Often times, after a visit with Mike’s parents, my mother-in-law would send us home with bunches of fresh herbs from her garden. Thyme, parsley, and always rosemary. Her bush was thriving and robust, and had been there for a very long time. Most of the time, I would make rosemary roasted potatoes– adding copious amounts of chopped fresh rosemary to olive oil dressed potatoes, and a good shake of sea salt and a grind of black pepper.

About a year ago, I was sent home with some rosemary cuttings. Most of them were stripped and used to make roasted potatoes, but i took one of the cuttings and rooted it. I remember doing this a little before our annual trip up north to visit my parents for a week. I wasn’t sure if it would survive, but it did, growing from a spindly little thing to a robust plant after I transferred it to a planter on my balcony, where it thrives next some unidentified sprouting bulbs that my mother-in-law gave me once upon a time. Where they tulip bulbs? I honestly don’t recall, but I’m glad to see them so happy and green. I think Ellen would be happy about it too.

Recently I tinkered around with making a pear ice cream for the annual lab pear contest among several third floor labs. It ended being closer to a sorbet due to how much I cut down on butterfat addition so that the pear flavors would shine through. I made some blackberry-pear sauce, pecan buttercrunch, and sticks of baked waffle cone batter to go along with it. This ice cream freezes a little harder than normal ice cream, so it needs a bit of extra time at room temp to reach a nice scoopable consistency.

Recipe for 1 quart of Pear Ice Cream ala Jules

My measurements switch from metric to american depending if I am weighing things or measuring them out in my american cups. This is just how I did it.

Mix the following:
• 800g pear puree

• roast ~ 10 pears packed in kosher salt
• 375F, 50 min
• cool, core and peel
• blend with 100g sugar + ~ 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• strain from a mesh sieve to reduce grittiness. This should yield around 1000g of puree

• 1 tsp vanilla extract (5 ml)
• 200g caramelized sugar

• I cooked this sugar with a little of the pear puree until it melted and caramelized a little, then mixed it back into the rest of the puree

• ¼ tsp salt (I used kosher salt)
• 60g nonfat dry milk
• 1 ½ cups whole milk (~350 ml)

Cover with saran wrap, and let everything meld overnight (mainly for the nonfat dry milk)

Churn in ice cream maker, or the old fashioned way.

My Ipod Nano broke after nearly 2 years. No powering up, nada. Just a silent blank screen. Where is my music???! More importantly, I had no way to play the awesome podcasts produced by NPR’s This American Life. Impossible! So I went out and bought a new shuffle. I wonder how long this one will last? No screen = one less thing to break, right?

But this post isn’t about my sound playing devices and their modest durability. It’s actually about the extended warranty program with my credit card company, American Express. I have had my Amex Costco card for the past 6 years, and one of the benefits of using this card to make purchases is the extended warranty coverage you automatically receive. For purchases with warranties between 1 to 5 years, you get an additional year under warranty by Amex. For purchases with less than a year warranty, you get a warranty extension equivalent to the purchase warranty length. I only became aware of it a few days ago.

I was nearly a year out of my warranty with Apple, so I called up Amex on friday and asked if their program would cover my broken ipod. They had me tell them what was wrong with it, the serial number of my product, date and location of purchase, purchase price and state tax rate. Good thing Apple emails me my receipts. A quick email search and I found it. I asked them if they needed me to send any receipt documentation or the failed product itself, and they said they didn’t need any for now, but would call me up if they required additional documentation.

This monday (aka 1 business day after I initially called), I get an emailed document from amex saying that my claim was approved, and the money would be credited to my account. Woohoo… pretty awesome!

One more reason to use my amex card to purchase items instead of my debit card.

L to R: The North Face Cat's Meow (W), Marmot Pinnacle (W), Marmot Pinnacle (M)

I’ve been using the North Face Cat’s Meow “20F” sleeping bag for around 6 years now. It is a synthetic sleeping bag, and has lost a lot of loft over the years, as synthetic insulation does not take repeated compression well. I also have never been able to take it anywhere near 20F. Except in the dead of summer (and not in the Sierras), I am generally always a bit cold, to very very cold in it unless I add a great deal of supplemental insulation. At it’s current reduced loft, it is probably a 50F degree bag for me. In order to take this bag down to freezing comfortably, I have to wear a long sleeve thermal top, down vest, puffy parka, synthetic tights and woolen tights, socks, use supplemental handwarmers by my feet, use a sleeping bag liner, and sleep on top of 2 sleeping pads (neoair pad + zlite eggcrate foam pad). Oh, and eat some food right before bed. Ridiculous! I might as well be carrying around a 6 lb sleeping bag. I have tried out Mike’s sleeping bag at freezing, and found it warm and comfortable. Mike’s sleeping bag is a Marmot Pinnacle 15F, and weighs the same as the Meow. Clearly, it was time for a new bag. The women’s version of Mike’s bag recently went on sale at REI, so I jumped at the opportunity.

