On our neighborhood walk this morning, Zel almost stepped on a snail a few blocks from our house. To make it up, he declared it was the snail’s birthday. First, he made a card…
We then made the snail a birthday cake to go with the card… (“I ❤️ you Snaily. Dear Snaily, I’m sorry I squashed you…”)
Next, we brought a present: a snail house. (Each trip here takes about six minutes each way…)
Zel wants to commemorate this occasion every year, so he asked me to add it to the calendar…
Finally, Zel decided to bring Snaily home. Snaily is currently in the backyard, crawling over lettuce leaves.
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Our current home setup is, @antichrista handles school in the morning, I do all the meals. Here’s a look into what our kitchen is like. This morning I woke up at 6:30 and, for breakfast, I toasted bagels I’d made yesterday…
I then took the bread dough I’d mixed last night (overnight, room-temp proof) and moved it to a banneton (a proofing basket). Then I fired up our outdoor smoker and put salmon in it; I had brined it two days ago, fridge-dried it overnight…
About an hour before lunch, I preheated the oven and sliced up bacon I’d made in the smoker a few weeks ago. I sliced mushrooms and shallots and sautéed them for mushroom gravy. In between these, I started setting up the table…
Quick story of parental pride: after the kids were in bed, I put on a Fritz Lang flick, ‘Ministry of Fear’ (1944). Olive walked in; couldn’t sleep. I thought she’d just fall asleep with me, watching this old b&w film, but instead… she stayed up to watch.
It's a deeply weird, moody spy-noir, with an unpredictable plot and bizarre characters—just what you expect from Lang! It's also slow and moody. This is the first time she watched an "old movie" of this sort, I believe. And she was definitely taking it in!
An one point, the cops have surrounded this one Nazi spy. Rather than get caught, he commits suicide by stabbing himself *in the heart* with *scissors*. To help Olive process this, I said “whoa, that’s pretty intense.” After a few seconds, she goes, “Well, that’s one less Nazi."
I see Apple has updated the TestFlight icon again! Here's the one in the current iOS 14 betas. Even though I don't use TF much anymore, I keep an eye on the icon because I designed the original one…
I designed the TestFlight icon ten years ago, when it was an independent service (and a pretty amazing one, compared to how iOS app-testing was supposed to be done at the time.) Here's my blog post on it from 2010… mrgan.tumblr.com/post/103735374…
This is the icon I designed for it. It followed Apple's "blueprint" idea for dev tools, with the added grainy vibe of a garage inventor designing their first airplane on paper. Why six blades, btw? It balanced the design, and it looked friendlier to me—like a flower…
When baking, I find stretching and folding to be crucial—it gives you a smooth, uniform dough, whether you knead or not. Last night I mixed no-knead bread dough and took pics each time I folded—30, 60, 90, 120 minutes after mixing:
See how the dough goes from a shaggy mess to a nice ball? Here’s my folding move, btw. (This is a kneaded dough, but a similar approach works with stirred, no-knead dough. You just want to fold the bottom to the top.)
Here’s that no-knead dough after 14 hours at room temp. What a happy little fluffo!
Pizza! We made four pies tonight. (The kids are getting into it slowly.) Stay tuned and I’ll tell you a bit about baking steels, preheating, and temperature… But first! This one has spinach cream (heavy cream blended with cooked spinach), smoked Sulguni cheese, and chicken skin
This is tomato-butter sauce, Provolone, fresh mozz, pickled Serrano peppers, shaved onion, and homemade fennel sausage. Classic combo!
Zel topped this one: sliced provolone, sauce, fresh mozz. And salt, don’t forget the salt! So, these were baked at Hi Broil for 4-5 mins each, 6” from the burner, on a baking steel. It was preheated at a 550° bake. For how long?