Tag: personal

You read that right! It’s the return of restaurant mini-reviews here at overt.org. I have a huge backlog that has been a mental block for years now, not to mention the fact that I started these reviews as “Berekeley Food” and now I live in Oakland and eat in San Francisco quite a bit. So here we are again, with a bit of rebranding.

Hibiscus is a newish restaurant in downtown Oakland with a Caribbean/soul-food feel. It was started by Sarah Kirnon, former chef of The Front Porch in San Francisco. The Front Porch is a fun place, crowded, busy, and unpretentious but with deservedly legendary fried chicken. Hibiscus is definitely going for something more upscale, but the menu reminded me a lot of the same basic themes.

To start, we had a very fresh and tasty squid ceviche that was not as sour as a lot of ceviche tends to be, so the flavor of the peppers and onions in it really came out.

I was sorely tempted to just score the fried chicken at Hibiscus so I could compare it to its ancestral roots. Instead, I went on a limb and tried the pepperpot, which was a stew/braise with (among other things) oxtail, pigs feet, tripe, duck leg, and cassareep (cassawhatnow?). It looked something like this (I didn’t take any pics so I stole this one from Yelp):

The sauce was delicious. It was infused with scotch bonnet pepper oil and the cassareep turned out to have this really fun sweet/bitter thing going on. I actually kinda enjoyed the tripe, the oxtail was good but difficult to access, and the duck leg was the best thing in there. I couldn’t handle the pig’s foot. Just no meat on it anywhere to be found but plenty of fatty pig skin. Oh well.

Leslie got the fried chicken (photo also stolen):

It was outstanding. Nice and crisp on the outside, even the white meat remained tender and moist. It had clearly been brined for a while. I’d say it definitely stood up to its Front Porch forbears.

The prices were a bit high, I thought, for the food and location, but the ambiance was nice and I hope that more restaurants pop up in the area. There’s a chance we’d come back, but there’s so many more places to get to first.

Rock Band 3, due out this holiday, has a “Pro” mode that lets you play using an actual electric guitar, while being scored playing actual guitar tablature.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5De9eCH1EU[/youtube]

It’s like my dream come true! Back in college, I spent an unseemly amount of money on a Fretlight guitar after seeing one at the Experience Music Project. It’s an electric guitar with LEDs underneath each fret, which can light up to demonstrate fingerings. The trouble was that the software sucked. It showed scale patterns and chord progressions, but there was no validation that you were doing the right thing nor sense of progression.

Now I can channel my unreasonable urges to master video games into the skill of actually playing guitar. Oh, please, be as awesome as I think you are.

Last weekend was the debut race for Doug’s 1986 300ZX Turbo: Sears Pointless 2010. Unbelievably, the car came together in time and ran all 16 hours over two days, green flag to checker. Doug has some pics on his page, and I’ve uploaded a few of the professional shots of our car to gallery. Here’s one of me dealing with some traffic:

We had a video camera in the car, which was unfortunately mounted to the roll cage, so it was pretty shaky on acceleration. If you can stand it, here’s a video of Tommy at the race start:

race start

The whole weekend was a blast. I drove a total about about 30 minutes on Saturday and an hour on Sunday—and that was plenty. It was simultaneously amazingly fun and terrifying and stressful. I did rub another car once on each stint, but always came out clean—no black flags or spin-outs! I’ll get some more pictures up soon.

Ten years ago today, I sat in my dorm room at UT Austin with a dictionary in my lap, hunting for a simple English word, five letters or less, that hadn’t already been claimed as a domain name. I must have tried a hundred things before I came across “overt.” I was a college freshman and totally digging all this new freedom over my life and interests, meeting new friends every day, trying on new ideas all the time—so overt seemed like a perfect fit. Although all three of overt.com, overt.net, overt.org were available (these being the only three top-level domains available for public registration at the time, not counting ones for other countries), my anti-corporate and alliterative (see?) tendencies let me to choose overt.org. In retrospect, I should have just registered all three, but the $75/year it cost to register a domain in 2000 seemed like a lot of money to me and I definitely wasn’t going to spend it three times over.

