Martin Pease

Iowa is famous for having more pigs than people, and so pork is amazingly affordable year round. Our local grocery store routinely sells thick cut, bone-in pork chops for about $2 each. But pork, like chicken, is easy to overcook and dry out. Using sous vide, you can get consistent, delicious results every time. I recently made the chops you see in the picture, and the entire meal cost about $20 for our family of 7. The technique for cooking pork chops is the same regardless of whether they are bone-in or boneless. If you are cooking anything larger than about 1.5 inches thick, you'll want to increase the cook time to about 2 hours, but below that an hour or so will do. You can trim the chops as lean as you like, but cooking them in the sous vide will turn the fat so soft and delicious that you can leave it on. The final sear gives you a chance to crisp it up if desired. About an hour and a half before dinner time, get your cooking pot full of hot water, and set your sous vid

"This is absolutely unacceptable. You should have told me this before I married you." Arms crossed, pouty face. But I know she's joking. Casually mentioning that I actually like several of the songs by The Carpenters, I get the full HOW DARE YOU from my loving wife. She has good taste, so I accept her position. Karen Carpenter was a tragic figure with a beautiful voice. The Carpenters wrote music that many would call anodyne, or sappy. Very much a product of their time, the sort of white bread pop songs they produced are easy to ridicule today in our aggressively cynical age. Ok, so I find as I get older that this sort of thing is more appealing to me. Gen X gets to slide into middle age sentimentality the same as the Boomers did. So it was with much joy that I recently discovered a band annoying called Weyes Blood, fronted by singer-songwriter Natalie Mering. Their latest album, Titanic Rising, is pretty great! Great if you suspect that Mering called the spirit o

Here are all the reasons my wife should allow me to get my private pilot license (PPL). I am writing this on my blog so that I can occasionally send her the link again, in hopes it will wear her down in this war of attrition. To be fair, she really only has one objection: that I will be killed in a fiery crash. In truth, it could also be a watery crash, or a snowy crash, depending on the terrain. But in her mind, one crash is the same as all the others, which shows what she knows. So take all these highly different kinds of crashes and put them on one side of the scale. Now let's fill up the other side with this list of all the wonderful things a PPL would bring into our lives. More exciting family vacations! What's better than flying to small residential airports? All that taxiing! No Shake Shack in our town- problem solved! Fly to a better town where there is one! Planes are so expensive, I won't be able to afford another car for a long, long time! She's alwa

Bandwagonning has never tasted so delicious It was the ancient Greek philosopher Playdo who once said, "A toaster is complete in itself- reduced to a single form commensurate with its function- while a toaster oven is debased by pretensions of being an oven or whatever." This aphorism has truly lasted the test of time. The Instant Pot and its similar competitors have brought pressure cooking back into vogue. I remember my mother using a stovetop pressure cooker a handful of times in my early childhood, but it's probably been decades since she's used it, if she still has it at all. Trends come and go in the world of cookery and the rise of electric, safe pressure cookers such as the Instant Pot have brought this one back. So this Christmas we got an Instant Pot, the 8 quart Lux model you see here. In theory, pressure cooking reduces the amount of time it takes to cook food, especially tough pieces of meat, to tenderness. These new electric pressure cookers also

So in a follow-up to my recent post about using Linux again, I took advantage of the downtime over Christmas break to spend some time upgrading my primary laptop to Linux Mint 19.1. Sometimes you have to take the plunge to see if you can swim. This post is a fairly technical overview of how I set up my system. If this sort of thing isn't that interesting to you, I'll be posting a comparison of modern Linux and Windows 10 that might be more interesting to less technically-minded people in the coming few days. Setup: Attempt 1 To do this without ruining my life, I decided to start with a fresh drive in my Lenovo Carbon X1. I bought a 1TB stick of NVMe storage from Crucial.com and swapped it. This way, if I need to get back to my Windows setup, it's a matter of replacing the original disk and booting. No problem. Installing most Linux distributions is pretty easy. You download an ISO and flash it to a USB stick. Then you boot the computer off that and it enters a &qu

Every year we forget how much work goes into making Christmas conform to the ideal- the decorations, the tree, gifts, food, friends and family. By the time the kids are asleep on Christmas Eve, it's been weeks of preparation. End of semester activities and the ubiquitous Christmas concerts and plays. Shopping, wrapping and shipping. Coordinating employee schedules for vacation time, and finishing up the last projects that can't wait until after New Years. And it was a good Christmas for all that. It was worth it. The presents brought delight, the food was exquisite, and much good cheer was shared. My memories of Christmas as a child were always happy and full of the things that we now provide to our children. But now I know how much work my parents went through for us! My wife gave me a very fine watch, one I had had my eye on for a while, and something I'll make a blog post about soon. In turn, I gave my wife some fancy boots which do not fit, so we'll have to make