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02/11/10 - Sunrise, Sunset

This isn't a software site, but Kaleberg Laboratories does maintain a few little pieces of software. There's our equation solver, Equato, a computer teaching tool, Cardiac, a program for making volvelles, and a number of tide forecasting and tide finding tools. One surprisingly popular program is Sunrise Sunset which simply produces an iCal calendar giving the times of sunrise and sunset. It is just an old basic program rewritten. You type in your latitude and longitude, your time zone and a few other particulars and out scoots an iCal calendar ready to use. Apparently, a fair number of people have some concern with when the sun rises and sets. Now and then we get feedback about the program, usually noting that it is broken. The latest note was from an Australian who reminded us that they do daylight savings time a bit differently in the southern hemisphere, so we've added a Down Under option to account for winter and summer being reversed. It still doesn't support British double war time, but the updated version is now more useful for people on the other half of the planet.

If you have a Mac, you can download the program here.

Keywords: software, science, kale, australia

01/31/10 - Clark Farms Beef at the Farmers' Market

We noticed a newcomer at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market this past Saturday, the Clark Farms beef people. They had a sign, some nice brochures and a big freezer pack full of beef. We had to try some, so we bought a pair of t-bone steaks, nicely packed and frozen. We put them to the test at Kaleberg Laboratories. That meant a session in the microwave for thawing, then heat processing in our broiler, not far from the electric coils. We applied hard infrared to push our sample to medium rare. That's a technical term.

Then came the actual testing. We applied our utensils, and transferred subsamples from plate to palate. The steaks were great, with a good, deep beefy flavor and a surprisingly tender texture. They weren't as fatty as Peter Luger's t-bone steaks, but they were better than the usual industrial beef by a long shot. Of course, these are just our preliminary Kaleberg results. We have a lot more testing to do, so we'll be looking for Clark Farms at next week's market.

The folks behind the beef

Our test sample

Their brochure

Keywords: farmers' market, farms, kale

01/05/10 - The Empire State Building

The Empire State Building was the last of the great skyscrapers of the Roaring 20s, even though it wasn't finished until 1931. As the tallest building in New York City and having opened at the start of Great Depression, it was often known as the Empty State Building. Now, it is still a building of note, though it has long been in need of a new look.

Recently, Kaleberg Construction was offered the opportunity to rebuild this landmark using more modern materials and advanced construction techniques. In fact, we were presented with a solution to the ailing building's troubles in a simple kit form. Here follow the adventures and triumphs of Kaleberg Construction from unboxing to installation, and marvel in the rebirth of a classic, just in time for our great recession.

If you aren't sure of what a prolegomenon is, see a recent posting on the classic form.

The Erector Set Empire State Building as installed on site

The classic unboxing shot - the prolegomenon.

Top down construction technology is surprisingly effective.

Work in progress

Ready for installation

Keywords: new york city, christmas, art, kale

12/23/09 - Cassoulet for Christmas

This year was a cassoulet year at Casa Kaleberg. (We alternate cassolet and choucroute garnie every other Christmas.) That's a photo of our Christmas cassoulet on the right. Cassoulet, if you've never had it, contains white beans, duck confit, pork loin, ham hocks, pig skin, garlic sausages, andouille and a host of other pork products. It's an amazing dish. Just making the duck confit, that is, duck preserved in its own fat with spices, is a fair production, and it takes several days just to cook and assemble a cassoulet.

We tried to get a shot of the whole cassoulet, but our guests moved in too quickly, so enjoy this action shot.

This year we got our pork from the folks at The Swinery, a butcher shop based in West Seattle. They get their pork from a number of local farmers, and we have to say that the meat is first rate. They didn't blink when we asked for pig's knuckles, and they came through with a first rate piece of pig skin. We tried their Toulouse sausages and were quite impressed. You can see some of them in the photo above. The Swinery is based out in West Seattle, so now we have to explore more of West Seattle, and we have to try out The Swinery's new sandwich shop near Pioneer Square. If you live in Seattle and hear oinking in 2010, that might just be a couple of Kalebergs on the march.

Keywords: christmas, seattle, kale

12/21/09 - Christmas 2009

December has been a busy month with parties, travel to Seattle and lots of excitement. We've also been decorating Chez Kaleberg and our Christmas trees. Here are a few pictures of our two trees. The big tree is a nine-footer and neatly fills a corner in our living room. The little tree is decorated with cookies, our friends' creations, and is lighted with candles. That's our Christmas party spread to the right. We'll post more pictures when things calm down a bit, most likely around Christmas later this week.

Ready for Christmas

Our tree

The cookie tree

Keywords: christmas, kale


Mount Baker and the moon

12/02/09 - Moon Over Mount Baker

This is a photo of Mount Baker taken from the Kaleberg Plateau in our backyard. We were out howling at the full moon.