An interesting side note- many sleeping bag companies are optimistic with their temperature ratings to different degrees, and it used to be quite hard to compare temperature ratings across brands. It has become standard for companies to call their bags “Name of Bag + Some Marketing Determined Temperature Rating“, even when their bags can’t realistically be used down to those temps. Both men and women specific bags are often branded with a temperature rating based on the comfort level for a man, even though women generally sleep colder than men. In recent years, the standardization of EN testing (a european testing protocol for estimating the temperature that one can get a comfortable night’s sleep in a given sleeping bag. They come up with specific ratings for the average man as well as the average woman, whatever that is) on sleeping bags has resulted in either 1) a dropping of the branded temp next to the name due to the EN temp rating being wildly off from what they marketed it as, or 2) an increase in the weight of the sleeping bags, as they needed to add more insulation to the bag to get it closer to the marketed temperature rating. Not a perfect system, with several flaws due to the method of testing, but much better than the system we had before, where there was no method to compare across bags from different companies and nothing to hold them accountable for their claims.

So anyways, I am pretty excited about this sleeping bag purchase. It has the same amount of down as the men’s version, but is 6 inches shorter and a few inches narrower at the shoulder. I was also considering a 15F Western Mountaineering Apache sleeping bag  because it is locally made, superb quality, very lightweight for it’s warmth (2 lb, which includes the weight of custom overfill in the footbox to make it more equivalent to the Pinnacle in warmth. Warm feet = d(^_^)b) and has a slightly more efficient cut around the hips. However, several factors made the Pinnacle more attractive. The REI backed refund policy made me feel more comfortable than the restocking fee I would be assessed for returning the custom overfilled bag in case it didn’t work for me. The hood design on the Marmot is far superior to the WM hood design. Also, the 170$ premium in price for a bag that never goes on sale overruled my desire for an 8 oz weight savings in my backpack.

Mike’s down bag is also around 6 years old, but it still lofts up as well as it did the day it was purchased. Measured double layer loft at the hips is ~ 6+ inches, while the footbox area has a maximum double layer loft of 9 inches! Only the footbox area of the women’s bag appears substantially more filled than the men’s bag. Otherwise, loft is similar. The Cat’s Meow footbox is sadly flat and not particularly insulating these days.

Here are some stats that only geeks care about. I weighed them all on my handy dandy kitchen scale, accurate to 0.1 g:

North Face Cat’s Meow 20F bag- Women’s
Insulation: Climashield XP
Fill Weight: 25 oz
EN comfort (rating for women): 34F <== 14F ABOVE what a 20F bag for a woman should be. Sheesh
EN lower limit (rating for men): 23F
Manufacturer specified weight: 2 lb 10 oz
Actual Weight: 2 lb 10.2 oz (1197 g)

Marmot Pinnacle 15F bag- Men’s
Insulation: 800 FP goose down
Fill weight: 22.58 oz
EN comfort: 22.3F
EN lower limit: 10F <== lower than the 15F marketed claim by 5F!
Manufacturer specified weight: 2 lb 8 oz
Actual weight: 2 lb 10.6 oz (1208 g)

Marmot Pinnacle 15F bag- Women’s
Insulation: 800 FP goose down
Fill weight: 22.5 oz
EN comfort: 21.6F <== higher than marketed temp by 6.6F, though not as outrageous as the North Face.
EN lower limit: 9.3F
Manufacturer specified weight: 2 lb 7 oz
Actual weight: 2 lb 7.9 oz (1132 g)

I’d like to go backpacking somewhere to test out this new bag. I think this calls for another trip to Henry Coe.

Check out how puffy-puffy they are! d(^_^)b

Our Sleeping Bag Family, +1

Looking over Oxford Greenhouse (grow me some plants woot):

So our lab always has plentiful amounts of pears around this time of year because of a study we do with a pear farm. A pear cook off was suggested by our rival lab, where the winning lab would be determined by the averaged scores of all participating lab members, based on presentation, taste and originality by a panel of unbiased judges (aka members of other labs) . No spouses or significant others could help out, and the main component of the dish had to be made with pears. In summary, we won! I was told by one of the rival bosses that we should have a pear off next year because he wanted to see what I would come up with next. Mwahahah.. I paired a pear panna cotta (based on the Pear, Foie Gras, Sauternes and Chervil panna cotta from the Alinea Cookbook) with a lemon curd sauce as well as a red wine fig reduction, as I thought the brightness of the sauces would complement the mellow panna cotta. Pear puree, lemon and lemon thyme were elements that tied the panna cotta and two sauces together. The recipe is easily scalable, but I’m too lazy to scale it for you right now. Makes one 9*13 pan aka A Lot since I wanted extra in case I made mistakes cutting out the shapes for the cook off. But really, you could use whatever pan you want, as you are just making adult jello. The panna cotta was ~2.5 cm tall, including the white wine layer on top.