I worked part-time doing web and database development at the career center for the college of engineering and had access to several internet connected computers. The same night that I registered overt.org, I set up an illicit web server (embarrassingly, Windows 2000/IIS) on my publicly accessible workstation in the career center and pointed my new domain to it. I stayed up late creating a web page with dated, journal-like entries that ran in reverse order on the front page just like my favorite website at the time, slashdot. Later I would learn that web sites like this had been called “web logs” since at least 1997—I was way behind the curve! And so, overt.org was born:

A week or two later, I set up an SMTP/POP3 email server on the same machine, assumed the email address I’ve used since then, and started handing out accounts to my friends.

The hardware behind overt.org took many forms over the next four years at UT, moving from my workstation to a dedicated machine in ENS, the electrical engineering building, but it always remained hidden in a corner or under a table, leeching off of UT’s excellent and pretty much unmonitored internet connection. As we approached graduation, Ali, George, Drew and I pooled our money together to pay for a dedicated server based out of San Francisco: overt.org was legit and has been ever since.

Over the last ten years, overt has grown quite a bit. It now hosts over three dozen web sites, blogs, and photo galleries. It’s a labor of love for Ali and I to maintain the server and it’s been a lot of fun to watch become a home for us, our friends, and our families on the internet.

Here’s to the next ten years of overt.org!

You may have heard me mention that Doug is putting together a car for the 24 hours of LeMons race at Infineon Raceway in March. Well, George and I are helping a bit (me a very little bit) working on the car and are also supposedly going to help drive the thing. A major concern with this plan, of course, is my total lack of experience and competence racing a full-sized car on a racetrack, especially in the presence of other people trying to do the same thing. I did one autocross long ago, but let’s just say that driving alone around cones in my 104HP Honda Civic hatchback probably doesn’t do a lot improve my status.

Well, all that changed today, ho boy! George and I went racing at Laguna Seca (he’s in the gray car on my left).

We signed up for a 4-hour “Intro to Racing” class at Skip Barber, which uses Laguna Seca near Monterey as one of their school locations. It was outrageously fun and terrifying, not least because it was pouring rain the entire time we were on the track. Each of us was outfitted with a Mazda Miata MX-5 Cup Car and followed an instructor (insultingly driving a pokey Mazda 3 much faster than us). We started slow, and did increasingly faster and faster laps around the full track.

Just being on the track sort of fulfilled a lifelong fantasy of mine, because I’ve probably done at least 500 laps around Laguna Seca while playing Gran Turismo 3. In fact I actually said (out loud, while driving, about 5 times), “Oh shit I’m lapping at Laguna fucking Seca.” George and I agreed that it felt smaller in person than it did when playing a video game, but we both think we benefited from our minute acquaintance with every turn. Here we are just before the start (George ahead of me in 09):

The rain made everything hard, but also more worthwhile from a learning perspective. It was no problem at all to put the car into a skid with just a touch too much throttle too fast coming out of a turn, and I ended up in the gravel more than once. After I realized I wasn’t dead, I pulled it back on the track with a huge smile on my face. What a blast.

I should have had video of the whole thing, but like a dumbass I put the Doug’s loaner video camera in take-a-still-picture-every-two-seconds mode instead of take-a-video mode. Luckily, George paid for the professional in-car video and spent half the time right behind me. Hopefully I’ll get a good clip of the time I spun out spectacularly right in front of him after leaving the corkscrew (he dodged me with aplomb).

Here’s a final, accidental shot of me just after removing helmet. I look exhausted, yes… but do I also detect a slight air of smug satisfaction?

Leslie mentioned when she saw it on the shelf that it had been one of Saveur‘s 100 reader-submitted taste-experiences (or whatever). I was intrigued… I love me some bottle-conditioned beer, and here it was, with a biblical reference and farm implement on the label. How could we not buy it? Oh, here’s how: it costs 21 fucking dollars, legal tender US. For a bottle of beer. Beer, also available in sub $0.50 can form, with more or less the same pharmacological end effect. OK, whatever, let’s do it. The guy at the checkout mentioned that, as far as he knows, it’s the most expensive bottle of beer available (at the Whole Foods Market, in Berkeley California. Yeah… nowhere down to go, really, from there…).

But, heck, here’s the deal: it’s like an unholy union of beer, champagne, and really laid-back merlot (maybe that comes from it being aged in old wine barrels?). The first sip was like, “Oh, okay, it’s a wild ale. I like that. WAIT. Wait. No, it’s… light. It’s like a sparkling wine. But there’s the malt. What the hell is this, in my mouth, costing more than twice what I’m normally willing to spend on a bottle of wine? It’s damned good, is what it is, and even more so with a nibble of sharp white cheddar or a garlic-stuffed olive.

