listed in rough order of importance. Theoretically an order-of-importance list is also an order-of-most-money-spent list but that's probably not literally true. However, from the point of view of reducing costs, it kind of is. $500 that I must spend on food is a tougher nut to a short budget than $2000 that I throw away on bingo. Put another way: Say I wanted to stop working. What's the first problem I absolutely must solve? It isn't "where am I gonna get my $2000 of bingo money". It's "how do I eat".

So how would I eat? One common solution is to start your own business. But that's still a job, albeit one where you are the boss. I'm imagining a socialist utopia where nobody would have to do any work at all. We'd just recline on chaise lounges all day.

I could grow my own food in my yard. That's still a lot of work, though. Planting, weeding, chasing away predators, harvesting, processing, etc. However, this is all repetitive, physical work, which is perfect for whom? Robots!

The first thing you need is a big field. (You could do this in your yard, but for reasons of efficiency and scale, farm-like installations are probably better.). Enclose the entire thing in glass (height determined by the crop) to make it a greenhouse. This also excludes many, but not all, bugs, animals and weedseeds.

Install some sprinklers. You'll be using a lot less water than usual for two reasons. One is that because the field is enclosed it will lose less to evaporation from the ground or respiration from the plants. The other is that you can collect any runoff and reuse it. (Why don't they already do this? Maybe it seeps down to the groundwater first? Perhaps my field should be enclosed on the bottom, too.)

Send in the seedbots to do the planting. Seeds and the planting thereof are relatively uniform, so this is a general robot. We may need to bury guide cables underground that will indicate to the robot where the rows will be. However, optical guides, GPS or other technologies could also be used.

All of this, btw, is controlled by computer. It could either be a hulking 1950s-style centralized FARMIVAC thing or an ultra-modern distributed intelligence ant-model thing. For instance the seedbots detect that it's planting time, the sprinklers detect moisture levels, etc and everything Just Works kind of like a natural ecosystem.

Now is the somewhat harder, more nebulous part of my vision. Each growing plant species needs different care. Some might have to be checked for mold, some might need petting or to be sung to or whatever. And they are all harvested differently. You can just cut down cornstalks but you have to pick apples. All this variation means different robot types. That said, this isn't an insoluble problem.

Another option is trained monkeys.

(I googled around for a bit and found some talk about robot or automated farming, but there didn't seem to be any cohesive vision or big plans. In all seriousness, it seems like this is a major lack. Growing food is an absolutely necessary, but peasant-level job. Until robots do it, peasants will remain.)

Monday, December 1, 2008

Invention Idea #2

Red increases the pulse and heart rate, and raises your blood pressure. It increases the appetite by increasing your metabolism, which is why red is such a popular color in restaurants.
("color red metabolism" gets hits mainly for People Magazine-level science info, so I don't know how well-established or bunked this is.)

The office across the hall from me just got "natural sunshine" fluorescent bulbs put in. They are much whiter than the regular bulbs, which are reddish-orange. It is causing me to wonder what effect constant immersion in red light is having on office workers. Obesity? Or is the above effect only a differential one? Has this even been studied?

Anyway, my invention: blue-tinted "diet" sunglasses.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

How To Make Awesome Pizza

Until recently, my idea of awesome pizza was "lots of cheese, almost burnt". Also, there needed to be a way to hold the cheese without burning yourself, so I needed crust. I wasn't sure what the sauce is for, but tradition demanded its inclusion. Tradition definitely did not demand the inclusion of members of the plant kingdom.

However, I have changed my boring pizza ways. I now make gourmet pizza on a weekly basis. The secret....REVEALED!

Crust Ingredia

  • 3 cups flour
  • Between 1 cup and 1.25 cups water, depending on the weather
  • A dash of olive oil
  • Two pinches of basil
  • A generous helping of yeast
  • 1 bread machine with a "dough" setting
  • 1.5 hours
Stir all these ingredia until you have a bunch of dough. Meanwhile, dice a couple sausage patties a 2.25 oz can of black olives (sliced) a tomato (The role of the tomato has been played by an understudy in tonight's performance due to a grocery malfunction.) And some pepperoncini: I think the rest of this recipe speaks for itself. I'm still using boring old Sauce in a Can, though. I need a good pizza sauce recipe.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Salsa & Guacamole

This is a very basic, simple recipe. It's 100x better than the canned stuff I used to eat (which I think is actually picante sauce, so I guess I'm comparing tomatoes to peppers there) but I'm sure there are homemade salsae out there that beat this to a pulp (GEDDIT??). Nevertheless, if you've never made salsa before this is an OK place to start and a good base for experimentation.

Salsa
2 green peppers
2 red onions (I like the taste vs the yellow/white)
some cilantro (you have to buy a whole bunch, but you only use a few chopped tablespoons)
several jalapeƱos/habaƱeros, to taste

Chop everything up and put it in sealable plastic bins. On Taco Night, I dice a tomato and add a few scoops of this salsa mix. The above lasts probably 3 months at the rate I use it. However, the quality seriously degrades so if you have more free time (for some reason it takes me like 45 minutes to put this together) I'd recommend making smaller batches more often.

The guacamole recipe is even dead simpler (deader simple?). The only reason I even mention it is that I never knew the awesomeness that is guacamole until recently. Here's the recipe:

Guacamole
An avocado
1/3 of a packet of guacamole powder

The only tricky part is choosing ripe, but not too ripe, avocados. A perfect avocado is just a little firmer than a perfect peach. If you squeeze it and it gives more than 1/16" clean off your hand and find another avocado. However, it must give at least somewhat or it is underripe. I've learned the hard way that an underripe avocado is a nightmare to get out of its skin. If that's all the store has go ahead and buy them, but store them on the counter for a couple days before enfridgerizing.

(Another way to identify avocados is by color: Black is too far gone, bright green is not far gone enough. You want a very dark green.)