Keywords: science, art, mount baker, kale

11/06/09 - When French Women Cook We had been neglecting one of our favorite cookbooks, Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook: A Gastronomic Memoir . Some of this is because a lot of the dishes call for a full cup of heavy cream. For example, the pizza like dish to the right is the Alsation version of pissaladiere. That's 3 lbs of onions in the topping along with a half a stick of butter, a full cup of heavy cream, and two ounces of prunier d'agen to give it a little kick. Those are bacon bits on top. Needless to say, one slice went a long way.

Flammkuche

Noisette of Pork with Prunes
 The dish to the left is a bit lighter. It is from Touraine. We sliced up a seven pound pork loin from Heritage Foods into slices and seared them in butter. That part was simple. We soaked 30 or 40 prunes overnight in a bottle of red wine, then cooked that wine down, without the prunes, to a mere cup or two. Then, in the typical French manner, we made the sauce in the pan we used for cooking the pork so we got all the cooked meat flavor. We added a cup of heavy cream, then a cup or two of veal stock and the cup or two that was left of the prune wine. Then, we cooked that down to a cup or two. Nearly six cups of liquid were cooked down to perhaps one and a half. That's why they call it a reduction, and it was a wonderful reduction with the pork and prunes.

Keywords: food, kale

10/27/09 - Moroccan Lamb Chez Kaleberg

We recently ordered some Romney Lamb from Heritage Foods, so we steamed up the shoulder and the shanks Moroccan style. This is one of our favorite lamb recipes from Paula Wolfert's Moroccan cookbook . You can see the Moroccan style steamer to the right. The lamb was a bit bulky for the steaming container.

It's a pretty simple dish if you have some kind of steamer handy, and some good lamb. Put some water, and, if you have them, some dried chick peas, in the lower part of the steamer and set it to boil.

Make a bed of parsley in the upper part of the steamer and put in a peeled onion or two. Take a half stick of butter, 1/2 tsp of saffron, a few pinches of salt and pepper and smush them together. Rub the lamb with the butter mixture and add it to the upper part of the steamer on the bed of parsley.

Our steamer, in action

Steamed lamb shanks and lamb, Moroccan style
 Put the steamer together and let the lamb steam for at least an hour and a half. (It may need a bit longer, but that's the usual cooking time.) Now and then check to make sure there is enough water in the lower part of the steamer. This is especially important if you added dried chick peas as they absorb a lot of liquid.

You can see the steamed lamb to the left. The meat should be so tender it is falling off the bone. The dried chick peas should be nicely cooked and swimming in delicious lamb soup.

Serve the lamb with a mixture of ground cumin and good salt. Break out the sea salt if you have it. It's also great with spicy horseradish.

Keywords: kale

09/15/09 - Filet of Beef Lucien Tenderet

It looks like the monster from outer space, but it's just an escapee from Kaleberg Labs. That's our filet of beef lucien tenderet, beef tenderloin stuffed with morels, pistachios and dry cured black olives. It's an amazing dish. Did we mention it's wrapped in bacon? We'll admit it's pretty lurid. We got our recipe from mad scientist Alice Waters in her original Chez Panisse cookbook. We too remember the 80s.

The menace from the oven

Keywords: food, recipe, kale

09/01/09 - Front Seat To Seattle

One of the nice things about flying in little airplanes is that you don't need a lot of special skills to sit in the front seat. That means even a Kaleberg can get the advantages of a wonderful cockpit view as you can see in a these photos. It was a cloudy day, but that gave everything a quintessential Northwestern look.

Rule One - Mitts off!

Blue tones and mountains

Ediz Spit and lens flare

The propeller is too fast for our camera.

More mountains and cloud

Keywords: seattle, flying, kale

08/23/09 - Aloha, Welcome to the Kaleberg Luau

Another year, another luau. Once again it was time for lau lau, ahi sushi, and Balinese chicken. This year we used Balinese fish spice instead of chicken spice, but nobody noticed. It's a long story. We also went a little crazy with the foldout pineapples, and the real one.

The Kaleberg Luau - Note the cupcake heiau in the foreground.

Welcome to the Pacific Ocean area.

Keywords: food, luau, kale

08/02/09 - Salmon Roe, The Kaleberg Way

One of our friends called us triumphantly with the news. He had caught, not one, but three salmon. We had to join him for dinner, so we did, and we had an excellent meal. One of the salmon had roe, a pair of red egg pods, but our friend wasn't sure of what to do with them, though he did a fine job with the rest of the fish. We, however, did.

Most people eat salted salmon eggs, which are processed much like caviar so that each egg is firm and separate, but coming from the East Coast, we were more familiar with shad roe, and salmon roe is quite similar. We pan fried the complete packets of roe in butter, then baked them to cook them through. The concoction in the photograph is the salmon roe on toasted whole wheat bread with lots of capers.

