For those of you with little enough meaningful entertainment in your lives who have as a result followed our nerd efforts to make chocolate from dirt air and water, big update: we harvested the first cacao pod from Tree #1 and…





…we will ferment, dry and roast the cacao nibs. Then, we will make chocolate!

Here, because we had only one mature pod, and because practice makes perfect, I’m adding the seeds from our homegrown pod to a bunch of others so we have good fermentation mass.

We have been raising Cacao Theobroma (chocolate) trees in our lab (next to the water jet-it’s humid) for a few years. We learned to pollinate them, and they made pods! Now we need to learn how to ferment, dry, roast, shell, mill, and temper chocolate. If that sounds fun, read on!





First, I know a lot of people know a lot about all this, so I want to say: this project isn’t about pretentious choco-bullshit.

I’m not trying to be snotty. I wanted to see if I could start with a seed in dirt and end up with chocolate! That’s it! And learning has been fun!

Mushy peas for Christmas Eve: Ready for chips. Recipe is on top left, in F because America.

Chimayó Chile, water, salt, garlic, fat. After one hour.

Starving for a decent bit of cod, and frustrated by the poor quality of Los Angeles area chip shops, area man just fucking gets it done. Atlantic cod is available in LA, as is English beer so the filet was sorted and essentially proper. American potatoes however are… lesser. For this application at least. Food nerds know this but I couldn’t help myself. These chips are therefore only about 40% proper.

WILD YEAST COLLECTION 日本 EDITION It is a GLORIOUS autumn day here in Shinjuku, in the center of Tokyo. The Tokyo government buildings are here, aside the stunningly beautiful Shinjuku Chuo park.

The fragrance of late summer hangs in the air- perfect time and place for nerds like me to collect some wild yeasts!

My dear, magnificent late friend 松原輝明 taught this gaijin how to make gyoza. We would battle to make proper, traditional gyoza. He was relentless. He trained me to be perfect. Tonight, me, a New Mexican, will honor him with Hatch green Chile and potato gyoza, with Chimayó dip. Cut the potatoes into small cubes. Cook some garlic in EVOO. Just get it to soften a touch, no browning.

In 2012 or, I left my job at CAA to work with Steven S on a game, a new Jurassic Park story, to make good the skid mark we left with Trespasser. I wrote a story and design, and made a trailer. The management at Universal changed, and the project became a film. Want to know more? OK, then. Here we go.

In 1995 I had just designed and shipped a game that was a big hit and made a lot of money for its publisher. I was unhappy at the developer so I took an offer from the brand new and exciting company DREAMWORKS. Yay! California!
(In 1995 this was impressive)

So @duetosymmetry inspired to me buy a dangerous book. The reason it’s dangerous for me is… …becuase I know I will spend hours now screwing around and learning stuff from it. It’s EXACTLY my kind of kryptonite…

Listen. I was raised in rural Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico. I had guns, I camped in waist high snow above tree line, caught brown trout and fried them up right next to the stream, the whole thing. 1/3 I own historic flintlock muskets, cast balls for them, make my own powder. I knap the flints. The local range made me promise not to shoot their steel targets anymore because the .75 caliber musket balls obliterate them. So I’m not a guy who takes the 2nd amendment lightly. 2/3

Emmer is beautiful. It is our ancient friend. I mill a lot of Emmer.

OK. With apologies to essentially everyone, Jew or not, I tried making bread with flour milled from Matzoh, olive oil, water, salt and atmospheric yeast. It worked. I will not speculate as to the weird religious issues this raises, and I am sorry for them, but here are the facts: I used a blender and my flour mill to convert Matzoh into the finest powder I could.

Quick question before sundown: if I mill flour out of matzoh, and leave it out, and microbes land on it, and I allow them to ferment, and then I bake that, is that leavened bread? @RutiRegan @RabbiHarvey @TheRaDR @Mottel @RabbiYonah I understand OF COURSE that this is still leavening. The question is if this is one of those corner cases in rabbinic logic that one could get away with, since all you’re eating is matzoh (and salt and water).

We set our US kitchen up so we could have a 3500W UK kettle, and the kettle finally wore out, so now while waiting for the replacement to arrive we are living like ANIMALS with an American one. I’ve written a new novel and started another while waiting for my tea. OK folks, to be clear here, remember that I am a person with lab equipment in his kitchen for ancient baking and biology projects. We have a big surplus adjustable autotransformer with meters and a U.K. plug on a 50A line. So I can dial my tea speed right up to blowing the kettle

As the proud and unstoppable people of @Ukraine face yet another onslaught from those who would steal their land and homes, let us take a moment and pay tribute to a big part of the reason Ukraine is so special - grain - and work to make some traditional Ukrainian rye bread. The Ukraine we think of today sits in a lucky climactic and geographic region, where domesticated grain grows really really well. It’s commonly referred to as “the bread basket of Europe,” and as such, historically every asshole in the region, has looked to take it for their own.

I live in a house that used to belong to one of Julia Child’s best friends. She was here a lot- it was the test kitchen for a cooking magazine; her friend was editor. Sometimes, and I mean this as a physicist and atheist, I can feel her when I cook; she holds me to a standard. ❤️ It made me cry to type that. Not sure why.

While I was repairing this little guy, I did a motor upgrade… …so now we can climb vertically and hover…

Are we in the last generation of game consoles? Is local compute dead?

Many used to say that downloadable games would never dominate, and many currently say that streaming will never, either.

But then again, many used to say that leeches cured cancer. I for one love local compute. But I am a dinosaur. I like to play games even when there’s (gasp) spotty internet.

The afterlife has no idea what’s coming.

My approximately spherical protobaguettes are expanding at 2.07±0.11 cm/h which to an observer yeast cell in the center looks like 1.035±0.05cm/h representing a redshift of 9.59x10^(-15) … if she could see the surface. One needed calculation is c inside bread dough. Yes I used calipers to take these data and yes the error is calculated.

Quand on fait une bonne sauce… 6 liters of broth, 1 liter of wine. Shallot, thyme, salt, pepper, butter, rosemary.