Roast Pear Puree I used this in the panna cotta as well as the two sauces. There will probably be leftover puree. I’m sure you can find uses for it. (modified from the Alinea Cookbook)

10 pears (~140 g each, yielding ~100g puree after the core and peel were removed)
1500 g kosher salt (about 1 box of Morton’s)
100 g sugar Heat oven to 375F.
lemon juice

Pack pears in kosher salt and put in oven for 1 hour. Allow to cool, and carefully remove pears from salt. I used a wooden spoon to crack the salt casings. Brush off most of the salt, peel and core. Blend pears and sugar on high speed 2-3 minutes until super smooth. Taste. Add in lemon juice to brighten the mellowness of the pear puree. Taste. I also ran this puree through a tamis so that I removed some of the pear grittiness to make a smoother puree.

Pear Panna Cotta with White Wine Gel (modified from the Alinea Cookbook)

7 gelatin sheets (I used Gelita Gold Gelatin Sheets)
700 g roast pear puree 140 g heavy cream
77 g sugar
7 g kosher salt

Line a 9*13 pan completely with plastic wrap. Immerse gel sheets in ice water for 5 minutes before use. Squeeze on excess water. In a sauce pan, combine the gelatin, puree, cream, sugar, and kosher salt over low heat. Stir until dissolved. Pour into baking dish and set in fridge ~2 hrs.

White Wine Gel

2-1/2 sheets gelatin*
200g dessert wine**

Same as before. Rehydrate gelatin, squeeze out excess water. Stir gelatin and wine over low heat until gelatin has fully dissolved. Cool it a bit, and then pour on top of panna cotta layer. Put back in fridge.

*I used Gelita Bronze sheets because I didn’t have enough gold sheets. They should be relatively equivalent, as the bronze sheets are heavier to account for lower bloom strength. I found I also had to use a higher amount of gelatin than in the puree because the alcohol resulted in a lower melting temp aka the top layer turned liquid after an hour at room temp the first time I tried it.

** I used a muscat wine, though Achatz recommended Sauternes, which I would rather drink than put in a gel on top.

Lemon Curd Sauce

Lemon thyme sprigs
1/2 stick of unsalted butter
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
Roast Pear Puree

Over low heat, add in the thyme, butter, lemon juice and sugar. Beat eggs in separate container. When the lemon sugar butter mixture is fully dissolved, slowly drizzle half of the mixture into the eggs while stirring to warm the eggs through. Then pour the mixture back into the pot. Stir over low heat until lemon curd coats spoon. Strain out lemon thyme sprigs. Take some pear puree, and add in spoonfuls of lemon curd until you can taste the lemon notes, but it doesn’t overpower the pear flavor. This makes ~3/4 of a Petite Maman jam jar’s worth

Red Wine Reduction

1/4 cup of lemon thyme infused sugar water (1:2 sugar:water)^^
1-1/4 cups Pinot Noir
4 thin slices lemon
Dash of cinnamon
Splash of Vanilla Extract
6 fresh Mission Figs

Add in all the ingredients except the figs. Reduce for 15 minutes at a boil. Taste. Remove lemon slices and turn heat down to a simmer. Add in a few spoonfuls of Roast Pear Puree to your liking. Taste. I added in some honey here to make it a little more sweet. Cut figs in half and lay them face down and poach for 5 minutes. Flip them over and poach for another 5 minutes. Remove poached figs to a container, and reduce wine sauce to your liking.

^^I had some lying around from making candied pear and lemon thyme garnishes. You could just throw in a sprig of lemon thyme instead. Or not even add it, no worries

CC girl: “Oh, I haven’t tried this batch yet. Oh wow, there are so many holes this time.” *munch munch* “Hmm… it tastes different from the last batch.”

Me: “Uh, good or bad?”

CC girl: “Oh, not good or bad, just … different”

I guess that should have been a big clue. No salesperson would tell you that their product is off. It’s just “different” and “unique”. Oh, those imperfections in that vase? That’s how you know it’s HANDMADE. That’s what makes it so UNIQUE. (I admit I sometimes buy into this philosophy).

In any case, I think I shall stick to their softies until they get a few more hard cheese batches under their belt.

This time around, there was a lot of water, and many flowers in bloom. We had a great view from our camp site at Willow Ridge, on the border of the Western Zone of the park (~7.5 miles from Coe Headquarters). We made it out of the park 30 minutes before the storm rolled in, and in time for Easter Sunday hanging out/dinner with Mike’s family (did I mention that we are all atheists? I don’t know what’s going on). We are backpacking ninjas.

Turkeys!

Navigating The Narrows

A hitchhiker

Drying off after Mike helped me dunk my right foot in The Narrows ~_^

Almost Home

]]> http://www.thegpbkids.com/2010/04/05/backpacking-at-henry-coe-state-park-round-ii/feed/ 0 http://www.thegpbkids.com/2010/03/10/717/ http://www.thegpbkids.com/2010/03/10/717/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:45:55 +0000 Jules http://www.thegpbkids.com/?p=717 Continue reading →]]> So I’ve been occasionally bugging a lab mate about his progress on making a particular construct to generate a mutant in our bacteria. Because if he doesn’t make it, then I have to. And I’d rather not if I can avoid it ~_^

Today I walked over to my lab bench, and saw a present for me:

What could it be? I unwrap it and lo and behold:

He made them! Awesomest bday present ever! d(^_^)

]]> http://www.thegpbkids.com/2010/03/10/717/feed/ 0