So, if you ever come across some good salmon roe and aren't sure how to serve it, just try them the Kaleberg way.

Salmon roe on toast, attractively plated; click to enlarge and see otherwise

Keywords: salmon, kale

06/03/09 - First Climb To Klahane Ridge For 2009

We made it up to Klahane Ridge today. Thanks to the warm spring weather, most of the snow on the trail has melted, and even we, the Klumsy Kalebergs, managed to make it up the Switchback Trail to the ridge. There was some snow on the trail, but we managed to clamber through it with our trusty Yak Trax. At this rate of melt, if you tried the trail tomorrow, you'd wonder what all our fuss was about.

The trail was lined with furious alpine growth, and there were already some summer flowers, including avalanche lilies, lupines, and wonderfully scented phlox. The views were stupendous, and even as we climbed, we could sense the snow melting. On our way down, we noticed that the band of snow nestled in the corner of Mount Angeles was melting into a series of cascades. The high country is open, and the Switchback Trail is as spectacular as ever.

The trail and the mountains

Phlox in the foreground, Sunrise Point in the mid-ground and the Olympic Mountains in the background

North slope, south slope

More mountains, of all things

Port Angeles and the Strait below

The ridge and the mountains

A mushroom

An avalanche lily

Lupines

The snow melting - Click to enlarge, and you can see the waterfalls.

The band of snow

Keywords: flowers, high country, klahane ridge, spring, kale, waterfall

05/24/09 - Deep Fried Chick Peas With Wilted Greens

We promised people we'd put this recipe on our web site. (We grabbed it from Tom Douglas's cookbook, Big Dinners, if you want to check out some of his other great recipes.) This recipe is simple, but you'll have to do some deep frying. We use one of those electric deep fryers, but you can just use a deep pot. You want a deep pot so the oil doesn't spatter as much, and you can get enough oil into it to cover the chick peas when you fry them. You will also want a slotted spoon so you can get things out of the hot oil.

For the recipe, you will need:

  • a pint or so of olive oil
  • eight cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
  • two cans of chick peas - pour off the liquid in the can and dry them a bit with a paper towel for less spattering
  • salt and black pepper
  • about a pound of escarole, mixed greens, kale, lettuce, seaweed or such
Heat the olive oil to about 350F. An electric deep fryer will do this automatically. Alternatively, you can use a thermometer. If you don't have a thermometer, just keep an eye on the oil so that it doesn't start to smoke.

Deep fry the garlic slices for maybe 30 seconds, until they turn golden. This cooks the garlic and flavors the oil.

Deep fry the chick peas a handful at a time. Give them about two minutes. They'll turn golden brown and shrink. Remove them from the oil and let them cool on a paper towel. Keep deep frying batches until they're all deep fried.

Heat two or three tablespoons of the deep frying oil in a pan. Clean the greens and toss them all in. Toss them around a bit until they wilt. You want to cook them as little as you can, but the cooking time will depend on what you are cooking.

Serve the chick peas and garlic on top of the cooked greens. How's that?

This is another Kaleberg Photoshop hash. Once again, our photographer fell behind the ravening hordes, so we had to cut and paste to make it look like we still had a full dish.

Keywords: recipe, kale

04/27/09 - Russian Easter 2009

We are recovering from our latest Russian Easter party. Yes, we know, Russian Easter was last week, but we are Kaleberg Kalendrists. Like the Old Calendrists and the New Calendrists who have been arguing about the date of the holiday since the new Gregorian calendar came out, we too have our own ideas as to when to celebrate Easter, and this year we chose yesterday.

We served the traditional meal of blini with salmon roe, Enemies of the Czar, Trotsky's Bane, home made sausage, and pan fried pelmeni. (For more on this, see our recipes page.) For dessert, there was a spirited defense of Moscow against the Monster Napoleon. It took a fair bit of flaming cognac and a lot of dessert spoons to get the proper scorched earth look. We also had a special guest dessert, Trotsky's balm, one of his mother's recipe. It looked suspiciously like a flan, but we know enough to keep our suspicions to ourselves.

The domes of Saint Basil's

The Kaleberg Russian Easter awaits the onslaught of our own ravening horde.

Moscow awaits the onslaught of the Monster Napoleon.

Keywords: russian easter, salmon, recipe, kale

04/05/09 - Spring Comes to the Port Angeles Farmers' Market

To start with, Westwind Farm is offering nettles. You have to cook these carefully, but once blanched, they are delicious. We had ours in a soup with shitake mushrooms from Sunny Farms and miso from McFee's bodega. We also spotted fresh arugula and kale raab which is young kale with flowers, so spring cannot be far behind. As for the QuilBay oysters, we tried some. They were wonderful on the half shell. Finally, Johnston Farms is back for the season. It is good to see the market gearing up after a long winter.