Andrew Jackson wasn’t much of a president anyway, so I’ll throw Washington in after him for .75 liters of this stuff any day.

We returned on Sunday from a whirlwind road trip to Texas and back. We had been hankering for a road trip for a while, but we didn’t make it happen this summer, so we decided it might be fun to drive to Dallas and meet at the Hall Ranch for dinner with Leslie’s parents and mine.

The trip down contained lots of interesting moments, such as Sous’s first exposure to snow:

Death Valley:

Vegas:

as well as several more unbelievably gorgeous national parks and general southwest scenery. We made it down to Dallas on Tuesday to commence ranching, cooking, and eating of delicious foodstuffs. I think Sous was really born for the ranch. She chased the golf cart, swam in the pond, played more fetch than I’ve ever seen, and generally wore herself out. Although she only reached a tenuous peace accord with the cows.

The drive back was accomplished in two days. The first day, we drove from Dallas to Blythe, California, some 1200 miles. We thought the second day, a mere 600 miles, would be a piece of cake in comparison, but it turned out that half of Cali was driving from LA to the bay area on sunday (the other half was driving back). But we persevered, and managed to get in by about 6pm to do laundry and collapse in exhaustion.

I’m a fan of barbecue. I think since I left Texas and got more into food, my love has only intensified—both because I appreciate slow-cooked meat more and it’s so dern hard to get on the west coast.

Leslie bought me the Cook’s Illustrated guide to grilling and barbecue last year and I have done a lot of grilling, but no smoking at all. So I decided to try and make one of my favorite Texas barbecue staples: smoked pork spareribs:

I started with the dry rub, a concoction of salt, sugar, and spices that covers the outside of the ribs and is responsible for a lot of the flavor. Here’s a pic of all the ingredients from Cook’s dry rub:

I coated two full racks of pork spare ribs with the rub:

…and let them sit for a while, soaking up the goodness.

Now, technically I don’t have the right equipment for barbecue. In the ideal case I’d have a dedicated smoker, which not only separates the meat as much as possible from direct heat from the coals, but also rotates or moves it to ensure even cooking. A nice smoker is the heart of any good BBQ joint, but it’s just not accessible to the average home cook. There are ways around this of course, with dedicated home smokers or even retrofitted oil drums and old refrigerators, but I decided to go with an even simpler method (the one suggested by the Cook’s guide), which is just to use my standard kettle grill for the smoking, putting the meat as far away from a low bed of coals as possible.

The “traditional” smoke source is, of course, hickory, but that sounded a bit too southern for me. My Texas roots drew me to mesquite instead. Luckily, chips of both kinds are easy to find even at hippie west-coast grocery stores. I soaked them for an hour before I started the coals, so they would combust slowly and give off plenty of flavorific smoke.

After the chips were good and damp, I put them on a low fire on my kettle grill, dialed in the temperature as best I could to about 275F, and laid the ribs on. I added coals as necessary and turned the ribs about every 30 minutes for about three and a half hours.

I should say that 3.5 hours is way, way less time than I could have left them on for. Traditionally, ribs on a full-size smoker might cook at 225F for 8 hours or more… it’s hard to go too long, assuming that you recover the rendered fat somehow to keep the ribs from getting too dry. But, since I was limited to kinda-sorta indirect heat, I did a much shorter time at a higher temperature. The Cook’s recipe tries to mitigate some of the toughness issues this raises by specifying an hour-long rest right after the ribs leave the grill, sealed tightly in foil and paper bags. After the rest, we pulled out the ribs and added some rib sauce imported from Peggy Sue.

How’d they turn out? Well, thanks to the excellent rub, mesquite smoke, and Peggy Sue sauce, the flavor was damned good. Nice and smoky, but still with some real porkiness still coming through… “authentic.” The texture, though, wasn’t quite there. The meat was thoroughly cooked and deep red from smoking, but I think it was just too close to the coals, or maybe the coals were too hot, and so it was a bit chewy and not fall-apart tender like it should be. If I were doing it again, I’d try to plan to double the smoking time, build an even lower fire, and use a drip try to catch the rendered fat so it would stay in contact with the meat.

Coming up next: my more successful adventure with pulled pork butt!