Keywords: farms, johnston farm, spring, farmers' market, oysters, westwind farm, kale


You can see the melted raclette in the middle. You can't see the scallions which means we should have added more.

02/03/09 - Deep Fried Tofu and Raclette We recently tried a rather improbable recipe for Fried Tofu Stuffed With Raclette Cheese. It was in Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook which we had bought, because we had enjoyed our meal at a Japanese pub in Honolulu, Izakaya Nonbei, some years back. The izakaya style of cooking tends to be informal and imaginative, but we had never seen any dishes made with cheese. Let's face it, Asia, unlike Europe, is not big on cheese. The recipe itself was easy. Just deep fry the tofu. Stuff it with scallions and raclette, then broil it until the cheese melts. The prunes were simple as well. Just dump them in a pot with red wine, a stick of cinnamon and simmer. The combination was incredible. Let's hear it for fried food and melted cheese, the glory of two continents combined in one great dish. The trick was to get a good, super-firm tofu. We went with the special 1950s stuff that was developed to take anything but a direct hit. We found that locally, but we had to get into Seattle for the raclette. It was worth it. To be honest, we've never had anything quite like this in any izakaya, but we'll be keeping our eyes, and mouths, open.

We deep fried the super-firm tofu in peanut oil. That's our Fry Baby in action. Then we cut a slit in the tofu, stuffed in the cheese and scallions and broiled them until the cheese melted.

Here are the simmered spiced prunes in red wine with cinnamon.

Keywords: food, recipe, kale

01/23/09 - Haiga Rice, Uni and Monkfish Liver

It started with a sale on sea urchin roe at Catalina Offshore Products, and in the typical Kaleberg fashion it went on from there. To start with, we bought four trays of the sea urchin roe and an order of frozen steamed monkfish liver which is also known as ankimo, but this is getting ahead of things. It all really started with some haiga rice we had bought some time ago. That's the haiga rice being soaked in the picture to the right.

Haiga rice is a partially milled short grain rice, so it still has some of its husk or bran. This supposedly makes it a better rice for diabetics, and it also gives it a richer flavor and hearty texture. We followed the recipe from the Seattle Times which involved washing the rice, and then letting the wet rice sit for a half an hour before cooking it. It wasn't at all like brown rice. In fact, it was the best sushi rice we have tasted.


We'll get back to the haiga rice in a minute, but first a word about the ankimo. The monkfish liver we bought was steamed and frozen, but supposedly the product contained nothing besides the liver itself and some salt. It looked like a salami wrapped in plastic. We decided to serve it simply on home cooked potato chips which we had fried in goose fat. We tried a purple potato for a real starchy flavor and a sweet potato for a bit of sweetness.

Ankimo has a subtle flavor. There is a mild livery note, but it is a lot like foie gras and unctuous. We served thin slices of it on our potato chips, which were a perfect complement. The sweet potato chips were best, but the combination was rich and delicious, sort of a foie gras Napoleon. Maybe that is reaching a bit, it was a great combination and we ate most of the ankimo in one sitting.
We decided to eat the sea urchin roe raw, as sushi, rather than cooking it with butter, coriander, scallions, cayenne pepper and lemon. There are sea urchins right here off the coast of Port Angeles, and they are harvested commercially, but you'd be hard pressed to find them on sale locally.

They are sold packed in little wooden boxes like the one shown on the right. Each box has its own little lid so that the boxes can be stacked without the delicate eggs getting crushed.


We spread the haiga rice on sheets of nori, dried seaweed. We cut the big sheet into rectangles, perhaps two inches by four inches and put a few pieces of uni on each. Then, we poured on tad of soy sauce and that was it. Most of the goodness of sushi is in the good ingredients. That's some pickled ginger on the plate with one of our unrolled uni rolls.

Our experiment was successful, and we actually got to use that bag of haiga rice. We'll be watching the member specials at Catalina Offshore Products to see if we can come up with any new ideas. If you are interested at all, you can sign up as a member pretty easily. You don't have to be running a restaurant. Hmm, the mackerel filets look kind of interesting, and we've never tasted geoduck clams. There's still plenty of room at the Kaleberg frontier.

Keywords: fish, recipe, kale

01/01/09 - Remote Controlled LED Lamp

Our multi-color LED candle lost its green a while back, and they don't make multi-color LED candles anymore, but we recently got our hands on one of those remote controlled LED lightbulbs and built a lamp out of it. Now we have something even better, a multi-color remote controlled LED lamp, and all it took was the LED bulb itself, $10 worth of hardware, a glue gun, wire strippers and a screwdriver. The picture should give you an idea of the effect. To find out more, take a look at our multi-color remote control LED lamp build page.

Keywords: lamps, science, kale

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